Summations Only

I'd be terrified to do that, since there's evidence that the awarding of Pulitzers is heavily liberally biased.

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Would the Pulitzer committee consider a prize for a news organization bankrolled by the conservative Koch brothers? Of course not. But by recognizing ProPublica, the committee is essentially rewarding the left side of the political spectrum.

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ProPublica’s main backers are billionaires Herbert and Marion Sandler. The couple has pledged $10 million a year to the organization. Such a big-ticket annual contribution fits right in with the Sandlers’ extensive support for Democratic candidates, left-wing advocacy campaigns, and PACs such as Moveon.org, which raises money for progressive office-seekers.

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Credibility Of Pulitzer Prize Takes A Hit By Rewarding ProPublica’s Liberal Bias | The Daily Caller All deaths. There is a ripple effect that goes all through the economy that can hinder many things that contribute to all deaths. Unemployment / business destruction can lead to more suicides, supply chains can be disrupted that serve hospitals. It goes on and on, when the economy is even partially closed, in violation of the first amendment. It is usually stated, or implied when questionable intrusions on the Constitution happen, that the founders couldn't possibly have foreseen the complications / circumstances of this ever complex society of today. The problem is, the founders knew plenty about the possibilities of viruses and pandemics, yet nowhere in the founding documents is anything stated concerning alterations to the Constitution concerning them. That can be projected both ways, the mandated closing of some businesses for a long period of time, resulting eventually in a depression rivaling the 1930's could increase numbers of deaths in many ways, suicide, civil unrest as only two of many examples. TDR indicates a change from when most U.S. citizens, while politically divided, cared about the good of the country. Now a significant number of Democrats are much more focused on Trump than they are the good of the country. I re-read some of your opening posts of this thread from 3+ years ago, and they just don't seem nearly as vitriolic as your posts now. Now that Trump's had time to show what he can do, decrease government regulation, grow and preside over a really good economy, until recently at least.I think I remember seeing or hearing about one of the late-night clowns (Maher maybe?) saying he'd take an economic downturn / depression, to see Trump get removed from office. There's a lot of anger and despair in the Democrat party, obviously because they weren't able to come up with a JFK, Bill Clinton, or even Obama, to challenge Trump in the 2020 election. I suspect that the big money handlers of the Democrat party - Soros, Gates, Steyer, Bloomberg, etc, are very frustrated over the Biden roadblock. All their money can't buy him out, he has the desire to be the nominee, and he has the delegates. But take heart, I honestly suspect that Biden just might have an "accident" this summer. The Clintons could become advisors for this project, several people have gotten dead around them in recent decades.I could elaborate more on TDR, but I'm out of time for now. Gonna be a busy week, (I'm an essential worker) but maybe I'll be back in a week or so, if there's anything else of substance to respond to here.

That reminder is just a sideways way of making a false assertion. No one blames the virus on Trump. It would make as much sense to blame the Chinese.Trump is responsible for the ongoing bungling of the viral threat. He is not actually competent to manage anything, only of avoiding responsibility, deflecting blame and turning the full bully pulpit on anyone insufficiently fawning.--Percy

This would be incorrect. Those pandemics were all caused by flu viruses that have obvious symptoms. The novel coronavirus is not a flu virus. The symptoms are different and can be absent. Cloth masks? No, there's no evidence of adverse health effects using cloth masks. N95 respirator masks shouldn't be worn by people with health issues, but otherwise they're fine, with only possible minor effects after wearing for a long time. But how many people are wearing N95 masks? They're still not available at the retail level, though Defense Procurement Act administrator Peter Navarro was on the Sunday morning programs today touting the Trump administration's great success with PPE. You're just reconfirming what people had already concluded, that you don't understand how dangerous this virus is and how important it is to wear a mask, for your own safety and that of all the people around you, including those you know and love. This reflects no comprehension of public health. Stopping a pandemic requires greatly reduced social interaction as well as protecting people from each other's exhalations and other sources of viral exposure. The individual right to freedom stops at society's greater right to be free from threat. This has long been recognized. Public health departments have been ordering quarantines for a long, long time, well over a century. Your information is incorrect. Hospital charges to Medicare for a coronavirus stay can vary widely depending upon length of stay and services provided. A 20% surcharge was passed by Congress and signed by Trump because of the extra costs of dealing with the extreme contagiousness of the virus, such as the constant sanitizing, the complete change of PPE required when moving from a coronavirus area to a non-coronavirus area, and so forth. So you're saying that had Trump not been distracted by the impeachment that he would have begun addressing the pandemic back in January when he should have? How many times did Trump tweet in January? He sent 125 tweets on January 22 alone.Congratulations on making it through another post without saying anything true or correct.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Typo.

