Showing posts with label 45*. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 45*. Show all posts
Monday, October 12, 2020
Friday, October 09, 2020
Curiouser
Lots of weirder-than-usual shit goin' on and goin' down today.
President Trump on Thursday retweeted a reporter who said invoking the 25th Amendment is not equivalent to a "coup," raised eyebrows from many on social media.
The president retweeted comments from White House reporter Andrew Feinberg, who was explaining aspects of the amendment regarding presidential succession after Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Democrats will discuss the 25th Amendment on Friday amid concerns over President Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis.
“Tomorrow, by the way, tomorrow, come here tomorrow. We're going to be talking about the 25th Amendment. But not to take attention away from the subject we have now,” Pelosi said in response to a reporter's question regarding coronavirus relief legislation.
House Democrats later said they plan to unveil a bill Friday that would create a commission to determine whether a president is fit for office.
So yeah - everything's pretty wild and crazy as long as the circus is in town.
Pelosi mentioned yesterday at a press gaggle that there would be a meeting today where they'd be talking about the 25th amendment.
The White House canceled a trip to Indiana that Mike Pence had planned.
After a public statement that he wouldn't be quarantining, Bill Barr announced he's doing exactly that.
The FBI busted 13 militia assholes in Michigan who were plotting to kidnap and murder the governor, hoping that would spark a civil war.
Trump has been cooped up in the White House residence, occasionally wandering into the west wing, or out onto the lawn to do these really odd videos for his fans.
He also retweeted a defense of A25 - prob'ly thinking he was retweeting the part from wingnut congress critter Mark Green.
President Trump on Thursday retweeted a reporter who said invoking the 25th Amendment is not equivalent to a "coup," raised eyebrows from many on social media.
The president retweeted comments from White House reporter Andrew Feinberg, who was explaining aspects of the amendment regarding presidential succession after Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Democrats will discuss the 25th Amendment on Friday amid concerns over President Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis.
“Tomorrow, by the way, tomorrow, come here tomorrow. We're going to be talking about the 25th Amendment. But not to take attention away from the subject we have now,” Pelosi said in response to a reporter's question regarding coronavirus relief legislation.
House Democrats later said they plan to unveil a bill Friday that would create a commission to determine whether a president is fit for office.
Thursday, October 08, 2020
No Honor - No Respect
Covid-19 survivors see callousness, not compassion, in Trump’s bout with the virus
Ken Holmes, a retired maintenance worker in Wisconsin, never had much in common with Donald Trump, or much affection for him.
But when the president caught a potentially lethal virus that had nearly killed Holmes this year, the 64-year-old saw a rare opportunity for connection. Trump, Holmes thought, might finally understand what he had come to learn through painful experience: The novel coronavirus is a monster that commands respect.
“He can still make this right,” Holmes thought.
But then Trump stood on the White House balcony Monday night, theatrically ripped off his mask while gasping for breath, and proclaimed the virus was nothing to fear.
Watching at home in Green Bay, Holmes cringed. Then he got mad.
The coronavirus is, in some respects, a great equalizer: Anyone, even the president, can get it.
But rather than bond Trump to the millions of Americans who have suffered from the virus or watched a loved one go through it, Trump’s experience with the virus has only deepened the sense of distance that some voters say they feel from a president who has consistently downplayed its severity.
In interviews, Americans whose lives have been upended by the virus said they felt disappointed that the president missed an opportunity to model responsible behavior. They expressed anger that Trump has continued to minimize the virus’s threat after receiving deluxe care that the vast majority of people can only dream of at a time when testing and treatments are running low. And they voiced fear that Trump’s words and actions would lead to more reckless behavior among his supporters.
“I wish he would just be square with the American people. But he can’t do that,” said Holmes, who spent three weeks in intensive care without access to the advanced therapies that Trump’s doctors deployed. “He says, ‘Don’t be afraid of covid. It’s not that bad.’ Well, he should see what it’s like in the real world.”
Since he got sick, Trump and his advisers have sought to portray his bout with the virus as an asset. The White House produced a dramatic video recounting his return from a weekend at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, fundraising emails touted his triumph over the disease, and Trump himself seemed to suggest his infection had been a personal sacrifice in the name of good governance.
“Nobody that’s a leader would not do what I did,” Trump said in his balcony address before reentering the White House, maskless and infectious.
Trump’s illness has only made him a better president, said Doris Cortese, 81, a fervent supporter who said she has had friends and acquaintances who have contracted the coronavirus — but who has escaped infection herself, despite wearing a mask “only when forced to do so.”
“If you’ve been there and done it, you understand better the people who are going through it,” said Cortese, who leads the Trump Republican Club of Lee County, Fla. “He has always done whatever he could to try to keep Americans safe. Now he has even more empathy.”
But that message does not appear to be resonating beyond his base. Even before Trump’s illness, polls showed strong disapproval of his handling of the pandemic, which has claimed at least 210,000 American lives. His numbers have only worsened in the days since last week’s diagnosis, with surveys showing significant majorities of Americans mistrusting the White House’s messaging — both on Trump’s health and the nation’s.
To doctors treating coronavirus patients, the president’s insistence that Americans should not be “afraid” of the virus or let it “dominate” their lives threatens to make the country’s struggle with covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, even more costly.
“It’s inaccurate, insensitive and because of the fact that he’s the president, it’s dangerous,” said Farshad Fani Marvasti, director of public health at the University of Arizona. “It’s very easy for him to give the impression that this is nothing to worry about. But he’s different. He has access to the highest level of care in the world. Most people don’t have a doctor on call at home 24 hours a day.”
Holmes certainly didn’t. He struggled through the symptoms of covid-19 this spring, with his wife — who still works — caring for him from home. But after a month, his health suddenly turned.
“I couldn’t breathe. My wife said, ‘You’re going to the hospital,’ ” he recounted. “We got to the emergency room, and that’s the last thing I remember.”
For three weeks, he struggled to catch his breath while alarms sounded and his oxygen level repeatedly climbed then plummeted. He was terrified but, ultimately, lucky: The doctors and nurses at HSHS St. Mary’s Hospital in Green Bay were “angels, not just heroes,” he said, and thanks to them, he survived.
But he emerged chastened and weak. Covid-19 was nothing like a cold or the flu, as the president has said. It was an entirely differently level — as he believes Trump knows, even if he won’t admit it.
“I think Trump was real scared. He should have been. He still should be,” Holmes said of the president, who also experienced falling oxygen levels and a need for supplemental help.
“We have nearly 1,000 people a day dying of covid. If you had three jetliners going down every day, would you get on an airplane? I don’t think many people would. But they sure don’t want to wear a mask,” Holmes said.
Trump’s decision to unmask on the White House balcony Monday night, while in full view of photographers, was in keeping with the president’s long-standing aversion to face coverings. That’s despite a nearly unanimous view among public health experts, including Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield, who has deemed masks “the most important, powerful public health tool we have.”
Health experts say Trump’s cavalier behavior — including mask-free rallies and other large-scale events — has led directly to a White House coronavirus cluster that has sickened more than 20 people, including advisers, senators, journalists and military officers. Nonetheless, his dismissive views continue to be embraced by many supporters, who surveys show are far more reluctant than other Americans to wear masks.
In the southwestern Missouri city of Joplin, a bastion of Trump support, mask use has been spotty even as infection rates remain high and testing kits run low. That has been a source of deep concern for people like Stephanie Lea, whose father-in-law nearly died of covid-19 this spring.
“I don’t think we should live in fear,” said Lea, who works as an administrator at Freeman Hospital, where the coronavirus unit has routinely been full since summer. “That said, we need to be very cautious and do what we can to help others by wearing our masks. There’s a difference between living in fear and living cautiously.”
Johnetta Warlick had been trying to do the latter. Working for the Missouri Department of Corrections, she knew she was at risk, so she was careful to wear a mask. The coronavirus found her anyway.
What started as a relentless headache became a fever at or above 102 degrees that wouldn’t break for two weeks.
