A pandemic of lack of leadership

My browser has a lot of open tabs that accumulated while I wrote about opera and billionaires. So some of them will just get a mention and a link.



Reacting to the news about how speedy the government will be sending out the assistance money already approved Leah McElrath tweeted:

Five months for paper checks.

The checks for the poorest will be arriving at addresses from which they will have been evicted by then.

She added that poor people don’t have bank accounts for cashing checks.



Yesterday the government released the number of applications for unemployment in the last week. It’s 6.6 million. That’s double last week – and last week blew the record off the charts. It also means 10 million applications in two weeks. There are, of course, a lot of people for whom unemployment insurance is not available. Benjamin Dixon tweeted:

6.6 million people just filed for unemployment.

That’s now 10M ppl who have no income & no insurance at the beginning of a pandemic.

Any politician NOT calling for a minimum of $2000/month UBI and nationalized healthcare will be complicit with the total collapse of our system.

Alan Merrill is famous for writing the song “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll.” He died Sunday from COVID-19. His widow Laura wrote about his final day and wants it shared widely. When he started getting sick she read that hospitals didn’t want to deal with him unless his symptoms were severe – meaning he was already dying. At the hospital they tested for COVID-19, with results back in 10 hours. They wouldn’t do much until the results came back. It took another 3 hours before he could be taken to ICU. He died shortly after that. Even though she had been with him while he was sick the doctors wouldn’t test her. She now has to grieve in quarantine. She wrote on Facebook:

So essentially you have to be near dead to get help. I know there is no cure, but surely there is something they can do to alleviate the risk your lungs being destroyed, like sending oxygen to people's homes?

The US Postal Service said because of the drop in business activity the level of mail has also dropped by quite a bit. So has their revenue. They warn they may run out of money by June. The bailout bill included $10 billion in loans – subject to the approval of the Treasury Dept.

The GOP has long sought to eliminate the USPS, forcing people to use a delivery service that makes a profit for shareholders. That’s why the USPS must fund pensions about 75 years ahead of time – a ridiculous idea whose only purpose is to cause money problems. The possibility of an inactive postal system comes at a time when there is a lot of talk of the necessity of vote by mail.

About that vote by mail… Georgia has a primary election scheduled for May 19. The secretary of state is mailing out absentee ballot applications to all 6.9 million registered voters. State House Speaker David Ralston objected, saying:

This will be extremely devastating to Republicans and conservatives in Georgia. Every registered voter is going to get one of these. … This will certainly drive up turnout.

Laura Clawson of Kos responded:

It’s incredibly sad—but also telling—that one of our major political parties is afraid of the basis of our democracy. It’s especially sad that a massive threat to public health if people go to the polls and stand in lines (a Republican specialty) and touch the same touchscreens and pens and so on isn’t enough to get Republicans to support vote by mail. They are literally putting their own electoral chances above human lives, and they’re not even being subtle about it.

I’ve mentioned that senators were caught selling stocks while telling the public everything was just fine. Jared Yates Sexton tweeted:

Just remember.

When these ghouls learned how devastating the pandemic would be their first call was their stockbrokers and their first thought was how to profit.

They condemned hundreds of thousands of Americans to lonely, agonizing deaths.

We're going to watch so much suffering and chaos in the next few months. There's going to be an overwhelming amount of news.

Never, ever forget what these ghouls did to us and to our loved ones.

Never, ever forget that they put profit over the lives of human beings.

Tiffany Cabán tweeted a quote from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:

People aren’t dying of just the coronavirus. They are dying of incompetence, for-profit motives, ignoring the advice of medical experts. We have a pandemic of lack of leadership.

Yamiche Alcindor tweeted a few days ago:

President Trump just said he likely was distracted by the impeachment trial and that impacted his response to coronavirus.

That is a remarkable admission.

TBashII replied with what the nasty guy was really saying:

Look I was busy doing a lot of crimes and abducting kids and consolidating my coup and because you yelled at me for doing those crimes I got distracted and murdered 200,000 people.

I started calling him the nasty prince, though it looks like calling him the pandemic price is more accurate.

He is being called Mr. Coronavirus, the go-to guy getting things solved, getting medical equipment to where it needs to be. Want to guess how well that’s going? Well, he told his father-in-law the nasty guy that New York doesn’t need all the ventilators they say they need.

Others are calling him the Blunderkind. He actually spoke at yesterday’s virus briefing, saying that the national stockpile of medical equipment is “ours” and is not supposed to be the states’ stockpiles.

Joan McCarter of Kos reminds us the purpose of the Strategic National Stockpile, to provide…

life-saving pharmaceuticals and medical supplies for use in a public health emergency severe enough to cause local supplies to run out. … When state, local, tribal, and territorial responders request federal assistance to support their response efforts, the stockpile ensures that the right medicines and supplies get to those who need them most during an emergency.

It says so right on their website. Well, used to say. It’s now been changed to conform with what the prince decreed.

If the prince is in charge of getting medical equipment where it needs to be, he’s surely aware of – likely directly facilitating – the price gouging now going on. Lydia DePillis and Lisa Song of ProPublica provide details. For example, a portable x-ray machine, normally selling for maybe $80K now going for $248K. This gouging would put huge dents in state budgets. It may also mean that rural health clinics with shallow pockets simply can’t get supplies. Oh, but the capitalist vampires …



Aviator Doc of the Kos community got word from his corporate hospital management of changes, so titled his post “We saw you were on fire, so we brought this gasoline…” Because the hospitals had to discontinue outpatient procedures and elective surgeries their revenue stream was only 40% of normal, even though critical care services were way up. So, everyone gets a 10% pay cut – but we’re sharing your pain, the cut affects us too! Yeah, the CEO’s take will be only $22.5 million, instead of $25 million. Corporate healthcare is murder.



FEMA is out in front and leading the way! … in procuring 100,000 body bags for the nation and an extra 85 refrigerator trucks to serve as temporary morgues in New York City. I’m sure you are comforted by that.



And to the nasty guy. Jared Yates Sexton tweeted:

Trump went from bragging that he would keep the virus from killing a single American to bragging that he'll keep it under a quarter million deaths.

Wrap your head around that. Don't let the normalization of his lies numb it.

250,000 living, breathing humans.

Jay Rosen tweeted:

Anyone who says he now soberly accepts the reality of the pandemic. No. He switched claims. From we're doing a fantastic job, the virus is like 15 people to we're doing a fantastic job, if we did nothing it would be millions dead.

Those calling him sober are the marks.

Laura Clawson of Kos expands on that. The media is praising the nasty guy’s serious face, even after months of his denial of the pandemic. But they don’t seem to see all he is doing is moving the goal posts. Yeah, it is a change in tone. But it is no more truthful.

Mark Sumner of Kos explains in more detail that all the nasty guy has done is redefine what “win” means. The only thing he pays attention to is what it all means for his reelection.

In a separate post Sumner lists all the things the nasty guy did or didn’t do that brought the current calamity upon us. These include canceling programs that spots new virus threats, ignoring warnings, dismissing reports showing America was unprepared, and failing to follow the playbook on how to handle a pandemic.