No, I Never Did Hear of "Supply Change".

 

Trump: Things like supply change. You never heard that term pic.twitter.com/Cr0RU9z2F0

— Acyn (@Acyn) February 6, 2024

I've heard of the "supply chain" and so has everyone else. We heard about it especially when it was broken during COVID shutdown when you couldn't find toilet paper or rubbing alcohol or Lysol.  Does Trump really misremember the phrase as "supply change"? As in, we changed from when we could find things in the store to where we could not find things in the store? 

Trump's economy was stupid and not great. It really wasn't what we were promised. His only success was inherited.  The story of his life. 

Maybe he thinks this is a phrase he invented, like when he invented "priming the pump". Trump is the Edison of prevarication--he's always inventing things. Sometimes he Columbuses stuff people have known since forever and asks if they've heard about it, like he's a pioneer. This is because the guy who can't remember people's names, even now, always tries to cover up for his lapses. He's covering up for one of his major lapses right now--he forgot to secure the border during his first term. He could have made it a priority since he ran on it, but he forgot and only shut down the government when he lost the midterms. 

And couldn't get his wall money because Mr. Art of the Deal had no leverage. And shutting down the government didn't help anything. It was costly and dumb. His immigration policy was meh at best. And abusive of human rights at worst. 

I Say Mint the Coin.

 

OMG, is it debt ceiling season so soon! I mean, no sooner than Republicans have control of the House of Representatives with a Democratic president in office, and they party like it's 2011?  Look, I hate this conversation. My first opinion is: Take the Uzi from the Babies.  Democrats should have nuked the debt ceiling thing when we had the chance because the Republicans were telegraphing that they are not by any means good faith partners in doing crazy regular things like paying the government's just debts like the Constitution says we should, and like responsible people who don't want a credit crisis would do. 

Barring that, it would have been greeeeaaat if Democrats could have been advertising "SCOREBOARD" every time asshole Republicans pretended they are the fiscally responsible people, when all Republican presidents do is pass tax cuts and run up the deficit. Trump put damn near 8 trillion on the debt. He passed tax cuts. His COVID response was a deadly stupid wasteful expensive mess. And he lost net jobs, which is amazeballs--no one else did that. 

But all Republican presidents recently have run up the debt, fail to really do wonders creating jobs and fuck up the economy. They can't help themselves. They get help from the Republicans in congress after all. 

Not One Republican

 

Yesterday, the Senate Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act. It's accurate to say Senate Democrats, because not one Republican helped pass it. Not one.  This bill brings significant benefits for health care costs and fighting climate change, and could have been even better, but Republicans spitefully blocked a provision that would have capped insulin costs to $35 a month. 

Why do I say they spitefully did that? Well, they could have just left in in the bill. But just as with their snit fit over the PACT Act, I really suspect they didn't want to be remotely helpful and were mad that this significant legislation would be passed at all. It's not like they seem to especially care about the environment, anyway, and they complain about prescription medicine costs--but doing something about them smacks too much of making government do stuff.

I could be disappointed, but not surprised. Remember, it was at this point in Barack Obama's presidency that Senator Mitch McConnell made clear that obstruction in order to hopefully deny Obama a second term was the actual goal of congressional Republicans. It didn't work for them, but here they are, looking for all the world like they have the same obstructionist strategy. 

The bill is expected to reduce the deficit and moderately curb inflation. To hear Republicans tell it, you would think inflation (a global phenomenon brought on by digging out of the COVID-19 recession and supply chain issues) was a purely local phenomenon and all Joe Biden's fault. You think if they wanted to demonstrate the genius of fiscal conservatism, they would offer suggestions?

Uh, no. They are just going to complain. This is why I am fed up with people who blow smoke about bipartisanship and unity and so on. Instead of being a part of the solution by passing meaningful legislation, they seem happy to gesture in the direction of progress and say "See, I tried to black that. You're welcome."

Not one Republican voted for this bill. As far as I'm concerned, not one Republican should stay in office.

Is There a Better Way?

 

The White House released a statement that basically says, "if you are vaccinated, we have your back, but if you are unvaccinated, there's only so much we can do." That's some pretty stark stuff, but I'm not actually sure how many ways are left to tell the actual grown adults (not the under 5 year olds who can't get the vaccine, or the eligible minors who might be prevented by their grown adult parents) that play-time has been over. Here we are, over 800K US people dead of COVID-19, and there are still people who want to claim it's the government taking away freedoms--not their bullshit ideas of freedom taking away other people's lives. 

