transplantbillsfan

I'm actually enjoying Westworld season 3 more than I did season 2. Turned itself into a totally different series, which is why I think I'm liking it. Only watched the first couple episodes, though. Also finally started Ozark. Only 4 episodes in but really liking it. I understand the Breaking Bad comparisons, but I like the situation with Jason Bateman's character better as he stumbles into his life of crime because it's not voluntary like it was for Walter White, which makes it a bit more tragic and almost believable at the start.

It's perspectives like these that I know are unfortunately too widely held here and also why I will simply often ignore even responding to a lot of posts.

I'm not ignoring your other post, but I will only minimally respond to it because frankly, despite what you seem to believe, I am generally using this time to step away from the Internet and TBD in general to do other more productive things. Your question to me is a trap based on a false premise... actually a fallacy commonly used here in PPP. That's why I won't engage you thoroughly. But I will respond so you at least understand why I often just don't respond to posters. Even if you still think I'm an idiot or a jerk, at least it might help you understand me a bit more. I trust journalists more than I trust random Twitter guy. I'm not saying they're never wrong, but knowing a couple journalists as you do, I view the safeguard of journalistic "sourcing" as more credible than random Twitter guy who says whatever he wants and has no guardrails. Inevitability someone here (I have a good idea on who those posters will be) will cherry pick certain stories by certified journalists from mainstream media as proof they're not to be trusted. Arguing with someone latching on to those cherry picked stories that end up being a very tiny percent of the slew of other true, well-sourced stories is pretty clearly a tried and true strategy on this forum, but in the end it really just becomes a straw man argument. The straw man fallacy actually seems to be the go-to over here. And it's the weasley way out of a discussion. And it's why I generally avoid prolonged discussion in this forum and why I am not directly answering your post, even though I just basically did, at least indirectly.

Ummmm... except Trump has ALWAYS complained, criticized and blamed. ALWAYS. Even before he was President. It's his nature. So spare everyone the asinine notion that Trump is exhausted, so he's excused.

I have a thought: Stop quoting or retweeting pundits and their thoughts. Pundits are paid to spew their thoughts on a daily basis. Rachel Maddow, Tucker Carlson, Chris Hayes, Sean Hannity... it doesn't matter. Sometimes they have news within their shows, but what the hell is the point of retweeting what you did? You guys are all about snapshot victory laps over here and it's disturbing. It's actually exactly the reason I made that bet with you. That's a victory lap I get to enjoy for 4 full years. But these momentary jabs everyone over here is prone to taking--and yes, I get sucked into the "fun," too--are just silly. You quote Chris Hayes and then a guy insulting Chris Hayes. We are 2 1/2 months into the 1st case of this Pandemic in the US and almost 15,000 people are already dead. Hayes speculated that the White House model (which scientists can't seem to figure out where they got their protections) actually over projected in order to look like "heroes" after. Hell, Trump's already basically said that without his intervention millions of lives would have been lost. That opinion by Hayes, despite your condescension over here, was fairly logical. However, it was still an OPINION and just doesn't remotely matter right now. Right now, we are in a seriously tragic moment where more than 1,000 Americans die daily due to this disease. We won't have a clue how truly deadly this was for at least months, but probably years. But as far as being productive in here, maybe stop posting tweets that are 100% opinion from Pundits and the attached criticism of it. It's just silly and proves how much of a victim of the moment you really are.

