(02-18-2021, 03:14 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: Right. So we shouldn't have DUIs be illegal.

(02-18-2021, 03:23 PM)Mickeypoo Wrote: If you are that scared, don't drive.  They shouldn't shut down the roads.

(02-18-2021, 02:55 PM)Mickeypoo Wrote:   We are being played like a fiddle; Devil Went Down to Georgia Style!

(02-18-2021, 08:19 PM)fredtoast Wrote: By who?

Who is benefitting from people wearing masks and social distancing?  How are they benefitting?

(02-18-2021, 02:48 PM)Wes Mantooth Wrote: You seem absolutely obsessed with comparing Florida to NY.

Why are you ignoring the plethora of other states that have taken a more agressive or strict approach that either are doing worse than Florida, or they're doing similarly?

I'm willing to listen and have my view changed, but I'm going to need  someone to explain to me how Florida isn't at the top, or the near the top (in both cases and deaths) if their approach was so reckless and stupid.

(02-18-2021, 02:32 PM)Mickeypoo Wrote: So, as of today, FL is free and open for business while NY is locked down and FL has 16k less deaths.  What do the trends look like today?  About even.

(02-19-2021, 05:10 PM)BmorePat87 Wrote: https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/539596-desantis-to-lower-florida-flags-in-honor-of-limbaugh?fbclid=IwAR1Z1bolqjN09dZPiIGJjtybv6YGQIYvvO5MxitnwQ_bCWTcEc5GfpviTzU

Lowering the flags for a guy who used to mock the victims of AIDS and pushed nonstop racist rhetoric. 2024?

(02-18-2021, 05:23 AM)NATI BENGALS Wrote: Details matter.

It’s like Dwayne Haskins throwing for 350 yards with most coming in garbage time of a blowout and bragging about his stats.

We can all cherry pick. Let’s play the comparison game with North Dakota and Maine.

(02-16-2021, 06:52 PM)Wes Mantooth Wrote: You would think they'd be dead last, or 1st (depending on how you look at it) when you hear about just dangerous and irresponsble their approach has been.

Fwiw, Flordia has the 5th highest median age of resident at 42.4 years old.  They've seen more travel to their state this year then any other single state in the country.  They've allowed fans at sporting events, they've allowed bars to remain open, etc. etc. etc.

Everything we've been told is these things are reciple for a disaster.  Yet they rank 23rd in cases (per 100,000), and they rank 27th in deaths (per 100,000).

They rank below both California and Illinois in deaths despite these two states (like New York) being very agressive in their approach to restrictions.  How is that possible?

How can the 5th oldest population rank 27th in deaths with such a approach, one that's been mocked and villified?

And let me say this, don't mistake any of this for me being the type of person that wants everything open, or doesn't wear a mask, or thinks travel is a good idea.  I'm not.  I've worn my mask everywhere, and haven't been anywhere other than the Kroger and my local library over the last 11 months.  I just think these numbers are very interesting. 

I'm going to be as safe as I possibly can be, and I would encourage others to do the same.  But I do think there's a lot out there that supports the idea that a lot of those in power, along with the people advising them, really don't know what the best approach is to this is.

(02-20-2021, 05:41 AM)CarolinaBengalFanGuy Wrote: On a side note, so much for Cruz 2024.

He's going to have trouble just winning Senate reelection in my opinion.

Quote:Trump fans tout DeSantis as their COVID hero and possible 2024 nominee. But Florida's data tells a different story.


Andrew Romano
·West Coast Correspondent
Fri, February 19, 2021, 5:00 AM





At some point in the not-too-distant future, America’s governors will be judged at the ballot box for their response to a pandemic that the Trump administration forced them to handle mostly on their own. In some cases, that judgment will be rendered in 2022, when they stand for reelection. Others will try to tout their COVID-19 résumés in an upcoming presidential contest.


According to a new Politico profile, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is already positioning himself as one of these post-pandemic White House hopefuls. The gist of the story is that while DeSantis, just 42 years old and still in his first term, formerly “drew national scorn for his stewardship of Florida’s Covid-19 response,” his “resistance to restrictive measures” like mask mandates and the blowback he got for being “divorced from science” has now “strengthened” his standing “among the GOP grassroots and elites heading into his 2022 reelection” — and even inspired “conservative chatter nationwide about a presidential bid.”

“Covid wars launch DeSantis into GOP ‘top tier,’” the Politico headline declares.

Politics and public health are, of course, two very different things. It’s entirely possible, even likely, that the 81 percent of Republicans who continue to approve of Donald Trump will eventually reward DeSantis for owning the libs on COVID. But while dissing a reporter with the line “you can whiz on my leg but don’t tell me it’s raining” is sure to act “like a shot of adrenaline to the conservative grassroots,” as one GOP strategist gushed to Politico, it’s not going to protect anyone from getting sick or dying from COVID.


Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis with then-President Donald Trump in July 2020. (Tom Brenner/Reuters)
So how does DeSantis’s actual record stack up?

