The Patriot Post® · Tuesday Short Cuts

Upright: “Truckers have become a new wave of front-line responders in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic. … Before the realities of this pandemic, trucks were often ignored. They were considered an annoyance in our daily lives — chugging slowly up the winding hills of our back roads to that grocery store, hospital, department store or Amazon distribution center. Never mind that they are filled with those essentials or nonessential things we thought we had to have. Too often people mindlessly assume what they buy at Target or Walmart or Whole Foods comes from the back room, not from a farm upstate, or a factory four states away.” —Salena Zito

For the record: “Every 1% hike in the unemployment rate will likely produce a 3.3% increase in drug overdose deaths and a 0.99% increase in suicides according to data provided by the National Bureau of Economic Research and the medical journal Lancet. These are facts based on experience, not models. … Overall, the death rate for an unemployed person is 63% higher than for someone with a job, according to findings in Social Science & Medicine. Layoff-related deaths are likely to far outnumber the 60,400 coronavirus deaths predicted through August. This comparison is not meant to understate the horror of coronavirus for those who get it and their families. But heavy-handed state edicts to close all ‘nonessential businesses’ need to be reassessed in light of the predictable harm to the lives and health of the uninfected.” —Betsy McCaughey

We concur: “I don’t like what I do professionally. I don’t think it’s worth my time.” —CNN’s Chris Cuomo

Non compos mentis: “I’m really tired of reading how business owners are ‘forced’ to layoff workers. No one made them do that. They chose to do that. Not saying it isn’t a hard choice, during a hard time, but to say they were forced obscures their agency AND casts owners/CEOs as the victims.” —CNN’s Sally Kohn

Braying jackass: “As we prepare to reopen America, we have to remember what this crisis has taught us: The administration’s failure to plan, to prepare, to honestly assess and communicate the threat to the nation led to catastrophic results.” —Joe Biden

A blind squirrel finds a nut: “The answer is we should blame China. Not Chinese Americans. But we can’t stop telling the truth because racists get the wrong idea. … We can’t afford the luxury anymore of non-judginess towards a country with habits that kill millions of people.” —HBO’s Bill Maher

And last… “Modern men and women have substituted ‘experts’ for prophets and priests. Science is the secular religion, and ‘experts’ are its prophets and priests.” —Dennis Prager