Wednesday August 5, 2020
88 Days until the election on November 3rd
168 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021
There are so many disheartening things going on.
A history lesson of the not too distant past. In 2016, Trump won Wisconsin by 22,000 votes. Curiously, the student vote was way down by 68,000 votes and so too was the vote in minority communities. What happened? Part of the answer is that then Governor Scott Walker managed to ram through a voter ID law two weeks before the election which said Wisconsin’s own student ID was not valid at the polls. Puff, there went the students; there went Wisconsin. He also did some dirty stuff to suppress the vote in minority communities, but I forget exactly.
There was also a little meme I saw that compared the Republican versus Democratic administrations in terms of indictments, convictions, those going to prison. There is no comparison. The number of convictions for Republicans is 112 for Dems 1. This count is for Nixon through Trump’s first 1.8 years in office.
Now we get to the latest round of “How can we muck this up anymore?” Ah, we have two contestants:
Louis DeJoy – heading up USPS.
The Census Bureau.
Okay, the contestants are at the line. And there off! DeJoy pulls ahead with restrictions on postal service, which are slowing the delivery of mail.
Here comes the Census Bureau they need more time to get the Census done.
DeJoy has over 70 million invested in companies that compete with the Post Office, is that why he’s slowing things down? Maybe. Probably not. It appears he is trying to gum up the works for his boss, The Donald. I mean if the Post Office can’t deliver the ballots in time that would mean you don’t count them (unless of course they favor Donald then you do) and you can declare the election rigged etc. So what if you were the one doing the rigging?
Oh wait, in a late move on the rail here comes the Census Bureau. Seems they’ve turned things around. After asking for an extension so they can count the people that are hard to find the Census Bureau has done a 180 and will be wrapping up a month early!
Why would the Census Bureau wrap up a month early? Especially with a pandemic going on and the lowest turnout ever? Well, this gets super tricky, so pay attention. If they wrap up the Census early the people hardest to count don’t get counted and to quote Jared Kushner “they aren’t ‘our people’ “ (Okay, he said that about states that voted Democratic, but same idea.) If you don’t count those people the next ten years of apportionment cuts them out – cool huh? It means that the Republicans achieve their dream of having more representatives than they should by cheating. This is their standard playbook. Whether they will get away with it I can’t predict, but I will say this, they’ve gotten away with this kind of stuff a lot.
So far, I give the win to the Census Bureau and whomever made that call but let’s not count DeJoy out. He’s got time to make a hash of things.
In other news, there were some primaries yesterday. One of the things being voted on in Missouri was whether to expand health care in the state. This would be an expansion of the ACA, and that’s an anathema to Republicans and to the Governor of the state. The people voted to do it 53% to 47%. This will allow hundred of thousands of folks in Missouri to get health care. Huh? Who would have thought that people would want health care? Bet the Republicans are surprised. (Not.) Seems they’ve lost this battle six times since Trump took office.
In Kansaa a Republican lost his primary weeks after being hit with voter fraud charges, imagine that? And Kris Kobach lost his primary bid to run for Senator, by like twenty points. Sorry only 14. Seems even Kansas is sick of his horse sh sh sh puckey.
They are still playing bits from The Axios interview with Trump. Johnathan Swan the headlines say revealed the way to reveal Trump’s lies. Wait for it…Ask a follow up question. OMG! He got to do that! And he did it brilliantly. Instead of starting as I would have with “Listen you lying sack od shit …” Johnathan started by seemingly to reveal the president as being really smart and asking for clarification.
Several exchanges were on the Covid pandemic. Trump said we were doing really well compared to other countries. Trump had some papers that he fumbled around with to show Swan how well we were doing. Johnathan explained to Donald that in fact the graphs said the opposite. This seems to come as a surprise to the president. I’m not being partisan or anything like that I’m saying that if you watch Trump’s behavior he seemed not to know. He didn’t seem like a befuddled old man, but rather a guy who wasn’t very bright, trying to get by on whatever he could.
He fell back on some words like “There are a lot of studies and books that say we are doing very well.” Swan asked, “What studies? What books?” Shockingly the prez had nothing. (Okay, it’s not shocking at all.)
Swan seemed to really be showing Trump what the president didn’t understand. Much of what I saw reminded me of Sarah Cooper’s analysis of him. She said that when he starts a sentence he doesn’t really know where he’s going with it or doesn’t really believe it, but then he repeats it and he starts to believe it. It’s a self feedback loop. In other words, he’s not talking to anyone but himself.
Swan managed to get him out of that loop. One of the things Swan said after the interview is that Trump is a big advocate of Dale Carnegie. Carnegie wrote many books on how to be an effective public speaker and he talked about the “power of positive thinking.” The idea being that if you envisioned something it was more likely to happen. Therefore, you are better off envisioning in a positive light. (This is similar to what Anthony Robbins talks about.) While it may be true to do such things for your personal development it does not work against a virus.
Let me repeat that:
While it may be true to do such things for your personal development it does not work against a virus.
Why is that?
Because a virus doesn’t know or care how you envision anything.
Trump’s envisioning that the virus will someday go away just ain’t so.
We’ll have to work really hard to stamp this thing out.
Right now we’ve got social distancing and wearing masks. We’ve shown that it works.
Mississippi has tried other things. Mississippi has a problem. Their morgues are full of dead bodies.
Tennessee was told by Dr. Birx, the head of the White House corona virus taskforce (from a scientific viewpoint) that they, Tennessee, needed to shutdown and practice social distancing. The governor? “F that.” They’ll continue to open. I’d look for Tennessee to be on the list of states with full morgues soon.
To understand what needs to be done isn’t hard.
To do it isn’t hard.
Yet, people and politicians are making it stupidly difficult.
88 Days until the election on November 3rd
168 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021
PS God Speaks. Unfortunately, I don’t know what language.
After the Swan interview, how can anyone still buy into Trump’s schtick?
I actually found it painful to watch realizing the whole time that this
Insane child is supposedly running this country.
Still muddling around with Bolton’s In the Room Where it Happened.
Not a fan of Bolton’s I just wanted to see what was going on during the Korea thing. What a fiasco! Trump just wanted to be seen signing something in front of the cameras. He sold us down the river.
I’ve never know hate like this before.