Right To Left

Sanders has failed! Not his supporters...many of whom grabbed hold of him same as working class people fed up with Blairite Third Way Labour drafted Jeremy Corbyn from the back benches to lead the Labour Party. The difference between Labour and the Democrats is Labour has fewer tools to try to rig candidate selection and voting, unlike the Dems...who often bitch about the Republican's voter disenfranchisement tactics, but apply it in their primaries.

Talk to Barry Oh about how hard it is to get a "grand bargain" and try to cut some of those mandatory 'entitlement' programs! But, unless the US Government plans to default, paying interest snowballing on the national debt cannot be negotiated with...even if interest rates go higher! Something to consider as Trump hands out 2.2 Trillion for Covid relief...the lion's share of it going to Wall Street and Trump's favorite corporate allies.

Not likely, according to scientists who've studied this virus and mapped out its progression: The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2 Conclusions In the midst of the global COVID-19 public-health emergency, it is reasonable to wonder why the origins of the pandemic matter. Detailed understanding of how an animal virus jumped species boundaries to infect humans so productively will help in the prevention of future zoonotic events. For example, if SARS-CoV-2 pre-adapted in another animal species, then there is the risk of future re-emergence events. In contrast, if the adaptive process occurred in humans, then even if repeated zoonotic transfers occur, they are unlikely to take off without the same series of mutations. In addition, identifying the closest viral relatives of SARS-CoV-2 circulating in animals will greatly assist studies of viral function. Indeed, the availability of the RaTG13 bat sequence helped reveal key RBD mutations and the polybasic cleavage site. The genomic features described here may explain in part the infectiousness and transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2 in humans. Although the evidence shows that SARSCoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here. However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features, including the optimized RBD and polybasic cleavage site, in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratorybased scenario is plausible. More scientific data could swing the balance of evidence to favor one hypothesis over another. Obtaining related viral sequences from animal sources would be the most definitive way of revealing viral origins. For example, a future observation of an intermediate or fully formed polybasic cleavage site in a SARS-CoV-2-like virus from animals would lend even further support to the natural-selection hypotheses. It would also be helpful to obtain more genetic and functional data about SARSCoV-2, including animal studies. The identification of a potential intermediate host of SARS-CoV-2, as well as sequencing of the virus from very early cases, would similarly be highly informative. Irrespective of the exact mechanisms by which SARSCoV-2 originated via natural selection, the ongoing surveillance of pneumonia in humans and other animals is clearly of utmost importance. ❐ Kristian G. Andersen1,2 ✉, Andrew Rambaut   3, W. Ian Lipkin4, Edward C. Holmes   5 and Robert F. Garry6,7 http:// https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-020-0820-9

NO, mandatory spending priorities can't be changed, and when it comes to discretionary spending over half goes to military department budgets....add Veterans Affairs to Defense (as it should be!), and it turns out to be about 60% of the discretionary spending budget....so you're wrong!

I'll agree with you on that one, because the evidence on how nations around the world are dealing with the crisis would indicate those nations that are able to rely on central planning and control, and have a proper number of hospitals to meet people's needs during normal times, have much greater success than capitalist nations that have mostly privately owned hospitals, private insurance and are unable to provide a coordinated response early on. The social democrat nations in the middle can swing one of two ways: 1. If they're gutting and selling off parts of their universal public healthcare system like England and Southern European countries, that puts them behind the 8-ball! 2. If they're still providing quality public healthcare, they're miles ahead. And the public policy response is most important...as mentioned elsewhere, comparing Norway and Sweden side by side; now that it's been a few weeks in to handling the Covid-19 crisis, Norway's infection and hospitalization rates are falling as they closed everything down except for essential services, while Sweden's more open response of allowing business to remain open along with public gatherings is causing a sudden spike in rates of infection. So, even two nations that are almost alike -- both northern white European nations with public healthcare, can look very different in a crisis when one of them is being extremely stupid!

