Playing the blame game

Testing. It’s the latest obsession by the mainstream media. Not that there’s anything wrong with testing someone for coronavirus, it’s crucial if you think you have it. The truth is testing has been pretty widespread for quite some time. You wouldn’t know that from watching the press frenzy at the daily White House briefings.

Although they’ve tried to get the message out, it still doesn’t seem to make it past the media firewall. Testing for coronavirus, or any other disease, is not the function of the federal government. In most cases it’s not the full function of the state and local governments. It’s a combination of local health departments and hospitals.

President Trump, in his frustration, displayed a print-out of 5,000 testing centers across the country. Some governors were still not aware that testing was available in their states, as amazing as that might sound. One governor had ordered tests from South Korea. Larry Hogan, the Republican governor of Maryland, used the influence of his South Korean-born wife to get 500,000 coronavirus tests flown in from South Korea. As Trump and Vice President Pence pointed out, there were already numerous testing sites all across Maryland. Many test sites across the country have been operating at only ten percent capacity.

A quick Internet search found news stories dating back to March with testing site locations all over Maryland. So what happened? Nobody’s quite sure. Pence said he’d been in contact with Governor Hogan but wasn’t sure why he ordered the tests from South Korea. Trump said of Hogan, “He could’ve saved a lot of money. He needed to get a little knowledge, that would’ve been helpful.” The Guardian characterized that as an attack on Hogan. It wasn’t an attack. It was an obvious point.

In Tennessee, there are testing sites all over the state. Some are run by hospitals like Vanderbilt that have walk-in clinics. You’ve been able to walk in since at least early March and get tested if the doctor on duty thinks you need it. The problem in mid-March was getting the results in a timely manner. What was supposed to take a couple of days ended up taking two weeks in some cases. That was presumably because of the backlog at places like Quest.

When this coronavirus first hit we were told by the health experts to not get tested unless you had all the major symptoms like shortness of breath, a dry cough, and a fever. Now we know some people don’t exhibit all, or sometimes any, of those symptoms. Some people simply have flu-like aches and congestion. Now they’re advising anyone with any symptoms to get tested.

It’s amazing how quickly the medical advice is evolving. First they said no masks. Now they’re advising everyone to wear a mask. That’s nobody’s fault. This disease is, in many ways, unlike anything we’ve dealt with before. The mainstream media love to take the luxury of current knowledge and apply it to situations weeks or even months ago. It’s not fair to do that to our health experts and it’s not fair to do it to President Trump.

Remember when this thing was just a curiosity? It was an outbreak, we were told, contained to Wuhan, China. The Chinese communist leaders chose to downplay the outbreak and not level with the rest of the world. That cost tens of thousands of lives.

I don’t think there’s anyone—Democrat or Republican—who isn’t acting with the best interest of the people at heart. It’s time for everyone to stop trying to score political points.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show, on SuperTalk 99.7WTN in Nashville. He's also co-host of The PodGOATs podcast and I'm Calling Bovine Scatology.

The war on hydroxychloroquine

I’ve often said that political correctness was going to get us killed. The coronavirus is a prime example. Because President Trump suggested on March 19 that hydroxychloroquine might be a viable treatment for coronavirus, mainstream media outlets have waged all-out war on the drug. This malaria drug, that’s been approved for use in the U.S. since 1955, has shown promising results with doctors all around the world. The FDA even issued an emergency use order. Governor Cuomo was the first governor to insist the drug be allowed in New York the day after President Trump mentioned it in a press briefing. 

Even a Democrat lawmaker from Michigan is crediting Trump with potentially saving her life. State Representative Karen Whitsett of Detroit was diagnosed with coronavirus on March 31. While in the hospital, Whitsett learned Democrat Governor Gretchen Whitmer had issued an order prohibiting the use of hydroxychloroquine for coronavirus patients. The governor backed down several days later. Whitsett told Laura Ingraham on Fox News, “If President Trump had not talked about this it wouldn’t have been something that would be accessible for anyone to be able to get right now.” Within hours of her first dose she was on the road to recovery. “It has a lot to do with the president…bringing it up,” she told The Detroit Free Press.

