The worms have crossed her blood-brain barrier.
Aug 13, 2021
Today's Deep Thought
Cops are quitting because of a vaccine requirement.
This seems like an elegant solution for a different problem.
@PaulCogan
Today's Prayer
God grant me the serenity to accept that Trump supporters are morons, the courage to tell Trump supporters they're morons, and the wisdom not to be a Trump-supporting moron.
@middleageriot
Eat The Rich
I'm totally uninterested in sob stories about how badly the obscenely wealthy are being treated.
Not when Jeff Bezos could end poverty and homelessness in this country all by himself, and still have more wealth than over 99% of us.
Elizabeth Warren, in WaPo: (pay wall)
Now that the Senate has passed a budget resolution, we’re one step closer to realizing President Biden’s transformational agenda: a once-in-a-generation investment in child care and Medicare, combating climate change and other efforts that would actually make our government work for families. The other half of the package — how to pay for these investments — is equally important.
The already huge gap between the 0.1 percent and everyone else is just getting wider. Billionaire wealth surged by $1.8 trillion from the early days of the pandemic through last month. The 400 richest Americans had more total wealth, as of 2019, than all 10 million Black American households, plus a quarter of Latino households, combined. Yet the ultrarich pay only 3.2 percent of that wealth in taxes, while 99 percent of families pay 7.2 percent. And scores of giant U.S. corporations pay zero.
I’ve proposed measures that would raise more than $5 trillion in revenue — far more than we need to enact the Biden plan. Though not every Democrat agrees with every one of my ideas, Biden campaigned aggressively on a suite of progressive tax policies, and voters embraced these changes at the ballot box. No matter how loudly Washington lobbyists bleat otherwise, progressive tax policies are wildly popular. Americans understand that our tax system has been rigged to reward the rich and powerful at the expense of everyone else. So let’s fix it.
First, it’s time to start taxing wealth, not just income. When Jeff Bezos takes a joyride to space, he isn’t paying for it with his declared income of $80,000. Bezos, who owns The Post, and lots of other billionaires have gamed the system so they have plenty of spending money and close to zero tax obligations. The best option to stop that is a two-cent wealth tax that applies only to the wealthiest 100,000 U.S. households — with a few cents more for the billionaires. Such a wealth tax would raise roughly $3 trillion in revenue over the next decade, without raising taxes on 99.95 percent of Americans. It’s supported by 68 percent of the country, including a majority of Republicans. And there are lots of ways to advance this principle — including a one-time wealth tax that would raise over $1 trillion.
Second, let’s turn to highly profitable giant corporations. In the three years following the 2017 Republican tax cuts, 39 megacorporations, including Amazon and FedEx, reported more than $122 billion in profits to their shareholders while using loopholes, deductions and exemptions to pay zero in federal income taxes.
These companies boosted their stock prices and increased CEO pay by telling their shareholders they raked in hundreds of millions of dollars in profits, while simultaneously telling the Internal Revenue Service that they don’t owe any taxes. The president supports taxing the profits that large companies report to their shareholders. Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) and I have a plan that mirrors this. We would require any company that earns more than $100 million in profits to pay a 7 percent tax on every dollar earned above that amount. Only about 1,300 public companies would pay the tax, raising nearly $700 billion over 10 years.
Finally, rules don’t mean anything if nobody enforces them, so let’s enforce the law. Currently, the top 1 percent of Americans fail to report more than a fifth of their income. The difference between taxes owed and taxes actually paid exceeds an estimated $1 trillion annually.
The superrich get away with not paying their taxes because decades of politically motivated budget cuts have hollowed out the IRS. Since 2010, the agency’s enforcement budget has declined by more than 20 percent, and it has lost one-third of its enforcers. It’s no surprise that audit rates for taxpayers making more than $10 million have plummeted. This should enrage every American who plays by the rules. That’s why over 70 percent of Americans support giving the IRS more resources to make sure the wealthy and corporations aren’t evading taxes.
Biden has proposed giving the IRS about $8 billion in additional annual funding. I’ve suggested a step further: $31.5 billion in permanent annual funding to track down wealthy and corporate tax cheats. The IRS also needs better reporting from banks and other financial institutions so it can sniff out the hidden cash of the ultrarich. These changes could raise as much as $1.75 trillion from tax cheats.
I’ve put these three proposals — a wealth tax, a tax on real corporate profits and closing the tax gap — on the table. There are other ideas worthy of consideration, but the standard should be writing rules that target wealthy freeloaders and corporate grifters and then enforcing those rules. American workers and families don’t want handouts. They want everybody to play by the same rules. The Democrats’ infrastructure plan is about investments and tax fairness — changes that would help build a strong future for not only a handful of people at the top but for everyone. This is what we were sent here to do. It’s time for us to do it.
