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April 24, 2020 10:57 PM UTC

Weekend Open Thread

  • 62 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

“The passions are the same in every conflict, large or small.”

–Mason Cooley

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62 thoughts on “Weekend Open Thread”

  1. “A man person can endure the entire weight of the universe for eighty years. It is unreality that s/he cannot bear.” 
    ― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven ( I took liberties with LeGuin’s nouns)

    Trump is dangerous because he has this way of re-framing reality in ways that some want reality to be:  the economy is the best ever, Climate change is a hoax,  immigrants are all criminals intent on taking your stuff, you can kill a coronavirus infection with sunlight. 

    We respect our truth-tellers: Dr. Fauci, Andrew Cuomo, Dr. Cody. We can handle reality. It’s unreality that we cannot bear.

    1. Could one of them explain whether this virus is so unthreatening that we need to reopen 'merika, or so deadly that we need to ban immigration? (note to rubes: you only get to pick one)

      1. The occurence of the pandemic was only a ruse to get Steven Miller’s longterm plan to stop immigration implemented:

        On the call, Miller sounded stung by the criticism from the right and urged surrogates and supporters to speak up for the president.

        “All around the country, Americans of every political stripe will rally behind an initiative to make sure that they, their children, their parents, their husbands, wives, sons, uncles, nephews, cousins can be the first to get a job when it opens up, to get her old job back when they rehire or to keep their job if they already have one,” he said.

        “Those individuals have a right and an expectation to get their jobs back and not to be replaced by foreign workers. That’s the action the president took, it is historic. It is vital, it is necessary, it is patriotic and it deserves the full-throated support of everybody on this call.”

          2. Starving, homeless ones with no jobs and no incomes . . .

            . . . you gotta’ give the Ttump/Miller/McConnell plan a chance.

            We’re getting there.

            What’s your hurry?

          4. They tried this experiment when The Yam first took office and cut temporary worker visas to the nub. All the farmers at the summer markets were talking about how they had to offer unreasonably high wages and how  locals who took the jobs still didn’t last a day.

            1. Then there is this…

              USDA let millions of pounds of food rot while food-bank demand soared

              Tom Vilsack, who served as agriculture secretary during the Obama administration, put it this way: “It’s not a lack of food, it’s that the food is in one place and the demand is somewhere else and they haven’t been able to connect the dots. You’ve got to galvanize people.”

              It has been six weeks since President Donald Trump and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention first urged Americans to avoid restaurants as part of national social distancing guidelines to slow the spread of Covid-19 — a move that immediately severed demand for millions of pounds of food earmarked for professional kitchens across the country.

              “There is no reason these high-quality, nutritious, farmer-grown products should be left in facilities to rot when there are so many American families who are suddenly faced with food insecurity,” the groups wrote to Perdue. “These growers and companies are already donating to food banks and others in need and will continue … but they are also facing their own economic crises.”

              The department did not make any fresh purchases in response to that request, according to USDA records. Perdue has yet to respond to the letter.

               

              https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/26/food-banks-coronavirus-agriculture-usda-207215

               

               

               

        1. You aren’t far off there,V.

          The anti-immigrant obsession of Steven Miller, Mike Pence, and whoever else is on their team at the Whitest House is front and center of the WHHI (Whitest House Hatred Initiative) are starting to panic and kick their “Stop the Brown Invasion!” campaign into high gear.

          Additionally, SCOTUS has clearly taken the side of the racists.

  2. "Revealed: leader of group peddling bleach as coronavirus 'cure' wrote to Trump this week

    Mark Grenon wrote to Trump saying chlorine dioxide ‘can rid the body of Covid-19’ days before the president promoted disinfectant as treatment
    …
    Since the start of the pandemic, Genesis II has been marketing MMS as a cure to coronavirus. It advises users, including children, to mix three to six drops of bleach in water and drink it.
    …"

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/24/revealed-leader-group-peddling-bleach-cure-lobbied-trump-coronavirus

    1. A drop or two of bleach in a liter of water will kill germs and viruses IN THE WATER, as those of us who spend a lot of time in the outdoors know. However, I don't carry bleach with me. It's much easier to carry a Steri-Pen or just simple iodine tablets or a good water filter.

