On Day One, even

[Fun CH]

I asked him ‘How was the trump administration response to Covid’ He said, ‘Without question, the inaction, confusion, poor messaging, bad planning, delay and general poor response of this administration cost at least 100,000 unnecessary US deaths.’

did you ask your cousin how many lives were saved because of the fast tracked Covid vaccine supported by the Trump administration?

And remember it was Fauci who said on 60 minutes that we don't need to wear masks. Later admitting that he said that so healthcare workers would have enough masks.

[just-jim]

If you want a Case Study of how this all is supposed to work look at the symbiotic relationships between the WHO, the CDC, USAMRIID, the FDA, and the State Department.

.
Indeed. A prime example – trump administration response to Covid.

I asked my cousins husband about this in late 2020. He’s one of the top Virologists in the Country; runs his own lab at a major University, elected Fellow of the AAAS and of Sigma Xi (2 major Scientific honor societies) and has spent his entire 40 year career on pediatric respiratory disease. His research helped develop the RSV vaccine that has just become available; RSV a major newborn disease. He has done advisory work for the CDC and FDA and rubs shoulders with Fauci, etc.

I asked him ‘How was the trump administration response to Covid’ He said, ‘Without question, the inaction, confusion, poor messaging, bad planning, delay and general poor response of this administration cost at least 100,000 unnecessary US deaths.’

Do you want some chicken farmer from So Carolina with no experience or education in Natural Resource management running the 3+ million acre Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest? With 500+ employees and a $50+ million budget, responsible for 3 or 4 million recreation visits and all the firefighting that goes on? Someone whose sole qualification is that they wrote a large check to dipsh*t donnie?
.

[Fun CH]

Please enlighten, what did you like about the Pandemic?
Was it losing friends and family? Getting sick? Seeing kids forced to get their education on zoom and fall behind? Was it seeing businesses close?

I wouldn't make those assumptions either. Of course no one would think those were positive outcomes of the pandemic.

[Rideback]

Please enlighten, what did you like about the Pandemic?
Was it losing friends and family? Getting sick? Seeing kids forced to get their education on zoom and fall behind? Was it seeing businesses close?

[Fun CH]

I think I can easily assume that there wasn't one thing that anyone actually 'liked' about the pandemic.

I wouldn't make that assumption.

[Rideback]

Jingles makes an interesting comparison. He seems to believe that there is an equivalency in following internationally recognized guideline responses to a pandemic with a President of the US directing the levers of govt to target his political 'enemies' for the specific reason of personal revenge.

I think I can easily assume that there wasn't one thing that anyone actually 'liked' about the pandemic. But, our govt did respond to ease the suffering that the pandemic brought to our shores. It was proactive for the people vs what Trump is crowing about is not proactive, it's not democratic in any way shape or form. It's pure revenge and taking the American people for a ride.

[mister_coffee]

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Because guilty donnie plans nothing less than a wholesale replacement of 10s of thousands of senior level civil service types - along with all the political appointees who already serve at the whim of a leader. And replacing them with a cadre of toadies, lackeys and bootlickers….
...

And what will happen when we eliminate those senior people and their institutional memory of how to get stuff done? And replacing them with people who have no qualifications but their horse breeding expertise and political reliability?

The United States Government is a large, complex organization full of human beings. Almost by definition that means there are important, if not critical functions that are only getting done because of informal and semi-formal arrangements between different departments in the Federal Government, but also arrangements between state and local governments, foreign governments, and international organizations. Nobody has that all in their head. And it is hard to tell coming in on January 22nd which of those informal arrangements might be of critical importance in the coming term.

If you want a Case Study of how this all is supposed to work look at the symbiotic relationships between the WHO, the CDC, USAMRIID, the FDA, and the State Department.

[just-jim]

.
Because guilty donnie plans nothing less than a wholesale replacement of 10s of thousands of senior level civil service types - along with all the political appointees who already serve at the whim of a leader. And replacing them with a cadre of toadies, lackeys and bootlickers….

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2023/10/1 ... l-service/

That could include positions like the Chief of the Forest Service. That position was civil service, until I think Clinton, then became an appointed position, although it is still technically civil service. Normally, such positions are filled by Secretaries of whatever department they serve under - Agriculture in the case of the FS.

There are thousands and thousands of such positions. There would be nothing to stop further politicization further down the ranks of civil service. Like a Forest Supervisor, Park Superintendent or District Ranger being replaced on a whim.

We finally got away with this nonsense after WW2, under Truman.
.

[Fun CH]

weakening civil service employee regulations would allow them to be fired without cause and replaced with loyalists.

Lots of checks in place however. The American people seem to correct any imbalance of power but that seems to happen on a 2 year election cycle if it's not in place already.

[PAL]

FBI and Justice would have to go along with his shenanigans and would they? After he spoke disparagingly of the FBI. Why would they?