I wish you included the link, so I could enlarge your colorful pie chart and read the fine print! And it is a conspiracy theory...or a shell game ... take your pick! Total spending on the Defense Dept. and adjacent agencies that should be included as part of military spending is almost one trillion today: Myth #2: Defense spending should be increased, even if other programs must be cut. Fact: Total U.S. military spending for FY 2021 is $989 billion. It includes more than the Department of Defense budget of $636 billion. You must also count the $69 billion which pays for the War on Terror, including military operations in Iraq, Syria, and the War in Afghanistan. There are five other agencies that support defense that should also be included. They are the FBI and Cybersecurity, under the Justice Department budget; the National Nuclear Security Administration, under the Energy Department budget; Homeland Security; the Department of Veterans Affairs; and the State Department. They add $228 billion to the base budget. This huge expense must be reduced if the deficit is to be cut in any meaningful way. https://www.thebalance.com/current-us-discretionary-federal-budget-and-spending-3306308

And what do you have to say about America's slow reaction to the threat? Donald Trump knew about it in early March; yet he was calling it 'just another flu or cold virus, and not something that should put economic growth at risk'! The Chinese Government officials likely thought that it would be easy enough to deal with because they've been down this road before...many times! If the viral threat could have been contained in Wuhan Province, then it wouldn't have mattered. But rightwing clowns in the US, who are trying to breathe new life into the cold war right now, are full of it when they claim they had no way of knowing! With all the crap they're pulling in Hong Kong, they didn't have any agents in China who could have given them a heads-up about what was happening there! America's failure now is the failure of a military-focused empire that provides little to help its own citizens on the homefront.

Well first off, the original source of Covid-19 has not been determined yet! Reports of some guy getting the disease started by making a soup out of bats and "wet markets" ...more correctly translated as fresh food markets, is speculation and hasn't been determined yet by the people who study disease flow and transfer. What we do know is that China got the pandemic under control in their country in a matter of weeks by 'tracing' and quarantining likely carriers along with using the social distancing techniques we're all becoming familiar with now. Canada's handling of the pandemic has been better than most....certainly far better than clusterfuck central to the south! The US has become the disaster zone of this story because of domestic reasons: -lack of proper healthcare for a growing number of people forced to pay exorbitant insurance fees for mediocre health insurance coverage, while 30 million Americans have no health insurance at all! -underfunded and closing of public hospitals that cater to people with low incomes and no insurance (this is a bipartisan failure btw, as noted in a post I did re. Andrew Cuomo yesterday). No surprise that America now leads the world in Covid-19 fatalities and that New York is no. one on this list of infamy. So, if you're running a military empire that devotes the largest portion of its tax revenues to military spending, what are you going to do? Go to war! Trump has been scheming for ways to try to start a war with China...even though they've tried to send medical equipment to the US in spite of US foreign policy. If Trump's re-election goes down the toilet and the Democrats take over, the only difference is they'll flip the script and try to start up a hot war with Russia...their main priority!