I don't know why you think "trump is bad at his job" is that much of defense, but I guess that's the kind of thinking you have when you're afflicted with tdss.Edited by DrJones*, : No reason given.

For Trump supporters everything is a conspiracy theory. There's the Deep State conspiracy, the Fake News conspiracy, the Russia Hoax conspiracy, the Ukrainian conspiracy, the impeachment conspiracy, the Michael Flynn conspiracy, the Roger Stone conspiracy, the Obamagate conspiracy, and now, if you can believe it, the coronavirus conspiracy.According to Eric Trump, the coronavirus is a Democratic hoax.As the election season heats up we can expect to see an unending stream of conspiracy theory accusations, not because there's any truth to them, but because Donald Trump thinks in terms of conspiracy theories. Look at all the conspiracy theories he's floated over the years. Obama was not an natural born American but was born in Kenya. Climate change is a conspiracy theory. The Obama administration conspired to wiretap the phones at Trump tower. The Democrats conspired to have millions of illegal immigrants vote for Clinton in order to deny Trump a popular vote victory. The death toll in Puerto Rico due to Hurricane Maria was faked. Windmills cause cancer. The Ukraine has Hillary Clinton's missing emails. It never ends.Unfortunately, what also never ends is the gullibility of Trump supporters. It seems their appetite for baseless conspiracy theories never ends, and their desire for fact-based information never begins.--Percy

This is the right answer, except for where you say that no one knows. We of course don't know what specific actions to take in advance, but you make clear that we do know the process we have to follow, one involving many decisions by many people reacting as circumstances evolve. In a general sense we can say that wherever the contagion ebbs we can continue reopening, and where it waxes we have to shut things down more.But it's more complicated than that because any plan has to incorporate the fact that people are mobile. A person from a coronavrius-free county out in the Illinois countryside (e.g., Knox County, 0 cases, 0 deaths) can travel to Chicago, walk around without a mask, then go back home and attend the town picnic the following weekend. These kinds of vectors complicate attempts at faster reopenings in those counties that are little affected. In that case you have a factually baseless political point of view, one the right has invented in order to cast aspersions at the other side rather than to accurately communicate their opponent's positions. It's a point of view the right wants their constituents to accept because it will increase division and hatred between the two sides and make mutual understanding unlikely. It's harder to hate the other side when you only believe true things about them. What you call attacks are just the news media reporting on what Trump was doing right out in the open. Honest reporting by the news media should be admired while Trump's disregard for human life should be despised. You and millions of others have a blind spot the size of Kansas when it comes to Trump. It's a puzzlement. The actual reaction of most people on the left to Trump's many shenanigans was a feeling of disbelief. The specifics of that feeling varied according to what Trump did. Sometimes it would be, "I can't believe he said something so racist," other times, "I can't believe he said something so ignorant," other times, "I can't believe he said something so misogynistic," other times, "I can't believe he said something so xenophobic," other times, "I can't believe he did something so impeachable," and so forth. In Message 3908 you were just commenting that Obama didn't shut down the country in 2009 but Trump did. That appeared to be saying that Trump's a better president than Obama because he was willing to shut down the country in the face of a pandemic.But since you object then I must have misinterpreted you. Are you saying Trump was wrong to shut down the country?Concerning made up stuff, the reason you end up introducing so much made up stuff is because you use an approach guaranteed to fixate on false information. You either get an idea or hear something from a right wing outlet, then you seek confirmation on the Internet where one can literally find anything being said, and when you find someone somewhere saying what you want to hear then that confirms it for you, regardless of source or factual support or consistency with other information or even whether it makes any sense.The big false belief of the right, which also makes no sense, is that liberals are evil purveyors of lies trying to fill the country with criminal illegal immigrants, put as many people on welfare as possible, hamstring the national defense, send jobs overseas, promote a false climate crisis, and stifle business, and that's not even a complete list. It would be nice if the politicians could have an honest debate, but any attempt quickly devolves into accusations.Liberals, independents, conservatives, libertarians, socialists, communists and those of all other political persuasions are just people. You have to stop demonizing those you disagree with. Instead seek out facts and discuss those. This would be incorrect. By March it had already spiraled into a pandemic in China and was spinning out of control in Italy and Spain. On January 23 and 28 Trump was warned of the pandemic threat in intelligence briefings, and more frequently during February. This is a good point. The longer the economy is shut down the worse it will get and the more difficult the recovery, and therefore the more urgent it becomes to reopen the economy. At some point it must overwhelm the desire to save lives, perhaps has even reached that point already. This is important for those in charge to discuss, as opposed to playing blame games like whether to call it the China Virus or making false declarations like that the virus will go away without a vaccine, and so forth. I'm pretty sure your "until AFTER" is covered by my "eventually." You're sort of all over the place here. I'll just comment that none of this has any factual support. Nobody said that it did, but shouldn't the government be helping people in need while the economy is restarting? Whoops, I had multiple webpages open. I meant United States Public Health Service - Wikipedia, its roots tracing back to around 1800, and its modern beginnings tracing back to 1889. The Surgeon General job goes back to 1870.
Sorry, Marc, public health goes way, way back. It is not an invention of modern Democrats. Where did you ever pick up such a weird idea? Here's a 1918 quarantine notice from a state board of health: Now you're making no sense. You were pushing ABC World News tonight, which if it's touting the same news as its webpage at ABC News – Breaking News, Latest News, Headlines & Videos - ABC News then it's saying pretty much the same thing as the New York Times and Washington Post.And are you truly condemning people who don't watch TV news? Are you nuts? One can absorb the written word far faster and in much greater detail than the spoken word. In reading print (at home) and audio (in the car) books, I'd estimate I get through a written book in about half the time of an audio book.What does it matter where you get your news, anyway, as long as its a legitimate news outlet? "Barr says criminal probe of Obama, Biden unlikely", "China announces aid package at WHO conference", "Trump names new DEA head," they're all reporting the same thing.If when I cite the New York Times or Washington Post you find errors of fact you let me know right away. Stop making unsupported and unspecified claims of bias and error. You're making no sense, so I'll just repeat my point. The Forum Guidelines say to make points in your own words and to use links as references. The Forum Guidelines have been around longer than you've been here. Please follow them. Yes, precisely like I did in Message 3901. The post was informational. I provided a link and briefly described it's content. Here that message in its entirety:

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Opinion | America’s True Covid Toll Already Exceeds 100,000 - The New York Times is a New York Times opinion piece that explains how the current 83,000 dead is an undercount. Its count derives from comparisons with deaths over the same period in prior years, i.e., excess deaths. The data and results are preliminary.

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We could discuss how they derived their numbers in as much detail as anyone's interests dictate. If you'd like to do that then I'd be happy to bring more detail into the thread so we could discuss it, though that discussion might be better suited for the Coronavirus and Pandemics thread. It would be nice to see you give up your other baseless arguments, too. Where in the article does the word "corrupt" appear? Did you maybe mean to link to Ex-CBS reporter’s book reveals how liberal media protects Obama? At least a form of the word "corrupt" appears in that article. If that's the one, though, then it doesn't contain any reference to "corrupt business interests." Are you perhaps thinking of where it refers to "corporate partners?"I'm asking these clarifications because you brought no information from the article into the thread, at least none I could track down. That's one of the reasons for that rule in the Forum Guidelines, that it can frequently be difficult to figure what part of a link supports the argument of the person who cited it. But the main reason for that rule is to prevent people from doing link dumps or linking to articles they don't understand or trying to debate by link. Every time you've been asked to support your contentions about biased news coverage you've failed. You're welcome to try again.--Percy

Honest reporting and commentary gets rewarded, but the point of my question was how you're judging the credibility of RedState. It's not even a news outlet, just a blog. The Internet has far more crap than quality. If you want a portion of my time point me at known quality and accuracy. You're arguing against trying to prevent all deaths? Are you nuts? This is mostly unintelligible, but I'd love to see it explained how shutting down businesses in the name of public health violates the First Amendment. I'd love to see it explained how the founders knew about viruses more than a hundred years before they were discovered. So you think federal, state and local governments are acting unconstitutionally when they take measures to protect public health? I'd love to see this explained, too. You could argue it, but not successfully. According to Suicide and the Economy - The Atlantic, every 1 percent increase in unemployment causes a 1 percent increase in the number of suicides. If the unemployment rate rises 30% it would cause around 15,000 more deaths. The novel coronavirus has already killed 90,000. That doesn't answer the question. Why do you use the TDR acronym for Trump derangement syndrome - Wikipedia. I think their focus on Trump is because of how bad he is for the country. I think the change is in urgency, not vitriol. It is true that Trump has decreased government regulation, but at the expense of employees, the environment and the public coffers. And we had a good economy for six straight years going into the Trump presidency. Just telling us what the letters of your acronym stand for is all that's asked.--Percy

I think this makes sense. He argues that even fundamental rights such as free speech can be suspended in a sufficiently dire situation.Update Your Browser | FacebookI can’t copy anything but the entire text.

