It's kind of hard for a patient who is undergoing surgery and receiving anesthesia to wear a mask. Just sayin'.

The NYC hospital where my SO had his kidney transplant has had and continues to have a mask mandate for the hospital, doctors' offices, treatment rooms, testing areas, etc. Mask mandates are helpful if people follow them by wearing decent quality masks.

Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin, "Mission Almost Accomplished":

Richard Stengel
@stengel
The Trump candidacy is not so much a political campaign as what intelligence services call an influence operation, a coordinated effort to use mis-and-disinformation to undermine democratic institutions and processes.

She will be eligible for parole once she has served half her sentence according to Joyce Vance on MSNBC yesterday.

The crews came from all over to help restore power. I read they came from 18 states and Canada. God bless them:

New York crews work to reestablish power along the North Carolina-Tennessee border after Hurricane Helene

In Trade, a Tennessee border town, a crew is working to erect new power lines for the Mountain Electric Cooperative, which provides energy to the region. The workers are from Fredonia, New York, which sits on the Canadian border.

Zael Kravitz operates a 21-ton material handler. He has to drive it carefully, as most of the road has fallen into a newly formed 90-foot ravine.

The cherry-picking is Gals "article", there's no qualification that is quoted.
FFS people, understand the difference between a contextomy and an actual quote.
#57 | Posted by oneironaut

It's not my article. It's an article posted in another thread by Robson, and it's from Fox News:

DEMS need to get real and just st-fu for once instead of perpetually lying and coverup. Mayorkus told us in June everything is under control and will be fine for hurricanes

Can you even imagine just how bad things will get if Kamala were to somehow be in total charge. She is the kind of head bureacrat who has no interest and nothing to offer. Give her a beach chair where she can sleep and relax like daddy Joe. She doesn't give a rats axx about sheep and the needs of people.

www.msn.com

#8 | Posted by Robson

Awesome!
#26 | Posted by LampLighter

Yep, here's a good article about the work they are doing:

Atlantic crews working in U.S. to restore power in Helene's wake
Restoration work is expected to take at least 2 weeks

"So what does that make Melania?"

The question should be: what does that make her speech writers?

Redial:

700 Canadian electrical line workers to the rescue!

"New Brunswick-based companies, Holland Power Services and its partner Gagnon Line Construction, began sending crews to staging areas across the Carolinas early last week, after being contracted by a U.S.-based power utility."

Tony Roma,
Mayorkas, "FEMA is tremendously prepared for hurricane season."
Nothing ambiguous about that. It's a very bold statement. Just admit it - he was and is FOS.
#48 | Posted by BellRinger
Link?
#51 | Posted by Gal_Tuesday

Hmm, it looks like his "very bold statement" was followed by qualitications, which is where we are now:

"FEMA is tremendously prepared," Mayorkas assured reporters in a video from July. "This is what we do, this is what they do, and the key here ... is to also make sure the communities who are potentially impacted are prepar

"And it's not just hurricanes and wildfires " also extreme heat, which certainly some parts of the United States are experiencing," he added. Mayorkas stressed that FEMA has "exercised these muscles, regrettably, year after year" due to the "increasing frequency and gravity of weather events."

However, Mayorkas did argue that FEMA's disaster relief fund remained in a precarious position and needed fresh funding from Congress ahead of an expected heavy hurricane season. In July, he anticipated running out by "mid-August."

Mayorkas stressed the need to be ready for the "consequences" of increasingly severe weather events as climate change continues to exacerbate disasters such as hurricanes and wildfires.

Tony Roma,
Mayorkas, "FEMA is tremendously prepared for hurricane season."
Nothing ambiguous about that. It's a very bold statement. Just admit it - he was and is FOS.
#48 | Posted by BellRinger

Link?

FEMA has money right now but will be running out of it because Congress didn't funded it before they went on vacation:

Lawmakers stunned as disaster funds left out of stopgap bill

A pair of destructive hurricanes along the Gulf Coast, an explosion of wildfires across the West and urgent pleas from Democrats and the White House this month were not enough to persuade Congress to secure new funding for disaster victims.

The House and Senate kicked off a six-week preelection recess Wednesday evening after passing a government funding extension that left out billions of dollars in requested supplemental disaster funding--even as Hurricane Helene, expected to grow into a Category 3 storm by Thursday evening, careened toward the Florida Panhandle.

The bipartisan continuing resolution passed the House on Wednesday on a 341-82 vote and hours later passed the Senate on a 78-18 vote. When President Joe Biden signs it, it will keep federal agencies open through Dec. 20, providing funding extensions for a range of federal programs, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

But some lawmakers from disaster-prone states--on both sides of the aisle--were aghast this week at the lack of additional dollars for FEMA's already depleted disaster relief fund and other federal disaster programs. Many of them were incensed that the typically bipartisan priority had fallen victim to partisan squabbles at such a dire time.

Indeed, as the House and Senate's top four leaders met last weekend to negotiate a deal to keep the government funded, they were forced to acquiesce to the demands of Congress' most conservative fiscal hawks, whose votes were thought to be pivotal for passage. They quietly stripped the CR of almost all supplemental funding, including for FEMA, according to multiple House appropriators.

The closed-door negotiations left many of Congress' biggest disaster aid advocates surprised and disappointed, and even top appropriators with jurisdiction over disaster funding said they were blindsided.

"I would have thought that if you were going to do something, disaster funding would've been one of the starting points. I have no idea how they got to that," Rep. Mark Amodei (R-Nev.), chair of the House Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, which funds FEMA, told POLITICO's E&E News.

