...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
UPDATE:
Thursday, April 30, 2020
Pence update
He did wear a mask to the factory today. But didn't have one on at the Mayo fucking clinic yesterday.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
UPDATE:
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
UPDATE:
Wednesday, April 29, 2020
Go for it, Justin
He'd probbly pull off Bernie voters as well as Trump voters. On balance, I think he'd pull off more Trump voters, but who knows? I don't want an Amash presidency, but I also don't want a Biden one. Either one is preferable to Trump, however.
Idiot
The mask doesn't cover your eyes. Nor does it tape your mouth shut.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
UPDATE:
Of course they did. Besides: even if he didn't know, for some reason, he walked into a place where literally every other person was wearing a mask. He wouldn't wonder? What about the people who accompanied him? Did they wear masks?Second lady Karen Pence said Thursday that Vice President Pence had been unaware of the Mayo Clinic's policy requiring all visitors to wear a face covering until after he left the facility on Tuesday.
"As our medical experts have told us, wearing a mask prevents you from spreading disease. And knowing he doesn’t have COVID-19, he didn’t wear one," she said on "Fox & Friends."
"It was actually after he left Mayo Clinic that he found out they had a policy of asking everyone to wear a mask," the second lady continued.
[...]
On Tuesday, the clinic tweeted, then deleted, a message that it informed Pence of its masking policy prior to his arrival in Rochester.
"Mayo shared the masking policy with the VP’s office," the clinic said in an emailed statement after deleting the tweet.
The Hill
They did. What about his own excuse: that he wanted to talk to patients "eye-to-eye"? Karen is just making an ass of herself along with him.Pence was the only individual spotted without a mask during his visit as he participated in a tour and held a roundtable discussion with physicians, nurses and researchers. Everyone else seen on camera with Pence had masks on, including Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn.
That will be interesting. After the backlash over the Mayo stunt, will he wear a mask at GM? How will that look - won't wear one in a health facility, but will in a factory?Pence is scheduled to travel to Indiana on Thursday to visit a General Motors facility making ventilators.
Did he honestly think he wouldn't take heat from that maskless Mayo visit?
UPDATE:
UPDATE 4/30:
He DID wear a mask to the factory. But not to the medical clinic. Brilliant.
UPDATE:
The consequences of having a stupid president
But does he have covid-19?Officials say two men in Georgia who have suffered from psychiatric problems ingested household chemicals in an effort to protect themselves against COVID-19, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.
Gaylord Lopez, director of the Georgia Poison Center, told the newspaper that a man was hospitalized on Saturday after he claimed to have ingested 16 ounces of bleach in a bid “to prevent COVID.”
“He said that he took 16 ounces,” Lopez said. “I don’t know very many patients who will take 16 ounces, but then again, it is a psych history patient.”
Lopez said the man was later transported to a psychiatric ward and has since been released.
That's quite a cocktail.The director said another man had also been hospitalized after drinking Pine-sol mixed with mouthwash, beer and pain medication.
What I want to know is how they decided how much to drink.In Georgia, Lopez said, one of the main causes behind the state’s rise in such calls in the past month is primarily due to product-mixing.
“When you mix bleach with certain types of chemicals, you produce a reaction that can cause release of noxious and toxic gases, and if you inhale enough of this stuff, you can induce a chemical pneumonia,” he told the paper.
And before you reporters ask if Trump takes any responsibility for this, the answer is "no".
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Bad move, Kirsten
So...every woman who wants to be the VP choice is going to have to do this, right?
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Bad move, Stacey
I guess she really wants that VP spot.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Gotta have meat!
And how would he get his hamberders...hambergers...you know what he means. Stop making fun of his spelling.The world's biggest meat companies, including Smithfield Foods Inc, Cargill Inc, JBS USA and Tyson, have halted operations at about 20 slaughterhouses and processing plants in North America as workers fall ill, stoking global fears of a meat shortage.
