Archives for May 2020

Day 1213 – Preparing for The Long Dark Winter

Friday May 15, 2020 

170 Days until the election on November 3^rd

250 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021

There are all sorts of bits lying about. Most of it is excrement.

Some of it is outrageous. Are you surprised? Of course not, it is what we have come to expect.

– There was the Republican congressman during the hearing of Dr. Bright who used his time to say this was all a political stunt and no one is giving Trump credit.

– There was another Republican congressman who during that same hearing questioned Dr. Bright about who was paying him: his old job at BARDA or the new job he was being offered at NIH? This congressman went on to question how it was that Dr. Bright was able to be at this hearing if he had been out on medical leave and now vacation if in fact as Dr. Bright had claimed he had high blood pressure? How was the doctor able to function here and not on his new job that he had to take “medical leave”? The congressman “just wanted to understand.” Bull Shit. 

But as Dr. Bright explained several times to the congressman, because the congressman by his own admission had trouble understanding, he – Dr. Bright – had been forced out of his job on short notice and this caused hyper-tension, which he was being treated for.

– Then there was the young look-a-like Kelly-Ann Conway who was on the White House lawn with Trump (I think she’s a former Fox News whatever) who explained that the Obama administration had left a playbook and it was inadequate and didn’t do the job, but the Trump administration had written a new playbook which did. Bull Shit.

Holding up a marked up not good looking report and a cute good-looking report does not make it true. Why haven’t you, The White House, followed any playbook?

Oh yeah, and at one point the White House denied the Obama administration had left them a playbook. That ended when Ron Klain, who headed up the Ebola response team under Obama, showed a copy of the front of the playbook that was left. It was marked “PLAYBOOK …” Read it? They claimed not to know about it! He also published the table of contents so folks would see for themselves the detail they went into.

We are still waiting to see the Trump playbook. Maybe because it really has nothing in it?

In that hearing Dr. Bright laid out what he had done to try and get the administration to pay attention to the coming pandemic. He had done everything he could think of. He repeatedly warned people at the highest levels. He pulled every lever, warned every person – repeatedly. They blew him off. Trump says Dr. Bright is a disgruntled employee. Disgruntled? Why would he be disgruntled? Just because he did his job and got fired? He says he’s not disgruntled, but frustrated.

So then there was the interview with Andrew Cuomo on Rachel. Man, what a breath of fresh air. New York is going to reopen. The Governor has put in place rules as to when a county can reopen. What? Rules and guidelines? Get out to here.

The Governor has said that nursing homes must test their staff and if they don’t they risk having their licenses pulled. He has sent out 100,000 test kits to start this process. Compare this to the White House “plan” which says that there should be testing. No money, no help, just a suggestion.

Then we get to the Michael Flynn case. The Justice Department has withdrawn from the case. That is they don’t want to prosecute Flynn. This has so outraged the lead prosecutor on the case that he withdrew from the case. Another disgruntled employee? 

The judge has now asked a retired judge to step in and argue the old Justice Department case. 

Meanwhile, Wisconsin and several other states have “opened up.” In the case of Wisconsin it is over the objection of the Governor of that state, who was overruled by the state Supreme Court. I’ve seen the charts on the infection rates of those states: Wisconsin, South Dakota, Texas are opening up, while their charts of the rates of infection are going up. This is not smart. This is stupid. I have to wonder what will happen when lots of those places are overwhelmed with sick patients?

There was a piece about a guy who thought this whole corona virus thing was fake, overblown, a hoax. He thought God would protect him. Then he got sick. He’s now preaching that it isn’t fake, not overblown, not a hoax. It’s real. Protect yourself. Don’t get this thing. Wow. Amazing huh?

How many more will have to undergo this miracle transformation? I suggest that they believe. Believe the scientists.

Then there’s Obamagate. This is the latest fabrication by Trump. What’s up with that? Well, the president has finally gotten the intelligence community cowed at the top levels and his plan is to use that and Justice and law enforcement to go after Joe Biden and the Democratic party that’s what.

Then there’s ballot harvesting. The practice of someone collecting mail-in ballots from others and submitting them en mass. Devin Nunes was seen on Fox News saying that was the only way that a Republican could win a  particular seat in California. This practice has been ruled illegal in the other 49 states. Why? Oh I dunno. Maybe after that guy in North Carolina deceived people about what they were voting for, took their blank ballots and filled them in, and threw out  the ballots that voted for the opponent? Just guessing.

