As Aides Concealed COVID Death Toll, Cuomo Sealed $4 Mill Book Deal | Talking Points Memo

He intended to donate all proceeds to … well … something appropriate.

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One way to excuse it, sure.

And another way:

characterize data in the most positive context possible.

And they were consistent and transparent about their methodology at the time.

The critical point is that it was only in May that CMS came out with new rules and standards for reporting deaths.

So the “higher death toll” for nursing homes was an after-the-fact Monday morning quarterbacking from the feds.

$5 says the new calculations were specifically intended to give a black eye to the president’s perceived enemies.

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So, let me see if I have this straight…

A) Aides mischaracterized/misreported/concealed/etc COVID deaths during X time period. A thing we already knew.
B) Cuomo had a book deal inked during that same time period. A thing we already knew because the book came out already, and the deal had to have been made some time between when the pandemic started, and when the book came out—a period of time which includes all of the [X time period] above.

So… I just have to ask… since we already knew this if we bothered to give the timing any thought at all… why is this news?

I mean, really. This is nothing we did not already know. The ‘news’ here is that someone at the New York Times basically went ‘holy shit! Did you know that the Apollo missions only took place after the non-avian dinosaurs went extinct?’.

Next, there’ll be an article from the NYT that will imply that maybe JFK killed the dinosaurs.

After that, another one, speculating that maybe the birds killed JFK for revenge.

Seriously, this is more breathless ‘OMG! WATER’S WET!’ bullshit.

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Get it right. Cuomo dud not conceal deaths not where the deaths occurred. What he did not report was where those who died had resided.

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That’s why they delayed in responding to State Leg inquiries. They got a letter from Barr asking for materials and threatening a possible investigation. They needed to get their ducks in a row because they didn’t want to be used as a political football during the fall campaign. Eventually, DOJ backed down because Barr began his 3 month process of disentangling himself from Trump and that probably included backing away from politically motivated investigations like the one that had been intended for Cuomo.

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This^

This is why I will always see Cuomo as a friend and ally.

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Good point. Today’s news is often not crafted to educate, but to sell advertising. Public understanding of nuances involved, and sequence in the time-line suffer, and can lead to misunderstandings.

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My question is where should these recovering elderly COVID patients have gone? Because if they still had COVID, but only needed supportive care as opposed to intensive care again where should they have gone?
Please let me be clear that I don’t approve of aides manipulating data, either on their own or by Cuomo’s direction, but what people seem to forget is that we were in a crisis situation. Bodies are piling up, hospitals are getting hit hard, and we were still trying to figure out the how to deal with the crisis on hand.

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This is the normal piling on of a guy that doesn’t have a lot of love from the political world.

It wouldn’t matter what he did, it was going to be wrong. The only issue is what would have been less wrong? I remind everyone that tells me what a horrible person he was and what a bad job he did of the same question I ask in response to my being a bad sister to my only older sister: And who was I suppose to learn this from? Who was supposed to model for me what constituted a good sister? I rephrase the question here for relevance to Cuomo - who was supposed to show him or model for him what a good governor does in the face of a pandemic, when the Feds offered no leadership and Cuomo’s State was taking the enormous brunt of the infections?

T**** gloried in making Cuomo look bad (because NYC went for Hillary in 2016) and finally grudgingly sent the USS Comfort in to help, but honestly no one knew what to do with it when it arrived based on all the restrictions for its use. The true reality hit when Cuomo started sending in refrigerated trailers to hold the bodies of the dead out of NYC because the morgues were overloaded.

Until someone has walked in Cuomo’s shoes in that time period, they all just need to STFU about what he did during the early days of the pandemic. It’s fine to be an armchair quarterback with 20/20 hindsight, but damnit, he didn’t have a prayer of managing this any better than he did.

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Also, I hate replying to myself, but it just occurred to me…

My god, that’s a terrible story. I really want to see the movie now, though. :slight_smile:

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Meh:
image
Things I do care about:
Texas Rangers games are open for full attendance W/O masks.
Nearly 4,000 people died in Brazil yesterday
Most of Europe is still experiencing surging cases. Except the UK.
I finally signed up for a vaccination on Tuesday and haven’t received an appointment yet. And it’s been two whole days already!!! WTF! :grin:

In the start of the Cambrian period, the only life forms were in the oceans. Pretty much just barren land void of plant life. CO2 levels were about 7,000 PPM.

So why are you defending him against a straw-man charge that no one is making … while avoiding the following?

using aides and junior staffers for tasks like editing and clerical work that potentially violated state laws prohibiting use of public resources for personal gain.

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Most of this I could agree with.

And yet mis-reporting the data is not the same as reporting accurately.

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Shhhh… thou shalt never question the motives of a “mainstream Democrat” on TPM.

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I take that claim skeptically. Are they saying he used them to edit his book? He has an easy defense to that: he wanted to make sure the claims he was making were fact checked and proofed. That’s really not a basis to charge a sitting Gov.

All I ask is that if you’re gonna take out Cuomo, give us something real.

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Oh, that explains why I never ever see that here. I was wondering.

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At the time they reported it, there were no standards for exactly what should be reported where. They made a perfectly defensible analytical call that deaths would be reported where they happened, in a nursing home or in the hospital.

CMS came out later and created standards that, if a nursing home resident died in the hospital, it still counted as a nursing home death.

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Yes, but an explosion altering the course of an asteroid at the start of the Cambrian wouldn’t hit the Earth during the Cambrian. Especially since I’m talking about that explosion causing the K-T Extinction Event some 475 million years later. :wink:

If all of the COVID atrocities being laid at Cuomo’s doorstep had occurred in say the 5th year of a global pandemic, bash away. Instead it was in the 1st year of a global pandemic, not experienced in over a century, with a Federal government providing absolutely no leadership or guidance, and actively hamstringing state efforts.

Hindsight is always 100% accurate.

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