"Mar 30, 2020,04:40am EDT

I Spent A Day In The Coronavirus-Driven Feeding Frenzy Of N95 Mask Sellers And Buyers And This Is What I Learned:

In the interest of brevity, I’m going to summarize what I learned below and then jump into a bit more detail.

Millions of N95 masks have been available throughout the U.S., Canada and the UK during the pandemic, according to brokers trying to sell them.

The high price point per mask, driven by extreme demand, has contributed to an overwhelmed reaction among potential buyers, especially in the U.S.

Scrutiny surrounding these deals is high because of ongoing scams and claims of price-gouging, both of which are triggering emotionally charged reactions and fear of making deals.

Millions of masks are being purchased by foreign buyers and are leaving the country, according to the brokers, while the domestic need remains alarmingly high. "

Full story here:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddisalvo/2020/03/30/i-spent-a-day-in-the-coronavirus-driven-feeding-frenzy-of-n95-mask-sellers-and-buyers-and-this-is-what-i-learned/#6b939e5856d4

"BOISE, Idaho — According to the web sites for all seven of Idaho's public health districts, 433 people have tested positive for COVID-19 in the state.

As of Tuesday morning, Idaho's death toll stands at 8.

Idaho's coronavirus web site says there are 7 deaths.

It says one person has died in Nez Perce County.

The North Central Health District now says two people died there."

https://idahonews.com/news/local/coronavirus-numbers-rising-in-idaho

Here is just one example of Trump lies. It is impossible to list them all; there are too many every day.

"During press questioning at the White House today, Donald Trump was asked whether his tone about the coronavirus challenge had suddenly changed.

For weeks, he’d been mocking the virus threat—at rallies, in tweets, and in press remarks.

But both yesterday and today, he’d suddenly shifted to warning that the public-health and economic problems were real, and would remain so for a long time.

What changed?

Trump denied there had been any shift in tone, and said (as you can see here):

“I have always known. This is a real pandemic. I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic....

“I’ve always viewed it as very serious.”

This is a flat-out lie.

Setting the lead for many Republican politicians and for most coverage on Fox News, Trump had for many weeks pooh-poohed the idea that the virus should be taken seriously.

He has said it was “contained” and “under control”.

He has said “It’s going to disappear” and, “We have very little problem in this country”.

He said three weeks ago that the U.S. had “15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.”

He tweeted just eight days ago that “The Fake News Media and their partner, the Democrat Party, is doing everything within its semi-considerable power (it used to be greater!) to inflame the CoronaVirus situation”"

"Trump is what happens when a president has no emotional intelligence"

Trump has said he has no time to read.

“I never have,” he said in 2016.

“I’m always busy doing a lot.”

People who brief him report a gnat-like attention span.

Trump’s frequent accusation that others are stupid or “low IQ” sits uncomfortably with his own shocking ignorance of history, science and economics.

It is evident that Trump’s combination of ignorance and arrogance exposes the United States to needless global ridicule.


But Trump’s most consequential deficit may lie in his emotional intelligence — what political scientist Joseph Nye defines as “the self-mastery, discipline and empathic capacity that allows leaders to channel their personal passions and attract others.”

He was only following Trump's lead.

For weeks he downplayed the seriousness of the virus.

Just more right wing lies.


They can't help it; to be in Cult of Trump you must embrace lies and misinformation.

Perhaps you can point out the part where any of that was directed by President Obama

To be sure, the president isn’t responsible for either the coronavirus or the disease it causes, COVID-19, and he couldn’t have stopped it from hitting our shores even if he had done everything right.

Nor is it the case that the president hasn’t done anything right; in fact, his decision to implement a travel ban on China was prudent.

And any narrative that attempts to pin all of the blame on Trump for the coronavirus is simply unfair. The temptation among the president’s critics to use the pandemic to get back at Trump for every bad thing he’s done should be resisted, and schadenfreude is never a good look.
That said, the president and his administration are responsible for grave, costly errors, most especially the epic manufacturing failures in diagnostic testing, the decision to test too few people, the delay in expanding testing to labs outside the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and problems in the supply chain.

These mistakes have left us blind and badly behind the curve, and, for a few crucial weeks, they created a false sense of security.