She’s not alone. Doctors around the world are having great success with hydroxychloroquine in combination with other drugs like azithromycin and zinc. Many have been on death’s door, and this anti-malaria drug has been a life-saver.

Still, outlets like CNN and MSNBC continue to try and scare people away from the drug. Both outlets even went so far as to link an idiot in Arizona who ingested fish tank cleaner and died to Trump’s comments about the possibility that this drug might help. Hydroxychloroquine and fish tank cleaner are not even remotely the same thing. And the guy in Arizona and his wife ingested the cleaner even when they didn’t have coronavirus. You can’t fix stupid.

But you can fix disinformation. The mainstream media were spectacularly wrong when they attacked Trump for giving “false hope” on a “potentially dangerous drug.” There’s nothing at all dangerous about hydroxychloroquine. Reported side effects are nausea and vomiting. Sure beats the hell out of dying. 

That’s not the point with the mainstream media. The objective is to blame Trump for the coronavirus and give him no credit with coming up with any solutions. There are two major decisions President Trump has made during all of this that were game-changers. Pushing this anti-malaria drug was one of them. The other was curtailing travel from China way back in January. Those two decisions alone probably saved thousands of American lives.

Did the liberals and the media admit their mistake? No, they doubled down. They ratcheted up the hysteria. One unhinged state representative from Ohio claimed she’d contacted The Hague to bring charges against the president for “crimes against humanity” for continuing to push the drug. This even after Governor Cuomo of New York reported encouraging results in his state.

Then Mika Brzezinski on “Morning Joe” hit an even lower low. She suggested Trump was pushing the drug because he was making money from it. All of this is designed to keep doctors and patients away from the drug for fear that it might actually work. These people, as usual, have become part of the problem.

The question is how many people have needlessly died because the liberal media and Democrat lawmakers didn’t want to admit that Trump was right?

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show, on SuperTalk 99.7WTN in Nashville. He's also co-host of The PodGOATs podcast and I'm Calling Bovine Scatology.

Coronavirus vs. civil liberties

We’re in an odd time, some would say a dangerous time, when public health concerns and civil liberties collide. A pastor in Tampa was arrested for holding a church service. What’s interesting is not one of the parishioners was arrested. Personally, I think it’s irresponsible to organize a large gathering these days, regardless of the purpose. I’m also troubled that governments that claim over and over that they’re not declaring martial law are behaving like governments that have. If you’re arresting someone for leading a group of people in a worship service then martial law is already here.

It does appear that stay-at-home measures are working. Kinsa Health produces internet-connected thermometers (a little concerning in and of itself). Their national tracking map showed fevers holding steady or dropping all across the country with two notable exceptions, parts of New Mexico and a ring around New Orleans. The latter is believed to have been set off by Mardi Gras. Fevers have been dropping rapidly in the West, and with stay-at-home orders in those two hot spots of New Mexico and Louisiana they’ve seen those regions start to cool.

Which brings us back to civil liberties. I completely understand the concern over governments enforcing restrictions on your movements. The governor of Kentucky is prohibiting anyone from leaving the state unless you’re going to visit family members or crossing the border for groceries. How in the world he expects to enforce that on every interstate and highway in Kentucky is a mystery. I suspect it’s more bluster than anything else. I can just imagine Kentuckians being smuggled under tarps in the trunks of cars into Tennessee in some dystopian COVID-19 underground railroad. Such measures only serve to scare people rather than offer any real solutions.

What’s also interesting is the same folks who have advocated open borders between the U.S. and Mexico are all of a sudden hellbent on restricting travel from state to state. Many of the same concerns of the spreading of dangerous diseases have fueled the push for stricter border control with Mexico. Now border control is all the rage.

But what about that pastor in Tampa? Should he have been arrested? There’s an old saying with civil libertarians that “my liberty ends where your nose begins,” meaning you have full and unfettered liberty as long as you don’t infringe on mine. Exposing someone to coronavirus literally fits the description of “where your nose begins.” Yes, you have the right to congregate for a religious service, but you do not have the right to expose me to a potentially deadly disease. It’s curious that no one in the audience of that church service has been required to quarantine just in case they were exposed.

