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Comment by thepasswordis | Hacker News Reader

Cuomo also sent thousands of elderly people to their deaths by forcing them back into nursing homes.

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.

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You forgot his "Best Selling" braggadocios book about how great he handled COVID-19, including his decision to send thousands of elderly to their deaths.

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...

> 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.

A politician killing a few (hundred) thousand people is rarely that big a black mark on their legacy, especially among their supporters.

People dying as a result of bad policy is one thing - people can hold the politician accountable at the ballot box (either next election or recall if bad enough). You can't always know a policy is bad before enacting it... that's just life.

Covering it up though, makes that process impossible.

Even when Cuomo realized this was a bad policy and was resulting in thousands of unnecessary deaths - he didn't reverse course... instead he doubled down, wrote a book, and won an Emmy - all while literally knowingly sending people to their deaths.

The very fact that the conversation surrounding Cuomo nearly always is focused on sexual harassment means the cover-up worked, and he got away with it.

Even now, as his own party (and the President himself) have turned their back to Cuomo, the conversation leaves out the cover-up.

Cuomo got away with it, sold a ton of books, won an Emmy, and will have learned nothing other than to not get caught groping women again. Wow...

Yeah, and not a soul in the media or other most elsewhere cared until after the election. Indeed, CNN had his own brother interview him, even coaching him to maximize his appeal. The activist media is detestable.

I think CNN liked the brother vs. brother angle purely for entertainment value. The only activism they practice is what drives traffic.

I don't doubt they make good money off of their activism, but let's not diminish the extent to which they are activist rather than journalist. These are the OG "mostly peaceful protest" folks[0], and this is only one of the more conspicuous on a long list of egregiously activist takes that they've produced in the last few years.

[0]: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cnn-fiery-but-mostly-peaceful...

I think activism implies service to an idealistic cause. I don't believe CNN has any idealistic causes, they're a capitalist firm servicing their market.

I don't mean this as a defense of CNN in any way. They're clearly giving their audience what they want to hear which drives revenue, making them more of an entertainment company than a news company. But the problem of for-profit news is bigger than CNN.

I'm not sure we can really separate activism from corporate greed in the context of the media. Typically you have a lot of rank and file journalists and editors who are activist and corporate leadership who have figured out how to monetize their employees ideological fervor. Moreover, as "activists" are rewarded financially for their commitment, they become greedy grifters rather than mere devotees of a toxic ideology (consider prominent activist-grifters such as Kendi or DiAngelo). Which is all to say that it seems not particularly worthwhile to try to distinguish between activists and grifters because it seems more like a spectrum than distinct categories and all positions on the spectrum are pretty equally toxic as far as I can tell (you're either propagating misinformation out of zeal or greed and one doesn't seem strictly better than the other).

If you are taking about Portland, it really was mostly peaceful protest. It probably would have been completely peaceful if trump hadn’t sent in his fascist anonymous SS shock troops (against the express wishes of both the city and state governments).

> fascist anonymous SS shock troops

Can you try again without going full Godwin's Law on your first post in the thread? How can we have any hope of productive conversation with rhetoric like this? (I'm far from a Trump supporter, but there's valid Trump criticism--and plenty of it--and then there's absurd hyperbole).

I'm not who you're responding to, but I'm not sure how else to reasonably characterize unmarked, unidentified armed and armored personnel snatching people off the streets into unmarked vehicles.

Is it more charitable to assume you genuinely can’t tell the difference between the US Marshals and SS troops or that you’re arguing in bad faith?

I don't believe those were US Marshalls, iirc they were volunteers from a collection of federal agencies that were the most loyal to Trump.

However, they way they acted, in refusing to identify themselves, the agency for which they worked, where they were taking their abductees, etc makes me inclined to liken them more to a notorious fascist unit than a legitimate law enforcement agency.

Per NPR (a solidly left-leaning source) they were US Marshals and they used unmarked vehicles to avoid the violent protesters who were allegedly targeting police. They didn't arrest anyone, but transported them to a safe location for questioning and immediately released them. Certainly not a good look but obviously this is nothing like SS troopers kidnapping people for death camps, torture, imprisonment, etc.

I am a vocal critic of Trump, but I don't understand the impulse to invoke absurd comparisons between the US and Nazi Germany. Trump gives us plenty of legitimate stuff to criticize on a regular basis, why discredit yourself like this?

“They didn’t arrest anyone.” Please. What is arrest other than losing freedom movement and then being moved to a location. It doesn’t make sense to me that you’re choosing to die on this hill. There is no excuse for using unmarked vehicles and police with no insignia. This is the US government, they’re doing it because they’re afraid of protestors? Sounds like BS. I’m tired of the government playing the victim during protests.

> It doesn’t make sense to me that you’re choosing to die on this hill

Friend, I’m not the one comparing US Marshals to SS Troopers, but please go on.

> What is arrest other than losing freedom movement and then being moved to a location.

Maybe the right phrasing would be "detained without the legal protections given to arrested people" -- not a step up...

What if there really were fascist shock-troopers and when people tried to express their outrage, anyone who wasn’t there says “whoa whoa, tone down the hyperbole”

There’s no real threat of fascism in America and people who use the term to characterize American politics are either ignorant or disingenuous or both.

I’d say Trump was definitely toeing the line. Taking all his actions as a whole 1) sending federal police to Portland and randomly kidnapping people 2) literally spewing lies every other word to the point you don’t know what’s real 3) wanting a military parade with tanks saluting him 4) inciting a mob to storm a democratically elected legislative assembly 5) expecting Supreme Court picks to be loyal to him specifically 6) undermining the integrity of an election which his own government and party often admitted was secure …

https://twitter.com/sfmnemonic/status/896884949634232320

>> "By all means, compare these shitheads to Nazis. Again and again. I'm with you."

If the Jack boot fits…

What's with the hysterical anti-media FUD? We know about Cuomo's nursing home shenanigans because the media you complain about were at the forefront of reporting about it, starting as far back as April 2020. (WSJ, Politico, WaPo, NYT, NBC News, Chicago Tribune, ABC, and CBS were just some of the national news organizations reporting on this.)

The public decided it didn't care.

Compare coverage on those outlets before and after the election. The media largely decides what the public does and doesn't care about. If they ran these stories as breathlessly as their ICE stories or their BLM stories the public would care.

...and he made the nursing homes not liable for anything related to covid-19. That's super villain evilry.

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.

It's a good thing the DOJ dropped the investigation into him and Whitmer over this at the end of last month. Evil and corrupt.

He was not allowed to transfer covid patients to the ship. The captain/navy didnt want to deal with the cleaning/disinfecting after the fact.

Tha javits center was for overflow, not first priority.

Where else were the elderly supposed to go? This one i have no info on

Then you move non-infected folks out of hospitals or nursing homes onto the ship, then use the empty space for the covid patients. There were still ways to utilize the resources available in a much better and safer way.

> The captain/navy didnt want to deal with the cleaning/disinfecting after the fact.

That sounds weird, like they weren't going to clean up after non-COVID patients? Is there a cite on this claim?

Covid patients were not allowed on board the ship. This was reported at the time.

On top of its strict rules preventing people infected with the virus from coming on board, the Navy is also refusing to treat a host of other conditions. Guidelines disseminated to hospitals included a list of 49 medical conditions that would exclude a patient from admittance to the ship.

Ambulances cannot take patients directly to the Comfort; they must first deliver patients to a city hospital for a lengthy evaluation — including a test for the virus — and then pick them up again for transport to the ship.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/02/nyregion/ny-coronavirus-u...

The ship's facilities were not meant for COVID patients, it was meant for patients who would go to a hospital if it wasn't full of COVID patients.

Don't forget the 40,000 ventilators he demanded for his state (a claim he said was based on science and data no less).

He then also criticized the Trump admin for not giving him that number even though they were giving him thousands already. 40k new ventilators didn't even exist at the time, there is no warehouse with tens of thousands of them, they were being built and distributed nationwide; but the media ate it up because orange man bad.

So you're talking about back in March of 2020 - when we did think ventilators would help. And at that point the federal government had sent a grand total of 400 ventilators to New York. But somehow managed to find 200 to send to Russia in May. And you can't figure out why he was complaining?

https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/489214-cuomo-says-n...

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/20/us-sends-200-ventilators-to-...

> More than half the nearly 8,000 ventilators the federal stockpile sent to states to fight the coronavirus pandemic went to New York, while the rest were split among 14 other states and territories, a report from the federal government shows.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2020/04/1...

I don't mean to be hyperbolic or off-topic, but wow, if this specific thread is anything to go by, I don't think we can have a nice society at all. We're like monkeys throwing feces around at eachother and can't even agree, after the fact, as to who threw the first batch or whether it was justified.

All while another separate set of monkeys (media), with their own agendas, tell the rest of us stories and interpretations of said feces throwing. Who am I to believe here? Where are the facts? Who is being punished and fired and impeached and imprisoned after we evaluate the facts? Were laws broken? Should there be laws against some of these things?

I think the culprit really is the clickbait, gotta get it out before someone else does, media. They seem to rarely fact check things anymore before pushing it out and when they are proven wrong retractions rarely happen. The lines between the democratic party and the media is definitely blurred, which isn't surprising as there are a lot of media execs who end up working for administrations for some time. It really is a worrying trend.

>I think the culprit really is the clickbait, gotta get it out before someone else does, media. They seem to rarely fact check things anymore before pushing it out and when they are proven wrong retractions rarely happen.

I think the culprit is people like yourself, who post a link to the government sending ventilators a month later, and pretending like it happened at the time New York was begging for them. What ACTUALLY happened was after 3 weeks of unending negative press, Trump finally caved and released ventilators. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/cuomo-knocks-trumps-claim-ny...

>"FEMA says, 'we're sending 400 ventilators.' Really? What am I going to do with 400 ventilators, when I need 30,000?" Cuomo said at a news conference.

>Later, Trump announced he would supply another 4,000 ventilators to New York from the national stockpile, but he added a claim that Cuomo had turned down the chance to stock up on thousands of ventilators in 2015.

>The lines between the democratic party and the media is definitely blurred, which isn't surprising as there are a lot of media execs who end up working for administrations for some time. It really is a worrying trend.

I'm not even sure what to do with that. The Trump administration literally hired Fox News employees to be a part of the administration. Fox News was founded to be a propaganda wing for the Republican party to ensure that they could try to control the message the next time they were caught in a situation like Watergate. And your concern is the media and the democratic party?

https://www.gawker.com/5814150/roger-ailes-secret-nixon-era-...

> CPI identified about 430 individuals working in journalism who contributed to either candidate between January 2015 and August 2016. Of the $396,000 they contributed, 96 percent ($382,000) went to Clinton, and 4 percent (about $14,000) went to Trump.[4]

https://ballotpedia.org/Fact_check/Do_97_percent_of_journali...

I'm concerned anytime media outlets have such close ties with politicians and political parties. Fox New included. But to me, one media outlet that leans conservative is way different than the other 5 or 6 major media outlets that run liberal.

> I think the culprit is people like yourself, who post a link to the government sending ventilators a month later, and pretending like it happened at the time New York was begging for them. What ACTUALLY happened was after 3 weeks of unending negative press, Trump finally caved and released ventilators.

Just because they were begging for them, doesn't mean they were entitled to them over every other state. In the end they got over half the federal stockpile. For one state. Those were taken away from allocations that would have gone to other states. Every state was facing ventilator shortages (my wife worked in an ICU at the time in VA and saw the same daily). NY just got more because they screamed the loudest.

>I'm concerned anytime media outlets have such close ties with politicians and political parties. Fox New included. But to me, one media outlet that leans conservative is way different than the other 5 or 6 major media outlets that run liberal.

And your point is what? 430 individuals is a fraction of the total journalists in the US, and an individual journalist donating to a political candidate != a news outlet supporting a candidate. But you know that, and are again attempting to insinuate something the data you've provided doesn't actually prove, at all. That's ignoring the fact that far more than 4% of the journalists in the US are conservative journalists... so either even the conservatives had no taste for Trump, or the numbers are bogus. If the numbers aren't bogus, it means journalists as a whole universally rejected Trump, and it has absolutely nothing to do with a liberal vs. conservative skew: the conclusion you're trying to draw from thin air.

>Just because they were begging for them, doesn't mean they were entitled to them over every other state. In the end they got over half the federal stockpile. For one state. Those were taken away from allocations that would have gone to other states. Every state was facing ventilator shortages (my wife worked in an ICU at the time in VA and saw the same daily). NY just got more because they screamed the loudest.