“It got to the point where I couldn’t talk, I couldn’t walk,” she said. “I thought I was going to die.”
But doctors had no cutting-edge therapeutics to ease her symptoms.
“They told me there was nothing I could do but take Tylenol and let it run its course,” said the 32-year-old resident of St. Louis County whose main caretaker — her husband, Vernnell — also became ill.
“I wouldn’t wish covid on my worst enemy,” said Warlick, who said she still has symptoms months later. “It’s nothing to joke about. The president should be grateful he didn’t get the real covid.”
Mary Root, a 65-year-old retiree, knows intimately what that looks like.
This spring, her 92-year-old mother contracted the virus at an assisted-living facility in South Dakota. A child of the Great Depression, Marjorie Root raised five children and, until last year, mowed her own lawn. She told anyone who would listen that she planned to live to 100.
When she became ill, she was initially hospitalized, then sent home to live with her daughter. But her ordeal was only beginning. The virus had invaded her nervous system, just one of the many insidious ways it attacks the body.
“Mom was so strong. She didn’t cry, ever. Not even when her son died,” Mary Root said. “But in her final days, I saw her wail like a baby. She died a miserable, excruciatingly painful death.”
Root said she had just begun to recover from the July loss of her mom when Trump’s case brought it all back.
“It’s cruel. People don’t need to suffer the way I watched my mom go,” she said. “He’s got blood on his hands. My mother’s blood on his hands.”
The Big Corkscrew
45* is spiraling in.
Vulnerable Republicans are increasingly taking careful, but clear, steps to distance themselves from President Donald Trump, one sign of a new wave of GOP anxiety that the president’s crisis-to-crisis reelection bid could bring down Senate candidates across the country.
In key races from Arizona to Texas, Kansas and Maine, Republican senators long afraid of the president’s power to strike back at his critics are starting to break with the president — particularly over his handling of the pandemic — in the final stretch of the election. GOP strategists say the distancing reflects a startling erosion of support over a brutal 10-day stretch for Trump, starting with his seething debate performance when he did not clearly denounce a white supremacist group through his hospitalization with COVID-19 and attempts to downplay the virus’s danger.
Even the somewhat subtle moves away from Trump are notable. For years, Republican lawmakers have been loath to criticize the president — and have gone to great lengths to dodge questions — fearful of angering Trump supporters they need to win. But with control of the Senate in the balance, GOP lawmakers appear to be shifting quickly to do what’s necessary to save their seats.
“The Senate map is looking exceedingly grim,” said one major GOP donor, Dan Eberhart.
Republican prospects for holding its 53-47 majority have been darkening for months. But recent upheaval at the White House has accelerated the trend, according to conversations with a half-dozen GOP strategists and campaign advisers, some of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose internal deliberations.
The strategists noted the decision to rush to fill the Supreme Court vacancy with conservative judge Amy Coney Barrett has not swung voters toward the GOP as hoped. Several noted internal polls suggested Republican-leaning, undecided voters were particularly turned off by the president’s debate performance and his conduct since being diagnosed with the coronavirus. It wasn’t clear that these voters would cast a ballot for Democrat Joe Biden, but they might stay home out of what one strategist described as a feeling of Trump fatigue.
Public polling shows Trump trailing Biden nationally but typically by smaller numbers in key battleground states.
“I think a lot of Republicans are worried that this is a jailbreak moment, and people who have been sitting on the fence looking for a rationale to stick with the president are instead abandoning the ship,” said Rory Cooper, a Republican strategist and frequent Trump critic.
To be sure, Trump has a history of political resilience. Wednesday marked the four year anniversary of the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape, in which Trump boasted of sexually assaulting women. Republicans quickly abandoned him then, and his poll numbers sunk, but he still won weeks later.
Trump’s behavior this week hasn’t prompted that sort of GOP rebuke. But Republicans expressed clear frustration with Trump’s erratic approach to negotiations on a stimulus bill aimed at mitigating the economic toll of the pandemic. Trump abruptly called off talks, then tried to restart them Wednesday, causing the stock market to plummet and then somewhat recover.
On Monday, as he returned from the hospital, a still-contagious Trump paused for a photo op at the White House, removed his mask and later tweeted that people should not fear the virus that has killed more than 210,000 Americans.
“I couldn’t help but think that sent the wrong signal,” said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, whose tight race is among a handful that could cost Republicans control of the Senate. “I did not think that it set a good example at all.”
Collins began airing an ad this week that urges voters to vote for her “no matter who you’re voting for for president.”
In Arizona, another endangered Republican, Sen. Martha McSally, struggled when asked whether she was proud to serve under the president during her Air Force career.
“I’m proud that I’m fighting for Arizonans on things like cutting your taxes,” McSally replied during a debate against Mark Kelly, one of multiple Democrats who have bested their Republican incumbents in fundraising.
Democrats have long considered Maine and Arizona, along with Colorado and North Carolina, top targets in their effort to gain the four seats they need to win Senate control. (It’s only three if Biden wins the White House.) But the race for Senate majority has been widening into reliably Republican states, now including Iowa, Alaska, Kansas and Montana. In North Carolina, meanwhile, Democrat Cal Cunningham’s recent sexting scandal has complicated his drive against Republican incumbent Thom Tillis.
Even South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, a close Trump ally, is suddenly scrambling.
Trump won the state by 14 percentage points in 2016. Still, a major Republican political committee aligned with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell began spending nearly $10 million on TV and radio ads this week attacking Graham’s Democratic opponent, Jaime Harrison.
Donors have not given up on trying to hold the Senate. As Trump’s fundraising has plateaued in recent months, it has spiked for Republican outside groups that are supporting House and Senate candidates.
The massive influx of new money for House and Senate committee will enable them to flood competitive races with advertising that embraces conventional Republican themes. (The South Carolina TV ad by the Senate Leadership Fund shows pictures of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and says, “Liberal Jaime Harrison is their guy, not ours.”)
The intention is to extend a lifeline to candidates who otherwise would have relied on the president’s political operation for support, according to two Republican strategists with direct knowledge of the House and Senate campaign plans.
Still, there’s little doubt Republican senators’ fortunes are linked to the president and his volatile political instincts. In the highly partisan environment, ticket-splitting — voting for one party for president and another for Senate, say — has become increasingly rare. In 2016, Republican Senate candidates lost in every state Trump lost and won where Trump won.
One GOP adviser said most Republican candidates are not running ahead of Trump in polling their states. And when his support drops, their support usually does, too.
Even in red states, Republicans are starting to make clear they aren’t following Trump when it comes to the pandemic.
Sen. John Cornyn told the Houston Chronicle editorial board on Monday that Trump “let his guard down” and said his diagnosis should be a reminder to “exercise self-discipline.”
In another GOP bastion, Republican Senate nominee Roger Marshall borrowed Trump’s slogan for a “Keep Kansas Great” bus tour on Tuesday, but not his health advice.
“Of course, I think everyone should respect the virus,” said Marshall, a doctor. “I’m really encouraging everyone to wear a mask when they can, to keep their physical distance, wash their hands, all those types of things.”
Marshall was quickly reminded of his party’s competing forces. As he spoke, he was briefly interrupted by a woman who appeared to be an opponent of wearing masks, yelling, “Stop telling people that!”
The debate commission says they'll do the next one via remote - a Virtual Town Hall venue - and 45* is making noise that he won't do it.
So he's stuck at home (even though he broke quarantine yesterday and wandered down out of the residence and into the west wing), he's hopped up on god-knows-what, and he's losing so badly even his "base" is starting to melt away.
And finally - fucking finally - some heretofore totally gutless Republican Senators who're up for re-election find themselves having to run away from him, even though they all know they too are totally dependent on the feral mob that Hillary accurately designated "deplorables".
Vulnerable Republicans are increasingly taking careful, but clear, steps to distance themselves from President Donald Trump, one sign of a new wave of GOP anxiety that the president’s crisis-to-crisis reelection bid could bring down Senate candidates across the country.
In key races from Arizona to Texas, Kansas and Maine, Republican senators long afraid of the president’s power to strike back at his critics are starting to break with the president — particularly over his handling of the pandemic — in the final stretch of the election. GOP strategists say the distancing reflects a startling erosion of support over a brutal 10-day stretch for Trump, starting with his seething debate performance when he did not clearly denounce a white supremacist group through his hospitalization with COVID-19 and attempts to downplay the virus’s danger.
Even the somewhat subtle moves away from Trump are notable. For years, Republican lawmakers have been loath to criticize the president — and have gone to great lengths to dodge questions — fearful of angering Trump supporters they need to win. But with control of the Senate in the balance, GOP lawmakers appear to be shifting quickly to do what’s necessary to save their seats.
“The Senate map is looking exceedingly grim,” said one major GOP donor, Dan Eberhart.
Republican prospects for holding its 53-47 majority have been darkening for months. But recent upheaval at the White House has accelerated the trend, according to conversations with a half-dozen GOP strategists and campaign advisers, some of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose internal deliberations.
The strategists noted the decision to rush to fill the Supreme Court vacancy with conservative judge Amy Coney Barrett has not swung voters toward the GOP as hoped. Several noted internal polls suggested Republican-leaning, undecided voters were particularly turned off by the president’s debate performance and his conduct since being diagnosed with the coronavirus. It wasn’t clear that these voters would cast a ballot for Democrat Joe Biden, but they might stay home out of what one strategist described as a feeling of Trump fatigue.
Public polling shows Trump trailing Biden nationally but typically by smaller numbers in key battleground states.
“I think a lot of Republicans are worried that this is a jailbreak moment, and people who have been sitting on the fence looking for a rationale to stick with the president are instead abandoning the ship,” said Rory Cooper, a Republican strategist and frequent Trump critic.
To be sure, Trump has a history of political resilience. Wednesday marked the four year anniversary of the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape, in which Trump boasted of sexually assaulting women. Republicans quickly abandoned him then, and his poll numbers sunk, but he still won weeks later.
Trump’s behavior this week hasn’t prompted that sort of GOP rebuke. But Republicans expressed clear frustration with Trump’s erratic approach to negotiations on a stimulus bill aimed at mitigating the economic toll of the pandemic. Trump abruptly called off talks, then tried to restart them Wednesday, causing the stock market to plummet and then somewhat recover.
On Monday, as he returned from the hospital, a still-contagious Trump paused for a photo op at the White House, removed his mask and later tweeted that people should not fear the virus that has killed more than 210,000 Americans.
“I couldn’t help but think that sent the wrong signal,” said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, whose tight race is among a handful that could cost Republicans control of the Senate. “I did not think that it set a good example at all.”
Collins began airing an ad this week that urges voters to vote for her “no matter who you’re voting for for president.”
In Arizona, another endangered Republican, Sen. Martha McSally, struggled when asked whether she was proud to serve under the president during her Air Force career.
“I’m proud that I’m fighting for Arizonans on things like cutting your taxes,” McSally replied during a debate against Mark Kelly, one of multiple Democrats who have bested their Republican incumbents in fundraising.
Democrats have long considered Maine and Arizona, along with Colorado and North Carolina, top targets in their effort to gain the four seats they need to win Senate control. (It’s only three if Biden wins the White House.) But the race for Senate majority has been widening into reliably Republican states, now including Iowa, Alaska, Kansas and Montana. In North Carolina, meanwhile, Democrat Cal Cunningham’s recent sexting scandal has complicated his drive against Republican incumbent Thom Tillis.
Even South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, a close Trump ally, is suddenly scrambling.
Trump won the state by 14 percentage points in 2016. Still, a major Republican political committee aligned with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell began spending nearly $10 million on TV and radio ads this week attacking Graham’s Democratic opponent, Jaime Harrison.
Donors have not given up on trying to hold the Senate. As Trump’s fundraising has plateaued in recent months, it has spiked for Republican outside groups that are supporting House and Senate candidates.
The massive influx of new money for House and Senate committee will enable them to flood competitive races with advertising that embraces conventional Republican themes. (The South Carolina TV ad by the Senate Leadership Fund shows pictures of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and says, “Liberal Jaime Harrison is their guy, not ours.”)
The intention is to extend a lifeline to candidates who otherwise would have relied on the president’s political operation for support, according to two Republican strategists with direct knowledge of the House and Senate campaign plans.
Still, there’s little doubt Republican senators’ fortunes are linked to the president and his volatile political instincts. In the highly partisan environment, ticket-splitting — voting for one party for president and another for Senate, say — has become increasingly rare. In 2016, Republican Senate candidates lost in every state Trump lost and won where Trump won.
One GOP adviser said most Republican candidates are not running ahead of Trump in polling their states. And when his support drops, their support usually does, too.
Even in red states, Republicans are starting to make clear they aren’t following Trump when it comes to the pandemic.
Sen. John Cornyn told the Houston Chronicle editorial board on Monday that Trump “let his guard down” and said his diagnosis should be a reminder to “exercise self-discipline.”
In another GOP bastion, Republican Senate nominee Roger Marshall borrowed Trump’s slogan for a “Keep Kansas Great” bus tour on Tuesday, but not his health advice.
“Of course, I think everyone should respect the virus,” said Marshall, a doctor. “I’m really encouraging everyone to wear a mask when they can, to keep their physical distance, wash their hands, all those types of things.”
Marshall was quickly reminded of his party’s competing forces. As he spoke, he was briefly interrupted by a woman who appeared to be an opponent of wearing masks, yelling, “Stop telling people that!”
Spotted Foot, Shot Same
When you step back and survey the last two years of U.S. politics, one of the biggest story lines that comes into view is this: One after another, a whole string of deeply corrupt schemes that President Trump has hatched to smooth his reelection hopes have crashed and burned.
In all these cases, Trump has either blown up the schemes himself or compounded the damage they did to him when they self-destructed. In some cases he did both.
Meanwhile, Trump has also managed to wreck numerous opportunities that he could have easily turned to his political advantage if he had reacted to them in a non-depraved manner. Instead, he sought to pervert or corrupt them in ways that ended up backfiring.
When you view these things in one place, the true scale of Trump’s commitment to winning the election through corrupt means becomes a lot more striking. And, since many of them are doing great damage to the country, his sheer destructiveness also comes into much sharper relief.
Let’s take these in reverse chronological order.
Trump’s vaccine scheme implodes. The White House has now agreed under political duress to the Food and Drug Administration’s guidelines for vaccine trials, after trying to block them for weeks. The FDA timetable requires a median of two months to pass after participants in vaccine trials take their final dose, all but scuttling authorization before the election.
Trump had repeatedly tried to rush the process to boost his reelection. This made it politically more damaging: It forced many stakeholders (the biotech industry, administration scientists) to loudly demand an uncorrupted process, reverse-spotlighting his own corruption.
Trump blows up stimulus lifeline. Trump angrily terminated talks over a new stimulus package on Tuesday, only to abruptly reverse course and tweet out demands that Congress approve aid to the airline industry and direct cash payments to individuals.
Signing a big stimulus would have delivered a political boost. Trump knows this: He corruptly insisted on putting his signature on a previous round of checks. Now Trump has placed himself on the hook for killing desperately needed aid just as the economy further tanks, while also reminding voters of his tendency to try to make complex, consequential policy via erratic, ineffective, self-contradictory rage-tweeting.
Trump wrecks public goodwill toward himself. When he tested positive for the coronavirus, he might have seized the moment to admit error; to show humility and humanity toward its victims. Instead, he launched a display of megalomaniacal propaganda that cast his supposed personal triumph over the virus as a function of his alleged strength, insulting the dead and bereaved.
His cultish theatrics for supporters outside the hospital needlessly put others at risk. And now Trump is still resisting further protective protocols in the White House, even as the coronavirus spreads among his top advisers. All this just reminds Americans of his reckless handling of the virus all throughout.
Amy Coney Barrett implicated in coronavirus event. When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, observers proclaimed Trump had an opening to change the subject from coronavirus. But when Trump introduced his replacement nominee at last weekend’s largely mask-free White House event, it may have infected at least eight people with the virus, including two GOP senators.
This further reminds Americans of Trump’s depraved requirement that all Republicans treat the virus either as no biggie or as largely vanquished by his spectacular leadership, and that they act this out by shunning social distancing, putting their own lives at risk.
Efforts to corrupt vote-by-mail backfire. Trump and Attorney General William P. Barr have spent months telling all kinds of lies about vote-by-mail fraud, to lay the groundwork for Trump to declare victory just after Election Day, while seeking to delegitimize millions of uncounted mail ballots.
But the telegraphing of such corrupt designs has helped spur an enormous amount of early voting and early mail-balloting, in which Democrats have a large registration advantage, as Republicans warned would happen. Experts say this will help avert the massive mail-voting overload around Election Day that could have produced delays Trump hoped to exploit.
Trump’s “law and order” agitprop tanks. Trump’s top law enforcement and national security officials used their positions to lend official credence to largely manufactured impressions of a full-scale, organized, violent leftist terror threat, in keeping with Trump’s campaign narratives.
But a Department of Homeland Security whistleblower helped disrupt this effort by revealing that higher-ups had pressed for the manipulation of intelligence to bolster that story line. And polls have since shown Biden favored on crime and safety, surely because voters grasp that Trump is actively working to foment violent civil conflict.
“Hunterghazi” flops. Trump and his propagandists spent months teasing major revelations about Joe Biden’s son Hunter, while openly banking on a transparently phony GOP Senate investigation to manufacture illusions of Biden corruption.
But that probe’s final report was a buffoonish bust. And all the hype only drew more attention to the profound corruption of demanding such blatant perversion of the congressional investigative process.
Which brings us to … impeachment. Let’s not forget that Trump’s zeal to manufacture such Biden corruption led him to try to strong-arm a foreign ally under extreme duress into announcing investigations that would validate those narratives, for which he was impeached.
That’s a reminder that Trump has been working to place the levers of government at all levels at the disposal of his reelection campaign for upward of two years now. In retrospect, the Ukraine scandal set the template for all the corruption that would follow — and for his accompanying string of miserable failures to get away with it as well.
Tuesday, October 06, 2020
Wondering
That would make for such a nice Christmas, dontcha think?
Monday, September 28, 2020
On The NYT Story
Hoo boy.
Ultimately, Mr. Trump has been more successful playing a business mogul than being one in real life.
In fact, those public filings offer a distorted picture of his financial state, since they simply report revenue, not profit. In 2018, for example, Mr. Trump announced in his disclosure that he had made at least $434.9 million. The tax records deliver a very different portrait of his bottom line: $47.4 million in losses.
-snip-
-snip-
Mr. Trump’s net income from his fame — his 50 percent share of “The Apprentice,” together with the riches showered upon him by the scores of suitors paying to use his name — totaled $427.4 million through 2018. A further $176.5 million in profit came to him through his investment in two highly successful office buildings.
So how did he escape nearly all taxes on that fortune? Even the effective tax rate paid by the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans could have caused him to pay more than $100 million.
The answer rests in a third category of Mr. Trump’s endeavors: businesses that he owns and runs himself. The collective and persistent losses he reported from them largely absolved him from paying federal income taxes on the $600 million from “The Apprentice,” branding deals and investments.
That equation is a key element of the alchemy of Mr. Trump’s finances: using the proceeds of his celebrity to purchase and prop up risky businesses, then wielding their losses to avoid taxes.
Throughout his career, Mr. Trump’s business losses have often accumulated in sums larger than could be used to reduce taxes on other income in a single year. But the tax code offers a workaround: With some restrictions, business owners can carry forward leftover losses to reduce taxes in future years.
That provision has been the background music to Mr. Trump’s life. As The Times’s previous reporting on his 1995 return showed, the nearly $1 billion in losses from his early-1990s collapse generated a tax deduction that he could use for up to 18 years going forward.
-snip-
Testifying before Congress in February 2019, the president’s estranged personal lawyer, Mr. Cohen, recalled Mr. Trump’s showing him a huge check from the U.S. Treasury some years earlier and musing “that he could not believe how stupid the government was for giving someone like him that much money back.”
Mr. Trump’s net income from his fame — his 50 percent share of “The Apprentice,” together with the riches showered upon him by the scores of suitors paying to use his name — totaled $427.4 million through 2018. A further $176.5 million in profit came to him through his investment in two highly successful office buildings.
So how did he escape nearly all taxes on that fortune? Even the effective tax rate paid by the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans could have caused him to pay more than $100 million.
The answer rests in a third category of Mr. Trump’s endeavors: businesses that he owns and runs himself. The collective and persistent losses he reported from them largely absolved him from paying federal income taxes on the $600 million from “The Apprentice,” branding deals and investments.
That equation is a key element of the alchemy of Mr. Trump’s finances: using the proceeds of his celebrity to purchase and prop up risky businesses, then wielding their losses to avoid taxes.
Throughout his career, Mr. Trump’s business losses have often accumulated in sums larger than could be used to reduce taxes on other income in a single year. But the tax code offers a workaround: With some restrictions, business owners can carry forward leftover losses to reduce taxes in future years.
That provision has been the background music to Mr. Trump’s life. As The Times’s previous reporting on his 1995 return showed, the nearly $1 billion in losses from his early-1990s collapse generated a tax deduction that he could use for up to 18 years going forward.
-snip-
Testifying before Congress in February 2019, the president’s estranged personal lawyer, Mr. Cohen, recalled Mr. Trump’s showing him a huge check from the U.S. Treasury some years earlier and musing “that he could not believe how stupid the government was for giving someone like him that much money back.”
There will be a lot more stories that come from this, but for me, the obvious overarching lesson is that we have a tax code that's being used as one giant loophole that lets rich people off the hook completely.
And - from the last part of the Stephanie Miller clip:
"Dissent is my way of speaking to the intellect of a day in the future." -- RBG
Saturday, September 26, 2020
Imagine Them Gone
From Don Winslow - #StopTheMadnessStopTrump:
US Cities of about 200,000 population:
- Rochester NY 205,695
- Port St Lucie FL 201,846
- Grand Rapids MI 201,013
- Huntsville AL 200,574
- Salt Lake City UT 200,567
- Frisco TX 200,490
- Yonkers NY 200,370
Friday, September 25, 2020
The Death Of Irony, Part ∞
The guy who told us he'd definitely run into a school to confront an active shooter felt compelled to leave a memorial service early because the crowd booed him - from 100 feet away.
Wednesday, September 16, 2020
45* Is A Mirage
This "president" doesn't hold up under any kind of scrutiny.
President Trump deigned to take hard questions at a town hall on Tuesday night, and the verdict of his propagandists is in: Trump was treated with hideous unfairness even as he managed to convert the spectacle into a triumph through sheer force of his forthrightness and deep benevolence.
After Trump appeared at the ABC News forum, which featured Pennsylvania voters questioning Trump, Fox News’s Laura Ingraham pronounced the affair an “ambush” that could have been staged by the Democratic National Committee. The Fox chyron read:
This response, and the town hall itself, capture a larger truth about the moment. When Trump is not permitted to freely dissemble with abandon or coddled by an interviewer who treats his magnificence as a foundational premise — as he so often is on Fox — he is actually very bad at answering difficult questions about his performance.
The notion that this spectacle constituted an “ambush” underscores the point: If this felt like a surprise attack, it’s only because direct and persistent questioning about his towering failures and broken promises really are politically damaging to him.
Follow-up questions are deadly
The questions from voters and moderator George Stephanopoulos were pointed, but they were largely premised on basic facts about Trump’s presidency. Over and over, Trump tried to lie away those facts, but (and this is the rare part) he was then pressed with follow-up questions based on more facts.
For instance, one woman asked Trump why he downplayed the coronavirus. When he repeated his frequent lie that he didn’t downplay it (he did, endlessly), she responded that he had admitted downplaying it himself, which he did in fact admit to Bob Woodward.
