Debris from collapsed building at West 33rd & St. Rocco Court blocks the street.
Sunday, March 29, 2020
Cleveland, Ohio [Sunday-March 29, 2020][5]
Debris from collapsed building at West 33rd & St. Rocco Court blocks the street.
Cleveland, Ohio [Sunday-March 29, 2020][4]
Cleveland, Ohio [Sunday-March 29, 2020].. At West 33rd street & St. Rocco Court, a building collapses. No injuries/deaths reported. The tower in the background also bricks missing from the top.
Cleveland, Ohio [Sunday-March 29, 2020][2]
Windy/rainy day takes its toll on building at West 33rd street & St. Rocco Court.
Cleveland, Ohio [Sunday-March 29, 2020]
Building at West 33rd Street & St. Rocco Court succumbs to high winds & heavy rain at approximately 4:00 pm edt.
Saturday, March 28, 2020
asmPolitics-324 [President Barack Hussein Obama & CDC Funding]
The Obama administration repeatedly sought to cut hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), yearly budget requests show -- seemingly undercutting former Vice President Joe Biden's repeated attacks on the Trump White House for its pandemic preparedness.
Numerous Democrats, including Biden, have falsely claimed that Trump slashed the CDC budget, and Biden has suggested that he would never pursue similar cuts. The Associated Press has noted that those claims "distort" the facts, with FactCheck.org pointing out that CDC funding has actually increased under the current administration, largely because Congress insisted on maintaining funding levels for both CDC and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Nevertheless, speaking to ABC News' “This Week” on March 1, Biden claimed: “They’ve cut the funding for the CDC.” On Friday, Biden stepped up his attacks, writing on Twitter: "Donald Trump's careless, shortsighted actions left our nation ill-prepared and now Americans are paying the price."
In its fiscal year 2013 budget, while Biden was vice president, the Obama administration sought a total funding level of $5.9 billion from the CDC, or a $569 million cut from the 2012 budget of $6.46 billion. In fiscal year 2015, the Obama administration wanted a $414 million cut year-over-year, and again in the fiscal year 2017 budget, the Obama administration looked to eliminate $251 million in CDC funding.
The proposed cuts take into account money budgeted for The Prevention and Public Health Fund, which was established under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 to bolster the nation's health care system. When not including that fund, the Obama administration sought CDC cuts in five of its eight years.
Some of the Obama administration's cuts specifically took aim at the CDC's preparedness initiatives.
“Now, President Obama’s 2012 budget calls for paring some of that spending. Funding for a public health emergency preparedness program run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was cut by about $72 million below fiscal 2010 levels in the budget proposal.” The Wall Street Journal reported in 2012.
Those cuts would later intensify. “The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) takes a hit of about $270 million in the Obama administration's proposed fiscal year 2014 budget, including significant cuts to biodefense and emergency preparedness programs," according to a 2013 post from the Center For Infectious Disease Research And Policy.
Then, in 2015, President Obama called for $50 million in budget cuts amid a measles outbreak -- and White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest's claims that ObamaCare would pick up the slack were rated false by The Washington Post's fact-checker.
“Chipping away at 317 funds — even if the majority of cuts are going toward vaccine purchases — jeopardizes the immunization system in general, public-health officials and advocates say. It restricts the ability of local public health departments to prepare for and respond to outbreaks and educate providers, Chris Aldridge, senior director for infectious disease at the National Association of County and City Health Officials, told The Washington Post in 2015.
During the current coronavirus pandemic, money that government disease detectives first tapped to fight the latest outbreak was a congressional fund created for health emergencies. Congress, which has strongly supported the CDC and NIH, rejected a Trump administration budget that might have cut their funding.
During the current coronavirus pandemic, money that government disease detectives first tapped to fight the latest outbreak was a congressional fund created for health emergencies. Congress, which has strongly supported the CDC and NIH, rejected a Trump administration budget that might have cut their funding.
While some public health experts have said a bigger concern than White House budgets is the steady erosion of a CDC grant program for state and local public health emergency preparedness — the front lines in detecting and battling new disease. But that decline was set in motion by a congressional budget measure that predates Trump.