What we now know is that the coronavirus silently spread for several weeks, without us being aware of it and while we were doing nothing to stop it.

Containment and mitigation efforts could have significantly slowed its spread at an early, critical point, but we frittered away that opportunity.

“They’ve simply lost time they can’t make up.

You can’t get back six weeks of blindness,” Jeremy Konyndyk, who helped oversee the international response to Ebola during the Obama administration and is a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, told The Washington Post.

“To the extent that there’s someone to blame here, the blame is on poor, chaotic management from the White House and failure to acknowledge the big picture.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/peter-wehner-trump-presidency-over/607969/

"It has taken a good deal longer than it should have, but Americans have now seen the con man behind the curtain.
Peter Wehner
Contributing writer at The Atlantic and senior fellow at EPPC

March 13, 2020

When, in January 2016, I wrote that despite being a lifelong Republican who worked in the previous three GOP administrations,

I would never vote for Donald Trump, even though his administration would align much more with my policy views than a Hillary Clinton presidency would, a lot of my Republican friends were befuddled. How could I not vote for a person who checked far more of my policy boxes than his opponent?

What I explained then, and what I have said many times since, is that Trump is fundamentally unfit—intellectually, morally, temperamentally, and psychologically—for office.

For me, that is the paramount consideration in electing a president, in part because at some point it’s reasonable to expect that a president will face an unexpected crisis—and at that point, the president’s judgment and discernment, his character and leadership ability, will really matter.


“Mr. Trump has no desire to acquaint himself with most issues, let alone master them” is how I put it four years ago.

“No major presidential candidate has ever been quite as disdainful of knowledge, as indifferent to facts, as untroubled by his benightedness.”

I added this:
Mr. Trump’s virulent combination of ignorance, emotional instability, demagogy, solipsism and vindictiveness would do more than result in a failed presidency; it could very well lead to national catastrophe.

The prospect of Donald Trump as commander in chief should send a chill down the spine of every American.


It took until the second half of Trump’s first term, but the crisis has arrived in the form of the coronavirus pandemic, and it’s hard to name a president who has been as overwhelmed by a crisis as the coronavirus has overwhelmed Donald Trump."

A very Trump like post.

"Donald Trump’s Cult of Personality Did This

The autocratic political culture that has propped up the Trump administration has left the nation entirely unprepared for an economic and public-health calamity.



The president of the United States is a menace to public health.

I don’t mean that I disagree with him on policy, although I do. I don’t mean that I abhor the president’s expressed bigotry toward religious and ethnic minorities, although that is also true. I am not referring to Donald Trump’s efforts to corrupt the Justice Department, shield his criminal associates from legal peril, or funnel taxpayer money to his tacky hotels and golf courses, although all of these things are reason enough to oppose the president.


What I am referring to is the fact that, soon after the coronavirus outbreak emerged in China, the rest of the world began to regard it as a threat to public health, while Trump has seen it as a public-relations problem.

Trump’s primary method of dealing with public-relations problems is to exert the full force of the authoritarian cult of personality that surrounds him to deny that a problem even exists.

This approach has paid political dividends for the Republican Party, in the form of judicial appointments, tax cuts for the wealthy, and a rapid erosion of the rule of law.

But applied to the deadly pandemic now sweeping the planet, all it has done is exacerbate the inevitable public-health crisis, while leaving both the federal government and the entire swath of the country that hangs on his every word unprepared for the catastrophe now unfolding in the United States.

The cardinal belief of Trumpism is that loyalty to Trump is loyalty to the country, and that equation leaves no room for the public interest."


https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/donald-trump-menace-public-health/608449/

"There are many reasons that children try to offload responsibility for things gone wrong:

avoiding disapproval and other painful consequences,

preserving a self-image as a good or competent person,

and sometimes getting revenge. "

Trump touted how great a leader he is; all he and his cultists do, after more than 3 years in office, is to point fingers and blame other people.

That is the behavior that most people leave behind in their childhood.

News Flash: this is 2020 and Obama is not the president.

Pelosi was correct; Trump was doing nothing when he could have had this country preparing for what he knew was happening in China.