[...]
United States President Donald Trump on Tuesday ordered meat-processing plants to stay open to protect the country's food supply, despite concerns about the coronavirus outbreaks, drawing a backlash from unions that said at-risk workers required more protection.
With concerns about food shortages and supply chain disruptions, Trump issued an executive order using the Defense Production Act to mandate that the plants continue to function.
[...]
The order is designed in part to give companies legal cover with more liability protection in case employees catch the virus as a result of having to go to work.
[...]
Before issuing the executive order, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that signing the order, "... will solve any liability problems," adding, "And we always work with the farmers. There's plenty of supply."
The executive order, released on Tuesday evening, said the closure of just one large beef-processing plant could result in 10 million fewer individual servings of beef in a day.
alJazeera
You think?Unions were not impressed. Some farmers said it was too late because pigs had been euthanised already instead of the pork going to market.
The United Food and Commercial Workers union (UFCW) said in a statement that if workers were not safe, the food supply would not be either.
[...]
"When poultry plants shut down, it's for deep cleaning and to save workers' lives. If the administration had developed meaningful safety requirements early on as they should have and still must do, this would not even have become an issue," Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, said in a statement.
[...]
Administration officials and some Republicans on Capitol Hill have said businesses that are reopening need liability protection from lawsuits employees might file if they become sick.
Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, speaking to reporters on a teleconference on Tuesday that mainly centred on immigrants working in the healthcare sector, was asked about Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell's pushing for business liability protections as they reopen their operations.
"Is he saying if an owner tells a worker he needs to work next to a sick person without a mask and wouldn't be liable? That makes no sense," Schumer said.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
UPDATE:
Everything this administration does is for the benefit of big business owners & stockholders: Coronavirus edition
Please note: the government payment to DuPont is your tax dollars, not "the government's" money.It usually takes up to three months [for DuPont] to ship [Tyvek] material to Vietnam, where it is sewn into body suits, and get it back. When the federal government offered to pay for chartered flights to reduce the round trip for 750,000 items to 10 days, DuPont agreed.
NBC News
It was defintely more than $4. This is how they take your tax dollar and put them in the pockets of corporations - middle men. The suits could have been bought directly from DuPont for approximately $4 each. And why can't we know how much they atually ended up costing us?Then DuPont sold the suits to a third-party distributor for approximately $4 each, according to company documents it provided to NBC News, and that distributor sold them to the government. The company initially declined to say how much the Department of Health and Human Services paid for 750,000 suits, and it refused to identify the third-party distributor or say how much that firm charged the federal government.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.President Donald Trump and HHS, which announced the deal last week, described the arrangement as one in a string of massive successes in delivering badly needed medical equipment into the U.S. in an expedited fashion.
But for some government officials familiar with the supply-chain end of the coronavirus fight, it was yet another example of Trump's task force serving industry as the White House tried to corner the market on medical supplies.
For weeks, Trump has resisted pressure to use the full power of his office to temporarily turn the private sector into an arm of the federal government in a national emergency. He and his lieutenants instead have used the crisis to make federal assets and personnel a support group for industry, rather than the other way around, according to NBC News' interviews with dozens of public- and private-sector sources involved in various aspects of the coronavirus response.
[...]
[T]he vice president's coronavirus task force — mostly through a supply-chain unit led by Rear Adm. John Polowczyk, vice director of logistics for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and heavily influenced by White House adviser Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law — has favored some of the nation's largest corporations and ignored smaller producers of goods and services with long track records of meeting emergency needs.
[...]
They have operated almost entirely in the dark, releasing few details of their arrangements with the big companies; created a new and convoluted emergency response system; and sown confusion and distrust in the states and among the people who need medical supplies.
There is virtually no accountability for their decisions about how and where to allocate emergency equipment.
[...]
