April 24, 2020

Lysol Manufacturer Warns Trump Is a Dangerous Moron...

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/04/donald-trump-lysol-coronavirus-warning

Coronavirus
Lysol Manufacturer Warns Trump Is a Dangerous Moron, “Under No Circumstance” Should Disinfectant Be Injected in Body
Yes, it has come to this.
By Bess Levin
April 24, 2020


As you’ve probably heard by now, Thursday, April 23, marked an important moment in the history books, as it was the day that Donald Trump went from dangerous circus clown to actual imminent threat to all Americans. Seizing on scientist Bill Bryan’s presentation showing that sunlight, humidity, and disinfectants can sometimes quickly kill the coronavirus on surfaces, the synapses in Trump’s brain caught fire, leading him to conclude that, perhaps, people should start injecting cleaning fluid into their veins. “I see disinfectant, where it knocks [the coronavirus] out in a minute—one minute—and is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning,” Trump mused on live TV. “Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that. So you’re going to have to use medical doctors, but it sounds interesting to me.”

As millions of Americans obviously know, this was a horrible suggestion, given that disinfectants like isopropyl alcohol, bleach, and cleaners such as Lysol and Clorox are highly toxic and are not safe for internal use. (In fact, there’s been a recent surge in accidental poisonings, and that’s not among people shooting them up like heroin.) Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who actually listen to the words coming out of the president’s mouth, so when he hypes unproven drugs as a cure for COVID-19—drugs that later turn out to be ineffective at best and deadly at worst—or suggests they try chugging household cleaner, there’s a strong possibility they might actually take him up on it. (According to the Washington Post, Maryland's COVID-19 hotline has received 100 calls re: ingesting disinfectants.) Which led to, on Friday, what we believe is the first known instance of a manufacturer of a product that carries a poison label on the side of the bottle having to put out a statement effectively saying, “Please don’t listen to the president of the United States when he tells you to drink this.”



The White House, of course, has tried to spin the incident as another example of the “FAKE NEWS MEDIA” trying to take Trump down, with new press secretary Kayleigh McEnany claiming the president’s comments were taken out of context, and that even though he quite clearly suggested maybe injecting disinfectant would cure coronavirus, he also “said that Americans should consult with medical doctors regarding coronavirus treatment.” (For his part, Trump angrily snapped at Washington Post reporter Phillip Rucker for having the audacity to point out that pushing unproven treatments is dangerous, telling Rucker “I’m the president, and you’re fake news.” On Friday, he claimed he was totally just being sarcastic when he said ingesting disinfectant could be a cure.)

And in a totally unrelated report from the New York Times that certainly shouldn’t be viewed as some kind of critique of Trump’s process:



Anyway, stay tuned for next week when Trump wonders aloud if there would be any merit to freebasing rat poison when it comes to killing the virus, adding, of course, that one should consult with their doctor before doing so.

April 24, 2020

Alicia Keys performs her new song, "Good Job."

&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR2u4DUss1g0MvMs73-LmCFpyd20vgxlyk7beKx00TQw6J8xORoPxNPvINE

April 24, 2020

Trauma On The Pandemic's Front Line Leaves Health Workers Reeling

Trauma On The Pandemic's Front Line Leaves Health Workers Reeling

April 23, 20201:06 PM ET
Yuki Noguchi


The scene at the Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx is unlike anything psychiatrist Bruce Schwartz has seen. Everyone, even interns and nurses in training, have been tapped to tend to the flood of COVID-19 patients, who are crashing and dying at rates comparable to the front line of a battlefield.

His hospital treats a highly vulnerable minority population — where rates of obesity and diabetes also run high — meaning infected patients face an especially high risk of death.

Hospital workers around the world face similar, sustained trauma, and it's taking an emotional toll. A recent study underscored the severity of those risks: Half of Chinese health care workers studied who treated COVID-19 patients earlier this year now suffer from depression. Nearly as many — 44.6% — have anxiety, and a third have insomnia.

Schwartz, who is also president of the American Psychiatric Association, says hospitals like his are offering teletherapy for their own staff. But he expects the need to only grow: "After this epidemic lets up, we're going to see a great deal of post-traumatic stress."

Medical professionals, in other words, will be the patients of tomorrow. And Harvard psychiatrist Roy Perlis worries health care workers will be reluctant to seek care.

snip//

And there's lots of other drama playing out around them: Not every patient gets a lifesaving ventilator, for example. And the medical staff can't clean patients of the tears and saliva that build up on their faces. On his hourlong commute home every day, Villareal is haunted by the constant stream of desperate calls from loved ones. A patient's family members aren't permitted to visit, and Villareal has no time to comfort them.



Psychologists have a name for that kind of feeling: "Moral injury."

more...

