US Politics, May 2020 — I will never lie to you. You have my word on that.

ye gods, if anything Scarburro was dorkier and more noxious during the Dubya era.

He was horrible. I found it hilarious that he somehow became a sympathetic figure

moving to NYC to become a minor media celeb puts you in different circles than righting radio, and resistance dorks have done180s on worse folks

re “cold case” — yes sorry for the misnomer. even so, Lock Him Up

rightWING radio

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/01/gilead-gets-emergency-fda-authorization-for-remdesivir-to-treat-coronavirus-trump-says.html

Gilead? where have i heard that name before...?

Conspiracy theorists don't like Gilead, but not for the reason you think!

(China ties)

donald trump believes 1.) joe scarborough murdered an intern and got away with it and 2.) this is just some kind of embarrassing piece of blackmail, doesn't change the fact that he is a dupe and a dunce.

oh yeah and 3.) it is comcast's responsibility to re-open this alleged murder investigation, not the state of florida or the u.s. justice department.

Dan S's fears largely confirmed by internal CDC projections.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/04/us/coronavirus-updates.html

If you have any friends or family that are reachable and not completely gone, the message to hammer home is "we are not on the back side of this".

Even one of my anti-Trump friends suggested we were this morning.

The only hope I have from this news is that Dems in Congress seize on it and push for monthly stimulus. Trump and his aides has already been backing away saying it's possibly not necessary.

Now is the time to cut monthly checks and extend the fed unemployment through Oct

Trump was on Morning Joe all the time during the early stages of his candidacy, even when it was abundantly clear that his only strategy was stoking race hate. fuck him.

oy, that nyt news is horrible.

xpost also really need to establish automatic triggers for stimulus that is tied to unemployment rate because if the glory of God finally shines upon us in November and we get rid of Trump, a Republican-controlled Senate will suddenly start to care very much about deficits and will never in a million years sign off on any new aid packages.

oy, that nyt news is horrible.

― Fuck the NRA (ulysses), Monday, May 4, 2020 12:54 PM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

normalizing a new 9/11 every day to own the libs.

Trump was on Morning Joe all the time during the early stages of his candidacy, even when it was abundantly clear that his only strategy was stoking race hate. fuck him.

Yes

Costco is limiting how many steaks shoppers can buy.

freedom under siege

also, 'cornering the steak market' entrepreneurship under siege

donald trump believes 1.) joe scarborough murdered an intern and got away with it and 2.) this is just some kind of embarrassing piece of blackmail, doesn't change the fact that he is a dupe and a dunce

He only believes #2

xpost also really need to establish automatic triggers for stimulus that is tied to unemployment rate because if the glory of God finally shines upon us in November and we get rid of Trump, a Republican-controlled Senate will suddenly start to care very much about deficits and will never in a million years sign off on any new aid packages.

otm

sad to say, right now is the probably the peak of republican empathy on this issue. this is how they do their best to help, with a GOP administration and senate. as soon as they're no longer officially in charge, heightened deaths will be a good thing for republicans, as an example of incompetent democratic leadership. it's fucked up all too probable

"y'all were told to save between 6-9 months of monthly bills up for emergencies. This is an emergency."

assuming the executive branch changes hands, anyone—be they R or D or a serious media person just delivering Hard Truths—who suggests that we really have to tighten our belts what with all this deficit should be immediately and in no uncertain terms be told to [ redacted] themselves immediately. and anyone who gives this advice one iota of thought other than to point and laugh and shame should also be written off forever. period.

Otm

Everyone uses money every day. Because of this everyone thinks they understand what it is and how it works. Almost none of them understand what money is or how it works.

Truly believe nobody on Earth fully understands modern global economy

the best framework for me parsing “”the economy”” is the realization that Nancy and Chuck will always have more in common with those obscenely wealthy Greenwich, CT MAGA assholes than they do with 99% of the folks who will go to the polls and vote for a Democratic candidate in November. they have an unspoken solidarity that I’m doubtful the working and poor masses will ever achieve in this country.

this sort festered under the surface for me when Obama was in office, but I think it’s all v much out in the open now. and the degree to which one cares, or is inclined to do anything about it, is directly tied to that person’s level of comfort/ wealth.

