Today's Beau

Justin King - Beau Of The Fifth Column

And Cult45 is fund raising on the fear (because of course they are - it's what they do). 

They're pimping the AntiFa angle again.

They Weren't Listening

Oct, 2016 ... they're not listening still.

US Exports

(thanks, Allan)

We don't make much anymore here in USAmerica, Inc.

We make noise. We make asses of ourselves all over the world. But we don't make a whole lot of stuff, so we don't export too much.

'Cept now, we can proudly crow about being a leading exporter of COVID-19 infection.

LA Times:

The Trump administration has deployed a team from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to Guatemala to “review and validate” the country’s coronavirus testing after officials there reported more than 70 deportees on two recent flights from the United States were infected, according to authorities in both countries.

At the same time, Guatemalan officials said Thursday they have indefinitely suspended deportations from the U.S.

About 30 deportees on a March 26 flight from Arizona and 44 more on a flight Monday from Texas tested positive soon after arriving in the Central American country, Guatemalan officials said.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement subjects deportees to a health screening before boarding but does not test them for the coronavirus. Guatemalan officials have been testing them after arrival.

Oops. I'm thinking Stephen Miller is one bummed-out Nazi vampire today.

Losing

The Guardian:

Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, which he once dismissed as a hoax, has been fiercely criticised at home as woefully inadequate to the point of irresponsibility.

Yet also thanks largely to Trump, a parallel disaster is unfolding across the world: the ruination of America’s reputation as a safe, trustworthy, competent international leader and partner.

Call it the Trump double-whammy. Diplomatically speaking, the US is on life support.

“The Trump administration’s self-centred, haphazard, and tone-deaf response [to Covid-19] will end up costing Americans trillions of dollars and thousands of otherwise preventable deaths,” wrote Stephen Walt, professor of international relations at Harvard.

“But that’s not the only damage the United States will suffer. Far from ‘making America great again’, this epic policy failure will further tarnish [its] reputation as a country that knows how to do things effectively.”

This adverse shift could be permanent, Walt warned. Since taking office in 2017, Trump has insulted America’s friends, undermined multilateral alliances and chosen confrontation over cooperation. Sanctions, embargoes and boycotts aimed at China, Iran and Europe have been globally divisive.

For the most part, oft-maligned foreign leaders such as Germany’s Angela Merkel have listened politely, turning the other cheek in the interests of preserving the broader relationship.

But Trump’s ineptitude and dishonesty in handling the pandemic, which has left foreign observers as well as Americans gasping in disbelief, is proving a bridge too far.

Erratic behaviour, tolerated in the past, is now seen as downright dangerous. It’s long been plain, at least to many in Europe, that Trump could not be trusted. Now he is seen as a threat. It is not just about failed leadership. It’s about openly hostile, reckless actions.
- and -

Heiko Maas, Germany’s foreign minister, said he hoped the crisis would force a fundamental US rethink about “whether the ‘America first’ model really works”. The Trump administration’s response had been too slow, he said. “Hollowing out international connections comes at a high price,” Maas warned.

Lasting resentment over how the US went missing in action in the coronavirus wars of 2020 may change the way the world works.

About Those Numbers

I've said before that it seems Cult45 is kinda softening us up to believe the numbers of dead Americans due to COVID-19 are coming down &/or "aren't really as high as the Fake News wants you to believe".

Golly gee - guess what.

WaPo

The fast-spreading novel coronavirus is almost certainly killing Americans who are not included in the nation’s growing death toll, according to public health experts and government officials involved in the tally.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention counts only deaths in which the presence of the coronavirus is confirmed in a laboratory test. “We know that it is an underestimation,” agency spokeswoman Kristen Nordlund said.

A widespread lack of access to testing in the early weeks of the U.S. outbreak means people with respiratory illnesses died without being counted, epidemiologists say. Even now, some people who die at home or in overburdened nursing homes are not being tested, according to funeral directors, medical examiners and nursing home representatives.

Postmortem testing by medical examiners varies widely across the country, and some officials say testing the dead is a misuse of scarce resources that could be used on the living. In addition, some people who have the virus test negative, experts say.

