FairAndUNbalanced.com

 

From Luke Darby :

Limbaugh’s not alone in claiming that news outlets are trying to use the pandemic to smear Trump—the president agrees. On Wednesday morning, hours before he held a news conference about the country’s coronavirus response, Trump tweeted, “Low Ratings Fake News MSDNC (Comcast) & @CNN are doing everything possible to make the Caronavirus look as bad as possible, including panicking markets, if possible. Likewise their incompetent Do Nothing Democrat comrades are all talk, no action. USA in great shape!”

At a rambling and medically uniformed press briefing, Trump downplayed the outbreak, saying that it was “a little bit like the flu…and we’ll essentially have a flu shot for this in a fairly quick manner,” even though it will be some time before a vaccine for the new coronavirus is available. He defended his decision to make multiple massive budget cuts at the Centers for Disease Control, hobbling the agency’s preparedness to handle an outbreak. “I’m a businessperson,” he said. “I don’t like having thousands of people around when you don’t need them.”

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From Hackwhackers:

Certainly, the pervasive, open grifting by Trump, his family, and his allies will go down in history as unique and perverse.

Aside from his nepotistic children, one of the glaring examples of shameless grifting is Trump’s 2020 campaign manager, bearded alt-right propagandist. Parscale has been profiting handsomely from his position, siphoning off donor funds to his and other allied businesses, buying multi-million dollar homes and a Ferrari. He’s made sure to grease the palms of Trump family members and hangers-on…

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From The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser:

The coronavirus gives rise to one of those deliciously pregnant moments when Evangelical theology runs smack dab into reality. The question I want to answer is this: is the Evangelical God to blame for the current coronavirus outbreak? Is God in any way culpable for the origin of the virus, its infection of people, and the subsequent death of scores of people infected with the virus?

The bigger question is this: is the Evangelical God — the one true creator of all things — to blame for everything? Evangelicals might chafe at my use of the word “blame,” but if we are going to answer the questions mentioned above, isn’t ultimately the issue about blame; about culpability; about ownership; about whom the buck stops with?

Evangelicals are often schizophrenic when answering such questions.

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From Max’s Dad:

The despicable appearance at the CDC where the Thug From Queens accepted the proverbial ring kissing from actual scientists, called a Governor with an actual pandemic going on a “snake” and wore a cheap campaign hat while stating how goddamned smart he was because some imaginary relative went to MIT.

Meanwhile the stock market is crashing, the travel industry is dying, the airports are deserted, a threat of empty stadiums and arenas while athletes compete is a real possibility and then we get a complete bubblehead playing golf and lying about something that kills people.

America, is this what you want?

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From Glenn R. Geist at MadMikesAmerica:

I should say a word about Elizabeth Warren. Look, if it came to it, I would have voted for her, but listening to her the other night with Rachel Maddow, I felt queasy.

I’m truly sorry if the little girls of America are sobbing because they can’t believe they can be president anymore – even though if all future presidents were women, the odds are still hundreds of millions to one for any particular one. Hang in there, little girls. Your futures are brighter as time goes on.

I’m pleased with the growing diversity, but as I said before, nobody on the plane that went into the Hudson complained that there was a gray-haired old white man in the cockpit.

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From driftglass:

Mild In The Streets

I understand that in the middle of a hotly contested campaign, it is impossible to tell anyone anything. At this point, campaign staffs are not worried about bruised feelings or stepping on toes: they are grinding it out an inches at at time and rooting through their tool kit looking for the biggest hammer available to get them to the finish line.

However, a brazen flip-flop on this scale does what a campaign should never do: drags attention away from what should be any campaign’s focus — the candidate’s strengths and ideas — and instead hangs a big, bright lantern on campaign’s internal weaknesses and contradictions.

Here is Sanders’ campaign national co-chair, Nina Turner, being appalled that candidates are using Barack Obama as a crutch:

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From Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged:

There is a Metaphor in Here

I could easily vote for either Bernie Sanders or Joe Biden. The ideological divide to me isn’t insurmountable. It doesn’t occur to me that the VP of the president who worked to get us the ACA really, genuinely, wants people to die from lack of health care access (as some of the Twitter red rose brigade want to claim) and I can sort through the awkward decisions the Sanders campaign makes and the yet more awkward pronouncements of Sanders superfans to support the man and his policies in general. I genuinely believed though, that adding up the full ledger of positive qualities: attitude of campaigning; thorough, detailed policies; the high caliber of the people who I know supported her, that Elizabeth Warren would have made the superior, actual, functioning president. She is articulate, a team-builder, an educator, a mentor, person who has run an absolutely respectable campaign–

But I guess the electorate isn’t taking a chance on another highly-competent blonde lady, because a highly-competent blonde lady only won the popular vote the last time out. After watching Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, and Amy Klobuchar all have to fold, knowing what extremely qualified badasses they actually are, seeing Senator Warren fucking ether Bloomberg like a kamikaze in debate and get this paltry voting result makes me want to holler. She is a phenomenon.

And she is a phenomenon the voters don’t want. And I don’t know how to not chalk that up to gender, because no other thing stands out to me as being as relevant to her lack of support.

Is there anyway, come a Democratic Senate majority, that she can be majority leader? Because that would make me ridiculously happy and strike a note of fear in all the correct people. Because here is the other thing I’m concerned about–

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From Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American:

Intelligence officers from Special Counsel Robert Mueller to Russia expert Fiona Hill have warned us that Russia would disrupt this election, and we know they are already disrupting the Democratic presidential nomination process, trying to affect the way voters perceive the Democratic candidates.

This attack seems likely to go unchallenged by the administration. Trump has installed as our acting Director of National Intelligence the current Ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, who has made clear he does not believe Russia interfered in our 2016 election or that it is attacking us in 2020, either. Trump’s recent nomination of Representative John Ratcliffe (R-TX), one of the key defenders of the president during the impeachment hearings, seems designed to guarantee an end to any investigation of Russian attacks.

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From Julian Sanchez:

Cato Podcast

The ongoing uncertainty over who will fill a high‐​level White House intelligence position illustrates a larger problem with how the chief executive handles inconvenient information. Julian Sanchez comments.

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From Michael Halpern at EcoWatch:

The Trump administration is scrambling to reconcile the president’s contradictions of statements made by federal health scientists about the emerging coronavirus crisis. Their solution: muzzle scientists, require that all statements be politically vetted through Vice President Pence, and punish federal employees who draw attention to gross negligence. This is a highly dangerous power grab that undermines both emergency response and public faith in the reliability of information coming out of the government. And it speaks to the incompetence and incoherence of the response to this crisis so far.

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