I say this as an extremely comfortable, healthy, white male who does very little other than vote

It is true enough that no matter how low in society your origins are, when you have risen high enough in the power structure, you acquire personal interests that align with maintaining the power structure. Only genuine idealists can resist that realignment and override their personal interest to seek the good of others at your own expense. Idealist politicians do exist, much more than e.g. idealist business owners, but the erosive forces in Congress upon one's ideals are steady and wearing.

eh, there are very few true idealists, and even fewer who cannot afford such a stance. but aimless is not wrong. "knowing" who is an ally takes a fuckton more than an address, tho keep it in mind.

the greenwich story is so gross i couldn't read it all, plus it's looooong as fuck, and i really think i know how they do. ay part of the "30%" live in greenwich. they also live in burbville. they live in the fuckin sticks. do they live in teh hood, i dunno. their circumstances steer the %s in some places more than others. at the core they're the same self-absorbed shitholes. don't be too surprised. greedy fucking shitbags are pretty universal imo.

“Quite frankly, Mother Nature is not a thinking enemy intent on inflicting grievous harm to our country, killing our citizens, undermining our government or destroying our way of life,” he told Congress in 2011. “Mother Nature doesn’t develop highly virulent organisms that are resistant to our current stockpiles of antibiotics.”

That’s Trump’s top official for public health preparedness, Robert Kadlec, who has been busy getting contracts for his former company and not disclosing it on ethics documents filings. Also cut emphasis on pandemics earlier to focus on bioweapons. https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/before-pandemic-trumps-stockpile-chief-put-focus-on-biodefense-an-old-client-benefited/2020/05/04/d3c2b010-84dd-11ea-878a-86477a724bdb_story.html

Nature is healing

Good morning!

it may well have been a naturally occuring virus that escaped from the virology lab. it's most certainly not a bioweapon.

but i don't trust the reports that it "definitely wasn't" one of the strains of bat coronaviruses they were studying there. like, who knows? very little is known about this virus.

it's the cubic model, jake

The White House is relying on a "cubic model" that predicts deaths will magically go to zero in two weeks.

It was created by a Trump econ advisor who also co-authored "Dow 36,000," which published just before the dot-com crash https://t.co/bArQ2z1Nj8 pic.twitter.com/343AHH76E8

— Eric Umansky (@ericuman) May 5, 2020

...Here I can’t help but note a basic point. Hassett is not a health care economist, let alone someone at the crossroads of behavioral economics and epidemiologists. Indeed, his record as an economist is rather notorious.

Perhaps Hassett’s biggest claim to fame is coauthoring a 1999 book entitled Dow 36,000: Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting From the Coming Rise in the Stock Market. The book argued that traditional metrics for evaluating stock prices were outdated and that the stock market was dramatically undervalued. The Dow, then a bit over 10,000, would rise to 36,000 over the next three to four years. These are the kinds of predictions one often hears at the top of a bull market. And indeed the market hit its peak within months of the book’s publication and continued to fall for almost the next four years. Needless to say, that was two and a half market collapses ago. 21 years later the Dow stands at 23,749, though it did approach 30,000 before the COVID19 collapse.

...Anyone can make a dumb prediction. Few have made ones of a more high-profile and quickly discredited nature. And for Hassett it’s rather par for the course. His is a DC GOP think tank (sinecured) economist who has generally paid no professional or reputational price for being wrong about virtually everything for decades. The decision to put such a person in charge of creating a predictive epidemiological model in the midst of a national crisis based on no professional or academic expertise whatsoever defies all logic. But then, who are we kidding? The President put his son-in-law, who’s only professional accomplishment was nearly bankrupting his real estate family after he took the reins after his father went to prison, in charge of epidemic crisis response.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/covid-36000

hassett and his co-author did a reading for dow 36,000 at the bookstore i worked at in '99 -- it was laughable even before the crash

i don't even care about the dumb DOW prediction so much as...why is that guy in a leadership position on coronavirus??