Some points:

1. We're not testing enough
2. 45* needs us not to know we're not testing enough
3. Because 45* needs us to believe it's all good, and it's all good because he's doing such a great job

To be clear, this cause-of-death discrepancy happens. A lot.

Death certificates for cancer patients almost never make it obvious that they died of cancer. There's always something like "organ failure due to sepsis", and even though there's also generally something along the lines of "...complications due to a diagnosis of hepatic cancer" or whatever, you have to look past the "actual cause of death" for the underlying condition.

So if you haven't diagnosed COVID-19 in that patient, because you haven't tested that patient for COVID-19 - before or after they died - then you get some statistical results that are less than fully credible.

And again - we don't know where the fuck we're going because we don't now where the fuck we are.

Today's Brian

When 45* blusters about how great all the COVID-19 testing is going, there's an element of truth to it - surprise!

But, as usual, the element of truth is at the surface, and you don't even have to drill down to get to a look at just how FUBAR this "response" is right now.

I'm sure they told President Stoopid that ya gotta get the testing in place so we can see where we are, and to map out how to get where we need to go.

And we've done well in ramping up the number of tests conducted. But there are glitches - because this is Cult45 and there are always fucking glitches.

First, get thru Brian's thing.

Brian Tyler Cohen

Now then, focusing in on the continuing testing fuckup:

1. We weren't adequately supplied with testing kits. And this is NOT an Obama problem. Obama knew there were problems, and he talked about it, and he asked Republicans every year for more money for CDC and FEMA and DOD so they could get us ready for this kind of threat, but somehow, Congress just couldn't see their way clear to ease up on any of the stoopid "sequestration" constraints.
2. WHO offered us kits and we turned 'em down. I think that's because somebody closely connected to this White House felt they deserved to get a paycheck out of it.
3. Testing finally starts to get ramped up, but this fuckin' moron 45* thinks that sticking a swab up somebody's nose is all there is to it. The reason he can brag about how great the testing is going while we still don't know what the fuck is going on, is that we have a shitload of tests sitting in boxes waiting to be processed.

So yes, we're #1 in test volume,

 ...but like I said, that's the number of tests performed - the number of samples collected - but we have yet to figure out how to boost the processing throughput so those tests can actually tell us something useful.

And, BTW, one of the numbers that really matters is the Tests/Million Population, and we're #44 on that list.

For The Record

I can't count the times I've done battle with some dipwad "conservative" who insists on shoving everything down the memory hole when it suits their need - which is pretty much all the fucking time.

So, for safekeeping here's a recap of 45*'s attempts to pretend COVID-19 was no biggie, from NYT, David Leonhardt:

President Trump made his first public comments about the coronavirus on Jan. 22, in a television interview from Davos with CNBC’s Joe Kernen. The first American case had been announced the day before, and Kernen asked Trump, “Are there worries about a pandemic at this point?”

The president responded: “No. Not at all. And we have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”

By this point, the seriousness of the virus was becoming clearer. It had spread from China to four other countries. China was starting to take drastic measures and was on the verge of closing off the city of Wuhan.

In the weeks that followed, Trump faced a series of choices. He could have taken aggressive measures to slow the spread of the virus. He could have insisted that the United States ramp up efforts to produce test kits. He could have emphasized the risks that the virus presented and urged Americans to take precautions if they had reason to believe they were sick. He could have used the powers of the presidency to reduce the number of people who would ultimately get sick.

He did none of those things.

I’ve reviewed all of his public statements and actions on coronavirus over the last two months, and they show a president who put almost no priority on public health. Trump’s priorities were different: Making the virus sound like a minor nuisance. Exaggerating his administration’s response. Blaming foreigners and, anachronistically, the Obama administration. Claiming incorrectly that the situation was improving. Trying to cheer up stock market investors. (It was fitting that his first public comments were from Davos and on CNBC.)

Now that the severity of the virus is undeniable, Trump is already trying to present an alternate history of the last two months. Below are the facts — a timeline of what the president was saying, alongside statements from public-health experts as well as data on the virus.

Late January

On the same day that Trump was dismissing the risks on CNBC, Tom Frieden, who ran the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for eight years, wrote an op-ed for the health care publication Stat. In it, Frieden warned that the virus would continue spreading. “We need to learn — and fast — about how it spreads,” he wrote.

