Don't fuck with Momala
Whew. Sooo many women know this ‘I’m-annoyed-but-I’m-going-to-smile-at-you-because-we’re-in-public” vibe. https://t.co/6HCFq8dFPH
— Soledad O'Brien (@soledadobrien) October 8, 2020
Oct 8, 2020
Today's Tweet
COVID-19 Update
USA
- New Cases: 48,715
- New Deaths: 932
A top White House security official, Crede Bailey, is gravely ill with Covid-19 and has been hospitalized since September, according to four people familiar with his condition.
The White House has not publicly disclosed Bailey’s illness. He became sick before the Sept. 26 Rose Garden event President Donald Trump held to announce his Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett that has been connected to more than a dozen cases of the disease.
A White House spokesman declined to comment on Bailey. He is in charge of the White House security office, which handles credentialing for access to the White House and works closely with the U.S. Secret Service on security measures throughout the compound.
A career federal employee who has seldom appeared in the news, Bailey was swept up in a controversy last year over security clearances granted to Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, and son-in-law Jared Kushner. Bailey privately testified to the House Oversight Committee that he didn’t face pressure from others at the White House to grant clearances, according to a report by The Hill.
- and -
John Hagee, prominent megachurch pastor, ill with COVID-19
And, entering the realm of Sci-Fi as prophetic messenger, The Times Of Israel:
COVID-19 is harming the sperm of patients, even weeks after recovery, Israeli doctors have concluded, raising concerns that the disease could reduce fertility.
“Men who had the mild disease had a broadly normal sperm quality,” Prof. Dan Aderka of Sheba Medical Center, told The Times of Israel this week. “But those who had the disease in moderate or serious form often didn’t, even after recovery.
“These men had a reduction of around 50% on average of the number of sperm per milliliter, total volume of ejaculate, and motility of sperm,” he said. This figure reflects testing that was carried out around a month after diagnosis.
Fact Check
The debate last night was at least more like a real debate, and not that stoopid brick fight thing they had on last week.
CNN's Daniel Dale does his thing:
No knockouts, but Momala knocked Pence down pretty good with what's becoming her signature slap-back, "I will not be lectured to..."
And that's becoming one of the salient features of this campaign season - ie: Don't bring that mansplainin' bullshit in here again, boys.
So, I think there's a consensus forming that says Harris won it on points.
I'm sure the "conservatives" will piss and moan about "the angry screeching black woman", but y'know, fellas, that's kinda the fuckin' problem women in general have with the GOP now - your dismissive and condescending attitude has worn thin, and they're just not gonna put up with your shit anymore.
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.
Oct 7, 2020
COVID-19 Update
For what it's worth, I took a look at Deaths Per Million Population Per Day.
- World: .6 Deaths/Million/Day
- USA: 2.9 Deaths/Million/Day
So the shock of reality continues. With 4.3% of the world's people, we're zooming along at almost 5 times the world's COVID-19 death rate.
Ain't we just so fucking awesome.
USA yesterday
- New Cases: 43,660
- New Deaths: 790
If we catch a couple of really big breaks, we could see a vaccine some time mid-summer next year. And, of course, they're getting better at dealing with the disease all the time. So anyway, a string of happier occurrences could fall into place.
- Biden wins
- Nation-wide plans and policies get put in place
- Public compliance with safety measures improves
- We continue to make advances in therapies
- Vaccination project rolls out next summer
Cutting to the chase now: if we can knock the growth rate down - and keep it down - to about 1.002, then the anticipated "worst case" of over a million dead is reduced to less than 400,000.
And somehow "only 400,000 dead Americans" will be something to celebrate.
This country is fucked up in the head.
Today's Tweet
Because there's always a tweet.
The Ebola doctor who just flew to N.Y. from West Africa and went on the subway, bowling and dining is a very SELFISH man-should have known!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 24, 2014
Oct 6, 2020
Wondering
That would make for such a nice Christmas, dontcha think?
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