Tag: Botched Covid Response

Facing The Music

The Daily Escape:

First snow, New Hampshire creek – December 2021 photo by Betsy Zimmerli

“It’s always been about the music. And when it’s not, it’s about facing the music” – Wrongo

Today is the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year. It is also Wrongo’s favorite day because he prefers daylight to darkness. This is an optimistic day since every succeeding day for the next six months will bring more daylight to the land.

But Wrongo struggles to see any political daylight at the end of this extremely dark year. Here is a summation of the three events most important to Wrongo in this dark, dark year:

The January 6 aborted coup. Nothing that happened this year can overshadow the effort to subvert our democracy. While it may be doubtful right now that the outcome of the Jan. 6 committee will bring justice for the coup plotters, let’s compare it to the Watergate scandal. Those plotters were held accountable. And Watergate occurred at a time when we didn’t have mobile phone, email, and text message electronic tracing to reveal what had happened. In this Jan. 6 case, proving accountability should be easier. We don’t need to know everything, we just need to know enough to prosecute people. With all the digital information that’s available, that should be an easier job than it was during Watergate.

The recent revelations by the House Select Committee are an encouraging sign because they moved quickly on passing a contempt resolution for a former Congressman, Mark Meadows. The Committee got to tell their story three times in 24 hours. They embellished it with juicy new details (texts from Trump’s family members, Fox News personalities, reporters, members of Congress) every time they told it. If they can keep that up through the early part of next year, maybe we’ll start getting somewhere with this.

Ending the Forever War. Biden was crushed by the media and the public for walking away from Afghanistan and the subsequent chaos around the pull-out, but it was the right thing to do. Nearly 2500 US service members were killed, 20,698 were wounded, and more than $2.2 trillion in American taxpayer funds were spent on warfighting, reconstructing programs, building the Afghan National Security Forces, and promoting good governance.

In the end, we have nothing to show for our time there except for more national debt and soldiers who will need care for the rest of their lives. We deserve a full and complete accounting of our 20 years in Afghanistan. After all, it’s another military defeat that requires a fundamental examination to ensure that we never again jump into a country when we fail to understand their social and cultural dynamics.

Losing the Covid war. We’ve failed as a country to work together to beat the virus variants, despite having a vaccine that offered protection. The politicization of Covid treatment is the second worse outcome in 2021, to the politicization of the January 6 attempted coup.

Anti-vaxxers believe that their strong natural immune system will beat the virus, and that “healthy lifestyles” will give you a healthy immune system. They think using a vaccine to enhance the natural protection offered by their beautiful immune system is a bad idea because [insert the excuse of the day]. Perhaps they don’t realize that you can’t have natural immunity to a virus that your body has never encountered. An unvaccinated but fit person can get Covid because their body has no idea how to fight it.

There’s also the argument that Covid only kills older people. While the facts don’t support that idea either, maybe the anti-Vaxx community views it as an experiment to see if “having living parents or grandparents” is an evolutionary advantage for the kids who didn’t lose their relatives.

These issues show America must face the music. Wrongo’s sure we’ll face more 2021 music, but this is his top-of-mind thinking.

We’re going to have Christmas or seasonal music in each post this week. Today let’s listen to U2 – “Christmas (Baby, Please Come Home)” filmed in November 1987 at the Assembly Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. These guys were children back then. Maybe this tune has a special relevance in a world where Covid has taken so many lives:

Be kind. Not just during this season, but all the time.

Facebooklinkedinrss

Monday Wake Up Call – November 22, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge, NV – November 2021 photo by Marcia Steen

Today is the 58th anniversary of the assassination of President John Kennedy. While it wasn’t the first time Americans dove deep into conspiracy theories, who killed JFK has always been a controversial topic surrounded by conspiracy theories since that November day.

Over the weekend, we passed a sad milestone. The number of US Covid deaths in 2021 surpassed the deaths in 2020 and we still have a month to go. So far, there have been 385,457 deaths this year vs. 385,343 in 2020 according to the WSJ.

Wrongo has a few observations about what our continuing saga with Covid says about America. Almost 200 million of us are fully vaccinated. In addition, we have had 47 million confirmed cases to date. That means 74.8% of us have some level of antibodies to the several variants of Covid that have traveled through our population in the past two years.

