The lives of us all depend on conservatives' courage

Let's face it, Trump is mentally ill, and the fate of the nation rests on the shoulders of conservatives that he listens to having the courage to tell him what he must do for the nation.  Here is his latest evidence of his profound mental disease:


"“I say, ‘Mike, don’t call the governor of Washington; you’re wasting your time with him. Don’t call the woman in Michigan. It doesn’t make any difference what happens.’ You know what I say: ‘If they don’t treat you right, I don’t call.”


Conservatives on Fox News and in the right wing media bubble need to tell him that he needs to use his powers to send help where it is needed, not where people "treat him right".  Republicans in the Senate and House need to tell him face to face what he needs to do. And if he won't listen they need to go public, en masse.


We need conservatives to show courage and do the right thing for the nation.  It is blue states with high population densities being hardest hit now by COVID-19, but rural areas with marginal health care systems are at very great risk as well, and this virus is coming for them.


Trump's mental illness - pathological psychotic narcissistic self centeredness - makes him incapable of compassion or caring for other people.  He can only see people as worshipers who "treat him right" or as enemies to be destroyed. It is sad for him as a person, and extraordinarily dangerous for the rest of us as long as he has any power at all over our lives.  He literally is threatening to kill people who don't "treat him right."  (It is an understatement to say that this is an unconstitutional abuse of power)


Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, the Fox morning show folks,  Mitch McConnell, Devin Nunes, all Republican Senate and House members, Republican governors - we need you to show courage.  Once you start, all can join, and you will be protected by your numbers if all join in.  And then Trump will decide, ON HIS OWN, that he was right all along that he said he was sending help to every state according to need rather than according to their political leadership, because he is the greatest president in American history.


The fate of America rests on the shoulders of a very few conservative.  I know this seems like a foolish dream right now, but it is one I need to have. And so I dream it.....

Is Trump profiting from the virus?

Why did it take Trump two months to issue a Defense Production Authorization to build ventilators?  Can we please see the finances of him, his family, and his cronies?  Is he a pandemic profiteer?  Why hasn’t he issues DPAs for testing kits and Personal Protective Equipment??  What investments are they making?  

One explanation is simply that he has been trying to convince people that the virus is no big deal and is trying to keep the stock market up so he gets re-elected. It might be even more disgusting. 

Why does Trump call the Corona Virus the Chinese Virus?

Conservatives seem to be rushing to defend Trump for calling the coronavirus the Chinese virus. After all, they say, the virus started in China. Correct? So what’s the problem and calling it the Chinese virus?



Well, the swine flu in 2009 originated in America. What is it called the American flu?  No.



 The corona virus the sweeping through the world because the world is so deeply interconnected. It is not the Chinese virus.



It is true that the dictatorial authoritarian of Communist China did his best to downplay the effect and scope of the  coronavirus. That authoritarian leader was more interested in protecting the reputation and business of China than protecting its people or protecting the world. Sound familiar?



It is deeply and sadly true that the Wanabee dictatorial authoritarian leader in the White House did his best to downplay the effect and scope of the Corona Virus in America. He was more interested in protecting his reputation and protecting business in America than he was in protecting the people in America.


So, the time to contain the virus has passed and we are now in the mitigation phase - trying to spread out the curve of infection in order to keep from overwhelming our health care system.


Donald Trump calls it the  Chinese virus for two reasons.

• First he gets to blame somebody else for his own delayed responses to protect America from this virus.
• Second, he gets to play to his racist base, and proudly display his own racism.  That seems to be his primary campaign strategy  - last time and this time as well.
  

What I really want to know is what Trump and his family and his associates sold and bought on the stock market while he was oddly telling everybody that the virus was under control and that the virus was nothing more than a cold or a flu. Two Republican senators were caught selling hundreds of thousands of dollars of stock after getting briefings about what was about to happen. Did trump and those close to him do the same? Was Trump's message that we should not worry just a ploy for him to make millions?



Is Trump a pandemic profiteer?  It certainly would not be out of character for him, would it?

Trump and the Tea Party prepared the country to be unprepared for the Corona Virus

Trump and his Tea Party comrades - dedicated to destroying the Federal Government -  are being exposed by how deliberately unprepared they were for this Corona Virus pandemic.  (By the way, it is not what Trump racistly calls the "Chinese Virus" it is the Corona Virus - a world wide virus).  Amber Phillips writes:

The New York Times reported that last year, the Health and Human Services Department performed startling government simulations to show how underprepared the United States was for such a pandemic. Nothing was done in response.

As Trump was coming into office, the Times reports, “outgoing Obama administration officials ran an extensive exercise on responding to a pandemic for incoming senior officials of the Trump administration.” A year later, Trump disbanded the government’s pandemic-response team.