So you went from intentionally falsely implying they received 4,400 ventilators to now backpedaling to: they didn't deserve them. Like I said, you are clearly attempting to mislead people with things you know to be untrue while trying to act as though you aren't. It has no place here or anywhere else.

OP is doing exactly what he claims is the problem. He's picking and choosing links and completely ignoring timelines and facts. Sure, New York EVENTUALLY got 4,400 ventilators AFTER they went public and called out the federal government on the original offer of 400.

Normally I would give him the benefit of the doubt that he just didn't do proper research, but then when I see him making claims like "the lines are blurred between the media and the Democratic party" I just assume he's acting in bad faith and knows full well that the ventilators weren't released until after the negative press.

Wasn’t NY the hardest hit back in March 2020. Literally bodies shoving in trucks?

Yes, which is why the federal government sent a ton of supplies (more than any other state by a large margin) and a hospital ship there: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2020/04/1...

For the doubters:

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.

> withholding the nursing-home death toll in fear then-President Donald Trump would "turn this into a giant political football".

When will the left calm down and realize this isn’t a war?

Conservative Trump voter here: Everyone who is watching the news thinks they're in a war with people who have slightly differing opinions than they do.

Liberal Biden voter here: Totally. Everyone is absorbing media that spends 90% of its energy encouraging them to think that they're being attacked by the other half of the country. Both ends of the spectrum are encouraged to have a victim complex that makes them feel totally justified in their heinous behavior, because in their minds they're just defending themselves against the aggressor.

It's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. I consume no media directly, but I get exposed to the victim complexes quite thoroughly here on HN. And from that I do indeed get the impression that I'm under attack.

Not (necessarily) a Trump voter, but a conservative nonetheless. I think it's a little more complicated. There's a style of propaganda that seems uniquely tuned to how technology has changed the way we engage with news. It goes something like "this thing you are saying is happening isn't, but if it was it's actually good, and if it's actually bad you deserve it". This formulation absolutely drives engagement numbers across the political spectrum, regardless of the "truthiness" of any of the preceding claims. That particular progression just didn't happen when we all dutifully read our newspapers with our morning coffee because it takes a few cycles to formulate. A lot of conservatives I know just don't engage with news anymore because once you notice these kinds of rhetorical patterns you can't un-see them.

> A lot of conservatives I know just don't engage with news anymore because once you notice these kinds of rhetorical patterns you can't un-see them.

CNN and WaPo both engage in word association type brainwashing. Anything negative one republican does, they associate it with all to help build that unconscious bias. In other sentences they'll associate proud boys or other extremist groups with the republicans to help build that idea that all republicans are extremists. It's a big part of why there's a huge divide these days. And yes, it gets old and sickening.

When one side basically denies the virus exists, it kind of is.

It only becomes a war when people are willing to do anything to “win”

I don't think any serious person denies the existence of the virus. Even if you go to the ('ultra' far right?) patriots.win, you'll find very few COVID deniers. The bulk of the sentiment is about rejecting the government's response to the virus and being left alone to make their own choices (good or bad).

Oh no, it was called a "hoax" for a long time, people were claiming doctors were faking death certificates. Trump said Covid is "their new hoax.” People on facebook were saying covid would "disappear" after the election.

Don't gaslight people.

Some examples:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

https://www.insidenova.com/headlines/congressman-elect-bob-g...

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

Trump did not call COVID itself a hoax: https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-virus-outbreak-ap-f...

Do you have any links that’s not just news about someone calling it a hoax getting the virus, but one of the actual quote of them saying it’s a hoax? Because one of the supporting links you provided shows one quote and it’s not calling the virus a hoax, it’s calling the pandemic a hoax.

“It's a serious virus, but it's a virus. It's not a pandemic ... You get it. You stand up against tyranny. Thank you for being here today. Thank you for saying no to the insanity."

> it’s calling the pandemic a hoax.

I find that distinction odd. The definition of a pandemic is "a disease prevalent over a whole country or the world."

Is your claim that they are really saying is that there is a virus, but it is not "prevalent over a country or world"? For the pandemic to be a "hoax", there needs to be either no virus, or it isn't worldwide. That's a strange hill to die on to defend denialism.

