Monday Reading

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

This front page article in the Washington Post doesn't pull many punches in describing the disastrous, deadly failure of moron vector Donald "COVID Donnie" Trump and his weakling toadies to protect our country from the coronavirus pandemic:

Five months after the novel coronavirus was first detected in the United States, a record surge in new cases is the clearest sign yet of the country’s historic failure to control the virus — exposing a crisis in governance extending from the Oval Office to state capitals to city councils.

President Trump — who has repeatedly downplayed the virus, sidelined experts and misled Americans about its dangers and potential cures — now finds his presidency wracked by an inability to shepherd the country through its worst public health calamity in a century. The dysfunction that has long characterized Trump’s White House has been particularly ill-suited for a viral outbreak that requires precision, focus and steady leadership, according to public health experts, administration officials and lawmakers from both parties.

As case numbers began rising again, Trump has held rallies defying public health guidelines, mused about slowing down testing for the virus, criticized people wearing masks and embraced the racially offensive “kung flu” nickname for a disease that has killed at least 123,000 Americans.

A similarly garbled message for the country has also been put forward by the president’s top aides and other senior administration officials, who contradict one another on a daily basis. On Friday, Vice President Pence used the first White House coronavirus task force briefing in almost two months to praise Trump’s handling of the virus and cast aside concerns about a record spike in new infections.

“We have made a truly remarkable progress in moving our nation forward,” Pence said, a few minutes after announcing that more than 2.5 million Americans had contracted the coronavirus. “We’ve all seen the encouraging news as we open up America again.”

Later Friday, the United States recorded more than 40,000 new coronavirus cases — its largest one-day total.

The deeply- sourced article is well worth a read, even if you're up on the topic.

That "truly remarkable progress" that soulless Trump ass- kisser Dense Pence is referring to? Couldn't be this:

When the lines go parallel
The US now has reproduced its March-> April trajectory for new confirmed cases and #COVID19 spread pic.twitter.com/GkvpmKw9Vv

— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) June 28, 2020

The Russian- bounties- for- American- troops scandal continues to unfold as the White (Supremacist) House scrambles to protect Putin's puppet:

...[O]ne American official had told The Times that the intelligence finding that the Russians had offered and paid bounties to Afghan militants and criminals had been briefed at the highest levels of the White House.

Another said it was included in the President’s Daily Brief, a written document which draws from spywork to make analytic predictions about longstanding adversaries, unfolding plots and emerging crises around the world. The briefing document is given to the president to read and they serve as the basis for oral briefings to him several times a week.

Asked on Saturday evening how the president could not have known about the report if it had been in his daily brief, a National Security Council spokesman did not immediately respond.

Ms. McEnany notably did not question the substance of the intelligence assessment, saying only that her statement “did not speak to the merit of the alleged intelligence.” She also did not challenge the Times’s reporting that the National Security Council had convened an interagency meeting about what to do about the report in late March.

Ms. McEnany did not explain why such an important report would have been withheld from Mr. Trump. Nor did she indicate whether Mr. Trump was upset at his subordinates for purportedly withholding the information from him.

As Speaker Pelosi said, "This is as bad as it gets, and yet the President will not confront the Russians on this score, denies being briefed."

Meanwhile, VoteVets has a stinging video out:

Donald Trump can take all his empty words about respecting our service and shove them. #TRE45ON #TraitorTrump pic.twitter.com/7vxGxLBYh0

— VoteVets (@votevets) June 28, 2020

With the election so near and yet so far, Greg Fallis has a good explainer about why Trump's scare tactics about fraudulent mail- in balloting don't hold water:

... That level of voting security — signature verification, ballot barcode verification — is only the beginning. The ballot itself has been tested to insure the ballot scanners will read ONLY authentic ballots, and only authentic ballots for that particular election cycle. The scanners aren’t able to read ballots from previous election cycles, even if those ballots were created to use the same scanning system.

But wait, there’s more. There are 3,007 counties in the United States. There are another 236 first-order administrative divisions, which are basically counties by other names (for example, Louisiana has parishes instead of counties, Alaska has boroughs, and the District of Columbia has…well, the District of Columbia). Why is that important? Because there is NO national ballot.

That’s right. Every voting jurisdiction designs and creates its own unique ballot. We’re talking the typeface, the weight of the paper used for the ballot, the size of the ballot, the phrasing of the text instructing the voter on how to vote by mail, the envelope in which the ballot is mailed to the voter, the security envelope containing the marked ballot to be returned, and the actual return envelope. These designs are deliberately changed from election to election.

So in order for Comrade Trump’s claim that “millions of mail-in ballots will be printed by foreign countries, and others” to be true, those foreign countries (and ‘others’ — I have no idea WTF he could possibly mean by ‘others’) would have to exactly duplicate thousands of distinctly different ballot packets unique to every voting jurisdiction in the United States for the 2020 election cycle PLUS be able to match the signatures on file of the individual voters they were attempting to impersonate.

But, of course, Trump's only interested in planting seeds for contesting the election, so the inanity of his lies is beside the point.

Infidel 753's link round- up is, as usual, a fine place to check out for a much more comprehensive picture of Our Times.  Politics, culture, religion, etc.  We always find plenty of stimulating topics, and this week is no exception.  (The piece above on mail- in ballots was found there.)