NPR got an audio recording of the top senator on the Intelligence Committee, Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), privately warning businesses in February that the virus, which was already in America, was going to be “aggressive” and “akin to the 1918 pandemic.” At the time, Trump was still comparing it to the flu.

We are lucky that the entire world is working to combat this pandemic, because this White House and these Tea Party Republicans certainly weren't prepared.

Why Trump and UK's Boris Johnson suddenly stopped calling the virus a hoax

Here is a quote about a very qualified report that got the UK's Boris Johnson, and probably Donald Trump as well, to stop telling people to go out and have a good time at restaurants and bars - from the WAPO's Daily 202:


3) Research from Imperial College London, endorsed by the U.K. government, suggests that 2.2 million would die in the United States and 510,000 would die in Britain if nothing is done by governments and individuals to stop the pandemic. The new forecasts, by Neil Ferguson and his colleagues, show that more-ambitious measures to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus, to slow but not necessarily stop the epidemic over the coming few months, could reduce mortality by half, to 260,000 people in the United Kingdom and 1.1 million in the United States. The new report concludes that the British government might be able to keep the number of dead below 20,000 by enforcing social distancing for the entire population, isolating all cases, demanding quarantines of entire households where anyone is sick and closing all schools and universities — for 12 to 18 months, until a vaccine is available. The modelers did not give numbers for the United States for these most intense suppression efforts.Seeing these numbers from some of Britain’s top modelers of infectious disease inspired Prime Minister Boris Johnson to take a much more severe approach to suppress the spread. “The report is also influencing planning by the Trump administration,” William Booth reports. “Deborah Birx, who serves as the coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force, cited the British analysis at a news conference Monday, saying her response team was especially focused on the report’s conclusion that an entire household should self-quarantine for 14 days if one of its members is stricken by the virus.”


The administration and the right wing news organizations who have been telling everyone that this virus is just some kind of plot to damage Trump have proven themselves to be totally unreliable sources of news - you could more properly call them "Fake News". 


I hope my conservative friends hear this wake up call to get out of their propaganda bubbles and have the courage to just listen to the actual news, rather than be continuously assured by the right wing media bubble telling them that the world is being run by liberals trying to hurt them in some way.


Please, just read, watch, and listen to actual news.  It may save your life.

Former CDC Director Dr. Tom Frieden clarifies info on the virus

I claimed yesterday that Trump and the Tea Party cut the CDC.  But Former CDC Director, Dr Tom Frieden, assured us on the Fareed Zacharia Sunday morning show that the experts and expert managers of the CDC are still in place.  That is good news.


It is true that Trump's budgets have and do try to cut funding to the CDC but Congress apparently has stopped that from happening.  Good for them!


It is also unfortunately true that Rear Admiral Timothy Zeimer and his team left the White House on the National Security Council after Bolton cut their budget and influence.  That White House team was in charge of executive leadership to respond to pandemics and was never replaced. We pay a big price for that now.


Dr. Freiden agreed that critical early responses to the pandemic were not taken, and that in the past America had taken the lead in fighting other outbreaks of pandemic potential diseases.  In the past, those were stopped.


Also, I was apparently wrong about China's response, as Dr Friedan said China slowed the spread by isolating millions in their homes for a month to increase the social distancing and reduce the spread of the virus.


He repeated that science does not know if this virus is seasonal, or can re-emerge violently after a pause.  This is a new virus. And it is not known. What we think we know are mostly just pretty good guesses for now.

It's the Tea Party too

This president's amazingly incompetent response to the Covid-19 virus pandemic was to be expected because he is simply an ignorant and incompetent con artist who conned conservatives into making him their leader.  Why is still quite a mystery to me, but it has something to do with his ability to speak to their rage at liberals.  More about that rage in later posts, not here today.


But, it is very clear to me that America's slow response to the pandemic is caused by the stripping of the Center for Disease Control of budget and expertise. (He ridiculously blames Obama of course, he always blames, blames, blames, not a mark of a leader is it?)  That gutting of the CDC is part of the systematic passions of the Tea Party - to shrink the government and make it disappear.  Sounds nice to some of my conservative friends, but once you find out what shrinking the government means you find out that it means stripping away the expertise that makes America safe and makes America great. 


Trump and the Tea Party have gleefully driven scientists and experts of all form out of the government. In Trump's case it is a matter of his own ignorance and stupidity.  In the Tea Party's case it is a matter of wrong headed ideology.


One of the terrible outcomes of this tragic pandemic is that we can all see how needed expertise of doctors, scientists, and other experts are for our safety and well being. 


I deeply hope and pray that America is able to spread out the incidences of severe virus diseases so that our hospitals and emergency care centers are able to handle the influx that is about to happen - slowly and manageably, I hope.  Italy was not able to do that and they are having to Triage patients - i.e. choosing which will have to die and which will be able to live.  We do this with plenty of warning ahead of time to inconvenience our normal lives and keep our social distance to try to slow the spread of this disease. 


