teri
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@ Madamski,
I don’t lack sympathy for these poor misguided people. However, they have had 4 years of their idol being in office and I have to wonder what possesses them to still support him now? He is no longer an unknown, a new-comer with promises that lead to hopefulness. Now they can see what he has done for them while he was in office. So what has he done for them? The answer is that he has done nothing for them. I can see what he has accomplished for the wealthy and for big businesses. I can see what he has done for the group of very conservative “law and order” people who want extreme judges putting women in jail for using birth control, long sentences for pot smokers, and who prefer business profits over workers’ rights. But what has he done for his voters who are not ultra wealthy? The tax bill certainly did nothing for them. The trade war just raised prices and caused the farmers to have to be bailed out to the tune of somewhere around $70 bb all told so far. He did nothing about Covid and has not spoken about it in months. (Over 4000 people in the US dead yesterday and again today.) He didn’t start new wars, but he didn’t end any either, and his sanctions on multiple countries is causing destitution and death abroad and doesn’t help anyone here, so “not starting a new war” is becomes a moot phrase. Sanctions are a form of warfare; I would posit that his sanctions regime against Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba are wars, in fact, and should count as such when this issue is raised. His sweeping deregulation of environmental laws is bringing on a whole new “Silent Spring” situation. I’m not sure we will ever be able to correct the damage, and the swill that is now being allowed in our water and air is going to be causing health problems for the next generation. (Not to mention how it utterly wrecks the wild places and kills off the flora and fauna.)
Trump did not bring jobs back (I am not talking about since Covid started circulating, as job losses this year should not be blamed on Trump). Job gains actually slowed down under Trump before the pandemic began. He did not invest in infrastructure, or introduce a new and better health care plan, or bring peace with North Korea, or even build the freaking wall. Although on that last one, his administration has grossly ramped up eminent domain seizures in Texas to steal land from the ranchers to build the mother. Because of course Mexico isn’t paying for it, nor can we build it on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande.
Anyway, you get my drift. He just hasn’t done anything that should foster such loyalty and blind adoration. I think his followers cannot think these things through. He says he did such and such, and the poor buggers just believe it without a second thought. They may as well be Justin Beiber fans at a Justin concert for all the thought that goes into their reasons for supporting him. And, boy, do they get pissed if you ask them what he has actually done that made their lives better.
And now he is going to leave them twisting in the wind after they thought they were going to “correct the election” for him. Some of these people thought this was the “Storm” – some QAnon theory about the Great Trump Exposure of the Pedophile Elites, or some such shit. Do they think he is going to do an en masse pre-emptive pardon for them before he leaves office? I rather doubt it. They ought to be really pissed at his remarks from last night and it should wake them up to how they’ve been used.
*******On another note, turns out Sidney Powell did release the Kraken, just not in the way she thought. Dominion Software is suing her ass for almost $2 bb. This filing is no nonsense and looks like it will be real legal trouble for Powell. I read the entire filing and it would appear they do a very thorough job of establishing defamation and malicious intent on her part.
They also show that she knowingly brought false accusations to benefit herself financially. They have not ruled out including other people in their suit.
https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.225699/
Well, that didn’t take long.
Trump tells his dumber-than-rocks supporters that he “loves” them and urges them to take their anger to the Capitol building and face Congress directly. He tells them “You’ll never take our country back with weakness, you have to show strength”. He tells them to “fight like hell”. He says he will go with them (but he doesn’t). His attorney, Guiliani urges “trial by combat” at the same rally. Don jr. has already warmed up the crowd by telling them to take on the Republican members of Congress who didn’t back Trump: go in and let them know ‘we’re coming for you,’ he tells the crowd.
Then last night, Trump releases a video denouncing the entire action. Trump is now telling his cult that they were exhibiting “violence, lawlessness and mayhem” and had “defiled the seat of American democracy”. He claims (lying) that he had immediately deployed the National Guard and other law enforcement to expel “the intruders”; i.e., the supporters whom he himself had directed to the Capitol.
Throwing them right under the bus, he is.
Even that sullen Slovenian slattern he married had sense enough to call her attorney and have her prenuptial agreement rewritten the last time Trump told her that he “loved” her.
Not sure his supporters will be that smart. Maybe the fact that the Dept. of Justice attorney in DC – this would be the Trump administration DoJ, by the way – is seeking to charge the 90 people who were arrested with federal rioting, insurrection and sedition will wake them up to the con.
If not, they can continue to donate to the Trump re-election fund and to Sidney Powell’s fictitious Kraken fund after they make bail. Money well spent (LOL).
True that, Mr. House. Ilargi is very patient with the commenters, and I know for sure I must make him more than a bit peeved with my loud opinions sometimes.
I wasn’t trying to be hateful in what I said in my comment above, but there are times when the record does need to be corrected, and in this case, it is truly only Trump’s fault that Assange is in jeopardy from the US right now. Guess I didn’t have to be so sarcastic (or hateful or whatever you thought I was being), and I am sorry if I was offensive.
@Polder Dweller:
I know it is de rigueur on this website to make excuses for Trump for everything he does, but surely you are aware of the underlying facts in the Assange case. There was no deep state, military cadre, or any such weaselly imaginary faction that made Trump bring charges against Assange or that is forcing him to deny a pardon.
The only reason Assange is going through what he is today is because of Trump. Obama decided not to indict him. It was Trump who reinstated the charges and added 17 new charges related to the Espionage Act. Assange would be a free man now, save for Trump.
And dig this – lawyers for the US (that means lawyers who work under the Trump administration) have already said they will appeal today’s decision from the UK. So Trump clearly still wants him in a US prison.
Of course Trump could preemptively pardon Assange; Trump is considering preemptive pardons for several people. And by the way, Assange had already formally requested a pardon from Trump a few weeks ago. Assange himself doesn’t care if it is “preemptive” or not.
Trump may still decide to scuttle his own administration’s position vis a vis Assange and pardon him, but I would be very surprised. (Ecstatic for Assange, who in no way should be in the position he is in, but surprised.) Trump does not spend any time thinking about anyone but himself and doesn’t give a rat’s ass about Julian Assange, me, you, or any person on the planet not named “Trump” – and he only cares about a couple of the latter.
Trump is responsible for his actions and the actions he sets loose in his administration. Nobody made these excuses for Obama and nor should they have. Why do people think they can blame every damn stupid thing Trump does on some fabricated inscrutable entity? The man wanted to be president, he got there, now he is in charge and responsible. If he is so weak he feels he cannot even use his pardon powers on his way out the door (what could anyone do to him if he did pardon Assange at this point?), then he is just as it would appear – a weak, spineless man. Or, the other most obvious answer: he just doesn’t want to let Assange off the hook that he, Trump, put him on.
And one more thing I just found out. I was curious about the $600 Covid stimulus checks, which we are supposed to get since Congress did pass that bill. Forget about the $2000 – that ain’t happening. Mnuchin said the $600 checks would go out last week. i haven’t gotten anything, nor has anyone I know. So I have checked several times on the IRS website, under the “Get my Payment” tab; as of ten minutes ago, it still reads as it has since Congress passed the bill: “Get My Payment is Temporarily Offline. The IRS continues to monitor and prepare for new legislation related to Economic Impact Payments. The IRS will make updates to the Get My Payment portal to provide updated information for taxpayers in the near future. Please continue to monitor IRS.gov for the latest information.”
