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Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped? Bernie Sanders wants to know who owns America?

#15281 User is offline   johnu 

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Posted 2020-May-04, 19:16

View Postjohnu, on 2020-April-27, 22:56, said:

Grifter in Chief raises estimate for COVID-19 death toll

Trump raises his virus death toll projection to up to 70,000 in U.S.


Just covering his ass-hat so that he can point to his accurate projection later this summer and fall during the presidential campaign. When the death toll approaches 70,000, the Grifter in Chief will revise his estimate to 70-80,000 deaths, and will continue raising his estimates throughout the summer and fall as each previous estimate becomes obsolete. No matter what, the Clown in Chief will claim that he did a simply "marvelous" job in keeping the death toll low.

Mea Culpa. I have to admit that my prediction in this post was 1000% wrong and totally off base. The Clown in Chief absolutely did not revised his estimate to 70-80000 deaths as I stupidly predicted.

Trump warns coronavirus death toll could reach 100,000

Quote

President Donald Trump has warned that the U.S. death toll from the coronavirus outbreak could reach 100,000 — revising upward his estimate of the number of people the outbreak could kill by tens of thousands.


I am now totally confused after being so wrong before. My best guess is that in 2 or 3 weeks as the death toll approaches 100,000, the Grifter in Chief will revise his death estimate to 200,000. As long as the death toll in the US is less than 2 million, the Grifter will have claim he has done a sensational job. Even if the death toll is millions more than 2 million, the Conman in Chief will proclaim he did an outstanding job that nobody else was capable of and that only he was capable of leading the country through this crisis despite the fact that Obama did not have a vaccine in place to prevent COVID-19.
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#15282 User is offline   johnu 

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Posted 2020-May-05, 01:34

View Postjohnu, on 2020-May-04, 18:53, said:

A fine person shopping at a supermarket.

California Shopper In Ku Klux Klan Hood Alarms Customers, Officials

The Grand Wizard in Chief approves of this type of mask worn by one of his rabid supporters. He is still waiting for his custom hood embossed with Presidential Seal to arrive from China.

Some fine people wear masks, other fine people don't.

GOP Lawmaker Opposes Coronavirus Face Masks Because They Cover ‘The Image Of God’

Quote

“This is the greatest nation on earth founded on Judeo-Christian Principles. One of those principles is that we are all created in the image and likeness of God. That image is seen the most by our face. I will not wear a mask.”


Obviously this story wasn't from 2020 but must have been mistakenly been taken from the Dark Ages around 1000 or 1500 years ago.
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#15283 User is offline   johnu 

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Posted 2020-May-05, 03:35

We seem to have a bottomless basket of deplorables:

Steve Mnuchin Urges Americans To Live Dangerously And Travel The Country

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Despite the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin is encouraging Americans to travel around the country this summer.

“It’s a great time for people to explore America,” Mnuchin said on Fox Business News on Monday. “A lot of people haven’t seen many parts of America. I wish I could get back on the road soon.”

One problem: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention strongly recommends avoiding all non-essential travel to protect against contracting or spreading COVID-19.

“Travel increases your chances of getting and spreading COVID-19,” the agency warns on its website. The “CDC recommends you stay home as much as possible, especially if your trip is not essential.”

Mnuchin also recommends taking a long cruise, visiting a meat packing plant, moving into a senior living care facility, or getting arrested and spending some time in prison. Good times B-)

Laura Ingraham: “There was no real scientific basis” for social distancing

Quote

LAURA INGRAHAM (HOST): Although intuitively I think it probably seemed like social distancing would be necessary, there was no real scientific basis for believing that, since it had never been studied.

And as one infectious disease doc told me last week, trying to stop this virus with social distancing is like trying to drive a nail through Jell-O. Viruses spread, that's what they do, they often weaken as they go and if it's like SARS, we hope it is, it'll eventually burn out as SARS did.

If you depend on Fox Propaganda for your news, I guess you will be overjoyed with what's coming your way and go out without a face mask and join crowds every chance you get. Does being in a crowd actually decrease your chances of getting COVID 19 because the virus gets confused by too many targets?

A disturbing new study suggests Sean Hannity’s show helped spread the coronavirus

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Using both a poll of Fox News viewers over age 55 and publicly available data on television-watching patterns, they calculate that Fox viewers who watched Hannity rather than Carlson were less likely to adhere to social distancing rules, and that areas where more people watched Hannity relative to Carlson had higher local rates of infection and death.