But because: 1) Vaccines haven’t made it beyond the rich world (only 6% of the population in Africa is vaccinated) and 2) Americans seem to value the freedom to control their bodies over public health, new variants that may not be controllable by current vaccines could infiltrate the US.

There’s one very concerning new variant, B.1.640. It appears to be from Africa and has only been seen in small numbers. Apparently it’s bad. The Jerusalem Post mentioned it in” New COVID variant found in France: Reason for panic or not quite yet?” after it spread to Europe:

“A new COVID variant identified in a handful of European countries is raising concerns among some health professionals because there are changes to the coronavirus spike protein that have never been seen before.”

The B.1.640 variant has nothing to do with Delta. Researchers have had a really hard time placing it on the known Covid family tree, because it’s so far removed from anything else, that it just sits on a very long branch of its own. They think that it may elude our current vaccines.

If true, this would be another example of viral evolution completely blindsiding us. And if it isn’t this one, we’ll probably see some other variant.

The sad truth is that America is no longer willing to fight Covid. We think its too hard, and we don’t like doing difficult things. Too many of us don’t want to choose between public health and our economy.

Our unofficial policy is to expect that Covid will become a gradually declining annual infection. But that’s based on the assumption that we have a successful vaccine, that the current variant is all we’ll see, and that the virus will lose its potency over time.

Nobody dares say it out loud, but Covid has revealed the US to be a prime risk for a bioweapon attack.

If a terror group, or an adversary country decided to launch a biological attack, there is clearly nothing that we would do to stop it. How do we know that? Because Covid could have been a biological attack, and it was allowed to spread broadly instead of being properly dealt with. Because it was “too hard” to try to stop it.

We’ve spent countless $ trillions over the last 20 years for “national security”, and this is where we’ve gotten to? Wrongo is starting to think that Churchill’s comment that “the US will do the right thing, after we’ve tried everything else” was overly optimistic.

Time to wake up America! We’ve got to toughen up, or face defeat, not only on the battlefield but in ICUs across America. To help you wake up, here’s a throwback song from another era. Listen to “I’d Love to Change the World” by the late Alvin Lee & his group, Ten Years After from their 1971 Album: “A Space In Time.”

The video doesn’t feature the band, just the song from the album. The video is a film student project that Wrongo likes. Overall, the song  looks at what were considered the biggest problems in the world in 1971: Overpopulation, economic inequality, pollution, and war. Unsurprisingly, the issues remain the same:

Sample Lyric:

Everywhere is freaks and hairies
Dykes and fairies, tell me where is sanity
Tax the rich, feed the poor
Till there are no rich no more

I’d love to change the world
But I don’t know what to do
So I’ll leave it up to you

Facebooklinkedinrss

Saturday Soother – August 21, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Portage Glacier, outside Whittier, AK – August 2021 photo by nowake

Yesterday, Wrongo finished Michael Lewis’s book “The Premonition”, that tells the story of our failure to contain COVID-19. It is told through the eyes of a cast of compelling characters, including a California public health officer, a couple of idiosyncratic MDs who are White House advisers and a brilliant academic scientist whose lab revolutionized the identification of viral pathogens.

We learn how the pandemic exploited the gaps in the public health system of the world’s most advanced country that Lewis shows to be fragmented and weak politically. Moreover, he shows that the CDC’s response was almost inert when it came to reports from the states that were seeing the first Covid cases.

Early on, the CDC basically had two positions on the pandemic. First, that it wasn’t a big deal, it was overblown. And later, they made a quick pivot when it started spreading in the US. That change came far too late to contain the spread of the virus.

Lewis says little in The Premonition about the US official pandemic response. The organization that comes off the worst is the CDC and its leadership. The White House and Trump are mentioned in passing. Dr. Fauci is mentioned only a few times, while Deborah Birx is entirely absent. The White House COVID task force is seldom mentioned.

The book’s takeaway is mostly about how we have built organizations that are excellent for studying “what happened” and publishing papers about past problems. But are incapable of real time response in a true public health emergency. This is because the top CDC job has been a political appointee since the Carter administration. Lewis told NPR how the institutional failure at the CDC came about:

“The brave ones have all got their heads chopped off. So, it’s sort of institutionalized a cowardice that we’re going to need to face up to so that this business of punishing people who are doing their damnedest to try to save us from ourselves has got to stop.”

The characters in Lewis’s book have fascinating life stories: A thirteen-year-old girl’s school science project on how airborne pathogens spread, morphs with her scientist father’s help, into an important model of how Covid spreads.

