Trump Sabotaging Post Office to Undermine Absentee Balloting

Because he knows he can't win this next election, Donald Trump is sabotaging the postal system so he can claim the November election was a fraud, sending the country into chaos for months:

The U.S. Postal Service is experiencing days-long backlogs of mail across the country after a top Trump donor running the agency put in place new procedures described as cost-cutting efforts, alarming postal workers who warn that the policies could undermine their ability to deliver ballots on time for the November election.

As President Trump ramps up his unfounded attacks on mail balloting as being susceptible to widespread fraud, postal employees and union officials say the changes implemented by Trump fundraiser-turned-postmaster general Louis DeJoy are contributing to a growing perception that mail delays are the result of a political effort to undermine absentee voting.

Yesterday the nitwit-in-chief tweeted:

With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 30, 2020

Of course, voting by mail and absentee voting are the same thing. Trump votes by mail all the time. Several states have been voting by mail for years. Trump wants to reserve absentee voting for rich old white people.

There's not a heck of lot of fraud in absentee voting, but if you look at who's doing it, it's Republicans like Leslie MacCrae Dowless, from North Carolina. Is it just a coincidence that Trump's new postmaster general, Republican megadonor Louis DeJoy, is also from North Carolina?

Trump can't delay the election. Only Congress can set the date, as specified in that annoying document, the Constitution.

And, as a matter of fact, the election can't be delayed. Trump's term ends on Jan. 20, according to the 20th Amendment, and he is no longer president if there's no election. There's only two months between the election and the inauguration. There's no slack time at all.

Trump is taking his orders from Moscow. He's turning the leader of the free world into a chaotic kleptocratic oligarchy riven by division and stunned by a pandemic that he failed to control.

At every turn he incites violence, from the right-wing nutjobs in Charlottesville, to the people attending his rallies, to the police who killed George Floyd during an arrest, to the demonstrators who protest police killings, to the Umbrella Man who started the real chaos in Minneapolis, to the Homeland Security agents who kidnap protesters from the streets of Portland, to the deranged "men's rights" lawyer who assassinated his California rival and killed the son of a female Hispanic lawyer during a second failed assassination attempt.

Trump is almost solely responsible for the horrific climate of hate and intolerance in this country. He wants to burn the country to the ground, for what reason I don't understand. Why does he want to be king of a shithole country, like the ones he told Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Presley and Rashida Tlaib to go back to? Considering that Ocasio-Cortez, Presley and Tlaib were all born in the US, one must assume that Trump was referring to his own country as a shithole.

Back in 2012, I think, though I can't remember for sure, Republicans ran a grim black-and-white ad claiming that after eight years of Obama the United States would be a bleak and destitute hellhole, with mass unemployment and violence on the street.

Well, they were off by four years and one president. Every major major disaster for the last century has happened on the Republicans' watch. With Hoover it was the Crash of '29 and the Depression. With Nixon it was the Viet Nam debacle and Watergate. With Bush it was the Afghanistan/Iran quagmire and the Great Recession of 2008.

With Trump it was the surrender of American power to Russia and China, the collapse of the economy, and before it's over, hundreds of thousands of deaths from Covid-19.

In eight years Barack Obama took the United States from the destitution left him by George Bush and handed Trump a vibrant and growing economy. In just three years Donald Trump turned it all to shit with his hatred, incompetence and greed.

Coronavirus Cavalcade III: Herman Cain Is Dead from Coronavirus

Herman Cain, the black Republican who ran for president in 2012, gained notoriety for being unable to pronounce Uzbekistan, and dropped out of the race when his history of sexual harassment became public, has died of the coronavirus:

Herman Cain, the former Republican presidential candidate and business executive who was hospitalized this month with the coronavirus, has died. He was 74.

Cain attended Trump's Tulsa rally last month, and it may well have been where he contracted the disease (the timing makes it quite plausible), but he was flying all around the country, and frequently did not wear a mask in public.

In short, Cain did what Trump wanted him to do, and now he's dead.

Remember back in 2016 when Trump addressed black voters, asking, "What the hell do you have to lose?"

For Cain, the answer was his life.

