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SunSeeker's JournalRepublican, Democrats reach compromise over Covid-19 stimulus package
Source: NBC News
WASHINGTON — Senior lawmakers reached a compromise over the Federal Reserve's emergency lending powers late Saturday night, overcoming a major hurdle that prevented Congress from completing a $900 billion coronavirus relief package earlier in the week, according to multiple sources.
A last-minute roadblock emerged on Friday as Democrats accused Republicans, namely Pennsylvania's Sen. Pat Toomey, of attempting to encumber the incoming Biden administration by cutting off the Federal Reserve's emergency lending abilities created by the CARES Act meant to protect the already battered economy.
“Now that Democrats have agreed to a version of Sen. Toomey’s important language, we can begin closing out the rest of the package to deliver much-needed relief to families, workers, and businesses,” a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told NBC News.
Compromise language is being finalized and any open items are expected to be worked out overnight, according to two aides.
Read more: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/republican-democrats-reach-compromise-over-covid-19-stimulus-package-n1251837
WaPo: Covid-19 hospitalization rates are dropping. That's terrible news.
So during most of the fall, we could look at any single day’s covid cases and predict that about a week later, a certain proportion of them — about 3.5 percent — would result in hospitalizations. The rate, in fact, was remarkably consistent. On Oct. 15, we had 53,000 new cases. On Oct. 22, you would expect 1,844 hospitalizations. What was it actually? 1,855.
But as we entered November, something began to change. For instance, on Nov. 1, the Covid Tracking Project’s seven-day average showed about 80,000 new cases — which we would predict should lead to about 2,800 new hospitalizations a week later, by Nov. 8. Instead, there were 2,600, a little fewer than expected. On Nov. 15, we had 146,000 new cases, which should have resulted in about 5,100 new hospitalizations by Nov. 22. However, there were fewer than 3,700. This pattern of declining rates of hospitalization continued through the end of November.
What is happening is pretty simple: Because hospitals are filling up, they are admitting fewer and fewer people. Any doctor or nurse will tell you that as the demand for beds soars, the threshold for admission rises with it.
The decision on whether to admit a patient depends on two things: clinical judgment and bed availability. Critically ill patients will always be admitted. But as hospitals start to fill up, those who are less sick — younger covid patients, or those whose oxygen levels aren’t yet dangerously low — get sent home. These patients would be safer in a hospital bed, but there isn’t one available for them anymore. And this doesn’t happen just to covid patients. People who show up at the hospital with heart failure, wound infections and other ailments will be asked to manage their conditions at home, as doctors keep the remaining beds only for the very sickest patients. One man with a brain abscess recently waited a day in a rural hospital in Missouri before being dispatched to a larger facility hundreds of miles away, in another state.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/12/07/covid-hospitalization-rates-dropping/
Trump and Friends Got Coronavirus Care Many Others Couldn't
Rudolph W. Giuliani became the latest in President Trump’s inner circle to boast about the treatment he received for Covid-19, as hospitals across the country ration care. Ben Carson, Chris Christie and Donald J. Trump are not the sturdiest candidates to conquer the coronavirus: older, in some cases overweight, male and not particularly fit. Yet all seem to have gotten through Covid-19, and all have gotten an antibody treatment in such short supply that some hospitals and states are doling it out by lottery.
Now Rudolph W. Giuliani, the latest member of President Trump’s inner circle to contract Covid-19, has acknowledged that he received at least two of the same drugs the president received. He even conceded that his “celebrity” status had given him access to care that others did not have.
Calling into ABC Radio from his hospital bed on Tuesday, he said specifically that he had received two drugs — remdesivir, which has F.D.A. approval for treatment of Covid-19, and dexamethasone, a steroid.
But he also said he had received the same treatment [Regeneron monoclonal antibody] “cocktail” as the president: “Exactly the same, his doctor sent me here; he talked me into it,” Mr. Giuliani said of Mr. Trump’s physician, adding, “The minute I took the cocktail yesterday, I felt 100 percent better. It works very quickly, wow.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/09/us/politics/trump-coronavirus-treatments.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage
Rubbing Trump's Face in His Loss Isn't Just Fun--It's Important
So Tuesday is the day. December 8 is the “safe harbor” deadline by which all the states must resolve all election-related disputes. Then the electors vote next Monday, but that should be anti-climatic, because over the weekend, Biden was certified the winner in California, which gave him 279 electoral votes, and it doesn’t look right now as if electors are going to be replaced anywhere; the crazy-ass Republicans of Pennsylvania are up to something, but it looks like it’s mainly for show. So as of 5 p.m. Tuesday, it’ll basically be over.