A California public-health officer uses her skills and experience to see what the CDC misses and reveals important truths about our public health system. An informal group of doctors, nicknamed the Wolverines, have the skills needed to fight the pandemic: brilliant backgrounds, world-class labs, prior experience with the bird and swine flus  ̶  everything except official permission to implement their findings on behalf of the American people.

One series of facts that floored Wrongo was how important children are to spreading a virus in our population. These insights started with the kid’s model mentioned above. From pages 90-91:

“…there were more than 100,000 K-12 [public] schools in the country, with 50 million children in them. Twenty-five million ride a bus to school….There were 70,000 buses in the entire US public transportation system, but 500,000 school buses. On an average day, school buses carried twice as many people as the entire US public transportation system.”

Moreover, school bus aisles are narrower than normal buses, and better for spreading disease. They observed that when kids stand at the bus stop, they crowd together, unlike adults who give each other personal space. In the halls at school, kids also crowd together. The conclusion was that kids’ different sense of personal space has a key role in the spread of viral disease. More:

“…each elementary school child spent the day in a space with a radius of just 3.5 feet, which when they reached high school, expanded to four.”

The discoverer of this insight is one of the Wolverines, Carter Mecher, an MD who worked at the Atlanta VA hospital system. His conclusion?

“I couldn’t have designed a better system for transmitting disease than our school system”

Wrongo didn’t know that school closure was the most effective strategy to contain the spread of Covid before reading this book. We all know that few families wanted their kids to stay home from school. We know how politicized the issue of school closure became, even in states where it was mandated. There are 130,930 schools in America, all individually and locally managed. And it’s impossible to enforce a mandate on them from afar.

Between a weak public health system, an ossified CDC, and an inability to control the disease transmission in the 130k+ schools in America, Lewis’s book is a devastating look at our ability to deal with Covid and with whatever the next pandemic brings.

With Afghanistan, the delta variant and a looming hurricane hitting the northeast this weekend, it will be difficult to settle down for a Saturday Soother. But let’s give it a try.

Take a seat by a window and listen to “The Last Rose of Summer” by Leroy Anderson. It is part of his Irish Suite, and was arranged in 1947:

This is as beautiful to watch as to listen to.

Facebooklinkedinrss

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – December 20, 2020

Many lawmakers have already gotten their first vaccine shots. Good for them! Most of us would take it on the first day they could get it too. But it’s wrong that they’re getting shots while (at least at the time of writing this) they haven’t passed a COVID relief bill. And is there a better metaphor for Trump’s presidency than this story from NPR?

“For….six years, the ghost of the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino has haunted the boardwalk in Atlantic City, N.J…..But not for long: The…eyesore is scheduled for demolition late next month, and the city is offering…the opportunity to bring it down….”

From Bodnar’s Auction House:

“We are selling the experience to push the button to implode Trump Plaza…”

There will be a bidding war for the right to implode Trump’s failed casino, just nine days after Trump leaves office. Atlantic City mayor Marty Small:

“…on his way out, Donald Trump openly mocked Atlantic City, saying he made a lot of money and then got out….I wanted to use the demolition of this place to raise money for charity.”

Trump persuaded the Republican Party and enough Americans that he was a genius businessman based on hype and his stupid TV show. While Trump was pretending to be a real estate big shot with a game show, his Atlantic City three-casino empire died. Information about his business failures was out there. But people didn’t want to believe it. Now after four years, America’s imploding. Pathetic. On to cartoons.

Will help arrive in time?

Will the new gifts for the season arrive on time?

Trump fails transitions:

Republican wish list for Santa:

The new hackers will control everything:

Mitch goes back to what he does best:

It didn’t take long for a chorus of Republicans to find a stupid non-issue to sing about:

Facebooklinkedinrss

Monday Wake Up Call – November 30, 2020

We’re back from our turkey-induced coma, but it’s hard to start a new week without our usual Sunday humor:

Yummy Thanksgiving pie:

Looking forward to the Inauguration:

This Thanksgiving, Biden thanked all the front line workers for all they have done. Trump thanked all of his lawyers.

Wrongo hadn’t realized that Trump has now spent more than an entire year of his term on a Trump property (418 days), and 307 days playing golf. Imagine how much more damage he could have done if he wasn’t so lazy.

