Tuesday, March 31, 2020

Tweets Of The Day -- Distraction


#MoscowMitch loves him some blame- shifting distraction:











BONUSIt only took about a day for the ego- driven Gold-Plated Turd to contradict Moscow Mitch's diversionBwahahahaha.

Trump Pushes Ahead With Anti-Environment Agenda




Taking advantage of a nation rightfully distracted by the coronavirus crisis, the Trump regime is continuing its assault on the environment by rolling back auto emissions standards set by the Obama administration:
The White House released the final version of its rules to roll back Obama-era auto emissions standards, taking a critical step toward completing what would be President Donald Trump’s most substantial environmental change since taking office as the novel coronavirus pandemic rages. 
The rule, written by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Transportation, would lower fuel economy standards for vehicles sold in the United States from 54 miles per gallon by 2025 to 40 miles per gallon.
The two-digit change carries 10-digit implications for climate change. Under the new standard, which could be implemented as soon as this spring, the U.S. auto fleet would emit nearly additional 1 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide over their lifespans on the road than they would under the existing rule. That’s nearly the annual emissions of Japan, the world’s fifth-largest source of planet-heating carbon dioxide(our emphasis)
While the regime modified its even more reactionary original proposal to freeze standards at this year's level, the new standards are another example of the regime's incestuous ties to the industries it "regulates" and to its overall blundering approach.  The Los Angeles Times notes:
Dialing back its original proposal hasn’t made the administration’s problems go away.
The government’s cost-benefit analysis shows that even if the rollback lowers the cost of new cars — as the administration maintains it will — drivers will likely still lose money in the end by having to buy more gas.
And although President Trump has boasted that the new standards will spur economic growth, the administration’s forecasts aren’t remotely sunny. They project car companies could suffer a loss of thousands of jobs by making dirtier cars that would be locked out of many overseas markets.  (our emphasis)
Of course, the focus isn't on whether the average consumer will benefit in the end from cleaner air, global climate change abatement, or having more money in their pockets.  It's about the Republican donor base, as it always is.

The greed and short- sightedness of the auto and oil and gas industries matches that of the Trump regime and its cadre of 4th raters and ideologues.  It's a recipe for environmental disaster, and reason number infinity that these vandals and crooks need to be kicked out in November (if they don't manage to kill us all first).

Today's Cartoons


(click on images to enlarge)


(Clay Bennett, Chattanooga Times Free Press)


(Dave Whamond, caglecartoons.com)


(Tom Toles, Washington Post)


(Bill Bramhall, New York Daily News)


(Jack Ohman, Sacramento Bee)


(Pat Bagley, The Salt Lake Tribune)
 
(John Darkow, Columbia Missourian)


(Nick Anderson, Washington Post Writers Group)


(Matt Davies, Newsday)


(Jimmy Margulies, jimmymargulies.com)


Wingnut Preacher Charged With Endangering His Flock



Tampa megachurch zealot Rodney "Holy Ghost Bartender" Howard-Browne was arrested yesterday and charged with unlawful assembly and flagrantly violating quarantine restrictions for holding two large services on Sunday. According to the Tampa Bay Times:
"The Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office received an anonymous tip that the pastor planned to hold services Sunday in violation of county orders asking residents to stay home and limit gatherings to slow the coronavirus. Sheriff’s officials said they warned church lawyers on Friday and Sunday about the 'dangerous environment they were creating for their members and the community.'

But Howard-Browne, the self-proclaimed 'Holy Ghost bartender' and COVID-19 conspiracy theorist, ignored those warnings. He held two large services on Sunday, deputies said, and even bused people in to the church at 3738 River International Drive." (our emphasis)
Hillsborough County, FL Sheriff Chad Chronister said in a statement:
“Because of the reckless disregard of public safety and after repeated requests and warnings, I worked with our state attorney, Andrew Warren, to obtain a warrant for unlawful assembly and violation of public health emergency rules, both of which are second degree misdemeanors. Our goal here is not to stop anyone from worshiping, but the safety and well-being of our community must always come first."
Unfortunately, Howard-Browne made bail, which was set at a mere $500, it likely being a small percent of the "take" from his holy roller grifting each week. It's a good bet that he'll be at it again next Sunday, if not before, while waving a phony claim of religious persecution in the air. A second violation should bring serious jail time for this Bible thumping charlatan.

