Coronavirus is one mutation away from infecting millions

No new cases in my zipcode for several days now.

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Originally Posted by Blake

Not one crumb of credit to Trump for any future successes. Not one.

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Clearly lays out the powers of the states vs the federal government.

Keep running, Blake. It's your calling in life.

What about success in November? Eh?

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Originally Posted by DarrinS

No new cases in my zipcode for several days now.

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Mine neither, but south Austin is getting hammerfucked by comparison.

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Originally Posted by ChumpDumper

I don't understand the metrics we're supposed to be using. In Austin we've been running at about 50 new cases a day for the past three weeks. There is absolutely no downward trajectory. Have we just been overachieving this whole time and it was always OK to open at 50 per day? If it gets to a higher level do we back off on the planned openings? What are the goals and limits?

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Here, we got 21 new cases. Zero deaths reported today. At least, not from covid. Some woman shot her two young children, her mother, and then herself.

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Originally Posted by DMC

Organizations without competition (government) don't need to be efficient. When you have competition, you have to find ways to come in lower and still be able to deliver. This is why the military takes the lowest bid, but that bid is from private industry. If the military was more efficient they'd make the shit themselves.

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military already contracts plenty of private companies and they make it even more inefficient and bloated than what it is

have you heard of the term “burn the money”?

that is used by private contractors widely which means do whatever bullshit you want to burn through this contract money.

thinking that this would not happen in an all private for profit military is childish

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Originally Posted by DMC

:lol sure you did.



Ergo any reason you can just conveniently dismiss as whataboutism you've already preemptively discarded.

Has Cuomo done a good job? (you'll ignore this or point to one comment about "dithering" from weeks back)
What governor has done a good job with it?

Has anyone in the federal government done a good job with it?

Or do you think it's just Trump?


You call anything you disagree with "irrelevant". You don't really deserve an answer.

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New York, like other states, waited too long to lockdown, and seems to have gotten hit hard for it.

Trump pissed away an entire month when he could have been urging states to close down and get ready.

Failure of leadership at all levels.

Once the crisis hit Cuomo did everything he could, and really deserves high marks. Organized, competent, good work ethic, listens to science, and accepts responsibility.

Trump is quite the opposite. Disorganized, incompetent, golfs and tweets, listens to conspiracy theories, and does not accept any responsbility.

Yes, Cuomo has done, overall, a good job, with a huge mistake of waiting too long to lock down.

Sorry that doesn't fit into your narrative of Trump worship. TDS on overdrive.

Have another cup of bleach flavored Koolaid.

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Originally Posted by DMC

Clearly lays out the powers of the states vs the federal government.

Keep running, Blake. It's your calling in life.

What about success in November? Eh?

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If you read it, the article also talks about the federal government role and how they failed us.

If you're not gonna blame Trump for anything at all here just make sure you don't give him any credit if we get out of this by November. Not one crumb of credit.

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Originally Posted by DarrinS

According to ksat.com, there are currently 16 patients on ventilators.

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I hope that number then was 20 on ventilators instead of the 20% on ventilators that Wolf said. Or maybe we only have ~100 ventilators in San Antonio? Hope that's not the case.

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Originally Posted by DMC

NY 22K deaths
Texas 600 deaths


Explain the disparity.

You won't because it will show things that you cannot pin on Trump.

You're another TDSer. Just move along.

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Again, noticeably absent is any kind of defense of Trump's coronavirus response.

Jumping in to answer a question with another and then citing TDS is proof positive that there is no defense.

I'm happy to have a substantive conversation. You just want to interject inane non-sequiters to make yourself feel smart, even though you're not.

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Originally Posted by baseline bum

I hope that number then was 20 on ventilators instead of the 20% on ventilators that Wolf said. Or maybe we only have ~100 ventilators in San Antonio? Hope that's not the case.

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I would think we'd have more than that, but I honestly don't know.

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Originally Posted by RandomGuy

New York, like other states, waited too long to lockdown, and seems to have gotten hit hard for it.

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Followed by

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Trump pissed away an entire month when he could have been urging states to close down and get ready.

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Notice you didn't fault Cuomo, just New York (as if it's a person). But you called out Trump by name, instead of saying "Federal government".

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Failure of leadership at all levels.

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Except you're only willing to name one.

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Once the crisis hit Cuomo did everything he could, and really deserves high marks. Organized, competent, good work ethic, listens to science, and accepts responsibility.

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Yeah he did everything he could... so he's absolved.

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Trump is quite the opposite. Disorganized, incompetent, golfs and tweets, listens to conspiracy theories, and does not accept any responsbility.

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Trump is in charge of New York.

