week 6

OMG, it just never ends and I'm not talking about the pandemic but about the continuing shit show of the Trump administration.

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All you American citizens married to immigrants without SS numbers who file tax returns jointly won't be getting your $1200. You are excluded. And those of us on SS may have to wait up to 5 months to get ours. In other words, we won't get it either. But certain businesses that support Trump and McConnell? They're getting millions from the fund that is supposed to support small business.

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And now McConnell wants states to declare bankruptcy for 'mismanagement' instead of getting federal help since they are running out of money for jobless benefits and other extraordinary expenses like having to pay exorbitant prices to buy the necessary PPEs that FEMA et al keeps confiscating from blue states to sell to middlemen who will then sell to the states or, as Trump implied, is hoarding them and only releasing them to red states as punishment of course but does he think there are no Republicans in blue states? The governor of Illinois finally arranged for a secret mission to China with a private plane in the dead of night to purchase PPEs in constant fear they would be found out and the material snatched away from them. McConnell's attack on blue states (that, incidentally, pay in to the government far more than they receive and as a result are the ones that subsidize the red states) is in stark contrast to his own state of Kentucky that receives far more federal aid than they pay in, in fact, receives the most federal aid of any state and is still the poorest state in the country. Where's all that money going Mitch? I read one article that stated that McConnell's goal with this idea is to break government workers' pensions and in the process break the labor union that keeps their pensions intact.

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After his insistence that the malaria drug was an effective treatment and a study done at the VA proved that it did not help and in fact killed people, now Trump suggested at his briefing today that sunlight kills the virus and there might be a way to inject UV rays into the body or clean out the lungs with disinfectant cause it kills the virus in one minute. One minute! It might work, it might not. Where did he get this idea? From a group that peddles industrial bleach as a virus cure. Holy fucking shades of Mengele. He's already caused some of our veterans to die with his insistence that the malaria drug works.

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Meat and food processing plants are closing down after the virus runs rampant in the work force and some may never reopen. This is bad news as it may result in food shortages down the line since food doesn't just magically make its way to the grocery stores from farms and ranches.

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Trump is still blocking the $10 billion Congress allocated to the USPS unless it immediately quadruples its prices for package shipping in a bid to undercut people's preference for USPS over the expensive Trump donors FedEx and UPS. FYI, the post office was self-sustaining before Congress passed a law in 2006 that imposed extraordinary costs on the U.S. Postal Service. The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA) required the USPS to create a $72 billion fund to pay for the cost of its post-retirement health care costs, 75 years into the future (covering postal employees that aren't even born yet). This burden applies to no other federal agency or private corporation.

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In his continuing attempt to blame the WHO for his own incompetence, America will not participate in the WHO's and other world leaders' efforts to speed up the response to covid-19.

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The new leader of the free world, Angela Merkel of Germany, and the other European nations have come together to organize a worldwide response and vaccine effort and the US was not invited to join.

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A former labradoodle dog breeder has been appointed to lead the US Pandemic Task Force. I kid you not.

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Unexplainable rashes now join loss of taste and smell, fever, cough, difficulty breathing, and body aches as symptoms of covid-19. There is still no treatment besides IV fluids and oxygen, there is no vaccine, and no promise of immunity if you get it and recover. And now they are finding that people in their 30s and 40s are throwing blood clots left and right and stroking out.

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I have good health, maybe better than good my heart rhythm problem aside, and yet I have moments of fear of getting infected (was that cough last night covid or just a reaction to all the plant dust and debris from the fence, are these body aches covid or just the result of weeks of pulling on stubborn vines, was the sweat I woke up with in the middle of the night a fever from covid or because I was hot under the quilt) especially after I read anything about how horrible it is to have this virus.

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One piece of good news, after walking out of several of his incomprehensible 'briefings' or refusing to take any questions or lashing out at the reporters when he does, Trump's handlers have finally convinced him that he is only harming his chances of reelection with these daily shit shows and he's going to stop having them!

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My county, after holding steady for about a week at 35 cases has now added one more. We're at 36 but no deaths.

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Current US statistics as of today 4/26/20, 19:04 GMT (last five weeks' totals in parenthesis): cases – 976,403 (741,230, 534,494, 312,223, 123,958, 38,757); deaths – 54,965 (39,103, 20,637, 8,483, 2,231, 400); recoveries – 118,633 (68,610, 30,548, 14,828, 3,238, 178). There is still no country-wide testing, contact tracing, forced quarantine for exposed individuals, or income support, all tactics that have proven to work in other countries, here in the US and despite that, people are protesting the stay at home orders and want businesses opened back up because they want a fucking haircut not caring who they infect or if they get infected and then take it home to their families. This is what we are left with, the knowledge that a portion of our population  is willing to sacrifice anyone for their selfish need. MAGA!