It’s an important question not just for DeSantis but for every governor with ambitions in the years ahead — people like California’s Gavin Newsom and Andrew Cuomo of New York, both of whom have received mixed marks for their leadership.

The truth is, a governor can control only so much about a virus that doesn’t respect state borders and spreads more because of how individuals choose to behave than anything else. Weather, demographics and emerging variants are also factors — none of which even the most powerful executive can change. But a governor can help or hurt the situation by pulling various levers and sending various messages. When and what to reopen, and at what capacity? How to encourage (or, as the case may be, discourage) masking? How to prioritize vaccine doses? And what about schools?

A dispassionate look at the data suggests that, under DeSantis, Florida’s response has been middling. Overall, the Sunshine State ranks third nationwide in total number of cases, with more than 1.8 million, and fourth in total number of deaths, with nearly 30,000. On a per capita basis, Florida’s rankings on those two measures aren’t nearly as dire — 29th and 27th, respectively — but they aren’t stellar, either.

And unlike many states with more COVID-19 deaths per capita — states such as New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut and Louisiana — Florida wasn’t caught flat-footed in the first wave last spring. Instead, the death rate in DeSantis’s state has risen over time, even as experts have learned more about keeping people safe.


Medical workers administering COVID-19 tests in Immokalee, Fla. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
A comparison with liberal California — a rival warm-weather, high-population state that DeSantis and other conservatives love to mock — is instructive. To date, Florida has logged only slightly fewer cases per capita than California, despite the fact that the Golden State has been testing at a much higher rate and recently endured the nation’s worst holiday surge, which was almost certainly amplified by a more transmissible homegrown strain of the virus.

The overall death rate in Florida (137 COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 residents) is actually higher than it is in California (122). The number of daily deaths in Florida has held steady at a record-high level for the past month; the corresponding number in California has declined by more than 35 percent. And even though about 14 percent of COVID-19 tests in each state were coming back positive a month ago, today Florida’s positivity rate (about 7 percent) seems to have plateaued at a level about twice as high as California’s, which is at 3.5 percent and falling.

DeSantis and his defenders would counter that sustaining a somewhat higher rate of COVID-19 death and transmission than California is a reasonable trade-off for keeping businesses and schools relatively open. Another caveat: More than 20 percent of Floridians are over 65, versus just 14 percent of Californians.
“There’s a whole bunch of things we’ve been doing for COVID, but at the same time, we’ve lifted our state up, we’ve saved our economy, and I think we’re going to be first out of gate once we are able to put COVID behind the country,” DeSantis told Fox Business Sunday. “People view Florida as the place where they can follow their dreams. … It is a free state.”

DeSantis can claim some successes on this front. In December, Florida’s unemployment rate fell 0.2 percent to 6.1 percent, even as California’s rose 0.9 percent to 9.0 percent. DeSantis fully reopened bars and restaurants last September and refused to let local officials limit capacity during December’s holiday surge, despite weekly reports from the Trump COVID-19 task force — which DeSantis refused to release — urging the state to mandate masks and restrict indoor drinking and dining. In contrast, indoor dining and drinking remain off-limits in California today.


A waiter in Palm Beach, Fla. (Saul Martinez/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
“If a local leader wants to put [restaurant and bar employees] out of work, you’re damn right I’m hobbling them from doing that,” DeSantis said at the time. “If they want to shut down businesses, I’m going to stand in the way.”

Likewise, Florida is one of just four states that have ordered all school districts and charter boards to keep brick-and-mortar schools open five days a week; in California, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom is still trying to strike a deal with the all-powerful teachers' unions to resume in-person schooling for younger students. And because Florida started vaccinating seniors before California, it has a slight edge (5.7 percent vs. 4.0 percent) in the share of residents who’ve received their second shot. (The share who’ve received at least one shot is the same, at 12 percent.)

With cases and hospitalizations falling in every state following America’s holiday surge, DeSantis has seized on such numbers to claim that he’s hit on a superior approach to COVID-19 — one that strikes a better balance between shielding the vulnerable and maintaining at least some semblance of normalcy than what scientists and Democrats are advocating. If he has to conduct a maskless conversation in a Super Bowl skybox while doing it, then so be it. “How the hell am I going to be able to drink a beer with a mask on? Come on,” DeSantis joked to Politico. “I had to watch the Bucs win.”

“The national media and all these people who are self-anointed ‘experts’ ... they all said Florida would be the worst,” DeSantis continued. “What we showed in Florida is you need to lead. I got a lot of blowback. A lot of that was BS, quite frankly. We led on schools. We led on putting people back to work. We would not have had a Super Bowl [in Tampa] if it was not for me.”


Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. (Chris O'Meara/AP)
Yet of all people, DeSantis should know it’s unwise to claim victory before the virus has run its course; with COVID-19, the appearance of a successful or unsuccessful response is largely contingent on the severity of the pandemic at any given point. After Florida rushed to reopen in early May, for instance, cases started to climb; by mid-July it was considered one of the worst-hit places in the world, with an average of 12,000 new cases per day. January’s peak — nearly 20,000 new daily cases — was even higher. Both times, DeSantis’s approval rating plummeted. It turns out that doing as little as possible to slow the spread of COVID-19 gets less popular when COVID-19 is spreading fast.