COVID-19 Update
Yesterday, August 12th, 2021
10,379 people were killed by COVID-19
99.996 % of them were not fully vaccinated
World
New Cases: 712,590 (⬆︎ .35%)
New Deaths: 10,351 (⬆︎ .24%)
USA
New Cases: 143,537 (⬆︎ .39%)
New Deaths: 660 (⬆︎ .10%)
USA Vaccination Scorecard
Total Vaccinations: 196.5 million (59.2%)
Fully Vaccinated: 167.4 million (50.4%)
I guess I have to ask: Why would you not be willing to face up to your fears, and take actions that are so obviously low risk and of minor inconvenience in service to the people of this country?
By behaving like short-sighted selfish bratty children, which puts their families and their friends and their neighbors in danger, "conservatives" are showing us just how shallow and phony their "patriotism" is.
The United States is averaging about half a million new coronavirus vaccinations per day for the first time since June, officials with the White House covid-19 response team said Thursday.
During an afternoon news briefing, the team praised the nation’s vaccination progress. Task force head Jeffrey Zients noted that the average number of 12-to-17-year-olds getting the shots has doubled in the past month as students return to classrooms.
States with the highest virus case rates have made the greatest strides in increasing immunizations, he said. The average number of shots given per day has nearly tripled in Arkansas and quadrupled in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi in the past month.
“We’re getting more shots in arms in the places that need them the most,” Zients said. “That’s what it’s going to take to end this pandemic: more vaccinations, more Americans doing their part and rolling up their sleeve.”
The vaccination news comes as the nation continues to experience an increase in coronavirus cases, hospitalizations and deaths. Ninety percent of U.S. counties are now experiencing substantial or high transmission of the virus, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky said.
“Those at highest risk remain people who have not yet been vaccinated,” she noted.
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Little Sure-Shot
"When a man makes a difficult shot, they call it marksmanship.
When a woman makes the same shot, they call it a trick."
Because of poverty following her father's death, Annie did not regularly attend school as a child, although she did attend later in childhood and in adulthood. On March 15, 1870, at age nine, she was admitted to the Darke County Infirmary along with her sister Sarah Ellen. According to her autobiography, she was put in the care of the infirmary's superintendent, Samuel Crawford Edington, and his wife Nancy, who taught her to sew and decorate.
Beginning in the spring of 1870, she was "bound out" to a local family to help care for their infant son, on the false promise of fifty cents per week (equivalent to $10 in 2020) and an education. The couple had originally wanted someone who could pump water, cook, and who was bigger. She spent about two years in near slavery to them, enduring mental and physical abuse. One time, the wife put Annie out in the freezing cold without shoes, as a punishment because she had fallen asleep over some darning. Annie referred to them as "the wolves". Even in her autobiography, she never revealed the couple's real names.
- snip -
Annie began trapping before the age of seven, and shooting and hunting by age eight, to support her siblings and her widowed mother. She sold the hunted game to locals in Greenville, such as shopkeepers Charles and G. Anthony Katzenberger, who shipped it to hotels in Cincinnati and other cities. She also sold the game to restaurants and hotels in northern Ohio. Her skill paid off the mortgage on her mother's farm when Annie was 15.
- snip -
Annie began trapping before the age of seven, and shooting and hunting by age eight, to support her siblings and her widowed mother. She sold the hunted game to locals in Greenville, such as shopkeepers Charles and G. Anthony Katzenberger, who shipped it to hotels in Cincinnati and other cities. She also sold the game to restaurants and hotels in northern Ohio. Her skill paid off the mortgage on her mother's farm when Annie was 15.
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Aug 12, 2021
Today's BTC
Brian Tyler Cohen on why "overturning the election and reinstating Trump" is not the point of the big lie.
Today's Tweet
Some folks really are beyond hope.
A reader sent me this sign from the Protest outside the Pulaski County Board of Education today #Spellcheck pic.twitter.com/PY5aDInh3a
— Matt Jones (@KySportsRadio) August 11, 2021
COVID-19 Update
Yesterday, August 11th, 2021
10,351 people were killed by COVID-19
99.997 % of them were not fully vaccinated
World
New Cases: 704,693 (⬆︎ .34%)
New Deaths: 10,351 (⬆︎ .24%)
USA
New Cases: 144,635 (⬆︎ .39%)
New Deaths: 614 (⬆︎ .10%)
USA Vaccination Scorecard
Total Vaccinations: 196.1 million (59.1%)
Fully Vaccinated: 167.1 million (50.3%)
It's not only that they're running short on space for COVID cases - they're running short on everything for every other need as well - ER and intake, available beds, equipment, and people to care for the patients. It's not just COVID. The virus is hogging all the resources, so that now they're looking at having to triage every patient to decide who gets what when.
