monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Twitter has suspended Steve Bannon’s War Room: Pandemic account, which promoted the popular podcast with audio and video clips from the show. The social media service did not provide an explanation for the suspension.

Josh Marshall
@joshtpm
1h
At the risk of stating the obvious, this is Trump's new way of making this into another Reality TV, my big decision ego-trip. The President has zero authority to re-open the economy. "Re-opening" isn't even the way to look at it. But the operative decisions are in govs hands.

Josh Marshall

Americans Need To Start Pushing Back Against Draconian Lockdowns

Bill Gates, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and anyone else advocating for a federally mandated lockdown either doesn’t understand the Constitution’s structure or doesn’t respect it.

In Greenville, Mississippi, police issued churchgoers $500 tickets for sitting in their cars at an outdoor service. The churchgoers are suing. In Kentucky, the governor announced law enforcement will record the license plates of anyone showing up to a mass gathering and then transmit that information to health officials, who will order a 14-day quarantine of those persons.

They're fine with pitchforks coming out if it's some citizens going after other citizens (eg white supremacists versus people of color)

Mark Meadows
Ivanka Trump
Jared Kushner
Steven Mnuchin
Larry Kudlow
Robert Lighthizer
Wilbur Ross
and likely to be named soon
Diamond and Silk

Trump Campaign Sues Small Wisconsin TV Station Over Critical Super PAC Ad

The owner of a northern Wisconsin television station is stumped as to why the President’s reelection campaign is suing over a critical super PAC ad it ran.

“Why they selected my little station in Northern Wisconsin, I have no idea,” Rockfleet Broadcasting President R. Joseph Fuchs told TPM on the phone Monday. Rockfleet owns three stations including WJFW-TV, the NBC affiliate in Rhinelander, Wisconsin targeted by the campaign.

Trump’s slim victory in Wisconsin in 2016 was key for his ultimate edge in the Electoral College against Hillary Clinton.

Now, his campaign is suing the TV station there over an ad that’s gone viral in recent weeks, from the Democratic-aligned super PAC Priorities USA. Last month, the campaign said it’d sent “cease-and-desist” letters to stations in several key swing states over the ad.

Dave Heller, deputy director of the Media Law Resource Center, told TPM it seemed likely that the Trump campaign was sending a “shot across the bow to other local television stations” by suing WJFW rather than the super PAC that paid to air the ad.

“It’s really a very risky area to go into, to be asking courts to subject every statement back-and-forth between candidates to the standards of a defamation suit,” Heller said.

The ad, “Exponential Threat,” shows clips of Trump downplaying the threat posed by the novel coronavirus, contrasted with a graphic showing the increase in Americans infected with the virus...

The ad, “Exponential Threat,” shows clips of Trump downplaying the threat posed by the novel coronavirus, contrasted with a graphic showing the increase in Americans infected with the virus...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Six states in the U.S. Northeast took the first tentative step on Monday toward reopening their economies by forming a regional panel to develop a strategy for the gradual lifting of restrictions aimed at stanching the coronavirus pandemic.

The announcement of the panel, to include economic and health officials from each state as well as the chief of staff of all six governors, came after President Donald Trump insisted that any decision on restarting the economy was his to make.

The states of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, with a total population of 32 million, will join with neighboring Delaware, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island in coordinating their efforts to reopen the economy as more signs the outbreak has stabilized emerged over the weekend.

Someone is scared of different opinions. The worst kind of bigotry is bigotry of other ideas and opinions. It does nothing but give the people they do not censor even less credibility.
https://pandemic.warroom.org/2020/04/13/twitter-suspends-war-room-pandemic-account-without-reason/

"He won't fire Fauci today," tweeted Joe Lockhart, press secretary to former President Bill Clinton, a Democrat. "That's not his style. He needs to humiliate him a while first."

The governors of California, Oregon and Washington will work together on a joint approach to reopen their economies. The move came after a similar announcement by the governors of six East Coast states, including New York and Pennsylvania.

“Trump was the moral test, and the Republican Party failed,” Stevens said. “It’s an utter disaster for the long-term fate of the Party. The Party has become an obsession with power without purpose.”

...John David Dyche, a lawyer in Louisville and until recently a conservative columnist, enjoyed unmatched access to McConnell and his papers, and published an admiring biography of him in 2009. In March, though, Dyche posted a Twitter thread that caused a lot of talk in the state’s political circles. He wrote that McConnell “of course realizes that Trump is a hideous human being & utterly unfit to be president,” and that, in standing by Trump anyway, he has shown that he has “no ideology except his own political power.” Dyche declined to comment for this article, but, after the coronavirus shut down most of America, he announced that he was contributing to McConnell’s opponent, Amy McGrath, and tweeted, “Those who stick with the hideous, incompetent demagogue endanger the country & will be remembered in history as shameful cowards.”

Sean Hannity blames Dr. Tony Fauci for Donald Trump’s coronavirus failures

Rush Limbaugh on coronavirus shutdowns: “This a political hit job taking place right before our very eyes”