So, with Cain's passing, how many Republicans are going to pick up the Black Lives Matter banner? Because African-Americans are dying of the coronavirus in much higher percentages than whites, and all Republicans can do is whine about how horrible it is to be forced to wear a mask for the 10 minutes a week they're in the grocery store.

Coronavirus Cavalcade II: Louie Gohmert Is Infected

A few days ago it was reported that Trump's national security advisor was infected, and it just keeps getting worse:

Representative Louie Gohmert, a Texas Republican who has frequently refused to don a face covering in the Capitol, confirmed on Wednesday that he had tested positive for the coronavirus before a planned trip with President Trump on Air Force One, and he blamed his diagnosis on wearing a mask.

The results immediately sent a shudder through the Capitol, where this week Mr. Gohmert has been voting and actively participating in congressional hearings, including a Judiciary Committee session on Tuesday with Attorney General William P. Barr and another held by the Natural Resources Committee.

Goober didn't announce this himself, his diagnosis was revealed by Politico. Politico then received an email from a Gohmert staffer:

"When you write your story, can you include the fact that Louie requires full staff to be in the office, including three interns, so that 'we could be an example to America on how to open up safely,'" the aide added. "When probing the office, you might want to ask how often were people berated for wearing masks."

Goober's claim that the mask gave him the coronavirus is ridiculous:

“There are an awful lot of people who think it’s the great thing to do all the time, but I can’t help but think if I hadn’t been wearing a mask so much in the last 10 days or so, I really wonder if I would have gotten it,” Mr. Gohmert said. “Moving the mask around, getting it sitting just right, I am bound to have put some virus on the mask that I sucked in. That is most likely what happened.” 

It's abundantly clear that the virus is airborne, but he thinks he had it on his hands.Why is he putting his hands in virus particles? Why doesn't he wash his hands, or use sanitizer before he futzes with the mask? Whose fault is it that he keeps touching the mask?

Conservatives like Gohmert are such children. Why can't he just suck it up and admit it's his own damn fault he caught the virus?

Don't blame the mask. Blame the fool wearing it.

Coronavirus Cavalcade I: Turning Point USA Co-founder Is Dead

After months of Trump and his conservative enablers lying about the pandemic, the virus is starting to take a deadly toll on the conservative establishment:

The co-founder of conservative student group Turning Point USA, Bill Montgomery, has died from complications of the coronavirus, according to two friends of his.

Montgomery, who started it in 2012 with young conservative star Charlie Kirk, died at the age of 80 on Tuesday from Covid-19, according to pro-Trump conservative strategist Caleb Hull, who posted about the death on Twitter and his personal Facebook page, and Chicago-based citizen journalist Vic Maggio.

“I really wish people would just stop politicizing this pandemic and grow up while innocent people around us are dying,” Hull also said. “You have no idea how painful it is to be forced to sit at home while your loved one dies alone in a hospital.”

Jesus Christ, do conservatives even listen to themselves? They have done nothing but lie about the severity of the pandemic, blasting anyone who wants to take reasonable precautions opening up schools and the economy, and when one of their own dies they whine about how people are "politicizing" it.

The sheer idiocy of the conservative movement is encapsulated in the podcast by that "young star," Charlie Kirk:

“[E]very single time I go into one of these grocery stores, ‘Where’s your mask?’ I say, well first of all, the science around masks is very questionable, very questionable,” he said. “In fact some people, some doctors think that masks actually make you sicker and have you less likely to be able to get oxygen and more likely to infect yourself, and less likely to be able to fight the virus, and actually more likely to be able to die sooner.

This is simply false. If you're just sitting or walking, you will still have plenty of oxygen. My wife just went to the doctor and had her O2 levels checked with a pulse oximeter while wearing a mask, and she was at 100%.

This Kirk guy is just plain stupid. Every day of every year painters and drywall installers wear N95 masks to protect themselves from inhaling carcinogenic particles while performing hard physical labor, and no one dies from lack of oxygen.

What Kirk said next reveals the intrinsic problem with conservatives: they only care about themselves.

“A lot of people believe that. I’ve met many doctors that hold that view,” Kirk added. “Secondly, we have a huge civil liberty issue here. Why do you have the authority to tell me what I can and cannot do with my body? I thought it was ‘my body, my choice.’”

