DramatistDreamer

Mr. Mayor needs to take his @ss home, he can workout at Gracie Mansion. I'm sure there's plenty of room there because it's well...a mansion. As for whether people will forget this and go on about their business by summer or the election, we're most assuredly heading toward a recession (which, with disastrous trade deals, we were likely heading there anyway) so I doubt the damage from this pandemic will be over anytime soon. It will be rooted in many people's minds months from now, which hopefully by then the actual disease will have been subdued by then.

Isn't slashing interest rates something that happened a few years before the global financial meltdown happened? This administration is always looking for a way to creative "easy lending" and free-flowing money for the banks.

"Honey, that was 15 years ago". I always remember when Kim said that to Douglas.

A random thought: I've often decried the seemingly unnecessary killing off of legacy characters just for what appeared to be a short-term boost but then you had situations where a real-life actor would die and the show would often choose not deal with it and leave it out there. I sometimes wonder why the show never acknowledged Michael Louden's death? I seriously doubt it was on account of any desire to not be seen as "capitalizing" on tragedy since TPTB at that point didn't seem to hold either their actors or their characters in any particular regard as the BTS stories we've heard have proven as much. Perhaps they fel that it wouldn't be worth it with Larry Brygmann on the verge of exiting by then or the fact that killing off Bryant Montgomery just a few short years ago had made them reluctant but I think ATWT missed an opportunity to give Lucinda (who had a fraught relationship w/Duke) and Margo and Tom (who had his own battles with Duke over Lien) something to do. Even Lily. I guess Andy was long gone by then but Scott could've been brought back for a brief story arc, which would likely have been more compelling than most of what the show had going on in those years. The shock and grief might have provided a powerful exit for John Dixon. That Elizabeth Daily clipped that jumped in during Bob and Lisa's scene. Is that the actress who played Annie Stewart on that Cascade commercial?

There was a NYT article some months back about some people who were actually able to make a full-time business selling on Amazon's marketplace. So, depending on what they're selling, yeah, I do think it is possible to make that kind of money...for now. This could change since 3rd party sellers have recently been getting a poor reputation for often being linked with selling counterfeit goods.

That's right, I forgot all about this!

I've been glancing through the posts that I've missed in this growing thread, mainly to make sure that I'm not duplicating a post that someone has already posted previously (which seems to be happening quite a bit in this thread) and am seeing some comparisons between China and South Korea? Really? I hope not. You cannot compare S. Korea, a democratic country with 51 million people to China, an autocratic country with 1 billion people. It's absurd. S. Korea has been doing some things that all countries should be replicating like testing many people every day (on average Korea was testing at least 10,000 people per day, employing accessible testing mechanisms like drive-through testing at specialized off-site locations but even the way S. Korea was able to trace members of that cult/church to locate people from testing is something that also made use of S. Korea's technology and culture (the head of that church was made to come in public, bow and issue a public apology as well as a promise to cooperate with the authorities) is not easily employed in other countries. There are definitely things that the Western/rich countries have to learn from smaller countries, particularly ones that have endured other pandemics and epidemics and health crises but please recognize the cultural, political and historical differences that differentiate countries and their methods for addressing crises. More testing though, is definitely something that every country should be doing. If the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere can manage to do this, the U.S. definitely has no excuse to at least ramp up testing. Then again, people in Haiti still have vivid memories of the deadly cholera outbreak that occurred in the wake of the 2010 earthquake caused by U.N. peacekeeping forces dumping waste into rivers and streams, infecting the water system. It's in the article. He had already been a third party seller on Amazon before he decided to buy "pandemic" surplus supplies from a local outfit that had gone out of business. Having gotten away with initial sales, he and his brother decided to ramp up the search for more supplies but was shut out by Amazon, who shut his online reseller outfit down.

This jerk now claims that he will likely donate his stockpile, backtracking from his previous assertion that he would try to sell the items locally, which is also a backtrack from his initial excuses that he was providing a public service by buying up all the local stock and selling items on Amazon for jacked up prices. Now that Amazon (who themselves bowed to intense public scrutiny and criticism for providing a platform for price gouging) and Ebay have blocked price gougers like this guy, he's changing his tune. An utter lack of ethics all around.

Spain is now becoming the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, which I had already anticipated would come to pass once Italy broke the threshold for Europe becoming the epicenter of the the virus outreak.

There was an Op-Ed piece by a health professional noting that Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong achieved better results by doing things somewhat differently from China. I'll post it when I can find the article.

More lies from Trump, presumably to 'goose' the stock market.

Since I'm not watching the actual press conference, I ended up scanning the trending topics and came across this tweet and was not surprised at Trump's rude response to being asked a perfectly legitimate question. Of course, being that the interlocutor is a black woman and Trump a white supremacist, I could imagine the venom in which Trump replied. Still, this is just not normal behavior from someone who is supposedly a leader.

Definitely a wise move on her part. If (God forbid) things get worse, the show won't be on air much longer anyway. Even with no audience, you've still got production crew, including hair and makeup people, so the risks are still there. It's all a big gamble these days.

Joy Behar is taking time off from the show due to concerns over COVID-19, citing her being in a vulnerable age group and out of an abundance of caution. Lord, if they replace her with Elisabeth Hasselbeck, it's gonna be over.

That Gillum story is crazy! With all the mess going on right now, I don't even have space to digest any of it. Mad mad mad times we're living in.

Bolsonaro is an racist, sexist, homophobic, privateering right-wing nutter who has plundered indigenous land rights and sown seeds of discord for personal benefit. I think he may also have some corruption allegations (as so many Brazilian politicians do) against him. A truly venomous individual in the mold of Trump.

No, they've canceled. Look upthread. Trump is back to his fallback of trying to blame Obama for the lack of available testing, even though it was Trump who eliminated an entire department from the CDC, most pointedly, he eliminated the department that dealt with pandemics. Yesterday I heard that 85% of the financial gains made during the Trump administration have already been frittered away. This morning, I'm reading a news article that confirms as much. That's not on account of Obama, that is because the markets have absolutely no trust or faith in Trump or his hapless administration.

Earlier this week I was posting about this in another thread!

Not sure whether this has been posted (I checked as far back as Sunday morning posts) but ICYMI while focusing on the coronavirus and national news: