Month: May 2020

 

From Jon Perr at PERRspectives:

“Governor Brown’s executive order mandates that we limit occupancy of the store,” she said tentatively. “We’re at the legally-allowed maximum now; I can’t let you enter until I have the go-ahead that other customers have exited. It’s part of the state’s social distancing requirements enacted to help contain the spread of COVID-19.”

I was furious. Smoke was coming out of my ears. Luckily, it was not enough to ignite the Claymore taped to my back or the extra AR magazine concealed under my Make America Great Again cap.

“No way!” I thundered, “My body, my choice!”

Shaking her head, she had the temerity to counter me, “No, sir. It’s the law.”

“The law? President Trump said I’m a very good person, or at least people like me are ‘very good people.'” Not content to let it go there, I resumed my beat-down. “Let me guess: your daddy is a lawyer.”

“No, sir,” she parried. “My father’s a nurse and my mother is an emergency room doctor.”

“Well, then let me explain something to you,” I snapped back, fully enraged.

– More –
 

 

From The Propaganda Professor:

Although it has virtually nothing going in its favor and has a great many strikes against it, the death penalty has been the default mode essentially all over the world for essentially all of human history. Why is that? The answer is really pretty simple: the death penalty is heavily favored by conservatives, or those who call themselves conservatives (in our day, they are generally right-wing radicals) and they are the ones who make the rules — rules that usually get changed only gradually, thanks to the arduous efforts of liberals and progressives. And the policies favored by conservatives and “conservatives” tend to be based on emotion rather than fact.

I know, I know, that may come as a surprise if you put stock in the standard narrative from the media. (That’s the “liberal” media of course. How do we know? Because the “liberal” media keep telling us.) That’s a narrative to the effect that it’s really those on the left side of the spectrum who act out of emotion rather than reason. You may have heard the cute little mantra “facts don’t care about your feelings”. It was coined as a clever bit of projection by smug right-wingers to make fun of “snowflakes”. But if you want to know who really acts out of emotion rather than reason, all you have to do is take a look at history, both distant and recent.

– More –
 

 

From Green Eagle:

The Great Covid Con

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about my fear that, in the face of an uncontrollable epidemic, Donald Trump, with the full cooperation of Republican run States, would simply resort to massive lying about the true death toll. Calculating the deaths from an epidemic is a fairly complicated process that not very many people know a thing about, and a lie is so easy to tell, particularly given the extreme unlikelihood of our pathetic excuse for a mainstream press doing a thing to arrive at the real numbers. Here, even intelligent and highly informed people at Talking Points Memo seem to have accepted numbers from Republicans; God, shouldn’t they know by now not to do that?

– More –
 

 
From Sarah Cooper:

– More –
 

 

From Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged:

I don’t have a whole lot to comment about with The Breakfast Club/Biden interview, but in terms of Biden gaffe, if this is going to be a problem, um, hold on to your butts, because it’s kind of Joe Biden’s thing. I think I lean towards the “badly-landed and too familiar joke” camp with what Biden had said because I don’t think his intentions are bad or that he doesn’t care, but I think he made a classic white people mistake (of which I am also guilty sometimes) of thinking if you have Black friends, you can kind of get away with being a little looser in discussing race issues–and it was the wrong time, because it always is.

But especially when running for president, and here’s my issue with it, which doesn’t necessarily come down to a question of race or any other thing, but Trump. Because when Charlemagne said “It don’t have nothing to do with Trump”, he has an incredible point. You have to imagine that you are not running against the worst human, a person with a terrible record and who says hateful things. You have to realize you are running to do something about the country that elected that guy. You have to pull this country back from that edge. It isn’t Trump–it’s the things that got him here.

– More –
 

 

From Dorian de Wind at The Moderate Voice:

This Memorial Day is probably unlike any other Memorial Day we have ever observed.

Of course, as every other Memorial Day, “It Is All About Honoring and Remembering” the men and women who have given it all for our country, for us, in military service – and we do.

But on a day when the coronavirus death toll in our nation quickly and inexorably approaches the grim milestone of 100,000, when our country has lost more lives to the virus than to six of our wars as well as to 9/11 combined, we cannot let it pass without also mourning and honoring those whose lives have been cut short by the virus.

The New York Times, in an unprecedented move to convey the enormity of the tragedy – and to personalize it — has dedicated the entire front page and three additional inside pages to list the names of 1,000 victims of the virus (just 1 percent of the toll) along with a short “tribute” depicting “the uniqueness of each life lost.”

Below the stark headline “US deaths near 100,000, an incalculable loss”, is the sub-heading that reads: “They were not simply names on a list. They were us.”

