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Category: Politics

Bernie Sanders was right

Bernie Sanders was right

Elizabeth Bruenig writes: Bernie Sanders has ended his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, which is a tragedy, because he was right about virtually everything. He was right from the very beginning, when he advocated a total overhaul of the American health care system in the 1970s. He remains right now, as a pandemic stresses the meager resources of millions of citizens to their breaking point, and possibly to their death. He was right when he seemed to be the…

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Boris Johnson listened to his scientists about coronavirus – but they were slow to sound the alarm

Boris Johnson listened to his scientists about coronavirus – but they were slow to sound the alarm

Reuters reports: It was early spring when British scientists laid out the bald truth to their government. It was “highly likely,” they said, that there was now “sustained transmission” of COVID-19 in the United Kingdom. If unconstrained and if the virus behaved as in China, up to four-fifths of Britons could be infected and one in a hundred might die, wrote the scientists, members of an official committee set up to model the spread of pandemic flu, on March 2….

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New Zealand isn’t just flattening the curve. It’s squashing it

New Zealand isn’t just flattening the curve. It’s squashing it

The Washington Post reports: It has been less than two weeks since New Zealand imposed a coronavirus lockdown so strict that swimming at the beach and hunting in bushland were banned. They’re not essential activities, plus we have been told not to do anything that could divert emergency services’ resources. People have been walking and biking strictly in their neighborhoods, lining up six feet apart outside grocery stores while waiting to go one-in-one-out, and joining swaths of the world in…

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Politicians and public figures return to medical careers to help coronavirus effort

Politicians and public figures return to medical careers to help coronavirus effort

The Guardian reports: An Irish prime minister, a French film director and a Hungarian MEP are among the public figures who are resurrecting their medical careers to fight the coronavirus pandemic. They are part of a small, growing group of people in politics, the arts and sports who are becoming doctors again to help health care systems under unprecedented strain. Leo Varadkar, Ireland’s taoiseach, has offered to work one day a week as a doctor as his country braces for…

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How Andrew Cuomo became the most prominent Democrat of the Covid-19 crisis

How Andrew Cuomo became the most prominent Democrat of the Covid-19 crisis

The Guardian reports: It’s rare for a single US state governor to get so much attention it even rivals the president during a historical national crisis – but that’s exactly what New York’s Andrew Cuomo is experiencing. Cuomo, the technocratic three-term governor who’s had to deal with the state hit hardest by the coronavirus pandemic, has emerged as the most prominent Democrat in charge of fighting the virus, filling a role many felt former vice-president Joe Biden should be occupying….

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As Trump played down the risks, his own trade adviser warned in January about the danger of a pandemic

As Trump played down the risks, his own trade adviser warned in January about the danger of a pandemic

The New York Times reports: A top White House adviser starkly warned Trump administration officials in late January that the coronavirus crisis could cost the United States trillions of dollars and put millions of Americans at risk of illness or death. The warning, written in a memo by Peter Navarro, President Trump’s trade adviser, is the highest-level alert known to have circulated inside the West Wing as the administration was taking its first substantive steps to confront a crisis that…

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Why Republicans pushed for ‘the most undemocratic’ election in Wisconsin’s history

Why Republicans pushed for ‘the most undemocratic’ election in Wisconsin’s history

The New York Times reports: Tuesday’s mess of an election in Wisconsin is the culmination of a decade of efforts by state Republicans to make voting harder, redraw legislative boundaries and dilute the power of voters in the state’s urban centers. The Republican-dominated state legislature, which has held a majority since 2011, due in part to gerrymandered maps, refused to entertain the Democratic governor’s request to mail absentee ballots to all voters or move the primary. Then the State Supreme…

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As a champion of hydroxychloroquine treatment for Covid-19, Trump promotes hope even if it’s baseless

As a champion of hydroxychloroquine treatment for Covid-19, Trump promotes hope even if it’s baseless

The New York Times reports: Day after day, the salesman turned president has encouraged coronavirus patients to try hydroxychloroquine with all of the enthusiasm of a real estate developer. The passing reference he makes to the possible dangers is usually overwhelmed by the full-throated endorsement. “What do you have to lose?” he asked five times on Sunday. Bolstered by his trade adviser, a television doctor, Larry Ellison of Oracle and Rudolph W. Giuliani, a former New York mayor, Mr. Trump…