So, come the fall when we are in the worst outbreaks of this virus we will have ever seen and rural states have people dying and they have no ventilators or places to store the bodies and the economy is in the deepest recession this country has ever seen, including 1929, then what?

170 Days until the election on November 3^rd

250 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021

PS Dead Fish, Seattle Farmer’s Market

Day 1212 – The Political Pandemic

Thursday May 14, 2020 

171 Days until the election on November 3^rd

251 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021

Let me introduce two ideas to begin. Actually, I’m going to call them idea/images, because I want you to not only grasp the idea but also what it looks like. 

The first is the phrase “by thought, word, and deed.” It’s part of the communion ceremony I grew up with. (Episcopal Church – Rite I) 

The other is the idea of a foreign agent embedded in our country, but with a twist. What if there was no external country directing the actions of this agent, but this agent was a product of our own making? Kind of a variant on Pogo’s famous line, “We have seen the enemy and them is us.” 

In all the foreign agent movies, books, and themes the idea is that the person or entity is bent on doing our country harm, of destroying it, or remaking it. Be it “AmeriKa”, “The Manchurian Candidate,” “The Man in the High Castle,” or “The 39 Steps.”

What if that enemy is within? What if it is us, or a big portion of us? What then?

America is a dream. It is an ideal. Something to aspire towards, “The Shining City on the Hill.” We celebrate this notion in many of our Hollywood films. A subgenera is the honest cop fighting against the corrupt system. It doesn’t have to be a cop, sometimes it’s a politician, or an average person. In the end good triumphs over evil. 

Let us consider where we are today.

In the latest round of news. 

– Two of the people the president likes are being released from prison early because of the coronavirus and one, who is not liked, is not being released.

– The White House has squashed the CDC paper that would tell people how to safely re-enter the world. There are two version of this report: the 17 page, and the 69 page one. The White House has told some of the CDC folks that the 17 page report will never see the light of day. Forget the longer report. 

– The Justice Department is trying to drop a case against an individual who basically pled guilty to treason. 

– In Wisconsin the governor of the state issued a “stay at home” order. The state’s supreme court has overturned that order saying it is unconstitutional. (Michigan will be up next.)

– The president is asking people to go back out into the world and get the economy going. Yet, the key to doing this is testing. We don’t have adequate testing and the president refuses to marshall resources so that we could. 

– Workers in meat processing plants are being told to go back to work, despite the huge outbreaks of the virus at their work location. They are not being given adequate protection or testing. If they refuse to go back they are being threatened with no unemployment checks. (They have a job. They refuse to go back!) Additionally, many of the workers are illegally here so they have the additional threat of being deported. (Why don’t we use the word “exported”? I don’t know.)

– Many red state, rural, Republican governors are opening up their economies despite warnings from health officials. One such official is the man who was in charge of developing vaccines for our country, now fired, now a whistleblower, who testified to Congress yesterday. He said this winter will be very dark unless we get a nation wide response to this virus. (Ha! Good Luck with that.)

So that is the state of the union as I see it. Actually, those are the facts that I will use to draw conclusions about the state of the union. 

We do not have adequate testing and it does not look like we will anytime soon.

We do not have any contact tracing program in place or on the horizon.

We do not have any national response to this virus and the president and those around him seem unable or unwilling to do so.

All this has been known, but what is new for me is the recognition that the president, along with the White House, the Attorney General, and many governors and now conservative court justices at the state level are actively working to let this virus physically destroy us, while at the same time those same individuals and entities are doing everything they can to destroy America. At least the America I knew, and grew up with. 

By the time November rolls around I’m not sure what will be left. By January and inauguration we will be in the midst of the worst economic disaster and pandemic this country has ever faced. 

The sad thing is – it didn’t have to happen. That’s another thing to know.

Oh yeah, the first idea I mentioned. It’s not until one gets their thoughts, actions, and act they are saying all in alignment that one can be effective. Think of our president, his administration, and where we are. “Thought, word, and deed” or as we used to say, “Get your sh*t together.”

We are a long way from that and there’s an active movement to make sure it doesn’t happen. This is a disease far worse than the virus we are facing. It has infected so many.

171 Days until the election on November 3^rd

251 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021

PS Between a rock and a rock.

Day 1211 – Two Tiny Truths

Wednesday May 13, 2020 

172 Days until the election on November 3^rd

252 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021

Truth 1: If Hillary, or Obama, or Joe Biden had been President there would be no pandemic. 

