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VA's wanna-be-Trump governor Youngkin shows his true colors - again...The sunny, basketball-loving, neighbor-next-door guy attacked a 17yr old h.s. student in a Tweet, including posting the student's name/picture, because the student dared to point out part of VA's Executive Mansion where enslaved workers once lived.
The student's info came from an NPR story, which was retracted by NPR and corrected by the student.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/02/06/youngkin-twitter-attack-student/
VA's Glenn Younkin channels TFG - bully whoever attacks is straight out of TFG's playbook.
Good. It's time to end that childish temper tantrum!
I'm surprised Jimmy Carter said out loud what many people believe...As for TFG's constant denial of Russian help - Thou dost protest too much, methinks.
Thanks.
Link? - TIA
Agree.
Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institute on C-SPAN this morning discussed Ukraine-Russia tensions...
https://www.c-span.org/video/?517528-3/washington-journal-michael-ohanlon-discusses-ukraine-russia-tensions-russia-amp-chinas-growing#!
One has class, is intelligent and knew how to be presidential, the other - well, you know.
Watching TFG do the sword dance in SA always cracks me up!
The LP is still very clever.
Very funny! - too bad spike strips weren't placed behind rear wheels.
There ya go!
NATIONAL REVIEW
RNC SHOULD TAKE A LESSON FROM MIKE PENCE
By THE EDITORS
February 5, 2022 10:12 AM
The Republican National Committee has voted to formally censure Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for “actions in their positions as members of the January 6th Select Committee not befitting Republican members of Congress.” This is both morally repellent and politically self-destructive.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/02/rnc-should-take-a-lesson-from-mike-pence/
In my area more than one NPR outlet is avail - in the Richmond area, NPR does not carry as many informative programs as in the Charlottesville area, hence my house/car radios are set at the C'ville station.
Scott Simon made an excellent point...
The political and social divides which so many decry may begin with who can and those who can't afford access to a wide-range of fact-checked information.
Disinformation, of course, is utterly free.
AMERICANS GET SICKER AS OMICRON STALLS EVERYTHING FROM HEART SURGERIES TO CANCER CARE
February 04, 2022
Will Stone - NPR
After every shift in his Seattle emergency department, Dr. Matt Beecroft comes away with some new story of how the omicron surge is making his patients sicker.
And not just from the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.
Instead, it's the delays and disruptions in medical care — a consequence of overcrowded and short-staffed hospitals — that are leading to, at times, life-threatening complications.
"It can be just heartbreaking," says Beecroft, who recalls one recent patient of his who had a heart attack. "She had been scheduled for a cardiac bypass," a procedure done to improve blood flow when there's an obstructed or partially blocked artery, "but that surgery had been canceled."
Beecroft, who's affiliated with the American College of Emergency Physicians, told two other doctors about the patient. That's when it became clear to him that this was far from an isolated event: "Between the three of us, we had seen four patients who had cardiac complications from not being able to get a cardiac surgery."
There's no way to quantify how many Americans are now suffering serious, if not irreversible, harm to their health because hospitals are buckling under the weight of the omicron variant of the coronavirus. But doctors say the consequences are far-reaching, given how many procedures have been postponed.
"The impact on surgery is incredibly broad," says Dr. Patricia Turner, executive director of the American College of Surgeons. "It's going to be felt for a long time."
The bottom line is that "we're seeing patients suffer," says Beecroft. "Everything from major traumas to heart conditions to cancers needing an operation are being affected."
"Elective" surgeries are still essential
As the omicron variant hit in full force last month, hospitals all over the U.S. started pausing "elective" procedures — a term that can be misunderstood to mean surgery that is optional or not needed, but in fact refers to essential, time-sensitive procedures.
An elective procedure is one that doctors can schedule, says Turner. "It may not need to happen today, but scheduling one's cancer operation for this week is very different than having it put off for a month."
The decision comes down to resources. Patients have grappled with unexpected delays periodically throughout the coronavirus pandemic. But omicron swept through the country with incredible speed, filling hospitals with more COVID-19 patients than ever before and sidelining many doctors and nurses at a time when the health care workforce was already depleted.
In many places, the surge has backed up the entire health care system. Hospital beds are filled, which in turn prevents patients who come to the emergency room from being admitted quickly. That leaves little room for someone who needs a hospital stay after a procedure. Some states, such as Washington, have ordered hospitals to pause non-urgent surgeries to save room, while others have left it up to individual hospitals.
The backlog reaches all the way to offices for surgeons like Sam Durrani. Some of his patients developed serious complications waiting out the surge.
"Our patients are getting a raw deal," says Durrani, who practices at several hospitals in Phoenix.
He explained how one of his patients needed gallbladder surgery and came down with a serious infection during the delay.
"She was in pain all weekend, didn't want to go to the ER, wanted to wait to see us in the office, but we cannot admit patients to the hospital," Durrani says.