When Trump claimed our coronavirus mortality rate shows we have done “very well” compared to other countries, Stephanopoulous produced a chart debunking the claim, and pointed out that we have 4 percent of the world’s population and more than 20 percent of cases and deaths.
Trump spewed lots of other coronavirus nonsense, as Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler documents: He falsely claimed he’d inherited a ventilator shortage, absurdly blamed our high cases on testing (another area of national failure), and dramatically overstated the impact of his China travel restrictions (his weeks of dithering let the virus rampage here after that).
But some of the most damaging moments of all concerned health care.
After a woman with a preexisting condition pointedly asked Trump how he’d protect people like her, a remarkable exchange followed, in which Stephanopoulos pointed out that the Affordable Care Act contains extensive such protections, that Trump has repeatedly tried to repeal it, and that he supports a lawsuit that would wipe it out right now.
Trump kept saying over and over that he has his own secret health-care plan. But as Stephanopoulos noted, Trump has been promising a plan for a very long time, and it hasn’t materialized.
The whole exchange is worth watching and should loom large in the remainder of the campaign:
“I have it all ready, and it’s a much better plan,” Trump insisted, demonstrating a level of contempt for the intelligence of voters that countless of them will find insulting. But, notably, Trump was pushed to this point of self-incriminating absurdity by hard questions.
To top it all off, Trump again insisted the coronavirus will just go away, and actually said the public will develop a “herd mentality,” when he meant herd immunity. That not only hints at his contempt for voters; it also demonstrated — along with that health-care exchange — his lack of real answers to our most pressing challenges.
Yet, after all this, Trump’s pollster told Ingraham that Trump had “answered those questions,” while hailing him for demonstrating “empathy.” That was a reference to an exchange in which Trump showed the bare minimum of humanity toward a woman who’d lost her mother — before abruptly pivoting to blaming China!
But Ingraham appeared to understand how damaging this had been. Baffled, she likened the questioning to the work of the “Trump resistance,” and asked: “Why did the president decide to do this?”
Yes, why did Trump expose himself to difficult questions about his record from voters, anyway? Didn’t he know in advance how risky this could be?
Big holes in the protective shield
Remember, Trump himself believes he’s entitled to his very own 24/7 propaganda network that doesn’t commit such heresies. When Fox News lapses from its role in that regard, which it sometimes does, Trump rages at it as a form of profound betrayal.
Indeed, last year a Fox anchor felt compelled to respond to Trump’s fury over this by clarifying, “Mr. President, we don’t work for you,” while admitting that many Trump supporters had come to expect and demand that the network show absolute fealty to him.
In a way, the Tuesday night town hall really was an ambush. It was an ambush of facts and follow-up questions that blew more big holes in the protective shield his propagandists have tried to construct around a record of extraordinary failure.
If the "debates" are properly staged, and there's any kind of fact-checking or honest journalism going on, 45* will wilt like a slug on a hot driveway.
The town hall thing ABC held the other night didn't go too well, even though DumFux News tried mightily to prop it up and sell it to the rubes as something it totally wasn't.
President Trump deigned to take hard questions at a town hall on Tuesday night, and the verdict of his propagandists is in: Trump was treated with hideous unfairness even as he managed to convert the spectacle into a triumph through sheer force of his forthrightness and deep benevolence.
After Trump appeared at the ABC News forum, which featured Pennsylvania voters questioning Trump, Fox News’s Laura Ingraham pronounced the affair an “ambush” that could have been staged by the Democratic National Committee. The Fox chyron read:
"ABC SPRINGS AMBUSH ON PRES TRUMP AT TOWN HALL"
This response, and the town hall itself, capture a larger truth about the moment. When Trump is not permitted to freely dissemble with abandon or coddled by an interviewer who treats his magnificence as a foundational premise — as he so often is on Fox — he is actually very bad at answering difficult questions about his performance.
The notion that this spectacle constituted an “ambush” underscores the point: If this felt like a surprise attack, it’s only because direct and persistent questioning about his towering failures and broken promises really are politically damaging to him.
Follow-up questions are deadly
The questions from voters and moderator George Stephanopoulos were pointed, but they were largely premised on basic facts about Trump’s presidency. Over and over, Trump tried to lie away those facts, but (and this is the rare part) he was then pressed with follow-up questions based on more facts.
For instance, one woman asked Trump why he downplayed the coronavirus. When he repeated his frequent lie that he didn’t downplay it (he did, endlessly), she responded that he had admitted downplaying it himself, which he did in fact admit to Bob Woodward.
When Trump claimed our coronavirus mortality rate shows we have done “very well” compared to other countries, Stephanopoulous produced a chart debunking the claim, and pointed out that we have 4 percent of the world’s population and more than 20 percent of cases and deaths.
Trump spewed lots of other coronavirus nonsense, as Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler documents: He falsely claimed he’d inherited a ventilator shortage, absurdly blamed our high cases on testing (another area of national failure), and dramatically overstated the impact of his China travel restrictions (his weeks of dithering let the virus rampage here after that).
But some of the most damaging moments of all concerned health care.
After a woman with a preexisting condition pointedly asked Trump how he’d protect people like her, a remarkable exchange followed, in which Stephanopoulos pointed out that the Affordable Care Act contains extensive such protections, that Trump has repeatedly tried to repeal it, and that he supports a lawsuit that would wipe it out right now.
Trump kept saying over and over that he has his own secret health-care plan. But as Stephanopoulos noted, Trump has been promising a plan for a very long time, and it hasn’t materialized.
CNN Fact Check:
“I have it all ready, and it’s a much better plan,” Trump insisted, demonstrating a level of contempt for the intelligence of voters that countless of them will find insulting. But, notably, Trump was pushed to this point of self-incriminating absurdity by hard questions.
To top it all off, Trump again insisted the coronavirus will just go away, and actually said the public will develop a “herd mentality,” when he meant herd immunity. That not only hints at his contempt for voters; it also demonstrated — along with that health-care exchange — his lack of real answers to our most pressing challenges.
Yet, after all this, Trump’s pollster told Ingraham that Trump had “answered those questions,” while hailing him for demonstrating “empathy.” That was a reference to an exchange in which Trump showed the bare minimum of humanity toward a woman who’d lost her mother — before abruptly pivoting to blaming China!
But Ingraham appeared to understand how damaging this had been. Baffled, she likened the questioning to the work of the “Trump resistance,” and asked: “Why did the president decide to do this?”
Yes, why did Trump expose himself to difficult questions about his record from voters, anyway? Didn’t he know in advance how risky this could be?
Big holes in the protective shield
Remember, Trump himself believes he’s entitled to his very own 24/7 propaganda network that doesn’t commit such heresies. When Fox News lapses from its role in that regard, which it sometimes does, Trump rages at it as a form of profound betrayal.
Indeed, last year a Fox anchor felt compelled to respond to Trump’s fury over this by clarifying, “Mr. President, we don’t work for you,” while admitting that many Trump supporters had come to expect and demand that the network show absolute fealty to him.
In a way, the Tuesday night town hall really was an ambush. It was an ambush of facts and follow-up questions that blew more big holes in the protective shield his propagandists have tried to construct around a record of extraordinary failure.
Thursday, September 10, 2020
Today's Poodle
Maggie Haberman can be the poodle-iest of Press Poodles.
Today's "effort" wins her top honors.
Maggie Haberman, NYT:
Trump Admits Downplaying the Virus Knowing It Was ‘Deadly Stuff’
In taped interviews with the journalist Bob Woodward, the president said as early as February that the virus was more dangerous than the flu, even as he told the country otherwise
President Trump acknowledged to the journalist Bob Woodward that he knowingly played down the coronavirus earlier this year even though he was aware it was life-threatening and vastly more serious than the seasonal flu.
“This is deadly stuff,” Mr. Trump said on Feb. 7 in one of 18 interviews with Mr. Woodward for his coming book, “Rage.”