"They didn't call me in and ask me for any advice," he said. "Can you believe that?"

The funding omission was made all the more striking by the fact that lawmakers were leaving Washington two days ahead of schedule, in part because of the hurricane.

Rumor: FEMA does not have enough money to provide disaster assistance for Helene.

Fact: FEMA has enough money right now for immediate response and recovery needs. If you were affected by Helene, do not hesitate to apply for disaster assistance as there is a variety of help available for different needs.

Rumor: Funding for FEMA disaster response was diverted to support international efforts or border related issues.

Fact: This is false. No money is being diverted from disaster response needs. FEMA's disaster response efforts and individual assistance is funded through the Disaster Relief Fund, which is a dedicated fund for disaster efforts. Disaster Relief Fund money has not been diverted to other, non-disaster related efforts.

Does not the GOP really care about those affected by Helene because the uber-wealthy donors to the GOP have not been affected?
#42 | Posted by LampLighter

It's all about saying the Biden/Harris adminstration are doing a bad job, so that Trump can rile up his base and use that to run on against Harris.

North Carolina was hit so badly and over such a wide, mostly rural, swath of the state that the clean up is going to be long and difficult. I mentioned earlier that my niece's husband went to Asheville in the first days after the storm to help in the rescue/recovery efforts. Today he went on FB and told people not to believe everything they read FB as the truth. When asked what he meant by that, he said that in WNC no one was stopping volunteers or confiscating supplies. He also said the NG were dropping off food and water to more remote areas. He did say there was some looting in downtown Asheville but not in the rural areas because everyone has a gun.

Leigh Ann Caldwell
@LACaldwellDC

FEMA has put out a website trying to debunk rumors and claims about Hurricane Helene recovery. I'm on the campaign trail -- far from Helene disaster area -- and have heard voters bring up every one of these claims.

Hurricane Helene: Rumor Response

-You assigned a position to me I didn't take and then attacked it.
You are well versed at identifying that move.
#242 | Posted by eberly

So are you.

But McCain, like any republican, has to campaign in the South and pander to the republican base. That means the racists, the bankers, oilmen, pro-lifers......and while he was doing it.....he was all those things.
Bad Bad Bad Bad man...........
#235 | Posted by eberly

The thing I remember most about MCain when it comes to race/religion was the time a woman stood up in one of his rallies and said of Obama, "He's an Arab." To which McCain responded, "No, ma'am. He's a decent family man who I disagree with on the issues." For which he got loudly booed.

McCain: Obama not an Arab, crowd boos

"I didn't say middle of the road. I said middle of the spectrum...which means anywhere inside the boundries of extreme. think about a bell curve with a standard deviation on each side (the extremes). I'm (well ....you really) are placing all those individuals inside the middle."

There are multiple spectrums on a variety of issues. You are acting like there is one spectrum I am "placing all those individuals inside the middle." Again, you are assigning a position to me I didn't take and then attacking it. Congrats!

You're all confused about this. It's just more fun to assign a position so you can attack them.
#230 | Posted by eberly

I'm not confused. You assigned a position to me I didn't take and then attacked it. Kudo!

Doesn't matter. When Jeb, W, Romney, McCAin were all in your face....they were extremists, racists, in bed with the pro-lifers and the KKK and hell bent on destroying this country.
But now? it's slowly all being walked back to the middle of the spectrum......all of them.
Posted by eberly at 2024-10-02 03:49 PM

It doesn't matter to you because you have this theory of the case which you have presented many times before. That's your opinion and your right.

#227 No, not the middle of the spectrum. Just some people who have said Trump and now Vance have gone too far. Nobody on the left thinks Dick Cheney or Liz Cheney, for example, are middle of the road. What we think is that they see the real danger Trump/Vance represent and have put country over party.

"Just like Jeb and Pence. In the rear view mirror, they become moderate and "old school".

No, but f you won't take my word for it, maybe you will listen to Mitt Romney, who I would consider an old school Republican but not a moderate:

Why Mitt Romney once said, I don't know that I can disrespect someone more than JD Vance'

Romney's scathing words come from McKay Coppins's biography "Romney: A Reckoning," an excerpt of which ran in The Atlantic last September. The former Massachusetts governor purportedly shared his thoughts on Vance during one of several interviews with Coppins.

Years earlier, Romney had read "Hillbilly Elegy" and was so impressed that he hosted Vance at his annual Park City summit in 2018, according to Coppins. At the time, Vance was a vocal Trump critic who once called the former president "America's Hitler" and "cultural heroin." But in the lead-up to his 2022 Senate run, Vance made himself over in MAGA's image.

"How can you go over a line so stark as that " and for what?" Romney mused, according to Coppins. "It's not like you're going to be famous and powerful because you became a United States senator. It's like, really? You sell yourself so cheap?"

Romney added: "How do you sit next to him at lunch?"

"Just like Jeb and Pence. In the rear view mirror, they become moderate and "old school".

My impression of Jeb is that he was more moderate, but I would never call Pence a moderate. He did, however, stand up to Trump and protect the Constitution, something Vance has said he wouldn't have done. Couple that with Vance's blatant demagoguery about race, and, no, I will not be changing my opinion of him after the election. I never heard Jeb talk about race like that, and I doubt he would have. W never did.

"I wonder how all the true believer pro-lifers feel about...."
can you define "true believer pro-lifer"?
#191 | Posted by eberly

Yes, of course. True believer pro-lifers are the ones who believe life begins at conception and want to bestow citizenship of embryos at the point. That's why they are against IVF. All those unused frozen embryos are human beings whose rights must be protected from their POV. They want a national abortion band, with no exceptions.