Another of Durrani's patients whose surgery was delayed had a paraesophageal hernia — a condition in which the stomach can protrude into the chest — that eventually caused a loss of blood flow to the patient's stomach.
In both circumstances, what was once an elective surgery he could schedule had become an emergency. Durrani says the only option was to send these patients to the emergency department.
"It's incredibly frustrating because those patients should have had their surgery and they should have been just fine," he says.
Cancer elicits particular concerns
Treatments like chemotherapy are being postponed along with operations to remove tumors, says Arif Kamal, an oncologist at Duke University and chief patient officer for the American Cancer Society.
"We're seeing cancer patients come to the hospital who are sicker and a bit later in their course [of disease] than we would typically see them," says Kamal.
On top of that, a critical shortage of blood has led to more stringent requirements for which patients get blood than Kamal has seen in his career. "We wait for their hemoglobin to get even lower than we normally have done before."
All of this is compounded by the fact that cancer patients are reluctant to go to the emergency department in the first place — out of concern they might catch COVID-19 from the other patients who are there, Kamal says.
"For someone with a very low immune system, who may be receiving cancer treatment, that's a scary proposition," he says. "So they're waiting for their pain to get to 10 out of 10," which means excruciating pain, "or some complication to get truly bad."
The consequences are enormous for those who do contract COVID-19 because they typically need to wait out a 20-day quarantine before getting their procedure. Several of Kamal's patients with aggressive cancers have dealt with these painful delays.
"Once you give it an opportunity of a month or two to grow uncontrolled, it can be really difficult to get control back," he says.
Dire consequences
Hospitals have processes for evaluating which operations can't afford to wait. The American College of Surgeons publishes guidelines for decision-making around elective surgeries.
But with hospitals inundated, it can sometimes be hard to predict exactly what the downstream effects will be for patients, says Eric Stecker, a cardiologist at Oregon Health & Science University who chairs the Science and Quality Committee for the American College of Cardiology.
"We cannot always tell the future," he says. "For some cardiovascular conditions, delaying elective care by two weeks to three months can really adversely impact patients."
A striking example comes from the spring of 2020, when hospitals deferred care in anticipation of a huge wave of patients. That wave didn't materialize in some parts of the U.S. until later.
Among those who had their procedures delayed were patients with aortic stenosis — a narrowing of the heart valve that restricts blood flow into the aorta. A study of 77 patients at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City found that eventually about a third of the patients who had their procedures delayed ended up with a serious cardiac event. Two of them died. In the three months before the surge of COVID-19, no patients died while awaiting the same procedure, the authors noted.
Stecker says this made it clear to hospitals that these particular patients need to be at the top of the priority list and not have their care put off, but "there are many other conditions for which we've not recognized that and are probably being inappropriately delayed or deferred."
An international study of more than 20,000 cancer patients early in the pandemic found that 10% of patients who were awaiting surgery during lockdowns did not receive surgery after a median follow-up of 23 weeks. Researchers in the U.K. and Canada analyzed more than 30 studies to estimate the impact of delayed treatment for a variety of cancers. They concluded that over the course of a year, 12-week delays in breast cancer surgery could lead to 6,100 preventable deaths from breast cancer in the U.S. alone.
Omicron cases are now falling in the U.S. overall, but the pressure on hospitals will not evaporate so quickly, doctors say. Hospitalizations generally trail infections by a week or two, and critically ill patients can require lengthy hospital stays.
And while some hospitals have restarted elective surgeries, others are still too overwhelmed to do so.
"Most facilities have lists of hundreds of people who have had procedures or non-urgent care delayed," says Dr. Tammy Lundstrom, senior vice president and chief medical officer for Trinity Health, which has hospitals in 25 states.
Like so many doctors, Matt Beecroft sees patients stuck in a painful limbo — unsure of when they'll be able to get care. One in particular stands out to him. He'd come into the emergency department for recurrent, worsening headaches related to a tumor that needed to be cut out but wasn't yet, because the hospital where the surgery was scheduled was too full.
"He got his surgery canceled a couple of times," says Beecroft. "He told me, 'You know, this was a really bad time to get cancer.' "
Copyright NPR 2022.
https://www.wbur.org/npr/1078029696/americans-get-sicker-as-omicron-stalls-everything-from-heart-surgeries-to-cancer
REMEMBER READING THE PAPER?
February 5, 20228:02 AM ET
Scott Simon - NPR
Heard on Weekend Edition Saturday
The road to free information and opinions seems to run into a lot of paywalls.
Want to finish reading an article? You can, but only if you subscribe for just $1 for 3 months, which becomes $11.99 a month thereafter, and into perpetuity, until your credit card expires. Even if it's after you do.
I have a strong, even personal interest in paying journalists fairly. But the cost most people have to pay these days if they want to try to stay informed and enrich their minds with a range of opinions is pretty steep.