BONUS:  Of course, he's only one of a multitude of grifting jackasses trying, counter- intuitively, to get their meal tickets killed.  Here's another.

BONUS II: Another reckless preacher / grifter, this time in Louisiana, defying social distancing rules.

(photo: Sheriff's office mug shot. Looks like the "bartender" has a case of gin blossoms.)

Pic Of The Day: Delivery



In a scene replicated across the U.S. as millions are under "stay at home" orders from their Governors, volunteer Phyllis Robinson delivers food to the Tranter family in Bethesda, MD. The Medium Rare restaurant has been delivering free dinners to the community's most vulnerable people, including the elderly and people with disabilities and compromised immune systems.

The COVID-19  "war" is being fought by self-sacrificing and generous people, not by a "commander" late to the "battlefield" suffering from recurring bone spurs.

(photo: Toni L. Sandys / Washington Post)

QOTD -- The Quiet Parts Out Loud


The things they had in there were crazy.  They had things — levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” -- Donald "Moron Vector" Trump, on "Fox & Friends" yesterday, commenting on proposals from Democrats during the recent coronavirus relief bill negotiations to make vote- by- mail and absentee voting easier.  (There are other examples at the link of Republicans saying the quiet parts out loud when it comes to suppressing and disenfranchising voters who might vote Democratic.)

Boston Globe: Unfit Trump "Has Blood On His Hands"


We're posting the entire, devastating March 30 Boston Globe editorial, "A President Unfit For A Pandemic," because it is the best major newspaper distillation of the case against Donald "Moron Vector" Trump's criminally incompetent handling of the coronavirus outbreak that we've seen, and because it deserves the widest circulation possible:
“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold,” wrote W.B. Yeats in 1919. A century later, it’s clear: The epicenter cannot hold. Catastrophic decisions in the White House have doomed the world’s richest country to a season of untold suffering.
The United States, long a beacon of scientific progress and medical innovation with its world-class research institutions and hospitals, is now the hub of a global pandemic that has infected at least 745,000 people and already claimed more than 35,000 lives worldwide. Now that the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the United States — more than 140,000 — has surpassed that of any other nation, Americans are consigned for the coming weeks to watching the illness fell family members and friends, and to fearing for their own fate as they watch death tolls rise.
While the spread of the novel coronavirus has been aggressive around the world, much of the profound impact it will have here in the United States was preventable. As the American public braces itself for the worst of this crisis, it’s worth remembering that the reach of the virus here is not attributable to an act of God or a foreign invasion, but a colossal failure of leadership.
The outbreak that began in China demanded a White House that could act swiftly and competently to protect public health, informed by science and guided by compassion and public service. It required an administration that could quickly deploy reliable tests around the nation to isolate cases and trace and contain the virus’s spread, as South Korea effectively did, as well as to manufacture and distribute scarce medical supplies around the country. It begged for a president of the United States to deliver clear, consistent, scientifically sound messages on the state of the epidemic and its solutions, to reassure the public amid their fear, and to provide steady guidance to cities and states. And it demanded a leader who would put the country’s well-being first, above near-term stock market returns and his own reelection prospects, and who would work with other nations to stem the tide of COVID-19 cases around the world.
What we have instead is a president epically outmatched by a global pandemic. A president who in late January, when the first confirmed coronavirus case was announced in the United States, downplayed the risk and insisted all was under control. A president who, rather than aggressively test all those exposed to the virus, said he’d prefer not to bring ashore passengers on a contaminated cruise ship so as to keep national case numbers (artificially) low. A president who, consistent with his mistrust and undermining of scientific fact, has misled the public about unproven cures for COVID-19, and who baited-and-switched last week about whether the country ought to end social distancing to open up by Easter, and then, on Saturday, about whether he’d impose a quarantine on New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. A president who has pledged to oversee the doling out of the $500 billion in corporate bailout money in the latest stimulus package, some of which will go to the travel industry in which his family is invested. A president who spent a good chunk of a recent press conference complaining about how hard it is for a rich man to serve in the White House even as Americans had already begun to lose their jobs, their health care, and their lives. A president who has reinforced racial stigma by calling the contagion a “Chinese virus” and failed to collaborate adequately with other countries to contain their outbreaks and study the disease. A president who evades responsibility and refuses to acknowledge, let alone own, the bitter truth of National Institutes of Health scientist Dr. Anthony Fauci’s testimony: that the country’s testing rollout was “a failing.”
Timing is everything in pandemic response: It can make the difference between a contained local outbreak that endures a few weeks and an uncontrollable contagion that afflicts millions. The Trump administration has made critical errors over the past two months, choosing early on to develop its own diagnostic test, which failed, instead of adopting the World Health Organization’s test — a move that kneecapped the US coronavirus response and, by most public health experts’ estimation, will cost thousands if not hundreds of thousands of American lives. Rather than making the expected federal effort to mobilize rapidly to distribute needed gowns, masks, and ventilators to ill-equipped hospitals and to the doctors and nurses around the country who are left unprotected treating a burgeoning number of patients, the administration has instead been caught outbidding individual states (including Massachusetts) trying to purchase medical supplies. It has dragged its heels on invoking the Defense Production Act to get scarce, sorely needed ventilators and masks into production so that they can be distributed to hospitals nationwide as they hit their peaks in the cycle of the epidemic. It has left governors and mayors in the lurch, begging for help. The months the administration wasted with prevarication about the threat and its subsequent missteps will amount to exponentially more COVID-19 cases than were necessary. In other words, the president has blood on his hands.
It’s not too much for Americans to ask of their leaders that they be competent and informed when responding to a crisis of historic proportions. Instead, they have a White House marred by corruption and incompetence, whose mixed messages roil the markets and rock their sense of security. Instead of compassion and clarity, the president, in his near-daily addresses to the nation, embodies callousness, self-concern, and a lack of compass. Dangling unverified cures and possible quarantines in front of the public like reality TV cliffhangers, he unsettles rather than reassures. The pandemic reveals that the worst features of this presidency are not merely late-night comedy fodder; they come at the cost of lives, livelihoods, and our collective psyche.
Many pivotal decision points in this crisis are past us, but more are still to come. For our own sake, every American should be hoping for a miraculous turnaround — and that the too-little, too-late strategy of the White House task force will henceforth at least prevent contagion and economic ruin of the grandest scale. But come November, there must be a reckoning for the lives lost, and for the vast, avoidable suffering about to ensue under the president’s watch.
 "The President has blood on his hands."  And, just like impeachment, it won't wash off.