Just as DuPont wouldn't say how much the Tyvek suits cost U.S. taxpayers, a spokesperson for FedEx laughed when asked what the government is paying for each of the 40 flights the carrier has chartered for the HHS and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. But a senior government official involved in the response effort said such charter flights can cost as much as $1 million apiece, while federal agencies can borrow comparable Defense Department planes for about $10,000 an hour. A round trip from the East Coast to Vietnam on a commercial flight takes about 41 hours of flying time.
[...]
The two priorities that officials say haven't been sacrificed by Trump or his supply chain task force, dubbed "the children" inside FEMA's headquarters, are private profit and the ability of the White House to choose where supplies go.
[...]
The supply chain task force leaders pushed aside federal emergency management response teams that had long-established methods for engaging assistance from the public and private sectors. Instead, they first reached out to personal contacts.
[...]
"Jared and his friends decided they were going to do their thing," said the senior government official involved in the response effort. "It cost weeks."
[...]
One potential supplier, whose officials spoke to NBC News on the condition of anonymity to avoid hurting future contract opportunities, was originally contacted by a FEMA regional official in mid-March about producing face shields, which protect medical personnel from being sprayed with virus particles by patients.
The supplier initially bought $20,000 of material and told the regional office that production could be ramped up to 10,000 face shields per day, using a supply chain based fully in the U.S., almost immediately. But word came back that under the new system, the regional office couldn't approve the buy. The application would have to go through the main federal acquisition system, where it still sits.
[...]
For companies working with the administration, [they are required] to give control of the allocation of 60 percent of their goods to the federal government. Their normal customers, even those in need, are being denied the supplies they expected.
Tuesday, April 28, 2020
Pomp and Circumstance for the Emperor!
Apparently they do.In the past week or so, President Trump, losing his public relations battle against the coronavirus, has cloaked himself in the mantle of commander in chief.
[...]
“I want to see those shows,” Trump said of the Thunderbirds and the Blue Angels, who will fly over New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania at midday Tuesday in the first of the events that will combine the skills of the two squadrons. Of his Independence Day pageant, Trump noted that even though it was pouring last year, that “didn’t bother the pilots, didn’t bother the military,” and “we’re going to be doing that again on July Fourth.” (As a former Army officer, I can tell you that it’s not fun for soldiers to participate in these things; they have to work on a rare holiday and spend days and often nights of hard work preparing behind the scenes.) As for the U.S. Military Academy graduation, he commented that he didn’t care for the look of a ceremony with social distancing — he prefers the “nice and tight” look — but that he had done the commencement addresses at the other service academies and “I’m doing it at West Point.”
In all these anticipated events of martial showmanship — all announced at coronavirus task force briefings ostensibly intended to update the American public on the pandemic — the common denominator is the president’s desire to appropriate the military as a symbol not of the nation but of himself.
[...]
At a time of unprecedented loss and disruption to all aspects of American life, the president’s obsession with military adoration is objectively wasteful and dangerous: Whether they are Blue Angels or academy cadets, the armed forces do not exist to provide photo ops for Trump.
WaPo
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.The Pentagon paints the flyovers as a way “to thank first responders, essential personnel, and military service members as we collectively battle the spread of COVID-19,” according to a memo obtained by The Washington Post.
[...]
[H]ow many of the people being honored will get the chance to be inspired by these demonstrations, given the importance of their lifesaving work and the fact that the aeronautical thank-yous will avoid flight paths that would make it easy for people to congregate? Moreover, these flights cost $60,000 an hour. The cost of Trump’s military-inspired Fourth of July celebration is unknown, but certainly any amount of money devoted to such things is poorly spent at this juncture, and elite pilots’ lives are always at risk in these daring demonstrations.
[...]