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The danger with Trump serving as risk-manager-in-chief

The danger with Trump serving as risk-manager-in-chief

Vox reports: The Trump administration’s failures in dealing with a global pandemic threat raise a frightening, but important, question: How else is this administration putting the United States at risk right now? And what is this administration neglecting in 2020 that will put Americans at risk five, 10, 20 years from now? In 2017, Michael Lewis, author of books like The Big Short, Moneyball, and The Blind Side, began asking these very same questions — and arrived at some startling…

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Andrew Cuomo for president? Joe Biden can and should make it happen

Andrew Cuomo for president? Joe Biden can and should make it happen

Craig Snyder writes: Donald Trump’s current term as president ends at noon on January 20, 2021. As strange as it may seem at this time of exclusive focus on our public health and economic emergencies, a vital national election is still coming. I have been a Republican candidate for Congress, a GOP staffer in the Senate and a business partner of Roger Stone when he conceived of and managed Donald Trump‘s first campaign for President (seeking the nomination of the…

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Coronavirus threatens survival of rural hospitals across the U.S. on the frontlines of crisis

Coronavirus threatens survival of rural hospitals across the U.S. on the frontlines of crisis

The Guardian reports: On Wednesday, Three Rivers, a small hospital in rural Washington, had exactly nine days left before it would run out of money to pay its staff and be forced to close. That same day, its CEO learned the hospital likely had its first coronavirus patient. The coronavirus pandemic has put a strain even on the wealthier parts of America’s vast, fragmented healthcare system: there are not enough beds, not enough ventilators, not enough protective equipment. But in…

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America’s pandemic war games don’t end well. Is this where we’re heading?

America’s pandemic war games don’t end well. Is this where we’re heading?

Mark Perry writes: On June 22, 2001, a group of well-known U.S. officials and a handful of senior policymakers gathered at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland for a senior-level exercise that simulated a biological weapons attack—an outbreak of deadly smallpox—on the United States. Designed by the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies (now called the Center for Health Security) and the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the day-and-a-half-long “Dark Winter” simulation was conducted to gauge…

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Sanders’ ‘narrow path’ to victory gets even narrower

Sanders’ ‘narrow path’ to victory gets even narrower

Politico reports: Bernie Sanders insists he has a “narrow path” to the nomination. But he and his aides refuse to say what it is. A majority of the states and territories yet to vote rejected him in 2016. The national polls don’t offer much hope either — since Joe Biden defeated him in Arizona, Florida and Illinois on March 17, Sanders has trailed him by double-digits in every single national survey. Days before the Wisconsin primary — the last major…

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The U.S. was beset by denial and dysfunction as the coronavirus raged

The U.S. was beset by denial and dysfunction as the coronavirus raged

The Washington Post reports: By the time Donald Trump proclaimed himself a wartime president — and the coronavirus the enemy — the United States was already on course to see more of its people die than in the wars of Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq combined. The country has adopted an array of wartime measures never employed collectively in U.S. history — banning incoming travelers from two continents, bringing commerce to a near-halt, enlisting industry to make emergency medical gear,…

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‘Trump is killing his own supporters’ – even White House insiders know it

‘Trump is killing his own supporters’ – even White House insiders know it

Lloyd Green writes: On Sunday, initially at least, there was no White House briefing on the president’s public schedule. But the bad news kept coming. Coronavirus deaths continued to climb and reports of the heartland being unprepared for what may be on its horizon continued to ricochet around the media. In the words of one administration insider, to the Guardian: “The Trump organism is simply collapsing. He’s killing his own supporters.” Members of the national guard, emergency workers, rank-and-file Americans:…

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Official counts understate the actual coronavirus death toll

Official counts understate the actual coronavirus death toll

The New York Times reports: A coroner in Indiana wanted to know if the coronavirus had killed a man in early March, but said that her health department denied a test. Paramedics in New York City say that many patients who died at home were never tested for the coronavirus, even if they showed telltale signs of infection. In Virginia, a funeral director prepared the remains of three people after health workers cautioned her that they each had tested positive…

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