why is a reality show host the president of the united states? Wheeeeeeeeee

Forget it Karl, it's Donnietown

President Donald Trump exploded at the Lincoln Project via Twitter early Tuesday morning after the anti-Trump conservative political action committee put out an ad that criticized his response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“A group of [Republican In Name Only] Republicans who failed badly 12 years ago, then again 8 years ago, and then got BADLY beaten by me, a political first timer, 4 years ago, have copied (no imagination) the concept of an ad from Ronald Reagan, ‘Morning in America,’ doing everything possible to get even for all of their many failures,” Trump tweeted at nearly 1 AM ET.

He described the group as a “disgrace to Honest Abe” and called out each of its members by name.

“They’re all LOSERS, but Abe Lincoln, Republican, is all smiles!” he tweeted.

One of those members includes George Conway, the husband of White House adviser Kellyanne Conway, whom Trump suggested was somehow responsible for her spouse’s actions.

“I don’t know what Kellyanne did to her deranged loser of a husband, Moonface, but it must have been really bad,” Trump wrote.

check out that last line. wow, fuck you, yet again

how could someone work for a man who trashes their spouse? if my boss called any of my loved ones "moonface" i would quit immediately.

I wouldn't quit. My boss would be fired for saying it.

It's a game Kellyanne and her husband play. As long as they keep cashing checks from somewhere, they are happy to amplify the WWE style "feud" they've got going. It's all bullshit.

Still waiting for some quality Ides of March action from folks in this administration.

Trump Administration Signals It Will Wind Down Virus Task Force

The White House is telling staff that it plans to wind down the coronavirus task force even as the crisis rages on. It’s not clear if it will be replaced.

mission accomplished

there was a kellyanne conway tidbit in that recent new yorker article on Greenwich, CT (which is quite good imo - it serves as a kind of lite overview of grand shifts in republicanism and conservatism over the last 50 years) that i hadn't heard before:

When Trump took an early lead in 2015, most of the political and financial world ignored him. Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor at the Yale School of Management, attended a salon that summer at the Connecticut home of Larry Kudlow, the business commentator who now leads Trump’s National Economic Council. “It was a lot of very deep-pocketed Republicans from Greenwich and New York,” Sonnenfeld told me. “Not one person had a pleasant thing to say about Trump.” Sonnenfeld urged them to take Trump’s chances seriously, but a fellow-guest, who worked for a super pac supporting Ted Cruz in the primaries, disagreed. “She said, ‘I’m a lifelong expert on the psychographics of women’s voter behavior, and I can tell you that Donald Trump will never get two per cent of Republican women voters,’ ” Sonnenfeld told me. “She got wild applause. That was Kellyanne Conway.” (Conway, now a senior adviser to Trump, called this a “specious, self-serving claim,” adding, “I don’t know ‘Professor’ So-and-So.”)

Trump has threatened to primary the virus

that article is also a good reminder (to me at least) of the futility of thinking of "shame" as something that could possibly hold republicans back or make them pause. it is truly irrelevant to them. i like the description of the rich Greenwich republicans pride in building tall walls around their homes that runs through these paragraphs:

n the early years of this century, the economic divisions that would come to define America in the age of Trump became evident on the lush back roads of Greenwich, in a sign so subtle that it was easy to miss. Many of the new estates going up were no longer surrounded by the simple stone walls, stacked to the height of a farmer’s hip, that crossed the New England landscape. Instead, the builders introduced a more imposing barrier: tall, stately walls of chiselled stone, mortared in place.

The fashion for higher walls had little to do with safety; Greenwich has one of the lowest crime rates in America. To Frank Farricker, who served on the town’s planning-and-zoning commission, they symbolized power and seclusion. “Instead of building two or three feet high, people got into six-footers—the ‘Fuck you’ walls,” he said. When nearby municipalities noticed the trend, they treated it like an invasive species; they rewrote zoning rules to prevent the spread of what stonemasons took to calling “Greenwich walls.”