Are you serious? You think the world is more peaceful today? How many active wars are brewing today compared to 10, 20 or 40 years ago? War has never been a more profitable enterprize than it is today. And high tech weaponry + the addition of mercenary 'security forces' on the ground, has eliminated the need for America to send its own troops in to fight and die for the corporate sponsors of war. That makes it a lot more appealing and acceptable at home when the only Americans dying are the "other one percent," as they're sometimes referred to....the kids from small towns and urban squalor where the military is the only real career option for most. I don't know what you're smoking when you declare that "proxy wars aren't happening anymore," because the genocidal ground troops sent in to mop up and slaughter in Libya, Syria and I would say Ukraine's rightwing Nazi squads like Pravy Sektor also, are paid forces advancing the aims of the US and its allies...including Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar etc.. No, I think I defined it as a 100% corporate governance of the world as an end goal, while national governments, international organizations concerned with mundane, unimportant issues to the wealth class -- world peace, combating climate change etc., get insignificant funding, media attention or political interest as a result. When it comes to the oligarchs like Soros and Charles Koch (the one who's still alive), they may differ on social issues --- race, minority rights, gay rights, women's rights etc., but when it comes to the flow of money around the world, taxes and trade issues, they're on the same team! Did I say there weren't rightwing warmongers and war profiteers.....Donald may be in both categories for that matter. What I don't recall seeing before the 90's was liberal warmongers...calling for first -- sanctions, economic blockades, bombing and then land invasion for regime change. Like I said before, when the Soviet Union collapsed into 15 separate nations, and Communist China became more capitalist than communist, there was a much ballyhooed "Peace Dividend" that the lucky occupier in the White House inherited in 1992. But, instead of a peace dividend, there was a military buildup to fight smaller, regional wars, which translates as countries that are still not getting with the plan that international finance was in charge, and smaller nation-states had to privatize public lands and public services as well. In more recent times, US military and surveillance dept. budgets doubled within two years of 9-11, and after several years of fighting little skirmishes in the Arab World,, the US needed to breathe new life into the cold war concept of Big Power Conflict...that requires fighter jets, nuclear missiles and aircraft carriers. Anyone's guess whether the strategists who called for a more than one trillion dollar buildup of America's nuclear weapons forces think they should try to win a nuclear war with Russia or China...depending on which party is in power in Washington. Still, the liberal warhawk, using R2P doctrine as an excuse to go to war against a foreign leader who's in the way....like Gadaffi, for humanitarian reasons is something that is a fairly recent, but highly lucrative innovation of the past 30 years.

Until age 26! And doesn't that depend on whether they are still full time students living at home? It's the over 50 black vote that Biden won. Not the younger generations, who noticed that Barack was all about helping his new friends on Wall Street...not pretending to be a 'community organizer' on the national scale. If they know anything about Joe Biden aside from his warmongering...pushing hard for both houses of Congress to approve the war resolution bill Bush II needed to authorize an invasion of Iraq. His job as Veep was supposed to be 'balancing the ticket' -- being Obama's ambassador to the Republican right. It turned out by the end of Obama's first two years that the GOP wasn't interested in negotiating anything with the White House! They rejected a "Grand Bargain" that put everything Democrats supposedly hold dear -- Medicare, Social Security, on the chopping block, in the interests of balanced budgets....but it didn't make Republicans budge! And Biden as presidential candidate is promising more of the same status quo crap that Hillary ran on in 2016. *It's worth noting that Biden's much vaunted African American support is mostly in those southern conservative Bible Belt states that typically vote Republican. So, in a presidential race where it's winner take all in the Electoral College, those black votes in the south are lost, while black support in the states that matter for Democrats did not want Joe Biden....even before his declining mental faculties became apparent! I've been waiting to drop a point or two about voter disenfranchisement in America's rigged two party racket of a "democratic" system" and this looks like a good place! In Republican states like Texas, the college towns like Austin featured thousands of young people waiting in long lines trying to get in to vote in districts...like the black and latino districts in Texas that feature fewer polling stations...making lines much longer than in the comfortable, older, white GOP suburbs. And, likewise a lot fewer minority voters get to exercise their right to vote, without jumping through ridiculous hoops set in front of them. So, it's not all a matter of "not bothering to get out and vote" as not being willing to invest the time or effort in a system that will likely remove them if they've been stricken from the voter list and have to fill out a provisional ballot (that will get tossed in the garbage). 2016 was supposed to be the most important federal election ever.....according to the endless hype and campaign ads...yet only 62% of eligible voters made the count! Did 38% decide it wasn't worth the time? Or more likely, how many of that 38% couldn't get registered for a variety of reasons, weren't on voting lists, or filled out useless provisional ballots? Fatuous claim in an era when the US Gov spends half of its discretionary budget on military. And worth noting that the lowball "defense" spending claims don't make note of the fact that nuclear weapons are located under the Energy Dept. for whatever reasons...that Rick Perry obviously didn't know about some years back. And the equally misnamed "Intelligence" agencies are also separate with huge budgets of their own. Add them all up together and its over half of your tax dollar! If it wasn't, you couldn't afford an imperial armada of carrier fleets, nukes, over 800 military bases around the world, if it was only 5% of your tax dollar! On Thursday, Reuters-Ipsos released a poll that shows (what I believe to be) an unprecedented level of support for Medicare for All, the American left’s brand-name for a single-payer, national health-insurance plan. The survey found a whopping 70 percent support for the proposal, with 84.5 percent of Democrats — and 51 percent of Republicans — voicing their approval. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/08/new-poll-majority-of-gop-voters-support-medicare-for-all.html You were saying? Some of the American medical tourists that were in that doc I mentioned previously about Cuba's healthcare system and medical research, would like to retire in Cuba if that counts! Worth noting that the first two waves of Cuban emigration to Florida were from the landowning and capitalist class in Cuba, who have this thing against sharing...like all diehard capitalists who think they can grab all the profits and benefits for themselves.

