Apparently the process to pass this bill in the House was some straight up bullshit, if you believe Justin Amash (and I tend to). I consider him a principled and intelligent person who I disagree with on a lot of policy, but I was very surprised he voted present on this.
He expressed a bunch of concerns on Twitter, among them that Steven Mnuchin played a huge role in drafting the bill, that the House itself didn’t have enough time to read it, and that there was not a process for deliberation on any other measures in the House.
Now, I get why some of that was necessary, but the Mnuchin part is deeply concerning. Is what it is, we’ll probably learn in a few months that we gave some massive corporate handout in there to the Trump Political Grifting Syndicate. May have just had to be done to get this passed and help people, which is a joke, but it’s where we’re at.
I told my friend in Saudi Arabia that I’d trust statements from her government on this more than statements from mine.
It’s truly remarkable that the Federal Govt hasn’t done jack shit, (except for tons of stuff for the financial markets), and basically the rest of the country has gone ahead and responded despite the total lack of leadership and information from the top.
Trump “I was honored to see that the stock market grew mostly there with us, it set a record in a short period of time, over a 45 minute period, that we had hte press conference yesterday in the Rose Garden. That was a record. An all-time record. I think we should do one of them every day, perhaps. How about five times a day? We’ll do one five times a day. But, uh, that was something to watch and I had no idea. We walked back, I said, so how did that work out? They said, ‘Sir you just set a new record in the history of the stock market,’ so that was good.”
That’s a real quote. Fuck this motherfucking piece of fucking shit impeach this fucking asshole right fucking now what the fuuuuuuuuuuuuck.
Right, that was it. Had to do with the big horse race, (one of the triple crown events but can’t remember which), when the winning horse was DQ’d I think. He may have received even less than 1/10 of what he thought he won. Still brings a smile to my face.
I am impressed by the action the governors, mostly Democratic ones, have been able to take. It’ll be a little late but they’re doing a pretty good job, all things considered. Wolf ¶ shut down a county near Philly that was a hot spot, I think they only had like 13 positive tests at that point - way ahead of the curve elsewhere. We’ve got a shot in some of these places to avoid the worst of it.
Trump will take all the credit in that case and fuck him.
At work when we were getting ready to work with an offshore company they had a cultural awareness class. The teacher said some study ranked low context (blunt, to the point) vs. high context (talk around the subject) countries. Japan was the highest context country. Israel was the lowest. India was very high.
US is in the middle. But just in the US East Coasters (hey fuck you now gimme my hot dog) communicate way different than West Coast (passive aggressive, Hollywood no). So midwest is like the middle of the middle.
No excuse for a congressperson or at least someone on their staff not reading every single word of every single thing they vote for ever.
And of course any bill under any administration that congress isn’t allowed to or isn’t given time to read is going to be chalk full of terrible and often completely unrelated things - without fail - always.
The second is that the claim that “actually nothing was done for a long period of time” is wrong, and the claim that Obama didn’t declare a national health emergency is very misleading. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on April 24, 2009, declared that the containment of swine flu in the United States was “not very likely.” Two days later, April 26, the Obama administration declared a public health emergency, before any American had been killed by the swine flu — the same step Trump has now taken. A couple days later, Obama asked for and received billions of dollars from Congress to deal with the swine flu.
Obama didn’t declare a more drastic national health emergency until six months later, but Trump hasn’t done that either. And that brings up the other key point here: The reason for the less drastic initial response was that the swine flu was significantly less dangerous than today’s coronavirus.
For people on FB who keep posting that stupid “why didn’t we freak out about the swine flu” graphic.
It’s important to remember that Trump is absolutely, 100%, biologically incapable of handing this like an actual leader. It is hopeless. He couldn’t do it if he wanted to.
It’s gonna be me because my local boomers won’t stop going out to restaurants until they’re forced, then they’ll just have parties until they all start dying.