The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Associated Press... all point to a similar level of failure and ineptitude on Trump's part at the beginning of this. And yet blind homers like @billsfan1959 will point to a timeline that sidesteps the point as proof that somehow Trump has been doing a great job.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday threatened to freeze U.S. funding to the World Health Organization, saying the international group had “missed the call” on the coronavirus pandemic. Trump also played down the release of January memos from a senior adviser that represented an early warning of a possible coronavirus pandemic, saying he had not seen them at the time. ... Trump continued on Tuesday to defend his actions in the early days of the crisis. He played down memos written by Peter Navarro, a senior White House adviser, that were made public this week. In the late January memos, the most direct warning as yet uncovered in the upper levels of the Trump administration, Navarro warned that the coronavirus crisis could cost the United States trillions of dollars and put millions of Americans at risk of illness or death. Trump said Tuesday that he was not aware of the memos back in January The two memos — one dated Jan. 29 and circulated to White House staff and the other dated Feb. 23 and addressed to Trump — warned that the coronavirus outbreak in China could ultimately kill more than half a million Americans and cost nearly $6 trillion, according to several reports. Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon told The Post Navarro felt he had no option but to write the memos as infighting between two White House camps broke out over how to handle the COVID-19 outbreak, delaying the administration’s response. ... It took more than a month for the government to impose travel restrictions after learning of the outbreak — Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and National Economic Council director Larry Kudlow were concerned about the economic fallout of banning travelers from China, Reuters reported on Sunday. So much of Donald Trump's ineptitude as President has been this notion that "Acting ________" is a good title because people somehow do their jobs better under pressure and he could easily use his trademark "you're fired!" If it's not working out. Except that idiot doesn't realize how impossible some of these jobs of EXTREME national importance are when you're always thinking "how do I spin this to make the boss happier so I don't get fired?" or "maybe I will just keep this bad news to myself." From Mick Mulvaney to Steve Bannon to... ALL these people Trump hires who his base might cast blame on (as Trump either already has or inevitably will)... IT'S HIS GODDAMN FAULT!!!! Can't wait til November when we get this jackass out of office. I just wish it were sooner.

Appreciate the concern, but I'm one of those rare lucky people who knew his career path when he was a Freshman in High School. Never changed and never wavered. Worked hard to earn both my undergraduate then Master's degree in 5 years total. Love my job. Incredibly rewarding. I'm doing damn well. Thanks for your wish, it was just utterly unnecessary. Use it on something meaningful, like this Pandemic ending.

"I don’t take responsibility at all,” said President Donald Trump in the Rose Garden on March 13. Those words will probably end up as the epitaph of his presidency, the single sentence that sums it all up. ... That the pandemic occurred is not Trump’s fault. The utter unpreparedness of the United States for a pandemic is Trump’s fault. The loss of stockpiled respirators to breakage because the federal government let maintenance contracts lapse in 2018 is Trump’s fault. The failure to store sufficient protective medical gear in the national arsenal is Trump’s fault. That states are bidding against other states for equipment, paying many multiples of the precrisis price for ventilators, is Trump’s fault. Air travelers summoned home and forced to stand for hours in dense airport crowds alongside infected people? That was Trump’s fault too. Ten weeks of insisting that the coronavirus is a harmless flu that would miraculously go away on its own? Trump’s fault again. The refusal of red-state governors to act promptly, the failure to close Florida and Gulf Coast beaches until late March? That fault is more widely shared, but again, responsibility rests with Trump: He could have stopped it, and he did not. The lying about the coronavirus by hosts on Fox News and conservative talk radio is Trump’s fault: They did it to protect him. The false hope of instant cures and nonexistent vaccines is Trump’s fault, because he told those lies to cover up his failure to act in time. The severity of the economic crisis is Trump’s fault; things would have been less bad if he had acted faster instead of sending out his chief economic adviser and his son Eric to assure Americans that the first stock-market dips were buying opportunities. The firing of a Navy captain for speaking truthfully about the virus’s threat to his crew? Trump’s fault. The fact that so many key government jobs were either empty or filled by mediocrities? Trump’s fault. The insertion of Trump’s arrogant and incompetent son-in-law as commander in chief of the national medical supply chain? Trump’s fault. For three years, Trump has blathered and bluffed and bullied his way through an office for which he is utterly inadequate. But sooner or later, every president must face a supreme test, a test that cannot be evaded by blather and bluff and bullying. That test has overwhelmed Trump. Trump failed. He is failing. He will continue to fail. And Americans are paying for his failures.