It's become harder to read more than an article or two in most publications, which may no longer be the word. News sites, from The New York Times and Washington Post to the Des Moines Register, insist you subscribe. So do Ebony, The New Yorker, The Economist, Rolling Stone and opinion journals, including The Nation and National Review, and sports-reporting sites. And of course, there are proliferating newsletters and extra-access-plus plans, as news broadcasters begin their own subscription services. They don't crave an audience, so much as what they call a "customer base."
"You can't do much web grazing of quality content these days without a paywall clanging shut on you," Jack Shafer wrote last year in Politico. "What delights publishers about subscriptions is what everybody from Amazon to Spotify to the Dollar Shave Club to Netflix love—the annuity-like reliability of steady revenue."
But the cost of inducing people to subscribe is to make news, information, and a range of opinions available to only those who have the means to afford and receive them online. This skews the audience toward what Nikki Usher, a University of Illinois College of Media associate professor, calls the "rich, white, and blue," as in left-leaning.
The political and social divides which so many decry may begin between those who can, and those who can't afford access to a wide range of fact-checked, accurate information.
Disinformation, of course, is utterly free.
Newspapers and magazines often got ink on your fingers. But they were cheap. Anyone with pocket change, rich, poor, students or job-seekers, could buy a copy of a magazine with Princess Diana or Oprah Winfrey on the cover, or a newspaper when the headline said MAN WALKS ON MOON, or, yes, HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR.
The internet has made news and views of all kinds, from all over the world, available on screens we can keep in our pockets. But so many paywalls have pulled costly shades over those screens.
https://www.npr.org/2022/02/05/1078377406/opinion-remember-reading-the-paper
Is it really that important to you?
Ronna dropped the "Romney" name sometime last year at TFG's request...
https://theweek.com/speedreads/815360/trump-reportedly-asked-rnc-chair-ronna-mcdaniel-drop-romney-from-name-did
TFG could not care less about this country or the GOP for that matter, yet the GOP sells its soul for his approval.
Maybe Pence is reading polls that show TFG's influence in the GOP is dropping.
What does it mean when the GOP censures Reps Cheney and Kinzinger?...Liz has raised a truck-load of campaign money, while the puppet the RNC is putting up is hardly known...Adam has already announced he is retiring; he doesn't need the GOP's un-American nonsense.
The GOP has struggled to refrain the Jan 6 insurrection since Jan 7.
SEN. MITT ROMNEY CONDEMS GOP LEADERS' MOVE TO CENSURE LIZ CHENEY AND ADAM KINZINGER FOR "SEEKING TRUTH" ABOUT JAN. 6 ATTACK
Today at 10:51 a.m. EST
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/02/04/sen-mitt-romney-condemns-gop-leaders-move-censure-reps-cheney-kinzinger-seeking-truth-about-jan-6-attack/
She sounded like a NYr - tell it like it is!
Youngkin will prove to be a phony - he's already backpaddling on his promise to eliminate the 1.5% grocery tax - a tax needed to fund our schools.
I have not followed it closely - if the Advisory Board has increased, why can't they vote DeJoy out?
XI AND PUTIN URGE NATO TO RULE OUT EXPANSION AS UKRAINE TENSIONS RISE
Chinese and Russian leaders call on the West to abandon "cold war" approach at pre-Olympic meeting
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/04/xi-jinping-meets-vladimir-putin-china-russia-tensions-grow-west
Pres Biden has to add members to the Advisory Board to dump DeJoy.
Read the Room Buddy! - good for that shopper.
I don't understand how the Nov and Dec numbers could have been that far off the mark...Sec'ty of Labor Marty Walsh was on CNBC this morning and tried to explain the Nov/Dec numbers - he confused me even more.
WALMART in turn pressured American companies whose products are found on WM shelves to lower their prices with the threat of shutting them out, which usually resulted in workers in these American companies taking a hit on pay/benefits.
Competition for workers is forcing companies to increase wages - CNBC mentioned this morning AMAZON cannot hire people fast enough to keep up with their growth.
Average wage of AMAZON warehouse worker is $16.22/hr...
https://www.indeed.com/cmp/Amazon.com/salaries/Warehouse-Worker#:~:text=How%20much%20does%20a%20Warehouse%20Worker%20make%20at,%2416.01%2C%20which%20is%206%25%20above%20the%20national%20average.
As wages for younger workers increases, will it affect college enrollment?
Good news on the economy...467,000 jobs added - 125,000 was expected.
Trump talked car salesman out of running for Senate from OHIO to replace retiring Senator Rob Portman (R)...
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/ohio-senate-candidate-suspends-campaign-after-talking-with-trump/ar-AATsfDD?ocid=undefined
Remember when Repub candidates had law/history degrees?
Just read this story in the WP - Jamie Diamon needs to clean house!
Thanks - ergo is right, it is hysterical.
the undereducated are intellectually lazy and are afraid of change, making them the perfect mark for TFG.
two-thirds? - That explains why TFG was elected in 2016.
Delay tactic.