And yes, I mean forcing.
Do you remember the hospital ship? The field hospitals? Javits center?
Did you know the hospital ship went home after being almost completely unused? Did you know it treated IN TOTAL 182 people? With a crew of 1200 and 1000 available beds?
Did you know that javits center never even got remotely close to full? In TOTAL in treated about 1000 patients and had 4000 beds.
And yet he’s forcing these elderly back into nursing homes because it makes him look in charge, and fuels his idiotic feud he had going with the federal government over who was more leadery. He won an Emmy for it!
Cuomo should be facing prison. The people who have been helping him cover up killing thousands of elderly people as a political play should as well.
The fact that he was transferring state employees around so he could kiss them on the cheek and touch their face should get him disgraced and fired. It is absolutely a distraction from the horror he has inflicted upon thousands of people. Imagine him sending your grandmother to her death so that he could look good on television. Absolutely evil.
It's one thing to make a policy blunder and deal with the consequences... It's another thing entirely to cover it up, lie, and suppress just to cling to power.
Just reflect for a second... the media cooed at how great this man was and how he was going to be the next President. And now, he won't go down for killing thousands of elderly and the ensuing cover-up, no - he's going to go down (big maybe!) for being a sexual creep. What a world...
A politician killing a few (hundred) thousand people is rarely that big a black mark on their legacy, especially among their supporters.
[0]: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cnn-fiery-but-mostly-peaceful...
The public decided it didn't care.
He repealed that law after becoming under federal investigation for it.
This man is the perfect illustration of New York State politics. Corrupt to the core.
Tha javits center was for overflow, not first priority.
Where else were the elderly supposed to go? This one i have no info on
That sounds weird, like they weren't going to clean up after non-COVID patients? Is there a cite on this claim?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_COVID-19_nursing_home...
>In January 2021, Attorney General of New York Letitia James released a report finding that Governor Andrew Cuomo had understated the toll of COVID-19-related deaths in state nursing homes by as much as 50 percent. The scandal was made public on February 11, 2021, when the New York Post reported that Melissa DeRosa, a secretary and aide to Cuomo, privately apologized to lawmakers for the administration withholding the nursing-home death toll in fear then-President Donald Trump would "turn this into a giant political football".
>U.S. Attorney Seth DuCharme of the Eastern District of New York and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have launched an investigation into New York state's handling of nursing home deaths.
When will the left calm down and realize this isn’t a war?
I'm ignorant on if this practice continued post arrival and construction of the added COVID treatment centers though.
Behind closed doors plenty of people say they think it's fine because the end goal was achieved.
Isn't that a TV/movie price? For good acting?
https://www.axios.com/gavin-newsom-trump-coronavirus-cnn-71e...
That's probably because it wasn't sent originally to support COVID patients, and it wasn't until later that they opened up for COVID, and then left shortly after it had opened for COVID. Not sure about Javits.
1. What he did went against published federal guidelines which state no transfers to nursing homes unless they have medical isolation wards
2. Why lie about it?
Also contemporaneous with his policies, pundits like mark Levin (who broke this story) were calling him out on it only to be accused of spreading conspiracy
>Cuomo repeatedly stated that the order was based on CDC guidance issued by the Trump administration. PolitiFact rated that statement as "mostly false" because the guidelines issued by the CDC and CMS indicated that a medically stable COVID-19 patient could be discharged from a hospital to a nursing home "only if the nursing home can implement all recommended infection control procedures."
Let's not mingle in choices that were reasonable given the best knowledge and advice from medical experts at the time along with crimes.
I hate this binary thinking of "bad person did x, therefore x is bad too!"
The impeachment process against Cuomo has been underway for a while, and it has shifted into a higher gear with this report.
It shouldn't be that way. Families shouldn't have that much power. But they do. And it takes a fair bit to bring them down.
Governor positions aren’t placed via connections or corruption or family power. The citizens have to vote them in.
These most recent issues weren’t known prior to the last election cycle. Given these recent revelations I don’t see the voters going for him again, if he were to run at all.
New York is a pretty complex state. When you hear somebody blabbering about “dems” and “blue”, you know they are clueless. It’s a conservative democratic state with a bunch of internal tensions that drive a lot of different dynamics.
Another thing is that the competition is pretty lame. If he survives this scandal, he will win re-election.
The person elected governor before Cuomo (Eliot Spitzer) resigned due to a sex scandal. (prostitution in this case)
The only governor we've had in the past 40 years who wasn't visibly corrupt was Eliot Spitzer—who allowed a sex scandal with no political/corruption elements (that I ever heard of) to push him out of office.
Cuomo was actually looking pretty good for a while, relatively speaking. He was still very much a NY politician, but he was getting some stuff done, and with Silver and Bruno no longer keeping a stranglehold over the state legislature, we actually had budgets coming in on time (for many years, it was guaranteed that the state budget would be months late, at best, due to the deliberate gridlock in Albany).
It is, of course, supremely unsurprising that Cuomo has been doing this sort of thing all along. It's exactly the sort of mid-20th-century "politician's perk" that anyone who's paying attention would absolutely expect him to be making sure he gets. Unfortunately, because he's built up a decent amount of political capital due to the aforementioned "getting stuff done", combined with the fact that it is something that far too many still consider "normal", and his almost fanatical stubbornness, it's also supremely unsurprising that he's not resigning. I expect to see a messy, drawn-out impeachment fight, at best.
At this point, we can just hope that we might get a replacement who's actually interesting in improving New York, rather than one who mostly cares about improving his own image and network. But I won't hold my breath.
The only way to do that is to credibly threaten impeachment. That’s the work that is being done.
Right now, a majority of the Assembly has come out in favor of an impeachment trial. We will see over the next few days if that threat is enough to push him out. I suspect it won’t be.
The executive can resign if they choose, but forcing a independently elected official out of office basically takes a lot of work and effort. He would need to be impeached by majority vote in the lower house, then convicted by a 2/3 vote in the upper house (plus, in an unusual NY quirk, the highest court, the Court of Appeals, joins the upper house as jurors) after a trial, where the governor has his own lawyers making his case for the defense, there are sworn witnesses and testimony, etc.
Impeachment has never removed a president. It has only ever removed one governor of New York. Cuomo has made enough enemies- and done enough heinous stuff- that he might lose, but it will be time consuming and painful, baring a resignation.
The US President is not directly elected by the people, even though the people by whom he is elected are not the legislature and he does not need to maintain their support.
Cuomo is skilled in playing "leader" on tv:
* the daily covid press briefings - these were especially powerful among Americans looking for some kind of steady leadership they could latch on to and feel safe and were especially amped up by the media (remember "Cuomo-sexual"?)
* in his response yesterday to AG's allegations, he showed multiple pics of him hugging and touching people he greeted, as a way of minimizing the pic that showed him touching one of his accuser's face
* multiple staged videos on tv of him assessing and riding the subways, cleaning the subways, attending gay pride parade, etc all to create a fake image of him as a "man of the people"
^^ that stuff still works on the over 55 demographics that watch CNN, so they still support him. IIRC, he had like ~50% approval rating like a couple weeks ago.
Likely being downvoted by folks who identify as liberal / democrat who still have misplaced faith that Cuomo is an effective leader.
That's how strong the media effect is.
And the elderly are a more active voter bloc.
The reason they stoped investigating the nursing home deaths is because titillating older women with a handsome elderly man is more likely to lead to political success than talking about how he killed older ladies.
I'm also interested in seeing Anderson Cooper trot out the accusers and interview them about Cuomo.
You really can't pin hypocrisy on the Democratic party here. You saw the same with Al Franken (where, in hindsight, they were probably too quick to judge).
If corruption didn't work for politicians, the “corrupt politician” image wouldn't be a thing.
But Cuomo is done, its just a matter of time. Unlike what has happened with the national GOP and Trump, NY Dems are done with Cuomo; his impeachment and removal are essentially certain even with his party hold majorities in both houses of the legislature, and it looks like there is a decent chance of him facing criminal charges as well, with DAs in multiple NY counties conducting investigations.
Politics is a weird thing, and to those who question situations like this really should watch that show. Aside than learning about the Constitution in school, you’ll learn more about real world politics from that show than you can imagine.
It’s been hours since the Attorney General’s report was was released. This is asking “why are people allowed to lie unassisted” picoseconds after a car crash.
Cuomo will be forced to either resign or be impeached.
This is the sort of hire that drives me nuts. I'm sure this person is a fully capable communications manager, but what Facebook really purchased was political access. Is it no surprise then that long after beginning work she was doing favors for her former employer? Maintaining a connection to powerful politicians might well have been in her job description.
>> Prior to joining Cuomo’s office in 2014, Lever worked as a press assistant for President Barack Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign and worked in press relations at the Clinton Foundation, among other roles, according to her LinkedIn profile.
Which is more valuable to Facebook: her skills as a "communication manager" or the fact that she probably has the personal numbers for half of Washington?
After some quickly googling: she appears to be the daughter of a prominent NYC attorney, which might have something to do with her previous work, as a student, for NY's attorney general. And for NYC's comptroller general. I would have killed for such jobs during law school. She seems to have bounced between them while an undergrad.
"Lever, who grew up in Quaker Ridge, graduated from [redacted] and the University of Wisconsin-Madison also worked for state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, President Obama's 2012 campaign, and Clinton Foundation. She is the daughter of Joel and Debbie Lever of Bradford Road."
https://scarsdale10583.com/about-joomla/the-project/5776-sca...
I love that "Bradford Road" reference. That is New England code for an old and well connected family. (The implications of her highschool are just inappropriate and so I redact it.)
Apple - Al Gore (Vice President of the US) - Ron Sugar (Northrup Grunman)
Google - Roger Ferguson (Federal Reserve of US)
Facebook - Robert Kimmett (Department of Treasury)
Facebook Oversight - Helle Thorning-Smith (PM of Denmark) - Nick Clegg (Deputy PM of UK)
Salesforce - Colin Powell (Secretary of State in the US) - John Roos (Ambassador to Japan from the US)
[0]: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-08-04/afterpay-square-mille...
Of course it all smells more than a little fishy, but I'm not really seeing any realistic way to solve it.
Biden's Counselor - Jeff Zients from Facebook's Board
Biden's General Counsel - Jessica Hertz from Facebook
White House Office of Legislative Affairs - Louisa Terrell - Public Policy director at Facebook
"While he was Minister for Trade and Investment, Robb approved Chinese company Shandong Landbridge Group to lease Port Darwin for 99 years. As soon as he left politics, Robb was hired by Shandong Landbridge on a $880,000 per year salary. In 2019, Robb left the position, shortly before a new foreign-interference law took effect."[0]
Good work if you can get it and still sleep at night.
"According to a poll released last week by Quinnipiac University, 45 percent of New Yorkers consider corruption to be a “very serious” problem, but 48 percent of voters said it’s as bad as anywhere else"
"You'll be hard pressed to find New Yorkers who don't think government corruption is a problem in New York State,” poll analyst Mary Snow said. “Yet, it's not the defining issue in the race.”[0]
[0]: https://www.politico.com/states/new-york/city-hall/story/201...
The reason is usually much less nefarious: Private sector pays a lot more than political jobs. This is especially true for FAANG positions.
Facebook is large enough to afford professional lobbyists and consulting firms if they need political access. They don’t need to give executive level positions to former employees of a governor’s communications team to get access.
Those cost and are not very effective. Lobbyists create paper trails and must follow rules. A more efficient strategy is to hire the friends and family members of influential people.
This is no different. Basically they are hiring lobbyists on staff instead of dealing with a lobbying firm.
Welcome to our neo-feudal reality!
That's patently false. The government, and in particular the executive branch, holds immense and immediate powers whose implementation materially changes when a change of officeholder takes place, even sometimes within the same party.
It's not clear that Biden's platform would have been as worker focused were it not for Sanders' run or as America-first were it not for Trump.
Also consider that within an 10 year span legislation as opposed to each other as Obamacare and the Trump tax cut took place.
Voting matters a great deal.
Right before you link to the page where you pulled your self-redacted quote from. So all you really did was call more attention to it. Clever trolling.
> Maintaining a connection to powerful politicians might well have been in her job description.
Well not doing that will be just resorting to banal technicalities to hire one for an important job. To me it would be as stupid and irritating as companies asking me SpringBoot 2.3.1 experience for a Sr Engineer job instead of problem solving skills.
Maybe I'm missing something, but you posted an article from a local news site in Scarsdale, NY. I'm pretty sure that just means that her family literally lived on Bradford Road.
I've never heard Bradford Road used as code before, and I grew up in New England. (And besides, NY is not in New England.)
I think you're reading too much into the small town newspaper editorial.
"Bradford Road" is how you describe the road they lived on, in a small town paper.
Scarsdale NY is a wealthy suburb in Westchester County, with a large Jewish population.
"Solomon Schechter" (your redaction) is a private school in Manhattan named after an important rabbi. Censoring his name is confusing. Are you concerned that readers here will think you are reacting negatively to her family's (presumed) religious affiliation?
Small town editorial is chummy and insular, but it's not written for a larger audience. I don't see anything unusual or inappropriate in the writing here.
I feel that you missed the most egregious problem with the article though. It was posted in 2016, and almost five years later, no one has corrected the misspelling of the name of the town!
It isn't that. If we are talking about family relations, daughters working for people who know their fathers, a school with ties to a particular religion or community injects a statement that I did not want to make. It is irrelevant to the issue but can easily start a _very_ negative conversation. I don't think ever mentioning someone's likely religion in such context is ever appropriate.
As for "of such and such road", that is a very common phrase going back centuries. It is a way of stating the wealth, or lack thereof, of a person's family.
I wish people would evaluate their own susceptibility to conspiracy theory thinking. There is no evidence of this other than "it is something I've seen in the movies that seems plausible," which frankly is more or less the same level of proof as "Plandemic" and "Antivax."