As best as I can read at this point, one of five infected by this disease will need to be hospitalized.  I hope that is an alarmist exaggeration, but the countries in the grips of the pandemic now are seeing these kinds of numbers, as I understand it. 


The Left Wing authoritarian country of China tried to tell everybody that the disease wasn't all that bad, and then the pandemic hit and proved them tragically wrong.


The Right Wing authoritarian country of Italy tried to tell everybody that the disease wasn't all that bad, and then the pandemic hit and proved them tragically wrong.


The Theocratic authoritarian country of Iran probably did much the same and satellite photos show that they have dug two massive trenches about the size of football fields to dump the bodies taken by this pandemic.


This pandemic has not seemed very real to me, and I think to most Americans, up to now because we just aren't seeing it here, and because this president and his sycophantic right wing media bubble have tried to tell their followers that there is nothing really that bad about this virus.  They lie.  I hope that about four out of five who get this disease will have fairly mild and manageable symptoms.  But one in five will have a real problem.  And about 3% or so die. 


Back before Trump and the Tea Party, America would have been the leader of the world in responding to this pandemic.  Now we have a Chinese billionaire donating a million masks and half a million testing kits to America.  Thank you, very gratefully for the help.


It is not just Trump.  It is the Tea Party too.  They have and are continuing to strip the government of needed expertise.  Why?  They want lower taxes?  Really?  Not a lot of foresight, wisdom, or compassion in that ideology, it seems to me. 

Decency please

Joe Biden increased his lead over Bernie Sanders last night.  Here is an excerpt from his speech acknowledging his victory in Michigan and elsewhere.


"Winning means uniting America, not sowing more division and anger.  Means having a president who not only knows how to fight but how to heal....We are a decent, brave, resilient people.  We are better than this moment we are in.  We just need to remember who we are.


He was calm, adult, competent, sane.  Such a contrast to Trump. 


My long held opinion is that each new president is an answer to what didn't work in the previous president.  There is much about Trump that does not work, but his lack of being calm, adult, competent, and sane are right toward the top  of that list.


Please, let's just go back to decency in the Oval Office.  Please, let America be a place that we can be proud to be from again.  Please, let us finally say no to childish, rageful, incompetent, insanity that has taken over this country.


Looks like Biden will be the nominee.  That is fine with me.  I suggest Klobachar as his running mate, but let the story unfold.

Why did southern African American voters vote for Biden on Super Tuesday?

African Americans, especially in the South, are seeing a re-emergence of JimCrowe.  They see Trump as appealing directly to racists around the country, and they are seeing people who are now proudly racist and spewing their bigotry as a badge of honor.  They are seeing the Republican Party shutting down polls in their neighborhoods in order to make voting more difficult.  We saw plenty of evidence of this on Super Tuesday as we saw extraordinarily long lines in Texas that people were waiting for hours to vote.  They are seeing voter ID laws as a way to suppress votes from African Americans who do not have driver’s licenses, and see that getting IDs is made deliberately difficult by the Republican Party.  They are seeing a Republican Party that is dangerous to them.  They are seeing the clock turned back to very dark times that they thought were gone.  They aren’t gone.  They are coming back.

 

And they saw Joe Biden as the one who they connected to in an emotional way.

 

So they voted for Biden.  And the other moderates – Buttigieg and Klobachar understood the message and withdrew prior to Super Tuesday so Democrats could unite behind one centrist Democrat – Biden – against the radical candidate calling for The Revolution wished for in his youth – Sanders.

 

Good for them.  They led the way.

 

Be clear, I am not saying that my conservative friends are Jim Crowe racists.  But it is very clear also that Jim Crowe racists are making very strong moves to go back in time. And they are Trumpsters.   And that is pretty disturbing.

The 15% solution

How did Biden suddenly become the front runner?  The 15% solution. 


It was explained to me that in the California Primary Tuesday, the only candidates who would get delegates were those who scored at least 15% of the vote.  So, I looked at the CA polls and saw that the most likely candidate to get to 15% - the only one who was not Sanders, who I am convinced has no chance of beating Trump - was Biden.  I regret that Klobachar and Buttigieg had no chance of getting 15% because I would have voted for either of them instead.  I also didn't think the Bloomberg would get to the 15% even though I think he would be an excellent president. 


So, the only person that I could vote for as a vote for moderate liberalism, and as a vote against Sanders, was Joe Biden.


So, I did.


I think the entire Democratic Party in the rest of the Super Tuesday states did essentially the same thing - they saw Biden as the only way to stop Sanders, and thus the only way to oust Trump.


Let the Force be with him.....

Voted for Biden

For what it’s worth, I mailed in my primary vote for Biden this am. I’m afraid Bloomberg doesn’t connect to women nor African Americans. And they will be the difference in November.