Why is it so difficult for Americans to understand the threat to our society from Covid? From the WaPo: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“In nine states, more than 1 in 1,000 people have now died of coronavirus-related causes, while daily covid-19 deaths nationwide are climbing to levels not seen since early in the pandemic.”

A few long-reluctant Republican governors recently adopted statewide mask orders and stricter social distancing measures. But not all: For example, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), last Tuesday extended an executive order that bans city and county governments from enforcing mask ordinances or limits on restaurant capacity. South Dakota’s governor Kristi Noem (R) is still resisting any kind of mask mandate. Nebraska’s governor Pete Ricketts (R) again stated his opposition to mask mandates, while Nebraska’s rural hospitals are nearly at capacity, as are bigger cities, like Lincoln.

White, rural American states are late to the pandemic’s deadly impact – partly due to how physically distant their residents are, by definition. But rural states have the smallest margin for error in terms of health care infrastructure. Their lack of ICU capacity combined with their relative inability to handle delivering the new vaccines when they become available, may see rural Trump-loving Americans take a much harder hit than they expected from Covid.

The exact criteria for who will be first in line won’t be defined until immediately after a vaccine is authorized. But the pressure’s on: The WSJ reported that United Airlines is already flying doses of Pfizer’s vaccine to points around the country in order to be prepared for distribution, if Pfizer wins government approval.

Think about the enormous pressure there is on the FDA to approve use of these vaccines. That approval starts with a meeting of its Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC). The FDA has scheduled a Committee meeting on Dec. 10 to discuss the request for emergency use authorization of Pfizer’s vaccine.

As of now, the FDA hasn’t made the names of Committee members’ public. But imagine if there are a few Committee members who disagree that the vaccine should be made available immediately.

This recently happened with an Alzheimer’s drug. The FDA’s review division reported that the drug’s effectiveness data was “extraordinarily persuasive”.  But many on that drug’s Advisory Committee rejected the study, saying that the data showed the drug offered no significant improvement to patients.

Now, the FDA is not required to follow the recommendations of its outside advisors, but it often does. So what happens if the Pfizer Committee has a split decision?

Finally, the Supreme Court’s decision in a Covid case about whether or not a state official could close down places of worship in order to stop the spread of a deadly disease, seems out of step with where we are in America. They ruled that restrictions previously imposed on New York places of worship by Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) during the coronavirus pandemic violated the First Amendment.

That’s a huge shift since Coney Barrett joined the court. In a similar case earlier this year, the court declined to lift pandemic restrictions in California and Nevada when Ruth Bader Ginsburg was alive.

But the longer term issue isn’t the possible infringement of individual religious liberty. It’s how the American Right wants to expand it so that religious people can ignore just about any law they don’t like.

The problem with this decision is that it expands an individual right to a communal right. A religious person should be able to follow their faith, but once you start giving religious communities separate rights, you’ve weakened the rule of law.

Your exercise of a right shouldn’t impose unreasonable burdens on others. But Conservatives want to treat religion as having a higher level of rights then others’ individual rights, and this isn’t right.

Time to wake up America! The fault lines of our society have been exposed by Covid and the Republican response to it. To help you wake up, listen to a cover version of Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song” by cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason and his siblings. He became an instant sensation after his cello performance at the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Megan Markle. Watch it, you won’t be dissapointed:

Facebooklinkedinrss

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – November 22, 2020

There are a few fine Republican governors out there. Vermont Governor Phil Scott is one. Earlier this week at a press conference, he spoke to the COVID skeptics, and to those who refuse to wear masks or follow Vermont’s social distancing mandates. Scott said that “they can do what they want”, but added:

“Don’t call it patriotic. Don’t pretend it’s about freedom. Because real patriots serve and sacrifice for all, whether they agree with them or not. Patriots also stand up and fight when our nation’s health and security is threatened. And right now, our country and way of life is being attacked by this virus — not the protections we put in place.”

Scott was recently re-elected by a wide margin by the voters in his very blue state. Bravo!

Could a campaign work that characterized those mask refusers as cowards who won’t stand up and fight, who won’t serve and sacrifice for the good of the country? Would it change a few minds? Nothing else has: not science, not facts, not cajoling, not even mandates. Maybe trying shame is overdue. On to cartoons.

