Category: Pandemic

It’s time to celebrate a COVID-19 milestone … with caution

Posted on (Updated by Mark Sumner

On Jan. 23, 2020, the same day that Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial began, Daily Kos diverted from following that story to cover what was then referred to as the “Wuhan virus,” after the city in China where the first outbreak of the highly infectious disease was reported. At the time of that report, there had been 17 deaths connected to the virus, but with 21 million people under lockdown in China and scientists already working to sequence the virus, that report ended with reassurance that “Restricting the spread of an emerging disease remains a near-impossible task, but health officials around the world are giving it a really extraordinary try.”

That report was the first of more than 500 that would follow. Daily Kos’ coverage included Trump’s promotion of increasingly unlikely outlandish “cures” and Dr. Anthony Fauci becoming a hero to Americans as well as a villain to conspiracy theorists. Seemingly overnight this became a world in which everyone was all too familiar with overflowing hospitals, cheering weary healthcare workers at the end of their shift, and terms like “spike protein” or “variant.”

Since then, there have been another 6,899,724 deaths. Of those, 1,134,710 happened in the United States. At its worst, the level of excess mortalities in the United States rose to an astounding 46%, including not just deaths directly attributed to COVID-19, but those who died because they couldn’t get adequate treatment in a pandemic-driven world.

However, over the first half of this year, the level of excess deaths has hit another very important number. That number is 0%. As far as deaths are concerned, the pandemic may be over.

Right now, a quick look at the CDC data shows that Puerto Rico still attributes 4.5% of deaths to infection by COVID-19. No other state or territory currently has a value above 1.5% and several states are reporting numbers so low that they easily round to 0%.

However, the CDC values also show that many states have quit breaking out COVID-19 deaths into a separate category. That’s a trend that started two years ago, when some Republican governors found it highly inconvenient to admit that people were dying from COVID-19 in their states. But even for those states where COVID deaths are shuffled in among deaths due to “respiratory failure” or “cardiac arrest,” the damage being caused by COVID-19 should show up in the form of excess deaths.

But in the first half of 2023, that signal disappeared.

The chart of excess deaths in the U.S. clearly shows the spike of initial deaths largely centered in the Northeast, where many medical facilities were overrun and life-saving equipment like ventilators became a huge topic of concern. Additional spikes appear as the disease spreads across the country, peaking at the end of 2020 when most states had lowered any restrictions and people traveled to see their families around the holidays. There’s a sharp drop in the rate of deaths in spring of 2021, as vaccines begin a widespread rollout. However, more spikes come in the fall of 2021 with the arrival of the 200% more infectious delta variant, and at the end of the year with still more travel and more family get-togethers. Then rates drop off again before the arrival of the still more infectious omicron variant, which drives a prolonged period of elevated deaths that peaks … with family travel and get-togethers at the end of the year.

Then the rates drop again at the beginning of 2023. And they have stayed down.

However, there’s another way of looking at this, with just a little annotation, that adds a cautionary note to the current celebration.

Looked at this way, it’s easy to see that every year of the pandemic has ended in much the same way, with that travel-related spike in which millions of Americans ran around the country stirring the mix and making sure that the latest variant was spread far and wide. When that spike subsides, each year has seen a big decline in excess deaths. There are two reasons for this. One is probably that following the spike more people have a level of exposure to the latest variant and have gained at least partial immunity. The other factor is that many of the most susceptible died during that holiday spike.

In each of the previous years, that low level of post-holiday deaths continued for some time, but only until a new variant that was either more contagious or more evasive of past infection became dominant. Then the number of deaths rose again.

It’s easy to read into those declining humps the idea that each variant has become weaker than the one before. That’s not the case. Untreated delta in a person with no immunity is actually 3.45 times more likely to be deadly than early variants up to alpha, and untreated omicron is about the same. Contrary to popular belief, there is no evolutionary pressure on viruses to become less deadly. In fact, since the same factors that make a disease more infectious can also make it more likely to result in the death of the host, diseases can easily move from mild to more deadly over time.

What’s different about 2023 so far is that no new variant has appeared that is significantly more contagious, or more evasive, than omicron. Also, the CDC estimates that 96% of Americans have antibodies to at least one variant of COVID-19 through either vaccination or exposure. Put that all together, and you get a season where COVID deaths have just stayed down.

The other big factor is treatment. In 2020, medical workers were in the dark on how to handle a COVID-19 infection. Now, in addition to over 75% of the population being vaccinated at least once, the steps to more effectively treat COVID-19 are better understood. Plus there are new tools like Paxlovid, which can reduce the rate of death even if it doesn’t necessarily help people get over symptoms more quickly. Improved treatment over time is a big factor in why each of those peaks in mortality tends to be smaller than the previous.

That’s fantastic. But it’s also not a guarantee of peachy keen sailing from here on out.

Scientists around the world are still tracking variants of concern, two of which are thought to be more contagious than baseline omicron while maintaining about the same level of severity. Those variants, or others with similar statistics, could become dominant in the United States in coming weeks, creating a new crest in mortality. All of these variants are descended from omicron. Right now, alpha, delta, and all the other variants and subvariants are either essentially extinct or found only at very low levels in the population. Omicron has won the evolution game by simply being more infectious than all the rest—including by being the variant most likely to infect people who have already been infected by past variants.

The good news is that the relative level of change in infectiousness between these latest variants is much lower than the two-times, or even five-times jumps seen earlier. The SARS-CoV-2 virus underwent a period in which the billions of people infected, pouring out quadrillions of new viruses, created a high-speed evolutionary showdown for most infectious virus ever. But having obtained a measles-like rate of contagiousness, the structure of the virus may not offer any other opportunities for big jumps that don’t involve a whole series of changes to the genetic sequence.

So the next big wave may never come—or it may begin next week. But even if the threat still looms out there, the level of deaths at this moment deserves real celebration.

Yes, things could get worse again quickly. Yes, levels of hospitalization haven’t dropped nearly as sharply as deaths, so COVID-19 is still making thousands of people a day very, very sick. Yes, long COVID remains a poorly understood problem that is affecting the lives of millions and will affect both the economy and the stability of health care programs. Yes, COVID-19 probably has more nasty sequelae waiting in the wings that we don’t understand at the moment.

But right now, the number of people dying from COVID-19 in the United States has dropped to a level that is pretty much lost in statistical noise. Numbers that were once going up by thousands a day are now going up by single digits. This is all much better than I expected.

That’s worth celebrating. Just please don’t blow the candles out while they’re on the cake. Because … germs.

Tough guy Jim Jordan turns outrage on teachers, unions

Posted on (Updated by Walter Einenkel

On Wednesday, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten testified before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, where the odious Rep. Jim Jordan tried to grill her on school closures during COVID and “culture wars.” To no one’s surprise, his effort was a flop.

According to the subcommittee’s Republican chairman, Rep. Brad Wenstrup of Ohio, the committee’s job is to investigate “the decision-making process behind school closures [during the COVID-19 pandemic] and the effects it had so that we can do better in the future.” 

Weingarten was brought in by Republicans because the conservative movement in our country wants the trials and tribulations we all dealt with during the pandemic—in this case, school closures—to be blamed on workers in all sectors of society, especially teachers and school staff.

Like most Republican-led committee meetings, this one was part circus, part conspiracy theory, and all useless. Committee hearings under Republican leaders are a cauldron of hypocrisies—too many to enumerate here. This committee could have made an effort to actually find out how school closures impacted students and educators. But instead, the general tenor of the Republicans’ questions for Weingarten was “unions and labor rights are bad.” After enduring some new lows from moral sewer-dweller Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who used her time to attack adoptive parents (including Weingarten herself), Weingarten had to answer a series of Jordan’s “gotcha” questions.

RELATED STORY: Marjorie Taylor Greene finally shuts up. It wasn't her decision

While Greene’s attacks on Weingarten were clearly personal, Jordan’s low-level interrogation was an attempt to paint Weingarten as a left-wing radical culture warrior for the implied crime of closing schools during a lethal pandemic. There are very few people who are less smart than Jordan, and Weingarten ain’t one of them, so Jordan’s plans blew up in his face.

Jordan, no stranger to wasting breath, began his interrogation by asking Weingarten, “Who cares more about a child's education, the teacher's union, or the child's parents?”

Weingarten replied that both parents and teachers care about children, and that obviously no one cares for individual children more than their parents. It’s hard to know what response Jordan thought he was going to get, but he evidently didn’t get the one he wanted—so he asked the question again. Weingarten easily circumvented Jordan’s sophomoric line of questioning, saying, “Look, I'm not here to be in a competition. Parents are so important in children's lives. Teachers are so important in children's lives, too.”

Jordan, whose cross-examination style might be a result of watching too many “L.A. Law” episodes, asked Weingarten, “Who are the ‘extremist politicians’?” The attempt to put Weingarten on her heels by employing a non sequitur failed miserably. Jordan read  Weingarten’s writing aloud on the matter of school safety during the pandemic, where she asserted that “attacks by extremist politicians have undermined teachers in schools.” That led to this amazing exchange:

REP. JIM JORDAN: Well, who are the extremist politicians?

RANDI WEINGARTEN: I think you just heard one, sir.

JORDAN: So Ms. Greene’s one of them.

Indeed. Weingarten pivoted to explaining how the conservative preoccupation with “culture wars” is anti-educational, then implied that book banning is a tell-tale sign of having lost an argument. Another swing and a miss for Jordan!

It is important to note here that Jordan—a coward of a man who clearly likes to talk fast but allegedly kept conspicuously silent when young men under his charge were being sexually molested at Ohio State University—pretends to do a lot of busywork when he’s supposed to be listening. It is his attempt to seem like he’s got everything under control, but he so clearly has nothing under control. His next question: “Who started the culture wars?”

Weingarten responded by explaining, once again, that the moment you start banning books about people like Anne Frank and Roberto Clemente, you’ve stepped into a place that can only be called “wrong.” Jordan, desperate to resuscitate his pointless existence on this committee, tried a transphobic attack, which Weingarten redirected back to the question he said he was asking.

YouTube Video

The Republican Party’s extremism comes with an enormous price: narcissistic incompetence. Even when they are in control of congressional committees, they cannot turn their circus “investigations” into anything worthwhile. Instead, like all Republican-led committees at this point, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic is mostly a performance art space for right-wing political theater performed by dunderheaded goblins like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Jim Jordan.

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Marjorie Taylor Greene is wrong (again): Non-biological parents are parents. Full stop

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Rand Paul Proposes Amendment To Eliminate Fauci’s Government Position Entirely

Posted on by John Hanson

Republican Senator Rand Paul has come up with a novel solution to what he considers the Fauci problem. He said he will propose an amendment that would eliminate the entire government position currently held by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. 