“The CDC’s response has been excellent, as it has been in the past,” said John Auerbach, president of the nonpartisan Trust for America’s Health, which works with government at all levels to improve the nation’s response to high-risk health crises. Some Democrats have charged that Trump decimated the nation’s public health leadership, but Auerbach said CDC’s top scientific ranks have remained stable the past three years.
And, it emerged this week United States was ranked the best-prepared country in the world to handle a pandemic in late 2019 by the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security (JHCHS) -- an assessment seemingly at odds with claims by Democrats that the Trump administration left the country vulnerable to the ongoing coronavirus outbreak.
The Global Health Security Index was "developed with guidance from an international panel of experts from 13 countries, with research by the Economist Intelligence Unit" from 2018 to 2019, The Washington Post reported last year. "More than 100 researchers spent a year collecting and validating publicly available data.”
At the same time, the paper noted that the U.S. score was still not perfect, and that "factors driving down the U.S. score include the risks of social unrest and terrorism, and low public confidence in government."
Trump's campaign has argued in recent days that misinformation may be one of the leading causes of that lack of confidence. For example, Trump's team has pointed to Biden's claims that "no one on the National Security Council staff was put in charge" of pandemic preparedness, based on a report that in May 2018, then-National Security Adviser John Bolton eliminated the NSC’s Office of Global Health Security and Biodefense in a reorganization effort.
Rear Adm. R. Timothy Ziemer reportedly was ousted as senior director, and no replacement was named. But, FactCheck.org has determined that the matter amounted to a reorganization, and that “some team members [of the NSC pandemic office] were shifted to other groups, and others took over some of [the top official’s] duties.”
Separately, the Biden team has repeatedly argued that the president once referred to coronavirus as a "hoax." That claim has been refuted by numerous fact-checkers, including the Post's, which found that Trump was clearly referring to Democrats' efforts to blame him for the pandemic, not the virus itself. Biden's advisors nonetheless were repeating the claim on Friday.
Further, a recent report by Reuters that the U.S. had recently terminated a CDC position in China was widely cited by Democrats and reporters as evidence of a lack of preparedness, and formed the basis for a reporter's question at a recent White House coronavirus briefing.
But, the article itself made clear that experts didn't think the move had anything to do with the spread of coronavirus in the United States.
"One disease expert told Reuters he was skeptical that the U.S. resident adviser would have been able to get earlier or better information to the Trump administration, given the Chinese government’s suppression of information," the outlet noted.
“In the end, based on circumstances in China, it probably wouldn’t have made a big difference,” former CDC epidemiologist and Emory University professor Scott McNabb told Reuters.
“The problem was how the Chinese handled it," McNabb continued. "What should have changed was the Chinese should have acknowledged it earlier and didn’t.”
asmPolitics-323 [Andrew Cuomo is Criticized]
(Tea Party 247) – The massive spread of the coronavirus has turned the entire world upside down and has left destruction wherever it has landed. Not just with a person’s physical health, but with the health of the economy as well, putting tons of people out of work due to illness, quarantine, and self-isolation measures meant to flatten the curve of infection and prevent overload at the hospital.
Liberals have been using this particular outbreak as a political weapon against President Trump, ripping him apart for his response to the pandemic, stating he’s not been adequately prepared. However, it seems the real individual who ought to be getting raked over the coals is New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
Here’s why.
Via Gateway Pundit:
It has also been reported a ventilator lottery would be an option in a pandemic crisis. Now with the COVID-19 Chinese coronavirus overwhelming New York hospitals, Cuomo is begging for ventilators.Life comes at you fast, as the saying goes, or as the case may be in this era of a viral pandemic, death comes at you fast. Sadly it is the latter for the citizens of New York who will pay the price for Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s (D) 2015 decision to not fix a shortfall and buy the recommended 16,000 ventilators to shore up the state’s stockpile in case of a pandemic. Cuomo spent more money than the cost of the ventilators on a solar panel boondoggle, reports former New York Lieutenant Governor Betsy McCaughey (R) in a syndicated column published this past week. McCaughey reports the Cuomo administration decided instead to establish “triage officers” to decide in a crisis who would get a ventilator and who would be left to die.
So Cuomo had an opportunity to ensure the state of New York had supplies that would have helped prevent the spread of a disease like the coronavirus and didn’t take it. Where is all of the criticism of this poorly made decision? Why aren’t leftist news media folk tearing him a new one over this?