Maybe shame won’t be enough:

Keep it simple for The Donald. Just go away:

Mitch won’t ever help:

This certainly will happen:

Even turkeys know how to beat COVID:

Facebooklinkedinrss

Monday Wake Up Call, More Covid is Coming Edition – November 16, 2020

The Daily Escape:

2020 Photo via Ed Hall

Doesn’t this disgusting guy show absolutely everything that’s wrong with America in 2020? The facts are bad, says the NYT: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“At least 1,210 new coronavirus deaths and 159,121 new cases were reported in the US on Nov. 14. Over the past week, there has been an average of 145,726 cases per day, an increase of 80% from the average two weeks earlier. As of Sunday afternoon, more than 11,050,100 people in the United States have been infected with the coronavirus and at least 245,700 have died…”

Why is stopping the Coronavirus political? The virus needs hosts and targets. If we are sufficiently far apart, the virus can’t spread, and will eventually die out. But people like our fellow citizen above refuse to believe they will spread, or get sick from Covid.

Long-time blog reader Pat M. asked Ms. Right to show Wrongo an article by Dr. Leah Curtin, “Pathological individualism”, in which Dr. Curtin says this:

“It seems we can no longer tell “freedom” from “license,” “rights” from “responsibilities,” or “laws” from “the common good.” And while the world pities us…we stand like spoiled children, insisting on our “rights” and making fun of people in masks.”

Curtin points out that even a superficial study of the Constitution is clear about our freedoms, our rights, and our individual responsibility to help bring about the common good: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“…to be “free” means to be able to do the doable without being subject to unjust constraints. It doesn’t mean that any of us can trample on the rights of others, though we’re still struggling to understand and implement the latter…..personal rights come with the responsibility to maintain them for self and others.

In other words, we don’t have the freedom to infect others. Why? Because that creates conditions that violate other people’s unalienable rights. If you think this is exaggerated, consider this tweet from a thread by a South Dakota ER nurse:

Politico reports that some Republican governors are signaling to Biden that they will not support any sort of federal mandate involving COVID-19 and masks: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“President-elect Joe Biden says he’ll personally call red state governors and persuade them to impose mask mandates to slow down the coronavirus pandemic. Their early response: Don’t waste your time. Almost all of the 16 Republican governors who oppose statewide mask mandates are ready to reject Biden’s plea…even as they impose new restrictions on businesses and limit the size of public gatherings to keep their health systems from getting swamped.”

South Dakota’s governor Kristi Noem, Oklahoma’s Kevin Stitt and Nebraska’s Pete Ricketts, whose states are seeing tsunamis of new cases, say mask wearing should remain a personal choice, not a legal obligation. This shows how difficult it will be for Biden to build consensus around even basic public health strategies after he’s sworn in.

Other Republican governors, like Eric Holcomb in Indiana and Kay Ivey in Alabama have had mask mandates for months, while Utah Gov. Gary Herbert imposed a statewide order last week when it became clear that his state’s hospitals were overwhelmed. Mike DeWine in Ohio also did the right thing.

We continue to think that we can only control Covid with a binary switch. The economy is either closed, or open. We either save the economy, or save the healthcare system.

But, the Biden administration isn’t proposing using an on/off switch for the country, or for individual states. They propose using a dial, with stops from fully open to fully closed, and many stops in between, depending on the local severity of the pandemic. This approach will recognize facts on the ground as they change, and keep draconian measures like lockdowns from being the only tool in the box.

When we wear masks that cover our noses and mouths in public, people should understand that:

  • The wearer knows that they could be asymptomatic and still give someone the virus.
  • They don’t “live in fear” of the virus; they just want to be part of the solution, not the problem.
  • They don’t feel like the “government is controlling them”.
  • Wearing a mask means they are caring and responsible.

Will Republicans help Biden create a teachable moment for America? Don’t count on that. As Thanksgiving approaches, it just seems that no one wants to bother: Sure, it kills other people, and that might include grandma, but it won’t kill me.

Trump and Republicans have shown utter indifference to Covid and how it’s affected people’s lives. But it didn’t seem to hurt them in the elections, at least at the state level.

What will it take to wake up, America?

Facebooklinkedinrss

Saturday Soother, No Concession Edition – November 14, 2020

The Daily Escape:

Big Lily Creek, Russell County KY – November 2020 photo by Dean Francisco

On Friday afternoon, the WaPo called Georgia for Biden and North Carolina for Trump. They were the last two states to be called. Overall, Biden is projected to win 306 electoral votes, Trump is projected to win 232, the same tally as in 2016, with Trump on the losing side this time.