So you cannot check the status of your $600 stimulus relief money. But wait, there’s more! It turns out that the IRS only has until Jan. 15th to get the payment to you. If they somehow miss you via direct deposit, paper check or EIP card (the 3 ways you might receive this money) by the 15th, you can only get it by using a special form for claiming it when you file your tax return. They must anticipate missing a bunch of people, because the IRS already has this claim form formatted for use so you can mail it in with your 2020 taxes. And maybe it’ll be added to your refund when they get around to sending those out next summer, or you can use it against any money you owe the Feds.
See, it turns out that when Congress wrote the bill, they put a Jan 15th cut-off date on the stimulus money. That gave the IRS only 17 days (Dec 29 – Jan 15) to get stimulus payments to 100 million people.
The IRS has been absolutely gutted by Trump; a particular annoyance of mine, as I work at a small-business accounting firm and we have to deal with them all the time. And Munuchin is the worst Treasury Secretary in history. (Treasury runs the IRS. Mnuchin seems hell-bent on making sure they can’t function properly and he has succeeded in this sabotage.) In any case, it may be that you won’t get your cheap-ass 600 bucks until you file your taxes.
Here’s an article:
https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/second-stimulus-check-irs-has-12-days-to-send-out-payments-when-will-yours-arrive/So do these people know what the hell they are doing, or not? They are now dicking around with the dosages to order to get more people vaccinated. Maybe you’ll have to share your vaccine dosage with your neighbor. Then you’ll both be half-vaccinated. I guess you’ll get to go out on Mon, Wed, Fri and the neighbor can go out on Tue, Thu, and Sat. Sunday you both stay home. Or something like that. But seriously, how could the FDA approve a “vaccine” that not only does not actually provide immunity, but now they are telling you it doesn’t really matter how many micrograms you get in each shot? Did anybody do any research at all?
I don’t even know how to satirize this. A “vaccine” that is not really a vaccine, don’t know how long it lasts, don’t know all the side effects, don’t know if it’s safe for kids or old people, and now it doesn’t even matter how much vaccine each shot contains. Can you imagine Salk coming up with a polio vaccine like this? “So, yeah, just try half the amount on that guy, triple it for that one, and if we run low, just water it down and hope for the placebo effect.”
But the head advisor of Operation Warp Speed says it will all be based on “the facts”. Snort.
*************
“The federal government is in talks with Moderna about giving half the recommended dose of the company’s Covid-19 shot to speed up immunization efforts, the head of the Trump administration’s vaccine rollout said on Sunday.
“Operation Warp Speed chief adviser Moncef Slaoui said there is evidence that two half doses in people between the ages of 18 and 55 gives ‘identical immune response’ to the recommended one hundred micorogram dose, but said the final decision will rest with the FDA.
“ ‘It will be based on facts and data to immunize more people,’ Slaoui said on CBS’ ‘Face the Nation,’ adding, ” ‘of course we continue to produce more vaccine doses.’ […]”https://www.politico.com/news/2021/01/03/moderna-vaccine-doses-warp-speed-half-453979
Ilargi,
The article does not say. It goes on to mention another drug that they use to treat cases where there is a cytokine storm (Avifavir, which has been used on severe cases of flu in Japan), but they seem to want to keep this new drug under wraps until testing is finished. Probably worried about formula theft, or maybe they just don’t want to hype it too much in case the testing doesn’t prove it as effective as they hoped.
Anyway, a good additional approach to Covid, considering that the “vaccines” aren’t really vaccines. In the US, it seems we do some shit fast and call it done, no matter how slipshod and raggedy the result is.
Now this is interesting, assuming that the reporting is completely accurate: Russia is working on an antidote to Covid.
“Russia’s Federal Medical and Biological Agency (FMBA) has announced the development of a drug to fight against Covid-19, which would become the world’s first direct-acting antiviral antidote if clinical trials are successful.
According to Veronika Skvortsova, the head of FMBA, studies thus far have shown it is more than 99% effective. […]”https://www.rt.com/russia/511116-world-first-covid19-antidote/
@ Doc Robinson,
Polyethylene glycol, huh? Robert Kennedy jr. just warned the pharma companies that this ingredient would be problematic as soon as he saw it on the list of inert ingredients. Apparently, polyethylene glycol has brought on severe allergic reactions from vaccinations for years and has been discontinued in most of them because of the acute reactions. Kennedy notes that it is not a required ingredient (does not affect efficacy or strength of vaccine one iota). I guess most people, certainly the pharma co’s, ignore him as they think he is an anti-vaxxer. However, in this case, he already knew about the problem, since he has been studying vaccine issues his entire adult life, and in this case, he was correct.
Investigation this week identified polyethylene glycol (PEG) as likely reason 2 people in UK suffered anaphylaxis after receiving #Pfizer’s #vaccine. In Sept, I warned #FDA that PEG in #COVID vaccines could lead to severe allergic reactions. #TheDefender https://t.co/zJtM17aRGf
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) December 11, 2020
@ Doc Robinson
So, the Moderna vaccine:
May only give a two-month protection.
May not be effective for immunocompromised people.
May not work for people who have already had Covid.
Was not tested on and may not work for anyone under 17.
May not work if virus mutates (which we know it does).
They have no idea if it is effective against (e.g.; prevents) asymptomatic infections, long-haul symptoms, death, or transmission of Covid to others.
They don’t know all the side effects, nor do they know if someone getting the vaccine may suffer from an “enhanced” Covid reaction later on (i.e.; the vaccine may make them sicker if they get Covid after they get the vaccine and it’s worn off, and since it may only last for 2 months, they may indeed get Covid later on anyway).Under what definition of the word “vaccine” , as commonly used and understood, does this even qualify as a vaccine at all?
Mother have mercy, we are in deep shit.
About the Hunter Biden/Bill Barr thing: Barr probably didn’t want to be the James Comey of 2020. Remember, Comey announced an investigation into Hillary Clinton just 10 days before the election and then mysteriously announced a week later that there was nothing to investigate after all. Everyone jumped all over him for costing her the election. (“Everyone” being the politicos and the MSM – the voters loathed the woman with good reason, so she probably wouldn’t have won anyway.)
The thing is that there is nothing Barr could have said that would have really mattered. The IRS is looking into it. It isn’t even really in Barr’s purview at this point. Hunter Biden, while a total jag-off and junkie, has not been, and is not currently, under any criminal investigation. His taxes are being examined – as are Trump’s, BTW – but he hasn’t been indicted for anything, nor does this tax investigation involve criminal charges. A banking associate of Hunter Biden is under criminal investigation of some sort. However, neither the tax issues nor the bank investigation have anything (so far – and they have been looking into these matters for quite awhile) to do with Joe Biden, the guy who was actually running for office.
I’m old enough to remember the embarrassment of the Clintons, the Bushes, the Kennedys, and Jimmy Carter; all of them had relatives who were either indicted/convicted criminals, or who had been involved in scandals and financial improprieties while their family member was running for office.
Barr might have spoken out if there was more to this story, but so far it isn’t much more of anything remotely provable than the same damn tax stuff that Trump himself has been going through for years. And Barr would be in a position to know.
Still, I’m glad Barr is out the door now. Next we can get rid of Trump, who is not doing anything remotely worthwhile for anyone and then Biden, who won’t do anything for the people either. And Pelosi and McConnell and Pompeo and Dejoy and Devos and…….oh, get rid of them all.