Jesus. You still don't ***** get it. So you're dense, illiterate, and are incapable of communicating. I'm done with you. Go play with your pals. I have better things to do with my time than engage in a conversation with someone who can't answer the first goddamn question in that conversation. Like pulling teeth.

Funny that you excuse the guy who was asked a question initially and avoided actually answering it while accusing the guy still waiting on the answer to his initial question as avoiding something. Learn what intellectual honesty is before you baselessly accuse someone of it. Par for the course for you, though. You are a massive hypocrite. A garrulous hypocrite, but a hypocrite nonetheless. Speaking of... @billsfan1959

No. The article didn't claim this. Proves you didn't read it. Again... more proof you didn't read. Oy. This is just sad. You first. This is pathetic. Again. Stop distracting everyone with your arrogance and defend your initial claim that the article is bull####. You're the one who made that statement first. The onus is on you to prove it. Too bad you clearly can't. You sure do like chasing your own tail and wasting time, though.

You called the article bull#### without any proof whatsoever. I asked you to prove that bold claim. Clearly you can't and you're just trying to distract everyone right now so you don't look so foolish. Coward

You did. Clearly you did it because you were too afraid to actually address the points made in the article and instead hoped your Red Herring of an argument would distract your Trump loving PPP pals enough to make you look like a hero. They love Trump, so of course it worked... because they wanted it to you. Again, back to the question I asked you initially that you are apparently afraid to address point by point: You claimed the article was bull####... prove that the details in the article are bull####