It was one of many such warnings from prominent experts in late January. Many focused on the need to expand the capacity to test for the virus. In a Wall Street Journal article titled, “Act Now to Prevent an American Epidemic,” Luciana Borio and Scott Gottlieb — both former Trump administration officials — wrote:

If public-health authorities don’t interrupt the spread soon, the virus could infect many thousands more around the globe, disrupt air travel, overwhelm health care systems, and, worst of all, claim more lives. The good news: There’s still an opening to prevent a grim outcome. … But authorities can’t act quickly without a test that can diagnose the condition rapidly.

Trump, however, repeatedly told Americans that there was no reason to worry. On Jan. 24, he tweeted, “It will all work out well.” On Jan. 28, he retweeted a headline from One America News, an outlet with a history of spreading false conspiracy theories: “Johnson & Johnson to create coronavirus vaccine.” On Jan. 30, during a speech in Michigan, he said: “We have it very well under control. We have very little problem in this country at this moment — five. And those people are all recuperating successfully.”

That same day, the World Health Organization declared coronavirus to be a “public-health emergency of international concern.” It announced 7,818 confirmed cases around the world.

Jan. 31

Trump took his only early, aggressive action against the virus on Jan. 31: He barred most foreigners who had recently visited China from entering the United States. It was a good move.

But it was only one modest move, not the sweeping solution that Trump portrayed it to be. It didn’t apply to Americans who had been traveling in China, for example. And while it generated some criticism from Democrats, it wasn’t nearly as unpopular as Trump has since suggested. Two days after announcing the policy, Trump went on Fox News and exaggerated the impact in an interview with Sean Hannity.

“Coronavirus,” Hannity said. “How concerned are you?”

Trump replied: “Well, we pretty much shut it down coming in from China. We have a tremendous relationship with China, which is a very positive thing. Getting along with China, getting along with Russia, getting along with these countries.”

By the time of that interview, the number of confirmed coronavirus cases around the world had surged to 14,557, a near doubling over the previous three days.

Early February

On Feb. 5, the C.D.C. began shipping coronavirus test kits to laboratories around the country. But the tests suffered from a technical flaw and didn’t produce reliable results, labs discovered.

The technical problems were understandable: Creating a new virus test is not easy. What’s less understandable, experts say, is why the Trump administration officials were so lax about finding a work-around, even as other countries were creating reliable tests.

The Trump administration could have begun to use a functioning test from the World Health Organization, but didn’t. It could have removed regulations that prevented private hospitals and labs from quickly developing their own tests, but didn’t. The inaction meant that the United States fell behind South Korea, Singapore and China in fighting the virus. “We just twiddled our thumbs as the coronavirus waltzed in,” William Hanage, a Harvard epidemiologist, wrote.

Trump, for his part, spent these first weeks of February telling Americans that the problem was going away. On Feb. 10, he repeatedly said — in a speech to governors, at a campaign rally and in an interview with Trish Regan of Fox Business — that warm spring weather could kill the virus. “Looks like by April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away,” he told the rally.

On Feb. 19, he told a Phoenix television station, “I think the numbers are going to get progressively better as we go along.” Four days later, he pronounced the situation “very much under control,” and added: “We had 12, at one point. And now they’ve gotten very much better. Many of them are fully recovered.”

His message was clear: Coronavirus is a small problem, and it is getting smaller. In truth, the shortage of testing meant that the country didn’t know how bad the problem was. All of the available indicators suggested it was getting worse, rapidly.

On Feb. 23, the World Health Organization announced that the virus was in 30 countries, with 78,811 confirmed cases, a more than fivefold increase over the previous three weeks.

Late February

Trump seemed largely uninterested in the global virus statistics during this period, but there were other indicators — stock-market indexes — that mattered a lot to him. And by the last week of February, those market indexes were falling.

The president reacted by adding a new element to his public remarks. He began blaming others.

He criticized CNN and MSNBC for “panicking markets.” He said at a South Carolina rally — falsely — that “the Democrat policy of open borders” had brought the virus into the country. He lashed out at “Do Nothing Democrat comrades.” He tweeted about “Cryin’ Chuck Schumer,” mocking Schumer for arguing that Trump should be more aggressive in fighting the virus. The next week, Trump would blame an Obama administration regulation for slowing the production of test kits. There was no truth to the charge.