A true leader would forgo the privilege and publicity of a U.S. Military Academy commencement address in the interests of the troops’ welfare. The Air Force Academy already held commencement exercises, with cadets seated six feet apart and parents watching at home. The Naval Academy chose to cancel graduation altogether. But this year was Trump’s turn to speak at the oldest and most storied of the academies, and he appears unwilling to give up the backdrop of 1,000 cadets and the million-dollar view of the Hudson Valley. [...] As U.S. Military Academy graduate, Lt. Gen. (retired) Mark Hertling, former commander of the Army in Europe, wrote in an op-ed for CNN, it’s more like mandatory fun for a president to fulfill his “political desires,” and that “the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.” The muted graduation event will be little more than a campaign rally with the cadets’ big day as background and footnote.
[...]
Trump is adding burdens by requiring all cadets to be there at the same time and most likely for longer periods, with all the expenses associated with supporting the corps, from laundry to mess hall staff to food. The academy is more than a school; it is a working Army base with military police and other active-duty soldiers who would need to be on duty to support not only graduation but also the intensive security procedures associated with a presidential visit (not to mention civilian law enforcement). The academy historically has adapted to accomplish its mission even in times of crisis. [...] In the midst of a pandemic, there is simply no good reason to hold a ceremony and risk the lives of all involved.
[...]
The president seeks to surround himself by military pomp to lend the appearance of strong leadership. It is the emptiest of gestures. The military parades he favors are, historically, the purview of dictators. They symbolize not just military power, but military power subservient to a supreme leader.
[...]
Perhaps Trump’s unilateral willingness to seek a militaristic solution to his pandemic failures should not be surprising. After all, based largely on his whim, a Space Force has made its debut as a branch of the armed services, costing billions to establish and appearing to be largely redundant, another entry in Trump’s “catalog of bad ideas.”
FAIL - again
What the heck? It's not the amount of money they're loaning - it's who they're loaning it to. (Or, more grammatically correct: to whom they're loaning it.)The relaunch of the federal government's massive small business rescue faltered on Monday, with banks reporting they were unable to move forward with a backlog of hundreds of thousands of loan applications amid widespread technical hurdles.
Several bankers and other industry representatives said lenders were struggling to submit Paycheck Protection Program applications through the Small Business Administration's systems, which reopened Monday morning. The program had been shut down since April 16, when its initial $350 billion in funding was exhausted. Last week, Congress approved another $320 billion.
But many lenders expect even the replenished fund to last only days because the program has proven to be extremely popular. The government-backed loans carry a 1 percent interest rate and can be forgiven if businesses agree to maintain their payroll.
The rescue is under intense scrutiny after several large companies with access to financial markets were able to secure tens of millions of dollars from big banks in the first wave.
The SBA's "E-Tran" system was prone to crashes and overloading during that first round of the program, and the agency made a rare public admission Monday that it was slowing down again because of unprecedented demand. The SBA announced it was "pacing" applications as it tried to manage the deluge. The agency began to impose new restrictions on the volume of loans banks can submit, a change that it only conveyed to banks on Sunday — fueling confusion that has dogged the effort ever since its hurried April 3 launch.
Politico
Still doesn't make sense. Lenders in some areas will have more requests for loans than other areas. Capping each the same is absurd.As it faced a barrage of new loan applications, the SBA on Monday tried to throttle the amount of incoming loan volume coming from any one lender.
On Sunday, hours before the program was set to launch, the agency told lenders it would be pacing applications and would cap at $60 billion the amount that a single bank could submit.
Par for the Trump admmnistration where the people in positions of power are ill-qualified to hold them."Our member banks across the country are deeply frustrated at their inability to access @SBAGov's E-Tran system," American Bankers Association CEO Rob Nichols said on Twitter Monday afternoon. "We have raised these issues at the highest levels. Until they are resolved, #AmericasBanks will not be able help more struggling small businesses."
[...]
[The SBA] told lenders they could submit applications in bulk, first setting a 15,000 loan minimum on Sunday and then lowering it to 5,000 by Monday afternoon.