Yes! It might not be an intentional goal of Twitter and other social media like Facebook (which I dropped out of early on) to try to put people together in likeminded groups who are assumed to have the same interests and want to share the same things. But the end result is giant hive-minds that divide into enemy camps and are often completely unaware of what the other side is talking about, or what information they might have that could be useful. ?? You should have watched the TV series "Mad Men," especially season one, when the shows were focused more on the nuts and bolts of the ad biz and how it was changing with the advent of television and hiring psychologists to study the motivations and reactions of test group consumers.....and make everyone filthy rich beyond their wildest dreams! See, what started happening in the 50's and thereafter, was marketers realized they weren't selling the product/they were convincing the potential buyer that they NEEDED the product! Thereafter both TV and magazine print ads started focusing on creating the want or the desire for the product. How many people buy stuff from bigger houses to new cars to new home entertainment crap, and have no practical reason why they bought it or even wanted it! Same with more mundane choices like: what kind of beer to drink etc.. And I would contend that both patriotism and religious faith have been subverted by capitalism in an age when wars are carried out for business interests looking to exploit previously unavailable resources, exploit people for cheap labour, and sell billions of dollars worth of weapons to carry out the job. Years ago, there used to be public tv and radio in the US, now it's all corporate sponsored and unable to challenge corporate ideology, like the virtues of free trade and globalization. Same here in Canada! I'm not sure what happened to the CBC in recent times, but it's not the same as it was 40 or 50 years ago, when both TV and radio would run some pretty radical, challenging content to the status quo. Those days seem to be long gone now. CNN and their adversarial "Crossfire" show is a good example of how a corporate-sponsored network frames and molds 'left' and 'right' within acceptable parameters. For example, show me the left side spokesperson on network TV who is anti-war? The debate is limited to 'how to conduct the war.'

Indeed! There was a time when those of us who were young Star Trek fans, were looking forward to an "Earth Federation" beginning with the UN or something very similar. What we weren't aware of was that globalism or globalization would remain a goal and future project for international capitalism and finance. And the largest banks and corporations who saw the whole world as their market wanted a GATT and regional trade pacts to step over national boundaries freely as they moved capital and production to whichever place was cheapest and brought the best return on investment....and had the lowest taxes.

I remember back when after the very long and dramatic waiting period, Justin Trudeau was finally ready to run for Prime Minister, an older neighbor of mine pondered over what it would mean having a second generation Trudeau running the country. My thinking was that whatever you thought of PET, there was no way in hell Junior could follow his father's nationalistic goals any further. Like him or loath him, the new Trudeau would be just as constrained as any other Canadian leader would be in the New World Order.

