US Politics, March 2020 — There’s a very good chance you’re not going to die.

Well...I guess a pyrrhic victory is still a victory.

Bolsonaro himself is positive now, too.

not seeing this reported anywhere but take a wild guess how I feel about ti

a link would be awesome

reputable source New York Post says bolsonaro has been tested

https://nypost.com/2020/03/12/brazil-president-jair-bolsonaro-tested-for-coronavirus-after-calling-crisis-fantasy/

Miami Herald sez Bolso's been tested.

#URGENTE | El presidente de Brasil, Jair Bolsonaro, dio positivo para el Coronavírus. pic.twitter.com/kEQPHzyswE

— Nexofin (@Nexofin) March 12, 2020

I saw this tweet, but comments are calling it fake.

Really good piece:

https://www.haymarketbooks.org/blogs/110-mike-davis-on-covid-19-the-monster-is-at-the-door

Biden given a solid address. at least he sounds like a human being who can put sentences together and project empathy.

Thanks for sharing that Mike Davis piece comrade alpha, will read

Trump claims (falsely) all Americans returning to country are being tested:"We have heavily tested. If an American coming back or anybody coming back, we have a tremendous testing set up where people coming in have to be tested ... if it shows positive ... We have to quarantine." pic.twitter.com/ndGlKmSFJh

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) March 12, 2020

daer journalists pls call these things "lies," not "false" or "innacurate" or etc

"We have very strong emergency powers under the Stafford Act," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday. "I have it memorized, practically, as to the powers in that act. And if I need to do something, I’ll do it. I have the right to do a lot of things that people don’t even know about."

-- Donald Trump on Thursday said he may declare the coronavirus pandemic an emergency by invoking a law known as the Stafford Act.

Donald Trump on Thursday said he may declare the coronavirus pandemic an emergency by invoking a law known as the Stafford Act.

This sounds... like an appropriate use of that act? I mean in principle, if it weren't in the hands of a dimwit?

sneaky, but I like it:

Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden proposes nationwide vote-by-mail in response to coronavirus

i'll bet they do

The American Gaming Association believes the gaming industry should be included in any federal stimulus action as the coronavirus outbreak weakens the industry’s performancehttps://t.co/TPOm3fYKbG

— Las Vegas Review-Journal (@reviewjournal) March 12, 2020

got ur stimulus 'right here'.

I mean be creative guys, move to the PredictIt markets, start holding odds on mundane life things.

How many traffic signals will be inoperative in Orange County the week of 3/11 -3/18? Take the over? the under?

this vibe to me is very Invasion of the Body Snatchers

WASHINGTON (AP) — Officials: US airstrikes underway against Iran-backed militia group that hit Iraq base.

— Zeke Miller (@ZekeJMiller) March 12, 2020

oh christ

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. launched airstrikes Thursday in Iraq, American officials said, targeting the Iranian-backed Shia militia members believed responsible for the rocket attack that killed and wounded American and British troops at a base north of Baghdad.

One U.S. official said multiple strikes targeted Kataib Hezbollah weapons facilities inside Iraq. The strikes were a partnered operation with the British, that official said. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because operations were still going on.

The strikes marked a rapid escalation in tensions with Tehran and its proxy groups in Iraq, just two months after Iran carried out a massive ballistic missile attack against American troops at a base in Iraq. They came just hours after top U.S. defense leaders threatened retaliation for the Wednesday rocket attack, making clear that they knew who did it and that the attackers would be held accountable.

Defense Secretary Mark Esper told reporters at the Pentagon earlier Thursday that President Donald Trump had given him the authority to take whatever action he deemed necessary.

Eh whatever

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/a-president-unequal-to-the-moment

...I reviewed all of the one thousand and forty-nine tweets and retweets that Trump sent in the five weeks between his impeachment acquittal and Wednesday afternoon, counting forty-eight that mentioned coronavirus. By far the largest number of these—twenty-one—bragged in some way about the Administration’s response to a crisis that Trump claimed was being contained because of his fast, early action to shut the “boarders” with China. The next largest group of tweets attacked Democrats or the media or both for not giving him credit, or for seeking to create panic, rather than recognizing what a good job he has been doing. It was only on February 24th that the President sent his first tweet about the illness arriving in America. “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA,” Trump tweeted. At the time, there were fifty-three confirmed cases in the country, a number that by March 1st had risen to more than a hundred. Just last week, Trump told Americans that coronavirus cases were “going very substantially down.”

Amazingly, these statements continued throughout this week, as the World Health Organization finally declared the novel coronavirus to be pandemic and chided nations—read the United States—for “alarming levels of inaction.” On Sunday, Trump claimed, “We have a perfectly coordinated and fine tuned plan at the White House for our attack on CoronaVirus.” On Monday, before the stock market crashed and a congressman who had flown with him on Air Force One had to quarantine himself, the President began the day by blaming the media and Democrats for seeking “to inflame the CoronaVirus situation, far beyond what the facts would warrant.” By the end of that catastrophic day, an unrepentant Trump appeared at a White House press conference and said, “We have been handling it very well” before promising a major, very, very big economic recovery proposal with no specifics. He concluded, “This blindsided the world, and I think we’ve handled it very, very well.” On Tuesday, he returned to this theme after visiting the Capitol for a private lunch with applauding Republican senators. “It will go away,” Trump said of the virus, on the day that more than a thousand cases were registered in the United States. “Just stay calm. It will go away.”