The Times further expands, “Numbers alone cannot possibly measure the impact of the coronavirus on America, whether it is the number of patients treated, jobs interrupted, or lives cut short.”

– More –
 

 

REMEDY PAC, a committee started by Representative Eric Swalwell (D‑CA), posts a video that gets personal about the pandemic.

Sarah Cooper tells it:

• What’s a Libertarian to do? You can’t very well devote Memorial Day to honoring those who died for our freedoms, then denigrate their sacrifice. Yet Ayn Rand, the founder of the libertarian movement, had only contempt for sacrifice of any kind, promoting instead the innate virtue of selfishness.
   
  Michael A. LaFerrara rises to the challenge. He insists those who died that we may be free were not actually sacrificing anything at all. They each had a personal stake in their personal freedom, so they were engaging in the purest form of egotism. They were actually the very model of complete selfishness.
   
• Near the corona-beginning, couple guys at the car repair place told me not to worry about the grandkids. Youngsters can’t get the virus and aren’t going to die. Some are still saying that. M. Bouffant at Web of Evil digs into the relationship between kids and COVID and discovers they can and some do.
   
• Scotties Toy Box asks us to remember long, long ago, before the pandemic, when blue lives mattered.
   
• The bright side is that 99.98% will survive this so called “pandemic”. We’ve all heard that, in some form, from one Trumpster or another. Right? nojo takes a slow and steady scalpel to the argument they are holding until there is nothing left on their hands but blood.
   
• John Scalzi at Whatever acknowledges that Ohio is officially ending stay-at-home rules and opening up. He explains why he will stay in for another month. Me too.
   
• Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson invites a guest writer, local religious leader Jerry Bader, to offer a “faith-based perspective” on wearing masks.
   
• Dr. Mark Bear, in MadMikesAmerica, discusses, from a Christian perspective, our mutual obligation not to harm each other’s health and suggests that an angry correspondent is incorrect in thinking that God is his personal property.
   
• JoAnn Williams at Biased Unbalanced and Politically Incorrect is impatient at one side-effect of pretty much every crisis: the loonies that come out of hiding. She is especially testy with one true believer who can’t picture Jesus with a mask on.
   
• tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors officiates as America votes on why why Mr. Trump does not want to be photographed wearing a mask. Maybe it’s because Jesus was never photographed with one?

Continue reading “Memorial Day, COVID, Blue Lives, Kids, Jesus Unmasked, Trump Cure, Portrait”

 

From Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged:

I don’t know if this makes any sense, but Trump is telling everybody he’s taking hydroxychloroquine, and that health care professionals are even taking it (prophylactic benefits remain to be seen), and he’s not even sick, but he feels good, and he’s even got a doctor’s note about it, so, um. Okay, then.

I’m not sure how well this drug interacts with statins (per Ronny Jackson, who has lost his mind or is still on the drink and apparently running for office), Adderall (rumored), European Sudafed (also rumored), Propecia (per doctor), and buttloads of artificial sweeteners from Diet Coke. I’m also not sure he’s really taking it, I mean, he lies constantly. He could just be saying it to impress Jodie Foster Laura Ingraham, who is all about that pill pushing life right now. (Aw, c’mon now. We know Don will always be her Fatherland Figure.)

But then again, there is a certain attitude a lot of people in the US have about finding solutions in a pill. It’s easy. It’s that “one weird trick” mentality. It’s also from the culture of “fake it to make it” and the “get rich quick” scam. It’s the pharmaceutical equivalent of prosperity gospel. Trump might just be falling back on what he knows–selling. And how can you sell unless you are also a testimonial?

– More –
 

 

From Jonathan Bernstein:

It’s tempting to think that a president unskilled at wielding power can’t do much damage by abusing it. It’s also wrong.

Presidential weakness isn’t insurance against harm. The real nature of presidential power, as political scientist Richard Neustadt explained long ago, is a function of bargaining skill, mastery at gathering and processing information, understanding of the political and other incentives of those a president deals with, and thorough knowledge of the political system. Trump has none of those things. Indeed, that makes his influence minimal. But presidents who can’t manipulate the system to realize their visions of what the country needs try instead to work around the system, even if that means bending or breaking the rules. It usually doesn’t work, but along the way they can do all sorts of damage.

Take Trump’s tweets Wednesday morning falsely accusing Michigan and Nevada of voter fraud and threatening to withhold federal funds if they proceeded with legitimate absentee-voter plans. It was a classic display of Trump weakness — he got his facts wrong, and he almost certainly can’t follow through on his threat. As with most Trump orders and proposals, legitimate and illicit, it will probably be ignored.

And yet that’s not the whole story.

– More –