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/04/23/840986735/trauma-on-the-pandemics-front-line-leaves-health-workers-reeling?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_term=nprnews&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&fbclid=IwAR30wthiNNeQZLFpi_kSRfznP_VM25WONxOc_ztJhkW_DthNXZ0qKFR9pYQ

April 24, 2020

Fifty Thousand Americans Dead from the Coronavirus, and a President Who Refuses to Mourn Them

Letter from Trump’s Washington
Fifty Thousand Americans Dead from the Coronavirus, and a President Who Refuses to Mourn Them
By Susan Glasser
April 23, 2020
Healthcare workers wheel deceased people to a refrigerated trailer.

To the extent that President Trump discusses those who have died, he does so in self-justifying terms, framing the pandemic as an externally imposed catastrophe that would have been worse without him.Photograph by Michael Nagle / Redux


In just the past few days, President Trump has blamed immigrants, China, the “fake news” and, of course, “the invisible enemy” of the coronavirus for America’s present troubles. He has opined extemporaneously about his plans to hold a grand Fourth of July celebration on the National Mall and has announced that he planted a tree on the White House lawn in honor of Earth Day. He has offered his opinion on matters small and large, bragged about himself as “the king of ventilators,” and spent much time lamenting the pandemic-inflicted passing of what he invariably (and inaccurately) calls “the greatest economy in the history of the world.”

Despite the flood of words, though, what has struck me the most this week is what Trump does not talk about: the mounting toll of those who have died in this crisis. So voluble that he regularly talks well past dinnertime at his nightly briefings, the President somehow never seems to find time to pay tribute to those who have been lost, aside from reading an occasional scripted line or two at the start of his lengthy press conferences, or a brief mention of a friend in New York who died of the disease soon after calling him at the White House. “He said, ‘I tested positive.’ Four days later he was dead,” the President recounted. “So this is a tough deal.” It was not exactly the prayerful, if often politically expedient, mournfulness Americans generally expect of their elected leaders. Trump, for the most part, dispenses even with the ritualistic clichés that other politicians, regardless of party or creed, have always offered in times of crisis.

But the numbers are the numbers, and, notwithstanding Trump’s relentless happy talk, the coronavirus epidemic has, as of this week, already produced some fifty thousand American dead. This is not, needless to say, a best-case scenario, or anything close to it. Just a few weeks ago, a survey of scientific experts predicted forty-seven thousand U.S. dead by the beginning of May, according to the Web site FiveThirtyEight. Instead, forty-seven thousand deaths were recorded by this Wednesday, April 22nd, well before the experts had anticipated. On April 8th, a leading model at the University of Washington had revised its projections downward to forecast a total of sixty thousand American deaths by the beginning of August. But the nation now looks to hit that number by May 1st, meaning that, just a few days from now, more Americans will have died from COVID-19 than the entire toll from the Vietnam War. Meanwhile, Trump talks of reopening the country, and of the “tremendous strides against this invisible enemy.”

You would think that no amount of Trumpian misdirection could disguise the awful fact that America has more confirmed coronavirus deaths than any country in the world, and that many of them might have been prevented by earlier, more decisive government action when the President was denying that the coronavirus even presented a threat to the United States. But Trump is trying his hardest to ignore the COVID-19 deaths. To the extent that he discusses those who have died, he tends to do so largely in self-justifying, explicitly political terms, framing the pandemic as an externally imposed catastrophe that would have been much, much worse without him. Earlier this deadly spring, Trump was briefly scared into a more sombre public presentation by projections that showed hundreds of thousands or even millions of U.S. deaths if no preventative actions were taken. Now he cites the absence of those worst-case scenarios as proof of his own brilliant handling of the crisis. The numbers of dead citizens he throws about, meanwhile, seem to be abstractions to a President who believes that even the subject of mass death is all about him. “If we didn’t do the moves that we made, you would have had a million, a million and a half, two million people dead,” he said on Monday. “You would have had ten to twenty to twenty-five times more people dead than all of the people that we’ve been watching. That’s not acceptable. The fifty thousand is not acceptable. It’s so horrible. But can you imagine multiplying that out by twenty or more? It’s not acceptable.” Trump did not pause to offer any sort of regret or sorrow, and instead claimed that the entire death toll in the United States would end up around fifty or sixty thousand as a result of his heroic moves. Of course, this was not true; that is, essentially, how many have already passed away.