  3. “On today’s What America’s Thinking, a new Hill-HarrisX poll finds 69 percent of voters support medicare for all. …The sampling margin of error of this poll is ±3.17 percentage points. “

  5. I have been reading this and been reading that: some I agree with, some I don’t but there seems to be a common thread that keeps popping up in the political spectrum, Mass criticism of Trump from Republicans.

    David Frum, former Bush aide says he thinks the GOP will “suffer dire political consequences because of Trumps slow, sloppy and widely criticized handling of the coronavirus pandemic”.

    George Conway, along with others, has founded the “Lincoln Project” which is made up of conservative strategists with ordinary Republicans. In a Washington Post op-ed, The Lincoln Project founders wrote, “The United States is beset with a President unprepared for the burdens of the presidency”. 

    In my 70 plus years, I have never heard so much criticism of a President from members of his own party. They seem to be determined to stay Republicans but still seem to want the face/leader of their party gone.

    Any comments by anyone who understands, let us say the oddness of the situation? 

      1. Nothing to see here.  No connection to the above, other than the sphincter muscles of the old white guys running the RNC are so tight right now you couldn't pull a straight pin out of their arse with one of Gardners red tractors. 

        Trump plans to cut daily coronavirus briefings

        He may stop appearing daily and make shorter appearances when he does, the sources said — a practice that may have started with Friday's unusually short briefing.

         

    2. David Frum had a dire prediction yesterday with Ari Melber.  He said that the right wing was setting up America to essentially give up and "take the punch" from COVID.  He cited people like "Dr." Oz who said a 2-3% death rate is acceptable.  Also, Trump and others who say they don't want "the cure to be worse than the disease".  In other words, America should be willing to accept the 1-2 million deaths resulting from a 60-70% infection rate.  Unless a therapeutic is found soon that minimizes the seriousness of infection, America will certainly face those massive numbers of deaths because conservatives will push to end the preventive measures we've been taking. 

    3. Dump is the virus that escaped the fever swamp that was once subject to the rule about Rs being the party that insists that government doesn’t work and then prove it when they get elected.

      Dump has far exceeded that quaint little adage. He has always killed everything he touched.

    4. There is a masss of self identified Republicans who believe that Trump is not representative of Republican goals and values. Instead he adopted the cloak of Republicanism to get elected for his own goals.

      They want their party back, i.e., they want what they think their party was, was supposed to be, back.
      I think they want Eisenhower. Sadly, that guy is dead.

    5. MADCO, I’m not much younger than your 70-plus, but recall things a bit differently. 

      There was a fair amount of Democratic criticism of LBJ — enough to trigger him NOT to run in 1968.  Republican criticism of RMN. Republican criticism of Ford.  Democratic criticism of Jimmy Carter.  and so on. 

      Most recently … there were a few Democrats criticizing Obama, suggesting he was doing too much or too little of any number of things.  Some of them even singled out members of his Administration to say support of Obama’s policy positions was disqualifying for a run for office as a Democrat.

      1. Eisenhower?? I was 11 years old when he left office. 

        Nixon: besides being a crook, signed bills creating the original EPA, National Environmental Policy Act, Endangered Species Act, and banned DDT, among other good enviro things.

        Reagan: signed more wilderness bills into law than any other president.

        G.H.W. Bush: his EPA stopped the ruinous, pork barrel, Two Forks Dam project southwest of Denver.

        G.W. Bush: rallied the country after 9/11. Created what was then the country’s largest national monument in the northern Hawaiian Islands.

        I’ll take any of these Republicans over Trump any day of the week & twice on Sunday.

        1. G.H.W. Bush also implemented the first (wildly) successful cap-and-trade program (acid rain). Dubya gave us the first renewable fuel standard. 

      2. Let's get it straight    
        85+
        The question was about R criticism of an R president, and how and why

        There is no way this is unique to Rs

        Ds are just as stoopid.

        Worse, really, because so many Ds just looove the idea of diversity identitiy politics, as if geneder, race, sexual orientation, vet status, etc, and so on has anything to do with being a better rep, senator, judge, etc.

         

  7. Potential early warning system for tracking COVID-19 infections — instead of expensive, time-consuming and difficult individual testing, test the water in the sewer system!

    By sampling sewage across greater Paris for more than 1 month, researchers have detected a rise and fall in novel coronavirus concentrations that correspond to the shape of the COVID-19 outbreak in the region, where a lockdown is now suppressing spread of the disease. Although several research groups have reported detecting coronavirus in wastewater, the researchers say the new study is the first to show that the technique can pick up a sharp rise in viral concentrations in sewage before cases explode in the clinic. That points to its potential as a cheap, noninvasive tool to warn against outbreaks, they say.

    “In most countries, individual tests are in short supply, and outbreak figures are based on computer modeling,” he says. “But sewer sampling gives a fairly inexpensive, evidence-based image of the actual viral load in a community.” Using computer models that incorporate data on how many viral particles individuals shed, and how they become diluted in sewage, it is even possible to translate detected viral concentrations into estimates of absolute numbers of infections in a sewage system’s catchment area, he says.

    Another advantage of wastewater sampling is that it picks up virus associated with the vast number of people who are infected with SARS-CoV-2 but do not present symptoms for the disease,

  8. This is worth 15 minutes of your time (30 if you’re Nutter).  The irony here is the blue states are generally net contributors to the federal budget; red states like McConnell’s Kentucky are a negative to the tune of about $150bb annually.  Why does Mitch want everyone to be like Kentucky? 

    Why Mitch McConnell Wants States to Go Bankrupt

    United States senators from smaller, poorer red states do not only represent their states. Often, they do not even primarily represent their states. They represent, more often, the richest people in bigger, richer blue States who find it more economical to invest in less expensive small-state races. The biggest contributor to Mitch McConnell’s 2020 campaign and leadership committee is a PAC headquartered in Englewood, New Jersey. The second is a conduit for funds from real-estate investors. The third is the tobacco company Altria. The fourth is the parcel delivery service UPS. The fifth is the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical corporation. The sixth is the home health-care company, LHC Group. The seventh is the Blackstone hedge fund. And so on and on.

    A federal bankruptcy process for state finances could thus enable wealthy individuals and interest groups in rich states to leverage their clout in the anti-majoritarian federal system to reverse political defeats in the more majoritarian political systems of big, rich states like California, New York, and Illinois.

    1. Politifact did a “Bankruptcy for Dummies*”article on the subject. Turns out state bankruptcy is probably unconstitutional, and would require an act of Congress. Not happening anytime soon, IMHO. 
       

      So probably a “red herring” by Moscow Mitch, to distract from $rump’sincompetence in running a Federal response to the CV19 pandemic. 
       

      Come on Amy McGrath!

      * You’re no dummy, but I needed the 101.

  9.  

     

    This is a well written piece by Bob Cesca

     

    The presidency is an actual job: This idiot can't do it

     

    Steven Wright, the great surrealist comedian, once inadvertently described how the last several weeks, if not the last three years, have felt to so many of us. 

    On his 1985 "I Have a Pony" concert album, Wright joked about the sensation of leaning too far back in his chair, but catching himself at the last second just before falling over backward. "I feel like that all the time," Wright added. We've all done it at one point or another, and we're all familiar with that momentary adrenaline rush of out-of-control panic.

     

    With a pandemic rapidly circulating the globe, with the first stages of another financial crisis in progress and with a breathtakingly incompetent White House running the show, we're all feeling a bit like we're leaning too far back in our chairs. And we're more or less experiencing that sensation "all the time." So much of it's in reaction to the aforementioned breathtakingly incompetent White House and our even more incompetent president. He's supposed to be handling this with expertise and aplomb, as most previous chief executives have, but he absolutely isn't. In any way.

    https://www.salon.com/2020/03/10/the-presidency-is-an-actual-job-this-idiot-cant-do-it/

  10. Frank Bruni of the New York Times draws a bead on Trump:

    He’s Houdini, he’s Scheherazade, he’s all the escape artists of history and fiction rolled into one and swirled with golden-orange topping. He’s lucky beyond all imagining. But here’s the thing about luck: It runs out.

    There’s incessant talk of how fervent his base is, but the many Americans appalled by him have a commensurate zeal. For every Sean Hannity, there’s a Rachel Maddow. For every Kellyanne Conway, a George Conway. She and her ilk may be wily in their defense of the president. He and his tribe are even better in their evisceration of him.

    And what of the diaspora of refugees from the Trump administration: people like Rick Bright, the government scientist who says he was just stripped of his leading role in the search for a coronavirus vaccine because he wouldn’t parrot Trump’s cockamamie talking points? I predict that as November nears, more and more exiles will speak out, sharing alarming accounts of life inside the president’s hall of mirrors. Trump in turn will mutter about the “deep state,” but the phrase won’t fly when he’s left with such a shallow pool of charlatans around him — and when he’s making such a repellent fool of himself.

    Don’t tell me that his nightly briefings are just a new version of the old stadium rallies; their backdrop of profound suffering makes them exponentially harder to stomach. Americans who take any comfort from them were Trump-drunk long ago. The unbesotted see and hear the president for what he is: a tone-deaf showman who regards everything, even a mountain of corpses, as a stage.

     

  12. Psychologist John Gartner: Trump is a "sexual sadist" who is "actively engaging in sabotage"

    Psychologist and psychotherapist John Gartner, contributor to the bestselling book "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump" and co-founder of the Duty to WARN PAC, has an answer: Donald Trump is a malignant narcissist. Our president's mental pathologies inexorably compel him to hurt and kill large numbers of people — including his own supporters.

    Dr. Gartner taught for many years at the Johns Hopkins University Medical School, and has private therapeutic practices in Baltimore and New York, specializing in the treatment of borderline personality disorders. In our most recent conversation, he explains that sadism and violence are central to Trump's malignant narcissism and his decision-making about the coronavirus pandemic. Gartner also warns that Donald Trump is an abuser locked into a deeply dysfunctional relationship with the American people and that, like other sadists, Trump enjoys causing harm and suffering.

    Ultimately, Gartner concludes that Donald Trump is engaging in "democidal behavior" and cautions that the tens of thousands of dead (so far) from the coronavirus pandemic are not simply collateral damage from Trump's policies, but rather the logical outcome of Trump's apparent mental pathologies and the poor decisions that flow from them.

    https://www.salon.com/2020/04/25/psychologist-john-gartner-trump-is-a-sexual-sadist-who-is-actively-engaging-in-sabotage/

    no comment

     

     

     

  14. Another conservative voice explaining why the GOP and the nation can't take 4 more years of Trump

    The Trump captivity of the GOP has reached its sad, inevitable destination: a failed presidency defended by a cowed party. As President Trump’s malignant narcissism and incompetence have been fully revealed — and can be objectively measured by the level of needless death from covid-19 — his approval among Republicans has remained strong. Across a continent filled with elected Republicans, only a few have taken a stand for sanity and effective governance.

    Trump is, no doubt, in a perilous political situation. The activist right wing of his party has seized on social distancing as the health-care equivalent of socialism. The tea party fundraising machine has lurched into loud, clanking motion, trying to manufacture outrage against epidemiology. Some pro-life and pro-family groups have joined in the ill-timed promotion of social anarchy.

    Yet none of this is likely to change the minds of partisan Republicans. Some ignore or dismiss Trump’s cruelty and deception because conservative judges need to be appointed and the culture war needs to be fought. Some embrace his cruelty and deception because conservative judges need to be appointed and the culture war needs to be fought. And Trump naturally takes continued Republican job approval as an endorsement for his handling of the coronavirus crisis. In this way, Republican tolerance for Trump’s ineptitude and ignorance has made these traits more lethal.

    The beginning of reform for Republicans might be a vote for the Democratic candidate.

  15. (To no one’s surprise. Perhaps they should have drawn pictures?)

    President’s intelligence briefing book repeatedly cited virus threat

    U.S. intelligence agencies issued warnings about the novel coronavirus in more than a dozen classified briefings prepared for President Trump in January and February, months during which he continued to play down the threat, according to current and former U.S. officials.

    The repeated warnings were conveyed in issues of the President’s Daily Brief, a sensitive report that is produced before dawn each day and designed to call the president’s attention to the most significant global developments and security threats.

  16. About the briefing book; I once heard him reading something (maybe it was a book cover blurb) and I swear, he sounded like a fifth-grader- a slow-witted fifth grader. I honestly wonder if he can read.  Not that I have any sympathy for him, but the B.S. and bluster may very well be a defense against anyone figuring out that he has learning disabilities.

    1. The SNL folks said the same- (When Donnie was a guest on the show). They said that he didn’t read scripts  fluently at all, and seemed to be “a person powered by bluster”.

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