Throughout late February, Trump also continued to claim the situation was improving. On Feb. 26, he said: “We’re going down, not up. We’re going very substantially down, not up.” On Feb. 27, he predicted: “It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.” On Feb. 29, he said a vaccine would be available “very quickly” and “very rapidly” and praised his administration’s actions as “the most aggressive taken by any country.” None of these claims were true.

By the end of February, there were 85,403 confirmed cases, in 55 countries around the world.

Early March

Almost two decades ago, during George W. Bush’s presidency, the federal government developed guidelines for communicating during a public-health crisis. Among the core principles are “be first,” “be right,” “be credible,” “show respect” and “promote action.”

But the Trump administration’s response to coronavirus, as a Washington Post news story put it, is “breaking almost every rule in the book.”

The inconsistent and sometimes outright incorrect information coming from the White House has left Americans unsure of what, if anything, to do. By early March, experts already were arguing for aggressive measures to slow the virus’s spread and avoid overwhelming the medical system. The presidential bully pulpit could have focused people on the need to change their behavior in a way that no private citizen could have. Trump could have specifically encouraged older people — at most risk from the virus — to be careful. Once again, he chose not to take action.

Instead, he suggested on multiple occasions that the virus was less serious than the flu. “We’re talking about a much smaller range” of deaths than from the flu, he said on March 2. “It’s very mild,” he told Hannity on March 4. On March 7, he said, “I’m not concerned at all.” On March 10, he promised: “It will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.”

The first part of March was also when more people began to understand that the United States had fallen behind on testing, and Trump administration officials responded with untruths.

Alex Azar, the secretary of health and human services, told ABC, “There is no testing kit shortage, nor has there ever been.” Trump, while touring the C.D.C. on March 6, said, “Anybody that wants a test can get a test.”

That C.D.C. tour was a microcosm of Trump’s entire approach to the crisis. While speaking on camera, he made statements that were outright wrong, like the testing claim. He brought up issues that had nothing to do with the virus, like his impeachment. He made clear that he cared more about his image than about people’s well-being, by explaining that he favored leaving infected passengers on a cruise ship so they wouldn’t increase the official number of American cases. He also suggested that he knew as much as any scientist:

I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.

On March 10, the World Health Organization reported 113,702 cases of the virus in more than 100 countries.

Mid-March and beyond

On the night of March 11, Trump gave an Oval Office address meant to convey seriousness. It included some valuable advice, like the importance of hand-washing. But it also continued many of the old patterns of self-congratulation, blame-shifting and misinformation. Afterward, Trump aides corrected three different misstatements.

This pattern has continued in the days since the Oval Office address. Trump now seems to understand that coronavirus isn’t going away anytime soon. But he also seems to view it mostly as a public-relations emergency for himself rather than a public-health emergency for the country. On Sunday, he used his Twitter feed to lash out at Schumer and Joe Biden and to praise Michael Flynn, the former Trump aide who pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I.

Around the world, the official virus count has climbed above 142,000. In the United States, scientists expect that between tens of millions and 215 million Americans will ultimately be infected, and the death toll could range from the tens of thousands to 1.7 million.

At every point, experts have emphasized that the country could reduce those terrible numbers by taking action. And at almost every point, the president has ignored their advice and insisted, “It’s going to be just fine.”

Susan Beachy and Ian Prasad Philbrick contributed research.

A Shift

Not everybody who was on the Trump band wagon is still four-square behind him.

It's a little weird to think Spring-like thoughts of green shoots and little rays of hope as we descend into the depths of a COVID-19 Winter.

COVID-19 Update

So President Stoopid finally gets up there at the press briefing and admits he's had his head up his ass for 3 months, and that, golly gee willikers it looks like maybe 100,000 of us may die because of it.

And that's after Deb Birx and Tony Fauci told us the death toll could be as low as 100,000 if we do everything perfectly for the next month or so, but don't be too surprised if it pops up over 2 or 3 hundred thousand.