There's only so much you can do with people who won't be vaccinated, won't social distance, and won't mask up. They made their choice. They insisted on it. Lecturing is supposed to be useless because it makes them double-down. Doom-saying supposedly just makes them more paranoid. What's left? Once the anti-responsibility folks start pretending they've been Nuremburged and Mengeled, other than a firm sock to the snooter I don't know what course-corrects their deluded asses. 

Especially when conservative vice-signaling seems to rely in part on vaccination-defiance. There really doesn't seem to be a point to trying not to politicize the vaccines since that ship is sailing away, setting a course for the Virgin Sea. Because they have to be free...free to... 

Look, I'm not the one to tell the Biden Administration they are fucking up the messaging just yet, but in part, they are. The thing with mutations is, you don't know what you are going to get, ever. That's why I'm pissed off at people who already want to declare that the Omicron variant is less deadly than Delta--we don't know that because hospitalizations and deaths are a lagging indicator anyway, and because post-infection syndromes exist. Also, there is likelihood the reinfection and a double-team of Omicron and Delta could occur, and we already know Delta is really deadly. 

O Tempora! Omicron!

 

The thing with Covid-19 is that Covid-19 started in 2019 and it's 2021 and we're still going through it, and it does not look like we are getting out of it for real anytime soon. Sure, maybe in the US we didn't think we had a COVID-19 problem until sometime in early 2020, but the thing with a pandemic is, by the time you know you've got one, depending on the rate of transmission, it's already ahead of you. Viruses replicate quickly, which means mutations are just this amazing verification of Darwinian stuff we can watch in real time, and in a kind of entirely unamused anxiety. 

And on news that there was a kind of "Nu" variant, the financial market was already reacting to the fear that we were going to have spikes like we saw with Delta. Which is entirely probable. It appears the mutations with the Omicron variant specifically would relate to the protein spike that vaccines and antibody-based treatments attack, meaning that this variation could be more likely to evade vaccination, and possibly earlier infection. 

So, a couple of things: transmissibility does not equal deadliness. We can't be sure that the Omicron variation is more likely to kill someone than its better-understood kin. Also, less protection against a specific variant isn't the same thing as no protection--it still makes sense to be vaxxed to the max. But with caution, I do think it is interesting that Omicron variant-infected people identified as having traveled from South Africa are represented by at least one person not at all vaxxed (in Europe) and vaxxed plus booster (Israel). This shouldn't tell us vaccination is useless--it should tell us we need to vax harder because we aren't getting "herd immunity" any other way!

And our failures in doing that are partially a capitalist choice, and partially a disinfo failure. In a culture that values free speech, democratic free nations suck at figuring out how to shut down liars and grifters. Also, I have to commend South Africa for identifying this variant, that will be attributed to having developed in SA unfairly. It could have happened anywhere--it was discovered in South Africa because they are a leader in virology science. 

Also, I have to be an entire arse about the name--how we could have had Abbot and Costello fun with the New/Nu variant (ok, it's not that funny, but still!) And it's clearly not funny that the western lettering Xi is the same for the Chinese president and for the Greek letter Xi that the new variant could have been marked by, and that also seems like it had humor potential but no--not very appropriate. 

I like Omicron as a name. It is the Giotto circle simplicity of Greek letters, but it is the 1980s Transformers-level naming for villians. The Omnicron variant. OMG, by Crom!. If a virus was as big as a micron, it would be a very big deal. 

Look, I take my inappropriate humor where I can get it. And I think Pfizer and Merck and them already know how to do a booster for this new development. I'm not actually all that phased because we know the drill by now--mask up, wash your hands. But I always suspect someone will try to politically benefit from disaster. And that is what this COVID set-back represents. And I hate that, because the people who would do that are the actual worst. 

Sociopaths Shouldn't Be in Government 3: Rand Paul

 

Being 16 months late in reporting the purchase of a particular stock could look like a mere oversight in some regards, like if one was updating one's portfolio as frequently as, say, David Perdue did. It stands out spectacularly when the purchase of one particular stock occurs one month after having been briefed on Covid-19 and if it were the only stock that had been singularly selected almost as if one was persuaded this particular stock was going places. 

So what the whole hell happened there? Did Kelley Paul get one hell of a tip from somewhere? And where oh where could that have been? Because you know, there were all kinds of tips going round back in the day. Only, it's only Rand Paul that misremembered what took place until 16 months later. Like he thought he'd be slick and avoid investigation, or something.

Now, whoa, whoa, whoa, you might say, doesn't the article suggest that the Pauls haven't earned money on that stock?  Well, whoa, whoa, whoa, yourselves, they haven't sold it, and the Senator from Kentucky was just out here being not at all helpful regarding arresting COVID-19 spread.  Do you suppose a man with 3/4ths the lungs he was born with and even had COVID-19 himself, and is actually trained as a doctor, thinks "What the hell, vector away you free-souled little sonsabitches?" without some kind of material impetus? I dunno. Maybe he's thinking remdesivir can make a comeback.