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Yes, Cuomo has done, overall, a good job, with a huge mistake of waiting too long to lock down.

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Cuomo and 22.5K deaths = good job with caveat of not actually doing anything

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Sorry that doesn't fit into your narrative of Trump worship. TDS on overdrive.

Have another cup of bleach flavored Koolaid.

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You just illustrated perfectly the retarded level of bias and TDS on this forum. Kudos.

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Originally Posted by DMC

So he has responsibility for it and that does fall in his lap. He condemned the CDC for lack of testing in early March. Oh but that's just him passing the buck. He should have built the tests himself in his basement.

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Yes that's exactly him passing the buck. Its an agency within his branch of government - he's accountable for it. He doesn't get to condemn them. He has to to answer for them. No one expects him to bust out a science kit, but he's blaming one of the entities he does, in fact, have absolute authority over. If you don't see that as anything other than an unmitigated shirking of responsibility, I don't know what to tell you.

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Originally Posted by vy65

Yes that's exactly him passing the buck. Its an agency within his branch of government - he's accountable for it. He doesn't get to condemn them. He has to to answer for them. No one expects him to bust out a science kit, but he's blaming one of the entities he does, in fact, have absolute authority over. If you don't see that as anything other than an unmitigated shirking of responsibility, I don't know what to tell you.

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So his words killed 22K people in New York.

Anyone that hopes heat will kill this shit needs to google guyacil ecuador.

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Originally Posted by ChumpDumper

Mine neither, but south Austin is getting hammerfucked by comparison.

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I know some people in Lago Vista. They say there's not many cases up there.

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Originally Posted by DMC

But you think COVID deaths are being recorded incorrectly, is that right?

If you think it's happening here, could it also be happening in South Korea?

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I think it's damn near impossible to have 100% accurate numbers, mostly because of testing availability I would actually argue SK would likely be more accurate than the US simply because they have been much more proactive about testing and had less of a testing problem than the US have.

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Originally Posted by DMC

Intent is beside the point unless we're talking about children - the effect is the same. The degree of accuracy needs to be similar to have any real comparisons.

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No, it's not the same, when you're making your main argument that other countries are making up numbers and the US is not. And you're supporting your argument over that premise.

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Originally Posted by CosmicCowboy

Anyone that hopes heat will kill this shit needs to google guyacil ecuador.

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Heat and sunlight kills it. Doesn't mean you can't get it in an enclosed air conditioned space.

Being outside is safer than being at the grocery store.

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Originally Posted by DMC

Yesterday, President Trump declared his intention to stage a resurrection for the U.S. economy – just in time for Easter Sunday. As he spoke, 17 governors across the country had placed their states on total lockdown, and another 11 had imposed such orders on the hardest-hit portions of their states, setting up a potential test of wills between them and the federal government.

Can President Trump order them to change course? The short answer is no, unless he wants to disregard the Constitution. Here are the basics:

The 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, included in the original Bill of Rights, states that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” As University of Texas law professor Bobby Chesney has recently reminded us, the states are independent entities within our system of federalism, not mere subordinate jurisdictions of the national government. In areas reserved to the states, he says, the federal government “cannot coerce the states into taking actions to suit federal policy preference.”

In particular, states enjoy unchallenged primacy in what constitutional scholars call “police powers”—those involving the health, safety, and well-being of their citizens. In exercising these powers, they may require citizens to do things—such as staying at home or getting tested—that some may resist.

As the federal government responded haltingly to the reality of the COVID-19 pandemic, governors across the country stepped forward to set policies for their states’ schools, businesses, and medical facilities. Many turned out to be credible and effective communicators as well, explaining the challenges they face and providing much-needed clarity for a confused and anxious citizenry. The day-to-day contrast between the leadership of governors, from Andrew Cuomo of New York, a Democrat, to Governor Mike DeWine of Ohio, a Republican, has not been lost on the public. In a recent Monmouth poll while 50% think President Trump is doing a good job handling the crisis, substantially more voters, 72%, think their governor is doing a good job.

If Trump thinks he can move to center stage by ending the crisis before the science says he should, he will find it difficult to do so. No federal statute gives the president the authority to override state decisions. Nor does he possess this inherent authority under Article II of the Constitution. Nor do any other provisions of the Constitution (such as the interstate commerce clause) confer this power on him. If governors choose to disregard his call to reopen their states, their decisions will be final, and the President Trump will have to live with them.

Still, there are powers that only the federal government can exercise. As we have seen, the president can restrict international travel, harden the borders, and invoke national emergency powers such as the Defense Production Act. Without federal leadership, the states will have hard time coordinating their policies on the many aspects of the current pandemic that cross state lines.