The idea would be to separate his job into three different positions so that “one person wouldn’t have a monopoly of so much power that they could use against their enemies.” 

Paul made his remarks during an interview on Fox News’ “Jesse Watters Primetime” on Monday.

RELATED: U.S. Health And Human Services Spent $10.3 Million On Faulty Covid Tests

Sen. Paul: ‘If you don’t agree with their political opinions, they’ll go after you’

In a statement from his office, Paul argued, “We’ve learned a lot over the past two years, but one lesson in particular is that no one person should be deemed “dictator-in-chief.” No one person should have unilateral authority to make decisions for millions of Americans.”

On Fox, Sen. Paul told Jesse Watters, “I will present an amendment that will get a vote on eliminating Anthony Fauci’s position. I think we should eliminate his position, divide it into three, and appoint three new directors that will be approvable by the Senate.”

“The problem with having only one person and having everything go before him for like 40 years is that he’s monopolized power and he’s created a culture that’s not conducive to scientific inquiry,” Paul continued. “You need people who question.”

“That’s what science is about,” the senator noted. “It’s about questioning and putting forth your hypothesis and then trying to prove it with experiments.”

Paul claimed Fauci has made his job too political.

“But he’s shown, Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins, have both shown that they’ll get into the mud,” Paul claimed. “If you don’t agree with their political opinions, they’ll go after you. That’s why, the last time I had an exchange with Dr. Fauci, we asked him about some emails between him and Dr. Collins. And in the emails, he says let’s do a dramatic takedown of three scientists who they disagreed with politically.”

RELATED: Never Trumpers Close Ranks After Pro-Impeachment Republican Gets Blasted By Trump As ‘Total Fool’

Paul on Fauci: ‘It’s long past time that we remove him from government’

“Well, when a person like Dr. Fauci controls $5 billion worth of money, it’s not good that we have a really petty tyrant who wants to take down the people he disagrees with, and that’s not conducive to scientific inquiries,” Paul said.

He added, “So, it’s long past time that we remove him from government. And I think really the power should be split up into three different positions, and then one person wouldn’t have a monopoly of so much power that they could use against their enemies.”

Rand Paul and Dr. Fauci have gone at it multiple over the course of the Covid pandemic and has been a skeptic about government mandates.

He has long called for Fauci to be fired.

You can read Paul’s statement about his proposal here.

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The post Rand Paul Proposes Amendment To Eliminate Fauci’s Government Position Entirely appeared first on The Political Insider.

Task Force Concludes Cuomo’s Nursing Home Policy Did Lead To More Nursing Home Deaths

Posted on by Rusty Weiss

The NYSBA (New York State Bar Association) Task Force on Nursing Homes and Long-Term Care determined that Governor Andrew Cuomo’s executive order policy forcing nursing homes to take on patients that had tested positive for COVID-19 led to more deaths.

The report is a devastating indictment on the Democrat governor’s policies and their effects on the elderly in the Empire State during the early stages of the pandemic.

The task force, according to the New York Post, defined Cuomo’s directive as “unreasonable” in both its “absoluteness” and the length of time it was left in effect.

While they were unable to put a particular number on that effect, the NYSBA was able to determine “there are credible reviews that suggest that the directive, for the approximately six weeks that it was in effect, did lead to some number of additional deaths.”

RELATED: Report: Cuomo Being Investigated For Retaliating Against Sexual Harassment Accusers

Task Force: Cuomo Nursing Home Policy Led To More Deaths

Governor Andrew Cuomo issued an executive order on March 25th which forced nursing homes to take on patients that had tested positive for coronavirus.

The order prohibited nursing homes from requiring incoming patients “to be tested for COVID-19 prior to admission or readmission.”

Cuomo’s directive remained in place for over six weeks while well over 15,000 senior citizens succumbed to the virus.

The New York Democrat and his top aides have also been accused of hiding the data on those nursing home deaths and stripping numbers from DOH (Department of Health) reports.

For months Cuomo touted a DOH report which contained an explicit quantifier that the order forcing the care facilities to take on COVID-positive patients was “not a driver of nursing home infections or fatalities.”

The NYSBA task force determined that was not accurate.

“The Department of Health issued a report in 2020 in which it argued unconvincingly that the admission of 6,326 COVID-positive residents during the period the Health directive was in effect had no impact,” the report states.

“That cannot be the case, and has now been shown not to be the case.”

RELATED: Fox News’ Janice Dean: My Family Didn’t Have To Die, Cuomo’s Policy Helped It Happen

Cuomo’s Order Cost Lives

The report that Governor Cuomo’s executive order for nursing homes did lead to more deaths is a small measure of vindication for Fox News meteorologist and author Janice Dean, who has argued for months that his policies led to the deaths of more seniors than in any other state.

She argued in an op-ed column for USA Today over the summer that very point.

Dean’s in-laws were the unfortunate victims of COVID-19, where nursing homes in New York played a significant part.

“At first we didn’t blame anyone for my in-laws’ deaths. This is a pandemic, after all,” she wrote. “Then we learned about a policy that put them in danger.”

Dean’s column featured a sub-heading arguing, “My family didn’t have to die.”

Governor Cuomo is under investigation and impeachment inquiry for a slew of scandals, not the least of which involves the nursing home executive order and subsequent effort to obstruct justice by hiding the numbers.

They include:

  • Numerous sexual misconduct allegations including a police report involving forcibly groping an aide.
  • Bullying and threatening fellow lawmakers and members of the media.
  • Under investigation for a $5.1 million book deal profiting off the pandemic by having aides write and edit portions using state resources.
  • Provided priority COVID-19 testing for his family and associates, also allegedly using state resources.