You Wouldn't Take This So Lightly

 

I don't know know how I would personally feel if the state I was supposedly running just broke its record in COVID-19 cases and also hospitalizations, but I absolutely imagine that if I had even thought about scoffing at the seriousness of the pandemic by making whimsical campaign merchandise* about flouting simple, solid, epidemiological advice because CULTURE WAR!!!!!, I'd probably feel like 31 flavors of untreated raw sewage. But I don't think Ron DeSantis is that kind of guy: he's probably all good with it. 

How do I know?  Well, he's even implying he would let his own, too-young-to-be vaccinated kids go maskless (similar to uncanny Valley Girl and Trump by marriage Lara) while promoting an executive order to let parents choose whether kids have to mask or not--basically banning local mask mandates for schools. Even if we know pretty well that having the unvaccinated mask is a really good idea. 

It's a decision that doesn't seem all that great, to me. Pediatricians are saying the Delta variant of COVID-19 does spread in kids, and whether it's uniquely dangerous to them or not, why the hell spread it, and why the hell let mutations flourish (ok, that last question is mostly mine, but,  seriously, give it time, and maybe some variation will escape vaccinations and be deadly AF--so why tempt fate?) 

Right now, people are losing their  unvaccinated family members (and even some sicker or older vaccinated family) and begging people to get vaccinated even if they weren't big believers before.  There isn't one thing in the world wrong with making the choice to both vaccinate yourself and urge it for the people around you--and to mask yourself just because you could, temporarily, be capable of breakthrough infection and spread. It's just a civic duty and a kindness to others. It's just caring enough about the people around you to not want them or their loved ones sick, any more than you want to be sick or see your loved ones sick. 

TWGB: Hot Accountability Summer?

 

I know, I know. At this point in my blogging about Trump, my expectations should stay low. Of course Trump has been impeached twice and is a one-term wonder, but he never was convicted by the Senate and his staunchest defenders insist his political story is not over. (Indeed, his most looney-tunes defenders maintain he never left office at all and that the Biden Administration itself is a kind of hoax, which, like the moon landing, a round planet, and the existence of birds*, seems pretty hard to pull off without an improbable amount of people in on the gag, but since when do facts persuade the self-deluded of anything?)

But news that indictments against the Trump Organization could happen as soon as next week have me like a child again, full of hope that maybe, the shambolic obscenity that disgraced the presidency for four years will get some measure of reckoning. Maybe an indictment means all his business loans, dubiously obtained at this point in the Trump credit history, are abruptly called to a disastrous effect. Maybe his resorts lose their liquor licenses (would you stay in a Trump property without booze?). Maybe someone with the Trump last name gets perp-walked. 

Sugar-plums dance in one's head and the heart fills with the honeyed yogurt* of schadenfreude. 

Maybe it helps that I subscribe to the rolling snowball theory of karma. A comeuppance starts with a small thing, but then small things lead to a lot. The Fates aren't merely weavers, but the authors of tragedies. They start small--and build. And Trump is a small thing, hoisted upon his own pedestal by so many--but when do they lose faith?

You could wonder about the 500 folks now arrested for the insurrection attempt at the Capitol, and how their hero has little to offer them, now. Or the "Trump train" members who are being sued under the Klan Act. Do they wonder what they were doing it for--how very little return they would get on their emotional investment in their idol? What does it say about the Republican party and its operatives that they engaged in spy shit against Democratic and liberal groups and so reminded us again that Republicans are mostly paranoid assholes representing Big Money when they aren't minging theocratic authoritarian busybodies or exhibitionistly and grandiosely prolix racists*? (I'll bet those emmerdeurs  are actually pretty satisfied with themselves, and of such is life.)

Let Them Know, Joe!

 

President Biden's speech this evening presented us with good things--policies that will move us forward from the trials and tribulations of the pandemic, the resulting economic damage, and the deep divisions we still feel from the flame-out and attempted insurrection under the former guy, and they were presented with a fervid belief in the possibility and reality of America's greatness. It was a speech that promised to build on the successes of the first hundred days and invited the "other side" to please come along for the ride to do things that would be both really popular and beneficial.

He let us know: we could be creating good-paying jobs for the workers we currently have in a way that uses what we once trumpeted as American ingenuity and the spirit of invention. We could be working to provide cleaner water and safer infrastructure. We could be educating today's kids for tomorrow's jobs. We could be putting our money where our mouths are and invest in the future we want to see--because we believe in America. The ability to pull ourselves up and do better is within our reach, so let's get reaching. 

Joe Biden is in favor of the idea of America and the ideals of America. He just wants to do stuff better. Come on, man. Isn't that what we're about?

And you know what? I applauded the hell out of Biden's vision. He promises tough, vigilant national security and a robust economy--I'm for it. He wants us to reform immigration in a way that is not cruel and tries to confront the realities of migration in terms of the economic, political, and environmental challenges people are facing in their nation of origin. He's a realist, not an ideologue, but he does believe in the liberal tradition and the small "d" democracy that are this nation's great heritage. We are a nation made of an idea. And the idea is really good. We should probably do more of it.

( As a side note: Fuck you, Rich Lowry. We aren't a nation in the sense of people bound by blood, religion, or even a common tongue, and the expansion of this country's borders historically, combined with immigration, make the idea of thinking of us in simple geographical terms ludicrous. What are we? A creedal nation. An aspiration nation. An idea set forth by our nation's forefathers. The blood and soil notion has nothing to do with our historical or current experienced reality--but thanks for playing and demonstrating the limitations of trying to even perform discourse with today's "intellectual" conservatives!) 

Of course Republicans didn't like this speech.

Sleepy Ted Cruz might look like he's just dreaming about Cancun in the picture above, but I think he's really just closing his eyes because the idea of Democrats putting on their work boots to accomplish real things for their constituents while he's just slipping into his clown shoes every morning to do prat falls and seltzer sprays for great culture war justice might almost make him self-aware enough to develop an actual personality instead of just hating libs and calling it a personality. 

And I have nothing, not one damn thing, to say about Tim Scott's speech because there is nothing to say about it. It was a Republican rebuttal to a speech Biden didn't give about an America no one in particular lives in, and Joni Ernst, Bobby Jindal, or Marco Rubio all have done similarly out of touch responses. I am unmotivated by the GOP's message regardless of the face they put on it, because the message is always the same: Blame Democrats for stuff and do basically nothing but tax cuts and culture war. 

Anyway, my takeaway is that the man the Former Guy once called "Sleepy Joe Biden" is wide awake and ready to do stuff for the American people, and Republicans can't do anything but complain about it. And that just figures. And if they can't even do bipartisanship when it's good ideas that create jobs (do they hate jobs?) or provide health care innovations like lowering insurance premiums and drug costs and funding research for cancer and vaccines (so what, are Republicans in favor of high drug costs and cancer?) then fuck'em and let the electorate figure out who's putting in the hours. 

Joe let them know. And I am yet another woman (like Vice-President Harris and House Speaker Pelosi--the historic event of two women behind the president during an address of this nature) happy to stand behind this president and what he wants to do for us--like support VAWA, gun control, equal pay, protections for LGBTQ workers and so much more. 

To echo the sentiment from the last Democratic president: Yes, we can! And I want to believe we will.

While They Were in the Nursery

 

Things had come to such a petty pass when last I blogged that I took a small break in the hopes that the revelation of so much smallness would not, actually, shrink my spirit like cotton trousers in a warm soak. The American Rescue Act passed, and not a single Republican wanted dick to do with it. Dr. Seuss they have time for. (I hear there there are more important things.) Mr. Potato Head they have time for. They will make time for lecherous cartoon skunks--before they bother with the needs of the American working class, who have been battered by the COVID-19 recession, and have been alternately told they are "essential" and treated like they are expendable if not disposable, and small businesses that need a helping hand. 

But when I saw Thursday night what we'd been missing for so long, I found myself back on my blogular bullshit. We have an adult in the White House now and the Republicans don't know how to act. Our dad kicked their dad's ass on the electoral playground and now he's kicking him in the nuts every chance he gets and they're big mad, you guys. I mean, sure, Biden is more popular than Trump ever was, but like, Trump was president, um, too? And did a job of it, right? Very productive!

And while we're at it, where's Trump's participation trophy for throwing money at pharmaceutical companies to get a vaccine going and only getting like, half a million people killed? 

Okay. Here:

Let's call it the Donald J. Trump "What Have You Got to Lose?" trophy and let him stick it wherever he puts his newspaper clippings about getting nominated for the Nobel Prize, right by the portraits of himself he bought with his fake-charity slush fund money and his also fake Time Magazine covers, because the real ones aren't always that flattering. 

But I've already spent too much breath on Trump, haven't I? (Hasn't everyone?) The real story is how the GOP had no after-Trump plan, and now they have nothing at all but "not whatever Democrats want". And since Democrats just mostly want good government and our people not dying, broke, or sick, um, what they want looks bad, actually. 

