Rick Kinnaird

Wednesday August 5, 2020

88 Days until the election on November 3^rd

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 3^rd

168 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021

PS God Speaks. Unfortunately, I don’t know what language. 

Tuesday August 4, 2020

89 Days until the election on November 3^rd

169 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021

The first part of this screed is left over from a few days ago: Bill Barr. Either he is grossly incompetent or inept, or he’s a liar. When he was being questioned about the fellas standing outside the state house in Michigan with AR-15s and say he didn’t know about it is way beyond unbelievable. He can lie with that placid look on his face. In fact, perhaps that’s the tell. Then to follow it up with that dismissive comment of “there are a lot of protests in this country.” Like it’s too hard for him to know about all of them? I guess he selectively looks at the ones that he or Trump decide can best embarrass Democrats? I don’t know. He seems busy doing the president’s bidding.

But here’s the thing. Barr said he didn’t know about the protests in Michigan and that his job was to protect Federal property. If he didn’t know about the protests in Michigan how did he know that they didn’t threaten Federal property?

Okay. Moving on. Seems the District Attorney in New York may get his hands on the eight years of Trump and the Trump Organization’s tax returns. The Supreme Court had ruled on it and it will go back down to a lower court where Donnie can have his lawyers make the same arguments they made before, which have already been ruled on and against him. Why, I’d say it will be just in time for the election. 

The case really isn’t all that hard to understand. Trump and his associates told the IRS that his properties weren’t worth all that much while also telling the banks that they were worth a lot more. There’s a term for that. It’s called fraud. You can go to jail for fraud. 

There seem to be two defenses for Trump-o. One) everybody does it. Two) the bank knew the numbers were inflated so it’s not fraud.

Number two is an interesting defense. Apparently, some of the people at Deutsche Bank were outright laughing at the numbers, so maybe some knew they were not true values. If so, why did the bank lend the money? Ah, maybe it’s because it wasn’t really their money? Maybe they were just passing the money through from the Russians? Ie Putin.

There is also the whole line of investigation into former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s son Justin, who worked at Deutsche Bank for ten years and became head of their global real estate division. He loaned Trump over one billion dollars when no one else would. Why did he do that? The senior Kennedy seemed to think that he might have had to weigh in on such a case and rather than do that suddenly retired. When I say sudden I mean sudden. He had his interns all picked for the next session. His office was ready to go, and then, “Sorry, I’m retiring.” He had been the deciding vote on a number of 5-4 decisions in Trump’s favor. 

Now the talk is of a woman at the bank who they are saying did the lending and was involved in some dubious transactions with Trump and with Kushner. She bought a condo or two or three from them. It would be a pity if the sallow and sloe-eyed young man had to go to prison. Hope, he took his hydroxychloroquine. Watch for big tears from Ivanka. For Jared, for dad, for herself as she gets hauled off too as part of this criminal enterprise.

Meanwhile, schools are facing the prospect of how to open safely. The answer is simple, ask yourself this, “Has the virus subsided in your community?” If not, you can’t open. Has it subsided anywhere in the U.S.? Not really. Therefore schools can’t open.

Next.

Beyonce. Watched her `movie,’ “Black is King.” I put movie in quotes because it’s not a movie in the classic sense of having a storyline or plot. It’s really an extended video and photo shoot with some hints at cliched story plot points. I’m not saying it’s bad, or that it is good. I watched the whole thing. I waited for something to conclude or happen, but it never did. The sets were gorgeous and they – surprisingly – featured Beyonce. I gotta say this, it takes a heck of an ego to engage that many people in a project that features “moi” with no real purpose other than showing themself off. Some might argue that there was a plot and I agree there were hints. There was the baby in the basket floating down the river. There was the humanization of the Lion King story in various references. There were the scenes of the young boy having to choose between the evils of something or other and another door. There was the nouveau riche guy in his Rolls. There were lots of things like that. Did they go anywhere? Not really. It was gorgeous. It was musical, but limited. Nothing really stood out musically. They were all sort of the same, and in the limited range Beyonce can sing in. Not good, not bad, just sort of there. 