Donald Trump will know it. He’ll try to pretend otherwise, even though it’s obvious to anyone with an IQ higher than the life expectancy in his beloved Russia that it’s all just a massive grift—a financial grift to get his bag-of-hammers-dumb supporters to pay off his debts, and a psychological grift of both his sucker admirers and the cowardly Republicans who know better but have the spines of amphibians and still won’t do something so basic as call Joe Biden the president-elect. (By the way, after Jan. 20, will they call him Mr. President? Sadly, this is a serious question.)
Trump knows. He knows he is a historic loser. And he is in pain. He’s humiliated. And I’m overjoyed. I’ve never been big on schadenfreude, but this is one occasion when it’s absolutely called for. Politics, like war, relies on both sides agreeing on a winner. When that breaks down, that's precisely when brutal mockery is in order, since that's still much more civil and preferable to endless rhetorical let alone martial conflict. So there’s never been anyone in American politics more deserving of total humiliation, and besides that, it’s important for the sake of this country’s future for decent people today to keep saying and saying how hideous the Trump era was. Memories, as we know, are all too short.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/rubbing-trumps-face-in-his-loss-isnt-just-funits-important?ref=home
Oregon Doc's License Suspended Over Anti-Mask Boasts at Pro-Trump Rally
An Oregon doctor who boasted about his anti-mask policies at a pro-Trump rally last month had his licensed suspended, KGW reported Friday. “I and my staff, none of us, not once, wore a mask in my clinic,” Dr. Steven LaTulippe said at the “Stop the Steal” rally, according to video posted by the Multnomah County Republican Party. In doing so, he was admitting that he violated a state order that requires masks in health-care settings, and the Oregon Medical Board stepped in. The suspension means that LaTulippe—who claimed the virus that has killed nearly 280,000 Americans is “nonsense”—is barred from practicing medicine indefinitely.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/oregon-dr-steven-latulippes-license-suspended-over-anti-mask-boasts-at-pro-trump-rally?ref=home
L.A. looking at layoffs for as many as 1,900 workers, including 951 police officers
Source: KTLA News
A budget proposal on Friday called for the Police Department to eliminate nearly 1,000 officer jobs — even though it could harm crime-fighting as the city struggles to close a huge budget shortfall caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
The cuts “will significantly impact public safety services” at a time when the city is experiencing a “drastic” rise in homicide rates with about 300 so far this year, his proposal said. It will be reviewed by the City Council.
Los Angeles is trying to close a projected $675 million budget shortfall sparked by tax and other revenue losses because of business shutdowns and personal restrictions aimed at slowing the spread of COVID-19.
Mayor Eric Garcetti said the city is still talking with the league and added that he hoped to avoid layoffs, possibly with hoped-for federal assistance, calling it “the very last option that we have.”
Read more: https://ktla.com/news/local-news/l-a-looking-at-layoffs-for-as-many-as-1900-workers-including-951-police-officers/
All cities are similarly feeling budget shortfalls because of Covid-19. Looks like it's Mitch McConnell who is defunding the police by refusing to pass state and local aid.
Epidemiologists: Coronavirus survival rates in the United States haven't improved since the summer
It’s true that better treatments are now available, but their impact isn’t nearly big enough to avoid an impending surge of deaths, expected to soon exceed 2,000 a day in the United States. And while the case fatality rate declined early in the pandemic, it hasn’t budged since the summer.
“It’s been rock solid stable since July, around 1.7 percent,” said David Dowdy, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “If anything, I think there is a concern it will go up again because we’re seeing hospitals reaching their capacity.”
Trevor Bedform, a genomic epidemiologist at the Fred Hutchsinson Cancer Research Center, found there have been no improvements in the death rates since August. Since then, the death rate among those diagnosed with covid-19 has averaged 1.8 percent, he told The Atlantic.“This rate is a major improvement, down more than tenfold from the earliest days of the pandemic, when deaths were high and the extreme limits on coronavirus testing held down the number of diagnosed cases,” The Atlantic's Alexis C. Madrigal and Whet Moser write. “But in this new phase of the pandemic, when testing is more widely available and a much higher proportion of cases are diagnosed to begin with, it is also terrible, terrible news.”