Also they want to suppress people voting because of course they do. They've given up on expanding their map and have definitely reached the "quiet parts out loud" part of their desperation--but it's okay, because they kind of think the Supreme Court is with them on this. I mean, compare what the representative from AZ said with Buckley and Bozell from another era. (The sins of the fathers, etc.) They can't win on the kitchen table talk, so they want a culture war. 

But what does that even mean, anymore? When Marco Rubio sides with an Amazon union bid because of culture war--it means less than nothing. When alt-right gadfly Milo Yiannopoulos declares himself an ex-gay for attention, we get a little nearer to whatever minute we're in now on the conservative clock (or check with Andrew Sullivan, still gay but basically a phrenologist).  

The conservative case seems to be a whole battle with the entire arc of history. (For everyone bending the arc of history towards justice, there's these pricks, riding athwart with dragging spurs yelling "stop".) The concept of time, even. The idea of getting out of the nursery. It's meatheads who practically swallow their tongues in the face of men who aren't their kind of manly and women who aren't their kind of feminine, families that don't look like the dolls that came with their dollhouse playset and human beings that aren't easily labeled. Who might be from somewhere else or even have a different idea of God.

So here's my take--I don't want unity with toddlers who break their toys and have tantrums when they don't get things their way, and who don't see others, for example, atheist, feminist and queer, or in any other way multicultural or diverse, or divergent in perspective, as deserving of respect or recognition. The GOP lost me when I was in the nursery, and so were they--when the Silent Majority of Nixon gave way to Reaganism, trickle down, and the culture war I always kind of thought was a little bit personal--against me. 

They are still in the nursery, and have opinions about, I guess, reefer madness. But we need to move on, even if Republicans aren't coming. So I just don't give a shit about unity or bipartisanship. I care about doing what works and protecting real people, not cartoon characters and plastic spuds. I hope Republicans get over their Trump-Daddy issues eventually, but they can't hold up fucking progress.

TWGB: Legacy, 400,000

 

-84 days after the 1st recorded passing due to COVID-19, the US surpassed 100k deaths.
-121 days later, the US surpassed 200k deaths.
-84 days later, the US surpassed 300,000 deaths
-36 days later, the US topped 400k deaths.https://t.co/AqwjyKWQz3

— Rashida Tlaib (@RashidaTlaib) January 19, 2021

In this tweet, Congresswoman Tlaib notes the rapid advance of the COVID-19 death toll, because the number is staggering, because these were our fellow Americans, because the damage done cannot go unnoted. Given the advantages the United States had, or should have had, so very little was made of our resources, because the people at the top (Trump above all) did not know how or couldn't be bothered or both.

If you need to know, my heart was in a place "more of sorrow than of anger" when Trump was elected, even understanding all I ever thought I wanted to know of this man's character. I was concerned about his racism and incomplete understanding of the American project in terms of our democratic values as a creedal nation, but I was stricken that so many others believed, or wanted to believe, in his version of greatness. 

His version of greatness lost the House and the Senate for his party, the trust of our allies, our esteem around the world, millions of jobs, he has widened inequality, he lost us the unique privilege of being a nation that enjoyed a peaceful transition of power according to our democratic elections. He added $7.8 trillion to the national debt. He never really built his stupid wall, even if he shut down the government a couple times.  He didn't end wars so much as shuffle around military personnel. He made the cultural domestic cold war at the minimum room temp. At worst, we will see more terror.

But he lost 400,000 human beings, in part because he thought the ones being lost were the right ones--blue state minorities. He knew the disease was bad and lied to us. I could go through the lot of the TWGB stacked case against Trump's presidency: his useful idiocy for Russia; his shameful act at Helsinki; his miserable cabinet choices; his lackluster policy; the way his snotty rich kid thin-skinned inability to fake competency for the media dug a deeper hole for himself that he subsequently blamed the media, not himself, for; the way he furthered distrust amongst his supporters for government over all, and so on, but still and all, the least little thing he could have done correctly, when faced with a challenge that harmed American lives, was show the least bit of a damn. 

Trump's supporters, some of whom seriously believe the vote was fiddled and Trump somehow won in a landslide that was snowed-in by fraudulent ballots, don't seem to know that 400,000 Americans dying because Trump was incompetent is bad, I guess. Some of them prefer his lies to the truth, and don't believe the death toll is real, either. It was the high testing, you know. The numbers looked bad because Trump was, I dunno. Willing to let them look bad. (As if!) And masks are bad, and state economies should be wide open--because liberty! And wolverines! And I guess, 1776. 

I've never been here to praise Trump, and I am not here to bury him either, because I do not believe this is even the last of the TWGB series, because the damage that men do lives long after they leave office, and he hasn't even left yet, and there is a lot of room for fuckery in the hours to come. But the worst he did was let 400,000 plus people die and didn't try to stop it. He tried to take credit for Operation Warp Speeding a vaccine into existence, but the distribution--the part that is the government's job--is fucked. 

At one term, two elections, no popular vote, the lowest polling of any modern president, and two impeachments, Trump is clearly a disaster.  Reputational salvage experts can swarm over this shipwreck forever looking for accomplishments to demonstrate that this was a hard-working and very masculine SOB, but what Trump mostly accomplished was watching his shows, golfing, and Tweeting. 

Anyway, Trump's golf game has probably never improved, he's been kicked, quite justifiably, off Twitter, and I for one, think it most apt if he just watched his dumb news shows, and was never a part of the news cycle again.

Especially after letting 400,000 plus of us die. I welcome a president who will mourn with us as he tries to correct this terrible tragedy.

God Rest Ye Merry....Gentlemen.

Fate of $900 billion coronavirus relief package in doubt as House GOP blocks a vote on Trump's demand for $2,000 stimulus checks https://t.co/FxznwMAXQh

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) December 24, 2020

There was, uh, something else we're not supposed to call them, but they make it very hard.

Trump is *Almost* There

 

He won because the Election was Rigged. NO VOTE WATCHERS OR OBSERVERS allowed, vote tabulated by a Radical Left privately owned company, Dominion, with a bad reputation & bum equipment that couldn’t even qualify for Texas (which I won by a lot!), the Fake & Silent Media, & more! https://t.co/Exb3C1mAPg

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 15, 2020

Take a look at the first two words, because they are the only ones that count: He won. Trump is pretty close to the epiphany that Biden is surely going to be president, but pretty much everything else in the tweet is absolute discountable nonsense. There were observers. The votes weren't all tabulated by Trump's new "villian of the day". He's implying that red state Texas has been using "bum" equipment and he won by "a lot" there, which definitely is eyebrow-raising. And he thinks the rigged Fake News media was against him...pfft! If anything they liked to play him down to avoid a panic (don't know where I heard something like that before, but you're welcome.)

 But the "Watters' World" segment he re-tweets hammers home for me the dopiest thing about Trump's re-election campaign, which started in January of 2017. That's right. He campaigned on his own behalf, in rallies and with selling Trump-logoed swag, for the last four years. 

This constant campaigning obviously cut into his golf time, and his television-watching time. It made his Twitter-game a bit more boring. It took away from the time that he had to defend himself against the FBI's Russia investigation into foreign interference with the 2016 campaign and the subsequent Mueller investigation. It certainly led to his impeachment for trying to get unfavorable information on former Vice-President Joe Biden from Ukraine. And, if you wander out on that very stable (and genius!) limb, you might become persuaded that it really took away from doing the one thing that might have helped the campaign the most--

Being an actual full-time president.

Trump obsessed over ratings, loyalty, boat parades, and crowd-size. Things he did not obsess over: competence. COVID-19 response. Acting like a full-grown man. Joe Biden didn't need big crowds, boat parades, loyalty oaths or whatever Trump was about to get a win--he had competence on his side. The ability to be a mature adult, and bring about coalition and not spin out like a toddler when things didn't go his way. He ran a responsible adult campaign for responsible adults. And adults responded.

Now, that might sound a little like I'm calling Trump's fans less-than mature people as well, and I want to get this straight--um, yes? If you watched the last four years of Trump and the excitable, indictable yeggs that have rotated in and out of his inner circle and think "These are the best people doing the best job for our country", I do have to question your judgment, but more than that, the distrust for mainstream media that has taken hold and the propaganda that has taken its toll from Fox News (lately derided by Trump's MAGA marchers) , OANN, Breitbart, etc. More people turned out for Trump this year than 2016. (That worries the hell out of me.) Only so many more people turning out for Biden, despite his more low-key campaign, spared us a Trump win.

No one has ever campaigned harder than Trump did. In a conclusion that shocks me to my core, if Trump even did a half-assed better job as president and steered us through COVID and avoided the worst of this economic downturn, he would have won. All he needed was to be half-assed good. 

And he didn't do it.

Trump on Steroids

 

Right now, Trump thinks he is the Lizard King, and can do anything. He's been on a Twitter roll that simply can't be anything to do with Dan Scavino or anyone else--it's all Trump.  He hasn't just come home to the White House, but has chosen to make weird, conflicting pronouncements whilst still operating as the President, like declaring that negotiations for COVID-19 economic relief are totally off on one hand, but agreeing with Fed Chairman Powell on the other hand that something must be done to prevent disaster, 

Although Trump has used Twitter to wreck the stock market with trash talk before, I don't even know if he did it intentionally this time. (By the by, did you know Trump's economic prowess in the trade war has resulted in an ever-widening trade deficit and man, he does not know how to fix that shit or even whether it is bad or should be fixed? Because those things are totally true.) 

He also declassified a bunch of Russia investigation information either several hours ago or a long time ago. (his sense of time might be a bit, um, unbounded.)Which might even include the redacted bits of the Mueller report, for all I know. I wonder which intelligence agency (he's mad at all of them) he's talking to. He's also in an online relationship with the Hoover Institute's Paul Sperry (sorry Melania--or is that congratulations?).

Anyway, Trump's insistence that he gets what COVID-19 is all about now (When I was a child I caught a fleeting glimpse out of the corner of my eye. I turned to look but it was gone; I cannot put my finger on it now. The child is grown. The dream is gone. I have become comfortably numb.) seems belied by basically everything he's been doing. And his doctors are not telling the truth and the White House hasn't been telling the truth, because we should understand Trump wasn't getting tested regularly for the virus, so we don't know exactly when he was infected, but what we can surmise is that yes, this guy is Donny Crappleseed and yes, he still doesn't understand prophylaxis. 

And he's presidenting under the influence of whatever cocktail the good docs at Walter Reed gave him, and now that he's "home", if rumors are true, whatever additions he might be able to get from "not so good doctors".  I've joked that we might not be able to tell the difference between regular Trump and Trump with special additives. It could behoove him then, to maybe interrupt his responsibilities/campaign until he makes any kind of sense, but let's face it--he never did! 

Also, Pence's Dr's note is awfully nice but I am glad he agreed to the plexiglass barrier. Not just because of COVID. But because having laid down with a dirty dog like Trump for so long, I fear he might have fleas. 

TWGB: Flynn Was Unmasked!

Wow, are we doing a thing about unmasking again and going back to the beginning regarding why Flynn was so shady that, for example, Obama warned Trump personally about not hiring the guy in the first place? Michael Flynn, who was apparently working for Turkey (and possibly, still, Russian interests) and the Trump campaign all at once? 

Oh, okay. On the face of it, a claim that Obama-era officials including VP Biden requested a person who was in contact with a foreign national under surviellance (Kislyak) be unmasked seems to me like it can't be targeting because I don't know how anyone was supposed to know they were supposedly "targeting" Flynn if they didn't know it was even him until he was unmasked? That sounds wrong. 

But cleverer people on the right than me (because honestly, I never would have come up with this retort) have said of course they had to be targeting Flynn, because of when they were asking for the unmasking and whether the person turned out to be Flynn after the request.  So they were asking about something that looked shady to them and it turned out to be Flynn? 

Hmm. Even if they were playing a hunch that paid off, that still sounds to me like a Flynn problem, not an Obama problem or a Biden problem, doesn't  it? Because he was still the guy on the call. I guess one could ask for transcripts though! I mean, if everyone wants to assume all Flynn's calls were, I dunno, perfect. But since Flynn was fired for lying to VP Pence and the FBI about his phone calls, and that was the official story in 2017, frankly, I don't know if Trump and them should actually be pressing that right now. 

Weird how they backed away from Flynn until Barr waded in and the prosecution decided that they couldn't follow through on a case where the defendant admitted he was guilty previously--and also supposedly substantially assisted with the Mueller investigation? 

That doesn't sound right, does it? (It sounds like Barr might be scuttling the prosecution, maybe in part because Flynn's lawyers could have a bit of reasonable doubt on their side--maybe--because of claims of bias and whatnot, but also because Barr is actually trying to cover Trump's ass like a cheap pair of briefs. Many people who know very well what the deal is feel that Barr should resign for this kind of ethical bullshit.) 

Anyway, Judge Emmett Sullivan doesn't seem to love any of the recent shenanigans to let Flynn off the hook, calling for amicus curiae argumenta as well as asking another judge to investigate whether Flynn should be held in contempt for wasting everybody's goddamn time lying to the court with his original guilty plea.  Flynn isn't yet out of the woods at all, at all. 

But as for the OBAMAGATE! shilling--goodness gracious! Can the mainstream media please recognize flak when shredded tinfoil is thrown up at them? Trump fans and associates are deflecting from Trump's manifest failures regarding the COVID-19 crisis and the attending economic crisis, and we should not forget, oh hell no, that doing a callback to Mueller (which did not exonerate) is a weird way to remind us he was always terrible, not a way to introduce a way that he's less at fault for anything, or that Obama and Biden did a damn thing wrong. 