So far, Biden has about 5.2 million more popular votes than Trump.

You may remember that in 2016, Trump called his Electoral College win a “landslide”. This time, no concession so far. We hear from the Right that “there is no Constitutional requirement for a concession speech, and the press does not certify election results.” That’s true. And there’s no Constitutional requirement for fairness in our society. Maybe there should be one. For better or worse, social norms, including being a graceful loser, are part of what keep our society functioning. If we ignore those norms, society will have problems surviving.

One malfunctioning area of society is our pandemic response. Alarm bells are going off all across the country because of COVID. The situation is approaching the horrific. Back in March/April, when hospitals became short staffed, they were able to hire nurses and other health care workers from parts of the country that hadn’t been overwhelmed.

Now, the disease is everywhere. It’s so bad that Doctors Without Borders, the independent organization that sends physicians to less developed countries having some sort of health care crisis, has sent COVID-19 teams to the US. How embarrassing.

The following chart on COVID hospitalizations shows you why we need hospital workers. We’ve hit a new high in America:

The result is a surging pandemic that has been left to run wild across the country and a “catastrophic” lack of ICU beds in places like El Paso, TX and Minnesota. The WaPo quoted Michael T. Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy:

“This is like one huge coronavirus forest fire, and I don’t think it’s going to spare much human wood out there unless we change our behavior.”

Sixty-seven thousand hospitalized and 1,100 dead per day. We’re not in a presidential transition, it’s more of a death march to January 20th.

If you live in South Dakota or Iowa, and take a COVID-19 test, the odds are that you will test positive. Positivity rates in both of these two states are above 50%. In South Dakota, its 56.4%; in Iowa, its 51.4%. Here in Connecticut, we’re at 4.3%, among the top eleven places with the lowest positivity rates in the US.

FYI, despite what you may hear, higher positivity rates do not correlate with more testing. In fact, South Dakota and Iowa are testing fewer people per 1,000 population than any of the 11 states with low positivity results.

In North Dakota, health-care workers with asymptomatic cases of the coronavirus were authorized by the governor to keep working. North Dakota is one of 15 states without a mask mandate. The ND Nurses Association has called for a mask mandate if they have to work while infected.

There are Maskholes in every state, people who are following their warped sense of “personal freedom”, and not wearing a mask to protect others, or themselves. Remember during the campaign when Trump told his followers that the day after the election, the media would stop mentioning COVID-19 because the only reason they were reporting on it was to hurt him?

His management of America’s COVID response is just one of many things that will improve after January 20. That brings us to the World According to Trump:

  • Stop testing – then we won’t have new cases…
  • Stop counting the votes – then I win…
  • Don’t publish my tax returns – then I’m still a billionaire…

Let’s cruise into the weekend leaving the Concession and COVID behind, at least for a little while. It’s cold and crisp in Connecticut this weekend, and time for our Saturday Soother, that part of the week when we try to refresh our bodies and souls before again strapping on the gladiator equipment for next week.

There’s little left to do to prepare the fields of Wrong for winter, so the focus today is indoors. Let’s start by brewing up a mug of La Esperanza Colombian Natural X.O. ($16.95/12 oz.) from Durango Coffee in southwestern Colorado. Durango Coffee’s motto is “Tough Town, Great Coffee.”

Now grab your mug and sit by a window where you can see the last of the leaves swirl down to earth, like Trump’s reelection chances, and listen to the “Band of Brothers Theme” from the soundtrack to the Band of Brothers movie. It’s played by the London Metropolitan Orchestra, conducted by Michael Kamen:

Facebooklinkedinrss

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – 48 Hours to Go Edition, November 1, 2020

Just 48 hours to go.

Has anyone else noticed that since his impeachment, Trump has lost a step? He no longer speaks about fighting the system, or his accomplishments. It’s all about how he’s been ganged up on, and mistreated. Maybe impeaching him wasn’t a complete failure after all.

We’ll see in two days if the blame game was a winning strategy:

It may be hopeful news or maybe just a deep fake, but several outlets are reporting that Trump has canceled his election night party. The party was to be held at the Trump International Hotel in Washington DC, but instead, he’ll party at the White House.