Truth 2: Any thoughts you have of the White House or the Republicans in office doing the right thing are delusional.

You want to argue Truth 1? Yes? No? 

How many people died in the U.S.A. From the HUGE Ebola Pandemic? You know the one Trump says Obama made a mess of? How many? Two. That’s right – TWO.

How about worldwide? How many would have died if one of the three I mentioned was in charge? It would be a damn sight lower. In fact, there probably wouldn’t have been a pandemic because as Joe Biden pointed out he would have sent people to China right away to figure out what was going on. What’s that called? Oh yeah, “Trust but Verify.” Who said that? Some guy named Reagan? Remember him? He started the real downhill slide of this country.

Remember when Obama was sending teams of people and supplies to west Africa to fight the Ebola crisis the Republicans were clamoring for shuttering our country. Well, we did that as our first attempt with this pandemic. How’d it work out?

Remember too that South Korea got its first case the same day we did. How’s it working out for them? According to just released data they have 256 dead from the virus. Oh but they’re a smaller country. Yeah, their population is 51M. Ours is 320M or six times. 

Lemme see 6 * 256 is like 1536. Hum, which is better 1536 dead or 81,000? 

The news and the president are talking about opening up the country and the economy. However, the health experts say you gotta do some basic stuff. It all begins with testing and we aren’t doing that. 

So what’s going to happen? More people will die – needlessly. We won’t do the testing. The economy won’t come back.

The president is incapable of doing the job. 

172 Days until the election on November 3^rd

252 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021

PS Can you guess where this picture was taken?

Day 1209 – Shelter In Place, Wash Your Hands

Monday May 11, 2020 

174 Days until the election on November 3^rd

254 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021

This ain’t over. This virus is still as deadly as ever.

Governments are easing up on restrictions and guess what? The rates of infection are going up. Amazing. Who would have thought? (Egads.)

In the middle of last week there was a skinny young lady testifying to – I guess – Congress. She was a doctor. She looked way too young to be a doctor. You know she looked like she was 12; okay maybe 24 or 27. She was kind of scared by the whole thing, I think.

What she said, however, scared me. She was a doctor with the EPA, or CDC or something like that. She said there were four conditions that any jurisdiction would meet before thinking about opening up. She listed them. They weren’t hard to understand and they all made sense.

Then came the kicker. She meekly said, “To date, none of the states have meet all four of these conditions.”

OKAY. STOP. THINK ABOUT THAT.

“To date, none of the states have meet all four of these conditions.”

Are you willing to go out and risk your health and your life given that none of the states have met the basic conditions needed to defeat this virus?

Are you willing to go out in the world and know that you have the potential to pick up the virus, even if you don’t show signs, and that you might bring it home, infect someone else and they might die?

Moving on. I outlined in a recent post how Trump and Barr are trying to subvert the rule of law. How Trump is trying to discredit the Mueller Report and dismiss and blemish the reputation of anyone who was associated with it. This to try and say that the Russians didn’t interfere in the 2016 election, when they clearly did. Furthermore, to say that he and his campaign knew nothing about the Russian efforts, when they clearly did. 

And now, I’ve seen a Trump ad for the 2020 ad. He has cleverly cut and spliced in Andrew Cuomo and Gavin Newsome saying things that make it look like they are agreeing with the job Trump has done. So the 2020 Trump campaign will come down to:

– Besmirching anyone who disagrees with him,

– Creating false narratives about himself and what he has done

– Restricting voting as much as possible

– Letting the Russians and whomever else tamper in our elections, as long as it helps him win

Let’s review his plan for fighting the pandemic:

– Don’t invoke the War Powers Act to get necessary equipment

– Lie about the numbers, 

– Make no attempt to contain the virus via testing and contact tracing

– Hold press conferences, tweets, and other PR to suggest that he and the White House are on top of the situation and doing everything possible to stop the virus. When in fact he is doing nothing, at best; and at worst, getting in they way.

– Fire or demote anyone disagreeing with him, even if they are right.

Don’t be fooled. The virus is still out there. It is deadly.

Don’t be fooled. The vile are still out there. They are deadly. 

They will do anything to get their way and it’s of no help to you.

174 Days until the election on November 3^rd

254 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021

PS The author at the minefield clearing sign. It also suggests that you not stray off the beaten path as they may not have cleared all the mines. I wish I had known this a little earlier when I had such distress from lunch that I had to squat behind a bush to take care of business. I could have lost my ass!