Hopkins is the man. Up here, it's Penn State Hershey. Daughter etc. picked up 250 ghost pepper plants today. The greenhouse is set up to pot them. Every pot has its own little water spout. Plus there's an overhead sprinkler. These dudes are scientists. There are another 1500 or so coming later to plant outside. That's more bute force irrigation. Pretty sure we're using strip tapes. We took the mower deck off their tractor, to make it easier to manipulate in the barn. Everybody sweating bullets about trying to reattach it. Kioti doesn't do drive ons. I doubt we ever take the SOB off again.

Today, I planted spinach and peas. Very late for the peas, but I just can't get into it right now. I'll put in tomatoes later, and that's it.

why else?

Pogo, I thought you were taking a swipe at me. Sorry. You and I disagree, but we've never gotten into name-calling or other insults. Same w/BB and DB. Think I'll contact DB) I've known them for over 20 years and we've never once gotten personal over politics.It is futile, anyway, as you know.I wish the others had been that way.

COVID is our mortal enemy, regardless of politics..But too many people are trying to use it to score political points. And as for the mainline media and some fools in Hollywood...

Starting a few seedlings indoors ad will set out in about a month. I think it's wise to grow some of our own stuff. Or, maybe Basebawl can fly in a planeload of veggies for each of us.

I'm told that Hopkins is THE place in Md. for COVID treatment.They've been gearing up for months. That's where I'd go if things get bad.

The store had a limit of two per customer. Which is fair.

mike,
Not indignant. Although I did make a joke, I just said that there is little or nothing to discuss as we are so far apart.
You disagree?
And going into defensive mode, you used to credit me with not taking knee jerk positions. Left, of course, but open.
But the purpose of this post is not to get into a name calling debate or personal characterizations.

Here's something to make you happy. Although I hate his positions on almost all issues, I actually think that our conservative Republican governor, Mike DeWine, has been doing a brilliant job in this crisis.
To the point that I am flying a large American flag from my porch, at his suggestion, as a symbol of solidarity that Ohioans are all in this together.
As are we all.

As a suggestion, without giving opinions as to the correctness or intelligence of anything expressed by anyone in politics, it might be interesting to hear how people are doing personally.
I see that BB & mzp have been doing a little of that. Plus personal tp access news.
I contacted a long time friend who I first met here (no longer active) and we have been sharing family stories.

And Hi! to you BB.

National rationing is not happening. Our (Cleveland) stores are chock full of toilet paper.
Does this mean that that there is a greater need here because we are full of - - --?

I can't say the last time I read anything from the Post. I was a big Chelsea Janes fan but after she left I doubt if I've clicked on more than a half dozen Post articles.

I see we have $75 million for PBS along w/the money for the damned Kennedy Center where those cretins in Hamilton insulted Pence.Maybe the fucking place burns down before they get a chance to waste the money.

Hi!

Um, the news? It's a summary from yesterday. I deny your implicit ad hominem attack. Argue a fact.

Not a Patriots fan at all, but kudos to Bob Kraft for arranging for his plane to go to China to pick up 1.2 million masks, which will be used for our medical personnel during the crisis. Dude said that the red tape involved to complete the project was the worst ever.

Getting an absolute thrill at seeing the WaPo sportswriters grasp to stay relevant by writing about ANYTHING sports-related as the Sports page's online User and Page View counts do a deep dive. At this rate they'll soon have an article about what socks Scherzer wore during the World Series.

HCR Wednesday summary. Here's how bad some of the federal government is under these morons.

The news broke that the United States has been sending medical supplies to other countries while our own health care workers don’t have masks or PPE (personal protective equipment). Politico revealed that an administration official called counterparts in Thailand to ask for PPE only to be told by a confused official on the other end who said that the U.S. was shipping those very supplies to Thailand. One shipment had already arrived, and another was on its way. Vice President Mike Pence, who is in charge of the administration’s coronavirus task force, immediately halted the shipment. It appears that there has been no coordination between the administration and USAID, the United States Agency for International Development, so we have apparently been exporting the very supplies we need at home.

This created a furor over the fact that we also sent 17.8 tons of medical supplies, including masks, gowns, gauze, and respirators to China in February, after the severity of our own impending crisis was already clear. The administration has said these supplies were “donated,” but I have not been able to track down by whom.

Politico also broke the story that since March 12, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has been in charge of his own coronavirus response team to get the private sector on board to fight the crisis. Trump has been reluctant to activate the Defense Production Act, a law that enables the government to encourage manufacturers to produce vital equipment and protects them from losses when they do. Bizarrely, the Trump administration—like all others since the law went into effect in the 1950s—uses this act all the time to respond to natural disasters, to move supplies around during emergencies, and so on, but refuses to do so now. Instead, it appears Trump has tapped Kushner to coordinate with private industry. In that capacity, he and his outside experts—including a number from the consulting firm McKinsey—are acting as a sort of independent cell without government oversight and are overruling the teams already in place.