We may look back on this time and realize that we all overreacted. Unfortunately, we don’t have the luxury of hindsight. Were it up to me I would urge all who are elderly and/or experiencing underlying health issues to shelter in place and refrain from contact with the outside world. I’d send the rest of us back to work. But I’m not in charge. Those who are are doing everything they possibly can to keep the death toll as low as possible.

At some point tough decisions will have to be made. Is it worth destroying a country in order to save it? That becomes the reality at some point. Where that point is nobody really knows. One thing is clear. We all must learn a lesson about preparedness. That’s if the country survives to learn the lesson. 

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show, on SuperTalk 99.7WTN in Nashville. He's also co-host of The PodGOATs podcast and I'm Calling Bovine Scatology.

Trump haters shamelessly exploit national crisis

The news media’s handling of this coronavirus crisis has been nothing short of despicable. An idiot couple in Arizona ingested fish tank cleaner to keep from getting the disease and the media blamed it on President Trump. Governor Cuomo of New York fumed that he wasn’t getting 30,000 ventilators even though only 26,000 people in the state had coronavirus. The media blamed Trump instead of explaining that only a small percentage of people with the disease would need to be hospitalized.

This left-wing media are downright giddy about what this is doing to the economy. They would literally rather see this country burned to the ground than see Donald Trump win re-election. But do we really believe the American people are going to turn to Joe Biden? Bless his heart, but this guy is lost. He stumbles and rambles and wanders off camera. He does not generate a lot of confidence.

And Bernie Sanders is snapping at reporters for getting too close to him like a get-off-my-lawn grumpy old man. He’s staying in the race until New York. Why, we just don’t know.

President Trump has taken decisive action since the beginning of this crisis. Even before it became a crisis. Shutting off travel from China was a bold move. So was banning travel from Europe. The latter drew virtually no fire from the media. The former drew accusations of racism. As did his reference to the disease as the ‘Chinese virus,’ which was first coined by the same media that attacked him.

And then there’s the malaria drug. President Trump placed high hopes on this drug being effective in treating coronavirus. The media battered him for giving false hope, and then a man in Florida was virtually cured by it. Governor Cuomo said they should use the drug on patients in New York and he was hailed by the media as a genius.

Now President Trump hopes to open the country back up by Easter. MSNBC and CNN trot out activist doomsday doctors who claim it’ll be a disaster. Chris Hayes at MSNBC claimed 50 percent of the country would die. Of course this is the same network that claimed Mike Bloomberg had spent a million dollars per U.S. citizen when he’d actually spent a buck-fifty-two. Fifty percent of the country dead? Really? Right now the mortality rate in the U.S. is running around one percent. Even if the entire country got this virus, which isn’t likely, the mortality rate wouldn’t even begin to approach 50 percent. That’s just vicious, irresponsible journalism, if you can actually call it journalism.

Chris Cilliza had the dumbest tweet of the entire crisis when he tweeted “Viruses don’t, uh, recognize borders.” Well, Chris, viruses don’t have the capability of recognizing anything, but people at borders sure recognize viruses. Can you imagine, in the midst of all of this, that there’s still some resident of Moron Mountain who believes borders are bad?

Imagine if Trump hadn’t secured our borders in January. There’s no telling how rampant this disease would be. In fact, if he’d just done it a week earlier Patient Zero in Seattle who had just flown back from Wuhan wouldn’t have killed all those poor folks at the nursing home.

There’s so much we’ve learned through all of this. We’ve learned that liberal policies are deadly. Whether it’s open borders, shutting down an economy long term, or trying to ram through Green New Deal policies in a coronavirus relief bill that have nothing to do with coronavirus. 

Thank God Hillary never got elected.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show, on SuperTalk 99.7WTN in Nashville. He's also co-host of The PodGOATs podcast and I'm Calling Bovine Scatology.

Toilet paper and paper towels? Really?

I hate to say it, but I don’t have a whole lot of faith in the American public. After seeing the run on toilet paper and paper towels it’s obvious that the people have developed an every-man-for-himself mentality. Why paper towels and toilet paper? The shelves of my grocery store were stocked full of actual food items. Bread was gone. I’ve never understood that one. During impending snow storms people clear the shelves of milk and bread. Are they making French toast?