Really? I too am an essential worker. But I have a question for you, marc. I see you arguing with Percy and enjoy reading the exchange. As a conservative, what would be your basic definitions for what is a liberal and what is a conservative?

One good thing is so many countries taking so many varied approachesWhat they did in the beginning...
What they're doing during the "re-opening" phase...This sort of virus, in this technological anyone/everyone travelling age, is unprecedented.But, eventually (a year or two from now?) we will be able to compare varying strategies.It will be interesting to compare tactics like Sweden (basically - don't shut down anything at all, even in the beginning) - to tactics like some of the hard-core communist countries with harsh/strict punishments on breaking curfew/shut-downs.Are the COVID-19 deaths significantly similar in the end?
If so - then more should follow tactics like Sweden and lessen the damage caused by the economic shutdowns.Are the COVID-19 deaths higher, but a harsh economic shutdown causes economic deaths on it's own?
If so - then more should follow tactics that balance the two as much as possible.Are the COVID-19 deaths significantly lower and economic damage is negligible?
If so - then more should shut down harshly and for longer.These are questions that do not have answers yet (they won't have answers for at least another year or two.)
-Anyone pushing for one over the other with blatant disregard that one of the other "non-favourites" could quite possibly be better - is pushing a personal bias, not looking at reality in order to help the most people through a difficult situation.It is difficult to make the "best decision possible" in an unprecedented event (and it's easily arguable that if anyone does make the best decision - it was mostly lucky.)
-Due to this, it's hard to blame anyone in charge for any decisions that were made
-sure, some are against "COVID-19 doctor recommendations"
-but COVID-19 doctor's do not understand how the economic shutdown, and other health-realated shutdowns (new cancer patients are being delayed treatment...) will also be killing some and how to balance such factors into the equation to make the "best decision."

Trump just can't stand being contradicted or shown wrong, so now he's doubling down on hydroxychloroquine just because of the mounting evidence of its dangers and inefficacy. It's as bad as his sharpie-modified weather map.First, it seems very unlikely that Trump is taking hydroxychloroquine. It's much more likely that it's his cockeyed way of doubling down on his original claim of how safe it is, that he's reacting to news about how it is not safe. It's possible there's another, "It was obvious I was joking," moment in our future. On the other hand, he's an impulsive guy - maybe the covid-19 cases among White House staff freaked him out.Second, while the headline states that hydroxychloroquine has not been proven to prevent covid-19, that's not the relevant point. Prevention was never a medical claim about hydroxychloroquine. It's for relief of symptoms for those already infected.Third, while there is evidence that hydroxychloroquine can provide relief of symptoms from SARS and MERS, there is little evidence that the same is true of covid-19. Initial studies have varied, some showing faster recoveries, some no benefit, and some increased mortality. This last is causing the FDA to consider removing it from its "compassionate use" classification.Here's a little more hydroxychloroquine information.The FDA approved emergency use (also known as compassionate use) for treatment of covid-19, not prevention, because it was thought possible that it might be helpful against symptoms in the same way it can be helpful against MERS and SARS, and that it's anti-autoimmune characteristics might help against cytokine storm responses where the body's own autoimmune system is revved into overdrive and attacks the very body it was intended to protect.Hydroxychloroqine's approved use is for treatment of malaria and lupus. Malaria is caused by a parasite. Lupus is an autoimmune disease. Neither are viral. Study results of its use against the novel coronavirus vary, some finding faster recovery from symptoms, some finding no benefit, others finding increased mortality.Hydroxychloroquine has mild antiviral characteristics against the novel coronavirus in vitro, but there is no evidence it is preventative in the human body. It is early days yet and it is not impossible that such evidence might yet emerge, but its dangerous side effects involving the heart can cause death. This is a drug that you take while under a hospital or a doctor's care because you have a condition such as lupus and malaria where its positive effects outweigh its negative. This is not true for the coronavirus.People might find this link helpful: Access to this page has been denied.--Percy

Some have speculated that his doct is giving him a placebo.

That pesky Hippocratic Oath...Edited by vimesey, : No reason given.

Then Doc could have just called it that and Trump would none the wiser. As I reported in Message 1205 (Humour VIII) on 26 Apr 20, from Al Franken's reading of Trump's latest tweets about a new drug that he had heard about (which I had to paraphrase from memory):

The doctor probably signed the paper because Trump insisted on it. If Trump is actually taking anything the doctor might have given Trump a placebo, but there is no way to say. But have no doubt, this is driven by Trump not medicine.From what I remember Trump’s doctors (and this one is an osteopath!) tend to cave in to Trump’s demands,