Oh, my, more Sidney Powell. From the article at American Thinker in today’s post [“The ‘Smartest Man In The Room’ Has Joined Sidney Powell’s Team” (AT)], we need to use some common sense here. I am NOT saying there aren’t problems with the election. I am NOT saying we don’t need some recounts. But some of these claims about fraud are just downright specious and require a tad of skepticism.
From the American Thinker article, we get this: “Dominion used Chinese parts, and there’s reason to believe that China, Venezuela, Cuba interfered in the election.” Parts made in China proves…well, what exactly? Most of my household appliances have Chinese parts, as do pretty much everyone’s cell phones, electronics, and toys. This is meaningless. The bit about China, Venezuela and Cuba interfering is just tossed in without even an attempt to show proof. That is also meaningless.
From article, “There was a Hammer and Scorecard cyber-attack that altered votes in the battleground states, and then forwarded the results to Scytl servers in Frankfurt, Germany, to avoid detection.” Okay, this is complete BS. Scytl does not have offices or servers in Frankfurt, Germany. Scytl does not tally or count votes in the US. Scytl products sold to the US are housed in the US at Amazon Web Services servers. The US Army has not, in fact, seized anything from Scytl in Barcelona, Frankfurt or anywhere else.
From the article, “The systems failed to produce any auditable results.” Hmm. Georgia used Dominion because they were required by court order to have paper ballots, which Dominion provides. The paper ballots allows traceable, audit-able results.
Dominion Systems was used in 24 states in the 2020 election. I guess that Dominion was not a problem when it was used in the states that Trump won, because they aren’t contesting those states. Nor are they suggesting there were any glitches at all one way or another in the other 18 states that used Dominion. If the software is a problem, it would be a problem in all the states that used it.
But the most glaring problem with the article is this: “Although he had no access to the machines, Dr. Kershavarz has looked at available data about the election and the vote results. Based on that information, he concluded 1. The counts in the disputed states (Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia) show electronic manipulation.” Wait, this guy has no access to the machines, the software, the ballots themselves, the smartsticks, the servers, or any of that; i.e., he has drawn his conclusions based entirely on the “available data” and the “vote results”? This is quite an admission for the Powell team to make. Their cyber-security guy did not even see the cyber or the security and is making a guess based on his gut instincts. That is appalling in what is purported to be a serious endeavor to investigate election fraud. He better have more than his best guess when they go to court.
By the way, when you go to Powell’s website, you see a picture of her which is titled, “The Kraken Releaser”, which is so juvenile one has to cringe. Follow the instructions to donate to her Defending the Republic non-profit (which is not really a non-profit and the donations are not tax-deductible), and you find that checks are to be made out to “Sidney Powell”, not to “Defending the Republic”. So the donations do not have to be used in her court battles (or for any specific purpose at all), do not have to be accounted for by her “non-profit”, and she can claim that the money received was all gift money – which means any tax repercussions are borne by the donor.
There is so much sketchy shit going on in every election in this benighted country. I just wish I didn’t have the feeling that every single person involved in this particular election is a grifter of some sort; from the candidates to the machines, from the primaries to the general, from the people who are sure Biden won to the people who are sure they can prove he didn’t. What a foul nest of actors across the board.
Gosh, I am surprised that anyone was still reading the comments. Thank you for responding.
It’s interesting to me to hear from my son that while most in France do not like Macron, they all appreciate his being clear about the government’s intentions regarding Covid. His speech a couple of weeks ago lasted for some 45 minutes and his written follow-up was very detailed. He has handled the pandemic this way all along. [My son sent me the latest itemized schedule and commented, “Here’s the sort of specific information we get from our government on a regular basis. Are you jealous?”]
The people want to know what actions are being taken, they want sound reasoning offered to support the proposed actions, they want clear instructions on what part they play and why it is being requested of them. They also want to be supported while they comply. And in France, that means if they aren’t supported (financially and physically), they will not comply.
@ straightwalker: I don’t know what will end up happening with the election. I am not at all impressed with Trump for a lot of reasons, most having to do with his handling of Covid, his rich-people tax cuts, his decimation of the various agencies, and his environmental policies. Dear God – he has been a one-man wrecking crew on environmental protections. Also, if he wants to continue being president, why isn’t he doing something about the urgent problems that continue unabated at this very moment? On the other hand, Biden is also just an old man who cannot rise to the demands that need to addressed at this time. He thinks in an old-school mumble-mumble-bipartisanship-bullshit way and the country needs new ideas. We are screwed with either one, as near as I can tell.
Congress knew in 2016 (hell, they’ve known for decades) that there were issues with elections. They all vowed to “do something”. Trump vowed to “do something”. So the House passed some bills regarding election security and McConnell refused to bring any of the bills to the Senate floor. Trump had an Elections Security Commission, or whatever he called it, look into the 2016 results and when they found no proof that he had actually won the popular vote, they simply disbanded without doing anything about security going forward. I can only surmise that everyone in Washington is fairly happy with all this shit being screwed up. They for sure aren’t interested in doing a damn thing about gerrymandering, voter suppression, irregularities during the primaries, or demanding provable paper ballots (i.e., paper trail) country-wide.
I am late writing a comment here – probably no-one will see it. But this is in regard to the French chart at the top of today’s post: “France is doing something right. Or you could say they were doing something very wrong before.”
I have a son in France (he lives w/his fiancé in the town where the teacher, Samuel Paty, was beheaded last month.)
The feeling in France is that they opened too many areas too quickly, although Macron was fairly careful in his lifting restrictions based on case loads and deaths by mapped-out areas. Paris, for instance, opened up later than smaller towns because Paris is so heavily populated and so had a very high number of cases and deaths.
The chart shown in today’s post reads in English,”daily cases on average, 19th to 25th of nov. -47% in 7 days”
They had begun opening up in October, but when they saw the death rates rising again, they immediately imposed lock-downs again. By the 2nd week of Nov, pretty much the entire country was considered to be in the “red zone”. Per an email from my son, this means:
“Right now we’re on a complete lock down. No personal visits; only essential shopping and businesses are open (even the non-essential aisles of grocers are currently closed); permitted to leave the house for personal activity and solitary outdoor sports within a 1km radius for up to 1hr.”
Macron issued a schedule for the gradual easing of restrictions expected to take place between mid-Nov through January. He gave a national speech, followed up with written guidelines that explained what they were trying to achieve and their best-estimate dates for meeting the goals week by week. He anticipates that a vaccine will eventually be available; in the meantime, they are counting on periodic lock-downs with constant testing and tracing.
The plan seems to be working. The case numbers are going down and the death rate is going down significantly. As you can see on the chart, they have reduced the new case numbers by 47% in one week.
I know the Yellow Vests are always protesting, but that is not so much about the lock-downs as about other issues. Everyone wears masks, all the time when out and about, and nobody seems to object much, even though France is very protective of individual freedom.
Here’s the thing: In France, you pay high taxes. The taxes are used for public good. Part of what the Yellow Vests are protesting has to do with Macron increasing the amount spent on the military instead of the commons – and that is not the deal the French have with their government. Your taxes are supposed to go to everyone’s benefit, not to blowing up countries hither and yon.
Anyway, in France in the time of Covid, you are protected in ways that we in the US are not. You do not pay for testing, medical care, or masks. A box of masks is dropped off at your household weekly. Testing is free and if you get sick, there is no charge for whatever treatment you need and for however long you need it. (They do have socialized medicine – i.e., universal healthcare – in France.) If you lose your job, you are guaranteed to be paid your average salary by the gov’t until you either find another job or until the pandemic is over. (Even in normal times, you are guaranteed something like 70% of your average salary as unemployment income until you find work again. There are some requirements, such as needing to be actively looking for work, but those requirements are nothing like the onerous demands made in the US.) Small businesses that are forced to close because of the lock-down are reimbursed by the gov’t for most of their losses. You cannot ever be evicted or foreclosed on in the winter-time in France anyway, but now that has been extended so that until the end of the pandemic, you cannot be evicted for failure to pay rent or lose your house to foreclosure. Since you are given unemployment if you have lost your job, you are expected to pay your rent as you normally would to your landlord so that he is not suffering a loss of income, too.
To people in the US, many of whom would sneer at the “sheeplike compliance” of the French, you would hear a rebuttal of how everyone should work together for the common good. The thought there is that herd immunity involves too many deaths to be acceptable. Old people are not considered disposable. So you do what you can to contain the virus so it runs out of hosts. If there is nowhere for the virus to spread to, it dies off. (This is what is working in China and the Asian countries, btw. A new outbreak is quickly contained with tracing and temporary isolation of the affected communities, and the communities on new lock-downs are supported financially by their governments.)
France had a very high death rate at the beginning of the pandemic and do not want to let it happen all over again.The first time my son and his fiancé came for a visit – her first visit to the US – they came home from the grocery store and she plopped down a few items they had bought in front of me. “What is this shit they put in your food here?” she asked. “What is red dye #3 and what are mono and diglycerides? And why is there corn syrup in everything?” In France, there are perhaps 6 ingredients in a loaf of bread, and you know what they all are. She thinks it is weird in the extreme that we never protest the crap in our food and water, or protest our Pentagon budget, but so many people here are vociferously protesting the simple act of wearing masks that can protect themselves and each other from a disease.
I think we ought to do another lock-down here in the US. A serious one, with tracing and financial support for the people. It would only take about 6 weeks and you could knock the virus pretty much out. Follow up with testing, tracing and free medical care. We are such pussies here, is one problem. God forbid we face some inconvenience for even a few weeks. But the biggest problem is that we have a totally screwed up government that is not willing to spend the taxpayers’ money on its people and would rather leave us all alone to fend for ourselves while they take our taxes and build weapons with the money. They let us lose our jobs, lose businesses all over the country, make us pay private health insurance companies or go without any medical care if you’ve lost your insurance, and let us get tossed out into the streets if we can’t pay for food and rent when we are out of work through no fault of our own. This is not “rugged individualism”; it is cruel and deliberate indifference to the human suffering of your own people, and it doesn’t have to be this way. Richest country on the planet, and we refuse to take care of our own. And our response is now ingrained because this is what the cold money-grubbing shits at the top levels have taught us: we no longer care about each other either, and consider anyone who loses his job or his home due to this emergency as a loser, as though he somehow deserved what is happening to him. We are so indoctrinated with the idea that it’s each man for himself that we don’t protest the government’s lack of concern for us – we protest against the minimal suggestions they do make, such as mask wearing in public stores. I keep wondering where are the angry mobs demanding that we deserve better?
We could have avoided a lot of death and job losses and pain if the government had handled this differently from the get-go. We could still turn it around even without a vaccine, but now people are pretty sure they “did” the lockdown once and should not be required to “suffer” through another. Why not fucking demand that another lockdown include what we need to have, so we can do it without all the cost being on us individually this time? Why are we letting them tell us it’s got to be herd immunity or a vaccine that is questionable at best, and that there is no other alternative?
Well, this turned out to be longer than I intended, but I’m going to leave it all in because it’s the end of the day and nobody will see it anyway. 🙂
On the twitter thing from “Amazing Polly is free” with a portion of JFK’s speech to the press…
This speech was given to the press on 27 April, 1961. It took place about a week after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. We were in the middle of the Cold War with the Soviets at the time. There had been some leaks in the press that had – in Kennedy’s mind – led to the military failure in Cuba. He mentions the exact instance he is talking about when he discusses the satellite information that had been leaked by the press. This speech was JFK’s attempt to reconcile the ideal of a free press with the need for national security/secrecy during war-time.
“It conducts the Cold War, in short, with a war-time discipline no democracy would ever hope or wish to match”, he says in the speech.
The “enemy” that Kennedy was referring to was Communism. It was the theme song of the entire Cold War period. Used to get us all scared of the Soviets taking over the world. Hide under your desks, etc.
It seems from her wording that Amazing Polly is not talking about communism when she writes in her tweet, “Because you’re afraid of one little word.” The word she appears to be referencing is “conspiracy”.
“I dedicate this to all of those people who refuse to address the reality of conspiracies.
To those who laugh them off, or use the word to silence.
You’ve all failed JFK.
You’ve all failed Western Civilization.
Why? Because you’re afraid of one little word.
Shameful cowards.” – Amazing Polly tweet.But JFK was not promoting the belief in conspiracies as a general practice; he was saying that the communists utilized conspiratorial methods to spread their message. Quite a number of people use this Kennedy quote as evidence that he was warning the public about the “Deep State”; that too is totally incorrect, which becomes completely obvious when you read the entire speech. In other words, JFK was saying that the communists had a conspiracy to infiltrate democracies; Polly is saying that if you don’t believe in her particular conspiracy theory (which is a different one than JFK’s – her theory involves the election and the Clinton pedophile baby-blood-drinking stuff), you don’t believe any conspiracies exist, and are therefore sliming the memory of JFK. This is a rhetorical conflation of two discrete ideas and very bad form.
I checked out Amazing Polly’s twitter feed, which led me to her website. She has been banned from youtube, so she set up a website where she does her own videos. She offers the latest QAnon “drops”, insights into the cabal of radical leftists who intend to track and kill all the Trump supporters, and the most recent information about how things are progressing in the Trump/Q quest to oust the pedophiles/baby killers who are trying to take over Western civilization.
But Kennedy’s “Address to the Press” is interesting to read, if only to see what was considered normal and respected political speech in those days. Compare it to Bush’s gee-golly routines, Bill Clinton’s slick hustler shit, Obama’s pretty but meaningless palaver, Biden’s ‘aw c’mon, man’ shtick and Trump’s gibberish. Kennedy sounds like he came from a different planet. Back then, the average guy would have thought Bush and Trump and Biden were retards if they had heard them talking.
The text of this JFK speech can be read here:
John F. Kennedy, “Address: The President And The Press” (27 April 1961)
I just have problems with the whole election fraud thing as presented by Trump, Giuliani and Powell.
Trump claimed the 2016 election was rigged, and he WON that one, so his take is just his usual fall-back position. The lawyers might have something, except….Sidney Powell is part of QAnon. Sorry, but that is a nonstarter for me. But there is also this stuff:
Her main complaint is about Dominion Systems voting software. For some reason, the “for real this time” evidence has been cleverly hidden until now, and not used in any of the 30 or so lawsuits that Trump filed previous to this time. Why?