Remember last year, when Italy was agonizing over what to do about having to choose between critical patients who didn't present with COVID vs the one who did? Keep that in mind as we approach having our healthcare system bent to the point of collapse, with the focal point being what to do about the shortage of qualified nursing.
Hospitals struggle with staff shortages in coronavirus hot spots
Just north of Miami, covid-19 patients are flooding into the six Broward County hospitals run by Memorial Healthcare System, as Florida is being slammed with the highest rate of coronavirus admissions in the country. Memorial has enough beds. Not so with nurses.
The hospital system has scrambled to hire 439 travel nurses from as far away as Alaska, and it is offering some of its own nurses well-paid short-term contracts to compete with the appeal of working for lucrative outside agencies. It is beginning to pause some elective surgeries to shift staff to patients sick with covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus.
Even so, the large public health-care system has about 700 nursing vacancies.
“I wake up every night and ask myself, ‘What else can I be doing?’ ” said Maggie Hansen, senior vice president and chief nurse executive at Memorial, where the census of patients with covid-19 has soared from about 100 four weeks ago to 670 on Wednesday.
That predicament is echoed this second pandemic summer in other states, largely across the South, where the virus’s delta variant and relatively low vaccination rates are driving record numbers of coronavirus hospitalizations.
“Every hospital in Arkansas is having major staffing challenges,” said Chris B. Barber, president and chief executive of Jonesboro-based St. Bernards Healthcare. Barber, who is chairman of the Arkansas Hospital Association’s board, said hospital CEOs in the state hold weekly calls about the pandemic. “I can’t get on a call where that’s not the issue — how to staff their hospital,” he said.
According to hospital executives and nursing administrators in several states, the struggle to find enough workers to care for people sick with covid-19 has emerged as a critical problem as other daunting shortages, widespread early in the pandemic, have eased. Once-scarce supplies of protective gear, ventilators and coronavirus tests are now plentiful, hospital officials consistently say.
Finding ways to hire and keep nurses is the main problem, officials say, although some hospitals also are short on respiratory therapists and workers for nutritional services and housekeeping. Some hospitals could enlarge their bed capacity if they had more nurses to tend to the coronavirus patients who would fill them.
The shortages are starting to interfere with other types of care. The disruptions are not as pronounced as during the pandemic’s early months, when hospitals routinely canceled elective procedures and other patients stayed away from needed treatment for fear of contracting the virus. Still, certain hospitals in the hottest of hot spots, such as the medical centers run by Memorial, are slowing other types of care so they can redeploy staff.
“We have begun to dial back on some services,” such as screening colonoscopies and some joint surgeries, said Tracey P. Moffatt, the chief nursing officer and vice president for quality at Ochsner Health System, based in New Orleans. Louisiana has the second-highest rate of coronavirus hospitalizations.
St. Bernards Medical Center, the 440-bed flagship hospital in a system that covers nearly two dozen counties in northeast Arkansas, built a tower with 245,000 square feet for intensive care and surgical services. It opened in December 2019, shortly before the pandemic was declared.
“So, that gave us physical space,” Barber said. Soon after the coronavirus arrived, the hospital drafted a surge plan to add up to 180 beds for covid-19 patients. In the past month, it has used the plan to expand three times — by 95 beds. Barber figures the volume of arriving coronavirus patients would warrant opening perhaps three-dozen more beds, if it had workers to staff them.
The hospital and outlying parts of the St. Bernards system have 350 to 400 job postings on a daily basis out of a workforce of 4,200. That is after hiring almost 30 nurses for the hospital, mostly from the Philippines, through Guardian Healthcare Providers, which recruits workers internationally. The hospital, which never relied on outside nurses before the pandemic, also is using 67 travel nurses.
Hiring through national travel nursing agencies “has been helpful, but it’s extremely competitive,” Barber said. “They are seeing big spikes in demand.”
At Baxter Regional Medical Center, a smaller hospital of 180 beds in the Ozarks of north-central Arkansas, the pandemic was so slow to arrive that the hospital’s two pulmonologists went to help out in New York, an early hot spot, before the first local coronavirus patient arrived in late June last year. On Thanksgiving Day, Baxter hit 34 cases, the peak until late this July, when it reached 45, staying near that level.
