Old Friend

Because there is a difference between dying "from" and dying "with." Guy with pancreatic cancer dies in a car crash. You'd count that as a death from cancer if you're not opposed to how deaths are being counted.

Look them up yourself. Who has literally died using HCQ as a mono-pharmaceutical, or who didn't have a significant underlying condition? I love how you contradicted your question with your statement. That's not easy to do. Edit : Here's the rep from Michigan. You and I both know you won't look anything up, and if you did you'd probably Google Big Bird and tell me you found nothing. https://nypost.com/2020/04/07/michigan-democrat-says-hydroxychloroquine-saved-her-life/

The implication was pretty obvious. I don't have much good to say about any professional politician, but this country has ALWAYS been unprepared for cataclysmic events like this, and the reasons are myraid. To politicize THIS one is as dumb as politicizing 9/11, Pearl Harbor, or Hurricane Katrina. Sh!t happens. Sometimes bad sh!t. You battle when it does, but blaming serves no purpose. For the record : https://kerrypicket.com/dr-fauci-we-acted-against-coronavirus-very-very-early/?utm_source=socialflow&fbclid=IwAR1RFE6W0T3g54ZvmdViX-ZrZDpJ5QgXp5A12sHu3I8Hh49tMnBvP4RWFVQ

It's not completely unproven. That's false and patently inaccurate. The medical community's protocol has never been set up to react to pandemics onset by a brand new virus. The FDA (unless you've been under a rock, you know this) has allowed clearance of several things more quickly recently than in the past and you have car makers producing ventilators (I doubt their factories are sterile and OSHA approved for such things), which are a little tricky. So unless you're in favor of and idiotic enough to think shutting down our economy for two years so we can have a peer reviewed paper to tell you a 65 year old medication (which doctors are already prescribing and is being used successfully) is safe and generally effective for an off label use, you might have to dive into today's reality and drop your biases. Your final comment is laughably elementary and completely transparent.

Depends on where you get your information and what doctors you're talking about. The ones that are old school and need an 18 month peer reviewed clinical trial? Some of them may doubt and call the evidence anecdotal, and in their world? They're right. But... Many more do not. New study from France (Paper published next week) with 1,000 patients studied for COVID-19, almost unanimous positive results and shortening of symptoms. No adverse reactions worse than a rash. Head (Dr. Wallace) of Cedars Sinai Rheumatology program (2,000+ patients on HCQ for Lupus) show zero cases of COVID-19 among that group, and zero adverse reactions. As I mentioned above, Michigan state rep took it and credits it for saving her life. Governor of Michigan had your thoughts 2 weeks ago, now asking for more and more of the medication and asking her doctors to prescribe it. Successfully used in almost every country with COVID cases. There is more positive news on it every day and the reason it's anecdotal is the drug has really only been tried in this capacity for 3 weeks or so. However, the evidence "for" is mounting very day. So like I said, it depends on what information you use. It's been around for 65 years. It's a known from an adverse reactions perspective and it's extremely safe in the doses being utilized. It's not a cure, but it significantly reduces the symptoms and no patient who has taken it in early onset has so far needed a ventilator.

Why is this important at all? Even a little bit? This is agenda driven crap. Lots of companies make it. It's been around since 1955 and has been generic for longer than I've been alive. Everybody says "trust the experts!" Well, in this case, those experts are doctors. Doctors are starting to see results, publish papers, and tout its efficacy. So now it becomes about money and donors? Do you truly believe repubicans are just an evil group of people? Like I said before, Donald Trump can do no right in the eyes of some, and people create this fake stuff every time there's good news. It's exhausting. But this is what "fake news" looks like.

Good thing it seems to work then, huh?

Yeah, I made a mistake there. Thought one thing and sourced another. Brain cramp. The affects of this remain to be seen, and I'm not for any kind of corruption. I don't know the reason, but so far, I really don't think precedent exists to assume the worst of Trump. Especially on something that would be so blatantly obvious.