Monday, March 30, 2020

Maryland, Virginia Residents Latest To Get Stay At Home Orders




A little local Hackwhackers news.

We'll be joining our fellow Marylanders observing a stay at home order effective tonight at 8:00 p.m., just issued by Gov. Larry Hogan.  The Commonwealth of Virginia's Gov. Ralph Northam also issued a stay at home order a short while ago.  Washington, DC, added itself to the growing list moments ago.  Neighboring mid- Atlantic states Delaware and West Virginia had already issued orders on March 24.

As of this moment, that makes 28 states and the District of Columbia with such orders in effect, representing more than two- thirds of the country's population.

Trump The "Greatest Risk" In COVID-19 Pandemic



"The final death toll from coronavirus will not be the result of viral disease; it will be the result of mental disease.  The greatest risk factor of disease and death is not being considered, and that is Donald Trump.  If he continues in this presidency, he is on course for having three main effects: First, he will make a deadly pandemic much worse.  Second, he will stoke divisions between 'believers' and 'unbelievers' in his alternative reality.  And third, he will vastly augment suffering, which he will be tempted to direct into widespread violence." -- Yale University forensic psychiatrist Dr. Bandy X. Lee, in a must read article that argues that the Very Stable Genius' narcissism, lack of conscience, detachment from reality, and mental instability will cause countless more deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 2017, Dr. Lee edited a book of essays by 27 mental health professionals, "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump," which argued that Trump's mental instability and pathology threatened democracy itself. Considering the danger posed by Trump to be unprecedented, the doctors came forward saying they had a "duty to warn" the public that his erratic behavior was dangerous to the country.

