Tag Archives: coronavirus

national news

POTUS exhibits extreme envy of a former POTUS

ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images

Critics of this blog are going to accuse me of engaging in psychobabble, but I am going to post these brief thoughts anyway.

Donald John Trump, to my way of thinking, is exhibiting extreme envy of his immediate predecessor, Barack Hussein Obama.

That seems to me to be the only reason he keeps trying to run down the former president’s accomplishments. For instance, Trump threw this little gem out today on Twitter: Gallup just gave us the highest rating ever for the way we are handling the CoronaVirus situation. The April 2009-10 Swine Flu, where nearly 13,000 people died in the U.S. was poorly handled. Ask MSDNC & lightweight Washington failure @RonaldKlain, who was the President then?

See? There you go. He keeps trying to suggest that President Obama’s two terms — to which he was elected both times with healthy majorities — just didn’t cut it.

Well, Trump is lying … which is no surprise to anyone with half a brain.

Why, though, does he keep insisting that Barack Obama was such a failure? Let me take a brief stab at it.

I believe he envies Obama. He looks at the way President Obama handled himself in public. He is jealous of the way the public responded to Obama’s grace, his calm, his class, his dignity. Can you imagine Donald Trump ever leading a grief-stricken church congregation in the wake of a massacre in South Carolina in a rendition of “Amazing Grace”? Try picturing Trump shedding a tear when talking about children and their teachers being murdered in a school as Obama did when mourning the shooting deaths in Newtown, Conn.

The public still yearns for that kind of presidential compassion and empathy. It finds none of it in No. 45.

And so when his Twitter fingers get itchy, he lashes out with nonsense. He directs his anger and his envy at the man he succeeded as president, at the man who continues to engender more admiration and outright love from a public that for the most part disdains Donald Trump.

The current president simply sickens me.

economic news

SXSW falls victim to coronavirus

The coronavirus scare has just hit a lot of Texans where it hurts.

Austin city officials have canceled the annual South by Southwest music and art festival. Why? They don’t want to expose the thousands of spectators who had planned to flock to the Hill Country to the threat of the virus.

Well now. This is how you measure the economic impact of the coronavirus.

SXSW means a lot to many folks who flock to Austin each year. They get a chance to experience the Texas brand of music. And oh brother, the event draws plenty of top-drawer acts to the Texas capital city. SXSW brought in an estimated $350 million to the Austin-area economy in 2019.

It might be rescheduled. Or, it might have to be put aside for a year. Maybe longer, yes?

According to the Austin Business Journal: Travis County Judge Sarah Eckhardt said cancellation was a data-driven decision and not made out of “panic.”

“This is a decision based on expert medical opinion that we should cancel or discourage festivals and mass gatherings countywide that are drawing participants from other areas of the country and the world that have documented cases of person-to-person transmission,” she said.

This is a prudent call. It was the only decision that made sense, given the exposure that many folks might have had by mingling with thousands of others.

They call it “community transmission.” It involves people touching other people. There’s a lot of that kind of activity at SXSW.

Good call, folks.

There’s always next year. We hope.

medical news, national news

Donald Trump: Are his survival ‘skills’ running out?

Donald John Trump has lied his way through three-plus years of the presidency of the United States.

He has lied about the economic revival and the credit he hogs all for himself. Trump has lied about his business acumen and the manner in which he “built” a fortune. Trump has lied about his intention to forgo golf while running up the largest golfing tab in presidential history. Trump lied about the ease with which it would be to erase the Affordable Care Act and replace it with something better.

He lies when he doesn’t need to lie. He cannot tell the truth. He lies about big matters and small matters.

Yet his base sticks with him. They cling to this man’s idiocy.

Now he is lying about the administration’s response to the coronavirus outbreak that threatens to become a pandemic. The latest set of lies, of course, now brings serious consequences. He endangers Americans by telling them the threat is overblown; he advises Americans that it’s OK to go to work even when they’re infected with a “slight” case of the virus.

Has this nitwit’s luck run out? Is the president now facing a situation that brings life and death consequences as a result of his incessant lying?

If a presidential administration needs anything at all at times like this, it needs to be seen as credible. It needs to be taken seriously. The president needs to be seen as a calming, steady and truthful presence on the national scene.

Donald Trump and his administration are none of the above. This medical emergency has brought out the worst in the president. It has revealed for all of us to see in plain sight that we cannot trust a single word that comes from this man’s mouth.

He is a dangerous man who remains fundamentally unfit for the office to which he was elected.

national news

Trump’s ignorance puts Americans in jeopardy

Donald Trump has emerged as a threat not only to our national security but now to the health and well being of rank-and-file Americans.

Consider what he told Fox News’ Sean Hannity, as reported by Yahoo! News:

“A lot of people will have this and it’s very mild. They’ll get better very rapidly. They don’t even see a doctor, they don’t even call a doctor. You never hear about those people,” Trump told Fox News host Sean Hannity. “So you can’t put them down in the category of the overall population in terms of this corona flu and or virus. So you just can’t do that. So, if you know, we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work. Some of them go to work, but they get better.”

A word to the wise and the unsuspecting: Do not go to work if you have the coronavirus!

What troubles many of us is that a lot of Americans who continue to hang onto the Medical Expert in Chief’s words will take him seriously when he blathers such nonsense.

Thus, in my view, the president of the United States — the fellow who swore on a Bible to protect us — instead is putting many of us in danger of getting potentially deathly ill.

Why and how? I can’t explain the why. The how is simple: Donald Trump is an ignorant buffoon who says whatever he thinks will benefit him politically.

national news

Matt Gaetz: newest GOP supreme goofball

Take a look at this idiotic image.

