OT Coronavirus: America in chaos, News and Updates. One million Americans dead and counting

hmmmmmmm

 

With so many people losing jobs and attached health insurance, members of Congress urged the administration to reopen Affordable Care Act signups. Naturally they refused since they are trying to get rid of it entirely. Trump said they are exploring "other" options, presumably like the "something wonderful" he was going to replace the ACA with on day one.

Made it clear whether states get supplies depends on governors being nice to him. Kiss my ass or your people die.

After touting with fanfare drive up testing sites, there are exactly five set up in the entire country.

But he's so pro life.

Tired of winning yet?

 

I hope she had them put away by the time the cops got there. I'd hate to see her arrested for indecent exposure.

 

April fool's?

 

The world view of Portlanders is that in reality it is an even stupider version of Portlandia, an entire city populated solely by stupid Bay-area transplants who failed miserably in real life and fled North to set up the world's laziest commune.

 

Silver lining?

Mexican drug cartels struggle during coronavirus, hike prices as lab supplies from China dry up

By Hollie McKay | Fox News
Cartels recruit AZ youth to smuggle drugs

The onslaught of the coronavirus has not only sent the global economy tumbling — it has also hit the black market where it hurts, and Mexican cartels are no exception.

The outbreak of COVID-19 has sent the price of heroin, methamphetamines and fentanyl soaring, as the likes of the Sinaloa cartel – and its main rival, the Jalisco “New Generation” – struggle to obtain the necessary chemicals to make the synthetic drugs, which typically come from China and are now in minimal supply.

“The cartels have suffered from COVID-19 due to the inability to get the regular shipments of synthetic opioids and precursor chemicals for the massive production of meth from China,” Derek Maltz, a former special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Special Operations Division in New York, told Fox News.

“The cartels have continued their production at a slower rate, but the demand seems to be increasing during these times of uncertainty in America. The shutdown of cities in China and travel in and out of China have also negatively impacted the flow of chemicals and drugs to Mexico.”

MEXICAN PIRATES POSING GREATER RISK IN GULF OF MEXICO TO OIL WORKERS, TOURISTS

China, where the virus originated late last year, has, for the most part, halted production on the chemicals required for the making of the drugs as it battles the virus within its own borders and battles to make medical supplies for other crumbling countries.

“Drug cartels and criminal support organizations in the industry global drug trafficking have been deeply affected by the pandemic of the COVID-19,” Johan Obdola, president of the Canada-based Global Organization for Intelligence (IOSI), concurred. “Especially when it comes to the operations of the Sinaloa Cartel, which control 90 percent of the entrance of synthetic drugs to the United States.”

Obdola underscored fentanyl, which originates from China, has become the most coveted cartel commodity in recent weeks.

“In China, according to the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), around 5,000 illegal drug laboratories have been processing synthetic drugs and chemicals to process them. Most of these drugs have Europe and North America as the main markets,” he continued. “Cartels bring synthetic drugs through food exports, fruits, automotive equipment, toys and other products that are allocated in an extensive distribution network across the United States. COVID-19 has generated a huge loss in regarding any illegal drugs, and specifically synthetic drugs, not only to Mexican cartels but to most drug cartels operating worldwide.”

In his assessment, the losses over the last two months stand at around 80 percent of their standard revenue. And the pandemic has seemingly hindered the cartels not only when it comes to getting their fix from China.

“The supply shock precisely comes from the supply chain disruption. At this moment, for the cartels, it must be hard to import cocaine from Colombia,” noted Fernando Posadas, a Latin America analyst for Medley Global Advisors. “The demand shock comes from a contraction in the U.S. economy."

He continued: "Drug consumption will likely be one of the sectors hit the hardest, given that people are now prioritizing in more essential expenses such as rent and food. I would expect a contraction in drug demand of at least 10 to 15 percent this year. That could translate in an annual loss of at least $3 to 5 billion for the cartels.”

But other experts beg to differ.

The coronavirus crisis has also ignited steep concern that the lockdown and social distancing measures, coupled with a shuttering of support groups, social services, and medical resources, could lead to another spike in drug overdoses.

Over the past decade, overdoses have claimed the lives of almost half a million Americans, and data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows that some 69,000 died in 2019 alone.

According to Maltz, the cartels have raised the prices of their products – as much as 400 percent – and “will get through the tough times,” especially since their business is so profitable.

