How Stoopid Are They?

...pretty fuckin' stoopid.

WaPo:

If all roads in Michigan lead to the state capitol, conservative protesters on Wednesday made sure they were closed.

For miles, thousands of drivers clogged the streets to demand that Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) ease restrictions and allow them to go back to work. They drowned downtown Lansing, Mich., in a cacophony of honking. They blared patriotic songs from car radios, waving all sorts of flags from the windows — President Trump flags, American flags and the occasional Confederate flag.

- and the kicker -

But in the massive demonstration against Whitmer’s stay-at-home executive order — which they have argued is excessive and beyond her authority — the pleas from organizers that protesters to stay in their vehicles went unheeded. Many got out of their cars and crashed the front lawn of the capitol building, with some chanting, “Lock her up!” and “We will not comply!”

So these boneheads decided to organize a protest against an order that says they need to stay away from each other, which brought them all together, while admonishing the protesters to stay in their cars and away from each other.

Do we kinda see the fucking problem here?

And we wonder why the Chinese cops were welding people's doors shut - just a coupla months ago.

Men In Black

J: "People are smart - they can handle it."

K: "A person is smart. People are dumb panicky dangerous animals - and you know it."

My dearest conservative brothers & sisters:

When we ask "How stoopid can you get?"

it's a rhetorical question -

please stop taking it as a challenge.

COVID-19 Update

Idiot Republicans refuse to do the right thing, and the plague continues apace.

And to this rolling fuckup, we can add the fairly high probability that the number of cases in the US is under-reported because we can't get the fucking testing straight, which means the number of dead is being under-reported too.

Today's Tweet

Follow the thread

I've compiled a side-by-side comparison of the reaction to coronavirus by Trump and the World Health Organization.

The timeline is utterly, comprehensively damning to Trump.

What it shows about him is far worse than what it shows about WHO.

New piece:https://t.co/ujv6EVqIEr

— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) April 15, 2020

Today's Pix

click

⬇︎👁👁⬇︎

COVID-19 Update

As suspected, we found out yesterday that some COVID-19 deaths weren't reported as such, so the death toll rose rather sharply.

Pop Prophesy

50 years ahead of its time - a tribute to 45* and his devotees.

American Horror Stories

Rolling Stone:

While Americans died of the modern plague, President Trump sang happy birthday to a fading Fox News personality. On March 7th, a who’s who of the Republican establishment gathered at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s lavish retreat in Florida, for the 51st-birthday party of Kimberly Guilfoyle, one of the former co-hosts of The Five, and now the girlfriend of Donald J. Trump Jr. All the usual suspects were there, including Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Sen. Lindsey Graham; Tiffany Trump; Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner; and Trump’s younger son Eric and his wife, Lara. They sang happy birthday to Guilfoyle and lit a big sparkler. At the end, she pumped her fist and shouted “Four more years!” This is what passes for a cozy family celebration in Trumpland. But out in the real world, darkness was falling fast.

There were already 100,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, around the world, and 3,600 people had died. In the U.S., more than 100 new cases had been reported that day, a rate that was doubling every three days. Other nations knew how serious this was: By that time, China had shut down major cities, all but quarantining 760 million people. Singapore and Hong Kong and South Korea had put in aggressive travel restrictions and testing procedures. In the U.S., fear was rising. South By Southwest, the giant music/tech conference in Austin had just been canceled. Grocery stores were stripped in panic buying. On Wall Street, stocks were in free fall.

There's also an AUDM version embedded at their site - you can listen or download it.

Two of the big points:

• 45* is responsible for dismantling the pandemic response team that was in place in the NSC. He let Bolton scrub that whole fucking thing.
• The "China Travel Ban" was a Swiss cheese measure. He blocked travel, but only for Chinese nationals (which is why it was in fact a racist asshole thing to do). Everybody else was free to come and go as they pleased. And he didn't block any manufactured goods coming in from China. It could have given us a little lead time to get something in place before the thing took off, but he sat on his ass doing that stoopid fucking wishful thinking thing he always does.

This is on him, and I've not seen any good evidence that we're not being played - that this is not the standard Shock Doctrine bullshit that the plutocrats have been using to fuck people over for 50 years.

History is not a series of random independent events - and there's not such thing as mere;y coincidental, un-connected happenstance in politics.

If you've got about 9 hours, give a listen to Naomi Klein:

Go, Joe

Obama talks up Joe Biden

We'll see if Biden is any kind of smart. I have my doubts. I know he's not dumb, but I don't know that's he's smart in the right ways

I know he can work the legislature, but can he motivate us to keep the pressure on the congress critters? Can he teach us how to bring that pressure for him - for us?

We need him to do exactly that, but yeah - we'll see.

Overheard

"...and if you still don't think of him as your president, then you better not cash the check he's sending you..."

Dude - c'mon - not only will I be cashing that check, I'll be laughing my ass off the whole way into town, knowing that every check I get is an open admission from this administration - as well as from every Republican - that trickle-down economics has failed again, and that these clear-eyed steel-nerved social Darwinists have had to fall back on a radical left idea like Minimum Basic Income to keep this joint from goin' tits up for-fuckin'-ever.

Seriously, what part of your feverish brain can make you believe I won't enjoy getting back a thousand of my tax dollars in the form of a check that basically says, "Ya'll were right - we was lyin' about that shit the whole time" on the memo line?

Gotta Be Something Left

Gillian Welch - One Little Song