If you're going to say "well really they are referring to something else when they say the pandemic is a hoax" then you're arguing about what you think they meant, not what they said.

> For the pandemic to be a "hoax", there needs to be either no virus, or it isn't worldwide.

Or it isn’t as widespread or dangerous as being made seem. That’s the other way. And this quote was mad what, July 2020?

Further if you look at the stats for global population lost, COVID claimed about 0.06% to 0.1% lives. It’s barely on the list of the top 18 pandemics by deaths. It got beat out by pandemics which we have no or incomplete data on.

So while you may think the world is ending, it’s really not.

The media once again attempting to control people and keep them indoors and vaccinated has caused mass panic.

In the US, more people died than US soldiers in WWII, which in any common parlance was "dangerous." Rationalize harder. Ready, Go!

Cause viruses and war are the same right? WWII also took 3% of the world population. So using your own example COVID is less deadly than WWII. But go ahead and cause more panic. It seems to be working well right? /s

He has the second highest covid death rate per capita, NJ's Phil Murphy beat him out (so far).

NY was ground zero in the US, so even without mismanagement it might have been the case. I work remotely with a Dr. in the Bronx and they were hit unbelievably hard early on. The hospital he worked at was surrounded with refrigeration trucks to store bodies.

To be fair, I don't think any politician could seriously influence that number. Crafting sensible policies helps a bit, but infection is a matter of chance and how people behave.

Indeed, I am poking fun. The current narrative is that sensible policies are the only thing that matters, which leads to the obvious conclusion that there was failure that should be accounted for.

Let's not be hyperbolic. He may not have handled covid perfectly but there are dozens of governments and legislatures out there that literally made mask mandates and lockdowns illegal to implement. If he deserves prison what about them?

I believe the initial rehousing of elderly patients back into nursing elder care facilities predates the arrival of the hospital ship and the construction of the Javitz Center hospital and triage space.

I'm ignorant on if this practice continued post arrival and construction of the added COVID treatment centers though.

This story is generally not discussed openly because there's a silent acknowledgement amongst people that distasteful things were done from 2016-2020 for obvious reasons.

Behind closed doors plenty of people say they think it's fine because the end goal was achieved.

> He won an Emmy for it!

Isn't that a TV/movie price? For good acting?

News reporters win Emmys too, they got varying categories.

It was disgusting re: the ships and the Javits center. But, the rude refusal to use any of those (by both Cuomo and Newsom), solely because Trump provided them, was also one of the early revelations of the politicization of the pandemic.

Newsom repeatedly and publicly thanked Trump for the USNS Mercy.

https://www.axios.com/gavin-newsom-trump-coronavirus-cnn-71e...

Before any of that happened, Trump was promising the pandemic would go away on its own, calling for less testing (implying either an astounding lack of intellect or something more nefarious) and he later admitted on a television interview he lied about the severity of the pandemic.

I’m glad I have a downvote button in this country.

Can you explain why you downvoted? Just making a snarky comment doesn't add anything to the conversation or explain why the post is incorrect or misleading.

Calling someone snarky is snarky and HN ALWAYS downvotes comments about downvoting which means this is an echo chamber and basically a waste of time as your comment so well illustrates.

My election votes do matter however and I may use them to downvote certain candidates which was the topic at hand.

> 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?

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.

Sadly the real scandal is that he was "following the science" at the given time and he wasnt the only official who did

Whether Cuomo "followed the science" in his nursing home directive is debatable. From Wikipedia (see above link):

>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."

What were the recommended infection control procedures? Disinfect surfaces and provide masks? Kind of a big deal was that the nursing homes mostly resisted but ultimately had to obey the order

Two things:

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

> Do you remember the hospital ship? The field hospitals? Javits center?

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!"

They intentionally shoved COVID positive patients into nursing homes full of vulnerable elderly while simultainiously rejecting the large-scale help offered by the Fed. There's no grey area here, just pure evil. They did the same in PA too, the PA Health Secretary even removed his mother from a nursing home before implementing this policy.

You're proving my point.

My comment was about "field hospitals, Javits center, and the hospital ship" which are all good safety precautions to protect the largest outbreak in the largest city in the country--just like the added safety of a seatbelt is good even on days you didn't get in an accident.

Your response is about none of those things.

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