Cuz guess what - Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and Greg Abbott (R-TX) still won't issue orders to tell people they need to do what President Stoopid's Task Force is telling us we have to do perfectly if we're going to have a chance to salvage something decent from this fucked up mess.

Growth Factors

Cases:
1.09 - World
1.15 - USA

Deaths:
1.11 - World
1.29 - USA

Case Fatality Rate (CFR) for The US right now is at 2.2%, which is lagging behind a World CFR of close to 5%. Which is another one of those things that seems weird because either they just don't know enough yet, or Cult45 is still trying to keep a lid on the bad news.

Or maybe that lag is why the briefing yesterday was so dark and ominous. When we look at the USA numbers on this thing, it doesn't seem all that bad, but there's a definite "We ain't seen nuthin' yet" vibe to it that's pretty fucking scary, so maybe they're just owning up to it now.

Wouldn't it be nice if 45* hadn't spent this whole time lying to us about everything.

Check The Timelines

I think we need to see the COVID-19 timeline compared with the impeachment timeline.

Here are a few highlights, as I've been able to piece some of this shit together:

The first case of what would become known as COVID-19 was recorded in November 2019.

In the December-January timeframe, American intelligence agencies (and other entities, in this and other countries) reported to federal officials about the concerns coming from the pros at CDC and WHO.

Articles of impeachment were presented in the Senate mid-January, and the votes to acquit were take on February 5.

They knew.

• At the very least, there were loud and urgent warnings of what was coming
• After 3 years, they knew damned well that 45* was poorly equipped to handle much of anything beyond an ad lib photo op

They knew what was coming and they left that orange blob in place.

A wiser man than I admonishes us never to assume nefarious intent when looking at even the most glaring instances of ineptitude.

But how do I adhere to that when it seems like it just gets more obvious that something's up?

We Are Not So Smart

President Stoopid says it, and some dumbass takes it as gospel, and just has to give it a try.

Phoenix New Times

An Arizona man died after he and his wife ingested a chemical in an attempt to prevent a coronavirus infection, Banner Health said in a press release. His wife is in critical care. Both are in their 60s.

The chemical — chloroquine phosphate — is commonly used to clean fish tanks.

During a press conference on Thursday, President Donald Trump touted chloroquine as showing "very, very encouraging early results" in treating COVID-19 and falsely stated that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was working "to be able to make that drug available almost immediately." The drug has been used to treat malaria.

Minutes after Trump made the false claim, FDA Commissioner Steven Hahn said a "clinical trial, a large, pragmatic clinical trial" would be required before making any determination on the use of chloroquine to treat the coronavirus.

In its press release, Banner Health advised against "the use of inappropriate medications and household products to prevent or treat COVID-19."

“Given the uncertainty around COVID-19, we understand that people are trying to find new ways to prevent or treat this virus, but self-medicating is not the way to do so,” said Dr. Daniel Brooks, Banner Poison and Drug Information Center medical director. “The last thing that we want right now is to inundate our emergency departments with patients who believe they found a vague and risky solution that could potentially jeopardize their health.”
I got into a little Twitter Spat yesterday with a guy trying to make the point that "the red tape is keeping us from finding new ways to beat this thing..." and (of course) "the government just needs to get out of the way".

I don't know what it'll take to break this logjam of deliberate wishful foolishness. Even when it's been made clear that the guy in charge is a complete fuckin' idiot, people are storming around in response to every little piece of shit that falls out of his mouth and floats by them on the internet.

What the fuck is wrong with us?

Some COVID-19 Fallout

Bryan Tyler Cohen

They're really scared. It's always interesting to see this technique though. 

Acknowledge the anger, but redirect it. Tell us we're not mad at what we're mad at.

"You're mad? Well, so am I. I'm really mad - and here's what we're mad at..."

We need a target for that anger, so the new script is, "Yes, this pandemic thing is pretty awful, and you have good reason to be really mad - so what we're gonna do is rebrand the thing in an attempt to deflect your anger away from us and our completely fucked up response, and onto those rotten Chinese people who started this horrible horrible problem - cuz foreigners are bad. Remember - they're not sending us their best - they're bringing drugs and crime and disease..."

