Posted on 03/29/2020 4:13:47 AM PDT by Alas Babylon!
The Talk Shows
March 29th, 2020
Guests to be interviewed today on major television talk shows:
FOX NEWS SUNDAY (Fox Network): Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin; Gov. Larry Hogan, R-Md.; Dr. Tom Inglesby, director of the Center for Health Security of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Panel: Marc Thiessen, Kristen Soltis Anderson and Juan Williams. “Power Player of the Week” segment: Joel Osteen.
MEET THE PRESS (NBC): Gov. John Bel Edwards, D-La.; Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, NOPE*; Dr. Deborah Birx, coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force; Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, D-Mich. Panel: Hugh Hewitt, Carol Lee, Andrea Mitchell and Eugene Robinson.
FACE THE NATION (CBS): Mnuchin; Scott Gottlieb, a former Food and Drug Administration commissioner; Dr. David Heymann, who led the World Health Organization’s response to the SARS outbreak. Panel:
THIS WEEK (ABC): White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow; Edwards; former White House homeland security adviser Tom Bossert. Panel: Jon Karl, Jennifer Ashton and Tom Bossert.
STATE OF THE UNION (CNN): House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.; Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders; New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio; Govs. Jay Inslee, D-Wash., Pete Ricketts, R-Neb., and Whitmer. Panel: Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.), Vivek Murthy, Jennifer Lee and Lanhee Chen.
SUNDAY MORNING FUTURES (FNC): House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy; Larry Kudlow; Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.); Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.); Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.).
*NOPE = “Never Obtain the Presidency, Ever”
Good catch went right over my head....thanks.
Any comments on the govt. trying to run things while we are all virused in our homes?
Stories, and questions too. The person asking the questions is the one framing the issue. That's why the press guards this role. Not many people have the nerve or ability to "frame the answer," except liberal guests who just deliver the canned speech no matter what they are asked.
Here is a good article about what happened to California’s medical disaster plans.
I would bet that other states did the same thing. New York comes to mind.
Now they want the Feds to come and bail them out.
Someone stole Bernie’s NOPE from the SOTU listing ;-)
Although I hate to quote the NY Times at any time, this is an article that describes what Sweden has been doing while corona virus hysteria sweeps the world.
I hope someone at the CDC read this.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/28/world/europe/sweden-coronavirus.html
“but rather a hit job blaming Evangelical Christians for the virus spread.”
That would be disturbing — disturbing that he might consider Joel Osteen an Evangelical Christian. That would give us real ones a bad name.
from the link:
By LANCE WILLIAMS, WILL EVANS AND WILL CARLESS
MARCH 28, 20206:04 AM
They were ready to roll whenever disaster struck California: three 200-bed mobile hospitals that could be deployed to the scene of a crisis on flatbed trucks and provide advanced medical care to the injured and sick within 72 hours.
Each hospital would be the size of a football field, with a surgery ward, intensive care unit and X-ray equipment. Medical response teams would also have access to a massive stockpile of emergency supplies: 50 million N95 respirators, 2,400 portable ventilators and kits to set up 21,000 additional patient beds wherever they were needed.
In 2006, citing the threat of avian flu, then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced the state would invest hundreds of millions of dollars in a powerful set of medical weapons to deploy in the case of large-scale emergencies and natural disasters such as earthquakes, fires and pandemics.
“In light of the pandemic flu risk, it is absolutely a critical investment,” he told a news conference. “I’m not willing to gamble with the people’s safety.”
The state, flush with tax revenue, soon sank more than $200 million into the mobile hospital program and a related Health Surge Capacity Initiative to stockpile medicines and medical gear for use in outbreaks of infectious disease, according to former emergency management officials and state budget records.
But the ambitious effort, which would have been vital as the state confronts the new coronavirus today, hit a wall: a brutal recession, a free fall in state revenues — and in 2011, the administration of a fiscally minded Democratic governor, Jerry Brown, who came into office facing a $26-billion deficit.
