Month: April 2020

 
From Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged:

The “Fake News” had him speaking to Dr. Birx, or did our own lying eyes, since the whole thing was televised? Is he just as clueless about how tv cameras work as he is about, well, everything else? He also spoke to the “Laboratory expert” (I think he means William Bryan?), but you know what? This makes it clear that he was not speaking to reporters (especially ones that were not there) sarcastically. I’m not even 100% sure he knows what sarcasm means. I think he means when you say a thing that isn’t true as a prank but doesn’t get that if it were an actual joke, it would be because everyone would get that what was said was obviously untrue. But we don’t get that when Trump says something that’s obviously untrue that he’s being in any way sarcastic, because he says things that are wrong because he’s dumb as hell, and also, he lies a whole lot. He also isn’t known for his sparkling wit. Occam’s Razor: he’s just ignorant.

Dr. Birx herself tried to pull his ass out of the mire of his own making, explaining that he just likes to talk out new information as it’s received. A lot of people, including the shiny new White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, tried to say he was being taken out of context, before he was suddenly “sarcastic”. And really, how sad is saying he was being sarcastic? Right. He meant to do that.

Whatever.

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From Infidel753:

It is time to recognize reality. The Bible-thumpers, reactionaries, racists, and miscellaneous paranoid morons comprising Red America are not our fellow countrymen. They voted for Trump largely because he would “own the libs” and inflict pain on us. They are our enemies, they hate us, and they are actively waging aggressive war against us. I have nothing in common with this horde of gibbering barbarians.

This division didn’t start with Trump. It goes back at least to the Civil War. We beat them then, at huge cost, and we should have completely crushed them and forcibly reformed their politics and culture, as we did with Germany and Japan after World War II. Instead, over time the internal enemy gradually metastasized through the whole territory of the United States, bringing the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow and creationism in the schools and a bitter-end resistance to gay rights and women’s independence — and, in the last few decades, an infestation of increasingly stupid and deranged politicians culminating in Trump.

But even if the division has existed for generations, Red America’s hysterical vilification of Obama during his presidency, and then their imposition of Trump on the country, have widened it into an unbridgeable chasm and destroyed whatever sense of common American identity did manage to exist before.

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From our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit:

He’s been glorying in his “briefings”, claiming that they allow him to speak directly to the American people (the briefing are carried live on cable TV). Trump thought that the briefings were a good thing, until he said stuff that was so irredeemably stupid that even the hosts of Fox shows couldn’t shrug it off.

Quite possibly, Trump realized that he had handed the Democrats the sort of footage that will fall neatly into attack ads that will portray Trump as being everything from mercurial to as dumb as a creosoted post.

But will Trump stay away? Don’t bet on it.

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From Mark Bear at MadMikesAmerica:

Let us dispel of the myth that once the “curve is flattened” that we will experience less loss of life than had the curve not been flattened, okay?

For Republicans to argue they have the higher moral ground these days is literally preposterous. They don’t! And no matter what amount of mental acrobatics they perform will assist in making their claim true. In fact, when you have a Lt. Governor of Texas arguing how many people his age “would gladly die for the economy to protect our future,” and you have protesters so callously arguing how “they need to get a freaking haircut, or go to the salon, or how they ought to be able to live free,” while acknowledging how “others have compromised systems” laying blame at those people’s feet, demonstrates not only a lack of concern, compassion, empathy, but also humanity. And if you lack humanity, you cannot proclaim that you occupy the higher moral ground and are pro-life; now, can you?

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If he had paid more attention to a couple of memos, he would have been in politics a whole lot longer.

Harry Hughes broke what was becoming a tradition in Maryland. It undoubtedly had been going on long before Spiro Agnew was caught. It probably ended with a man whom I regarded as a political hero, a couple of Governors before Harry Hughes.

There was no apparent political benefit, and a whole lot of political cost, when that courageous Governor fought against doctors and hospitals, when he worked to overcome legislative indifference, to establish the nation’s first shock trauma unit. Lives have been saved everywhere you look since then.

And that was not all.

Marvin Mandel stood tall against the tide that was running strong in those days. He had become governor when Governor Spiro Agnew became Vice President Spiro Agnew. Mandel defended legislators as they were attacked by the former governor who had come just before him. Spiro Agnew waged a scorched-earth political war against anyone who criticized him or his boss, Richard Nixon.