Trump's Character: "It's Never The Lead Story"


Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog observes what the general takeaway is from coverage of Golden Turd Donald "Moron Vector" Trump's daily bullshit sessions:
... What Trump is doing every day -- it's hard to say whether he's being shrewd or has just stumbled on a routine that seeks to work for him -- is weaving his pathology into a briefing that generally has at least some real news. That news is what a lot of Americans take away from the briefings, because news organizations generally treat it as far most important than Trump's outbursts. Some news outlets seem to regard the news as the only important part of the story. [snip]
It ought to matter that, in the midst of a crisis, we have a president who's accusing desperate healthcare workers in a viral hot zone of being grifters trying to steal and sell face masks, all because he can't accept numbers predicting exponential growth of demand for health services that are extremely dangerous to provide. It ought to matter that Trump bullies and insults reporters for quoting his own words back to him. It's an election year. When it suits us, we decide that "character" is an important criterion when we're judging who's fit to serve. But the media isn't treating Trump's character as an important story.
Trump parcels out just enough news every day that the takeaway, for people who can't read the news in depth, is A serious man is leading us through a serious crisis.
We keep waiting in vain for the corporate media -- especially in the form of the nightly network newscasts -- to cover Trump's manifest moral rot and mental incompetence, mostly displayed in his unscripted remarks and tweets, but... they don't.  Instead of seeing some of his more sociopathic tweets like these highlighted --




-- we get valuable minutes wasted on "good news" pablum that infantilizes the audience and whistles past Trump's existential grave yard.

Jay Rosen has suggested the media, among other things, use a "truth sandwich" approach in covering Trump's firehose of falsehoods:
Experience has taught us that there will occasionally be times when the President makes a demonstrably false claim, or floats a poisonous lie, and it is too consequential to ignore. We feel we have to tell you about it, even at the risk of amplifying his deceptions. In those special cases, we will adopt a news writing formula that has been called the “truth sandwich.” It is a more careful way of reporting newsworthy falsehoods. First you state what is true. Then you report the false statement. Then you repeat what is true...
This should also apply to the unhinged comments/ tweets/ etc. that the low information public needs to see.  Rather, we believe the media has largely adopted the stance that "Trump's low character is already a given" and that nothing is gained by further hammering his moral rot and mental incapacity into the public consciousness.  So, one of the lessons of 2016 is being repeated, even with three years of hindsight.

Before Trump was even sworn in as "president," Ned Resnikoff at the sadly departed Think Progress wrote some advice for the media, which has only fitfully been heeded, if at all (no link): 
Journalists need to understand what Trump is doing and refuse to play by his rules. He is going to use the respect and deference typically accorded to the presidency as an instrument for spreading more lies. Reporters must refuse to treat him like a normal president and refuse to bestow any unearned legitimacy on his administration.
They must also give up their posture of high-minded objectivity — and, along with it, any hope of privileged access to the Trump White House. The incoming president has made clear that he expects unquestioning obedience from the press, and will regard anyone who doesn’t give it to him as an enemy.
With the exception of a few stalwarts (Yamiche Alcindor, being the most recent to stand up to the bully), the media continue to gloss over what is plain to see -- a mentally unhinged, morally unfit sociopath floundering and deflecting at a time of national crisis.

Is the truth that hard to tell?

Today's Cartoons


(click on images to enlarge)


(Mike Smith, Las Vegas Sun)
 
(Michael de Adder, deadder.net)


(Tom Toles, Washington Post)
 
(Ken Catalino, gocomics.com)


(Bart van Leeuwen, caglecartoons.com)


(Chris Britt, gocomics.com)


(Carlos Amorim, Correio do Povo, Brazil)


(Milt Priggee, caglecartoons.com)


(Ann Telnaes, Washington Post Writers Group)


(Gary Markstein, gocomics.com)


Fundie Fraudster Endangering Students



The head of fundamentalist diploma mill "Liberty" University, the execrable hypocrite and pool boy mentor Jerry Falwell, Jr., partially opened his sham college last week, defying public health directives warning against social exposure to COVID-19. He's been one of the COVID-19 deniers, echoing his golden calf Donald "Golden Turd" Trump's original lie that the virus was a "hoax" by Trump's enemies to bring him down.