But here’s a good reason to be nervous. Forbes reports that the Post Office is failing to deliver on time in key places:

“Battleground states in the presidential election are suffering from some of the worst ballot delivery delays in the country….and with state laws or court rulings requiring mail-in ballots to be received by Election Day, several states face a particularly high risk of voters having their ballots arrive too late to count, potentially impacting close races.”

Every Vote should be counted! Shouldn’t the Supreme Court support that?

Since January, the GOP has filed more than 230 lawsuits about voting:

Not all the gravestones are about Halloween:

The ghost of elections past:

Facebooklinkedinrss

Trump Says: “What Coronavirus?”

The Daily Escape:

DH Day Barn in Glenn Arbor, MI photo by seedy_reedy_photos

From the WaPo:

“The presidential campaign was roiled this weekend by a fresh outbreak of the novel coronavirus at the White House that infected at least five aides or advisers to Vice President Pence….With the election a little over a week away, the new White House outbreak spotlighted the administration’s failure to contain the pandemic as hospitalizations surge across much of the United States and daily new cases hit all-time highs.

The outbreak around Pence, who chairs the White House’s coronavirus task force, undermines the argument Trump has been making to voters that the country is “rounding the turn,” as the president put it at a rally Sunday in New Hampshire.

Further complicating Trump’s campaign-trail pitch was an extraordinary admission Sunday from White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows that the administration had effectively given up on trying to slow the virus’s spread.”

The WaPo reported that one of Trump’s top staffers acknowledged on Sunday that he (Trump) had tried to avoid disclosing these new White House cases to the public. Some in the VP’s office suggested that White House doctors should release a statement saying that [Marc] Short [Pence’s Chief of Staff] was positive, and that Pence was still okay to travel. But that idea was scuttled by Meadows and others. Meadows later said:

“We’re not going to control the pandemic,” Meadows said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “We are going to control the fact that we get vaccines, therapeutics and other mitigations.”

There is no plan, and no strategy. Trump again said on Sunday in New Hampshire that the country is “rounding the turn”, but there’s no truth to that. Here are the 7-day average Covid statistics as of October 26: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“Yesterday there were 60,789 new confirmed cases, 16,222 recoveries, 340 deaths. The current 7-day rolling average of 68,768 new cases/day grew 38.8% from 14 days ago, while the average of 794 deaths/day grew 13.3%…”

If cases continue to grow at those rates, the number of cases will look like this:

9,221,976 cases in 7 Days; 9,888,654 cases in 14 Days; 12,042,648 cases in 30 Days

Even if you accept the view that: we can’t stamp out the virus, so we’ve just got to live (or die) with it, this just leads you to the other big idea: We knew back in March that even if we couldn’t stop the virus, we had to slow it down enough so that it doesn’t overwhelm our so-called “Greatest Health Care System in the World”.

If the GOP invested as much energy into fighting COVID as they do in voter suppression, we would have fewer cases and they wouldn’t need to suppress votes. Everyone expected that the virus would spread. But the least we should have been able to expect from Trump was an honest effort to inform the public; to do whatever it would take to contain it like the majority of other countries did; and to stop trying to blame someone else for it.

The Covidusa web site says that we’ve already reached a quarter of a million deaths (225,495) in this country. It’s clear that we’re being led by a pack of liars who think it’s more important to win an election than it is to save American lives. And they have the gall to call themselves “pro-life.”

And remember, there are 78 days after the election for Trump to fumble the Coronavirus before he leaves office.

Here’s another Trump delusion: This sheet was left on the seat of every member of the press on Airforce One yesterday. (Hat tip: Automatic Earth)

This suggests that the Trump camp expects a Red tsunami on Election Day. That may be true, but it will be very difficult to undo the massive early voting that is already in the books in all the battle ground states.

Every four years we say “this is the most important election of our lives.” This time, it’s true.

Why? Because if Trump wins again, we may see the freedoms we’ve long taken for granted curtailed, or in some cases, eliminated. You may think that Wrongo is well, wrong, and an alarmist. But do you REALLY want to take a chance that this isn’t the most important election of your life?

Your job is to vote for Biden, and to elect Democrats to the Senate.

There are seven days to go until the election. It’s certainly possible that you may never cast a more important ballot in your life. We have no control over what may happen in the future, but we can control what happens in seven days.

We can elect competence, sanity, and a reaffirmation of our democracy, but only if we all vote.

Facebooklinkedinrss