“You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed,” the president told Mr. Woodward in audio recordings made available on The Washington Post website. “And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus.”
But three days after those remarks, Mr. Trump told the Fox Business anchor Trish Regan: “We’re in very good shape. We have 11 cases. And most of them are getting better very rapidly. I think they will all be better.” A little less than two weeks later, he told reporters on the South Lawn that “we have it very much under control in this country.”
By Feb. 26, the president was publicly dismissing concerns about the lethality of the virus. “It’s a little like the regular flu that we have flu shots for,” he said at a White House news conference. “And we’ll essentially have a flu shot for this in a fairly quick manner.”
And by Feb. 28, at a rally in South Carolina, Mr. Trump denounced Democrats for their concerns about the virus as “their new hoax,” after the Russia investigation and his impeachment.
The audio recordings show that as Mr. Trump was absorbing in real time the information he was given by health and national security experts, he made a conscious choice not only to mislead the public but also to actively pressure governors to reopen states before his own government guidelines said they were ready.
By March, Mr. Trump was straightforward with Mr. Woodward about his tactics. “I wanted to always play it down,” the president said in an audio recording of an interview on March 19. “I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”
“This is deadly stuff,” the president repeated for emphasis.
Despite the president’s own words in the recordings, the White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, told reporters on Wednesday that Mr. Trump had never publicly played down the virus.
The Post and CNN were given advance copies of the book and published details on Wednesday. The New York Times obtained its own copy.
As part of the White House’s effort at damage control, Mr. Trump told reporters that his recorded remarks to Mr. Woodward were vastly different from what he was telling the public because he was worried about frightening people.
“We don’t want to instill panic,” the president said on Wednesday. “We don’t want to jump up and down and start shouting that we have a problem that is a tremendous problem” and “scare everybody.”
But his acknowledgment that he was fully aware by early February of the perils of the virus only intensified questions about why he was so slow to respond, and why he did not tell Americans the truth to better prepare them for the worst public health crisis in the United States in more than a century.
Mr. Woodward’s book also illustrated that as much as Mr. Trump tries to change the subject before the November election to law and order and a call for a crackdown on nationwide protests against police brutality, he is unable to escape scrutiny for his response to a virus that has killed nearly 190,000 people in the United States and upended the lives of millions more.
The president also told Mr. Woodward on March 19 of the virus: “Part of it is the mystery. Part it is the viciousness. You know when it attacks it attacks the lungs. And I don’t know — when people get hit, when they get hit, and now it’s turning out it’s not just old people, Bob.” He went on: “Just today and yesterday, some startling facts came out. It’s not just old, older. Young people too — plenty of young people.”
And yet in an interview broadcast by “Fox and Friends” on Aug. 5, Mr. Trump asserted: “If you look at children, children are almost, and I would say almost definitely, but almost immune from this disease. I don’t know how you feel about it, but they’ve got stronger immune systems than we do somehow for this.”
Two days later, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that “children are at risk for severe Covid-19.”
One question swirling in Washington on Wednesday was why Mr. Trump had given Mr. Woodward such extensive access. Mr. Woodward, a longtime editor and reporter at The Washington Post who with Carl Bernstein broke the Watergate scandal that led to the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon, has written books on most of Mr. Nixon’s successors, many of them critical. Karl Rove, President George W. Bush’s former top political adviser, noted on Fox News on Wednesday that nearly every president who has cooperated with Mr. Woodward regretted it.
Current White House officials said that Mr. Trump opened his door to Mr. Woodward in the hope that the eventual book would be positive. Mr. Trump did not speak to Mr. Woodward for his first book on the Trump presidency, “Fear,” and the president has maintained that it would have turned out better had he participated. Officials also said that Mr. Trump, who has great faith in his ability to sell people on his version of events, was eager to have Mr. Woodward’s seal on his time in office.
Although Mr. Trump and his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, spoke extensively to Mr. Woodward, White House officials were pointing fingers at one another on Wednesday about who was responsible for giving the journalist such access.
Speaking to reporters on Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Trump repeatedly bragged about his limited ban on travel into the United States from China at the end of January, and falsely claimed that almost everyone disagreed with him at the time. Mr. Woodward’s book documents that the majority of the president’s advisers urged him to go ahead with the ban during a meeting in the Oval Office before he ultimately did.
When pressed on why he did not do more in February and March, knowing what he knew, Mr. Trump maintained that he had not expected the virus to spread as far and as fast as it did.
“You didn’t really think it was going to be to the point that it was,” he said. “All of a sudden the world was infected. The entire world was infected. Everyone was scrambling around looking where to buy face masks and all of the other things.”
"You didn't really think it was going to be to the point that it was."
Today's "effort" wins her top honors.
Maggie Haberman, NYT:
In taped interviews with the journalist Bob Woodward, the president said as early as February that the virus was more dangerous than the flu, even as he told the country otherwise
President Trump acknowledged to the journalist Bob Woodward that he knowingly played down the coronavirus earlier this year even though he was aware it was life-threatening and vastly more serious than the seasonal flu.
“This is deadly stuff,” Mr. Trump said on Feb. 7 in one of 18 interviews with Mr. Woodward for his coming book, “Rage.”
“You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed,” the president told Mr. Woodward in audio recordings made available on The Washington Post website. “And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus.”
But three days after those remarks, Mr. Trump told the Fox Business anchor Trish Regan: “We’re in very good shape. We have 11 cases. And most of them are getting better very rapidly. I think they will all be better.” A little less than two weeks later, he told reporters on the South Lawn that “we have it very much under control in this country.”
By Feb. 26, the president was publicly dismissing concerns about the lethality of the virus. “It’s a little like the regular flu that we have flu shots for,” he said at a White House news conference. “And we’ll essentially have a flu shot for this in a fairly quick manner.”
And by Feb. 28, at a rally in South Carolina, Mr. Trump denounced Democrats for their concerns about the virus as “their new hoax,” after the Russia investigation and his impeachment.
The audio recordings show that as Mr. Trump was absorbing in real time the information he was given by health and national security experts, he made a conscious choice not only to mislead the public but also to actively pressure governors to reopen states before his own government guidelines said they were ready.
By March, Mr. Trump was straightforward with Mr. Woodward about his tactics. “I wanted to always play it down,” the president said in an audio recording of an interview on March 19. “I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”
“This is deadly stuff,” the president repeated for emphasis.
Despite the president’s own words in the recordings, the White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, told reporters on Wednesday that Mr. Trump had never publicly played down the virus.
The Post and CNN were given advance copies of the book and published details on Wednesday. The New York Times obtained its own copy.
As part of the White House’s effort at damage control, Mr. Trump told reporters that his recorded remarks to Mr. Woodward were vastly different from what he was telling the public because he was worried about frightening people.
“We don’t want to instill panic,” the president said on Wednesday. “We don’t want to jump up and down and start shouting that we have a problem that is a tremendous problem” and “scare everybody.”
But his acknowledgment that he was fully aware by early February of the perils of the virus only intensified questions about why he was so slow to respond, and why he did not tell Americans the truth to better prepare them for the worst public health crisis in the United States in more than a century.
Mr. Woodward’s book also illustrated that as much as Mr. Trump tries to change the subject before the November election to law and order and a call for a crackdown on nationwide protests against police brutality, he is unable to escape scrutiny for his response to a virus that has killed nearly 190,000 people in the United States and upended the lives of millions more.
The president also told Mr. Woodward on March 19 of the virus: “Part of it is the mystery. Part it is the viciousness. You know when it attacks it attacks the lungs. And I don’t know — when people get hit, when they get hit, and now it’s turning out it’s not just old people, Bob.” He went on: “Just today and yesterday, some startling facts came out. It’s not just old, older. Young people too — plenty of young people.”
And yet in an interview broadcast by “Fox and Friends” on Aug. 5, Mr. Trump asserted: “If you look at children, children are almost, and I would say almost definitely, but almost immune from this disease. I don’t know how you feel about it, but they’ve got stronger immune systems than we do somehow for this.”