Now, there's reporting that Falwell ignored the national advisory and opened the school (the school's head of student health services, "Dr." Thomas Eppes, Jr. should lose his medical license over this decision, too):
“'We’ve lost the ability to corral this thing,' Dr. Thomas W. Eppes Jr. said he told Mr. Falwell. But he did not urge him to close the school. 'I just am not going to be so presumptuous as to say, "‘This is what you should do and this is what you shouldn’t do,’” Dr. Eppes said in an interview.

So Mr. Falwell — a staunch ally of President Trump and an influential voice in the evangelical world — reopened the university last week, igniting a firestorm. As of Friday, Dr. Eppes said, nearly a dozen Liberty students were sick with symptoms that suggested Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus. Three were referred to local hospital centers for testing. Another eight were told to self-isolate." (our emphasis)
The sheer stupidity and recklessness of these men is breathtaking; that Eppes doesn't think he has the responsibility to tell Falwell "this is what you shouldn't do" from a health perspective is beyond belief. Of course, it's very likely that Eppes was just reading Falwell for an answer.

Let's hope that some smart attorneys start legal action against "Liberty" University, and Falwell in particular, for reckless endangerment, etc. Reactions on Twitter were predictably strong:







Sue Falwell's ass out of existence and shut his diploma mill down for good.

(photo: The Golden Turd receiving a bow from his apostle).

Monday Reading


As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.

In case you missed the latest blame- shifting and conspiracy- mongering by the Golden Turd:
President Donald Trump went off on a rant accusing hospitals, doctors and nurses of hoarding equipment and intentionally exaggerating the things they need.
Speaking in the Rose Garden Sunday, Trump asked, “How do you go from 10 to 20 to 300,000 masks? Where are the masks going, are they going out the backdoor?”
Indeed, the masks are going in the trash after they’re used. The masks are one-use masks, which Trump said he wants to be able to sanitize them so people can reuse them.
“They have to look into that in New York,” Trump said, noting that he heard they went from 10,000 masks to 300,000 masks. 
“I don’t think it’s hoarding, it’s maybe worse than hoarding,” Trump said.
The crooked cheater is projecting again, suggesting that the most heroic, selfless people in our communities are crooks and cheaters like him.  ER doctor and Executive Director of Committee to Protect Medicare Rob Davidson:



As the death toll relentlessly climbs, Golden Turd can't help but give himself a pat on the back should we "only" lose under 200,000 lives:
Anthony S. Fauci, the White House adviser, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that models suggest the virus could cause between 100,000 and 200,000 deaths and that millions of people could be infected. But he stressed that the 200,000 figure was a worst-case estimate that is unlikely to come to pass.
In the Rose Garden on Sunday, Trump compared those numbers favorably with the more than 2 million deaths forecast as a worst-case scenario had the nation not taken strict measures to respond to the virus. If coronavirus-related deaths remained under 200,000, he said, “we all together have done a very good job.”
Spoken like a true sociopath who ignored the health experts, dragged his feet, and placed more value on "the markets" than on human life.

Meanwhile, let's get into the Wayback Machine to remind the Golden Turd about how his regime bungled the medical supply issue from the get go:
The U.S. State Department shipped 17.8 million tons of donated coronavirus medical supplies to China seven weeks ago, when health experts and some American lawmakers were already seeking federal action to prepare the country for the disease.
The massive shipment to China included medical masks, gowns and respirators, now in desperately short supply across America. The supplies were contributed by American companies and nonprofits, according to a U.S. Agency for International Development official.
Maybe should have checked our own stockpiles first? Nah, too competent!

Let's stick with the State Department, run by odious toady Mike "Pompous" Pompeo. Here's  Jackson Diehl on some of what Pompeo has been doing to weaken what's left of our standing in the world:

Let’s recall how the U.S. secretary of state has historically behaved at a time of grave international crisis: circling the globe (at least telephonically); formulating a coherent multilateral response; and lining up nations behind it — starting with America’s closest allies.

Now, consider how Mike Pompeo spent his time last week, as cases of covid-19 soared in the United States and numerous other countries. He kicked off Monday by indulging in a pointless war of words with Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, whom he accused of lying about the country’s grave coronavirus outbreak. [snip]

On Wednesday, Pompeo had an opportunity to lead when foreign ministers of the Group of Seven convened by telephone. James A. Baker III, George Shultz or Madeleine Albright would have emerged with a clear statement of purpose by the world’s leading democracies — perhaps a commitment to aiding the poor nations and refugees that face devastation by the new disease.