1) The CDC and NIH have both seen increases in the budget every year Trump has been in office. Funding was not cut. 2) He was calling the media's treatment of him a hoax because of their airing of partial quotes and applying no context. Joe Biden had a tweet and a campaign ad using this quote, but eventually apologized and took down the tweet because he was wrong. 3) The quote about flu deaths was made well before we knew how serious this was. I posted the picture of all the headlines from all of those publications (did so again) and the quote from Dr. Facui among others, all of whom said the same thing. Much of this came from the data and information from China, which they vastly under-reported. They were just as worried about the economic impact there as we were here. 4) You quoted Dr. Fauci "last Wednesday." Go back and see what he said on February 17th. "The threat to the US is low." So you're going back a month and a half. That defines revisionist history. That's the same as "I was opposed to the bill until I was for it." 5) New inspector has a decade of service for the General Services Admin in charge of waste, fraud, and abuse. Trump knows the guy and he's done a good job. Lots of waste from Andrew Cuomo right now....that should also be investigated. 6) State rep of..I think Detroit..hard left (D), Karen Whitsett said today that were it not for Trump's touting of hydroxychloroquine, she would not have known to ask for it, and felt better within 2 hours after testing positive. 7) I don't understand why you're holding things Trump said against him when doctors, including Fauci were saying the same things? It wasn't until March 10th or so we really knew much about this thing, but Trump banned travel from China on January 31. He was actually ahead of the experts and called a racist and xenophobe because of it. Etc. No worries on long winded-ness. We're all bored. =) EVERYONE, including Dr. Fauci downplayed this. How can you hold Trump responsible when his own top adviser said the risk is low? Trump counts on Dr. Fauci. Always has. And Dr. Fauci himself saif Trump's response to this was impressive. Seriously? What could any president have done better? The New York Post (hardly a conservative rag) had an article over the weekend saying America has almost always been under-prepared for crisis', but always responds better than most. It used Katrina and 9/11 as examples. As I said before, the problem is systemic because the US is economically driven, not doomsday driven. And I'm good with that. To use quotes from recently as proof Trump down played the virus and leave out the ones from before is the stuff Trump always calls fake news. The rest of the story and the whole story are important, here. Trump's job is to put people around him to advise, not to preside and be all knowing. This thing has changed daily since the beginning, and to lay it at Trump's feet means you want to in my opinion.

JS, I don't know that I have ever had any kind of disagreement with you, so please take this only at face value and on this subject only. Political discussion is poison on its own merit, but sometimes it does need to be talked through. It's laughable to me you believe the problem belongs to the GOP. Seriously laughable. It's like you have no objectivity on this matter at all. Unless I'm missing something, which is possible.... Do you seriously think the exact same thing you said about the GOP can't be said in absolute equality about democrats? I have seen republicans take the high road time and time and time and time and time again. Labeled racists, homophobes, and other vile things simply because of political party affiliation. Hell, I've experienced it! The left claims tolerance and the moral high ground every chance they get, but disagree with one and you become an unwashed racist who's uneducated and probably hides behind guns while killing babies and everything not white! That's been a problem since the Clinton administration. Obama called the GOP bitter clingers. Hilary called Trump voters a basket of deplorables. Fake news is rampant. Blame thrown out just for the sake of finding fault with Trump. Check this out, BTW : https://kerrypicket.com/dr-fauci-we-acted-against-coronavirus-very-very-early/?utm_source=socialflow&fbclid=IwAR1RFE6W0T3g54ZvmdViX-ZrZDpJ5QgXp5A12sHu3I8Hh49tMnBvP4RWFVQ You have GOT to be kidding me with this. If you want, I'll copy you on over 100 examples by midnight and flood your inbox tomorrow. Putting this partisan issue on the doorstep of the GOP is intellectually dishonest.

I said a few pages ago the problem we have is systemic. It's not any one man's fault, and certainly not limited to whoever's in the chair now. This is just one source, but it shows what I mean and the complexity of it. Blaming one man and in particular the man in the chair now is pretty elementary. It's not the fault of Donald Trump, Barack Obama or Big Bird. Now is the time to battle and solve. Not blame. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/04/03/fact-check-did-obama-administration-deplete-n-95-mask-stockpile/5114319002/?fbclid=IwAR20clpJPOABykwm3TtaFGO0EPZNceF50PrpZ78pwOrjwlHKS2HqmTBUYdE

He said he hoped. He said that was a goal. Perhaps an audacious goal, but what did a hopeful goal ever hurt? He didn't commit to anything. For the love of God, the left just WANTS this man to fail. Trump : "I had bacon and eggs for breakfast." Left : "So you're saying you hate animals?" It's laughable. Good God.

Help me with cherry picked facts. Facts....that's your word. Facts. Which ones are cherry picked and what did I leave out? The US wasn't prepared for Katrina. We weren't necessarily prepared for 9/11. The easiest and most elementary thing anybody can do is blame the guy in the chair. I've posted several things above which basically say the same thing....we need unity (not compromise because compromise usually ends up in a sh*tty solution), and we do need to work as a unit rather than two separate parts. To suggest in retrospect Trump should have acted earlier says his advisers are incompetent and he should have known more than they did. Facts are facts. And the ones you suggested late in your post are hardly exclusive to Trump. The top medical guy in terms of diseases said the threat to the US was low 17 days after Trump acted. Was Trump supposed to listen to his GP? YOUR GP? Some guy with a weird feeling in his belly?