The agency decreased the threshold after Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) told the Trump administration in a letter that the 15,000-loan minimum "appears to favor large lenders over smaller financial institutions.
Urged. Not required."Unprecedented demand is slowing E-Tran response times," the agency said. "Currently, there are double the number of users accessing the system compared to any day during the initial round of PPP. SBA is actively working to ensure system security and integrity while loan processing continues."
[...]
In addition, the SBA told some banking industry representatives that it planned to limit incoming applications to 350 loans per bank per hour, according to sources familiar with the matter, though some lenders were in the dark Monday morning. An agency spokesperson discouraged POLITICO from using the number but declined to clarify further.
Banks expect the demand for the loans to outpace funding and that the program will be exhausted again as soon as this week. In an attempt to stretch out funds and address concerns about money going to big firms, the Trump administration last week urged publicly traded companies to return loan funds they received.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
UPDATE:
Monday, April 27, 2020
Too crazy for Fox
By the same token, Fox shouldn't be airing Trump's batshit pressers.Fox News has cut ties with MAGA vlogging superstars Diamond & Silk, who had contributed original content to the network’s streaming service Fox Nation since shortly after its late 2018 launch.
The sudden split comes after the Trump-boosting siblings have come under fire for promoting conspiracy theories and disinformation about the coronavirus. “After what they’ve said and tweeted you won’t be seeing them on Fox Nation or Fox News anytime soon,” a source with knowledge of the matter told The Daily Beast.
Daily Beast
Maybe they can get a gig on OANN.After rising to prominence during the 2016 election, Lynette “Diamond” Hardaway and Rochelle “Silk” Richardson leveraged their newfound celebrity into regular sycophantic appearances on Fox News, resulting in President Donald Trump raving about their performances, featuring them at rallies, and treating them as “senior advisers.”
The social-media personalities were eventually tapped to provide weekly videos for Fox Nation.
[...]
The sisters’ Fox guest spots have also dried up recently. According to a search of TVEyes, a cable-news monitoring system, Diamond & Silk haven’t appeared on the network since a March 6 interview on Fox & Friends and a March 7 hit on the now-defunct Fox Business Network show hosted by Trish Regan, who was also ditched by Fox after her own comments calling the pandemic an “impeachment scam.”
Diamond & Silk have used their heavy social-media presence to be at the forefront of right-wing misinformation about the COVID-19 outbreak. For instance, during their March 30 livestream, the duo claimed that the number of American coronavirus deaths has been inflated to make Trump look bad.
[...]
Silk, meanwhile, baselessly asserted that the disease was “man-made” and “engineered,” wondering aloud if there was a “little deep-state action going on behind the scenes.” She also questioned whether the World Health Organization had a “switch” to “turn this virus on and off?”
[...]
A day after Diamond and Silk’s last Fox Nation episode was posted online, Twitter removed a post from the pro-Trump sisters calling for people to expose themselves to the virus that has now killed more than 55,000 Americans. “The only way we can become immune to the environment; we must be out in the environment,” the since-deleted tweet read. “Quarantining people inside of their houses for extended periods will make people sick!”
They followed up that deleted tweet with an April 10 live stream that featured the pair pushing even more unhinged conspiracies and dangerous commentary, such as saying they’ll refuse to take any coronavirus vaccine that tech giant Bill Gates was involved in because he’s pushing for “population control.”
[...]
During the same broadcast, they also openly wondered whether 5G technology was being used to infect people with coronavirus in an effort to fill “empty” hospitals, suggesting that the “deep state snakes” were building towers in certain areas to “turn things on and off to make sure that certain things go down so those hospital beds can be filled?”
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
A failed state
It sounds very much like his father-in-law's history.When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.
The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering. The administration squandered two irretrievable months to prepare. From the president came willful blindness, scapegoating, boasts, and lies. From his mouthpieces, conspiracy theories and miracle cures. A few senators and corporate executives acted quickly—not to prevent the coming disaster, but to profit from it. When a government doctor tried to warn the public of the danger, the White House took the mic and politicized the message.