Instead, Pompeo blocked the G-7 from issuing any communique after the other ministers sensibly refused to go along with his petty insistence that it refer to the “Wuhan virus.” The message he sent was clear: Scoring a rhetorical point against Beijing is more important to this U.S. administration than forging a consensus with Britain, France, Germany and other close allies.
For all the evidence of Golden Turd's incompetence, vindictiveness and evil you won't ever see on any of the national network news evening broadcasts (they're failing even more spectacularly than they did in 2016), Digby has the lowlights of his latest "briefing."

As we usually do, we highly recommend you visit Infidel 753's link round-up for a much more comprehensive view of what's going on all over the world.  Go!

Sunday, March 29, 2020

Across The Universe, Cont. -- One-Armed Spiral Galaxy


(click on image to enlarge)

 

From NASA/ESA, March 23, 2020NGC 4618 was discovered on 9 April 1787 by the German-British astronomer, Wilhelm Herschel, who also discovered Uranus in 1781. Only a year before discovering NGC 4618, Herschel theorised that the “foggy” objects astronomers were seeing in the night sky were likely to be large star clusters located much further away then the individual stars he could easily discern. 


Since Herschel proposed his theory, astronomers have come to understand that what he was seeing was a galaxy. NGC 4618, classified as a barred spiral galaxy, has the special distinction amongst other spiral galaxies of only having one arm rotating around the centre of the galaxy. 

Located about 21 million light-years from our galaxy in the constellation Canes Venatici, NGC 4618 has a diameter of about one third that of the Milky Way. Together with its neighbour, NGC 4625, it forms an interacting galaxy pair, which means that the two galaxies are close enough to  influence each other gravitationally. These interactions may result in the two (or more) galaxies merging together to form a new formation, such as a ring galaxy  

Credit:  ESA/Hubble & NASA, I. Karachentsev

QOTD -- Get Out Of The Way, Cadet Bone Spurs!



"One month ago, President Trump expressed great confidence in his handling of the coronavirus pandemic. “When you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero,” he said, “that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.” Now the United States has more than 100,000 cases, the most in the world, and more than 1,300 deaths — and the pandemic is expanding. The “job” Mr. Trump has done is disastrously inadequate, failing to lead the government or marshal the country to face this crisis.

"Mr. Trump says he feels like a “wartime president.” The most important thing he can do now is to manage the pandemic as if in wartime: put it in the hands of commanders who know how to fight it." -- Washington Post editorial today.  Since the editorial was written, perhaps a day or so ago, the U.S. confirmed cases has jumped to 137,000 confirmed cases and 2,400 deaths.  That's how fast it's spreading, as Cadet Bone Spurs lies, distracts, dithers, flip flops and engages in petty but deadly gamesmanship with the governors and health care providers on the front lines.

Today's Cartoons


(click on images to enlarge)


(Bill Day, caglecartoons.com)


(Clay Bennett, Chattanooga Times Free Press)


(Dave Whamond, caglecartoons.com)


(Arcadio Esquivel, caglecartoons.com)


(Kevin Kallaugher, Baltimore Sun)


(Nick Anderson, Washington Post Writers Group)


(John Cole, Scranton Times-Tribune, PA)


(Tom Toles, Washington Post)


(Chris Britt, gocomics.com)


(Kevin Siers, Charlotte Observer)


(Mike Luckovich, Atlanta Journal-Constitution)


(Ken Catalino, gocomics.com)


(Mike Thompson, USA Today)

Tweets Of The Day -- Numbers



Are those staggering projections being absorbed and acted on by Cadet Bone Spurs?  Spoiler alert --  Here are the numbers currently occupying the big brain of the sociopathic narcissist:


"Lunatic" -- there he goes projecting again!