Two days later, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that “children are at risk for severe Covid-19.”
One question swirling in Washington on Wednesday was why Mr. Trump had given Mr. Woodward such extensive access. Mr. Woodward, a longtime editor and reporter at The Washington Post who with Carl Bernstein broke the Watergate scandal that led to the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon, has written books on most of Mr. Nixon’s successors, many of them critical. Karl Rove, President George W. Bush’s former top political adviser, noted on Fox News on Wednesday that nearly every president who has cooperated with Mr. Woodward regretted it.
Current White House officials said that Mr. Trump opened his door to Mr. Woodward in the hope that the eventual book would be positive. Mr. Trump did not speak to Mr. Woodward for his first book on the Trump presidency, “Fear,” and the president has maintained that it would have turned out better had he participated. Officials also said that Mr. Trump, who has great faith in his ability to sell people on his version of events, was eager to have Mr. Woodward’s seal on his time in office.
Although Mr. Trump and his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, spoke extensively to Mr. Woodward, White House officials were pointing fingers at one another on Wednesday about who was responsible for giving the journalist such access.
Speaking to reporters on Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Trump repeatedly bragged about his limited ban on travel into the United States from China at the end of January, and falsely claimed that almost everyone disagreed with him at the time. Mr. Woodward’s book documents that the majority of the president’s advisers urged him to go ahead with the ban during a meeting in the Oval Office before he ultimately did.
When pressed on why he did not do more in February and March, knowing what he knew, Mr. Trump maintained that he had not expected the virus to spread as far and as fast as it did.
“You didn’t really think it was going to be to the point that it was,” he said. “All of a sudden the world was infected. The entire world was infected. Everyone was scrambling around looking where to buy face masks and all of the other things.”
"You didn't really think it was going to be to the point that it was."
45* had already established that he knew it was bad, and that his people had told him it was going to get worse - in a hurry - cuz that's kinda what happens with a pandemic.
You can't know something, and not know it at the same time.
On Capitol Hill, several Republicans defended the president.
“I don’t think he needs to go on TV and scream that we’re all going to die,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and an ally of the president who White House aides said encouraged the president to participate in the book. “But his actions of shutting the economy down were the right actions. I think the tone during that time sort of spoke for itself. People knew it was serious.”
Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, said he had not seen the book and directed questions to the White House.
Democrats were quick to slam Mr. Trump for his comments. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, said that the book offered “damning proof that Donald Trump lied and people died.”
On Capitol Hill, several Republicans defended the president.
“I don’t think he needs to go on TV and scream that we’re all going to die,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and an ally of the president who White House aides said encouraged the president to participate in the book. “But his actions of shutting the economy down were the right actions. I think the tone during that time sort of spoke for itself. People knew it was serious.”
Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, said he had not seen the book and directed questions to the White House.
Democrats were quick to slam Mr. Trump for his comments. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, said that the book offered “damning proof that Donald Trump lied and people died.”
Let's review:
- Lindsey Graham is not "several Republicans"
- 45* didn't downplay or mislead or falsely claim - he lied outright
- The word "lie" is never used except under cover of a quote from Chuck Schumer
- 45* wasn't "slow to respond" - he fucking failed
Monday, September 07, 2020
45* In A Nutshell
WaPo:
As Donald Trump laid the groundwork in 1999 to run for president as the Reform Party candidate, he made a little-remembered attack on the person he saw as a rival in a possible general election campaign: Republican John McCain.
Many considered McCain a war hero for surviving five years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, and a television interviewer asked why Trump felt he was more qualified to be commander in chief.
“Does being captured make you a hero? I don’t know. I’m not sure,” Trump said in the CBS interview.
A few years earlier, Trump had bragged on a morning radio show about avoiding the Vietnam draft, remarking that one of the show’s hosts who had gotten out of service by declaring he had a bad knee had done a “good job.”
Long before Trump’s views of the military would emerge as a flash point in his 2020 reelection campaign — before he would shock the political world with the more widely seen 2015 attack on McCain, in which he said the senator was “not a war hero” and declared, “I like people who weren’t captured” — Trump had a long track record of incendiary and disparaging remarks about veterans and military service.
Many of his remarks are memorialized in television interviews and the tapes of radio conversations with shock jocks, dating to his years as a private citizen and businessman.
Trump, who avoided military service by citing a bone spur in his foot, has disparaged veterans who were wounded or captured or went missing in action and even compared his fear of sexually transmitted diseases to the experience of a soldier, saying in 1993, “if you’re young, and in this era, and if you have any guilt about not having gone to Vietnam, we have our own Vietnam. It’s called the dating game.”
It is a history filled with contradictions, of a man who denigrates his handpicked generals while saying no one supports the military more than he does, and of a commander in chief who questions the bravery of some soldiers even as he reversed disciplinary action against a Navy SEAL over the objections of Pentagon officials. He was raised in a family that criticized the value of military service, according to niece Mary L. Trump, but nonetheless he was sent to a military academy for most of his teenage years.
And there it is. Again. This time in the context of serving your country in ways that don't just put medals on your chest or money in your pocket.
He hates the military - partly (imo) because people in uniform are in fact better people than he'll ever be - he knows that, and his self-loathing makes him think he has to shit on them to bring them down so he can feel better about himself, but at the same time, he uses it all as part of his gaslighting bullshit. He can never let anything stand as any kind of benchmark for fear of having to live up to something that makes it uncomfortable for him as he rationalizes his way thru his miserable little existence.
The man has no honor.
And now, Trump and his aides are fiercely denying a report in the Atlantic in which the president is quoted denigrating U.S. soldiers, including calling those killed in combat “losers.”
And now, Trump and his aides are fiercely denying a report in the Atlantic in which the president is quoted denigrating U.S. soldiers, including calling those killed in combat “losers.”
I think there's an element of transaction in practically everything we do. We get something in return for everything. But for normal people, what we get in return for a lot of things we do is an internal gratification - a reward that has no corporeal manifestation. We feel it inside.
The short circuit for guys like Trump occurs because they have no soul. They can't imagine why you'd do something that can't be accounted for on a standard 12-column ledger sheet.
Unfortunately, there's too much of that been going around for a good 40 years or so. It's like we've given in to the temptation to model our civilization on the storyline of Kelly's Heroes.
So there's nothing that says you can't go for the gold - all god's children gotta get paid for what they do or they gotta find something else to do.
But that can't be what the whole thing is always (and only) about. We're supposed to be the thinking animal. If we allow our existence to be nothing more than a zero sum game, then we've squandered the advantage that evolution has given us over millions of years, and we're right back where we started.
Thursday, September 03, 2020
There's No Bottom
...to the emptiness of a man who has no soul and no honor.
The Atlantic (pay wall):
When President Donald Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018, he blamed rain for the last-minute decision, saying that “the helicopter couldn’t fly” and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Neither claim was true.
Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day. In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.
Belleau Wood is a consequential battle in American history, and the ground on which it was fought is venerated by the Marine Corps. America and its allies stopped the German advance toward Paris there in the spring of 1918. But Trump, on that same trip, asked aides, “Who were the good guys in this war?” He also said that he didn’t understand why the United States would intervene on the side of the Allies.
Trump’s understanding of concepts such as patriotism, service, and sacrifice have interested me since he expressed contempt for the war record of the late Senator John McCain, who spent more than five years as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese. “He’s not a war hero,” Trump said in 2015 while running for the Republican nomination for president. “I like people who weren’t captured.”
The Atlantic (pay wall):
When President Donald Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018, he blamed rain for the last-minute decision, saying that “the helicopter couldn’t fly” and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Neither claim was true.
Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day. In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.
Belleau Wood is a consequential battle in American history, and the ground on which it was fought is venerated by the Marine Corps. America and its allies stopped the German advance toward Paris there in the spring of 1918. But Trump, on that same trip, asked aides, “Who were the good guys in this war?” He also said that he didn’t understand why the United States would intervene on the side of the Allies.