Is this once again a case of being on the “correct side” of a political ideology earning someone a free pass? More than likely.
That task force came up with rules that will be imposed when ventilators run short. Patients assigned a red code will have the highest access, and other patients will be assigned green, yellow or blue (the worst) depending on a “triage officer’s” decision. In truth, a death officer. Let’s not sugarcoat it. It won’t be up to your own doctor.NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo gestures toward a hospital ventilator during an interview with CNN New Day co-host Alisyn Camerota, March 19, screen image.…After learning that the state’s stockpile of medical equipment had 16,000 fewer ventilators than New Yorkers would need in a severe pandemic, Gov. Andrew Cuomo came to a fork in the road in 2015. He could have chosen to buy more ventilators. Instead, he asked his health commissioner, Howard Zucker to assemble a task force and draft rules for rationing the ventilators they already had.
Cuomo could have purchased the additional 16,000 needed ventilators for $36,000 apiece or a total of $576 million in 2015. It’s a lot of money but less than the $750 million he threw away on a boondoggle “Buffalo Billion” solar panel factory. When it comes to state budget priorities, spending half a percent of the budget on ventilators is a no brainer.Now the pandemic is actually here. Cuomo’s grim reaper rules will be applied. New York City’s deputy commissioner for disease control Demetre Daskalakis is anticipating “some very serious difficult decisions.” So far, in New York City, 1 out of every 4 people with a confirmed case has been hospitalized, and 44% of them have needed a ventilator.The task force claimed there was no point in buying ventilators because there’s also a shortage of doctors and nurses trained to use them. Five years ago, that problem could have been fixed, too. Even now, the National Disaster Medical System can send staff to hot spots like New York…
Just before the virus started tearing up New York, the NY Times reported on Februrary 27 about a shortage of ventilators and the rationing plan that included a lottery.
This is what Cuomo’s bad decision resulted in, ladies and gentlemen:
Across New York, there were 7,241 ventilators in acute care settings, and another 1,750 stockpiled for use in an emergency, according to a 2015 state report. The report noted that the supply of ventilators would be inadequate for a pandemic on the scale of the 1918 flu outbreak.The task force that issued the report devised a formula, relying partially on medical criteria, to help hospitals decide who would get ventilators and who would not. It also envisioned a lottery system in some instances. And age could play a role, with children being given preference over adults.
As if that’s not enough to enrage you, check out his comments concerning how many ventilators the state will need to combat the spread of the virus via an appearance he made on CNN March 19:
Cuomo: “That’s the war time mentality. You can’t buy a ventilator right now. Globally, you can’t buy them. We’re going to have to make them or make something like them. And that’s why the federal government is stepping up and ordering the manufacturers to now come together and make this happen is going to be imperative.”
“That’s the war time mentality,” @NYGovCuomo says on Trump invoking the Defense Production Act to expand production of hospital masks and more amid coronavirus.
The need for the federal government to step up and order manufacturers to make this happen is “imperative,” he adds.
29 people are talking about this
Just this past Friday Cuomo, speaking to reporters, said, “It’s ventilators, ventilators, ventilators. That is the greatest need.”
Seriously?
This man had the opportunity to ensure his state was stockpiled and prepared for just such an emergency and screwed the pooch. He needs to be held accountable for his failure, but the media is too busy aiming all of their energy at President Trump.
Cuomo will likely get a pass from the mainstream media and that’s tragic.
Source: thegatewaypundit.com/2020/03/ny-gov-cuomo-rejected-buying-recommended-16000-ventilators-in-2015-for-pandemic-established-death-panels-and-lottery-instead/
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
after the last H1N1. He did not replenish the stocks so he needs to shut his mouth about shortages.
It appears that Cuomo in a bit short in the competence area as well as his minions. Sadly, that is the
Democrats for you. They screw up everything they touch and then they try to blame someone else.
Obviously that trait is alive and well in the party. To hear the Democrats tell it, they can do no wrong.
They are the shining saviors of the world, Yea, right. The only thing the Democrats care about saving
is their own a** after they have fouled up everything else. Pelosi and Schumer have really brought out
the anger in me.
And he shud have the guts to admit his error!