More Red Herrings So irritating. You made a claim that the article was bull####, so I asked you to prove it. Your timeline does not disprove what's in the article. So again, you made that statement, the onus is on you to prove the article itself is bull####, please do. Here, I will pull out most of the major points for you to read since I'm sure you didn't: Which points are incorrect and do you have proof? https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2020/04/04/coronavirus-government-dysfunction/ The most consequential failure involved a breakdown in efforts to develop a diagnostic test that could be mass produced and distributed across the United States, enabling agencies to map early outbreaks of the disease, and impose quarantine measures to contain them. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2020/04/04/coronavirus-government-dysfunction/ Protracted arguments between the White House and public health agencies over funding, combined with a meager existing stockpile of emergency supplies, left vast stretches of the country’s health-care system without protective gear until the outbreak had become a pandemic. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2020/04/04/coronavirus-government-dysfunction/ ... The poll showed that far more Republicans than Democrats were being influenced by Trump’s dismissive depictions of the virus and the comparably scornful coverage on Fox News and other conservative networks. As a result, Republicans were in distressingly large numbers refusing to change travel plans, follow “social distancing” guidelines, stock up on supplies or otherwise take the coronavirus threat seriously. ... By mid-January, Robert Kadlec, an Air Force officer and physician who serves as assistant secretary for preparedness and response at HHS, had instructed subordinates to draw up contingency plans for enforcing the Defense Production Act, a measure that enables the government to compel private companies to produce equipment or devices critical to the country’s security. Aides were bitterly divided over whether to implement the act, and nothing happened for many weeks. On Jan. 14, Kadlec scribbled a single word in a notebook he carries: “Coronavirus!!!” Despite the flurry of activity at lower levels of his administration, Trump was not substantially briefed by health officials about the coronavirus until Jan.18, when, while spending the weekend at Mar-a-Lago, he took a call from Azar. Even before the heath secretary could get a word in about the virus, Trump cut him off and began criticizing Azar for his handling of an aborted federal ban on vaping products, a matter that vexed the president. ... But the secretary, who had a strained relationship with Trump and many others in the administration, assured the president that those responsible were working on and monitoring the issue. Azar told several associates that the president believed he was “alarmist” and Azar struggled to get Trump’s attention to focus on the issue, even asking one confidant for advice. ... In other ways, though, the situation was already spinning out of control, with multiplying cases in Seattle, intransigence by the Chinese, mounting questions from the public, and nothing in place to stop infected travelers from arriving from abroad. Trump was out of the country for this critical stretch, taking part in the annual global economic forum in Davos, Switzerland. ... On Jan. 22, Trump received his first question about the coronavirus in an interview on CNBC while in Davos. Asked whether he was worried about a potential pandemic, Trump said, “No. Not at all. And we have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. . . . It’s going to be just fine.” ... The group, which included Azar, Pottinger and Fauci, as well as nine others across the administration, formed the core of what would become the administration’s coronavirus task force. But it primarily focused on efforts to keep infected people in China from traveling to the United States even while evacuating thousands of U.S. citizens. The meetings did not seriously focus on testing or supplies, which have since become the administration’s most challenging problems. The task force was formally announced on Jan. 29. “The genesis of this group was around border control and repatriation,” said a senior official involved in the meetings. “It wasn’t a comprehensive, whole-of-government group to run everything.” ... On Jan. 29, Mulvaney chaired a meeting in the White House Situation Room in which officials debated moving travel restrictions to “Level 4,” meaning a “do not travel” advisory from the State Department. Then, the next day, China took the draconian step of locking down the entire Hubei province, which encompasses Wuhan. That move by Beijing finally prompted a commensurate action by the Trump administration. On Jan. 31, Azar announced restrictions barring any non-U.S. citizen who had been in China during the preceding two weeks from entering the United States. ... But by that point, 300,000 people had come into the United States from China over the previous month. There were only 7,818 confirmed cases around the world at the end of January, according to figures released by the World Health Organization — but it is now clear that the virus was spreading uncontrollably. Pottinger was by then pushing for another travel ban, this time restricting the flow of travelers from Italy and other nations in the European Union that were rapidly emerging as major new nodes of the outbreak. Pottinger’s proposal was endorsed by key health-care officials, including Fauci, who argued that it was critical to close off any path the virus might take into the country. This time, the plan met with resistance from Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and others who worried about the impact on the U.S. economy. It was an early sign of tension in an area that would split the administration, pitting those who prioritized public health against those determined to avoid any disruption in an election year to the run of expansion and employment growth. Those backing the economy prevailed with the president. And it was more than a month before the administration issued a belated and confusing ban on flights into the United States from Europe. Hundreds of thousands of people crossed the Atlantic during that interval. ... A national stockpile of N95 protective masks, gowns, gloves and other supplies was already woefully inadequate after years of underfunding. ... Azar then spoke to Russell Vought, the acting director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, during Trump’s State of the Union speech on Feb. 4. Vought seemed amenable, and told Azar to submit a proposal. Azar did so the next day, drafting a supplemental request for more than $4 billion, a sum that OMB officials and others at the White House greeted as an outrage. Azar arrived at the White House that day for a tense meeting in the Situation Room that erupted in a shouting match, according to three people familiar with the incident. A deputy in the budget office accused Azar of preemptively lobbying Congress for a gigantic sum that White House officials had no interest in granting. Azar bristled at the criticism and defended the need for an emergency infusion. But his standing with White House officials, already shaky before the coronavirus crisis began, was damaged further. White House officials relented to a degree weeks later as the feared coronavirus surge in the United States began to materialize. The OMB team whittled Azar’s demands down to $2.5 billion, money that would