She alleges that this software was developed by the late Hugo Chavez to make sure he never lost an election. The fact that he was wildly popular in Venezuela is apparently irrelevant to his winning his elections, because “Socialism”, or as it is now called, “Communism”. (Chavez had an approval rating of close to 80% for his entire tenure in office. Not that the Venezuelans should have a right to pick, much less like, their own president.)
The countries that manipulated the US vote from abroad by hacking into the Dominion Systems now include (list comes from various Powell statements, tweets, filings and interviews): Venezuela, China, Iran, Cuba, Canada, the Netherlands, and Serbia. These are all now to be referred to as Communist, rogue countries.
Also mentioned as being involved in vote fraud are the entities HSBC Bank Canada, BMA Capital Mgt, and DVS Corp China. They are presumed to be rogue Communists, as well. Not in the court filings, but included in Powell’s interviews, are the names Soros, Clinton, Pelosi, and the groups Antifa and the Clinton Foundation. That is a hell of a lot of countries, entities, and individuals involved in this scam. Plus, all the county clerks in various states who had to have participated in one or another for it all to have worked.
Her court filings are full of typos, misspells the names of the courts where the lawsuits are filed, and she misspells her key expert’s name twice (in two different ways). I personally would demand my retainer back from an attorney who couldn’t spell the words “district” and “court” correctly, but maybe that’s just me.
One of the GOP county chairmans who is listed as a plaintiff says he never agreed to take part in the legal action. There are 7 plaintiffs listed in Powell’s filings, well, less the one guy, so 6 plaintiffs, although she now claims to be representing the “American People” as a whole, so maybe 330 million plaintiffs.
Dominion Systems is “responsible”, she says, for manipulating the votes in the five states that Trump is filing lawsuits. Those states would be Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. Powell has filed her suits in two of these states – Georgia and Michigan. Dominion Systems, however, was used in 24 states in the 2020 election. I guess that Dominion was not a problem when it was used in the states that Trump won, because they aren’t contesting those states. Nor are they suggesting there were any glitches at all one way or another in the other 18 states that used Dominion. In the states that used Dominion, both the Democrats and the Republicans in the state legislatures approved the election laws and the purchase of the Dominion machines. Which no doubt proves that both parties were probably in the bag for Biden all along and they are all rogue Commies.
She has set up a “Defending the Republic” fund, and Trump has set up an “Official Election Defense Fund”. Please give generously…you do have some of that stimulus money left, doncha? And – hand to God – these funds will only be used for the stated purposes [see fine print] and are not part of a money-grubbing grifting scheme which will be milked until hell freezes over.
Sydney Powell [QAnon, esq] needs to put up or shut up. This is the third “we will release the Kraken” date she has given. Jabbering on about “communist” Venezuela, the very dead Hugo Chavez, the Great Dreaded China, and Antifa does not proof make.
Reminds me of Trump’s “infrastructure week” and “beautiful healthcare plan”, both coming “in two weeks”, “very soon”, or “over a short period of time”. Both of which he has been promising since he took office.
John Day;
“Is Trump a class-traitor in the same way FDR was? I can’t say whether he is or isn’t yet, but I don’t see any other candidates auditioning for that role, either.”I would think that plenty of evidence is in. Trump = Tax cuts for the wealthy/big corporations, later bragged about openly at Mar-a-Lago. Cuts to food stamps, unemployment insurance, medicare, medicaid. Zealously carried out deregulation of the banking sector, deregulation of environmental protections, massive selling off of public lands to oil companies, fracking everywhere, fast-tracking the expanded use of toxic pesticides/herbicides, installation of right-wing judges that are anti-union, anti-worker, and anti-women’s health.
Meaningless executive orders that are so poorly written and toothless that even Jared Kushner is openly ignoring them and has started eviction proceedings against tenants in his buildings already.
If he cared about the working class, why isn’t Trump using this time to push Congress for more stimulus? Why isn’t he talking about the loss of jobs, or the way the big companies took all that Covid money and used it to buy back stocks and give CEOs some bonuses – while still laying off employees? Why isn’t he looking into that? (Hint: because he doesn’t care. Mnuchin handed out the money with Trump’s approval, let us remember.) As a matter of fact, if he actually wants to continue being the president, why isn’t he talking about Covid at all? I’m not suggesting what, exactly, he should do about it, but he isn’t even addressing it at all. No remarks on economic relief, no calls for Congress to start testing and tracing and let’s find out what the hell is happening here. He hasn’t even attended a Covid task-force meeting in over 5 months. Hasn’t attended a security briefing since Oct 1, for that matter. So what does Trump want to do with his time should he remain in office? It’s obvious he isn’t all that interested in being president right now, while he is still in power. And sure not interested in being president for those of modest means, much less the poor.
I suspect it would be 4 more years of deregulation and catering to the big banks and big businesses, more QE 4ever, all the while screaming at the “commie, socialist Democrats” and urging his base to rise up against their local officials who happen to be wearing the wrong color hats. 4 more years of building more nukes (including in space), selling more weapons to countries like Saudi Arabia, more sanctions on more countries, etc. Enough time to finally get rid of social security altogether, after making a good run at it already.
He has done nothing for the little guys. I know they don’t believe that, because they believe whatever he says, and he says he “helped” them. But he has done nothing to improve their lives at all, and did not fulfill any of his promises to them. He has shown us who he wants to impress – the big money guys. My view is that there is no point in trying to pretend Trump is better than he is just because we want SOMEONE to be better. They all suck and don’t give a shit.
And, no, there is nobody else who is going to be FDR for now, either. FDR had Wallace for a VP, let’s remember, who was a member of the Progressive Party (that was an actual party back then), and he had his wife, Eleanor, who was a fierce advocate for civil rights, womens’ rights and the working class. They both really pushed him to be a “class traitor”. We, however, are on our own.
Hey, on a positive note, Trump did NOT nuke Iran last week like he wanted to (God help us if he decides to go ahead with that nifty idea), and a group has nominated the doctors of Cuba, collectively, for a Nobel Peace Prize for their tireless work helping with the Covid outbreaks around the world.
You might be interested in this website, which is looking for ways of becoming self-sustaining:
http://stormcloudsgathering.com/
They started publishing around the time of the economic collapse in ’08, then went silent for awhile, but have a new post up now regarding going forward from 2020 on.
Just wanted to pass on some useful (I hope) information:
Re: discrepancy between numbers of votes for president and for senate.