Honoring the dead has long been one of the tests of American Presidential leadership. Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was, after all, not just another political speech but a remembrance of those who were killed in the bloodiest single battle of the Civil War, in which some fifty thousand Americans became casualties and about eight thousand died. Twenty-five years ago this week, Bill Clinton’s lip-bitingly empathetic response to the Oklahoma City bombing, in which a white supremacist blew up a federal building and killed a hundred and sixty-eight people, was seen as a key moment of his tenure. He was dubbed the “mourner-in-chief,” at a time when he was languishing politically. That speech is often said to have saved his Presidency. More recently, Barack Obama wept from the White House lectern in speaking about the deaths of schoolchildren in Newtown, Connecticut, and gave arguably the speech of his lifetime in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, singing “Amazing Grace” as he mourned at a funeral service for nine African-Americans killed by a white supremacist at a church massacre. Even those Presidents who aren’t particularly good at speechifying—think of the two George Bushes—have considered public commiseration amid national tragedy part of the job description. Have we ever had a President just take a pass on human empathy, even of the manufactured, politically clichéd kind?

more...

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/fifty-thousand-americans-dead-in-the-coronavirus-pandemic-and-a-president-who-refuses-to-mourn-them?utm_source=facebook&utm_social-type=owned&utm_medium=social&mbid=social_facebook&utm_brand=tny&fbclid=IwAR0TGMWk7K6VQxKGQ-1r5gFP6JlKoLo5bDCPIgkExwDJgleFXWK1B1JRejI&fbclid=IwAR3F7jPF01GNornNjYXc-Es24MuaB7WuelmaBoeR8Dcy2lSSm099r3JfYIw

April 24, 2020

Florida parents caught selling free meals from school

Some people really suck.

https://www.wptv.com/news/state/florida-parents-caught-selling-free-meals-from-school?fbclid=IwAR3FfkMd25UF9IJq5vIMlM0KWQ9DF1u9mL_W5e4GoGrVlGhhOplaqHTrG1k

Florida parents caught selling free meals from school
People in at least 50 cars went to multiple locations to receive free food then sold it for a profit.
Posted at 7:51 AM, Apr 24, 2020
and last updated 7:51 AM, Apr 24, 2020

snip//

The school district said it did not have enough food on Wednesday.

The district said people in at least 50 cars went to multiple locations to receive free food. It appears they sold the food on social media platforms for a profit.

The district has remained flexible allowing families to pick up food at any of the sites. It will adjust its protocols to make sure people do not take advantage of the system.

School staff are now using a tracker to make sure parents are not cheating the system.

Parents will have to give their child’s name and school ID number in order to pickup food, and so they cannot pickup more than once.

“We want to make sure that children actually get the nutrition they need to be successful during the e learning process,” said Davis.

April 23, 2020

Fox News Devotes Entire Segment to Mocking COVID-19 Positive CNN Anchors

Fox News Devotes Entire Segment to Mocking COVID-19 Positive CNN Anchors
Fox News’ Laura Ingraham took a break from misleading viewers about all things coronavirus to disparage those at CNN who have shared their experiences while battling the virus
By Peter Wade


Fox News’ Laura Ingraham took a break from misleading viewers about all things coronavirus to disparage those at CNN who have shared their experiences while battling the virus.

On Wednesday night, Ingraham, who regularly trolls in dangerous coronavirus advice like touting untested drugs and encouraging people to take part in anti-stay-at-home protests, devoted more than five minutes of her program to talk smack about the newscasters, complete with pre-packaged graphics.

Guest Raymond Arroyo began the segment by panning CNN’s talent — Chris Cuomo, Brooke Baldwin, and Richard Quest — who have, in one way or another, spoken on-air about contracting the virus and its ramifications.



more...

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/fox-news-mock-coronavirus-cnn-988906/?fbclid=IwAR0hecF2oRuw6YWir3j_Ln2ehIyYWchVQY0-Dcr4zq5bi8C3RjakLxOvgMg

April 23, 2020

Facing furor, Ruth's Chris high-end steak chain returns $20 million small business loan

Facing furor, Ruth's Chris high-end steak chain returns $20 million small business loan
The restaurant chain has been under fire for accepting stimulus loans earmarked for struggling small businesses.
April 23, 2020, 4:18 PM EDT / Updated April 23, 2020, 4:21 PM EDT
By Ben Popken


Ruth's Chris Steak House will return the $20 million coronavirus small business loan it procured from the government's $350 billion Paycheck Protection Program, the company announced Thursday.

The PPP was designed to throw a financial lifeline to the millions of small businesses who have seen revenues plunge due to social distancing lockdowns — but the hastily conceived program left thousands of applicants high and dry, after funds were snapped up in less than two weeks.

Ruth's Hospitality Group, which owns the Ruth's Chris Steak House brand operates more than 100 steakhouses across the United States, Canada and Mexico. It managed to secure two $10 million loans, one for each of its subsidiaries.

With fewer than 500 employees at each location, the company argued that it does meet the eligibility requirements for the loan and has had to furlough some employees.