Coronavirus patients account for 12 of the 14 people in the intensive care unit. The unit lacks the staff to care for any more, so Baxter was forced to look for another hospital where it could send a neurology patient with an aneurysm and ended up doing the transfer last weekend to a Kentucky hospital, 4½ hours away, because closer ones did not have room, according to Ron Peterson, Baxter’s president and chief executive.
“The issue is staffing, no question about it,” Peterson said.
Baxter is an independent hospital with a thin profit margin in ordinary times and, in a popular retirement area, an uncommonly large number of patients on Medicare, which pays the hospital less than most insurers. To try to keep its own nurses, it has raised their pay by $2 an hour. The dozen travel nurses it has hired, Peterson said, cost three times as much.
It is scheduled to get six more outside nurses soon. “We would . . . hire more if we could even find them,” Peterson said. “At some point, you’ve got to ask, how long can we do this?”
Ochsner, with 24 hospitals in Louisiana and into Mississippi, has 300 travel nurses from all over the country.
“Frankly we could use more — probably another 100 to 150 would help us,” said Moffatt, the chief nursing officer.
During the initial surge that hit New Orleans after Mardi Gras last year, Ochsner expanded the role of a hub that coordinates nurses who float among different hospitals in the system. The hub also became a staffing agency to hire contract nurses from elsewhere and was able to recruit about 500 at first.
“In this fourth wave, it’s become a lot harder to recruit nurses,” Moffatt said. She suspects that some travel nurses who worked through earlier pandemic surges are burned out — or have made enough income that they are taking time off.
With the pool of available travel nurses smaller and coronavirus cases flourishing, she said, hospitals in hot spots “are all at this time drinking from the same pool of people.”
Bidding wars occasionally break out. “We will sometimes see an agency nurse accept at Ochsner,” she said, “and . . . two hours later they pull out and [have] accepted a higher rate.”
The fierce competition means that already-high prices charged by companies that contract out travel nurses have risen.
At a hearing this week before a Texas Senate committee, Esmaeil Porsa, president and chief executive of Harris Health System, a large public health-care network with two hospitals in Houston, said temporary agencies that supply travel nurses typically charged $65 an hour to $145 an hour last year.
A few days ago, Porsa told the legislators, “we were approached by an agency with a rate of $286 an hour for nursing staff.” As of last week, he said, the two hospitals had 133 agency nurses and needed 132 more that the system has been unable to find.
Over the weekend, a nursing shortage prompted one of the Harris safety-net hospitals, Lyndon B. Johnson Hospital in northeast Houston, to close eight of its 24 intensive care beds, and it declared an “internal disaster” Sunday night, in which no patients were admitted for most of a day.
“I am faced with a workforce that is tired, overworked and constantly under siege,” Porsa testified. “I have lost staff to fatigue and retirement. I have lost staff to covid infection. And I have lost staff to . . . quite honestly, ridiculously high-paying jobs by temp agencies.”
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) and Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R) said in recent days that they were reactivating programs from earlier in the pandemic in which state agencies would help hospitals find staff, with reimbursements from federal coronavirus relief laws.
Note: Republicans never again get to self-promote as being shrewd business folk - not when they make stupid politically calculated decisions that needlessly drive up the cost of something as vital as healthcare. These idiots have no fucking clue how an economy actually works. They only care about the part that rewards their big-dollar contributors and puts money in their own pockets.
At Memorial, the public health-care system in Broward County, the number of coronavirus patients this week tied the record set in its hospitals during the pandemic’s surge last summer.
In the year that has elapsed, the system has tried to innovate, seeking ways to train and retain its own staff, and bringing in nurses licensed to work in Florida from Seattle, Vermont and Canada, said Hansen, the chief nurse executive. Some have come from New York. Memorial has already offered a nursing residency program in coordination with a local university. Next week, it is beginning a fellowship program to provide fledgling nurses a year’s specialized training with classes and a mentor.
Training nurses to be specialists, Hansen said, is particularly important because, even before the pandemic, nurses in the baby boomer generation were retiring, and the outflow has quickened because of the rigors of caring for desperately ill people with covid-19.
Memorial furnishes its staff with mental health services — coaching on how to stay resilient, especially as a growing portion of the patients filling hospital beds in this latest surge are younger than before and probably would not be in a hospital if they had been vaccinated against the virus. Memorial’s nurses “are experiencing PTSD already,” Hansen said. “They are seeing things they can’t unsee when they go home.
“It sounds dire, but we are going to get through it,” she said. “It’s just going to be a long haul. We’ve become accustomed to the uncertain aspect of covid.”
Aug 11, 2021
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