Majority Not Buying Trump's Words On COVID-19


In a new Ipsos poll conducted March 26 - 27, data suggests that efforts by mentally unstable sociopath Donald "I Alone Can Fix It" Trump to downplay, happy talk and misinform the public about the spreading COVID-19 virus are largely failing, with only Fux Channel viewers largely accepting his word:
"Partisan affiliation affects perceptions of facts. For example, there are more than double the number of Republicans that believe anti-malaria drugs have been approved to treat the virus (32%) than there are Democrats (14%). Among Fox News viewers, even more believe this is true (44%). [snip] 
Majorities of all demographic subgroups – across age, gender, partisan affiliation, education level, area of residence – believe the virus to be more deadly than the flu. The one exception is among Fox News viewers, where less than half (48%) say it is more deadly, 21% say less, and another 21% say about the same. [snip] 
...[B]y a nearly three-to-one margin, more Americans disagree (69%) than agree (26%) that getting people back to work is more important than social distancing. However, there is a nearly 30-point difference between Republicans and Democrats on ending social distancing; fifty-seven percent of Republicans disagree getting people back to work is more important, versus 83% of Democrats." (our emphasis)
This outcome is what you get when you elect a demagogue whose first mission was to tell his cult not to believe anyone but him, and to brand all news that didn't flatter or support him as "fake." The mounting numbers of the infected and dead from the virus he was telling his followers was under control and was a partisan "hoax" should tell them that.

Jushtish w/ Judge Jeanine


People handle home quarantine in different ways. Some act as teachers for their kids, some work on projects in the home they've been putting off. Some hit the wine box, like hate shrieker "Judge" Jeanine Pirro may have done yesterday before her Fux broadcast:

She looks rather disheveled, too. Maybe she was playing a drinking game for every time an ominous new COVID-19 stat was reported. Maybe she was told that booze would prevent her from getting the virus.

Twitter was quick to notice:











"His Ego Will Cost Lives"


In a new campaign ad, former VP Joe Biden is smacking narcissistic sociopath Donald "Moron Vector" Trump for his petty attacks on the Governors of Washington and Michigan. The ad uses Trump's own words to demonstrate his unfitness and vindictiveness, which will cost lives if not checked.


While this ad centers on the situations in Washington and Michigan, people need to be reminded over and over that Trump botched the response to the COVID-19 pandemic from the beginning, costing lives.

Please share on your social media!

Saturday, March 28, 2020

Pic Of The Day


(click on image to enlarge)



People (children?) running in a park in Dublin, Ireland.  (More here.)

(Photo: Jason Cairnduff/ REUTERS)

CDC Warns About Trump's COVID-19 "Cures"



Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, sociopath and mentally unstable Donald "Moron Vector" Trump has been the single most prolific purveyor of lies, misinformation, deflection, and ignorance in his briefings / Nuremberg rally substitutes and on social media. Instead of letting the public health experts run the briefings, he insists on hi-jacking them to try to give the impression that he knows what the hell he's doing. He doesn't. That was most apparent in a deadly fashion when he got out over his skis on the chemical hydroxychloroquine, which he touted as a therapeutic (he equated it with "cure"), and other medicines that haven't undergone testing for COVID-19 purposes.

Today, the CDC had to remind his gullible cult that believes everything he says that products containing chloroquine phosphate, which is used for aquariums, should not be ingested:


When he's not proposing to spread the disease through encouraging people to resume their social lives and business, he's pushing quack remedies from who knows what source (Alex Jones, Glenn Beck, greedy billionaires?). At least one person has already died, and more people will die if they listen to that dangerous fool.

(photo: Is Trump considering relaxing the "clean hands" advisory too?)

Today's Cartoons


(click on images to enlarge)


(Bill Bramhall, New York Daily News)


(Paul Szep, gocomics.com)


(Ann Telnaes, Washington Post Writers Group)


(Mike Smith, Las Vegas Sun)


(Clay Jones, claytoonz.com)


(Dave Granlund, davegranlund.com)


(Matt Wuerker, Politico)


(Gary Markstein, gocomics.com)
 
(Matt Davies, Newsday)


(Jeff Darcy, Cleveland Plain Dealer)


(John Deering, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette)


(Andy Marlette, Pensacola News-Journal, FL)


(Rob Rogers, robrogers.com)


(John Darkow, Columbia Missourian)


(Marc Murphy, Louisville Courier-Journal, KY)