“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out admitting over 9,000 Covid patients into nursing homes for 46 days would increase the amount of deaths, but if a 242-page report from the NY State Bar association proves [Cuomo] lied and people died, so be it,” Dean tweeted.

The Fox News personality has suggested many people in the Cuomo administration belong in prison over the nursing home scandal.

“I really feel like he should go to jail,” Dean has said. “And all these people surrounding him that covered this up for so many months, they should go to jail.”

The NYSBA report relied in part on a study by the Empire Center for Public Policy that tied “several hundred and possibly more than 1,000” deaths of nursing home residents to Cuomo’s executive order.

There is now a straight-line correlation between his policies and the deaths of the elderly during the pandemic. The question is, will anybody in New York state do anything about it?

 

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Even federal judges are referencing far-right conspiracy theories to overturn our laws

Posted on (Updated by Hunter

It should be noted, yet again, that being an actual, bonafide judge in the United States of America requires no qualifications whatsoever. You either are appointed as a judge or win an election to become one, and the rest is filler to be worked out by whoever's been tasked with updating the webpages. They say anybody in America can grow up to be president, but that is obviously a lie. But anyone can grow up to be a judge in America. Louie Gohmert was a judge.

Being a judge is in fact one of the few occupations in America that does not require you to even have a head. Unfortunate roller coaster accident? Got too close to Dick Cheney during a hunting trip? No problem. You can still write opinions. Years before his untimely death, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia outsourced all his important opinions to a family of grumpy squirrels that had taken up residence in his attic and nobody noticed or said a damn thing about it.

In a Friday night news dump, a California judge issued a ruling announcing that the state's assault weapon ban, in place since 1989, was unconstitutional because reasons. It caused a stir primarily for using language that sounded conspicuously like what the National Rifle Association and American militia groups have long been spouting in their newsletters and pamphlets, and mostly for Judge Roger Benitez's comparison of weapons designed explicitly for mass murder to a "Swiss Army Knife." An AR-15 rifle "is a perfect combination of home defense weapon and homeland defense equipment," Benitez said in his ruling. Whether he had his pants on while writing that sentence is unknown; whether he cribbed it exactly from a gun manufacturer's ad is ... probably worth exploring.

That is not, however, the only bit of bizarre editorializing in the ruling. Judge HasAHead also took it upon himself to opine that assault weapons actually are far less dangerous than ... the COVID-19 vaccine. "The evidence described so far proves that the 'harm' of an assault rifle being used in a mass shooting is an infinitesimally rare event. More people have died from the Covid-19 vaccine than mass shootings in California."

If I were head dictator of judgeships this one would be off the bench in five seconds flat for putting the "harm" of assault-rifle-assisted mass shootings in scare quotes, but I ain't and he's not. The part that's getting more heat is that U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez appears to be flat-out lying in that second sentence, and that’s us saying it nicely.

The Washington Post fact-checks Benitez on this one, but to anyone who does not live entirely inside Tucker Carlson's inflamed colon the problem here should be obvious. The number of people who are believed to have died from the COVID-19 vaccine is, at this time, approximately zero. There has been some very public speculation as to whether some of the vaccines might cause an extremely rare form of blood clot, one that may have killed three people in this country after millions and millions of doses, but the data is not conclusive and the clots seem to appear in the unvaccinated general population at roughly similar rates.

Meanwhile, mass shootings continue to be a regular occurrence in California, just as they are elsewhere. Even if you presume all three deaths suspected of being vaccine linked were indeed caused by a vaccine, it's not even close.

All we can assume here is that this particular judge is referring to far-right conspiracy theories about the vaccine from the dark nether regions of the American political psyche. It's possible we can attribute the blatant factual error to Fox News and to Tucker Carlson's white nationalist conspiracy show, but the suggestion that lifesaving, normality-saving vaccines are killing people in greater numbers than AR-15s does feels more like something plucked more directly from the Q crowd, from frothing far-right militias, or both.

Unfortunately, there's no particular recourse for this sort of judicial conspiracy peddling. For particularly grotesque behavior on the bench, the House and Senate can remove a federal judge via impeachment, but that is reserved for only the most egregious of cases and "is factually wrong when issuing weirdly premised opinions" isn't it. This is why, in fact, the Republican-held Senate was so obsessive in filling as many judicial vacancies as possible with hard-right ideologues while blocking nominees from a Democratic administration: stuff the benches with hard-right conspiracy theorists, hard-right conspiracy theories become the stuff that governs us. The judge's ruling is absolutely certain to be appealed, but the Supreme Court is itching to undo a century of laws itself and will probably not let the unending goofiness of this written opinion stop it from writing a more dignified goofy version that scrubs out the most embarrassing parts.

So far, though, there's been no ruling from hard-right judges declaring that making fun of bad judicial opinions kills more people each year than AR-15 "freedom bringers" do, so we can at least point and shake our heads here. Maybe it's cathartic. Maybe it's whistling past the graveyard.

FNC’s Janice Dean Says It’s ‘Disgusting’ Cuomo Scored Book Deal – Thought It Was A ‘Joke’

Posted on by LifeZette

Fox News senior meteorologist Janice Dean went on “Fox & Friends” on Tuesday morning to slam New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) after it was reported that he will receive $5.1 million from his book about the coronavirus pandemic.