And so, that year, the state cut off the money to store and maintain the stockpile of supplies and the mobile hospitals. The hospitals were defunded before they’d ever been used.
Much of the medical equipment — including the ventilators, critical life-saving tools that are in short supply in the current pandemic — was given to local hospitals and health agencies, former health officials said. But the equipment was donated without any funding to maintain them. The respirators were allowed to expire without being replaced.
Together, these two programs would have positioned California to more rapidly respond as its COVID-19 cases exploded. The annual savings for eliminating both programs? No more than $5.8 million per year, according to state budget records, a tiny fraction of the 2011 budget, which totaled $129 billion.
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Ironically similar problems are now occurring in New York as gov. Cuomo refused to buy masks and other needed medical items and now the federal govt. is supposed to take up the slack.
This is what happens when any level of govt. trys to take over systems created on a basis of capitalism.It all crashes.
We have shut down almost half of our economy to the point that the cure could be worse the disease. Understandably, since it is a novel Coronavirus, we had no idea as to how dangerous it was and the initial numbers out of China were frightening. Now that we have more data and those data are increasing daily, we can make a more informed judgment and place the virus in context compared to a bad flu season. We don't have a vaccine yet nor a proven therapeutic or prophylactic.
Would we have responded the same way initially if we had the data we have today? How do we get off of the back of this tiger when the MSM and the Dems are using the virus as weapon against Trump? They would rather destroy the economy than have Trump reelected. They have already spied on him, investigated him, and impeached him. Now, they will move heaven and earth to prevent any return to normalcy by Easter. TDS is growing in intensity as we approach November.
Any rational person can now see that the virus is not the threat once viewed initially. If we tracked the generic flu with the same level of scrutiny, the nation would be in a greater state of panic. The primary threat is to our healthcare delivery system, particularly in urban areas with the elderly and those with impaired immunity systems being the most vulnerable, similar to the generic flu.
It is apparent to me what we need is a more targeted approach than total lock-downs and cessation of most economic activity statewide. The data show so far that virus is not a much greater threat to the public health than a bad flu year. The biggest difference seems to be infection rates in high density urban areas creating hot spots that could overwhelm the local healthcare system. We do know that 86% of the people tested with symptoms prove to be negative. In the case of NYC we see 30% to 40% testing positive.
It is not naive to compare the virus to a bad flu year in terms of a risk assessment and how to proceed from here. If we are truly at war with the virus, then we must accept a certain level of casualties in order to survive. The latest data show 123,781 total cases, 118,314 active cases, 2,666 people in critical condition, and 2,229 deaths. We are a nation of 330 million people. How much long lasting damage to our economy are we willing to accept? What level of casualties can we tolerate? The annual generic flu is a logical metric. It is not politically correct to state the obvious.
Truth is if grocery stores can stay open why can’t restaurants or hotels stay open? Assuming they(hotels/restaurants don’t know how to do simple things that will help the situation like seating people further apart or whatever the need is selling business people short.
Forbes Magazine did a hit piece on George Webb re his articles suggesting a US cyclist carried the virus. Many of his you tube videos have been taken down now. Hope he has security people around him.
I’m with you, RG...here is another point...the lovely Gates couple would like to see global populations reduced drastically...Billy boy says we need to keep the world zipped tight for 3 months...hmm...so he can be one of the elites in charge of what is left?
Note the timing of him dropping off Microsoft’s boards of director...so he can have time for other interests.
I believe PDJT is playing right along with over deploying resources to call the elites’ bluff...ventilators, ships, masks, etc. He will have the last word when we soon open back up for business.
Brilliantly stated. There is probably a small number of fatalities if any that would be incurred if the country were opened up tomorrow. What will happen however if it stays closed is that the lives of millions will be change. some forever.Unemployment will reach the stratosphere,govt. finances will be destroyed for decades and the cost of destroying the economy will far outweigh the potential damage of opening the economy back up asap. Politically, the rats are going to go after Trump whether he opens or closes the economy. Why not open it up.