This Bozo45 keeps telling us that BRANDING is at the root of his genius, so here we go:

Everything you need to know about the Chinese coronavirus can be found on one, regularly-updated website: https://t.co/nGCCDVqcqe

— Kevin McCarthy (@GOPLeader) March 9, 2020

We must remain calm but not complacent about the Chinese Coronavirus. We addressed it on tonight’s show. We hope you’ll watch if you missed it.https://t.co/elhyObX1oV

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) March 10, 2020

You might be getting a weird swirly feeling right about now - because of the rapid pivot these clowns are trying to execute.

Always An Option

Most of us are blissfully ignorant of the US national death rate.

7,452 people in the US die each day - about 1 every 12 seconds.

WaPo:

Problems with a government-created coronavirus test have limited the United States’ capacity to rapidly increase testing, just as the outbreak has entered a worrisome new phase in countries worldwide. Experts are increasingly concerned that the small number of U.S. cases may be a reflection of limited testing, not of the virus’s spread.

While South Korea has run more than 35,000 coronavirus tests, the United States has tested only 426 people, not including people who returned on evacuation flights. Only about a dozen state and local laboratories can now run tests outside of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta because the CDC kits sent out nationwide earlier this month included a faulty component.

U.S. guidelines recommend testing for a very narrow group of people — those who display respiratory symptoms and have recently traveled to China or had close contact with an infected person.

We all know good-n-goddamned well that Cult45 will lie to us about how people died - or just conveniently not report the deaths at all, either by ignorance or incompetence.

Meanwhile, it's being suggested that we all ditch the customs of shaking hands, or kissing and hugging each other in greeting.

A big shift in the cultural paradigm is in progress, and appears to be accelerating.

All For Show

This "presidency" is almost literally nothing but a dog-n-pony show for the purpose of distracting us, while the Rent-Seekers go from thinly-disguised embezzlement to looting the joint outright.

AP New York:

Tony Rankins, a formerly homeless, drug-addicted Army veteran, got a standing ovation at the State of the Union after President Donald Trump described how he turned his life around thanks to a construction job at a company using the administration’s “Opportunity Zone” tax breaks targeting poor neighborhoods.

But that’s not completely true.

Rankins, who indeed moved out of his car and into an apartment since landing a job refurbishing a Nashville hotel two years ago, doesn’t work at a site taking advantage of the breaks and never has done so. In fact, he started that job four months before the Treasury Department published its final list of neighborhoods eligible for the breaks. And the hotel where he worked couldn’t benefit even now because it’s an area that didn’t make the cut.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Rankins said he always considered the job that launched him on his new life two years ago to be in an Opportunity Zone and was honored to be invited by the White House to the State of the Union, with a prime seat in the balcony next to Ivanka Trump.

“After struggling with drug addiction, Tony lost his job, his house and his family. He was homeless. But then Tony found a construction company that invests in Opportunity Zones,” the president said in his Feb. 4 speech. “He is now a top tradesman, drug-free, reunited with his family.”

Days later, Trump doubled down on the Rankins story in a speech on his economic initiatives in Charlotte, North Carolina, and invited him up to say a few words.

“First of all, I would like to thank the president for signing this bill, because without it I wouldn’t be standing here before you right now,” Rankins said.

Trump also praised Rankins’ employer, R Investments, for “working to help 200 people rise out of homelessness every year by investing in opportunity zones.”

That is also not quite true.

CEO Travis Steffens said he has hired hundreds of homeless to work at the 400 buildings the company has owned over the years, taking advantage of various tax breaks. But when it comes to Trump’s Opportunity Zone breaks, he said, the company has only one building tapping the program now, a warehouse in Cincinnati where no one seems to be working, homeless or otherwise.

“We’ve not really worked there,” Rankins said, “but we’ve stored things over there.”

Steffens suggested that when Trump said R Investments was helping 200 people rise out of homelessness he was referring to the number the company hopes to teach construction skills to at the warehouse once it has been converted to a training academy.

Blue sky bullshit. And it's a great illustration of the typical Trump-style scam. I take tax money and use it to train people in certain trades. I get paid, and it costs me practically nothing, and 45* can make a bogus claim that he's created jobs for some poor people.