“Greater exposure to Hannity relative to Tucker Carlson Tonight leads to a greater number of COVID-19 cases and deaths,” they write. “A one-standard deviation increase in relative viewership of Hannity relative to Carlson is associated with approximately 30 percent more COVID-19 cases on March 14, and 21 percent more COVID-19 deaths on March 28.”

This is a working paper; it hasn’t been peer reviewed or accepted for publication at a journal. However, it’s consistent with a wide body of research finding that media consumption in general, and Fox News viewership in particular, can have a pretty powerful effect on individual behavior.


How Fox’s Sean Hannity has downplayed the coronavirus pandemic in America

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Fox’s coverage of the coronavirus pandemic has been abysmal -- and dangerous. Fox Business fired prime-time host Trish Regan less than a month after she ranted that Trump’s opponents were using the disease as “yet another attempt to impeach the president.” Tucker Carlson has become the face of the network’s racist attempt to rebrand coronavirus as the “Chinese” or “Wuhan” virus in some twisted effort to deflect attention from Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic. Fox’s news anchors and medical commentators have also contributed to the network’s spread of misinformation. And Hannity, who has at least twice interviewed the president about the coronavirus and even appeared in a Fox News public service announcement on the issue, has downplayed the severity of the coronavirus pandemic in numerous ways.

On March 9, Hannity suggested that young, healthy Americans have no reason to fear coronavirus and claimed people were faking concern about it to “bludgeon Trump with this new hoax,” echoing a comment Trump had made at a rally in late February. Two days later on his radio program, Hannity promoted a conspiracy theory about the “deep state” allegedly using coronavirus to manipulate the public.

FYI, that's Mr Deplorable to you Hoi Polloi.
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#15284 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2020-May-05, 06:59

From Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg:

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According to news reports on Monday, two models of the future path of the coronavirus pandemic have reportedly been circulating within the administration. One was a “cubic” model put together by White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett that predicts deaths from the coronavirus “essentially going to zero by May 15.” Kevin Drum, among others, was dismissive of that idea.

The other model was much more interesting. It was reportedly a draft from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and it reached the alarming conclusion that the country could be facing 200,000 new infections and 3,000 deaths per day by the end of the month. The White House pushed back against that one, evidently trying to use the Hassett model as spin.

There are at least three interpretations of what’s going on with the CDC model and why it leaked.

Nate Silver speculated that perhaps it was an attempt to get some scary numbers on the record so that President Donald Trump could then portray the eventual results as a success, even if they’re pretty bad. Plausible! On the other hand, Trump already frequently mentions the high mortality levels that would’ve been reached had the government done nothing at all, and he doesn’t hesitate to exaggerate even those numbers.

A second possibility is that this really was a draft model that leaked out accidentally and wouldn’t have become a part of the policy-planning process, as the White House has suggested.

What I suspect, however, is yet a third possibility: The model was put together to scare Trump. After all, the president did eventually come out in full support of harsh social-distancing measures after his task force convinced him that doing nothing would be a disaster. He still compares the U.S. response favorably to Sweden’s more permissive strategy. And even now, when talking about the urgency of reopening businesses, he emphasizes the need to maintain best practices. It seems quite possible that the public-health experts might’ve been trying to push the president to lend more significant support to his own reopening guidelines.

Of course, the White House’s decision to mostly abdicate responsibility to the states doesn’t seem to be up for grabs, at least for now. But a gradual, phased-in reopening is going to work a lot better if the president is saying responsible things about it than if he’s taking the side of conspiracy-addled demonstrators. Perhaps that’s all the public-health professionals can hope to get out of the administration right now. If this is evidence that they’re trying, it’s what passes for good news these days.

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#15285 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2020-May-05, 07:29

View Postjohnu, on 2020-May-05, 01:34, said:

Some fine people wear masks, other fine people don't.

GOP Lawmaker Opposes Coronavirus Face Masks Because They Cover ‘The Image Of God’



Obviously this story wasn't from 2020 but must have been mistakenly been taken from the Dark Ages around 1000 or 1500 years ago.


These may not be THE Dark Ages but these are dark ages indeed.

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Black Lives Matter. / "I need ammunition, not a ride." Zelensky
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#15286 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2020-May-05, 14:11

I mean, Jesus Christ, what the ***** is wrong with these people?

Quote

WASHINGTON (AP) — A government scientist was ousted after the Trump administration ignored his dire warnings about COVID-19 and a malaria drug President Donald Trump was pushing for the coronavirus despite scant evidence it helped, according to a whistleblower complaint Tuesday.

Rick Bright, former director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, filed the complaint Tuesday with the Office of Special Counsel, a government agency responsible for whistleblower complaints.

He alleges he was reassigned to a lesser role because he resisted political pressure to allow widespread use of hydroxychloroquine, a malaria drug favored by Trump. He said the Trump administration wanted to “flood” hot spots in New York and New Jersey with the drug.
my emphasis

A better question: What the ***** is wrong with people who still support these pieces of human scum that comprise the Trump administration?

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Black Lives Matter. / "I need ammunition, not a ride." Zelensky
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#15287 User is offline   Trinidad 

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Posted 2020-May-05, 16:40

Well err ... on the one hand there is Science and on the other hand is ... "It could work... It could not work... I believe it works."

The problem with me is that I trust Science. But that trust is not universal, particularly not in the USA.

Rik
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#15288 User is offline   Cyberyeti 

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Posted 2020-May-06, 04:17

View PostTrinidad, on 2020-May-05, 16:40, said:

Well err ... on the one hand there is Science and on the other hand is ... "It could work... It could not work... I believe it works."

The problem with me is that I trust Science. But that trust is not universal, particularly not in the USA.

Rik


Particularly where religion is involved. The view that my belief in what my holy book says is just as valid as your tested science is all too prevalent
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#15289 User is offline   barmar 

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Posted 2020-May-06, 10:20

View PostTrinidad, on 2020-May-05, 16:40, said:

Well err ... on the one hand there is Science and on the other hand is ... "It could work... It could not work... I believe it works."

Don't forget "What do you have to lose?"

Seems more like Russian Roulette than sound policy.

#15290 User is offline   johnu 

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Posted 2020-May-06, 14:19

Yet another in the No lie is too big or too small to tell category

Trump’s Baseball Boast Gets A Brutal Fact-Check: ‘He Couldn’t F**king Hit

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President Donald Trump has repeatedly bragged about his athletic prowess as a youth, and has even claimed he could’ve played Major League Baseball.

“I was captain of the baseball team,” Trump told MTV in 2010. “I was supposed to be a professional baseball player. Fortunately, I decided to go into real estate instead.”

But Slate found some of his old stats as a player for the New York Military Academy and they don’t exactly scream MLB talent. Partial records uncovered by the website revealed a .138 batting average over the nine games.

One baseball writer who also worked as a scout for the Toronto Blue Jays offered up a blunt assessment when asked if Trump sounded like a prospect.

“There’s no chance,” said Keith Law of The Athletic, adding:

“You don’t hit .138 for some podunk, cold-weather high school playing the worst competition you could possibly imagine. You wouldn’t even get recruited for Division I baseball programs, let alone by pro teams. That’s totally unthinkable. It’s absolutely laughable. He hit .138 — he couldn’t ***** hit, that’s pretty clear.”

.138??? You would probably be benched for even the smallest high schools unless your Daddy was personally financing an expensive school building. In defense of the Easy Out in Chief, it's very difficult to hit well when you are suffering from bone spurs. :rolleyes: It's not like his father had enough money to pay for the Grifter to get foot surgery.

Was Donald Trump Good at Baseball?

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Trump, who played first base, wrote that “being a pro was in the equation” until he attended a tryout with “another young kid named Willie McCovey.” Apparently, the sight of the future Hall of Famer in action convinced him to give up baseball for good.

Quote

Many grown-ups recall high school glory. Far fewer can cite newspaper articles as proof. Except it seems likely that Trump got his own headline wrong—or made it up entirely. After combing the Evening News and the Cornwall Local, the only local newspapers to regularly cover NYMA sports, and doing an extensive search on Newspapers.com, I’ve been unable to find “TRUMP HOMERS TO WIN THE GAME” in any local paper, nor “TRUMP WINS GAME FOR NYMA,” a headline he’d mention to D’Antonio for his book The Truth About Trump.


Perhaps that’s because in 1964, NYMA didn’t play Cornwall High School, according to the schedule in its yearbook. They didn’t play in 1963, either.

What I have been able to find is box scores from some of Trump’s games, and the picture they paint of the player is not pretty.

As for Willie McCovey, he was eight years older than Trump. When Trump was a senior in high school, McCovey was in his fifth year in the major leagues and already an All-Star.

Obviously the Grifter in Chief meant Hall of Famer Willie Mays, not Hall of Famer Willie McCovey.

Or maybe not. Willie Mays had been a star in the major leagues since 1951.

It's not that the Liar in Chief isn't an outstanding athlete in other sports. He's been the club champion at the golf clubs he owns. Sometimes he doesn't even have to have played in the championship tournament. He'll call the golf pro at the club that hosted the tournament, and report that he had a lower score at an entirely different course so he actually won the tournament. What's the problem?
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#15291 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2020-May-06, 17:47

Quote

“I thought we could wind it down sooner,” Mr. Trump said in the Oval Office on Wednesday at an event to honor National Nurses Day. “But I had no idea how popular the task force is until actually yesterday, when I started talking about winding it down.”

Cabinets are only for displaying fake golf trophies apparently.
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#15292 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2020-May-06, 17:55

From NYT:

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Joe Biden’s lead on President Trump is growing nationwide, according to a new Monmouth University poll.

All told, 50 percent of voters said they would vote for Mr. Biden and 41 percent said they would vote for Mr. Trump. It is the first major national survey to ask voters about the sexual-assault allegation by Tara Reade, a former Senate aide, against Mr. Biden. There was a large partisan divide in assessments of her credibility.

Young Republicans largely dislike Mr. Trump, but one issue remains a powerful force pulling them toward the Republican Party: abortion.

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#15293 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2020-May-07, 02:49

From Fintan O'Toole at NYRB:

Quote

Trump’s wild zigzagging has destroyed, for his followers, the possibility of a single, coherent, rational narrative of the pandemic: it is a dark conspiracy and nothing much to be worried about; it demands wartime restrictions on freedom and such restrictions are totalitarian and un-American; we all have to act but we don’t need to do anything; you should wear a mask but I won’t. He has generated for those who believe in him the cognitive double bind that abusive parents generate for their children when they convey contradictory and irreconcilable messages about how to win their parents’ approval.

And we know what happens during plagues when people cannot find a rational response. They adopt an irrational one. They find a scapegoat—historically in Europe usually the Jews, but if there are no Jews at hand, any outsider will do. The one thing Trump still knows is how to press on this nerve. He has had a lot of practice. It is hard to overstate the centrality of the imagery of invasive infection and infestation to his political career. When Trump turns on journalists for asking him basic questions about the pandemic, for example, we must recall that a chapter in his book The Art of the Comeback is called “The Press and Other Germs.”

Trump’s career on TV gave him a feel for test-marketing. He test-marketed his signature policy of banning flights from Muslim countries not by raising fear about terrorism, but with paranoia about plague. Before he announced his presidential run, his big political cause (alongside his racist campaign on Barack Obama’s alleged foreign birth) promoted the fear that US troops and aid workers would bring back the Ebola virus from Africa. As he tweeted in September 2014, “Why are we sending thousands of ill-trained soldiers into Ebola infested areas of Africa! Bring the plague back to US? Obama is so stupid.”

Trump’s solution was the formula he would return to on the campaign trail: a blanket ban on visas for citizens of and flights from certain countries. August 2, 2014: “The US must immediately stop all flights from EBOLA infected countries or the plague will start and spread inside our ‘borders.’ Act fast!” September 30, 2014: “The United States must immediately institute strong travel restrictions or Ebola will be all over the United States–a plague like no other!” November 10, 2014: “A single Ebola carrier infects 2 others at a minimum. STOP THE FLIGHTS! NO VISAS FROM EBOLA STRICKEN COUNTRIES!” Substitute “Muslim” for “Ebola stricken” and you have one half of Trump’s electoral appeal in 2016.

The other half is, of course, the wall. Again, we must recall that Trump’s justification for the wall was not just about keeping killers and rapists at bay. It was about immigrants as carriers of disease, a common trope in nativist propaganda. (In 2015, for example, the Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle spoke on air of immigrants as “a tumor or a disease.”) But the strategy is one that Trump successfully reanimated in preparation for his presidential campaign. August 5, 2014: “Our government now imports illegal immigrants and deadly diseases. Our leaders are inept.” July 6, 2015: “Tremendous infectious disease is pouring across the border.”

Trump uses the words “infect” and “infest” as synonyms, allowing him to extend this imagery of the dirty, disease-bearing Other to African-American communities within the US itself. In July 2019 he lashed out at the black Democrat Elijah Cummings, whose House district covered much of Baltimore: “Cumming [sic] District is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess. If he spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could help clean up this very dangerous & filthy place.” The invasive disease-bearing migrant has an ally in the infested and filthy sump of infection that is, in Trump’s rhetoric, already present on the margins of clean white society.

Trump returns to what has worked for him before. As the cost of his terrible failures of public duty and common decency becomes ever more starkly evident, he will revert in his reelection campaign to an explanation of the disaster, not as a consequence of his own incompetence and contempt but as a punishment inflicted on the United States for its failure to build his wall, keep out foreigners, and crush the enemy within. Like a medieval quack making a profit in times of plague, he will offer a stricken people an ever higher dose of a toxic cure.

—April 15, 2020

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#15294 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2020-May-07, 08:34

Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg:

Quote

Matt Yglesias asks over on Twitter:

Quote

Something I don’t totally understand is are reopeners *hoping* to spark a revival of interstate and intercity travel (which would have a lot of economic benefits but pose a huge public health risk) or are they assuming that won’t happen (which is safer but has less upside)?

The question would be a good one if we were debating public-policy ideas. In that case, the important issue would be whether economic normality is even possible as long as public health is still at risk. As far as I can tell, virtually all economists and medical experts think the answer is no — and thus fighting the pandemic and boosting the economy are one and the same at this point, not a terrible choice we have to make.

Yet as far as I can see, the folks that Yglesias calls the “reopeners” — not so much President Donald Trump, as the people who have been leading Trump away from his own guidelines — simply aren’t thinking in those terms. Because they’re not really thinking in terms of policy. This is the post-policy thinking that’s been dominating the Republican Party for several years now. It’s putting the slogans of talk-radio hosts and Fox News personalities front and center, and leaving serious governing professionals to either go along, be marginalized or leave the party altogether.

My guess is that in this case we're seeing a combination of several impulses.

One is: Defy the experts. #FireFauci! That’s a theme popular with talk-radio audiences.

Another goes something like: Look! Some yahoos demonstrating with guns! Let's not fall behind them and be considered RINOs.

A third one is: Look! Some yahoos demonstrating with guns! Let's exploit the opportunity and jump to the head of that parade.

Yes, of course this is irresponsible when lives are on the line. But at this point, it’s probably not as much a decision as it is an ingrained way of doing things. After all, we’re talking about a party that’s been trying to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act for a decade now and hasn’t got around to coming up with the “replace” part.

To be clear: This isn’t to say that conservative ideas can’t be serious. The movement has had plenty of strong policy ideas in the past, and there are still plenty of conservatives who can formulate an array of real governing options. By and large, though, those aren’t the people guiding the Republican Party in 2020. Now it’s Mark Levin and Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham and politicians who aspire to be like them. And they’re generally much more interested in figuring out what sounds good to their strongest supporters than what the outcomes of any particular government action might be.

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#15295 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2020-May-07, 13:09

U.S. democracy has been Trumped beyond the expectations of sane people everywhere but there is still hope as long as the resistance includes people like Ruth Bader Ginsberg who showed up by phone for oral arguments on Wednesday after having gall bladder surgery at age 87 on Tuesday. The dudess abides.
If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
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#15296 User is offline   barmar 

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Posted 2020-May-07, 13:12

View Posty66, on 2020-May-07, 13:09, said:

U.S. democracy has been Trumped beyond the expectations of sane people everywhere but there is still hope as long as the resistance includes people like Ruth Bader Ginsberg who showed up by phone for oral arguments on Wednesday after having gall bladder surgery at age 87 on Tuesday. The dudess abides.

She's amazing. I imagine that if anyone other than Trump were in the WH she might have retired already, but she's hanging on as long as she can to prevent him from putting in another replacement. Two Trump appointees is two too many already.

#15297 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2020-May-07, 13:45

Ginsberg is a dandy, but this country is so broken now that I no longer believe it repairable:

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department on Thursday said it is dropping the criminal case against President Donald Trump's first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, abandoning a prosecution that became a rallying cry for the president and his supporters in attacking the FBI's Trump-Russia investigation.

The action was a stunning reversal for one of the signature cases brought by special counsel Robert Mueller. It comes even though prosecutors for the past three years have maintained that Flynn lied to the FBI in a January 2017 interview about his conversations with the Russian ambassador.

Flynn himself admitted as much, pleading guilty before asking to withdraw the plea, and became a key cooperator for Mueller as the special counsel investigated ties between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign.


And there will be no repercussion for this decision - no one will be held accountable after Flynn pled guilty of lying to the FBI about his call to Russian ambassador Kislyak and told Putin via Kislyak not to respond to sanctions imposed by Obama, and this after Russia had directly and repeatedly interfered with our elections and our democracy, not to mention acting as an agent of Turkey and lying about that as well. This is Barr. None other has the authority to dismiss.

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#15298 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2020-May-07, 15:27

Matt Yglesias @mattyglesias said:

Donors to conservative causes have correctly ascertained that transmogrifying all policy arguments into culture war sh#tshows is an effective strategy for advancing unpopular tax policy ideas.

Some people die as a result but they believe it spurs more long-term economic growth.

@ne0liberal said:

As pointed out by @ATabarrok - "The people protesting to reopen the economy are also protesting against the use of a key tool to reopen the economy, masks! Welcome to crazy town."

I can think of two hypotheses why this is happening.

https://marginalrevo...he-economy.html

Matt's point is not new. What's somewhat surprising is that some people expect this sh#t to end.
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#15299 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2020-May-07, 17:30

Charles Blow at NYT:

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The video is short and shocking.

It’s taken from the perspective of a vehicle following a young black man running at a jogger’s pace. The jogger is 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery. Arbery approaches a pickup truck parked in the street. There are two white men, one outside the vehicle with a shotgun, 34-year-old Travis McMichael, and the other, his father, 64-year-old Gregory McMichael, standing aloft in the flatbed.

The McMichaels had reportedly chased Arbery, blocking his path at another location, at which point he had turned around and jogged another way to avoid them.

In the video, when the men encounter each other, there’s immediately an altercation. Arbery and the younger McMichael fight for control of the shotgun.

Shots are fired. Arbery tries to run away, but he is clearly wounded and his knees buckle. He collapses to the ground. The video ends.

After Arbery fell, the younger McMichael rolled over the limp body “to see if the male had a weapon,” according to a police report. There was blood on McMichael’s hands when the police arrived.

Arbery died of his wounds.

This is how the police report detailed the father’s explanation for why he and his son chased Arbery:

“McMichael stated he was in his front yard and saw the suspect from the break-ins ‘hauling ass’ down Satilla Drive toward Burford Drive. McMichael stated he then ran inside his house and called to Travis (McMichael) and said, ‘Travis, the guy is running down the street, let’s go.’ McMichael stated he went to his bedroom and grabbed his .357 Magnum and Travis grabbed his shotgun because they ‘didn’t know if the male was armed or not.’”

Arbery was not armed, and he was not the “suspect” in any break-ins. He was a former high school football player who liked to stay active and was jogging in the small city of Brunswick, Glynn County, Ga., near his home.

Neither of the McMichaels was arrested or charged. From the time this happened in late February, they have had the luxury of sleeping in their own beds, free men, while Arbery’s body is confined to a coffin, deep in a grave at New Springfield Baptist Church in Alexander, Ga.

According to The New York Times, “Gregory McMichael is a former Glynn County police officer and a former investigator with the local district attorney’s office who retired last May.” The local prosecutor recused herself from the case because Gregory McMichael had worked in her office. The next prosecutor, a district attorney, also recused himself because his son worked for the district attorney for whom Gregory McMichael had worked.

But, before the second prosecutor’s recusal, he said in a letter obtained by The Times:

“It appears Travis McMichael, Greg McMichael and Bryan Williams were following in ‘hot pursuit,’ a burglary suspect, with solid first hand probable cause, in their neighborhood, and asking/telling him to stop. It appears their intent was to stop and hold this criminal suspect until law enforcement arrived. Under Georgia law this is perfectly legal.”

The third and current prosecutor on the case said Tuesday that the case should be heard by a grand jury.

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Arbery was enjoying a nice run on a beautiful day when he began to be stalked by armed men.

What must that have felt like?

What must he have felt when he approached the truck and saw that one of the stalkers was brandishing a shotgun?

What must he have thought when he fought for the gun?

What must he have thought when he took the first bullet?

Or the second?

What must he have thought as he collapsed to the ground and could feel the life leaving his body?

Ahmaud Arbery was a human being, a person, a man with a family and a future, who loved and was loved. The McMichaels took all of that away on a glorious Sunday afternoon in February. Who knows what Arbery could have become. He was young, his life a buffet of possibilities. Friday would have been his 26th birthday.

If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
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#15300 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2020-May-07, 18:40

View Posty66, on 2020-May-07, 17:30, said:

Charles Blow at NYT:


No doubt this is Trump's position: There were very good people....on both sides.

PS: The two - Travis McMichael, Greg McMichael - have been arrested and charged with murder.

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Black Lives Matter. / "I need ammunition, not a ride." Zelensky
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