Bray, there is no way this pandemic would have been minimized or ignored. The toll it is taking on Italy, Spain, France, the UK, and Iran makes it impossible to minimize. What is happening in the NYC metropolitan area is horrific.
My problem with all of this involves how we are formulating public policy. I want the career technocrats like Dr. Fauci to provide their expert technical advice, but I don't want them to drive public policy. He sees solutions thru the narrow prism of his field of expertise. He wants to stop the spread of the disease and save lives. The economic damage is not his concern. I would note however that he reacted differently to the H1N1 virus that infected 60 million and caused 12,000 deaths. Obama may have done the right thing, intentionally or not, by delaying the response to that pandemic. Imagine if he replicated the current approach in 2009 when the economy was in the dumpster.
I have been very disturbed by the process of how public policy decisions are made. The MSM is playing an advocacy role in partnership with the Dems and Deep State. They are using emotion, distortion, and omission to stampede the public to support bad policy. Ben Rhodes had it down pat as he pushed through decisions like the Iran Deal. Trump was forced to react the way he did because of the political consequences.
We must now fight sanitized wars with little or no collateral damage. Trump has been asked a number of times about what is the acceptable level of deaths due to the virus. The politically correct answer is none as Cuomo is wont to say stridently. So how can Trump open up the economy if the metric is no life will be lost if he opens up the economy. Pointing out that we seem to tolerate the loss of tens of thousands of lives to the flu every year is considered to be naive or worse, insensitive.
Not only has Trump become a prisoner of this process, but so have the governors who feel compelled to declare statewide shutdowns regardless of the data. The more draconian the measures, the better since it is win-win. If the virus infections are low, they can point to the measures taken. If things go South in terms of the virus, they can say it would have been far worse if they hadn't taken such severe actions.
I am seeing this happen here in SC. The governor has been under lot of pressure politically to declare a statewide shutdown. Some cities have unilaterally declared shutdowns, but the state AG has said that they don't have such authority.
When all of the data are analyzed months and years from now, I am convinced that the conclusion will be that we overreacted by cosmic levels adding huge amounts to our national debt and taking counterproductive actions. TDS has played a major role in this crisis.
Democrat Andrew Cuomo is a joke......he had nothing to prepare NY State for this tragedy. He wasted all his taxpayers money on illegals immigrants and criminals. Then he bitches to POTUS, Trump. Well...New Yorkers...you all better wise up and realize and understand that what you have now has come from POTUS, Trump and the Federal government. Cuomo is simply nothing but a “BS” artist, and, abd one at that. Thank God for POTUS, Trump amdthe magnificent team he has put together!!!
And...where are all those big mouth, Democrats that ran for POTUS, Obama, Michelle Obama, Clinton, Buttigieg, Booker, Deyer, Bloomberg, Harris, Biden, Sanders, Klobuchar, etc., not a word from any of them!!!
The numbers are far less than we were told initially and many here on FR refuse to acknowledge it. Yesterday one was claiming there would be over 1000 in the last 24 hrs when it was 524. What number of those would have died from the normal flu?
This does not look like the Spanish flu of 1920. The media may have terrified the country needlessly.
One chronologically adult age Yankee arrival scoffed at the Florida 14-day self isolation and said, "We're not going into quarantine for 14 days! We're on vacation!" The first thing the Yankee escapees do upon arrival is shop in the local grocery stores. With viral seeds already planted during Spring Break, additional influx from viral hot spots is a setup for disaster in Florida.
And...where are all those big mouth, Democrats that ran for POTUS, Obama, Michelle Obama, Clinton, Buttigieg, Booker, Deyer, Bloomberg, Harris, Biden, Sanders, Klobuchar, etc., not a word from any of them!!!
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Arrogantly, they on their ‘team’, believe PDJT to be finished. They really do. They are part of the purposely released virus event and they are sitting back planning...I’m sure the insiders have a daily planning webex or zoom locked down conference call on next steps.
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