No he didn't. That's not accurate, and in fact the president of Ukraine substantiated this. That's one thing this democrat committee said he did, but it's not accurate. The funds to Ukraine were delayed, but still released ($35 million) within the allotted time window. (Window expired September 30th. Funds released September 27th, but the temporary hold was actually lifted on September 11) The law wouldn't have been broken until October 1st. So all he did was piss people off. That's not an impeachable offense. He did not break the law, nor did he withhold funding.

You lose credibility with your statement in bold. This is false. Fake. Not true. In fact, Biden said the same thing and ended up apologizing and taking down the tweet in which he said it. Trump called the media's treatment of him "their latest hoax," not the virus. This is factually inaccurate and has been widely regarded as such.

Sort of revisionist. Indiana got it March 6th. There had been a ban on travel from China in place for 5 weeks by then. It didn't affect all 50 states at first, and about halfway through that time frame, Dr. Fauci said the risk was low. If is only now affecting all 50 states, but that doesn't change that Andrew Cuomo (as an example) was told in 2015 he would need 18,000 ventilators in case of an emergency, but only had 2,000. He blew it off and said to ration what they had. So is that Barack Obama's fault? He was president at the time. States are responsible for themselves. Indiana is not bankrupt because we've done a good job managing finances. Other states have not. The federal government does not exist as a watchdog nor a babysitter. They are a safety net, but that doesn't mean they are supposed to fill 100% of a state's needs. They fill the gaps.

Help me with this, then. 1) The entire month of January, Trump was a little busy dealing with an impeachment hearing brought by people whose sole purpose was to say "he will always be impeached." The significance of his being involved in that scam can't be ignored. He also had to deal with every other responsibility a president has. 2) Presidents have advisers and experts for a reason. Public health is no different, and as a matter of fact, probably MOST important. You've heard the Steve Jobs quote, right? It's attached if you haven't. 3) Trump placed a travel ban from China on January 31st 4) On February 17th (17 days later) Dr. Fauci said the threat to the US was "low." 5) How is it not revisionist history and absolute hindsight to say now "we should have acted sooner?" 6) Trump was called a racist and xenophobe when he DID act; mainly by people who are critical of him NOW for not acting sooner. So help me. The man can do no right. Presidents don't get elected because they know everything. They get elected because they can bring people together to get things done. Whatever you think of Trump, he has gotten things done. Especially in this situation. But...the left and the media have changed their tune on him. From "Trump is a racist for banning travel from China" to "Trump is incompetent because he didn't act sooner!" See the other attachment. Trump was supposed to act sooner based on what information?

This is how the country's set up, though. State's rights. That dates back to the reason the US was settled in the first place. I'm not trying to be combative, but the federal government's budget is filtered into 2 basic categories. Mandatory spending (which is about 60% of the overall budget), and discretionary spending (about 35%), and the other 5% goes toward interest payments. Mandatory spending is social security, medicare, medicaid, etc. Those programs eat up about 90% of mandatory spending. Of the discretionary spending (which is where stockpiles would come from), military / defense receives about 55% of that. The budget is ~ $1.1 trillion in 2020. So military gets ~ $650 billion, and it needs to. By the time you add in international spending, transportation, things like farm subsidies/agriculture, housing benefits, veterans' benefits, environmental spending (for which lobbyists apply incredible pressure), etc., there's just not much room for "disaster preparation / pandemic preparation." It's easy in hindsight to say what should have happened, but go talk to the lobbyists who said where the money should go. Nobody lobbies for pandemic preparation because it hasn't happened like this in 103 years. States hold responsibility for their citizens on this more than feds do. The point is, funding simply hasn't been in the federal budget to build national stockpiles because many states have fallen short and it hasn't been a priority. Easy to say now "it damned well should have been." Well, we live and we learn. And sometimes, the lessons suck. We have barred international sales. What we didn't do was take back the stuff we had already committed to send. States aren't "on their own." They're being held to their place in the constitution, and when they aren't prepared, they turn to the federal government to bail them out, and sadly, the federal government wasn't prepared any more than the states were. Like I said before, that's not Trump's fault. That's not Obama's fault. It's systemic. States are short on money in large part due to stupid tax breaks they give businesses for moving there. Northern Indiana (via lobby to the state) did that years ago to attract the RV industry to Elkhart county and eventually had to build their part of the toll road because that was one way to re-coup the money they'd given away, and the RV folks all use that road. That was smart. Casinos were smarter, and Indiana's okay. Not all states have done even that much, and others just have too much other spending (New York has a whole lot of entitlement programs and lots of pork, as an example), so they're not prepared either. Some states are flat @$$ broke. Indiana's had decent leadership, so we're not. And we're generally prepared, not in need of as much federal aid. New York? A sh*t show. The overall point is this pandemic was on nobody's radar, and the states have to blame themselves first. Probably no one particular administration, but there was nobody in charge of "triage federal stockpile medical equipment to send to states in case of a pandemic that hits us in a blink of an eye." It's unrealistic to think there would have been. This was going to be a clusterbomb regardless of who was in the White House or running the NIH. Oh, and COVID patients were accidentally taken to the ship in NY tocay, which is why they are now being careful about who gets on. That's a clusterbomb, too. Cuomo hasn't done well at all, despite his constant complaining about other people.

