Coronavirus

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Originally Posted by fred41

He can even handle questions - all he has to do is not take any real gotcha bait and perhaps...and this one’s important...perhaps, admit he made some mistakes early on. Shit - almost everyone made mistakes early on (as Stavros mentioned in another post)...a pandemic doesn’t come up every year.

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I agree that anyone in power was going to make at least one mistake. But when people care about what's going on they typically don't make more than one. If they can't get testing going and there's community spread, maybe they're more conscientious about distancing at the beginning. If they shut down too late and there's been too many outbreaks, maybe they're great at backing up the states with ventilators and ppe, and then do a great job of ramping up testing.

He compounds one mistake with another and his insistence on wanting to make the economy boom in the middle of a pandemic instead of just preventing economic disaster and trying to stabilize things shows that he's done such a poor job because he doesn't care. Preventing deaths is not the right incentive system for him. He is a man who is not sensitive to the difference between 60,000 dead and 20,000 dead.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump

I'm not linking a particular tweet but his entire twitter timeline. It shouldn't need an explanation. Any society where someone writing stuff like this during a crisis isn't a pariah is in trouble. He not only shouldn't be a leader, decent people shouldn't interact with the guy.

Are there any Republicans who think Democrats (except for total fringe people) would be okay with this kind of trash from one of our leaders?

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Originally Posted by broncofan

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump

I'm not linking a particular tweet but his entire twitter timeline. It shouldn't need an explanation. Any society where someone writing stuff like this during a crisis isn't a pariah is in trouble. He not only shouldn't be a leader, decent people shouldn't interact with the guy.

Are there any Republicans who think Democrats (except for total fringe people) would be okay with this kind of trash from one of our leaders?

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Completely agree. His entire timeline doesn't need any explanation and he shouldn't be leader at all. and no Democrats wouldn't be okay with this kind of trash from one their leaders.

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Originally Posted by filghy2

I guess the other thing is that the states that voted for Trump have not generally been too badly affected as yet. When it really hits them - and it's hard to see why it won't given they've been more lax about social distancing - we should see his support start to erode. It's one thing to believe bullshit when it's about someone else; it's quite another to believe it when it relates to your direct experience.

As far as I know, no president in recent decades has been reelected when the economy has been in recession or just coming out of one. Ford, Carter, and Bush I all lost when the economy was doing poorly. It looks like Trump's strategy may be to blame the Democrat states for not reopening the economy as early as he wants, but I can't see that working - especially as people will be able to see what happens in states that do his bidding.

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Agree. No president in recent decades has been re-elected when the economy has been in recession. and Trump's strategy of blaming democratic states for not reopening the economy as early as he wants will backfire.

State Department cables warned of safety issues at Wuhan lab studying bat coronaviruses
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...coronaviruses/

Taiwan says WHO ignored its coronavirus questions at start of outbreak
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-h...-idUSKBN21B160

Trump is on live now taking vengeance on the WHO. He's putting all US funding on hold. Brilliant move in the middle of a pandemic.

Because finding a scapegoat is the most important thing.

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Originally Posted by Fitzcarraldo

Trump is on live now taking vengeance on the WHO. He's putting all US funding on hold. Brilliant move in the middle of a pandemic.

Because finding a scapegoat is the most important thing.

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Not surprised at all that Trump is withholding all funding on hold from the WHO. The same WHO he was praising a few months ago. Another prime example of him taking no responsibility for his poor handling of the CO-VID 19 Pandemic and blaming everybody else for his failures.

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Originally Posted by broncofan

He sent me two PMs so I'm flattered he likes me twice as much;). Then again the second one was on the profane side. I tried to respond and say something nice but could not.

I'm sure a big part of the problem is that he hasn't filled key positions with qualified people but instead with people he trusts who have no business being there.

Also, I'm of the opinion the federal government can't force states to open businesses as that's a state police power, but if states do it on their own the federal government should be facilitating it with lots of testing.

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1. I didn't respond to African's PM because I knew that would happen, and I don't think I could be as diplomatic as Stavros.

2. How long until Anthony Fauci gets the chop for the crime of speaking inconvenient truths?

3. Trump will probably withhold financial and other support from states who don't do his bidding (after all, they are not going to vote for him). He's getting pushback from his own side as state rights are a bedrock Republican principle. We'll see whether they go to water as usual. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/0...acklash-186887

It looks like I've roused Mr Fanti from the dead, but I guess there's not much harm as long as he's only posting links.

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Originally Posted by MrFanti

State Department cables warned of safety issues at Wuhan lab studying bat coronaviruses
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...coronaviruses/

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You may want to watch the Epoch Times video which I was alerted to and watched yesterday.
With these words of caution-

a) Epoch Times is founded and funded by supporters of Falun Gong, so be wary of the 'Communism is evil' stuff, and no, this is not a backhanded compliment to Mao or Xi.

b) the central claim is that as no bats are sold in the wet marked in Wuhan, the virus originated elsewhere, specifically the P4 Laboratory which was conducting experiments on bats and coronaviruses. There is speculation that either this was part of a long term plan to create a vaccine that would give China first mover advantage in the market should another variants of SARS break out into an epidemic or even a pandemc; or that the Lab was engaged in experiments in a biological weapon, which is why the Party has covered up many of the facts. (The owner of the firm that might sell the vaccine is the grandson of former President Jiang Zemin).

c) the 'cock-up' theory is suggested by the American molecular biologist Judy Mikovits who claims when she worked at a lab in I think, Virginia in the 1980s health and safety procedures there were sloppy. I find this hard to comprehend in either the US or the China cases, but the key point is that no precise explanation is offered as to how the virus leaked from the lab, if that is what happened.

d) the video makes much of China's global ambitions, as if it were a shocking discovery -but if one bears in mind that since 1949 China has made so much of the century of humiliation it suffered from the Opium Wars of the 1840s to the Japanese occupation that began in 1931, then with this anxiety over its past, China's determnation to establish itself as Numero Uno in East Asia is as logical as it is potentially scary. But will China and Japan go to war?

e) the US closed its own biological weapons labs in 1973, but for all we know the Miilitary may have secret facilities or programmes to ensure it can stay in touch with what the USA's enemies are doing. And in the past, the US did experiment on its own citizens with bioweapons.

f) lastly, as I said before, the use of biological/virological weapons is too broad and unpredictable to be useful- even al-Qaeda had precise, limited targets in the US on 9/11, and effective ones too.

Nevertheless, if you want to see the video, it is here-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htMUCYkFO6M