[...]
When test kits, masks, gowns, and ventilators were found to be in desperately short supply, governors pleaded for them from the White House, which stalled, then called on private enterprise, which couldn’t deliver. States and cities were forced into bidding wars that left them prey to price gouging and corporate profiteering. Civilians took out their sewing machines to try to keep ill-equipped hospital workers healthy and their patients alive. Russia, Taiwan, and the United Nations sent humanitarian aid to the world’s richest power—a beggar nation in utter chaos.
[...]
Despite countless examples around the U.S. of individual courage and sacrifice, the failure is national. And it should force a question that most Americans have never had to ask: Do we trust our leaders and one another enough to summon a collective response to a mortal threat? Are we still capable of self-government?
[...]
The long recovery over the past decade [from the financial crisis of 2008] enriched corporations and investors, lulled professionals, and left the working class further behind. The lasting effect of the slump was to increase polarization and to discredit authority, especially government’s.
Both parties were slow to grasp how much credibility they’d lost. The coming politics was populist. Its harbinger wasn’t Barack Obama but Sarah Palin, the absurdly unready vice-presidential candidate who scorned expertise and reveled in celebrity. She was Donald Trump’s John the Baptist.
Trump came to power as the repudiation of the Republican establishment. But the conservative political class and the new leader soon reached an understanding. Whatever their differences on issues like trade and immigration, they shared a basic goal: to strip-mine public assets for the benefit of private interests. Republican politicians and donors who wanted government to do as little as possible for the common good could live happily with a regime that barely knew how to govern at all, and they made themselves Trump’s footmen.
Like a wanton boy throwing matches in a parched field, Trump began to immolate what was left of national civic life. He never even pretended to be president of the whole country, but pitted us against one another along lines of race, sex, religion, citizenship, education, region, and—every day of his presidency—political party. His main tool of governance was to lie.
Like a wanton boy throwing matches in a parched field, Trump began to immolate what was left of national civic life. He never even pretended to be president of the whole country, but pitted us against one another along lines of race, sex, religion, citizenship, education, region, and—every day of his presidency—political party. His main tool of governance was to lie.
[...]
Trump acquired a federal government crippled by years of right-wing ideological assault, politicization by both parties, and steady defunding. He set about finishing off the job and destroying the professional civil service. He drove out some of the most talented and experienced career officials, left essential positions unfilled, and installed loyalists as commissars over the cowed survivors, with one purpose: to serve his own interests. His major legislative accomplishment, one of the largest tax cuts in history, sent hundreds of billions of dollars to corporations and the rich.
[...]
This was the American landscape that lay open to the virus: in prosperous cities, a class of globally connected desk workers dependent on a class of precarious and invisible service workers; in the countryside, decaying communities in revolt against the modern world; on social media, mutual hatred and endless vituperation among different camps; in the economy, even with full employment, a large and growing gap between triumphant capital and beleaguered labor; in Washington, an empty government led by a con man and his intellectually bankrupt party; around the country, a mood of cynical exhaustion, with no vision of a shared identity or future.
[...]
The virus should have united Americans against a common threat. With different leadership, it might have. Instead, even as it spread from blue to red areas, attitudes broke down along familiar partisan lines. The virus also should have been a great leveler. You don’t have to be in the military or in debt to be a target—you just have to be human. But from the start, its effects have been skewed by the inequality that we’ve tolerated for so long. When tests for the virus were almost impossible to find, the wealthy and connected—the model and reality-TV host Heidi Klum, the entire roster of the Brooklyn Nets, the president’s conservative allies—were somehow able to get tested, despite many showing no symptoms.
[...]