I went to the grocery store because we were actually running low on paper towels. I went to three different locations and it was the same story. Who started this? That’s the problem. Nobody really knows. Someone started buying up toilet paper and the madness started. Then it spread to toilet paper. What’s next?

Toilet paper aisle at Target

I started a hashtag on Twitter. #PanicIsTheVirus. I’m not suggesting that the coronavirus isn’t serious. If you’re over 70 and/or have health problems you should probably stay close to home. I don’t have any problem with the social distancing. But cancelling NASCAR? Sure, make the fans stay home, but race. And I’m not even a big NASCAR fan. What are the chances that someone in a full driving suit and helmet is going to either get the coronavirus or spread it? Zero. I certainly understand cancelling mass gatherings of people. I just wish we’d been a little less hysterical about it.

We’re having to walk that thin line between precaution and panic, and we’re solidly on the side of panic. Anybody remember the Hong Kong Flu of 1968? It killed over a million people worldwide and around 100,000 in the United States. I don’t recall the government shutting down all public events. The Asian Flu of 1957 killed almost 70,000 Americans. Where was the freak out?

The common denominator is Donald Trump wasn’t president. The people on the left have shamelessly used this crisis to try and topple the president. Again. The Russia hoax didn’t work. The Ukrainian hoax didn’t work. They’re hoping this time they’ll be successful. I doubt it.

These pandemics can last for years, but they usually peak within a few months. This one appears to have peaked in China. If we’re lucky we’re only looking at a few more weeks here in the United States before things can get back to normal.

What’s really interesting is how Taiwan, which is only 140 miles across the Taiwan Strait, has managed to keep its cases really low. Like us they’ve instituted tight border restrictions and limited public gatherings. That seems to be the key. All of these open border advocates are looking like idiots now. There’s a great reason why countries have borders. That’s never been more clear than today.

We’ve not yet peaked in the United States. It will surely get worse before it gets better. Probably several thousand deaths before it runs its course. If you’re in a high risk group then you should confine your movements. If you’re anyone else you should limit yours. No need to rush out for toilet paper and paper towels. And bottled water? Don’t people have taps in their houses? If the end of the world to you means drinking water from your sink and doing your business with a leaf then we’re much weaker than I thought.

Get it in one bag, people. This is not a time to be selfish. Buy what you need and stop hoarding. Leave something for others. We’ll get through this if you’ll just stop acting like animals. BTW, animals don’t need toilet paper.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show, on SuperTalk 99.7WTN in Nashville. He's also co-host of The PodGOATs podcast and I'm Calling Bovine Scatology.

Coronavirus—Calm down

Eighty. That’s the average age of coronavirus fatalities according to Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams. He also said if you’re young you have a better chance of dying of the regular flu than from coronavirus. Your chance of dying from it is way below a half-percent until you hit the age of 50 when it jumps to 1.3 percent. It goes to 3.6 percent when you reach 60, 8 percent at 70, and 14.8 percent when you hit 80. In other words, anyone under 60 who’s in reasonable health has virtually no chance of dying from coronavirus. Think that stops the panic? Not hardly. Why? Because the hysteria from the news media drowns out all else.

They’re amplifying the Democrats like Chuck Schumer who see victory in panic and a tanking economy. Each and every day the Democrats wake up to see what kind of new doubt they can put in the minds of Americans. At a time when everyone should be coming together they’re trying to tear us apart. And all because they know a robust economy means certain defeat in November.

I would love to see a political party just say, “Hey, things are actually going pretty good right now. We don’t see much that needs changing.” Think that’s going to happen? Instead both parties try to tear down whichever one is in power. How about looking out for us citizens? And I’m talking to both parties. But there’s too much at stake. Too much power on the line. I’ve never understood people who crave power. Me? I tend to avoid it. Someone wants to put me in charge I say, “No, thanks.” I don’t want to run things. Am I alone? Ever seen that mild-mannered guy at work go nuts with power once someone puts him in charge? It’s ugly.

You know, maybe we should be putting people in power who don’t want it. Kinda tough to do that, though. If they don’t want it they probably won’t take it. So, we’re stuck with people who run for office who love telling the rest of us what to do. Not all of them, obviously, but too many of them. And that’s what we’re seeing on display right now. We saw something similar during the Obama administration with the Ebola outbreak. Obama invited a good deal of criticism when he refused to restrict travel from African nations. We dodged a bullet on that one. Or maybe the Ebola scare as it pertained to the United States was overblown.