Extremely weird or naive to think of it as an implausible conspiracy theory.
That took me all of 5 minutes to find and I guess being lazy in complaining about lazy reporting is the ultimate irony?
There are always double standards for journalistic ethics for primetime anchors, it's certainly not a CNN nor even a US only thing, but this one is a bit too egregious to spin, surely ?
I would love to hear the discussions going on on the international side of CNN (which I would argue has fairly high standards to reporting)...
Instead, it seems the best way to get actionable news without the addition of bias from the source, is to get it from the primary source itself.
I've been thinking about building something to accomplish this for a while, a news aggregator that pulls news exclusively from primary sources.
If you think about it, the primary/original source for news in these major categories usually falls in these buckets:
- Business/Financial News: primary sources are company press releases, government regulatory bodies, etc - Political/Local News: generally originates from the websites of government agencies, or that of a particular politician's.
There are of course several other categories of news, but I'd argue these two make up the bulk of what can be considered "actionable news"
https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/2021.08.03_nyag_-_inve...
Funnily now people call for keeping politics out of it. In politics. This isn't about general media anymore.
[0] https://nypost.com/2020/08/29/political-insider-explains-vot...
This is a guy who wrote a book about his leadership in the covid pandemic during the covid pandemic. That's like Churchill writing his memoir of World War II during The Blitz.
We ought to have a culture where someone who behaves like this is laughed out of the building.
Politics is nasty. Full stop.
My only TIL that I can offer: Everyone should run for office. Any office. At least once.
Once you decide to play the game -- play to win -- every thing makes perfect sense.
Not to excuse it, in any way. It's just that folk theories aren't even wrong. So people get worked up about the wrong stuff. There will always be devils doing bad stuff.
What should we do about them?
(Haven't started Caro's LBJ biographies yet. I've gleaned that LBJ makes Moses look like a middleweight.)
Like many other officials during this period, his frequent press conferences were nothing but ego satisfying spectacles.
I thought I should make the comment from the sibling poster more explicit.
Some of us do, but the partisan politics have blinded many. We can't even agree on basic things any more, like supporting the Iraq war should be a disqualification for either party at this point. People keep supporting these liar, fraud, war criminal types.
Trump campaigned on how dumb Afghanistan and Iraq are and promised to remove troops.
Back in March 2020, the American Health Care Association told Cuomo, Wolf, Murphy, Whitmer etc to stop ordering infected patients into nursing homes. The governors ignored the AHCA and removed their own family from nursing homes while forcing others:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1191811
After this, it turned out Cuomo was also fabricating and lying about the actual nursing home death numbers by 10000.
Remember the trans Health Secretary Rachel Levine from PA (now US Assistant Health Secretary) who took out her own mother from nursing home while pushing covid patients into them:
https://nypost.com/2020/05/13/pennsylvania-health-official-m...
Despite all this, nobody has been held accountable and last month, the DOJ dropped the investigation:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-04/cuomo-alo...
In light of deep stupidity like this, it baffles me that people bother using models of electorate behavior more sophisticated than emotionally-incontinent monkeys banging on typewriters. There's more consistency and intelligence evident in the way six year olds pick their favorite power rangers.
The US military docked a hospital ship in New York Harbor during the peak of the initial outbreak. That ship remained almost entirely unused [0] while COVID-positive adults were being discharged from hospitals straight back to nursing homes, where they died and/or infected others. The emergency hospital established in New York's Javits Convention Center went similarly underutilized [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospital_ships_designated_for_...
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/why-nycs-largest-emergency-h...
At first stance it looked rsther bad but having read the article its much more flimsy.
However the optics of this happening are bad for fb and i dont think its unreasonable for fb to act against her.
That said, a communications manager is strongly, hilariously, obviously not a "facebook executive". For one thing, it's an IC position. CM's don't manage people, they "manage" a message. (Source: I worked at FB)
Please don't let yourself get baited by the literal tabloid that is the Murdoch post.
Maybe the truly shocking thing is the ratio of strong opinions to actual knowledge.
The city mayor is so unpopular that The only thing stopping a recall is that he's going to be leaving office soon.
Cuomo has got to go for sure, hes now too weak to keep diblasio & pals in check
I was always puzzled why so few FB employees whistleblow (RSUs aside). That was until I read An Ugly Truth and read about Sonya Ahuja's internal policing tactics. Scary stuff!
I feel sorry for you all being keylogged and monitored so closely by your employer!
OMG...this person worked as THE "communication manager" for facebook...everyone knows facebook only has ONE communication manager and she pretty much runs the company...
This is guilt by loose association...Typical NYPOST/Murdoch crap..