The antibody treatments from Eli Lilly and Regeneron are the most promising treatments so far. But they’re in short supply and difficult to administer, so they’re not going to be a magic bullet for saving the nation from a massive death toll this winter.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/11/24/health-202-coronavirus-survival-rates-united-states-havent-improved-since-summer/
Why does MSNBC's Ayman Moyheldin keep using the GOP's pejorative, "Democrat Party"?
It's jarring when you hear that on MSNBC. But he just did it again a few minutes ago (12:47 pm PT) while interviewing an Atlanta Constitution reporter.
God, I hope that grammatically incorrect petty insult has not gone mainstream.
The name is DEMOCRATIC PARTY.
GSA head Emily Murphy's name should ring a bell.
Maybe the most high-prifile thing she has done is block Biden’s transition, but well before that, the ethics-bereft Trump appointee lied to congress and violated the Constitution to help Trump make money at his Trump Tower hotel in the Old Post Office building in DC, with its valuable location near the White House.
She violated the rules that prevent a sitting president from leasing federal property, not to mention enable Trump to violate the Constitution's Foreign Emoluments clause, by letting him lease the Old Post Office building for his hotel, where foreign dignitaries seeking to curry favor with Trump flocked. Then she blocked the long-planned move of the FBI headquarters out of DC to the suburbs, costing taxpayers millions, all so a site would not open up for a hotel that might compete with Trump's at the nearby Old Post Office. Then she lied to Congress that Trump didn't direct her to block the relocation, when documents clearly showed he did.
She is an enabling, toady scum through and through. From her Wikipedia page:
During her tenure, two issues that were personally important to Trump became sources of controversy for Murphy and the GSA: the hotel that Trump operates under a federal lease (in Washington, D.C.'s Old Post Office) and plans for the relocation and consolidation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) headquarters.[3]
The FBI had long-scheduled a move out of its D.C. headquarters, the J. Edgar Hoover Building, as the aging building was falling apart and not secure.[3] The bureau's headquarters were planned to move to a suburban location.[3] Although the project had been in the works for more than a decade, Trump personally intervened in 2017 (during the first year of Trump's term and Murphy's tenure) to kill the plan.[3] Democrats said that Trump canceled the move to prevent the Hoover Building site from being redeveloped into a hotel that could compete with Trump's hotel across the street; the Trump White House denied that Trump's business played into the decision.[3][13] House Democrats investigated the episode.[13] In April 2018, Murphy told a congressional oversight hearing that the decision to stop the FBI from moving its headquarters came solely from the bureau without the involvement of Trump.[13] However, three months later, the GSA inspector general (IG) released a report finding that Murphy's statement to Congress was "incomplete and may have left the misleading impression that she had no discussions with White House officials in the decision-making."[13][14] The report revealed that Murphy and other GSA officials had multiple meetings with Trump about the FBI headquarters, specifically a two-day meeting in January 2018 between Murphy, Trump, White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, and budget director Mick Mulvaney.[15] The IG report also found that GSA officials misrepresented the costs of an alternative plan to build a new FBI headquarters in downtown D.C., portraying the replacement plan as cheaper than the original plan when it would actually be more expensive.[15] In October 2018, internal GSA emails disclosed by House Democrats showing that GSA discussed "the President's instructions", "direction from WH" and "what was decided in the meeting with POTUS" in January 2018.[13]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_W._Murphy
Here's Trump campaign's allegations of election irregularities. So far, none has been proved.
Republicans have made claims of election irregularities in five states where President-elect Joe Biden leads in the vote count, alleging in lawsuits and public statements that election officials did not follow proper procedures while counting ballots in Tuesday’s election.
So far, they have gone 0 for 5.
Since Election Day, President Trump has repeatedly claimed that a broad conspiracy of misdeeds — apparently committed in both Republican and Democratic states — had cost him the election.
But in the lawsuits themselves, even Trump’s campaign and allies do not allege widespread fraud or an election-changing conspiracy.
Instead, GOP groups have largely focused on smaller-bore complaints in an effort to delay the counting of ballots or claims that would affect a small fraction of votes, at best.
And, even then, they have largely lost in court.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-election-irregularities-claims/2020/11/08/8f704e6c-2141-11eb-ba21-f2f001f0554b_story.html
[ Note that WaPo has taken down its paywall for this story and it is readily accessible by clicking on the link. Lots of detail, and debunking, of specific allegations are found at the link. Good read!]
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