The Ebola outbreak of 2014 afflicted 28,652 people worldwide. Of those, 11,325 died. That’s a kill rate of 40 percent. Only 4 people came down with it in the U.S. and one of them died. What saved us was the disease was confined primarily to Africa. Travel from Africa to the U.S. is low compared to China. Business conducted with Africa is low compared to China. President Trump greatly curtailed travel to and from China in late January. I thought he should’ve done it earlier, but it was the first time it had been done.

What’s interesting is to go back in time and look at the predictions from the World Health Organization on the number of Ebola cases. They predicted in excess of 20,000 worldwide. We got over 28,000. What are they saying now about coronavirus? They’re being pretty quiet when it comes to estimates. Understandable given all the hysteria.

The ordinary flu has already killed over 12,000 people in America alone. Be cautious, but don’t be foolish. The panic industrial complex is playing you.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show, on SuperTalk 99.7WTN in Nashville. He's also co-host of The PodGOATs podcast and I'm Calling Bovine Scatology.

Biden is inevitable

I always hated that guy who came back after the fact and said, “I told you so,” but, um, I told you so. When every pundit had left Joe Biden for politically dead I said, “Wait for South Carolina.” Even as we approached South Carolina some pundits were claiming Bernie Sanders would win. I explained to you several weeks ago that Iowa and New Hampshire don’t matter. They matter less each passing election. Why either party stakes so much on them is a curiosity. I think that will change in 2024.Now what?

Well, Joe won big on Super Tuesday (or Super Thursday as he preferred to call it) and that’s because of his performance in South Carolina. Now, I don’t profess to have any inside knowledge of the Democrat machinery. At the risk of getting a “Go to hell!” from Donna Brazile, I’ll do a little speculating on the backroom workings of the DNC. I suspect they wanted Pete Buttigieg. He’s young, he’s smart, he’s gay. The perfect progressive. He’d just won Iowa (supposedly) and looked like the fresh face in comparison to the Jurassic bark of the old “get off my lawn” candidates on the debate stage. I expected one of them to randomly shout out “Bingo!” at any moment. The DNC elders looked at South Carolina as the litmus test. If Pete could miraculously pull out a win there then he’d be their man. If he couldn’t he’d have to step aside for the good of the party.

Then Joe Biden ran away with it in South Carolina, raking in almost half the vote. At that point it was clear that he was the only one who could beat Bernie. And the last thing the DNC wants is Bernie as their nominee. It goes far beyond the fact that Trump would mop the floor with him. The DNC establishment knows that a Bernie nomination would effectively relegate the Democrats to third-party status. This is the interesting part. It’s not that they don’t agree with him. Many in the DNC are just as socialist as he is. They just don’t say it out loud. It’s like pooping. Everybody does it, but, egads, you never discuss it in polite company.It’s all about winning. Both parties have that mentality to a certain degree, but the Democrats seem to place it above all else. They would love to see the economy tank so that it hurts Trump. Heck, they’d love to see the coronavirus become a crisis in America if it hurts Trump. I’ve never seen a group of people like this in my life who place party before country. If you think I’m being unfair look at the impeachment. Look at the two-year-long Trump/Russia hoax. Heck, Donna Brazile was on TV on Super Tuesday claiming the RNC chairman was using “Russian talking points” before she told her to “go to hell” for speculating on what the DNC was up to.What is the DNC up to? They’re devising a strategy to win. Even if it means elevating a guy as the party’s standard-bearer who looks like they found him on a beach with sandals and tube socks and a metal detector. When Donald Trump is the youngest man in the race alarm bells should be going off.Mayor Pete’s smart. He knows he had no chance of getting the nomination. He has a much better chance of being president if he’s on the ticket with Biden. When Biden loses he’s positioned for 2024. If the economy keeps booming that may be a moot point.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show, on SuperTalk 99.7WTN in Nashville. He's also co-host of The PodGOATs podcast and I'm Calling Bovine Scatology.