President Trump providing medical observations
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.
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?
If he had paid more attention to a couple of memos, he would have been in politics a whole lot longer.
Harry Hughes
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.
Lysol Warning on Trump Suggestions: Don’t Try This at Home
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
At least a third of our country’s population labors under the mental sway of decades of militant anti-intellectualism and science-denial emanating from fundamentalist pulpits and right-wing fake-media propaganda outlets. With their president, their red-state governors, and their pastors all chivvying them along, they are not going to listen to Dr. Fauci or the scientific establishment. They’ll go back to church, back to the beaches, back to everything else they’re so furious about having to stay home from. It’s already starting to happen. And among those populations, the pandemic will explode.
Most other advanced nations don’t suffer from this problem to anything like the same degree because, to be blunt, they have less religion, better education, and a greater deference to expertise. I know it’s contrary to the American character to be deferential to anything, and by and large this is a positive trait — but in dealing with a biological crisis, it’s just a matter of common sense to recognize that people with years of medical or scientific training and experience understand the problem better than preachers, politicians, or businessmen.
Tell the Democrat Governors that “Mutiny On The Bounty” was one of my all time favorite movies. A good old fashioned mutiny every now and then is an exciting and invigorating thing to watch, especially when the mutineers need so much from the Captain. Too easy!
This is extraordinary. Just a few days ago, I posted a piece mentioning that Trump was “trying to out-crazy Onion stories” and comparing him to “an imbecilic Captain Ahab – obsessive and prone to reckless decisions that endanger those he is supposed to lead, but without any redeeming qualities like, oh, basic knowledge of his chosen profession.” Now he is choosing to compare himself to Captain Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty, which he claims “was one of my all-time favorite movies.” But apparently Trump has never seen it, or completely misunderstood it, because Bligh is the villain, and does not fare well.
The single most unanimous agreement among experts is that we need to vastly increase testing and contact tracing before we start to loosen lockdowns and get back to (sort of) normal life. There’s literally not a single reason this should be a partisan issue.
But it is. For some reason Republicans resisted it for more than a week before caving in. What the hell is wrong with these people?