We don’t know whether this is Trump’s long-delayed reckoning, the overdue moment of accountability for a man who has escaped such reckonings his entire life. The election is not for many months. The dizzying events of just the last few weeks—the remarkable upending of the Democratic Presidential race, the hubris and foolishness of the Administration’s initial response to the virus—may be long forgotten by then.

That does not make this any less of a significant milestone in this most unbelievable of American Presidencies. On Wednesday, the respected government medical expert Anthony Fauci told Congress that the worst is yet to come. “Yes, yes it is,” he said. Trump cannot tweet this virus away or lie it into oblivion. The virus does not care if he gives tax cuts to friendly oil barons or bails out his own hotels with federal dollars, possibilities that have been floated in recent days. Trump may believe that only Republicans matter to his political fortunes, but he has yet to find a doctor who can insulate his base, and his base only, from the ravages of this disease. Nor will he.

Trump has spent years devaluing and diminishing facts, experts, institutions, and science—the very things upon which we must rely in a crisis—and his default setting during the coronavirus outbreak has been to deny, delay, deflect, and diminish. His speech on Wednesday night was a disappointment but not a surprise. He told us what we already knew: America is in big trouble.

Meanwhile, his more devout supporters will see this as a test rather than downright poetic Death By Fact divine punishment. In related news:

The amount of fixing national security related laws, policies and basic government functioning the next president will have to do is just staggering

— Carrie Cordero (@carriecordero) March 12, 2020

House Democrats delayed a scheduled vote on their package on Thursday as their negotiations with the White House continued behind the scenes. A vote could still come later in the day.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, and Steven Mnuchin, the treasury secretary, spent Thursday negotiating privately over the contours of the measure, which would provide a substantial new paid sick leave program, enhanced unemployment insurance, free coronavirus testing and food assistance.

Many Republicans are opposed to the paid sick leave proposal, complaining that Democrats are using the coronavirus crisis to accomplish a long-held domestic priority that is exceedingly costly.

But another improbable sticking point has emerged: Republicans are trying to insert abortion restrictions into the emergency bill. The Republicans want to include the Hyde amendment, which would bar the use of federal funds for abortions, according to a person familiar with the deliberations. Republicans routinely push to include the language in legislation that governs the distribution of federal money.

The fuck

So not gonna happen

Republicans are trying to insert abortion restrictions into the emergency bill.

a quarter of the country are evangelicals and another 20% are Catholic, the former at least are are well organized politically via churches (and white American Catholics often might as well be evangelical Protestants)

The white evangelical movement is just a big decentralized socially acceptable white supremacist hate group

They worship death, it’s awesome

Having been raised in the environment, I can confirm their death worship. Armageddon is all they've ever cared about and longed for.

btw isn't it just adorable that Trump keeps talking about looking into vaccines a) like nobody else has already been doing that and b) like they can just be crapped out in a week?

wait til someone tells him 2021 is likely the earliest we'd seen one

the perfect prescription

silby and sparkle motion both seem like they're exaggerating but yes i wholeheartedly agree

like, that's totally true of the part of it that i experienced. and many others as well. i want to think that it's an exaggeration because that would be more comfortable to live with, but holy shit, trump is who he is and this is happening

https://i.imgur.com/2l7Ydg6.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/be47XEk.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/DKkqEyw.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/U14Wzf6.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/cf3gpLm.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/CgyKUvH.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/yuTtTzL.jpg

uh, hail satan. not sure what else to say. fight the power

pretty creepy to see that sinner michael cohen behind him in that last image

It takes all those people to coax the president into taking a crap

it's the glorious apotheosis of narcissism

(pun intended)

I’m imagining what happens immediately after these photos are taken- they all shrivel up and die, Raiders of the Lost Ark style, as Trump absorbs their life force and gains their evil powers and super-moves.

help a raised-by-atheists out, is this laying of hands normal prayer practice? the one that looks like he's smirking is pretty chilling

also enjoyed the massive rings on that follow shot one

normal prayer practice = performatively acting like a pious tool, iirc

wait til someone tells him 2021 is likely the earliest we'd seen one

― sorry for butt rockin (Neanderthal), Friday, March 13, 2020 1:18 AM (seven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I personally have seen video of people explicitly telling him precisely this on at least two occasions. I'm sure people have additionally told him dozens of times when he wasn't on camera. He doesn't hear, he doesn't process, he doesn't care.

Note it only allows States to amend their unemployment benefits laws, but....STATE LEGISLATURES, GET MOVING, NOW!

https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-economy-labor/u-s-labor-department-allows-unemployment-benefits-for-coronavirus-idUSW1N29L03G?

He doesn't hear, he doesn't process, he doesn't care.

....cocaine

(riff)