Lots of people only vote for the president in a presidential election year and don’t bother with down-ticket candidates. And lots of people only bother to vote at all when it is a presidential election year and don’t bother voting during mid-term years. Also, US senators serve for 6 years and the schedule is staggered so that only about a third of the Senate is up for reelection during any given election. Neither of Maryland’s Senators was up for reelection this year, for example, so there was no section on the ballot for US Senator in our state.Choosing sources of media reporting: about a couple of sites that are being quoted here more and more often (both of these are from wiki, but you can find the exact same information at any media-bias group or truth-in-media fact-checking outfit):
The Gateway Pundit is an American far-right[9] news and opinion website. The website is known for publishing falsehoods, hoaxes, and conspiracy theories.[17]
The Gateway Pundit is known as a source of viral falsehoods and hoaxes.[8][28][29] It has been described by Newsweek as a fake news website[30] and by CNN as a website “prone to peddling conspiracy theories.”[31] As a result of a number of lawsuits against The Gateway Pundit over its false stories, it was reported in March 2018 that Jim Hoft had told his writers to be more careful: “I don’t want any more lawsuits so we have to be really careful with what we put up.”[32] Hoft stated that he believes the lawsuits “are part of a multi-pronged effort to attack media outlets on the right.”[32]
——–
Project Veritas is an American far-right[4][5][6][7][8][9] activist group founded by James O’Keefe in 2010.[10][11][12][13] The group uses undercover techniques to reveal supposed liberal bias and corruption[10] and is known for producing deceptively edited videos about media organizations, left-leaning groups[14][11][15][16][17][18][19] and debunked conspiracy theories.[11][20][21] In a 2018 book on propaganda and disinformation in U.S. politics, three Harvard University scholars refer to Project Veritas as a “right-wing disinformation outfit”.[22]In March 2020, The New York Times published an exposé detailing Project Veritas’ use of spies recruited by Erik Prince, to infiltrate “Democratic congressional campaigns, labor organizations and other groups considered hostile to the Trump agenda”. The Times piece notes O’Keefe’s and Prince’s close links to the Trump administration, and details contributions such as a $1 million transfer of funds from an undisclosed source to support their work. The findings were based in part on discovery documents in a case brought by the American Federation of Teachers, Michigan, which was infiltrated by Project Veritas.[23]
So Trump is really mad at some of the people in the government. He is going to fire their asses right after the election. And he seriously means it this time.
They are, in fact, awful at their jobs – Haspel, Barr, Wray, Devos – and are actively harming the public weal and ought to go. Now tell me again how they got into their positions in the first place.
Geppetto,
It sounds like you are saying Biden is responsible for his adult son’s actions and he should pay a price for it rather than his son, while Trump is not even responsible for his own (much less his family’s) actions because he never pretended to be anything but a grifter.it’s an argument of sorts, I guess.
Roboto:
Uh-huh, except the laptop thing isn’t really about Biden so much as his son, right? His son, who is not (correct me if I am wrong here) running for president.
Hell, Trump’s son-in-law gave classified information to Saudi Arabia in exchange for a nice bailout deal for his 666 property, and nobody is making that an election issue, even though it’s much more salient than Hunter Biden and his exploits on camera.
They are all malign shits, is the truth of it.
I’m just not sure why I should care more about Joe Biden’s kid making book off his father’s position than Trump’s kids making money off his position. Or any other politician’s or world leader’s kids making money off their parents positions. Is it because Hunter is “ickier” because of his drugs? Well, shit, even the Kennedys have known drug and alcohol problems in their family. (Remember Chappaquiddick?)
Seems to me the whole entire globe is rife with the families of politicians taking advantage of connections to get their kids, in-laws, wealthy donors, etc. into some lucrative deals of one sort or another.
An explosive New York Post story that sent Trumpworld into a frenzy is riddled with holes and red flags:
Ilargi,
Trump has not handled anything about the virus well. It doesn’t matter what the media talking heads say, it matters what he himself has said and done – and he has been really bad in regard to Covid. I don’t need some spokesperson on CNN or FOX to tell me what to think – I can see with my own two eyes and hear with my own two ears and make my own judgment. His lack of response to Covid has nothing to do with the whole stupid Russia/Ukraine thing the idiots on the Democrat side have going on; I think you have somehow decided to dismiss criticism of the one topic because the other things are so egregiously ridiculous.
I never said he caused all those deaths by himself or that he somehow brought Coronavirus into the US. I have, however, maintained that he and his administration’s responses were the worst and most inept they could have possibly been.
I am really taken aback that you make the remark that we should all “be gracious” about Trump having Covid, “like with everyone who catches it”. A week or two back, I made a comment here on your blog about the death of my father. (I immediately regretted it – I was really missing Dad that day and otherwise would never have left such a personal comment on the damn internet – but there is no way to delete your comment here once it’s posted.) In any case, I did write the comment, and you sure didn’t bother to offer one word of sympathy. I never felt you were required to do so, but now that you are telling me how I am supposed to respond to Donald Trump having Covid, your own lack of response to a heartfelt comment from one of your readers makes your advice to “be gracious to everyone who catches it” look pretty hypocritical.
You want people to be gracious about Trump getting Covid?
You do realize how dismissive he has been about 212,000 dead Americans, right? And how cavalier his attitude about wearing masks, providing testing to the population, exposing other people at rallies, etc, right?
Moonofalabama has a very concise timeline and some interesting info on this event here:
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2020/10/us-president-trump-caught-the-flu.html#more
The guy who runs moonofalabama, “B”, points out that it is possible Trump could have infected Biden during the debate. Now wouldn’t that be something? Both candidates not only mentally unfit, but also physically incapacitated. The shit is piling up fast.
Ilargi, please, I don’t think you have understood my point very well. Trump needs to be held to account for the wrong actions he has taken. That is all I am saying. You seem to want to suggest that I am saying he is always bad and all his actions are always bad. I have not ever accused him of, or bought into, the whole dumbass Russia investigation, and that Ukraine impeachment thing was downright silliness. There are a lot of other ridiculous things he’s been accused of, but I don’t need to make a long list of them all.
But when I castigate him for the way he and his administration handled the virus (as I did with explicit examples in a comment I left yesterday), I believe that everything I mentioned is worthy of censure. This has nothing to do with Woodward’s book; it has to do with the actual steps the Trump administration has taken since January and February. I have been thinking about this on and off all afternoon while I worked. (Luckily, I work at home, so no-one sees me staring off into the distance doing nothing occasionally.)
So, I’ll tell you what it is about. This is my personal Covid story. My Dad died in April. At the time, he was in the rehab center at a nursing home. He was only there out of dire medical necessity. We never intended either of our parents to be in a nursing home, but he had taken a horrible fall down a flight of steps where he broke his back and sustained multiple injuries to several organs. Thus, he needed the sort of medical and rehab care he could only get in a medical care facility with 24-hour nursing staff. He had been in this facility since Dec . By March, we were under lockdown orders and were not allowed to visit Dad any more. Sometimes the nurses would hold their personal cell phones close to Dad’s face so Mom could do a face-time sort of thing over the phone with him.
Our governor could not get PPE supplies from the federal government. Trump/Kushner had picked their favored states and really hated Hogan – the one Republican governor who criticized Trump. Hogan ended up ordering some testing kits from S. Korea and had to have the state troopers and state National Guard meet the plane and hide the fucking supplies so the Feds wouldn’t confiscate them. But we also couldn’t get masks, robes, testing swabs, etc. The staff at Dad’s nursing home had no PPE in March, and were re-using the meager supplies they had in April. In Jan and Feb, Trump was selling supplies made by US manufacturers overseas. In March, he and his team of miscreants were hoarding supplies and sending out stuff to only Republican states – and even that stuff was shoddy and dry-rotted.
By April, when Hogan placed his order with S Korea, Trump was telling the governors they were on their own, and specifically mocked Hogan a number of times in public, via tweets and at live press conferences. At Dad’s nursing home, 42 staff members and 57 patients eventually tested positive for Covid (after we got the test kits on our own to test them). One staff member and 16 patients died from provable Covid. A significant number of other patients died due to lack of nursing care – this was true at all the rehabs and nursing homes; the staff was overworked, there were no supplies, doctors were working at both the long-term care facilities and at local hospitals.