And Daniel Romero, an Argentina-based analyst and expert in narco-trafficking, observed that while he is yet to see any sweeping changes to the cartel business model, small dealers in the region are now relying more heavily on using drones with posts to transport cocaine.

“These drones with GPS go from one point to another in the way of posts, where they change batteries,” Romero explained. “And payments are performed on e-commerce platforms.”

However, the lockdown constraints have also crippled the cartel business model beyond just the drug trade. The usually frequent shipments from China, stuffed with counterfeit luxury goods, clothes, and household items sold in Mexico City by the Union de Tepito cartel, have all but disappeared, along with the cartel’s own ability to travel to the country to facilitate collections as a result of travel restrictions.

According to Gabriel Ruiz, a California border-based deportation officer with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), it is still too early to tell what the effect the coronavirus has on the cartel’s ability to move product into the United States.

“The ports of entries have stopped non-essential traffic and [illegals] attempting entry are pushed back south without formal processing. Migration, in general, has slowed,” he said. “Since DHS his aware DTOs [drug-trafficking organizations] may exploit the pandemic for their gain, CBP [Customs and Border Patrol] is able to focus more on detecting and stopping illicit activity.”

However, Ruiz also stressed that it is likely DTOs will “shift away from land crossings to ocean crossings.”

David Johnson, a former assistant secretary of state for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, indicated that one should also expect an uptick in the use of mail and small package services for substance delivery.

"With the decline in legitimate border crossings and the near cessation of civil aviation, traditional means of exporting, the [cartels] need to find alternatives," he observed. "And with the stay-at-home orders, combined with fear of leaving, the volume of goods moving by mail, FedEx, and UPS has exploded. So it's the simple needle-in-a-stack rule, it will become much easier to hide product."

But with the rapidly rising coronavirus caseload across the United States and much of Central and Latin America, the cartel’s central dilemma and disruption to its model is unlikely to bounce back anytime soon. For some Mexican locals, that sentiment instills a different kind of fear.

“When their normal M.O. isn’t making them a lot of money, they switch to extortion and kidnapping, which is exactly what happened to a neighbor,” one young professional based in Guadalajara, who requested anonymity due to safety concerns, told Fox News this past weekend. “He was assaulted while they went to his house and bank.”

The source noted in recent days, those in the ex-pat or more “well-off” swaths of the city have been either getting out of the area or picking up bulletproof SUVs and other modes of self-protection.

And many are bracing for the violence to worsen as the coronavirus continues to wreak havoc on the region.

“Under normal conditions, the cartels could shift to Indian suppliers to augment supply, but Indian ports are experiencing slowdowns and backlogs of containers as government directives limit port activity. This situation only looks like it will worsen in the coming month as India begins a three-week lockdown announced on March 25,” added Andrew Lewis, a former Defense Department staffer and the president of a private intelligence firm, the Ulysses Group. “But the cartels will adapt to the changes and develop new routes and methods to move product and people into the U.S. to compensate for the losses if this continues for an extended period.”

Hollie McKay has a been a Fox News Digital staff reporter since 2007. She has extensively reported from war zones including Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Burma, and Latin America investigates global conflicts, war crimes and terrorism around the world. Follow her on Twitter.

 

After attacking Trump's coronavirus-related China travel ban as xenophobic, Dems and media have changed tune

By Gregg Re | Fox News
Within hours of President Trump's decision to restrict travel from China on Jan. 31, top Democrats and media figures immediately derided the move as unnecessary and xenophobic -- and they are now beating a hasty retreat from that position as the coronavirus continues to ravage the economy and cause scores of deaths.

Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden led the way, quickly attacking what he called Trump's "record of hysteria, xenophobia and fear-mongering" after the travel restrictions were announced, and arguing that Trump "is the worst possible person to lead our country through a global health emergency." Biden, on Wednesday, didn't criticize the travel ban in any way, and instead accused Trump of "downplaying" the virus early on in remarks to Fox News.

"I had Biden calling me xenophobic," Trump told Fox News' "Hannity" on March 26. "He called me a racist, because of the fact that he felt it was a racist thing to stop people from China coming in."