Most Americans hardly register this kind of special privilege in normal times. But in the first weeks of the pandemic it sparked outrage, as if, during a general mobilization, the rich had been allowed to buy their way out of military service and hoard gas masks. As the contagion has spread, its victims have been likely to be poor, black, and brown people. The gross inequality of our health-care system is evident in the sight of refrigerated trucks lined up outside public hospitals.
[...]
In a smartphone economy that hides whole classes of human beings, we’re learning where our food and goods come from, who keeps us alive. An order of organic baby arugula on AmazonFresh is cheap and arrives overnight in part because the people who grow it, sort it, pack it, and deliver it have to keep working while sick. For most service workers, sick leave turns out to be an impossible luxury.
[...]
The pandemic has also clarified the meaning of nonessential workers. One example is Kelly Loeffler, the Republican junior senator from Georgia, whose sole qualification for the empty seat that she was given in January is her immense wealth. Less than three weeks into the job, after a dire private briefing about the virus, she got even richer from the selling-off of stocks, then she accused Democrats of exaggerating the danger and gave her constituents false assurances that may well have gotten them killed. Loeffler’s impulses in public service are those of a dangerous parasite. A body politic that would place someone like this in high office is well advanced in decay.
The purest embodiment of political nihilism is not Trump himself but his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner. In his short lifetime, Kushner has been fraudulently promoted as both a meritocrat and a populist. He was born into a moneyed real-estate family the month Ronald Reagan entered the Oval Office, in 1981—a princeling of the second Gilded Age. Despite Jared’s mediocre academic record, he was admitted to Harvard after his father, Charles, pledged a $2.5 million donation to the university. Father helped son with $10 million in loans for a start in the family business, then Jared continued his elite education at the law and business schools of NYU, where his father had contributed $3 million.
[...]
Jared Kushner failed as a skyscraper owner and a newspaper publisher, but he always found someone to rescue him, and his self-confidence only grew.
The Atlantic
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.He made conflicts of interest his business model.
So when his father-in-law became president, Kushner quickly gained power in an administration that raised amateurism, nepotism, and corruption to governing principles. As long as he busied himself with Middle East peace, his feckless meddling didn’t matter to most Americans. But since he became an influential adviser to Trump on the coronavirus pandemic, the result has been mass death.
In his first week on the job, in mid-March, Kushner co-authored the worst Oval Office speech in memory, interrupted the vital work of other officials, may have compromised security protocols, flirted with conflicts of interest and violations of federal law, and made fatuous promises that quickly turned to dust. “The federal government is not designed to solve all our problems,” he said, explaining how he would tap his corporate connections to create drive-through testing sites. They never materialized. He was convinced by corporate leaders that Trump should not use presidential authority to compel industries to manufacture ventilators—then Kushner’s own attempt to negotiate a deal with General Motors fell through. With no loss of faith in himself, he blamed shortages of necessary equipment and gear on incompetent state governors.
[...]
It turns out that everything has a cost, and years of attacking government, squeezing it dry and draining its morale, inflict a heavy cost that the public has to pay in lives. All the programs defunded, stockpiles depleted, and plans scrapped meant that we had become a second-rate nation. Then came the virus and this strange defeat.
[...]
If 9/11 and 2008 wore out trust in the old political establishment, 2020 should kill off the idea that anti-politics is our salvation. But putting an end to this regime, so necessary and deserved, is only the beginning.
[...]
We can learn from these dreadful days that stupidity and injustice are lethal; that, in a democracy, being a citizen is essential work; that the alternative to solidarity is death.
JFC
Yes, it's eye-rollingly bad, but that is the least problematic thing Trump has done to promote his own political interests. It's a stupid thing to waste effort on.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Sunday, April 26, 2020
Executive Tantrum Time
LMAO. Why did you delete that series of tweets if you were just being "sarcastic" (from the Greek sarkazein, to tear flesh)? Also, reporters and journalists don't get Nobel (or Noble) prizes. They get Pulitzers. So...basically....dumbshit two times.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
UPDATE:
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