What else. Oh yeah, a hurricane. No, a tropical storm. Five miles an hour short of a category one hurricane. Fast moving and unpronounceable Isaiasaisaisiaias – or something like that. It moved through here in a couple of hours or less. Going 28 miles an hour, headed up the interior coast line. Due to die out in Canada.

So, here we are, six – seven months into this pandemic and still no plan from the Federal government. We are still talking about a country wide mask order. Still talking about using the Federal government’s power to get manufacturers to make PPE and testing kits. Yet, nothing. 

You know what we should do? Force a double impeachment. Throw Trump and Pence out. Nancy Pelosi becomes President. She appoints Andrew Cuomo to clean up the virus. He shuts down the country for four to six weeks. Congress gives people money to survive, and the whole thing is over – done – by election day. Simple. Schools open in November. Broadway opens by Christmas. 

I pray that these toadies who have supported the president and these foolish and stupid ideas about government and economics and health are all booted out of office.

Moving on, again. I have a VP pick for Joe Biden, and it isn’t a woman.

Wait for it …

Okay, I’m not going to outright tell you you have to figure it out in this word scramble. Fun, huh?

Ra Ma Ba Ab Ok C

There you have it.

My pick.

89 Days until the election on November 3^rd

169 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021

PS Dragon landing off Pensacola, Florida.

Sunday August 2, 2020

91 Days until the election on November 3^rd

171 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021

Well, well, well, what can I say?

I remember reading about a chess master in the 19^th century who during one match jumped onto his chair, pointed at his opponent and yelled, “Why do I have to play this idiot?”

I was watching the exchange between Jim Jordan and Anthony Fauci. Jordan was doing what he always does in these situations – being a bully, or being an idiot. Maybe, both. Jordan was trying to get Fauci to say that the government should intervene on the protests to stop the spread of the corona virus. This went on for most of Jordan’s five minutes of questioning. So, either Jordan is stupid or he’s a bully. Fauci repeatedly said that wasn’t his call. What he did was to advise: avoid crowds; wear a mask was his advice.  He repeatedly told Mr. Jordan that it was not his call as to what gatherings should be allowed and which not. This was either too hard for Mr. Jordan to understand or he was being a bully.

In other stuff I got a meme showing on a horizontal split picture Bill Gates and below him the people in the white lab coats that were in the ad saying don’t wear masks and screw social distancing. The meme showed bullet points near Bill’s picture. Things like: “never graduated from college,” “has no epidemiological experience,” etc. Then there were paragraphs saying who the folks in the picture were and what their medical experience and degrees were. The question posed was basically, “Who are you going to believe?”

Bill – obviously.

(Just to be clear, the points the meme didn’t mention was that Bill founded one of the most successful companies of all time. Has been the richest man in the world. Wiped out via his organization one of the most deadly diseases in the world. Warned us via a TED talk in 2015 that a pandemic like we are experiencing was possible and that we should prepare. Likes to read unpublished PhD thesis while on vacation.)

Next.

Well, then there’s Louie Gohmert who said he can’t help but think that maybe he got the corona virus from wearing a mask. It’s good to know that Louie thinks. 

Hopefully, he and his Republican members of Congress will get together for a big party to “Stand Up to the Virus.”

I think Jim Jordan and Louie Gohmert should ask Herman Cane what he thinks about the virus and whether he should have attended Trump’s rally in Tulsa massless. Oh snap, he’s dead. From the virus. Came down with it shortly after Tulsa. Good thing Trump had everyone sign those “Don’t sue me” forms, eh?

Dragon lands in half an hour. Perseverance took off earlier this week. At least there are some things this administration hasn’t screwed up. 

91 Days until the election on November 3^rd

171 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021

PS Dragon SpaceX leaving the International Space Station