It's not about your body, Charlie. It's about everyone you breathe on. Air is a shared resource. If you're infected and are asymptomatic or presymptomatic, you will spread the disease to everyone you come in contact with.

We don't allow smoking on airplanes anymore because we learned that second-hand smoke causes cancer and a host of other diseases. For the same reason people should wear masks on planes and in grocery stores because they may be infectious, even if they don't feel sick.

What is wrong with these people?

A Self-Inflicted National Embarrassment

This guy played baseball?

Donald Trump is such a pathetic loser. When he heard that Anthony Fauci was throwing the first pitch at a Nationals game, he became insanely jealous, and said this:

“Randy Levine is a great friend of mine from the Yankees,” Mr. Trump, referring to the president of the baseball team, told reporters on Thursday as Dr. Fauci was preparing to take the mound. “And he asked me to throw out the first pitch, and I think I’m doing that on Aug. 15 at Yankee Stadium.”

There was one problem: Mr. Trump had not actually been invited on that day by the Yankees, according to one person with knowledge of Mr. Trump’s schedule. His announcement surprised both Yankees officials and the White House staff.

But Mr. Trump had been so annoyed by Dr. Fauci’s turn in the limelight, an official familiar with his reaction said, that he had directed his aides to call Yankees officials and make good on a longtime standing offer from Mr. Levine to throw out an opening pitch. No date was ever finalized.

So, to no one's surprise, Trump was just talking through his MAGA hat, and his stooges had to walk the claim back:

After the president’s announcement, White House aides scrambled to let the team know that he was actually booked on Aug. 15, although they have not said what he plans to do. Over the weekend, Mr. Trump officially canceled.

“Because of my strong focus on the China Virus, including scheduled meetings on Vaccines, our economy and much else, I won’t be able to be in New York to throw out the opening pitch for the @Yankees on August 15,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter on Sunday, using a racist name for the coronavirus. “We will make it later in the season!”

Hah. Trump spends all his time watching Fox News and playing golf, and thinks that the coronavirus would just go away if only those damned doctors would stop testing people.

And it only gets worse. On Tuesday Trump devolved into whining self pity on the national stage:

Just over a week after he began a rebooted effort, driven by rising infection rates and sinking poll numbers, to talk about the virus in terms more in line with medical consensus, Mr. Trump was again making unfounded claims and defending discredited medical experts. It was the sort of eccentric, science-deficient performance that many of his aides believe unnerved the public during the spring and has come to gravely threaten his re-election prospects.

Noting that Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, and Dr. Deborah L. Birx, his administration’s top coronavirus coordinator, have high approval ratings even as his own have sagged, Mr. Trump added, “And yet, they’re highly thought of — but nobody likes me.”

“It can only be my personality,” he concluded.

It's not just his personality, though his constant whining, lying, jealousy, selfishness, callousness, racism, misogyny, vengefulness and narcissism certainly make it impossible for anyone to actually like him. They only toady up to him out of fear, greed or ambition, or "like" him because they find his toxic tirades against liberals entertaining or his racist rants confirming their own predilections. But no one is actually fond of him as a person.

But they also don't like him because of his incompetence, incoherence, inconsistency and ignorance, as perfectly illustrated by what happened next:

When reporters pressed him on a viral video he had retweeted on Monday night that included doctors falsely claiming that hydroxychloroquine was a “cure” for the virus and that masks were unnecessary, Mr. Trump responded: “They’re very respected doctors. There was a woman who was spectacular in her statements about it, and she’s had tremendous success with it.’’ 

When a reporter noted that the physician who spoke of “a cure,” Dr. Stella Immanuel of Houston, also “made videos saying that doctors make medicine using DNA from aliens,” Mr. Trump responded, “I know nothing about her,” and abruptly ended the briefing moments later.

First Trump says this "doctor" is spectacular and then mere seconds later says he knows nothing about her. This is the same "doctor" who also says that endometriosis is caused by having sex with demons.

This is not how a "strong and powerful" leader behaves. This is how a thirteen-year-old girl acts. Just ask Roseanne Barr, (formerly?) a big Trump supporter, who says that Trump is the first woman president.

How much more evidence do we need to see that Trump is completely unqualified to be president? In a nationally televised news conference intended to calm American's nerves in the midst of a pandemic he says something in the most confident terms and when confronted with reality just throws up his hands and runs away to pout.