Dean Thought Cuomo Book Deal Was A ‘Joke’

Dean said that she initially thought the book deal was a “joke,” as she feels Cuomo is the last person who should be writing a book about handling the COVID-19 pandemic when he allegedly covered up the number of deaths in New York nursing homes.

She added that it is “disgusting” that Cuomo is profiting off the deaths of New Yorkers, including her in-laws.

“When I first read that the governor was writing a book in the middle of the pandemic, I thought it was a joke,” Dean said. “I thought it was a headline in the Babylon Bee or The Onion.”

“How could a governor write a book about leadership when thousands of elderly are dying?” she added. “It was incredible. And I was mad at the time but seeing he got over $5 million for this, profiting off the deaths of New Yorkers, including my in-laws, it’s disgusting.”

Related: Cuomo Now Being Investigated Over $4 Million Book Deal Celebrating His Pandemic Leadership, Janice Dean Calls It ‘Disgusting’

Dean Doubles Down

“I think the book publishing company can sue him for breach of contract because it’s filled with lies,” she added.

“And if you look at the timeline — the governor covering up the nursing home issue, the tragedy over 5,000 deaths that him and his administration tried to cover up for months — the timeline corresponds with him trying to sell that $5 million book,” Dean said. “So, I wonder if we can profit off the Son of Sam law. All of that money should go to the families of our dead loved ones.”

Last month, Dean demanded that lawmakers take action and impeach Cuomo.

“Our lawmakers in Albany need to do something,” she said at the time. “This whitewash of an impeachment is ridiculous. Go in there today and get it done. There are at least four investigations into this governor. How much more do you need to get him out?”

Full Story: FNC’s Janice Dean Calls For Cuomo To Be Impeached Immediately – Says He Covered Up Nursing Home Deaths To Sell His Book

This piece was written by James Samson on May 18, 2021. It originally appeared in LifeZette and is used by permission.

Read more at LifeZette:
Pathetic Third Party Bid Against Trump is DOA
Parents Read Porn at School Board Meeting Straight from Books the School Board Has Approved
Biden Brings National Weakness, Says Hanson

The post FNC’s Janice Dean Says It’s ‘Disgusting’ Cuomo Scored Book Deal – Thought It Was A ‘Joke’ appeared first on The Political Insider.

Bombshell Report Indicates Cuomo Aides Repeatedly Blocked Release Of Nursing Home Deaths

Posted on by Rusty Weiss

A bombshell report from the New York Times indicates top aides to Governor Andrew Cuomo overruled his own health experts, blocking the release of the pandemic’s true death toll numbers at nursing homes, and did so all while they were helping him write a book.

The crux of the Times column refers to the length of time aides spent in trying to cover up the number of deaths in nursing homes – five months – a particularly sore spot with the governor who had issued an executive order forcing care facilities to take in COVID-positive patients.

The order was not reversed for months.

Cuomo aides clearly sensed the fallout, doing their best to minimize the numbers by not counting seniors who were transported to hospitals and died there.

“By the time the policy was rescinded less than two months later, it had become clear that not all the deaths were being included in that tally: Those who died after being transferred to hospitals were not counted as nursing home deaths,” the Times writes.

When Cuomo’s own top health officials tried to get a more accurate count, his aides rebuffed them time and again. In fact, they fought release of the true numbers for five months, according to the report, a “far greater (effort) than previously known.”

RELATED: Cuomo Now Being Investigated Over $4 Million Book Deal Celebrating His Pandemic Leadership, Janice Dean Calls It ‘Disgusting’

Cuomo’s Unbelievable Nursing Home Scandal

While critics were noting the role of Governor Cuomo’s nursing home executive order in a large number of elderly deaths during the pandemic, the state Health Department was preparing a report on the matter in the spring of 2020.

Secretary to the Governor, Melissa DeRosa, according to an email reviewed by the New York Times, told health officials: “We are getting anxious over here on this report.”

That report was eventually published in July but contained an explicit quantifier that the order forcing the care facilities to take on COVID-positive patients was “not a driver of nursing home infections or fatalities.”

It also included a much lower number – not counting hospital deaths – in the report that the Times states was “rewritten several times by senior advisers to Mr. Cuomo.”

The department report listed just over 6,400 deaths. As of this month, more than 15,500 nursing home residents died from COVID-19.

In February, the New York Post revealed that DeRosa told leading Democrats that they tried to suppress the numbers because the administration feared the data could “be used against us” by the Justice Department saying, “basically, we froze.”

“We were in a position where we weren’t sure if what we were going to give to the Department of Justice, or what we give to you guys, what we start saying, was going to be used against us while we weren’t sure if there was going to be an investigation,” she said.

The New York Times reported in January that attorney general Letitia James, a Democrat, accused Cuomo and his administration, particularly officials at the State Health Department, of undercounting COVID deaths at nursing homes by as much as 50%.

A subsequent report by the Wall Street Journal in early March accused the aides of a very explicit cover-up by the Cuomo administration in the nursing home scandal.

“Cuomo’s top advisers successfully pushed state health officials to strip a public report of data showing that more nursing-home residents had died of Covid-19 than the administration had acknowledged,” they detailed.

Much of the pressure by the Health Department to suppress the numbers on the nursing home deaths was being applied by the administration itself.

“Aides overruled state health officials on releasing the figures over the span of at least five months, The Times reports,” according to The Hill.

“The effort included halting the publication of a scientific paper, which included the true tally, and the sending of two letters drafted by the Health Department and intended for state lawmakers.”