The walls were products of one of the most extraordinary accumulations of wealth in American history. In much of the country, the corporate convulsions of the seventies had entailed layoffs, offshoring, and declining union power, but on Wall Street they inspired a surge of creativity. Since the seventeen-hundreds, Wall Street had focussed mostly on funnelling American savings into new businesses and mortgages. But, in the last two decades of the twentieth century, financiers and economists opened vast new realms of speculation and financial engineering—aggressive methods to bet on securities, merge businesses, and cut expenses using bankruptcy laws. U.S. stock markets grew twelvefold, and most of the gains accrued to the wealthiest Americans. By 2017, Wall Streeters were taking home twenty-three per cent of the country’s corporate profits—and home, for many of them, was Connecticut.

The Internet allowed financiers to work from anywhere, so some escaped New York’s higher taxes by relocating their offices closer to where they lived. Newspapers took to calling Greenwich the “Hedge Fund Capital of the World.” The dealmakers earned vastly more than the industrial executives they had replaced. In 2004, Institutional Investor reported that the top twenty-five hedge-fund managers earned an average of two hundred and seven million dollars a year.

Nine of those top managers lived or worked in Greenwich, led by Edward Lampert, who in 2004 earned an estimated $1.02 billion after orchestrating the merger of Kmart and Sears. Lampert was not one to dress like a gardener; just offshore, he docked his yacht, a two-hundred-and-eighty-eight-foot vessel that he had named Fountainhead, for Ayn Rand’s individualist fable. (Trump has said that he identifies with the book’s hero, Howard Roark, a designer of skyscrapers who declares, “I do not recognize anyone’s right to one minute of my life. . . . No matter who makes the claim, how large their number, or how great their need.”) So much individual wealth accumulated in southern Connecticut that tax officials took to monitoring the quarterly payments of a half-dozen of the richest taxpayers, because their personal earnings would affect how much the entire state was able to spend on public services.

Around town, Morgan Stanley executives no longer competed to wear the cheapest wristwatch. (The current chairman and C.E.O., James Gorman, is celebrated on watch-enthusiast blogs for a rare Rolex that can sell for seventeen thousand dollars.) Jack Welch, who succeeded Reginald Jones at G.E., retired in 2001 with a record severance package of more than four hundred million dollars. One of Jones’s friends, the investor Vincent Mai, was dismayed that many business leaders put short-term interests ahead of long-term vision. “The culture changed into grabbing as much as you can, as quickly as you can,” Mai, the founder and chairman of the Cranemere Group, told me. “Restraint just seems to have gone out the window.”

The money physically redrew Greenwich, as financiers built estates on a scale once favored by Gilded Age railroad barons. The hedge-fund manager Steven A. Cohen paid $14.8 million in cash for a house, then added an ice rink, an indoor basketball court, putting greens, a fairway, and a massage room, ultimately swelling the building to thirty-six thousand square feet—larger than the Taj Mahal. In a final flourish, Cohen obtained special permission to surround his estate with a wall that exceeded the town’s limits on height. It was nine feet tall.

also a good reminder (to probably only me, again) that these are the actual power brokers in our society. almost all national politicians belong to that class. they either emerge from that class, aspire to it, or frequently bend to the will of it. i do think that the servitude is less extreme and total on the left, in general. it's hard to think of any national politician on the right that is anything but a craven fucker from hell on a mission to pass down wealth to their shitty families and friends. but there are plenty o democrats in Greenwich, too

i think it's weird that politicians from the middle of the country do the bidding of the east coast elite

"He has a bunker" for June

https://thumbs-prod.si-cdn.com/uahUz0E0AyaxTlHWZYaCnJuaO5U=/800x600/filters:no_upscale()/https://public-media.si-cdn.com/filer/c1/09/c1098538-bb86-4812-bbc9-ee78c5ccadb3/archie-bunker-all-in-the-fmaily.jpg

do we have a June thread?

US Politics, June 2020 — Positively towards negative