The man is just a demented huckster with the most tenuous grasp on reality, trying to sell snake oil to a country that is in desperate need of real leaders, real doctors and real scientists, not fake presidents like Trump and religious quacks like Immanuel.

Is This Communism

So Much for "Law and Order"

Somehow, it isn't a surprise that the man who murdered George Floyd has been filing fraudulent tax returns since 2014:

Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer accused of killing George Floyd, was charged with multiple tax-related felonies, prosecutors announced on Wednesday.

Mr. Chauvin and his wife, Kellie Chauvin, failed to file income tax returns and pay Minnesota income taxes, and underreported and underpaid income taxes, according to Washington County prosecutors. The investigation into six years of tax filings, prosecutors said, also showed that the Chauvins did not pay the proper amount of sales tax on a vehicle.

When Chauvin killed Floyd it became known that Chauvin owned houses in Minnesota and Florida and was a registered Republican. I speculated that Chauvin was also committing tax fraud and voter fraud because he was working a full-time (and a part-time) job in Minnesota while registered to vote in Florida.

This is the scam that wealthy people like Trump use all the time to vote in multiple jurisdictions and avoid taxes. They live in Minnesota (or New York), and then own property in Florida, and then claim citizenship and register to vote in Florida, even though most of their business is conducted in Minnesota (or New York), and they live in Minnesota (or New York or Washington) they claim residency in Florida to avoid taxes.

I'm waiting for the third shoe to drop for Chauvin, when they file charges against him for voter fraud.

Guys like Chauvin and Donald Trump claim to be for "law and order," but they constantly break the law. Slowly choking a man to death in the street can hardly be counted as law and order, and that murder has predictably sown protests across the planet. Law enforcement has just made the situation more chaotic.

Trump responded by sowing even more chaos, sending jackbooted thugs across the country to arrest protesters in Portland, claiming to restore "order," tear-gassing the mayor of Portland in the process.

But chaos is nothing new for Trump: his own administration is a chaotic dumpster fire, with hundreds of positions still unfilled, and employees being fired for cause, for disloyalty, for leaking, for telling the truth, and -- in the case of the inspectors general rooting out corruption in the Trump administration -- for doing the job they're legally required to do.

Trump has spread chaos across the country and the world over. He has completely destroyed the previous "world order," single-handedly demoting the United States from the leader of the free world to just another banana republic. Now Russia and China are the predominant powers in the world, and the United States economy is in the toilet because Trump completely botched his coronavirus response. He put his toady Pence and his nitwit son-in-law in charge of the response instead of the scientists and experts whose advice countries like Germany, New Zealand and even China took, drastically reducing their case loads while our are mushrooming.

Trump regularly breaks the law and violates the Constitution: Trump "University," the scheme to blackmail the Ukrainian president, the emoluments he receives from foreigners through his hotels and resorts, his asking the US ambassador to get the British Open at his Scotland golf course. So many of his cronies have resigned, fired, jailed, convicted or confessing to crimes that Trump ordered or were done on his behalf (Cohen, Flynn, Manafort, Stone, etc., etc.). And then Trump used the office of the president to further that corruption, pardoning crooks like Roger Stone, Rod Blagojevich, Harvey Milken, Bernie Kerik, even pardoning war criminals like Eddie Gallagher, the Navy SEAL who threatened to kill his fellow SEALs if they reported him.

Trump doesn't believe in the law: it's just a tool to use to hammer his enemies (as in the lawsuit he filed against a tiny Wisconsin TV station for running an ad against him).

The only order guys like Chauvin and Trump care about is the social order, with white men on top and women and minorities at the bottom.

Put 2020 Into Perspective

Prior to our current times, let’s say pre-1990, life had a lot of problems. It got worse the further you went back. Disease, famine, war etc...people still got on with their lives. And their capacity to deal with that misery also was greater the farther you go back.

Today, people have better lives. They still do despite the pandemic. But we aren’t used to dealing with any real strife like previous generations. Think about what someone in 1880 or 1935 had to deal with. Most people didn’t live past 50. No one had money except a few people. People starved all the time.