RELATED: Cuomo Admin Accused Of ‘Criminal Conspiracy’ Following Bombshell Report They ‘Stripped’ Data From Report On Nursing Home Deaths

‘They Should All Go To Jail’

The New York Times report notes that much of the effort to halt the release of the true figures in the Cuomo nursing home scandal revolved around the Governor’s efforts to write a book celebrating his ‘leadership’ during the pandemic.

“The actions coincided with the period in which Mr. Cuomo was pitching and then writing a book on the pandemic, with the assistance of his top aide, Melissa DeRosa, and others,” the report reads.

State Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, is currently conducting an investigation of allegations that the Governor used state resources and state employees to write his book on which he received a multimillion-dollar advance.

Fox News meteorologist and author Janice Dean, a leading voice on the nursing home scandal involving Governor Cuomo, expressed her optimism that justice may finally be served.

Dean’s in-laws were the unfortunate victims of COVID-19, where nursing homes in New York played a significant part.

“I feel like all of these months, close to a year now, it feels like it finally is happening, that all of the things we’ve been yelling about and trying to shine a light on, it’s finally happening,” Dean said.

Many of the things I’ve covered here at The Political Insider as well, things that should have been revealed much earlier if not for a complicit New York media that spent more time fawning over Cuomo than reporting on him.

On May 18th, nearly one full year ago, I labeled Cuomo’s executive order on nursing homes a “scandal” and noted at the time that the Governor seemed uninterested in accountability.

He even suggested it wasn’t his fault because “older people … are going to die.”

In an interview with Fox News, Dean didn’t hold back on what she felt should happen to the governor and those in his administration complicit in the nursing home cover-up.

“I really feel like he should go to jail,” she said. “And all these people surrounding him that covered this up for so many months, they should go to jail.”

The following is a list of scandals in which Cuomo is currently embroiled, most of which have resulted in investigations, calls for his resignation, and impeachment inquiries:

  • Forcing nursing homes to take on COVID-positive patients.
  • Obstructing justice by hiding the data on those deaths and stripping numbers from DOH reports.
  • Numerous sexual misconduct allegations including a police report involving forcibly groping an aide.
  • Bullying and threatening fellow lawmakers and members of the media.
  • Under investigation for a $4 million book deal profiting off the pandemic by having aides write and edit portions using state resources.

In an incredibly cold and callous comment last May, Cuomo snapped at a reporter for asking about grieving families of nursing home patients seeking justice.

“What is justice? Who can we prosecute for those deaths? Nobody. Nobody,” he rationalized. “Mother nature? God? Where did this virus come from? People are going to die by this virus.”

It’s time somebody from the administration is prosecuted, if not the governor himself. That would be justice.

 

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Republican Rep. Lee Zeldin Announces Gubernatorial Campaign To ‘Save New York’ From Andrew Cuomo

Posted on by Rusty Weiss

Republican Representative Lee Zeldin announced he is running for governor of New York, saying Andrew Cuomo must be ousted in order to “save our state.”

“I’m running for governor of New York in 2022,” Zeldin declared in an interview with ‘Fox & Friends.’ “We are going to win this race.”

In an accompanying statement, Zeldin vowed to “bring the kind of relentless, fighting spirit towards helping to save our state that Andrew Cuomo only reserves for multi-million dollar self-congratulatory book deals, cover-ups, abuse and self-dealing.”

And while he pointed out Cuomo’s “long line of scandals,” the Republican focused on what he has to offer the Empire State, including beating back the impacts of poor “tax policy,” “public safety,” and “attacks on our freedoms.”

Zeldin went on to suggest the current woes in New York are due to one-party Democrat rule in New York City and Albany.

RELATED: Cuomo Now Being Investigated Over $4 Million Book Deal Celebrating His Pandemic Leadership

Lee Zeldin Wants To Save New York From Cuomo

Governor Andrew Cuomo has become vulnerable of late, currently plagued by several scandals including: 

  • Forcing nursing homes to take on COVID-positive patients.
  • Obstructing justice by hiding the data on those deaths and stripping numbers from DOH reports.
  • Numerous sexual misconduct allegations including a police report involving forcibly groping an aide.
  • Bullying and threatening fellow lawmakers and members of the media.
  • Under investigation for a $4 million book deal profiting off the pandemic by having aides write and edit portions using state resources.

“Cuomo has abused the power and trust granted to him and it is time for him to immediately exit stage left,” Lee Zeldin said.

He has actively called for Cuomo’s impeachment in the face of resistance to resigning over his many scandals.

But he smartly notes that it isn’t just the details of these salacious accusations that are the problem – it’s Cuomo’s inability to competently run the state.

“The New York that was once a magnet for the world’s best and brightest is now forcing its own to leave under the crushing weight of skyrocketing taxes, lost jobs, suffocating regulations, and rising crime resulting from dangerously liberal policies,” Zeldin accused.

“At the helm of New York’s downfall is Governor Andrew Cuomo.”

RELATED: Biden’s ATF Director Wants ‘Well Regulated’ Second Amendment

Cuomo’s Budget Includes Aid To Illegal Immigrants

Speaking of skyrocketing taxes and incentives to leave the state, the New York Times on Tuesday reported that Governor Cuomo and the New York legislature had reached an agreement on a $212 billion budget.

The budget includes “tax increases” on the wealthy – or job creators – as well as “a $2.1 billion fund to provide one-time payments for undocumented workers who did not qualify for federal stimulus checks or unemployment benefits.”