Anyone who is actually honest on the left or right, would have to concede that platforms like Twitter encourage piling on. I found myself doing this to some extent when I joined Twitter several years ago and wanted to keep growing my followers...until I reached 1000 and I thought: "why the hell am I bothering?" So, I still use Twitter and check on my feed every day, but rarely stay too long unless I find things that are really useful and informative. For example, the best information and most important experts I've found on the Covid-19 pandemic have been on Twitter. The downside is that regarding politics, the Twitter platform encourages people to divide into separated, isolated camps where they have little or no idea what is going on outside their little niches where everyone believes pretty much the same thing and has the same take on most every issue. For me, that came as somewhat of a surprise, because I've always been of the thinking that being liberal means being more open-minded that close minded conservatives. But in the brave new world of internet everything, it seems like nobody is open-minded and undecided about anything anymore!

Canada, for all intents and purposes is already an extension of the United States. And the days when we could oppose US foreign policy and wars (like Vietnam) are long gone today! That's part of the price of NAFTA and the rest of the "free trade" regime. Where does Canada differ with US policy on overthrowing democratically elected governments like Honduras and installing drug-trafficking thugs? Same plan operating in Venezuela and Bolivia..... JT has nothing to say, and our media mouthpieces are silent also. I only wish we could get off of this merry-go-round. But it won't end unless maybe this pandemic does us a favor and destroys the world order that is teetering on the edge of extinction already. What comes after can't be easy, but things can't go on like this much longer!

1. It certainly shows why the safer, more peaceful world we were promised when the Soviet Union fell, never came to pass! Globalists have a way of glossing over capitalist economics and trying to make everything about political ideology and theorizing. But, warfare is the most profitable business opportunity for bankers and industrialists to engage in. The big rhetorical innovation of the globalization era has been the liberal warmongers who feign grave concerns for human rights and suffering (except for citizens in countries they want to blow up....like Libya, Syria, Yemen...even Ukraine). Multimillion dollar missiles are only good for a single use. Not using them means Raytheon and other manufacturers receive fewer orders, since stockpiles are only allowed to grow so high. So, Raytheon, Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics etc., are going to make sure they have money flowing in to buy their favorite politicians and media....prattling on endlessly about foreign threats to US security. I imagine a conversation going something like: we need to get behind some idiot for our presidential candidate who will argue that America needs yet another two aircraft carriers! The most expensive obsolete weapon out there today. 2. Nope!

I don't think you have a grasp on how much the ground has shifted over the past 10 years regarding this socialism vs capitalism thing. Younger people coming up are seeing fewer and fewer opportunities with jobs that are so horrible they are soul crushing, pay little and offer few if any benefits. And then there's the healthcare system! Now is a hard time to try to argue in favor of privatizing public healthcare services as countries with the highest levels of greed-based profit-driven heathcare are not getting control of the global pandemic/while the most socialistic, non-profit healthcare are responding much better! Centrist Democrats would get wiped off the face of the political earth in the US if they didn't have big money and media saturation on their side! And Republicans who cannot adapt to deal with the conditions their non-rich base of supporters are dealing with, will also be dropped! If Bernie was a real leader....let's just pretend he had some of Trump's aggressive qualities, it would have been a cakewalk for him this year. Sanders is muted mostly by being the only one to take the Surgeon General's recommendations seriously and not holding rallies...but making a muted late request on his campaign site that voters vote by mail if possible and NOT go to the polls. Again, Bernie did not say it loud enough to get noticed. If Sanders wanted to look like a leader, he should have done his best Andrew Cuomo impression, and not waited till the last minute to make that declaration! Cause lives are at stake. Imbecile Biden on the other hand, told people to get out and vote and even LIED about what the medical experts advised...declaring that it was perfectly safe to go vote at polling stations where primaries were held....using idiotic WWII analogies et al. There have....no surprise, already been many people who voted in the states that did not cancel or postpone their primaries, and lawsuits are pending for a number of governors and the bastard running the DNC - Tom Perez, who also insisted that primaries not be postponed or suspended....even threatening states that did delay primaries, cause he needs all of Joe Biden's elderly supporters to get out and vote for him, whether they die later or not! Bernie's campaign workers will be the first to tell you that it's a lot easier getting those millennials and 'zoomers' out for big rallies, than it is to get them to show up on election day at a polling station. And the old people have not all been 'removed' yet! When it comes to worrying about debt, nobody could have made a better campaign for free money MMT theory than Donald Trump! He has already blown through deficits for the purpose of throwing more and more billions at military and war spending, while no Democrats and allied media have the guts to challenge "where's the money going to come from for this Trillion Dollar military and surveillance spy agency budgets! And now, they've outdone themselves, with the biggest multi-trillion dollar bank and corporate bailout in history! That's why one of my cousins says his wife had to stop him from almost destroying their big screen TV when Biden pulled up his stock objection to Medicare For All: 'it's 1.6 Trillion ... how are you going to pay for it?" And Bernie goes to his bookish, weaselly response about...well something about MMT, instead of throwing it right back at Joe that military spending hasn't had to pass affordability tests in over 50 years! I think most people now in America are so fed up with paying thousands per month (like my cousin) for healthcare plans that still have such high deductibles that they aren't hardly useful for anything, that they will jump to that socialist medicine the right fears so much in a flash! And speaking of socialist medicine, you're not going to like this, but I was shocked to find the documentary - CUBA'S CANCER HOPE on the PBS science series - NOVA a few days ago. Since PBS is funded almost totally by big trust funds, I surprised and delighted to see that they would broadcast a show this challenging to the rest of the corporate messaging machine: Cuba's Cancer Hope