Yes, crappy things are happening. Individuals have it really bad compared to society as a whole. But overall, I’ll take 2020 any day over previous eras in terms of a better world. I just wish we had the gumption that those past generations had. I know I don’t

The Myth of the Secret Trump Voter

“Dear everyone: there’s no such thing as a “secret Trump vote.” What there is is a really high turnout rate for Rep voters- like in the 70s- as compared to D turnout which at best hit the mid 60s in my 2018 voter file analysis.” (Rachel Bitecofer)

 Please give Rachel a follow and stop listening to nonsense about secret or shy Trump voters. Republicans vote more reliably than Democrats. That’s the only way they can win.

My Dream Last Night

Last night I dreamt that I lived in a country where people still had to deal with the pandemic but it was quite different.

They had leaders who were scientists that relied on facts and evidence, not anecdotes and online gossip. The people admired their intelligence and weren’t antagonistic about their knowledge and accomplishments in a contrarian and adolescent way.

The people were disciplined in their pursuit of solutions and weren’t distracted by irrational nonsense. They helped each other out instead of engaging in petty arguments and pointless debates on social media. They encouraged and supported each other, valuing logic above all else.

They were rational but passionate.

They asked the right questions like:

-How many people have had the virus?
-How many people have it?
-How much of the virus is required to transmit it?

They followed through in pursuit of answers to these questions with comprehensive strategies and gave their energy to goals that actually solved problems.

They were curious in the best possible of ways, wanting clear, positive outcomes for society as a whole while dealing with actual facts and evidence.

And then I woke up and realized what country I actually lived in:

 A CHILDISH SHIT SHOW OF SELFISH AND SELF RIGHTEOUS MORONS.

What the fuck, people? Can we turn this around?

Watergate Advice is Still Good: Follow the Money

I've been playing volleyball for more than 30 years. I know a lot of players. When the pandemic started all the gyms closed down, even before the state of Minnesota called for a general shutdown.

As the state opened up this spring I started looking into playing outdoors, which is much safer. The first guy I called, we'll call him D, said he wasn't going to play this year because his wife has a health condition.

This is a guy who plays almost every day in the summer, and in the winter drives more than 150 miles round trip once or twice a week to play at an indoor sand court in Wisconsin.

As infection numbers declined I decided to play sand doubles with a group of guys who (I thought) were being fairly careful. We didn't high five and maintained our distance. But the most important thing was to keep the circle small: no more than 10 people who are taking care to avoid contact with others.

I haven't even been inside a building, other than my house, for the past five months. If I do get infected, I want to make damn sure I don't pass it on to someone who didn't agree to be exposed.

Clearly I'm taking a risk by playing, but I have the explicit consent of everyone I'm in contact with to take that risk. My sister, who has a number of health conditions, was hospitalized with the virus, but she's okay now. So I figured genetics are on my side.

Then a couple of weeks ago one of the guys in the group invited his brother. After I was done playing I found out that the brother had just come from Arizona, a coranavirus hot zone. I was ticked.

So I resumed my self quarantine and stopped playing, assuming I had been exposed. I monitored my temperature and other potential symptoms. I've had none, but that's not uncommon -- about 50% of infected people don't know they've got it. And contrary to what Donald Trump says, the coronavirus is not 99% harmless. Trump might think he has the best words, but he most definitely does not have the best numbers.

According to experts, exercising outdoors while maintaining distance is pretty safe. So I continued to bike. I stopped by a different volleyball court where another group of people I know happened to be playing. One of them we'll call K. K also just came from Arizona. Between games he was citing numbers from some right-wing website, claiming that reaction to the pandemic is overblown.

Today we read that Arizona is experiencing the worst covid-19 outbreak in the country. Ninety percent of the ICU beds are occupied. Arizona is now the first state in history to enact "crisis care standards" for deciding who will receive treatment -- the infamous "death panels" that Republicans accused Obama of creating with the Affordable Care Act.

What's the difference between D and K? D works for a medical technology company and can work from home. K is a regional manager for national car rental company.

D knows that the coronavirus threat is real and is paid to save people's lives.

K is paid to entice people into flying around the country, rent cars so they can go to Disneyworld and the Grand Canyon, where they patronize bars and restaurants.

