Hi Kady,
Here we go again. Yes I saw the picture of Pope Francis in St. Peter’s Square.
Well, freedom has always had a price, eh? Yes, like yelling fire in a crowded theater.
I looked at the budgets for the CDC and the NIH, and you are correct. I removed the CDC from the list. However, there have many articles of late about how the rural areas are unprepared and hospitals have been closing.
Yes, but that’s generally not for budgetary reasons; and if it is for budgetary reasons, it’s a state and local government funding decision, not a federal one. (If I’m not mistaken, the problem with rural health care tends to be centered around the fact that doctors just make a ton more money in cities, so they gravitate there.)
not to mention the tanking of our economy because people can’t go back to work without testing.
Well, South Korea is ostensibly the best at testing, and they’re projected to go into recession also.
I have to disagree with you on that. The masks are used for a lot of illnesses and dust control, etc. so there is no reason with all the warnings throughout the years for there to be this shortage of PPE. And no on the party difference.
Yep. And it’s the states which are front and center in disaster response. And yet, none of these states, regardless of party, invested in that equipment.
There is an unhealthy desire on the part of many to ignore fact and assign all the blame to an unpopular president. Reality is that there is no reason to think that the other party would have done better. The national stores of these medical supplies were depleted during the Obama Administration and neither Obama nor Trump were interested in building them back up. And once you get into the crisis, fuggetaboutit. You have 160 nations all competing for the same supplies from factories running 24x7. They can’t meet demand, and it doesn’t matter if it’s a Republican or Democrat doing the demanding.
Look Kady, you are a data driven conservative, and I appreciate your corrections, but there is a qualified difference between what constitutes the Republican Party right now and the clearly brainwashed people who keep putting them in office from real conservatives, many of which have left the Republican Party and have called for it to be razed to the ground. These Republican politicians and the Dolts who vote for them are a danger to the country, not sane conservatives like you.
Well, let’s unpack that a bit.
First off, let’s set Trump’s mouth and tweets aside for a moment. Because from a POLICY standpoint, he’s been a pretty garden variety GOP president. GOP Presidents all cut taxes; GOP Presidents all deregulate industry. Trump, Cruz, Rubio, Romney…….same behavior. The tariff matter, trying and get some leverage on the Chinese (primarily) and Europeans was new, but that’s because the traditional (corporatist, not conservative) Republican is perfectly OK with giving away half a point of employment and half a point of GDP to bad trade agreements and look the other way on intellectual capital violations to keep the corporations humming along; they really don’t care if there’s a negative hit on the little guy.
All in all, I think POLICYWISE, this has been an OK administration. I could have done without the cuts in the individual tax rates, but that’s kind of typical GOP stuff also.
Further, I don’t see that any *real* conservatives have left the Party. No “real conservative” is going to vote for a Democrat under any circumstance; they’ll always flip the switch for the free marketer, and the Dems have done themselves no favors by moving to the left.
Those that have “left the party” are, generally speaking, the neoconservatives who really didn’t give a crap about economics anyway — — the David Frums and Bill Krystols and David Frenchs are the guys who just are not happy unless the US military is off killing somebody someplace. Trump kept criticizing the Eternal War of the Pax Americana, so they went elsewhere. If they find that the Dem candidate is a more promising warmonger than Trump, off they go. Good for them.
And finally, I am no fan of the Democrats either. It is clear to me we have a plutocracy.
Maybe so, but I’m not sure that’s a negative. I trust individual greed more than I trust politicians. It’s more predictable. :-)
I am assuming you know that the political parties set the rules for the primary elections that for president usually gives us the lesser of two evils choice.
Yep, sure do.