On Dad’s last day, someone on the nursing staff (realizing the end was near) let my Mom sneak in for a half-hour visit. Somebody loaned her a mask, gloves and a robe. Dad died later, in the middle of the night, all alone and having not seen any of his 6 children for more than a month. (Mom has not contracted Covid so far herself, thank god.)
Dad’s life did not have to end this way. This is personal to me. It is also a fact – a FACT – that the Trump/Kushner/Pence handling of supplies, equipment, testing and tracing, supply transit routing, PPE procurement, the whole nine yards, was grossly negligent, inexcusably slip-shod, and showed such preference for Trump’s favored states that no-one can excuse it. I don’t blame him for the pandemic. I blame him for only and exactly what I itemized here.
And while I am at it, let me tell you what else I am thinking right now. My father was worth a million Donald Trumps. Dad was a world-renowned scientist who was once nominated for the Nobel prize in physics. He was inducted into the basketball hall of fame in his home state. He could milk a cow, ride a horse, and fix the damn tractor with baling twine and bubble gum. He never lied, never cheated, sang like a lark, taught us to play chess, had us all reading before we ever went to school, ingrained in us a thirst for knowledge, and led his large family with humor and love, love, love.
Trump cost me my wonderful Dad. Fuck Trump. And that is all I want to say about that.
Ilargi, it’s that you never, ever cover any news that might criticize Trump – except to point out how unfair it all is. There has been no coverage of Trump’s destruction of the environment, deregulation of and further massive bank bailouts to the banks, cronies placed in charge of agencies, increased usage of drone bombings around the planet, horrible sanctions on Venezuela and Cuba, incredibly bad decisions repeatedly made vis a vis Covid, a furthering of the wealth divide which surged with his tax cut bill and his administration’s mishandling of Covid funds, the huge increase in nuclear weapons in the US, etc., etc.
There are things that Trump deserves blame and castigation for, and the fact that the asshats in the Democratic party are useless and swimming in Russia/Trump conspiracy theories does not alter the reality of the actual bad policies that Trump has undertaken.
I couldn’t stand Obama, and didn’t vote for him. I never voted for a Republican in my life either, but my tendency to vote for the left never led me to offer up some excuses for Obama’s wrongs by saying how ‘unfair the Republicans were’, or that he was ‘not doing anything that Bush didn’t do before him’, nor would I simply ignore what he was doing in an effort to pretend like it was all acceptable.
Each president is responsible for his own choices. Some of Trump’s have been awful, but you simply won’t allow any of that kind of talk. It’s true I can’t stand Trump, but then, I despised Obama and his smooth lies and his death march around the globe, and I found Bush intolerable before that. I excuse none of them. I consider it correct and just to let each carry the burden of blame for his destructive choices, or to receive the accolades for what he did right. This isn’t a hate fest against Trump, it’s me asking for a righteous recounting instead of pretending that the guy is above reproach.
You are closing today’s post with that silly tweet about Trump? That thing has been trotted out by twitter users for a couple of years now, and has been debunked. Took me just a few minutes of fact-checking to find that dozens of articles have already been written about the false claims in that tweet.
Trump did walk down a NY street a few days after 9/11 – that is for sure a real photo of him walking down the street outside the NYSE on 18 Sept, 2001. There is no proof he paid any workers to help with cleanup or searching for bodies; matter of fact, private citizens were barred from the Ground Zero area by Sept 15. Trump himself certainly never did any such “clean up” or “rescue” missions, and except for that one photo-op shown in the tweet, nobody ever saw Trump (or any of his supposed hired hands) anywhere near Ground Zero ever again. Last year on the anniversary of 9/11, Trump told the story a little differently, saying that he had gone to Ground Zero with “men who worked for me to try to help in any little way that we could.” That’s a little different than the claim that he hired hundreds of workers to help with search and rescue or clean-up efforts. Yeah, well, maybe those guys standing behind him in the photo worked for him. Who knows what he means by either the first or the second claim?
He did not donate any of the personal money he promised to any 9/11 fund, although the Trump Foundation did donate other people’s money to one such fund. [The Trump Foundation has since been shut down because of gross illegalities in the use of its funds.]
And just this morning we have this news: “The Trump administration has secretly siphoned nearly $4 million away from a program that tracks and treats FDNY firefighters and medics suffering from 9/11-related illnesses.”
This Trump love fest you got going on has now reached the level of grossly stupid.
I can understand a president who doesn’t want to create a panic amongst the people; however, there are ways of speaking that can instead create a sense of unity and toughness, if you will, in the face of a big problem. Trump is not capable of that.
But leaving aside his personal inability to coalesce the public, to me the larger issue is that he went on to actively harm the public. He could have quietly had some teams working on PPE assessment and procurement, testing capacities, etc. before the lockdown became inevitable. Instead, the Trump administration was selling our PPE abroad in January, February, and March. They [Trump administration] secretly told some of the major manufacturers that they would help them apply for preferred status to sell US products through the fast-track sales exchange in Bejing. They refused to ship products to states run by Democrats because Trump didn’t “like them” and then, when the states were told to buy their own equipment from wherever they could find it, they had some federal goons intercept and confiscate the shipments. Our own governor, who is a Republican, had criticized Trump, so he ended up having to surreptitiously order supplies from South Korea and have them shipped to an undisclosed location so the Feds wouldn’t grab the goods. The territories and Indian reservations were ignored completely. A lot of PPE that finally went out to the states was dry-rotted and unusable.
There has been no full testing and tracing ever put in place, and now schools are reopening without any way to adequately test the kids and teachers. The agencies in charge of keeping track of the pandemic have been ordered to lie about the numbers, and Trump has dicked around with who the hospitals are supposed to report to – there are a couple of weeks’ worth of numbers that are lost since the new reporting system mysteriously didn’t work.
Trump had already down-sized the various agencies and put his cronies in charge of them, so none of the federal agencies were at all capable of handling a crisis when it came. To add insult to injury, he put Kushner and his old college chums in charge of PPE and supply chains, and put Pence in charge of the Corona task force – Pence, who thinks Covid is just a plague of the End Times that will weed out the sinners before the Rapture.
Trump has recently written a couple of unworkable, useless executive orders and memoranda, but has said he will veto any legislation that gives financial aid to the states. The states, in the meantime, are running out of money and discussing major cuts to education, unemployment, etc. to try to balance their budgets. (And please to not talk to me about “states rights”, and all that hoo-hah. The freaking federal gov’t is the only entity that can help in this dire situation; if it won’t do it now, what is the point in considering this a country any more?)
So, okay, he says he didn’t want to panic everyone. I don’t agree with that decision; you don’t get through a problem by treating the public like a bunch of babies. But Jesus on a cracker, the stuff that followed that initial impulse to keep the public in the dark is inexcusable. Once he knew action of some sort had to be taken, every single one of his actions was wrong, driven by politics, and cost lives. Screw Trump and the horse he rode in on. As to the members of Congress, the intelligence agencies, the CDC, Woodward, Fauci, and all others who had advance warning and did not speak out – fuck them, too.
They are ALL using Covid to steal everything they can from the public domain.
This is the final stage of what I call the Great Taking, and we are on our own.
The holiday weekend is over, so we are back to reporting the numbers again, I guess.
So far today (on Worldometers’ time-frame), we have 912 Covid deaths, bringing us to just shy of 195,000 deaths YTD.