I think that by the time the brokered Democrat Convention in July or August selects Andrew Cuomo as their presidential candidate, Cuomo's voluminous piles of dirty laundry will be taken out and held up for everyone to see by Trump and his allied rightwing ruthless media! It has already been a hard time for carpet bagging Democrats who keep finding ways to defund public healthcare in support of their donors. But now with a pandemic unleashed, enough heat and focus on how bad Cuomo has been on these issues, will make it really hard for him to take advantage of Trump's grift and careless disregard for the health and welfare of US citizens he's supposed to be working for! Choose your poison in November I suppose!

Hell NO! Especially now that America is a failing, flailing dangerous empire armed with thousands of nuclear warheads. Who wants to join the global empire now that its 23 Trillion in debt? I'm just wondering when enough countries start trading outside the US Dollar regime and force a run on the USD - driving down its value in a similar manner that took down the Austria-Hungary Krone in the first world war, and then the British pound after the second world war. Eventually America will have to pay its own way in the world....presuming it can't keep threatening countries militarily who don't want to use the Dollar! I should point out that Canada was far better off before we got dragged into this "free trade" bs that started with the FTA that quickly morphed into NAFTA. We've never had control over our own economy ever since!

Bernie's supporters...and I talk regularly with a few of them...two are cousins of mine...are not going to turn out for Biden! They are getting so pissed off at Bernie's unwillingness to fight back or even ask Joe some tough questions for a change, that they may not even turn out for Bernie! Some are looking at 3rd party options - Greens, DSA, and some won't bother, especially if they are living in areas where voter disenfranchisement is severe and Democrats are unwilling to address the problem! They may take the streets if things get bad enough now, or they may be too busy just trying to keep their homes or apartments, and are just not paying any more attention to what increasingly turns out to be a useless political process for average working people. Don't compare apples and oranges....if you're referring to Spain and Italy's public healthcare systems! That's not the only consideration...especially in countries where public health is increasingly underfunded and being cut back....like in Southern Europe! We have problems up here in Canada with medicare systems...even for those of us who also have employer-based extended benefits. But the crisis in the US is mostly related to the defunding of public healthcare...and as mentioned in the Nation piece I posted about Democrat superhero of the hour - Andrew Cuomo, some Democrats are worst offenders than Republican governors and mayors! On my Twitter account, I've been following a Financial Times statistician - John Burn-Murdoch https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch closely over the past week, because of his posts on the coronavirus pandemic around the world and analysis of statistical chart data. Lately, he's been doing some analysis of the covid-19 data from smaller nations that make better side by side comparisions. Sweden and Norway are instructive...being Scandinavian neighbors with similar cultures and government. Norway has followed the social distancing/quarantining strategies advised by the WHO and other agencies, while Sweden has taken the liberal approach of doing very little to control people's behavior. How are they making out? As of two days ago, it seems Norway's rate of infection is dropping, while Sweden's is increasing:

So, delaying the provision of weapons for a near-fascist/ Nazi-sympathizing government to continue an ethnic cleansing campaign against its rebellious eastern provinces....is breaking the law! I'm finding the stuff that Trump is doing legally to be far worse than what he does when he 'breaks' the law!