Trump’s understanding of concepts such as patriotism, service, and sacrifice have interested me since he expressed contempt for the war record of the late Senator John McCain, who spent more than five years as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese. “He’s not a war hero,” Trump said in 2015 while running for the Republican nomination for president. “I like people who weren’t captured.”
There's more, but I can't take it any further than right here. It's making me sick.
Wednesday, September 02, 2020
Overheard
Lots of buzz on the intertoobz lately about "mini strokes".
I thought maybe Stormy Daniels was back again, talking about her escapades with the Prez.
I thought maybe Stormy Daniels was back again, talking about her escapades with the Prez.
Monday, August 24, 2020
High Stakes
In a country where they have elections, and a trilateral government, it seems odd that one guy could hold power for more than 20 years.
Appeasement. Remember that term.
Vlad Putin is a bad guy.
Saturday, August 22, 2020
Tuesday, August 18, 2020
Thought
The number of Republicans who have turned against Trump shows us how bad he is.
The number of Republicans who haven't turned against Trump shows us how bad they are.
The number of Republicans who haven't turned against Trump shows us how bad they are.
Thursday, August 06, 2020
Today's Tweet
The Lincoln Project via Jonathan Pie
I have no idea who made this (aside from the fact they’re a fucking genius), but it makes me think we should almost be thanking Trump for the wealth of comedy material he’s inadvertently gifted us these past three and a half years.pic.twitter.com/QHhDhJUukV— Jonathan Pie (@JonathanPieNews) August 5, 2020
Tuesday, August 04, 2020
Our Criminal POTUS
We've had "empty vessel" presidents. Grant, Taft, Harding - and others, whose administrations were corrupt as fuck but for whatever reason, we just didn't find out about it.
A New York City prosecutor fighting to get President Donald Trump’s tax returns told a judge Monday he was justified in demanding them because of public reports of “extensive and protracted criminal conduct at the Trump Organization.”
Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance, Jr. is seeking eight years of the Republican president’s personal and corporate tax records, but has disclosed little about what prompted him to request the records, other than part of the investigation related to payoffs to two women to keep them quiet about alleged affairs with Trump.
In a court filing Monday, attorneys for Vance, a Democrat, said the president wasn’t entitled to know the exact nature of the grand jury probe, which they called a “complex financial investigation.”
They noted, though, that at the time the subpoena for the tax filings was issued to Trump’s accountants, “there were public allegations of possible criminal activity” at the president’s company “dating back over a decade.”
They cited several newspaper articles, including one in which the Washington Post examined allegations that Trump had a practice of sending financial statements to potential business partners and banks that inflated the worth of his projects by claiming they were bigger or more potentially lucrative than they actually were.
Another article described congressional testimony by Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, who said the president would overstate the value of his business interests to impress people or lenders, but then deflate the value of assets when trying to reduce his taxes.
The attorneys also cited reports of past non-criminal investigations by New York regulators into whether the conduct described by Cohen amounted to bank or insurance fraud.
“These reports describe transactions involving individual and corporate actors based in New York County, but whose conduct at times extended beyond New York’s borders. This possible criminal activity occurred within the applicable statutes of limitations, particularly if the transactions involved a continuing pattern of conduct,” the lawyers said.
Trump’s legal team has argued that the subpoena for his tax filings was issued in bad faith and amounted to harassment of the president.
Speaking to reporters later Monday, Trump called the district attorney’s investigation another attempt by Democrats to damage him.
“This is just a continuation of the witch hunt. It’s Democrat stuff. They failed with Mueller. They failed with everything. They failed with Congress. They failed at every stage of the game. This has been going on for three and a half, four years,” Trump said, referring to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The Supreme Court last month rejected claims by Trump’s lawyers that the president could not be criminally investigated while he was in office.
Vance’s lawyers urged U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero to swiftly reject Trump’s further arguments that the subpoenas were improper, saying the baseless claims were threatening the investigation.
“Every day that goes by is another day Plaintiff effectively achieves the ‘temporary absolute immunity’ that was rejected by this Court, the Court of Appeals, and the Supreme Court,” Vance’s lawyers said.
Marrero has scheduled arguments to be fully submitted by mid-August.
Vance sought the tax records in part for a probe of how Cohen arranged during the 2016 presidential race to keep the porn actress Stormy Daniels and model Karen McDougal from airing claims of extramarital affairs with Trump. Trump has denied the affairs.
Cohen is serving the last two years of a three-year prison sentence in home confinement after pleading guilty to campaign finance violations, lying to Congress and tax crimes. He said he plans to publish a book critical of the president before the November election.
If the court orders Trump’s accounting firm to give his tax returns to the grand jury, they could be used in any criminal inquiry, but would not be released publicly. Grand jury documents are secret in New York.
And I use "empty vessel" in a very widely generic way. Mostly, in this case, it just means those guys were decent fellows who didn't know all that much, thought they might do something good for the country, and ended up with people in positions of power who were either quite a bit less than honorable or outright crooks.
In 45*, we've got a guy who's crooked like a mountain road.
A New York City prosecutor fighting to get President Donald Trump’s tax returns told a judge Monday he was justified in demanding them because of public reports of “extensive and protracted criminal conduct at the Trump Organization.”
Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance, Jr. is seeking eight years of the Republican president’s personal and corporate tax records, but has disclosed little about what prompted him to request the records, other than part of the investigation related to payoffs to two women to keep them quiet about alleged affairs with Trump.
In a court filing Monday, attorneys for Vance, a Democrat, said the president wasn’t entitled to know the exact nature of the grand jury probe, which they called a “complex financial investigation.”
They noted, though, that at the time the subpoena for the tax filings was issued to Trump’s accountants, “there were public allegations of possible criminal activity” at the president’s company “dating back over a decade.”
They cited several newspaper articles, including one in which the Washington Post examined allegations that Trump had a practice of sending financial statements to potential business partners and banks that inflated the worth of his projects by claiming they were bigger or more potentially lucrative than they actually were.
Another article described congressional testimony by Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, who said the president would overstate the value of his business interests to impress people or lenders, but then deflate the value of assets when trying to reduce his taxes.
The attorneys also cited reports of past non-criminal investigations by New York regulators into whether the conduct described by Cohen amounted to bank or insurance fraud.
“These reports describe transactions involving individual and corporate actors based in New York County, but whose conduct at times extended beyond New York’s borders. This possible criminal activity occurred within the applicable statutes of limitations, particularly if the transactions involved a continuing pattern of conduct,” the lawyers said.
Trump’s legal team has argued that the subpoena for his tax filings was issued in bad faith and amounted to harassment of the president.
Speaking to reporters later Monday, Trump called the district attorney’s investigation another attempt by Democrats to damage him.
“This is just a continuation of the witch hunt. It’s Democrat stuff. They failed with Mueller. They failed with everything. They failed with Congress. They failed at every stage of the game. This has been going on for three and a half, four years,” Trump said, referring to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The Supreme Court last month rejected claims by Trump’s lawyers that the president could not be criminally investigated while he was in office.
Vance’s lawyers urged U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero to swiftly reject Trump’s further arguments that the subpoenas were improper, saying the baseless claims were threatening the investigation.
“Every day that goes by is another day Plaintiff effectively achieves the ‘temporary absolute immunity’ that was rejected by this Court, the Court of Appeals, and the Supreme Court,” Vance’s lawyers said.
Marrero has scheduled arguments to be fully submitted by mid-August.
Vance sought the tax records in part for a probe of how Cohen arranged during the 2016 presidential race to keep the porn actress Stormy Daniels and model Karen McDougal from airing claims of extramarital affairs with Trump. Trump has denied the affairs.
Cohen is serving the last two years of a three-year prison sentence in home confinement after pleading guilty to campaign finance violations, lying to Congress and tax crimes. He said he plans to publish a book critical of the president before the November election.
If the court orders Trump’s accounting firm to give his tax returns to the grand jury, they could be used in any criminal inquiry, but would not be released publicly. Grand jury documents are secret in New York.
The President of The United States of America is under criminal investigation for bank fraud.
Let that percolate for a minute.
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