Don't get me wrong, job training is a huge thing. Programs aimed at helping people out of the cycle of poverty are to be celebrated, and I'll sing their praises all day long. But at the end of that training, if there's no real job with no real bennies and no real security, what's the fuckin' point?

All we've got here is a phony "president" and his scammy daughter crowing about what an amazing thing they're doing for us when actually, they're siphoning tax dollars into the pockets of a few of their rich cronies.

This is not a government

This is a robbery

Overheard

We figured there was no way folks in the bible belt and all across the South would ever trust a city slicker like Trump, but once they saw him makin' googley eyes at his daughter, they recognized him as one of their own.

Whoa

The victory speech.

It took him barely 30 seconds to start taking a giant shit on everybody - including some of the people who helped him.

Boiling The Frog

We should remember right now that the vote probably won't happen until Wednesday, the 5th.

And we should remember that there's practically no fucking way it's going to turn out to be anything but the 51-49 bullshit on the question of witnesses.

Rolling Stone:

We may be witnessing the end of the United States presidency as we know it. It doesn’t come in large, destructive gestures, like the demolition of the White House. Instead, we most often see it arrive in the mild utterances of old men. Such was the case on the Senate floor on Wednesday, when Alan Dershowitz spoke up in favor of President Trump’s autocracy.

We should have seen this coming, as Trump hardly ever misses an opportunity to reach for more power, not even amidst a process ostensibly about stripping it from him. Ironically and most unfortunately for the Democrats who sought even a modicum of accountability for President Trump’s high crimes and misdemeanors, the impeachmentprocess is being perverted into a process to make Trump into a dictator.

Trump’s defense against impeachment has, to this point, been somewhat bifurcated. At once, Trump was supposedly utterly innocent of the charges being brought against him — it was a perfect call with the Ukrainian president, we keep being told; just look at the White House’s doctored transcript — and it was also perfectly fine if Trump did everything he was charged with, because he is allowed to do whatever he likes. It was hard to discern which argument was more disturbing or less befitting of a president.

- but the money quote:

This is how reckless Republicans are with America, willing to give untold amounts of power to a man whom they still don’t fully understand in a frantic attempt to maintain their own grip on advantage in a country that has already elected a black president once and whose demographics are quickly turning against them.

Continuing A Theme

The impeachment trial is looking like a simple continuation of what we've seen from the GOP for at least 25 years - adapted for this malignant wart they still insist on calling "president".

And watching (a little) yesterday, it was very clear from the beginning that we were going to see the same ol' same ol'.

• Dems stating facts and trying to engage on the evidence.
• Repubs making campaign speeches (ie: lying their asses off).

Here's a pretty fair characterization of what little actual "defense" the Repubs are putting up:

Women: 

Feminazis

Liars 

FBI & Intel Professionals: 

Deep-Staters

Never-Trumpers

Liars 

Civil Servants: 

Never-Trumpers

Deep-Staters

Liars 

Documents: 

You're reading it wrong

Totally false

Written by liars 

Established Indisputable Facts: 

Yeah but Hillary

What about Obama

And not to be too repetitive, but notice how they never defend 45* on the basis of his being an honorable standup guy who just wouldn't do such things. They never mention that shit at all. Ever.

This New Thing

...isn't new at all.

The Doomed
A Perfect Circle

Behold a new Christ
Behold the same old horde
Gather at the altering
New beginning, new word

And the word was death
And the word was without light
The new beatitude
"Good luck, you're on your own"

Blessed are the fornicates
May we bend down to be their whores
Blessed are the rich
May we labor, deliver them more

Blessed are the envious
Bless the slothful, the wrathful, the vain
Blessed are the gluttonous
May they feast us to famine and war

What of the pious, the pure of heart, the peaceful?
What of the meek, the mourning, and the merciful?
All doomed
All doomed

Behold a new Christ
Behold the same old horde
Gather at the altering
New beginning, new word

And the word was death
And the word was without light
The new beatitude: "Good luck"

What of the pious, the pure of heart, the peaceful?
What of the meek, the mourning, and the merciful?
What of the righteous? What of the charitable?
What of the truthful, the dutiful, the decent?

Source: LyricFind

A Perfect Circle