Agnew attacked critics like Maryland Senator Joe Tidings as RadicLibs a clever combination of Radical and Liberal. So Senator Tidings couldn’t just be wrong on policy issues, he was in league with dirty hippies: unpatriotic, long-haired protestors against the war in Vietnam.

Mandel campaigned for re-election as Governor as Tidings campaigned for re-election to the Senate. Joe Tidings, Mandel said, was an important member of his team. Tidings lost while Marvin Mandel won in a landslide.

When Spiro Agnew turned out to be a crook, it was blatant as all hell. When he had been governor of Maryland, he literally was getting literal envelopes stuffed with literal cash in exchange for state contracts. When he became Vice President, he still got envelopes stuffed with cash, right there in the White House, right up until he was caught. He resigned as Vice President and pleaded no-contest to being a crook.

I didn’t cry when my political hero, Governor Mandel, also turned out to be a crook. I was born and raised a boomer and men just didn’t cry. But it hit me hard.
Continue reading “Harry Hughes from Decades Ago, and Lessons We Should Apply to Trump”

• Okay, calling the pandemic “Chinese Virus” is pretty much racist by not-so-subtle implication. tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors brings us the writings of new Health and Human Services spokesperson Michael Caputo. They bring anti-Asian racism to a much more explicit level.
   
• So here’s the new narrative: My president wasn’t really suggesting everyone try injecting themselves with household cleaning products. He merely wanted the idea carefully researched. You know… set up a control group, and another group into whose veins you inject Clorox. Then see what happens. News Corpse speculates what might be behind this and other presidential suggestions.
   
• Jack Jodell at The Saturday Afternoon Post offers his take: President Trump has met a very small opponent impervious to bloviating and bully-boy tactics.
   
• At The Onion, in spite of presidential indignation, a potentially promising COVID-19 vaccine hits a roadblock after testing reveals it’s just a shotgun.
   
• PZ Myers is a little ticked off at the wheedling coverage by the NY Times of the Lysol-Gate presidential briefing. He compares Times headlines with those of Fox News, and cannot tell the difference.
   
• The news conference that produced Lysol-Gate will always be remembered for … well … you know. But Tommy Christopher points to another reason involving shameful performance by most of the press corps.
   
• In Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson notices an under-reported, and illegal, cover-up of the treatment of federal workers. Seems a purge is going on in violation of federal law.
   
• At The Moderate Voice, Joe Gandelman summarizes another scandal. Seems billions intended to help small businesses were hijacked and redirected to huge hotel and restaurant chains.
   
• We’ve all heard random Republican officials propose that folks my age have a duty to sacrifice their lives to COVID-19 for the sake of the economy. Ant Farmer’s Almanac offers its own Swiftian Modest Proposal, and why it won’t work. Stealing the headline – Shortage of Ice Floes Sinks Proposal to Send Seniors Adrift at Sea. I can hardly wait.

Continue reading “Anti-Asian Appt, Lysol, Press Shame, Trump IQ, Election Non-Prediction”

Really?

Manufacturers are issuing urgent warnings. Despite President Trump’s suggestion, people concerned about the COVID-19 virus should not inject household cleaning products into themselves.

Lysol maker refutes Trump’s suggestion that disinfectants may treat coronavirus

Reckitt Benckiser, the maker of disinfectants Lysol and Dettol, released a statement Friday that its products cannot be injected or ingested to combat coronavirus after President Trump suggested the possibility during Thursday’s task force briefing.

What Trump said: “I see the disinfectant that knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets inside the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that.”

 

From Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger:

There is no evidence of widespread fraud with mail-in voting. The Republicans are just trying, once again, to suppress voting. They know that when the voters turn out in large numbers, it tends to favor the Democrats. This is just one more effort to keep as many people from voting as possible.

But it puts them at odds with most Americans. About 58% would support a law allowing all Americans to vote by mail, and another 9% would support allowing it for this election only. That’s two-thirds (67%) of voters who would support allowing mail-in voting in this November’s election. People want to vote in this important election, and they would prefer to do it safely.

The Republican opposition to mail-in voting may actually hurt their own candidates — at least in red states.

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From a couple of weeks ago.
Never gets old.
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