[just-jim]

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Guilty, Guilty, Guilty donnie isn’t even being very secretive about his plans, should he win in ‘24.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... 4-election

“…. if I happen to be president and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say go down and indict them, mostly they would be out of business. They’d be out. They’d be out of the election.”
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[mister_coffee]

Funny how Red States, and Red Counties within Blue States, have third-world life expectancies (e.g. worse than China or Mexico, and bordering on El Salvador and Egypt). While Blue States and Blue Counties have life expectancies within shooting distance of countries like France and Switzerland.

It is almost like the governments in some places care about the people who voted them into office. Kind of a funny concept when you think about it.

Yeah, and this ties nicely into COVID because COVID death rates on a county by county basis tightly correlate to how much that county voted for Trump and COVID vaccination rates tightly correlate to how much that county voted for Biden.

This has been beaten to death in the news these last few years:

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/ ... s-00113369

https://www.newsweek.com/how-life-expec ... es-1811447

Fair used from the above:

Life expectancy in the U.S. fell in 2020 and 2021, eliciting concern across the health and political spectrum. Whilst other developed countries also saw their life expectancy decline in 2020, due to the coronavirus pandemic, most saw a recovery the following year. American life expectancy is now lower than that of dramatically poorer countries such as Cuba and Lebanon.

World Population Review data, analyzed by Newsweek, gave the U.S. as a whole a life expectancy of 76.6 in 2023. However, this varies significantly by state, from 80.7 years in Hawaii to 71.9 years in Mississippi.

In general, people living in states that voted Democratic in 2020 tend to live longer than those in their Republican-backing counterparts. Of the top 10 U.S. states by life expectancy, only one, Utah, backed Trump in 2020. The top 10 states, in order, are: Hawaii, Washington, Minnesota, California, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Oregon, Vermont, Utah and Connecticut.

I'm guessing a lot of Republicans have quietly concluded that the best way to solve the Border Crisis is to make America as awful as the places people are emigrating from. And for a lot of the country they are succeeding.

[PAL]

Nope, nope the mask mandate, the closings, started under Trumps watch. You need to improve your memory.
Did you try injecting yourself with bleach? As was suggested.
The Covid shots were the only shots I had taken since the vaccines I had as a child. I took the risk because I don't want to have what has happened to a relative and that is he has not regained total sense of taste and smell for 2 yrs.
I wore the masks because I chose to.
Review Project 2025 to see where it is headed.

[Jingles]

As if the Democrats didn't control you during 2020 through 2022, with telling you that you could not go to place of worship, could not eat in restaurants, could not go to a movie theater, had to wear a mask if you were outside your home, could not be within 6 feet of anyone outside your household, had to be a human lab rat and get an experimental vaccine not only once but again with numerous "boosters" yea no controlling just instill the fear of death in you if you'd didn't do as they say. About the only thing they didn't do was start loading you into cattle cars to take you to a "quarantine" camp

[PAL]

Well, isn't this what his supporters want? The average person? To be controlled and told what to do. Oh, that's right, he wouldn't do that to them.

Also for a real scare look up Project 2025.

[mister_coffee]

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/ ... r-00125767

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... cond-term/

I consider the very idea appalling, but also hilariously unrealistic. Our military is in no way equipped to control large-scale unrest in this country. They just don't have the people or the gear to effectively occupy the whole country. There are too many streets and not enough tanks.

To me it sounds like a good way to start a civil war.

Fair used from Politico:

According to a page one story in The Washington Post Monday, Trump plans on the first day of his new administration to invoke the Insurrection Act so he can dispatch the military to counter any demonstrations that might resist his policies.

...

By putting us on notice that he plans to punish his past foes — and presumably his future foes — with the justice system, Trump has given us a head start in blocking his future lawlessness. These promises — call them campaign promises — deserve full scrutiny from the press.

Starting today, political reporters have a duty to grill Trump’s primary opponents, especially the “Trump Lite” candidates Ron DeSantis, Tim Scott and Vivek Ramaswamy, on whether or not they support Trump’s plans for political prosecutions and the imposition of military power over the citizenry, essentially the rapid dismantling of our democratic system of governance. No caviling answers to these questions should be accepted. Instead, reporters should push candidates to give the sort of unequivocal answers that will either qualify them for cabinet positions in the Trump regime (“Yes, it’s OK for a president to jail his opponents and for the military to occupy cities”) or earn them a Trump indictment should he win (“No, everything about the reported Trump plans for trials and military control stinks”).

...

If The Washington Post has accurately captured the style of government Trump intends to deploy should he win, there is no bigger issue on the plate than Trump’s reported plans. If he has totalitarian designs for mass political trials in storage and plans to release them in 2025, the press and his political opponents, including Joe Biden, should escalate their criticism of him pronto to make it the leading political issue. Biden can’t pretend to be an advocate of constitutional self-governance unless he presses Trump hard here.

Trump, ever the master of evasion, can’t be allowed to fudge who he intends to prosecute nor should we allow him to make such threats without describing in detail what crimes he thinks have been committed and what evidence exists. The same questions should be directed at Trump supporters and his donors. Trump, after all, has put them on notice, too, with his plans. They are as complicit in the plot to throttle our civil liberties as Trump is believed to be.