New York Republican Committee Chairman Nick Langworthy released a statement blasting the budget proposal while indicating the only thing that can save New York is a new governor.

“The only thing this budget accomplishes is the accelerated decline of our state,” Langworthy said. “It’s a $212 billion dollar tax-and-spend boondoggle that will push New York’s mass exodus to the point of no return.”

“This budget makes clear that the only way to save New York is to elect a Republican governor who will stand up to this madness and return common sense to state government,” he added.

Will Lee Zeldin be the man to do that?

 

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It’s amazing to see, but Republicans are really digging their own graves

Posted on by kos

Much has been written lately about the GQP’s unfathomable opposition to the Democrats’ $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package (see here, here, here and here). In short, the Democrat’s proposal is incredibly popular, even among Republicans. A Morning Consult poll pegged support at 76% of voters, including 60% of Republicans. That’s bipartisanship. But Republicans in Congress want to play off the old destroy-Obama-at-all-costs playbook, and have put up a wall of opposition to the legislation. 

And not only are they rhetorically opposing it, but they’re actively whipping against it, forcing congressional Republicans to vote against it or else. Let’s hope they’re successful, because nothing will make the 2022 midterm messaging clearer than “those checks came from us, they didn’t want to help you at all.” 

Indeed, their current stances are so at odds with basic political common sense, it almost makes you suspicious, right? What do they know that we don’t? But no, they think the COVID-19 relief package is like the Affordable Care Act, where they could fearmonger about losing your doctor. Pandemic relief isn’t about taking anything away from you, it’s about giving you cold, hard cash. 

The current Republican response is hilariously stupid. It’s stuff like this: 

We’ve run the numbers and here’s your receipt, @SpeakerPelosi @SenSchumer. pic.twitter.com/e2cAG8st8W

— Sen. Marsha Blackburn (@MarshaBlackburn) February 24, 2021

That “$$$”, of course, is checks for people. But even libraries and mass transit aren’t particularly unpopular items, so not sure what they think they’re getting from this kind of messaging. Here’s another one: 

Only 9% of the Biden Bailout Bill goes to #COVID relief. A few examples of where the money is actually going: ➡️$135 million for the National Endowment of the Arts ➡️$350 billion in blue state bailouts ➡️$1.5 million for the Seaway International Bridge ➡️$1.5 billion for Amtrak

— Ways and Means GOP (@WaysandMeansGOP) February 24, 2021

For a party that is losing ground with swing voters, not sure why they think that “blue state bailouts” kind of divisive rhetoric gets them anything beyond their old, white, rural, and literally dying off base. “$1.5 million” for something? In a $1.9 TRILLION dollar bill? Does anyone care? And Amtrak is a lifeline for many rural communities. And people like trains. 

Part of the GOP’s problem is that they no longer know how to message against an old white male. President Kamala Harris or Elizabeth Warren? Oh boy, they’d have a field day. But the old guy who doesn’t grandstand or showboat much, keeps his head down, stays professional? They’re at a loss. 

So much so that he is a far more popular politician than pretty much anyone else in this country. Some polling has shown positively gaudy numbers for Biden. 

New numbers from @MorningConsult show that @JoeBiden is the most popular national political leader in America https://t.co/EgQ7jtrlob pic.twitter.com/marUPs14FJ

— John Anzalone (@JohnAnzo) February 24, 2021

Civiqs, which does a great job of filtering out partisan non-response bias (in essence, demoralized partisans refusing to answer polls), has more measured numbers: 

Civiqs Results

For comparison’s sake, Donald Trump is at 42% favorable, 56% unfavorable. And just as important as the toppling, the trend is a good one. Republicans can’t touch him, which is maybe why they’re resorting to this kind of buffoonery: 

Newsmax guest attacks Biden's dogs for being dirty and "unlike a presidential dog" pic.twitter.com/6yitOlM765

— aliciasadowski (@aliciasadowski6) February 20, 2021

They’ve got nothing of real substance. 

Now, as we look ahead to 2022, take a look at this question, which asks which party better represents you:

Civiqs Results

That 16-point gap (46% Democratic vs. 30% Republican) is quite dramatic, and is driven by crashing numbers among independents: only 22% think the GOP is concerned about people like them, down from 33% on Election Day. Meanwhile, 36% of independents say Democrats are concerned about them. Let’s keep an eye on this chart in the coming months, because it’s going to become extra clear which party cares about people, and which one is hell-bent on committing political suicide. The damage Republicans are doing to themselves is already extensive. Let’s compare the two parties: 

Republican Party favorability: 23% favorable, 65% unfavorable, with brutal trendiness.

Civiqs Results

Democratic Party favorability: 44% favorable, 49% unfavorable, with gradually improving trendiness. 

Civiqs Results

Republicans already lost the 2018 and 2020 elections, and demographic trends continue to move against them. Trump cost them the White House, the Senate, and the House, and there is zero guarantee his voters will ever turn out for an election without Trump on the ballot (they haven’t before). Yet the Republican Party isn’t just doubling down on Trumpism, it’s doubling down on opposing popular legislation.

Think about it, even a Q-addled Republican will have to think twice in 2022 if she or he has to vote between losing their monthly child credit check from the IRS, or a Republican promising to end any such help. Deliver help to people, and it’s a different playing field. It’s already happening, and the legislation hasn’t even passed into law. 

Democrats gifted Republicans the chance to rip out the Trump cancer from their party, but the GQP refused to convict in the impeachment trial. Now Republicans are gifting Democrats the chance to lock in popular support for their party and candidates. 