17 days AFTER Trump placed the ban on China. Pelosi was touring Chinatown in SF on February 24th and inviting everyone to join her, saying it was "safe." Nobody will convince me our real first case was January 21st when the Chinese had no travel restrictions for over 50 days while it was known over there. No chance. Gavin Newsom is touting CA's flattening their curve, but I'd bet a whole lot that state already had some immunity built up because the Chinese, when they fly to the US? They land in San Francisco and Los Angeles

Man, if he had only known ahead of time.... Hindsight is always 20/20.

Can't have house terms be 10 years. Way too much can change from district to district, which is why the term is 2 years. Demographics can change in a few months as different counties adjust and zone for different things, tax bases change. Hell, a guy/gal who was elected to represent District 5 in Indiana has a completely different landscape now than 10 years ago. It's not even recognizable time period over time period.

This is precisely why Trump won 4 years ago.

Yep. As recently as the 1980's, there was overlap. The furthest left republicans overlapped with the furthest right democrats and we could govern in the middle. That's not true now. Not to make this a political narrative, but a large group of people in politics drifted away to a place where political power and agenda trumped (no pun intended) what works in a representative republic dependent on capitalism. And with no common ground (I believe, for example that there isn't one thing on which Jerry Nadler and Pete Sessions would ever agree. And that's a problem. They will always fight each other, and not for the American people, but for their ideology. Neither ideology is absolutely correct, but I favor one over the other because I'm pro-capitalism/anti-big government, and when I see what's happening right now in the private sector, I am validated in MY opinion. But that's my opinion. The problem is there will always be a gap in income and class; but much of that depends on things like risk, education, and work. Some does not, and some have benefitted from abuse of the system, greed, etc. That is true, so absolutely some changes need to be made, but until there are term limits, it won't happen. I heard a suggestion yesterday for a 1-term, 6 year presidency and 1-term 4 year senate seats to go along with 2 year house seats which could be no longer than 2 terms. I sort of liked it.

I saw a post on Twitter today that said this is going to make everybody take a hard look at political correctness, special interests, "just in time" needs for everything - including information, corporatization, etc.. and make some of those initiatives seem petty and insignificant. God, I hope so. I was in medical sales for 20 years beginning in 1994 or so. When I started? St. Vincent hospital had 3 campuses. The mother ship on the north side of Indy, Carmel, and a small hospital in Brazil, IN. When I got out, they owned 47 campuses. Selling became corporate and based solely on pricing. No care-based rationale and no relationships. Contract driven medicine based on purchasing power. That's not Donald Trump's fault. That's not Barack Obama's fault. That's not George Bush's fault. It's systemic. But the answer is not state control or whatever it is Gavin Newsom said today. The government was set up of the people and for the people. And the people are the ones stepping up to solve problems. Our issue? There are no term limits. There are hundreds of professional politicians with no life experience, and the people leading our country right now from a medical perspective (Dr. Fauci in particular) have no understanding of the economic catastrophe which would be caused by his recommendations of "not opening up the country until we have a vaccine....in a year and a half." Or really what's happening out there. He has tunnel vision, and said yesterday therapies aren't his top priority. I get that testing and finding out who's infected is his priority, but damn, dude...the country needs to turn the lights back on, too. You can manage two priorities simultaneously! I do think this will create a better system for rapid response, and I think American manufacturing will play a huge role as long as leadership in Washington promotes and permits it. If we start to gravitate more toward state control? We're doomed. In my mind, it's as simple as that. I trust business people and American ingenuity over elected officials every time.

Dude, get a grip. Seriously. I didn't say my experience proved anything nor did I claim anything. Jesus, I said I was on board with parts in the article YOU posted. I claimed nothing, nor did I have even the slightest bit of discussion with you which could have been viewed even by the most elementary person on the planet as "evidence." You inferred it and that, pal? That's on you. What the hell is your deal other than the same old personal bullsh*t you've carried for years? Get a grip on yourself and grow the hell up.