When it comes to the pandemic, you just can't trust people who are literally paid to say that things are fine, that the coronavirus is just the flu, that's it's not airborne, that only old people die, that only a tiny percentage of people suffer long-term effects.

All of those things are false: the coronavirus is not a flu virus and a flu shot provides no immunity whatsoever.

Experts may argue about droplets and aerosols, but it is crystal clear that people get the disease by breathing the same air as infected people. The evidence has been there since the beginning: the well-documented case from a restaurant air conditioner, the Washington state choir practice, and the superspreader soccer match in Italy.

Younger people with no underlying conditions do die (Nick Cordero, a Broadway actor, just died at age 41), and children are coming down with an inflammatory condition similar to Kawasaki disease.

About 20% of infections require hospitalization, which means spending thousands, tens of thousands, and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Many victims suffer strokes, heart attacks, limb amputations and long-term neurological and lung problems because Covid-19 causes severe clotting throughout the body (that's what killed Cordero). That's not "harmless."

Trump makes his money from hotels, resorts and golf courses, all of which have been hammered by closures from the pandemic. The booming economy that he inherited from Obama has gone down the toilet, and the stock market has been gyrating madly as gamblers who usually bet on sporting events, all now canceled, turned to stocks to sate their addiction.

So, who do you believe when it comes to the pandemic? The people on the front lines who staff the hospital wards, ICUs and labs, or the hucksters whose income (and reelection) depend on lying about the severity of the crisis?

If Trump had acknowledged the severity of this pandemic from the beginning and really locked down the entire country with a coordinated federal response, the way Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand and Angela Merkel in Germany did, we would have been done with this in May. (How much better would this country have fared if we'd had a woman president during this crisis?)

But all Trump cared about was promoting himself and his properties. The disease would magically go away by summer, he said, because that's what happens with flu, and this was just the Kung Flu. So now it's summer, and the disease is running rampant in the south -- Florida, Texas, Arizona and California -- because everyone flocked to air-conditioned bars after Trump demanded the states open up.

All these years later Deep Throat's advice is still good: follow the money. If someone's future depends on denying the reality of the pandemic, don't believe a word they say.

Best. Ad. Ever.

Betrayed

Metastasized Right Wing Blogger

The swift changes to our country's social fabric have left folks like Kevin Baker coming completely unglued from reality. His latest exercise in attempting to sound smart is merely one long away of saying, LIBERALS BAD. His reasoning is based on a failed ideology that perpetuates in tiny bubbles of self-referential confirmation. 

It's a petty and insecure dogma that refuses to accept outside information (facts, reality) that completely contradicts it. Essentially, it's a cult with members like Kevin and his followers engaging in bizarre thought processes that can best be described as unhinged. They hide like cowards from challenges because they want to keep up their fantasies regarding how the world works. 

It's also worthy to note that he doesn't actually write much of his "uber posts" at all. Most of the words are cut and paste jobs with no original thought whatsoever. If he had gone through formal schooling and achieved higher levels of education, he might have been capable of critical thinking. Of course, he would have had to get over his short man syndrome-like issues with academia which will likely never happen. 

Back when I was allowed to post on his site (before everyone became afraid of my intellect), I pondered the possibility of one of their own running the country. He keeps obsessive track of my posts there, even having an entire subheading (containing 20 posts!) dedicated to yours truly, so it would be easy to find it. I predicted that such a leader would result in American deaths, a crashed economy, and marked deafness of tone to major issues of the day like racism that would result in social unrest. 

Donald Trump has proven this to be EXACTLY the case. 120K dead because a child (just like Kevin) didn't want to admit that liberals were right about something. 

Running a country on the one conviction of "owning the libs" demonstrates a massive ignorance and utter stupidity in terms of how effective and necessary our federal government is to the working machinations of our republic. You can't fake you know wtf you are doing when lives are on the line. 

Kevin and his ilk don't get it because all they have is adolescent retorts. They are about to be judged on that philosophy and are going to be relegated to the ash heap of history forever. Thank God, because we can't afford to lose any more American lives due to their childishly insecure and petty bullshit. 

Read

Who'd a Thunk?

Two weeks later, the chickens have gone to the hospital to roost:

Herman Cain, a former Republican presidential candidate, announced on Twitter on Thursday that he had been hospitalized with the coronavirus.