be available only in the current fiscal year. Congress ignored that figure, approving an $8 billion supplemental bill that Trump signed into law March 6. But again, delays proved costly. The disputes meant that the United States missed a narrow window to stockpile ventilators, masks and other protective gear before the administration was bidding against many other desperate nations, and state officials fed up with federal failures began scouring for supplies themselves. In late March, the administration ordered 10,000 ventilators — far short of what public health officials and governors said was needed. And many will not arrive until the summer or fall, when models expect the pandemic to be receding. “It’s actually kind of a joke,” said one administration official involved in deliberations about the belated purchase. ... Although viruses travel unseen, public health officials have developed elaborate ways of mapping and tracking their movements. Stemming an outbreak or slowing a pandemic in many ways comes down to the ability to quickly divide the population into those who are infected and those who are not. Doing so, however, hinges on having an accurate test to diagnose patients and deploy it rapidly to labs across the country. The time it took to accomplish that in the United States may have been more costly to American efforts than any other failing. ... Among the costliest errors was a misplaced assessment by top health officials that the outbreak would probably be limited in scale inside the United States — as had been the case with every other infection for decades — and that the CDC could be trusted on its own to develop a coronavirus diagnostic test. ... the CDC was not built to mass-produce tests. ... The effort collapsed when the CDC failed its basic assignment to create a working test and the task force rejected Azar’s plan. On Feb. 6, when the World Health Organization reported that it was shipping 250,000 test kits to labs around the world, the CDC began distributing 90 kits to a smattering of state-run health labs. Almost immediately, the state facilities encountered problems. The results were inconclusive in trial runs at more than half the labs, meaning they couldn’t be relied upon to diagnose actual patients. The CDC issued a stopgap measure, instructing labs to send tests to its headquarters in Atlanta, a practice that would delay results for days. The scarcity of effective tests led officials to impose constraints on when and how to use them, and delayed surveillance testing. Initial guidelines were so restrictive that states were discouraged from testing patients exhibiting symptoms unless they had traveled to China and come into contact with a confirmed case, when the pathogen had by that point almost certainly spread more broadly into the general population. The limits left top officials largely blind to the true dimensions of the outbreak. In a meeting in the Situation Room in mid-February, Fauci and Redfield told White House officials that there was no evidence yet of worrisome person-to-person transmission in the United States. In hindsight, it appears almost certain that the virus was taking hold in communities at that point. But even the country’s top experts had little meaningful data about the domestic dimensions of the threat. Fauci later conceded that as they learned more their views changed. ... On Feb. 10, he held a political rally in New Hampshire attended by thousands where he declared that “by April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.” The New Hampshire rally was one of eight that Trump held after he had been told by Azar about the coronavirus, a period when he also went to his golf courses six times. A day earlier, on Feb. 9, a group of governors in town for a black-tie gala at the White House secured a private meeting with Fauci and Redfield. The briefing rattled many of the governors, bearing little resemblance to the words of the president. “The doctors and the scientists, they were telling us then exactly what they are saying now,” Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) said. ... Later in February, U.S. officials discovered indications that the CDC laboratory was failing to meet basic quality-control standards. On a Feb. 27 conference call with a range of health officials, a senior FDA official lashed out at the CDC for its repeated lapses. Jeffrey Shuren, the FDA’s director for devices and radiological health, told the CDC that if it were subjected to the same scrutiny as a privately run lab, “I would shut you down.” ... One week later, on March 6, Trump toured the facilities at the CDC wearing a red “Keep America Great” hat. He boasted that the CDC tests were nearly perfect and that “anybody who wants a test will get a test,” a promise that nearly a month later remains unmet. ... For weeks, he had barely uttered a word about the crisis that didn’t downplay its severity or propagate demonstrably false information. He dismissed the warnings of intelligence officials and top public health officials in his administration. At times, he voiced far more authentic concern about the trajectory of the stock market than the spread of the virus in the United States, railing at the chairman of the Federal Reserve and others with an intensity that he never seemed to exhibit about the possible human toll of the outbreak. In March, as state after state imposed sweeping new restrictions on their citizens’ daily lives to protect them — triggering severe shudders in the economy — Trump second-guessed the lockdowns. The common flu kills tens of thousands each year and “nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on,” he tweeted March 9. A day later, he pledged that the virus would “go away. Just stay calm.” Two days later, Trump finally ordered the halt to incoming travel from Europe that his deputy national security adviser had been advocating for weeks. But Trump botched the Oval Office announcement so badly that White House officials spent days trying to correct erroneous statements that triggered a stampede by U.S. citizens overseas to get home. “There was some coming to grips with the problem and the true nature of it — the 13th of March is when I saw him really turn the corner. It took a while to realize you’re at war,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said. “That’s when he took decisive action that set in motion some real payoffs.” ... The Kushner initiatives have, however, often interrupted the work of those under immense pressure to manage the U.S. response. Current and former officials said that Kadlec, Fauci, Redfield and others have repeatedly had to divert their attentions from core operations to contend with ill-conceived requests from the White House they don’t believe they can ignore. And Azar, who once ran the response, has since been sidelined, with his agency disempowered in decision-making and his performance pilloried by a range of White House officials, including Kushner. “Right now Fauci is trying to roll out the most ambitious clinical trial ever implemented” to hasten the development of a vaccine, said a former senior administration official in frequent touch with former colleagues. And yet, the nation’s top health officials “are getting calls from the White House or Jared’s team asking, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to do this with Oracle?’ ” If the coronavirus has exposed the country’s misplaced confidence in its ability to handle a crisis, it also has cast harsh light on the limits of Trump’s approach to the presidency — his disdain for facts, science and experience.