However, the chain has been under fire for accepting stimulus loans earmarked for struggling small businesses, not multimillion-dollar corporations.

more...

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/facing-furor-ruth-s-chris-high-end-steak-chain-returns-n1190606?fbclid=IwAR3A4BQI5W6e5Lf1Uyncyz75M1h6cO0-N8pF2FoBbxWV3MX5UxTXx7xcSk4

April 23, 2020

Seth MacFarlane Calls Out Oprah for Popularizing "Dubious Characters" Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz

Seth MacFarlane Calls Out Oprah for Popularizing “Dubious Characters” Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz
The celebrity doctors have been spouting off misinformation about the coronavirus and its possible treatments
by Ben Kaye
on April 22, 2020, 11:26pm


Over the last few weeks, celebrity doctors Phil McGraw (a psychologist) and Mehmet Oz (a cardiothoracic surgeon) have been spouting off misinformation about the coronavirus and its possible treatments. Besides the fact that neither are actually trained in epidemiology, a common factor between the two TV docs is how they got their start: as guests on Oprah Winfrey’s talk show. That’s a connection Seth MacFarlane has recently taken issue with, calling on Oprah to “correct” the record on the pair of medical hosts.

The Family Guy creator’s first remarks came from a tweet in which he shared a Los Angeles Times article detailing Dr. Oz and Dr. Phil’s controversial COVID-19 remarks. “Oprah has done some wonderfully altruistic things with her career, but the use of her platform to amplify the voices of dubious characters rather than legitimate scientists has been a disservice,” MacFarlane wrote. “I hope she will lend her own powerful voice to correct it.”

Then on Wednesday night, MacFarlane joined Anand Giridharadas for the first episode of Vice TV’s new political talk show Seat at the Table. Asked about the tweet, MacFarlane again emphasized that Oprah had largely “used her platform for good.” However, he added, “The exception to that is the elevation of these purveyors of pseudoscience. People like Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz, all the way back to Jenny McCarthy and the anti-vax movement.”



more...

https://consequenceofsound.net/2020/04/seth-macfarlane-oprah-dr-phil-dr-oz/?fbclid=IwAR0prhb8_nob1GseisvPuzfCCwbii5avo-tACAj5fRVKKDRcfSjHQqqRk5Y

April 23, 2020

McConnell: Let's Use COVID-19 to Crush Public Sector Unions

https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/04/mcconnell-lets-use-covid-19-to-crush-public-sector-unions/?fbclid=IwAR0rzRFWr2mlMeLXTHmoEGsAlCOmakxbwGgsSPoyr2dzt101YEI2kbjLLNU

3 hours ago
McConnell: Let’s Use COVID-19 to Crush Public Sector Unions
Kevin Drum


You’ve probably heard that Mitch McConnell wants states to declare bankruptcy instead of getting rescue funds from the federal government. However, this is not due to some kind of generalized fear of running up the deficit. It’s because, like most Republicans, he hates public sector unions:



Republicans have been targeting the pensions of state workers forever. For the most part, these pensions are protected because they’re part of union contracts, but that just makes them even more attractive targets: If you can gut pensions, then not only will you reduce state spending, but you can crush the unions at the same time. Legally, though, the only way to do this is as part of a bankruptcy restructuring.

So as far as McConnell is concerned, COVID-19 has an upside: by wrecking state finances, it will force them into bankruptcy. And that means Republicans can get their revenge on public sector unions, who are big supporters of Democrats. What’s not to like?

April 23, 2020

Pelosi Fires Back At 'Insecure' McConnell After He Derides 'Blue State Bailouts'

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/pelosi-fire-back-mcconnell-insecure-pathetic-language-blue-state-bailouts?fbclid=IwAR1wEvoO6hqSzePmSbICqs8QMhBv0SJV-SvFcaNiPjFNe6x1N3L9n9nnrWw


Pelosi Fires Back At ‘Insecure’ McConnell After He Derides ‘Blue State Bailouts’
By Cristina Cabrera
April 23, 2020 11:41 a.m.


House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) slammed Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) on Wednesday after the senator’s office mocked so-called “blue state bailouts” as Congress hammers out another relief package during the COVID-19 outbreak.



Earlier on Wednesday, McConnell’s office had issued two press releases on his interviews on Fox News and Hugh Hewitt’s radio show. Both releases had sections on “Stopping Blue State Bailouts” and “Preventing Blue State Bailouts” that quoted the Republican leader’s complaints about assisting Democratic regions of the country amid the pandemic.



In that interview, McConnell even argued that the states ought to go bankrupt.

“Yeah, I would certainly be in favor of allowing states to use the bankruptcy route,” he said. “It saves some cities. And there’s no good reason for it not to be available.”