The fool behind that gas mask is Florida GOP U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz, who reported for work on Capitol Hill this week sporting the mask. He was making some sort of ridiculous statement about the coronavirus crisis that is beginning to cause some signs of panic around the country.

Instead of being a sober, serious and studied lawmaker, Gaetz — who is known for his histrionic and occasionally hysterical defense of Donald Trump — chose to make a spectacle of himself.

By donning this mask and making a complete a** of himself in public, he has demeaned the actual illness that Americans are enduring and has mocked the deaths of the dozen or so Americans who have succumbed to this illness.

Rep. Gaetz should be ashamed of himself.

Sadly, though, he won’t.

medical news, science news

Shut up, Mr. POTUS, on the subject of ‘coronavirus’

Donald John Trump is putting millions of Americans — the folks he took an oath to protect — in dire jeopardy if they listen to his idiotic rants about his “hunch” and the coronavirus.

Trump told Fox News’ Sean Hannity last night that those who might have the coronavirus could just get “well” even if they go to work while infected with the highly contagious — and potentially fatal — disease.

What is this guy trying to do?

Then he disputed the World Health Organization’s view about the mortality rate among those who come down with the virus. WHO doctors suggest the rate is about 3.4 percent. Trump says it is his “hunch” that the death rate is less than that figure. His hunch? What the hell is that all about?

U.S. public health officials do not have enough testing kits to find the virus among the population. At least we have an admission of that shortfall from Vice President Pence, who went to Washington state today to assess the situation at the epicenter of the outbreak in the United States.

As for the president, he needs to stop tweeting his idiocy. He needs also to leave the topic of the coronavirus exclusively up to the health experts who are working to stem the growing concern.

Donald Trump doesn’t know a damn thing about this virus. He needs to shut his trap and let the experts do the talking.

national news

Trump delivers on this amazing pledge

What you see here reportedly is a check signed by Donald Trump paid to the Department of Health and Human Services.

It depicts his fourth-quarter salary that he is donating to the HHS to fight the coronavirus outbreak that is threatening nations around the world.

Trump vowed to forgo his $400,000 annual salary, donating it to various charities and causes.

Yes, I have been highly critical of the president since before he took office. And, yes, there is not a single thing he likely can do to change my opposition to his re-election.

I do, though, want to salute him for making good on his pledge to send his presidential salary to causes that need the money more than he does.

Sports news

How will the Olympics fare under this coronavirus threat?

They’re going to light an Olympic flame later this summer.

It’s supposed to occur in Tokyo. It likely will occur there, even though Japan sits near the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak that got its start in Wuhan, China, which is just a bit west of Japan.

I have been wrestling with a supreme hypothetical question: If I had tickets to any Olympic event, would I still want to attend given the extremely contagious nature of the virus that is killing people around the world? I cannot answer that question because I do not possess a ticket to any event, nor have I purchased an airline ticket to Tokyo.

However, it is a question facing potentially millions of spectators who are set to go to Japan to cheer on athletes from their nations.

Do they move the Olympic Games? Can they possibly tell the Japanese Olympic organizers to fold it all up out of fear that event spectators will be stricken by a killer virus?

I have heard that London is ready to step up if Tokyo cannot stage the Games. The Brits played host to the 2012 Olympics and, I presume, their facilities haven’t rotted into decay the way many recent Olympic venues have been allowed to deteriorate.

It’s a conundrum, to be sure.

medical news

Is this how to rally unity against a potential health threat?

I am trying to think back when I’ve ever heard an American president say the things that Donald J. Trump has said about a potentially pending health crisis.

An American has died of the coronavirus; it happened in Washington state. Yet the president of the United States just this week declared at a political rally that the coronavirus issue is a “Democratic (Party) hoax.” A hoax? Yeah. He used that word just as he did against the evidence brought forth that led to his impeachment by the House and just as he has labeled the climate change crisis that is threatening Planet Earth.

It’s a hoax! That’s how the president of the United States describes it. Good grief! This individual is off his rocker!

I believe Donald Trump should call the family of the coronavirus patient who died and try to persuade them that this crisis isn’t real. How do you think that would go?

This kind of outbreak deserves sober and steady analysis. It deserves to be treated for what many of us believe it is, which is an ailment that threatens to claim many more victims before it is eradicated.

This isn’t the time to play politics with a crisis that is unfolding in real time before us all.

medical news

Now the White House is censoring the top docs in the world? Huh … ?

What in the name of science denial is going on at the White House?

The nation is being threatened with a potentially monstrous medical pandemic — the coronavirus — and the president of the United States wants the world’s top immunologist to pass all public comments through the White House before it’s made public.

I refer to Dr. Anthony Fauci, someone who has worked for seven presidential administrations. The man is a medical genius. He is trying to offer candid assessments of the threat of the virus that is sweeping through Asia and is threatening to do the same through every other continent on Earth … maybe even in Antarctica.

He stood before the nation the other day and said without hesitation that he cannot predict what the coronavirus is going to do to the United States. Then Donald Trump took the microphone and essentially contradicted him, saying that everything is under control. He predicted — and I cringed when I heard him use the word — there might be a “miraculous” discovery to cure the virus.

Trump is saying that a vaccine is just over the horizon; the medical gurus say “not so fast,” there ain’t a cure to be found just yet.

Meanwhile, the president put Vice President Mike Pence in charge of the coronavirus mission. Pence is, shall we say, a noted science denier. He has demonstrated little tolerance or understanding of the complexities of crises such as what we’re facing at this moment.

He wants instead to protect the president’s backside, of which he has shown quite an ability.

Meanwhile, the world is engaging in something close to panic. The White House response is to censor the brilliant medical minds who are seeking answers — and developing updates that they need to give to an increasingly anxious public.