We learned that the Obama administration tried five years ago to address what it perceived as a lack of ventilators in case of a pandemic, paying $13.8 million to a Pennsylvania manufacturer—a subsidiary of a huge Dutch appliance and technology corporation-- to create a cheap, easy ventilator to stockpile. The FDA cleared the device in September and the Department of Health and Human Services, which had provided the $13.8 million, ordered 10,000 of them for $3,280 each. Instead of providing those ventilators, the company instead hiked its prices and sold them overseas. Trump has declined to use the DPA to get the company to produce the ventilators it developed for the U.S. Instead, Kushner’s team is negotiating with it to build 43,000 more expensive hospital ventilators for the U.S.

Pence tried to suggest that the administration’s slow response was because China had been slow about admitting the full extent of the disease and that the Centers for Disease Control had initially mischaracterized the danger from it as low. (While China did try to quash information about the disease, the CDC was clear about it.) Pence continued: “I don’t believe the President has ever belittled the threat of the coronavirus.” (There is overwhelming evidence Trump did exactly this.)

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has not wanted to take the responsibility for closing down his state and has been trying to get Trump to do it. But Trump doesn’t want to do it either. So the two of them have been trying to get the other to do it as the infection and death rates in Florida climb. Finally, today, DeSantis made the call, but he exempted churches, synagogues, and houses of worship from its provisions, calling them essential businesses. This will permit religious leaders like Rodney Howard-Browne to keep his megachurch open. On Monday, sheriff’s deputies arrested Howard-Browne for unlawful assembly and a violation of health emergency rules.

Georgia Governor Brian Kemp has finally issued shelter-in-place order for Georgia, too, as the state reported 4,748 cases of Covid-19 and 56 deaths. He said a key change was the recent news that people could transmit the virus without showing symptoms, but of course that news is not recent; we have known it virtually since the beginning.

DeSantis has another crisis on his hands, too. A cruise ship with infected passengers is sitting off the coast of Florida, and he doesn’t want it to dock in the state. Trump is not taking responsibility for that, either. So DeSantis has finally announced he will take off the ship the 49 people on it who hail from Florida… but not the others, including those from other countries, who continue to float on a ship with disease on it. This situation needs an immediate solution.

The federal government had a similar problem aboard the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt, an aircraft carrier where Covid-19 was spreading. Tired of waiting for his superiors to get his people to safety, the ship’s commander wrote a scathing letter claiming that keeping the sailors on the ship was “an unnecessary risk and breaks faith with those Sailors entrusted to our care.” After the letter was made public, Navy officials agreed to offload sailors to quarantine in Guam to keep the disease at bay.

Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler, appointed by Kemp and married to the CEO of the company that owns the New York Stock Exchange, revealed more stock trades today that took place after she had attended a Senate briefing on the severity of the coming epidemic. She sold stock in retail stores and bought stock in a company that makes PPEs. She maintains she has done nothing wrong.

And Devin Nunes (R-CA), the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee and associate of indicted political operative Lev Parnas said on the Fox News Channel today he thought that closing schools was “way overkill” and that it was hurting the economy unnecessarily. California has more than 6,900 cases and at least 150 people there have died from it.

Finally, it appears that Trump will continue golfing despite the crisis. Although staying mum about who the “dignitary” they need to protect is, the Secret Service has signed a $45,000 contract to rent golf carts in Sterling, Virginia, where Trump has a golf course that remains open despite Virginia’s stay-at-home order.

It’s important to note that any of these stories might have good explanations. Maybe shoring up USAID was worth losing our PPEs, or there’s a good reason not to use the DPA to get more ventilators from the company who contracted to produce them. But if so, we are not hearing those explanations. Instead, what jumps out at this hodge-podge of stories is the lack of organization and expertise, and the apparent every-man-for-himself attitude at the highest levels of government.

That attitude sure doesn’t seem to be producing an effective response to the global pandemic that is threatening our lives.

First of all, you know as well as I do that any Democrat president would take advantage of a situation like this to "campaign" too.Any politician would.

It's good that you seek out pertinent Covid info. But a whole lot of people, particularly less-educated, wouldn't have the presence of mind to sift thru a lot of other news outlets to learn what Trump's doctors are saying.They hear him continually denigrated, so they simply assume what he says is wrong and turn the briefings off. They'll depend on rumors which I'm sure are legion.To their sorrow.

Some of this campaign to get people to turn off Trump is plain hatred from the left, which is loaded with Trump haters. Of course they correctly say that this helps his image. He's the best communicator since Reagan.And he uses that bully pulpit pretty good. They can't do a thing but try to marginalize him. They can't get him to stop. Frankly, I love it. The left must sit there helplessly , watch and and wail as he does his performance every day.Frankly, I think it's BEAUTIFUL. Of course they can put on a REAL expert like Joe Biden as a counter. I'd pay to watch that.