Okay so in an entire post full of a ton of hot air, @Deranged Rhino actually said this: "And, because I love my country and this community, I take offense to those corrupt politicians who abuse their positions of power in order to enrich themselves and weaken the country. " He actually said this... and this line is what all of that hot air boils down to. H O L Y C R A P ! ! ! You're losing it man. No worries. Guess I will take back the Olive Branch. You clearly need a good lesson in humility so at least I can provide that for you when you lose in November

More Ad Hominem attacks. .. I win again!

Prove it. If there's so much bull in an article you likely didn't even read, prove that all the points made in it were false. Or even a majority of them were false. Find evidence to prove that the bulk of that article rather than a single sentence or statement is false. You're making the claim that the article is bull****, so prove you're speaking from a part of you that's well-informed and not just arrogant and bull-headed

Red Herrings the entire Trump base is clearly desperately clinging to in the hopes they can fool the broader American public. Did you even read that article that had dozens of sources? That was a rhetorical question. If you didn't read it, you're either going to lie and say you did or scramble to be intellectually honest at this moment and actually read it. While I applaud the bravado in your bunker mentality, this crisis is definitively exposing to the American public and the World how big a mistake we made in the 2016 election that we will correct in 7 months time.

I bet myself last night when I posted that article that your response would be the immediate reaction after being posted. I won. You guys are just that predictable.

