Covid-19 PSA Sing-a-Long

🎶Don't spread droplets all over the place, just cover your freakin' face🎶 #CoverYourFreakinFace #WearAMask 😷🙄 pic.twitter.com/KsdLbrkRkj

— Randy Rainbow (@RandyRainbow) June 29, 2020

Thanks, Randy!

Why are Americans putting up with this?

WaPo has an editorial this morning about how poor leadership has allowed the virus to flourish, necessitating more lockdowns and layoffs even though the country has already done this once at great sacrifice.

The road back will be even harder now than it was in March. The United States is experiencing multiple outbreaks from California to Florida that will seed more infections in the weeks and months ahead. The hope that summer’s warm weather would help, that the sacrifices made in March and April would be sufficient, that a miracle cure would arrive — all have been dashed. The United States faces a crisis unseen in recent generations, and if it deepens, the pain won’t be only in illness and death but also in education and economics.

Yesterday, the European Union told us that Americans are not welcome.

I’ve been an American all my life and this is not what I signed up for. We are supposed to be the most developed of developed nations. We were supposed to be better, stronger, than the old world. We were decades ahead of China and the rest of Asia.

All that is gone in the span of 3.5 years. All gone.

Don’t bother defending Trump and the Republicans. They did not rise to the occasion. They did not show their can-do spirit. They didn’t use the ingenuity and resources of the federal government that we all pay through the nose for.

All they did was beat their chests, whine about their freedom and stop local officials from enforcing mask requirements.

There’s something profoundly shameful about putting your own selfish individualism above the needs of others during a pandemic. But there’s no looking away from where we are as a nation. The rest of the world looks on with horror and the innocent among us can’t leave. They can’t leave their houses let alone the country. Now our chances of getting the virus from a once weekly trip to grocery story are even higher than they were in April.

Well done. Can you feel my revulsion and disgust? Interpret that any way you want. I’m not defending myself anymore. That applies to anyone of any party who is shocked and appalled by what we are witnessing. That number irrespective of party, is growing.

If you still support the “president”, you need help.

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Put this in the category of “thinking five impossible things before breakfast”:

I’ve been trying to figure out why the administration is so hell bent on dismantling Obamacare during a pandemic. Count me as not one of Obamacare’s biggest fans. I am securely on the side of the hard working working class, gig workers, self-employed and those unfortunates between jobs who get stuck in that no man’s land where part time employment makes you too rich for Medicaid but too poor for a subsidy. Yeah, wrap your head around that. I had to one year and it was ridiculous.

But I digress.

So, why would you want to get rid of the only lifeline some Americans have to health care, no matter how flawed, during a pandemic?

Well, leave it to the Russians paying the taliban to pick off American soldiers and the president doing a shrug to make me have an even more disturbing thought about this.

If you are the powerful who have a country in your jaws and you don’t like the idea of contributing some of your dragon hoard to universal healthcare, there are a couple of ways to make sure the pool of people you are mandated by law to cover is low:

1.) you can get rid of the mandate.

2.) you can make sure that a convenient pandemic gets rid of as many elderly people on Medicare and as many people with pre-existing conditions as possible who take advantage of the ACA protections. That right there will save you soooooo much money. Lots of old people dying along with the morbidly obese who tend to have a lot of expensive problems. And don’t forget the cancer patients who just might survive with the pricey chemo.

The pandemic can look like a budget measure if you’re in that psychopathically wealthy and powerful category.

I’d let it rage through the country and take out as many inconvenient people as possible. What do I care? I’ll have myself and my staff tested everyday, have my own stash of PPE and hide away in my mountain lodge somewhere west of Boise.

I can just hear you saying, “that’s f{#%ing crazy RD. It’s evil. No one would be stupid enough to try something like that and get away with it.”

Yeah, probably I just need more coffee.

Probably.

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So I started to look around for locations west of Boise where I might hide my mountain lodge compound and stumbled upon Joseph, Oregon, which looks gobsmackingly beautiful:

I have to check the National and state parks in the vicinity… since I can’t take that walking tour of Scotland this year. 🙄