RBG looks like she might live longer than the rest of them....providing her cancer issues don't return:

He'll deny he ever said it......just like in the debates! And if someone rolls the tape, he'll say "that guy's lying!"

Are you serious? Based on some sort of corruption scale, Cuomo takes a back seat to no one...Joe Biden included! Cuomo Helped Get New York Into This Mess The governor’s position on health care spending looked starkly different a couple of months ago. ..........the same Cuomo who is racing to expand New York’s hospital capacity and crying out for more federal resources is quietly trying to slash Medicaid funding in the state, enraging doctors and nurses, and elected officials of his own party. The same Cuomo who holds press briefings at a major New York City convention center, now the home of a temporary 1,000-bed hospital, presided over a decade of hospital closures and consolidations, prioritizing cost savings over keeping popular health care institutions open. It’s the same Democratic governor—every liberal pundit’s tried-and-true Trump antidote—who is doing damage to his state’s health care system at the worst possible moment, in the eyes of the critics who follow him most closely. “Andrew Cuomo has repeatedly stated, over and over again, that New York has excess capacity of hospital beds, that it’s too expensive and not needed and we need to reduce spending. He said this over and over again throughout his entire tenure,” said Sean Petty, a pediatric nurse at a public hospital in the Bronx and a high-ranking member of the state’s politically active nurses’ union. “If this budget goes through in April, next year’s health and hospitals budget is going to be devastating.” What’s striking to Petty and other health care experts is how Cuomo has not backed off his plan to cut Medicaid, despite the horrific Covid-19 outbreak. Earlier this year, Cuomo empaneled what is called a Medicaid Redesign Team to slash Medicaid spending in New York after a $6 billion budget shortfall, driven largely by rising Medicaid costs, became evident in late 2019. Medicaid enrollment has been growing about 13 percent a year and is now a $70 billion program in the state. More than 6 million New Yorkers are on Medicaid, which has meant just 4.7 percent of the state is uninsured, a historic low. The Affordable Care Act has boosted Medicaid enrollment in New York. Though Medicaid is a federal program that provides low-cost, comprehensive health care to the poor, the state still picks up almost half the costs, with county governments also bearing a small share. Some of the budgetary abyss has been the Cuomo administration’s own making: postponing Medicaid payments and failing in the past to iron out inefficiencies like the state’s paying Medicaid costs for relatively wealthy, private hospitals that don’t need the aid in the first place. Despite his reputation as a big-government progressive, Cuomo has held to a self-imposed caps on state spending and property tax increases, putting additional strains on local governments trying to fund municipal services. https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/covid-ny-hospital-medicaid/

What was Jimmy's pandemic? The oil embargo? Or the Iranian embassy hostage taking that Reagan's staffers had arranged a secret deal for their release after the election was over. For more than a year, it gave Ted Koppel something to talk about on his late night show. I wouldn't have given Trump a chance for re-election with what's going to be happening over the next 3 to 6 months. But, the Democrats keep lowering the bar (as usual) and put the stupidest, most mentally incompetent man forward they could find...just because job one was stopping Bernie Sanders! Unless they figure a way out of the mess, like the rumored backroom strategy that they're going to switch out Biden for a rightwing Democrat who still has a functioning brain (rumored to be Andrew Cuomo, because of all the MSM made up media hype about him), then they have no chance of winning.That's the price of no one having the guts to push back against the insurance industry, even during a pandemic, and wants US healthcare kept strictly as a for-profit service.