Narcissistic??? That's seriously all you got on Trump at this point? He's an incompetent moron... and every time you post like this, I legitimately do question more and more just what your motivations might be This article, which retraces the failures over the first 70 days of the coronavirus crisis, is based on 47 interviews with administration officials, public health experts, intelligence officers and others involved in fighting the pandemic. Many spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information and decisions. ... The Trump administration received its first formal notification of the outbreak of the coronavirus in China on Jan. 3. Within days, U.S. spy agencies were signaling the seriousness of the threat to Trump by including a warning about the coronavirus — the first of many — in the President’s Daily Brief. And yet, it took 70 days from that initial notification for Trump to treat the coronavirus not as a distant threat or harmless flu strain well under control, but as a lethal force that had outflanked America’s defenses and was poised to kill tens of thousands of citizens. That more-than-two-month stretch now stands as critical time that was squandered. ... The most consequential failure involved a breakdown in efforts to develop a diagnostic test that could be mass produced and distributed across the United States, enabling agencies to map early outbreaks of the disease, and impose quarantine measures to contain them. At one point, a Food and Drug Administration official tore into lab officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, telling them their lapses in protocol, including concerns that the lab did not meet the criteria for sterile conditions, were so serious that the FDA would “shut you down” if the CDC were a commercial, rather than government, entity. ... In mid-March, as Trump was rebranding himself a wartime president and belatedly urging the public to help slow the spread of the virus, Republican leaders were poring over grim polling data that suggested Trump was lulling his followers into a false sense of security in the face of a lethal threat. The poll showed that far more Republicans than Democrats were being influenced by Trump’s dismissive depictions of the virus and the comparably scornful coverage on Fox News and other conservative networks. As a result, Republicans were in distressingly large numbers refusing to change travel plans, follow “social distancing” guidelines, stock up on supplies or otherwise take the coronavirus threat seriously. ... The CDC learned of a cluster of cases in China on Dec. 31 and began developing reports for HHS on Jan. 1. But the most unambiguous warning that U.S. officials received about the coronavirus came Jan. 3, when Robert Redfield, the CDC director, received a call from a counterpart in China. The official told Redfield that a mysterious respiratory illness was spreading in Wuhan, a congested commercial city of 11 million people in the communist country’s interior. Redfield quickly relayed the disturbing news to Alex Azar, the secretary of HHS, the agency that oversees the CDC and other public health entities. Azar, in turn, ensured that the White House was notified, instructing his chief of staff to share the Chinese report with the National Security Council. ... U.S. officials began taking preliminary steps to counter a potential outbreak. By mid-January, Robert Kadlec, an Air Force officer and physician who serves as assistant secretary for preparedness and response at HHS, had instructed subordinates to draw up contingency plans for enforcing the Defense Production Act, a measure that enables the government to compel private companies to produce equipment or devices critical to the country’s security. Aides were bitterly divided over whether to implement the act, and nothing happened for many weeks. On Jan. 14, Kadlec scribbled a single word in a notebook he carries: “Coronavirus!!!” Despite the flurry of activity at lower levels of his administration, Trump was not substantially briefed by health officials about the coronavirus until Jan.18, when, while spending the weekend at Mar-a-Lago, he took a call from Azar. Even before the heath secretary could get a word in about the virus, Trump cut him off and began criticizing Azar for his handling of an aborted federal ban on vaping products, a matter that vexed the president. ... The CDC had issued its first public alert about the coronavirus Jan. 8, and by the 17th was monitoring major airports in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York, where large numbers of passengers arrived each day from China. In other ways, though, the situation was already spinning out of control, with multiplying cases in Seattle, intransigence by the Chinese, mounting questions from the public, and nothing in place to stop infected travelers from arriving from abroad. Trump was out of the country for this critical stretch, taking part in the annual global economic forum in Davos, Switzerland. He was accompanied by a contingent of top officials including national security adviser Robert O’Brien, who took a trans-Atlantic call from an anxious Azar. ... On Jan. 22, Trump received his first question about the coronavirus in an interview on CNBC while in Davos. Asked whether he was worried about a potential pandemic, Trump said, “No. Not at all. And we have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. . . . It’s going to be just fine.” ... On Jan. 29, Mulvaney chaired a meeting in the White House Situation Room in which officials debated moving travel restrictions to “Level 4,” meaning a “do not travel” advisory from the State Department. Then, the next day, China took the draconian step of locking down the entire Hubei province, which encompasses Wuhan. That move by Beijing finally prompted a commensurate action by the Trump administration. On Jan. 31, Azar announced restrictions barring any non-U.S. citizen who had been in China during the preceding two weeks from entering the United States. ... But by that point, 300,000 people had come into the United States from China over the previous month. There were only 7,818 confirmed cases around the world at the end of January, according to figures released by the World Health Organization — but it is now clear that the virus was spreading uncontrollably. ... A national stockpile of N95 protective masks, gowns, gloves and other supplies was already woefully inadequate after years of underfunding long article. Read it yourself I think I might let you out of the bet just because I feel bad for you and I really and truly hope much of what you say is just the stubborn refusal to lose an argument rather than actually believing most of what you spew.

What a joke. Allen is lower than Darnold and friggin Gardner Minshew???? pffft

It's a good point though... we don't want you any dumber than you are

My comments weren't about him actually wearing a mask. It's his blatant disregard for new mass recommendations by the scientists. Do you seriously not get that? Good one.... Oh wait... is the ***** censored because the word was "congratulate" and in this Big Brother / Trump Loving forum, anything anti Trump is censored? Well then I will congratulate myself. Thanks for that.