Mr. Cain, the former chief executive of Godfather’s Pizza, learned Monday that he had tested positive, was hospitalized Wednesday, and on Thursday “was resting comfortably in an Atlanta-area hospital,” according to a statement posted on his Twitter account.

Mr. Cain attended Mr. Trump’s indoor rally in Tulsa, Okla., on June 20. A few hours before the event, the Trump campaign disclosed that six staff members who had been working on the rally had tested positive for the virus during a routine screening. Two members of the Secret Service also tested positive there, people familiar with the matter said.

In a video on his website, Mr. Cain described the rally and he said he had worn a mask while in groups of people. But he also posted photographs of himself on social media that showed him without a mask and surrounded by people in the arena.

“People were concerned, because of the media, about whether or not this was going to turn into another uptick in number of cases of Covid-19,” Mr. Cain said in the video.

Are Republicans congenitally stupid?

The media aren't responsible for your Covid infection, Herman. You are, for running around the country pretending that everything is hunky dory.

Defeating the coronavirus should really be easy, and we could have done it if someone other than that idiot Trump was president. New Zealand did it. Most Asian countries are doing far better than we are. Even France is. The EU has banned travel from the United States because Trump has totally blown it.

If we had clamped down really hard for three weeks at the beginning of the pandemic, then controlled all entry into the country, it really would have burned itself out. But not like magic. Like science. Quarantine with rigorous testing and contact tracing is the only way to stop the spread of the virus.

But no. Trump had to pretend it would go away magically. Then have press conferences every day for a month, blabbering about injecting bleach and shining UV light inside your lungs.

Then he wanted to open the country up by Easter. Now he's blaming the record number of cases and hospitalizations, mostly in Florida, Arizona, California and Texas, on too much testing.

Today Florida reported more than 10,000 new cases, 325 hospitalizations and 68 deaths. Testing didn't put those people in the hospital or kill them.

So what should we do? Those four states should be quarantined, at a minimum. Their airports should be closed for all but essential travel because they are huge vectors of infection.

But to really stop this pandemic we'd have to take real action, by shutting down the country again. That, of course, would require a federal response. But Trump is a coward, afraid of looking like a pussy.

If he was really a tough guy he would say:

You know, I was wrong. I totally blew this. I was afraid the numbers would make reelection impossible. But it's too late for that now. I know I'm gonna lose in November, and I deserve to lose. I might as well put America first and save some lives. So we closing the country down again, for the entire month of July. If everyone but the people who provide essential services stays home, we can beat this thing.

When the stay-at-home order is lifted, I will resign the office of the presidency. I'm directing my people to begin vetting candidates to replace Mike Pence when he takes my place on August the first.

Thank you, and God bless America.

On August 2nd Pence can pardon Trump and he can shuffle off to Mar a Lago, hit the golf course with his buddies, contract the coronavirus, and spend his last days in a Miami ICU, writhing in agony, rasping, "I can't breathe..."

Profiles in White Privilege

Check out these idiots.

They are Mark and Patricia McCloskey of Central West End St. Louis and they are this week's poster children for white fragility. 

Protesters marching to the mayor's house walked through an unlocked gate to travel on the private street by the home of the McCloskey's. Mark and Patty got a little freaked out when they saw the black folk and went for the heavy armaments. Don't they look completely fucking ridiculous?

Yes. Yes, they do. 

My family is from Missouri. I was born there and my sister lives close to this neighborhood. I'm very familiar with how people view race in this state. Essentially, they think all black people are criminals and when their white privilege is threatened, look out! 

In so many ways, this is a perfect illustration of how out of step some white Americans are with the times. The world is shifting rapidly before them with statues and flags (see also: participation ribbons, prizes for second place ) of losers, racists, and traitors coming down, police departments being reimagined, and the majority of the country supporting Black Lives Matter. The McCloskeys watched the future pass by their house last week and they looked completely impotent to do anything about it. The fear and the desperation on their face is FUCKING HILARIOUS... 

They are afraid and feel insecure so they go to their blankey (ArmaLite Rifle) to make them feel all better and stuff. Sorry to disappoint you, fragiles, you aren't relevant anymore.