The federal government is also the only entity that can address medical supply issues that have already begun to generate a zero-sum competition among the states. It does no good to tell New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo to procure ventilators and respirator masks on his own if not enough are available to meet his needs, let alone national needs. The president can and should lead a national mobilization of businesses and engineers to improvise solutions to the looming shortage of life-saving equipment.

Achieving effective coordination within the federal government, and between the federal government and the states, may be the toughest job of all. A mass-contagion simulation performed last year by the Department of Health and Human Services was the latest to reveal that the federal government would be unprepared and uncoordinated in responding to the kind of crisis that now threatens to overwhelm us. As far as we know, neither executive departments and agencies nor the legislative branch undertook the necessary reforms. The price we paid for this neglect will be measured in time squandered and lives lost.

Federalism is perhaps the most basic structure of our constitutional order. In the aftermath of the national tragedy that is unfolding, we must searchingly reexamine how this system performed under pressure and what we must change to do better next time.

The countries that have done the best to fight the current pandemic learned lessons from past failures and responded with new organizations and policies. There is no reason whatever to believe that this is the last pandemic that will hit us. We can start by taking a simple and inexpensive step: recreating the unit within the National Security Council that was responsible for planning for pandemics that was disbanded in 2018. With such an organization there will be civil servants who know, from day one, the steps that a president needs to take.

If we fail to undertake the necessary reforms between now and the next one, we will have no one except ourselves to blame for the consequences.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgo...whos-the-boss/

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From the Good Professor Chesney:

Instead, we are contemplating a situation in which the president, or officials at lower levels, might be in position as a practical matter to withhold, modulate or delay various forms of discretionary aid (federal funds, for example, but perhaps other things—including things not directly related to the current crisis), while either expressly or (more likely) implicitly signaling that the state must comply with the president’s policy preferences on the COVID-19 response. Put another way, we are contemplating a situation in which the administration might subtly (or not so subtly) graft a condition onto existing aid mechanisms. To borrow a phrase, it would be a quid pro quo.

In my view, this would be as much a violation of the anti-commandeering principle as the direct-coercion scenarios noted above, and arguably even worse given the lack of public transparency. But it also might be difficult to detect, or at least to prove, that the administration is imposing such a condition. In any event, the long timeline associated with having to litigate such a matter renders the point practically moot. Should the president take this route, the most one can hope for might simply be reliable reporting exposing the coercion and resulting pushback from the public and other government officials.

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Originally Posted by DMC

So his words killed 22K people in New York.

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Still noticeably absent from this post is any defense of Trump's coronavirus response.

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Originally Posted by DMC

Organizations without competition (government) don't need to be efficient. When you have competition, you have to find ways to come in lower and still be able to deliver. This is why the military takes the lowest bid, but that bid is from private industry. If the military was more efficient they'd make the shit themselves.

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Normally those organizations serve more than shareholder value though, which is why they're handled by government. The USPS certainly was very efficient and profitable until Congress stripped it of a lot of it's money making abilities, competes with the private sector (here's another canard that falls, BTW, that the private sector can't compete with government-run organizations), but also serves a much wider area that is probably not profitable for the private sector, but still needs to be serviced (ie: Fedex and UPS subcontracting the USPS for last mile service).

I think when there's strictly commercial value, the private sector does work optimally, but whenever you need to serve a purpose that goes outside bean counting, wheels tend to always fall off.

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Originally Posted by vy65

Still noticeably absent from this post is any defense of Trump's coronavirus response.

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Other than downplaying it initially, and saying a bunch of dumb shit, what part of his response do you take issue with?

Well we could always move to new zeland or stockholm

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Originally Posted by DarrinS

Other than downplaying it initially, and saying a bunch of dumb shit, what part of his response do you take issue with?

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This is my point. I'm happy to answer this, but I'm asking if Trump supporters think he's doing a good job - and why. No one can give me anything except the question "what do you think he's doing bad?" Do you not see the problem in that?

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Originally Posted by DarrinS

Other than downplaying it initially, and saying a bunch of dumb shit, what part of his response do you take issue with?

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Off the top of my head:

- Flat out lying about testing availability would be one, and it's pretty severe.
- Also "downplaying it initially" carries a lot of deaths attached to that decision.
- Putting in charge unqualified people like Jared on any type of response capacity is also extremely amateur, harder to measure in number of deaths.
- Complete lack of leadership when it comes to communication and sound decisions. The whole "saying a bunch of dumb shit" also has measurable consequences, like when he compared this to the seasonal flu.

I'm sure I'm missing a bunch.