Don't be played. Flynn lied. Russia certainly interfered (regardless of Trump's regular pronouncements to the contrary). And blaming Obama or Biden for Trump and them being found out is just tacky and unsportsmanlike. 

Trump's Failed "Mission Accomplished"

The giant banners one either side of Trump's podium proclaiming that "America Leads the World in Testing" were there to bolster the White House message: "We have met the moment. We have prevailed."  In other words, "We're declaring victory even while the invisible enemy has infiltrated the White House and started taking our dudez." 

The banners themselves proclaim more or less the only good thing the administration has got going--the testing. But about that; there is higher per capita testing elsewhere and the levels of testing we have aren't up to what would be needed for a successful reopen. Since it's what Trump has got, it's what's going on the banner, even if Trump still wants to congratulate himself for closing travel from CHYYYYNA, the results of which have been overstated and revised upwards generously. 

They had the damn banners, though, so what was the takeaway from Trump's Rose Garden display? 

Well, Trump has a Plan B if declaring victory over COVID-19 doesn't work (and it won't, because cases are spreading in the heartland even while Trump urges "liberation" and because viruses, like facts, don't care about Trump's feelings) which is OBAMAGATE. Which is? Trump doesn't himself seem to know, but it's genuinely terrible and you can look it up, he says. He feels very genuinely aggrieved that the FBI et als looked into Russian assistance to his 2016 campaign and then completely sandbagged him by very cleverly not actually releasing any information about it before Election Day. 

Look, it's a tactic, not a strategy, so of course it doesn't make sense. Also, Trump doesn't do strategy, or he'd have come up with one for COVID-19 before declaring victory.

Also, the victory talk was dampened by Trump's problem answering simple questions from good reporters. 

"Don't ask me, ask China that question, okay?"

Trump abruptly ended today's press briefing after an exchange with Weija Jiang, a reporter for CBS News who was born in China, asked why he views testing as a "global competition" pic.twitter.com/X1bZXkELLZ

— Bloomberg QuickTake (@QuickTake) May 12, 2020

First--it's a global competition because the White House has to find a silver lining somewhere, and considering the cases and deaths, that's a tough one--but Trump can't admit to that. But as for "ask China that question, okay?" It's pretty clear he needs to escape responsibility at all--to him, China is at fault because the disease started there, even if there is no proof that it was either designed or released in a lab accident, or that the US didn't have significant intelligence to start making preparations to do something right away. Blaming China is his response to claims he could have done more. Taking out the utter weakness of that response on an Asian American reporter is....proof of the extremely bad optics of that choice.

He was supposed to be projecting competence, but it ended with conspiracy theories and racism and annoyance at female reporters. And I'm not at all surprised. He is, despite all the best efforts of all the worst people, what he is.

And it isn't much.

The Way He Wants It

Trump's refusal to permit members of his coronavirus task force to testify in front of the House was a remarkable bit of open political retaliation that set up a situation where only the president’s own party would be in charge of hearings into his conducthttps://t.co/jueoV8iioI

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) May 7, 2020

Well. Sometimes government departments speak too much. Sometimes what they say is subject to all kinds of interpretation.

What you need to know, though, is:

Per Johns Hopkins, that's one of the highest rates in the world https://t.co/oOg00EC6Oq https://t.co/C4KFDItvnB pic.twitter.com/XMzjD53Xtb

— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) May 6, 2020

The US has the highest rate of infection, and the most deaths. We are testing at an incredible rate, but because we have to, because we are well and truly fucked. Trump doesn't want you to know that this country is unique in particular for it's fucked-ness. But we really are. With no real remedy, only panaceas:

NEW: Dr. Rick Bright, the ousted BARDA chief who had led vaccine development for Covid-19, revealed his whistleblower complaint today.

He says Trump admin demanded NY and NJ be "flooded" with hydroxychloroquine as an unproven "panacea."

Doc: https://t.co/B9GmNH1kkr pic.twitter.com/ktovlnMoE3

— Adam Klasfeld (@KlasfeldReports) May 5, 2020

This is how Trump wants it. It isn't good. It isn't great. It is what we will get.

Capitalism is Sick 2

U.S. stock futures rise after payrolls report shows record number of Americans lost their jobs in April https://t.co/SU8W8AzUhQ pic.twitter.com/BlBKToFrfI

— Bloomberg Markets (@markets) May 8, 2020

The stock market is not the economy, lather, rinse, repeat. The market has optimism based on plans to reopen the economy, but there is no guarantee that business will take off because many people are a) broke and/or b) concerned for their health going back to work in a potentially unsafe environment. There won't be a "normal" anytime soon.