Posts from — March 2020

I’m quite confident that today is March, 5 so I wonder about Medicare telling me:

Your Medicare Part B (Medical Insurance) covers a test to see if you have Coronavirus. This test is covered when your doctor or a health care provider orders it, if you get the test on or after February 4, 2020. You usually pay nothing for Medicare-covered clinical diagnostic laboratory tests.

And the add on:

Note: Your provider will need to wait until after April 1, 2020 to submit a claim to Medicare for this test.

The thing is, the CDC didn’t announce that they would begin testing on a limited basis until February, 14: “The agency said it is working with public health laboratories in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago and New York City to begin testing for cases of the virus.”

As I am over a thousand miles away from any of those cities, it is highly unlikely that I could have been tested before this week, and it isn’t certain that the test would be available in this area for days or weeks. This is chaos leadership by morons that cannot end well.

See Matt Gaetz make a fool of himself. It’s not just the mask, check out his shoes. You don’t see those outside of film noir (or possibly Roger Stone).

For months two of my e-mail accounts have been flooded by sundry political action groups and a few candidates asking for money. Too often these missives highlight the fundraising of opponents as the reason they are asking for money. This is the result of the “politerati” scoring the viability of candidates based solely on their ability to raise money.

Michael Bloomberg has spent a half of a billion dollars ($500,000,000) to win the delegates of American Samoa. In his effort he even managed to be the only candidate to actually contact me via “snail mail”. If money was actually the most important criteria for a candidate, wouldn’t Bloomberg done a bit better than the delegation from American Samoa. Now every delegate is important, but American Samoa is not that populous, so it’s not much to show for $ 0.5 Gigabucks.

Digby notes Steve Bannon saying:

“This is Trump’s Churchill moment. He’s got to bring the country together, which he’s doing. He’s got to confront not just the virus, but the economic contagion that’s coming out of China… He does that, you don’t need to worry about 2020.”

Is it the moment when as First Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill “During the First World War, he oversaw the Gallipoli Campaign; after it proved a disaster, he resigned from government and served in the Royal Scots Fusiliers on the Western Front.”

Winston Churchill had a number of “Moments” over the course of his career that led to his exit from the government. Churchill served in the military; Trump had “bone spurs”. Churchill wrote books; Trump can’t even read them.

The Word for today is “Misinfodemic”.

It’s Saint David’s Day, and, as he is their patron saint, it is a national holiday in Wales. The Welsh wear leeks or daffodils [called Peter’s leek in Welsh] on this day.