In this, DeSantis hasn’t so much led as followed the example of Donald Trump, who downplayed the disease and dismissed the experts — then left office after a single term with a 38.6 percent approval rating.

As the weather warms and more Americans get vaccinated, it is entirely possible that the U.S. pandemic will continue on its current downward trajectory. If it does, DeSantis will keep claiming that his less-is-more strategy worked — and while the numbers won’t exactly confirm that claim, they won’t directly contradict it either.
But the virus may not be done with us yet. Last month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned that if the worrisome U.K. variant known as B.1.1.7 behaves in the U.S. the way it did in Britain — where it fueled a massive winter wave and was found to be about 50 percent more transmissible than previous versions of the virus — then it will outnumber all other U.S. strains by March. A subsequent study showed that B.1.1.7 is now spreading so rapidly here that it is doubling in prevalence roughly every 10 days.

And where is it spreading most rapidly? The same state that served as ground zero for maskless Super Bowl revelry earlier this month: Florida. So far, scientists have detected twice as many B.1.1.7 cases in Florida than in any other state — a full third of the national total.


Fans celebrating the Tampa Bay Buccaneers' victory in the Super Bowl on Feb. 7. (Ivy Ceballo/Tampa Bay Times via Zuma Wire)
The threat of B.1.1.7 is obvious: a fourth wave of COVID-19 in the spring, fueled by a variant that’s even better at exploiting the kind of “freedom” DeSantis is so fond of. Because the most at-risk Americans are getting vaccinated first — seniors, nursing-home residents — mortality rates wouldn’t match their previous peaks. But it’s unlikely Floridians would appreciate yet another surge in infections, especially if it could have been mitigated by a governor who spent more time encouraging mask use and outdoor dining and less time hiding COVID data to align with spin from the Trump White House and threatening to take vaccine doses away from counties that question the equity of his distribution plan.

Eventually, the pandemic will end. Infections will flatline in every state. Every governor will claim victory and vindication. Schools and businesses will fully open. Economies will recover. Something like normal life will resume. The finer points of policy — the squabbles about who vaccinated who first and who kept bars open the longest — will fade. The political playing field will, in effect, be level. 

Instead, what will linger in voters’ minds is the deeper impression their leaders made during the crisis. Cuomo’s aggressiveness, but also his deceit. Newsom’s wonkery, but also his hypocrisy. These impressions will, in turn, come to define their larger political brands.

For DeSantis, what will remain is his Trumpiness, for good and for ill — the anti-elite attitude, the eagerness to buck the experts, the polarizing politics, the fast-and-loose approach to facts, the reluctance to lock down even when the pandemic was at its worst.

The MAGA base is likely to love this, regardless of whether Florida’s numbers ultimately strengthen or weaken DeSantis’s case on COVID-19. Whether other voters end up rewarding him for it, however, remains to be seen.

(02-18-2021, 08:19 PM)fredtoast Wrote: By who?

Who is benefitting from people wearing masks and social distancing?  How are they benefitting?

(02-21-2021, 01:46 PM)samhain Wrote: DeSantis and other MAGA clingers will pose an interesting challenge to GOP leadership over the next 2 years.  The base largely remains in the grip of MAGA politics, and it will be nearly impossible for any candidate to win a Republican primary without support from Trump, or at least without avoiding his wrath for daring to cross him.  We're seeing this in Ohio as well with candidates for Rob Portman's senate seat.  The Republicans declaring are all too ready to pledge allegiance to all things Trump, and in fact going out of their way to crap on John Kasich.  Kasich hasn't held office since 2018 and was elected by large margins when he did.  It's a strange form of political jockeying to say the least.

The big problem for people like DeSantis and the like is that they won't see a real test until they face a full electorate nationally.  What wins in a GOP primary or even a Florida senate or governor's race is much different that what will play in a national general election.  A majority of the country holds Trump and his policies responsible for both pandemic and insurrection.  Once red states are now purple, or in various states of turning blue.  Going full authoritarian facist isn't going to do much to win the voters in the middle, the independents, or the GOP voters seeking to put the embarrassment of Trump behind the party.

Cllinging to MAGA in the twilight of Trump's decline could very well destroy the GOP as we have known it.  It's already hurt the party in Georgia and the senate.  It would be pretty hilarious to see the MAGA masses that the GOP manipulated throughout the Trump era come back to cannibalize and historically damage the party in a real long-term sense.  

C'mon GOP, a storm is coming.  Gear up the base and slap on the red hats.  You are all Q now.  Better hurry before the left fires up the Jewish space lasers!

(02-20-2021, 05:41 AM)CarolinaBengalFanGuy Wrote: On a side note, so much for Cruz 2024.

He's going to have trouble just winning Senate reelection in my opinion.

(02-24-2021, 10:42 AM)Mickeypoo Wrote: 7 day average cases

FL 5893   NY 7396

7 day average deaths

FL 151     NY 126

One open and one closed