In March, another Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., conspicuously insisted at a Fox News town hall that he wouldn't consider closing the U.S. border to prevent the spread of coronavirus, before condemning what he called the president's xenophobia. The Vermont senator has since taken to promoting "Medicare-for-All" and workers' rights amid the outbreak, while deferring to health experts on border closings.

For many news outlets, the about-face has been stark. A Jan. 31 article in The New York Times quoted epidemiologist Dr. Michael Osterholm as saying that Trump's decision to restrict travel from China was "more of an emotional or political reaction."

Weeks later, though, the paper reported that dozens of "nations across the world have imposed travel restrictions to curb the spread of the coronavirus," and did not criticize any of them for the move.

The Washington Post ran a story quoting a Chinese official asking for "empathy" and slamming the White House for acting "in disregard of WHO [World Health Organization] recommendation against travel restrictions."

In March, The Post finally acknowledged that critics accused China and WHO of "covering up or downplaying the severity of an infectious disease outbreak."

A week earlier, Vox confidently declared that "The evidence on travel bans for diseases like coronavirus is clear: They don’t work." The article originally referred to the "Wuhan coronavirus" in its headline, before left-wing journalists and Democrats argued that terminology was racist.

Vox also tweeted on Jan. 31: "Is this going to be a deadly pandemic? No." On Mar. 24, Vox deleted that tweet, writing that it "no longer reflects the current reality of the coronavirus story."

HOPKINS STUDY FOUND US MORE PREPARED THAN ANY COUNTRY TO HANDLE A PANDEMIC

The Heritage Foundation's Lyndsey Fifield identified numerous other instances of prominent media outlets criticizing the travel ban, in many cases without issuing any kind of correction. For example, The Verge cautioned that Trump's policies "contradict advice from the World Health Organization (WHO), which said yesterday that countries should not restrict travel or trade in their response to the new virus."

BuzzFeed News asserted that "barring foreign travelers from China, along with making U.S. citizens self-quarantine at home ... likely violated civil rights laws, without leading to any real lowered risk of a U.S. outbreak," citing "global health law expert" Lawrence Gostin of Georgetown University.

STAT, a health and medicine news site, reported that the travel ban was similar to calls from "conservative lawmakers and far-right supporters of the president," even as "public health experts ... warn that the move could do more harm than good."

On Jan. 15, when the first American with coronavirus returned from China, House Democrats were ceremoniously carrying their articles of impeachment against Trump to the Senate. (The president was acquitted overwhelmingly on each article of impeachment.)

Nevertheless, this week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., accused Trump of endangering lives by wasting time. “As the president fiddles, people are dying,” Pelosi told CNN's Jake Tapper.

“The president, his denial at the beginning, was deadly," she claimed.

In recent days, the Biden team and other Democrats have moved on to other lines of attack, including claiming that Trump once referred to the coronavirus as a "hoax." That claim has been refuted by numerous fact-checkers, including The Post's, which found that Trump was clearly referring to Democrats' efforts to blame him for the pandemic, not the virus itself.

Additionally, numerous Democrats, including Biden, have falsely claimed that the president cut the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) budget. The Associated Press has noted that those claims "distort" the facts, largely because Congress blocked planned cuts.

Fox News has reported that the Obama administration also sought hundreds of millions of dollars in funding cuts to the CDC.

"Many in the scientific community beclowned themselves because their hatred for Trump blinded them -- and does to this day," Fifield said.

Meanwhile, even some prominent left-wing Democrats have come to the president's defense.

"This is not time to bicker," California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom said Wednesday on CNN. “Let me just be candid with you. I’d be lying to you to say that [Trump] hasn’t been responsive to our needs. He has. And so, as a sort of an offer of objectivity, I have to acknowledge that publicly."

OBAMA ADMIN SOUGHT HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS IN CDC BUDGET CUTS

Newsom added: "The fact is, every time that I've called the president, he's quickly gotten on the line. When we asked to get the support for that [USNS] Mercy ship in Southern California, he was able to direct that in real-time. We've got 2,000 of these field medical sites that are up, almost all operational now in the state, because of his support. Those are the facts."

Gregg Re is a lawyer and editor based in Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter @gregg_re or email him at gregory.re@foxnews.com.

 

I was ready to smack the shit out of this woman

 

Mitch McConnell said further Corona virus relief can wait a few months. His priority is confirming as many hard right judges as possible.

 

What do you want them to do right now? Serious question. Spend more money we don't have?