Perhaps it’s time to stop looking the gift horse in the mouth, and just run up the advantage. 

Caught vacationing in Cancun during a pandemic as Texas voters froze, Ted Cruz blames his kids

Posted on by Hunter

All right, we have to do it. We have to spend a few moments celebrating these new accomplishments by the forever hapless but somehow still-sociopathic Sen. Ted Cruz, a man who once had presidential aspirations but who now spends his days humiliating himself and those around him, chipping away at his own integrity in what appears to be a spirited game of Dog Turd Jenga.

Oh, Ted. What are you, even?

As we all now know, Ted Cruz was caught taking a flight to the resort town of Cancun, Mexico, during (1) a massive natural disaster in his home state that caused much of the state to lose power and is now resulting in citizens dying in their homes and (2) a global pandemic that has killed 500,000 Americans, closed schools, shuttered businesses, and prevented many Americans from seeing their friends or loved ones for something approaching a full year now.

When caught, Ted blamed his young children. "Like millions of Texans, our family lost heat and power too," says Ted. "With school cancelled for the week, our girls asked to take a trip with friends. Wanting to be a good dad, I flew down with them last night and am flying back this afternoon."

You've heard of the general edict between politicians and press to "leave the children out of it." This is the other edict: When in political danger, throw your youngest daughter at reporters and bolt.

Now, there are sev-er-al problems with Cruz's statement up there, and that's being generous. Cruz previously said that his home did not lose power, suggesting he was selflessly hosting the neighbor children who were not so fortunate. The airport pictures show Cruz with a rather significant amount of luggage for a supposed one-night stay, but we will be good sports and presume that he is merely moonlighting as a Texas drug mule or that he never, ever leaves the country without a two week supply of his favorite canned soups.

Fine. But then there's the rather bigger problem of Ted Cruz, a United States senator, willingly declaring that despite a deadly global pandemic, his kids got bored during a school break and insisted daddy spirit them off to Mexico for funsies, which he of course did, but of course he had to shepherd them there himself before, um, turning right around and coming back. Really now? Really? The rest of us are conducting half our lives over Zoom to keep ourselves and our neighbors safe during a plague while the senators ostensibly in charge of these things are letting their daughters organize their own international superspreader events? Outstanding. Just outstanding.

By far the biggest flaw with Ted's claims here, however—and it is a doozy—is that an airline-knowledgable reporter was quickly able to check with a source and reports that Cruz's original United Airlines tickets originally had him booked to return Saturday. Ted Cruz is, apparently, just brazenly lying his confederate beard off on this one.

I realize that does not really come as a surprise to anyone, given that the current crop of propaganda-spewing Republicans quite literally uses lying as means of governance and therefore lies about absolutely everything, all the time, but it still needs to be said that this yellowbellied Texas lungfish blamed a weekend Cancun vacation on his kids, then lied to everyone in his state about how Actually he was just tagging along to show them how to work the hotel vending machines.

Nope. It seems Cruz had, among senators, a very particular reason for being outraged at the notion that the Senate might have to hear evidence in the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump for longer than a few days. Cruz had an international beach trip planned for the Senate break, and didn't intend to let a probe of whether a former president attempted to have his vice president and a good chunk of the presidential line of succession killed in a coup attempt interfere with that.

Oh, and apparently he didn't even tell his staff where he was going, which was the reason his staff had no immediate response when pictures began flowing in of their boss leaving the damn country. The last time that happened we learned that a certain Republican governor had an Argentinian mistress, but not before his staff had piped up with a cover story claiming he was off hiking the Appalachian Trail on—shoulda done a little research on that one, kids—National Nude Hiking Day.

You may, at this point, be almost close to maybe having a microscopic bit of sympathy for Ted Cruz in the form of at least being embarrassed on his behalf for being such an amazingly craven little sea squirt. Don't bother. Once the Jan. 6 seditionist had been caught and had to book a quick flight back to Texas in order to pretend that he gave two biscuits about his voters freezing to death in their homes, one of the things his staff quickly made sure of was to contact the Houston Police Department to arrange for their "assistance" at the airport when he got back.

Sure, it's not like anyone in Texas has anything better to do right now. Surely there're some spare officers available to guide Cruz through an airport terminal and fend off anyone who wants to ask for more details about his international pandemic superspreader sleepover.

Cruz has managed to be a truly amazing human being these last few years, and that should not be taken as praise. He has managed to throw every member of his family, from his father to his wife to his children, under ye olde tour bus in his various attempts to slither through a political career. He has both Trump's sociopathic unwillingness to stick to the truth and a personality so magnificently awful that he could save 10 orphans from a burning orphanage and still somehow come out of it more hated than he was when he went inside. Above all, he somehow managed to maneuver himself into playing a central role in the biggest seditious anti-government conspiracy since the actual Civil War, all in service to an incompetent blowhard and gasbag, under the apparent impression that what the nation really needs these days is to just nix elections outright and put tax-dodging rapists in charge.

Did he support the nullification of an election because his kids and their friends were bored and wanted to play insurrection, or was that one on him? If any of us could still stomach even hearing this mulletfaced Gulf treasonfish bubble at us any longer it might make for a fascinating story, but if Texas voters still have a drop of dignity left maybe they'll run Ted out of town—the roads are slick, so a pair of skates and a little push is probably all it would take—and appoint a particularly irritable rat snake to fill out his term.