The Democrat leading the nation’s biggest state is facing a raging pandemic, vaccine distribution problems and a nascent recall drive.
LOS ANGELES — California is running so low on oxygen that officials are telling emergency crews to conserve supplies. Ambulances in Los Angeles are backed up outside emergency rooms, sometimes for hours. And the coronavirus vaccine distribution remains so disjointed that a freezer failure that forced immediate inoculations of hundreds of people in Northern California — inmates, older people, and some people on the street — was hailed as an improvement.
Californians are frustrated, tired and sick. And in the midst of the unfolding catastrophe, Gov. Gavin Newsom — confronting a burgeoning recall effort, on top of a year of wildfires and civil unrest — is under siege.
“Nobody has been dealt a tougher hand than Gavin Newsom,” Gray Davis, the former California Democratic governor who was recalled in 2003, said in an interview. “Look, I had the energy crisis and a recession. He has a pandemic we haven’t seen for 100 years. He has the fallout from that pandemic, racial injustice, wildfires, and I think I’m leaving something out. But nobody, no living governor, has had to experience as many crises as him.”
Halfway through his first term, the Democratic governor of the nation’s most populous state is scrambling to control a pandemic that has crippled the southern half of California since Thanksgiving. The pandemic has given Republicans, long sidelined in this heavily Democratic state, a rare opportunity to wound him. And Newsom is laboring to keep the state — and his own political future — intact.
“People are really pissed off,” said Ted Costa, the anti-tax crusader who was the original proponent of the Davis recall. He signed Newsom recall papers last week in the parking lot of a Home Depot in Thousand Oaks. “Things can get hot quick, and I don’t know if Newsom realizes what happens when a groundswell hits.”
For Newsom, an ambitious Democrat with a national profile, the extent of the problem is unclear. The last Republican to win a gubernatorial election in California was Arnold Schwarzenegger, and that was nearly 15 years ago. When Newsom won the governorship in 2018, he carried the state by nearly 24 percentage points. His public approval rating last year stood at 60 percent.
Yet the pandemic has worsened in recent weeks. And the frame of reference through which Californians view Newsom is about to change dramatically when Joe Biden replaces Donald Trump in the White House. No longer benefiting from a reliable foil in Washington, the bar of public approval for Newsom — and for Democratic governors across the country — is likely to be raised.
“For the last couple of years during Newsom’s tenure, people have been saying the nation’s going in the wrong direction and the state, compared to the nation, is going in the right direction,” said Mark Baldassare, a veteran pollster and president of the Public Policy Institute of California. Now, without a Republican president to judge Newsom against, he said, "It certainly changes that point of contrast."
Newsom has met the surging virus and its economic fallout with a series of proposals intended to help the most vulnerable Californians and to get schoolchildren back into classrooms. Last month, he proposed a $2 billion effort to reopen elementary schools for the state’s youngest students, with additional protective equipment and testing. Earlier last week, Newsom proposed giving the state’s low-income workers $600 “rapid cash” grants. And in a boon for his political fortunes, the state’s budget, despite dire predictions, is so healthy that Newsom released a budget proposal on Friday that calls for record spending while adding billions of dollars to the state’s reserve accounts.
metmike: He can't blame President Trump anymore for many of the incompetent, dishonest and bad decisions he made recently.
This is one of the examples. California had the most severe COVID restrictions in the country early last Summer but was near the worst for COVID cases..........because they led the nation...................IN PROTESTING. They never did tell us the truth about that because contact tracers were not allowed to ask if a person had been to a protest. Seriously! It was a violation of their civil rights we were told.
Groups of 10+ and people in barber shops or people on beaches were dire threats for spreading COVID..........but thousands, smashed together and shouting, while wearing cloth masks that don't protect you as they protested were encouraged!
Covering up massive COVID being spread from protests
Here's another example:
California has had widespread cloth mask mandates in place everywhere since last Spring.....yet there COVID cases and numbers have been near or the worst in the nation since that time.
But cloth masks DON"T protect you. And the advice has been to NOT get an N-95 mask that provides 95% protection(filters out 95% of the COVID which is what the 95 stands for). Save those for the people that need to be protected...........the heath care workers that are incredibly using them once and throwing them away every day.............wasting hundreds of millions of N95 masks.
So all the places with the highest rates of cases/hospitalizations/death have had cloth mask mandates for many, many months. How can it be any more obvious that they don't protect you!!
And the messengers of the junk science continue to insist "make sure to wear your (worthless) cloth mask.
Get N95 masks ASAP! Here's the truth.
21 responses |
Started by metmike - Dec. 21, 2020, 7:27 p.m.
But there's no need to fear, Joe Biden is coming to the rescue (-:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/20/health/biden-first-day-health-executive/index.html
(CNN)President-elect Joe Biden, who plans to make the coronavirus pandemic his top priority, will begin his presidency by asking Americans to wear masks for 100 days and requiring their use on federal property.
His first executive order, the "100 Days Masking Challenge," will symbolize the administration's sharp turn from the Trump era by emphasizing recommendations by public health experts. A president cannot tell states or cities what to do, but a federal mandate will affect federal offices and federal lands and will urge states to do the same.
Biden Inauguration
"This executive action will direct the agencies to take action to require compliance with CDC guidance on mask wearing and physical distancing in federal buildings, on federal lands and by federal employees and contractors," said Biden counselor Jeff Zients, who will be the administration's Covid-19 response coordinator.
"And the president will call on governors, public health officials, mayors, business leaders and others to implement masking, physical distancing and other public measures to control COVID-19," Zients added.
"This is not a political statement. This is about the health of our families, and economic recovery of our country."
President Donald Trump pointedly refused to wear a maskin public throughout his presidency, and Trump political appointees across federal agencies often discouraged mask use among their staff. Largely mask-free events sponsored by the White House were linked to multiple Covid-19 infections, including a party surrounding the swearing-in of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
Trump was himself hospitalizedfor a coronavirus infection in the fall.
metmike: 100% bs based on authentic science and the physics of how a cloth mask works. It can't filter out COVID particles.
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/63115/#63326
By metmike - Dec. 26, 2020, 12:09 p.m.
What if we were told the truth in numbers?
1. The 95 in N95 masks is because they have been scientifically tested/proven to filter out 95% of the COVID sized virus particles. The N means Not resistant to oils.
2. Cloth masks should be called N00 masks to reflect them tested to filter out near 0% of the actual COVID sized virus particles.
We have been encouraged to wear the N00 masks for the past 10 months. Places with strict, long lived mask mandates in place this year, are having some of the deadliest COVID numbers right now.
https://www.rd.com/article/what-does-the-n95-stand-for-in-n95-masks/