Not sure Spain is such a good example of what to aim for. US has an average of 588 Covid deaths per million population. Not too many countries are worse, but Spain is one of them. They average 634 Covid deaths per million.
Ilargi; you don’t know? For real? So why not just leave this sort of thing in the comment section instead of publishing it like it was a valuable insight of some sort?
I read your website every morning, Ilargi. I would like to ask a question that I have asked three times in the past without the curtesy of an answer. However, now that you are highlighting Dr. D as a guest author, I believe a direct answer is warranted: is “Dr. D” an actual medical doctor? If so, what is his field?
Dr. D, you may choose to answer this question yourself; I directed it to Ilargi as he is the blog owner.
In other words, is he opining the way I do (I’m just a commenter with an opinion, which may be thought-provoking, valid, funny, stupid, interesting, irrelevant, etc. depending on how I strike the reader) or does he have some medical experience that ought to be taken into account and may add some weight to his commentary?
I know there are plenty of doctors that have written lots of unadulterated crap about covid, and we have to learn to weed them out after researching their background and experience. I am not saying Dr. D is one of those, but I do think it is only proper etiquette to credential the bona fides of a person you have given the honor of guest-posting on a medical topic.
Thank you, Teri
“Universal” mail-in ballots go to registered voters. It is not some random mailing to “Our Neighbor” or “Postal Customer” at 123 Main St, Anywhere, USA.
Your article about voting by mail comes from The Daily Caller, a right wing website founded by Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel. Patel, who wrote this particular article on voting by mail, was a chief policy advisor to Dick fucking Cheney. The Daily Caller denies climate change and publishes articles from white supremacists. They are not rated well on sites that check for accuracy and honesty in reporting.
The below is another article regarding “universal” vote-by-mail procedures. It is not written by someone affiliated with Fox News or Tucker Carlson or the Libertarian/Teabagger Party, so you probably don’t want to bother reading it.
The Kimberly Klacik video; meh. Same old political BS. She is correct that Baltimore is a mess, for lots of reasons (one of which – never mentioned as a real problem, although it makes the city impossible to travel through – is that the damn streets are always being worked on, with the attendant detours that take you miles out of the way, but none of the streets ever get finished. EVER. I have no idea how delivery trucks get anywhere.) Anyway, I noticed that she does the same old shit all politicians do; she says the other side can’t run things properly and can’t take care of the people, but offers absolutely no clue as to what her side has to offer instead. If she thinks she can fix Baltimore, what does she have in mind aside from not being a Democrat? Because that is not a “plan”. Heck, I could walk around my city and point out the flaws and find somebody else to blame them on, but that doesn’t mean jack.
Watch it again. You might as well be watching Trump or Biden.
@ John Day: When you say “There may be another Texas of oil buried in Alaska. It has been kept top secret after a few wells were drilled in Carter years, then capped off. It could be nothing, but it would have taken them longer to be sure that it was nothing”, I’m not sure I understand what you mean. Are you suggesting we ought to drill it up just because it might be there? We have already passed our storage capacity, so what would be the point right now? Plus, a lot of other stuff about preserving the wilderness, methane leaks, blah, blah, blah (I’m too tired right now to give all the bullet points), and the fact that they are killing off and impoverishing enough of us that I doubt there will be nearly as much demand for years going forward.
@ Vietnam Vet: I have noticed in comments you have made before that you are a fellow Marylander. Just wanted to say hello from the north end of the state.
Coronavirus is now the 3rd leading cause of death in the USA.
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/512427-covid-19-now-no-3-cause-of-death-in-us
Dept of the Interior approves gas and oil leases on the ANWR
US approves oil, gas leasing plan for Alaska wildlife refuge
I am curious as to where you got that chart showing that the voting absentee is so much better and different than vote-by-mail. The chart is not included in the original article, nor are any of the so-called “facts” about vote-by mail which are expressed in the chart. I find some of them rather doubtful, frankly; looks like a chart written by Red State.
BTW, are we allowed to criticize Trump’s attack on the postal service? Can we mention his latest assaults on the environment? The seizing of the oil aboard 4 Iranian tankers day before yesterday? (Which Trump says is now in Houston, since we “confiscated” it.) May we find it odd that the new database company Trump/Kushner demanded that the states now report covid cases to seems to have technical issues, totally incorrect numbers, had to sign a nondisclosure agreement, and is refusing to answer questions from Congress about how they are handling and disseminating the data? Or is all this considered just too much criticism of the sitting President? As a follow up question, will we be allowed to mention any of this after he leaves office and we are all breathing our methane straight up, or is he to be forever held blameless for any and all sundry things that happen during his tenure?
Asking for a friend.
“ ‘..Congress inserted the words “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Those six words have perplexed scholars for 150 years.’ But being perplexed by them today is racist.”
Hogwash. The 14th amendment was written that way for two reasons: 1) foreign diplomatic status; babies born to parents where one may be an American and subject to US jurisdiction, but the other parent may not be so subject. The applicable jurisdiction of the baby and the nonAmerican parent are handled through treaties between the US and the other foreign country.
2) The 14th amendment was written in the 1860’s. The US was “at war” with the Indians at the time, and that continued well beyond the end of the Civil War. Native Americans were not considered citizens, were not taxed and were not counted in any of the US states or holdings census of the day. It wasn’t until 1924 that Indians were granted citizenship. (In their own country, mind you.)
If I knew that, surely a “constitutional scholar” should know it. Pretending not to know it, as regards to Kamala Harris’ status, is indeed just racist bullshit. Turley could have looked it up on wikipedia, for god’s sake and found some paragraphs from scholars before him who have written at length about this clause.
@Dave Note,
Well, the EO on drug pricing has not actually been published yet, meaning that 2 weeks after signing it, it has not been put in the Federal Register, which means it is not actually an official Order yet. Plus, right as he signed it, Trump said that it wouldn’t go into effect until Aug 25, so as to let the pharma companies come up with “a better idea”. His exact words were, “This one will go into effect on Aug. 25 if we don’t make a deal.” In other words, it was not even meant to be a real EO; it was a negotiation tactic with big pharma.
Plus, nobody, not even the pharma companies, have been told what the text of the order says. The people in the pharmaceutical industry have resorted to trying to blow up press pictures taken during the signing so as to read the printing on the order Trump was holding up. The best they have been able to come up with, is that the page that would show the actual details appears to be missing. So this looks like a gimmick. Kind of like how we have been repeatedly told for the past three years that there will be “Infrastructure Week” within the next two weeks, or that there will be an “amazing Republican Health Plan” in the next two weeks.
Trump did promise his base that he would never get rid of SS and Medicare, and he beat out a lot of other Republican contenders on that promise alone in 2016. But today he signed an EO that totally guts SS/Med funding through the end of the year (that’s what the P/R tax holiday does – employers don’t have to withhold FICA taxes from paychecks) and furthermore added that if he wins reelection, this “tax holiday” will be made permanent via EO in Nov. I.e., that will be the end of the SS and Medicare programs.
Oh, and he announced there will be more EO’s coming along soon, which will be for more tax cuts and a further reduction of capital gains tax rates. You should have heard those wealthy people at Bedminster Golf resort, where he held today’s press conference, cheer when they heard that. Now those people are the base he cares about.
Trump and promises….pffffft. Trump caring about his base (except the wealthy ones)…it is to laugh.
