monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

I had a homey who drank 10-12 tall glasses of vodka every day. But he would always insist that they had a "splash" of water, ya know?

Rex Huppke
@RexHuppke
And I met Trump when he visited the Chicago Tribune's editorial board shortly after announcing his candidacy. It was a remarkably disturbing hour-and-a-half of dissembling and narcissism. I went in thinking I'd write a funny column. I walked out truly terrified. He's a sociopath.

Jonathan Greenblatt
@JGreenblattADL
· 3h
Idaho state Rep. Heather Scott not only referred to Idaho’s Governor as “Little Hitler” but said stay-at-home orders are “no different than Nazi Germany” sending Jews to concentration camps. https://rawstory.com/2020/04/Idaho-goper-says-stay-at-home-orders-no-different-than-sending-jews-to-extermination-camps/

A parishioner who regularly attended services at a Louisiana mega-church that has made national headlines for defying social-distancing orders has died from coronavirus complications—but the church’s pastor claims it’s all a lie.

Tony Spell, the pastor of Life Tabernacle Church in Baton Rouge, was issued a misdemeanor summons last month for repeatedly violating a state ban on large gatherings amid the coronavirus pandemic. Despite the charges, he has continued to hold services including an Easter Sunday gathering that he claimed 1,345 people attended.


He previously claimed that his church was not at risk of being infected because coronavirus was “politically motivated.” Ahead of his Easter service, he told Reuters: “Satan and a virus will not stop us... God will shield us from all harm and sickness. We are not afraid.”

Rex Huppke

Mass. General study in Chelsea finds 32% have COVID-19 antibodies

1/ In the working-class Massachusetts town of Chelsea, 32 percent of the population tested positive for viral antibodies (!) – meaning they have already been infected and recovered – 16 times the rate known to be infected. https://t.co/iMuNgfGfEK

— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) April 18, 2020

Nearly one third of 200 Chelsea residents who gave a drop of blood to researchers on the street this week tested positive for antibodies linked to COVID-19, a startling indication of how widespread infections have been in the densely populated city.

Sixty-four residents who had a finger pricked in Bellingham Square on Tuesday and Wednesday had antibodies that the immune system makes to fight off the coronavirus, according to Massachusetts General Hospital physicians who ran the pilot study.

The 200 participants generally appeared healthy, but about half told the doctors they had had at least one symptom of COVID-19 in the past four weeks.

...I know this story well because I saw it firsthand in 2009-10, when I traveled from Massachusetts to Arizona — risking my eardrums at the Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot in Kentucky, listening to Sarah Palin wow a Tea Party convention and getting Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s business card — to understand the right-wing political backlash after Barack Obama became the 44th president. I met — and sincerely listened to — dozens of people very much like the folks who this weekend protested the coronavirus shutdown. They were anxious and angry for a variety of reasons for which I could feel sympathy (their factory jobs shipped overseas) or moral revulsion (fear that whites are becoming a minority group). But the Tea Party’s biggest problem, I ultimately concluded, was that they were being manipulated.

Both Obama’s healthy-sized 2008 victory and the rise of a Congress where Democrats, for an incredibly brief window, would have a filibuster-proof majority, terrified the conservative movement that felt entitled to rule America ever since the Reagan era. And here’s the thing: In the early days of the Great Recession, some of the working-class anger was in fact directed toward the big banks (and the government’s overly generous bailout) and corporations that give money to both parties but really give a lot of money to the GOP. The Tea Party was in reality a very top-down, billionaire-backed effort to steer that rage away from them and onto Obama and even the folks who voted for him.

It’s telling that the term “Tea Party” was invented in a rant by a capitalism-on-steroids CNBC host not against those banks but against “the losers” (i.e., working people but especially black and brown ones) forced into their terrible mortgage deals, as rich commodities traders standing behind him cheered. Soon, Fox News (owned by Rupert Murdoch, today worth $16.3 billion) was promoting where its viewers could attend “Tea Party” rallies, the Americans for Prosperity — largely funded by oil gazillionaires the Koch Brothers — paid for the buses to get there, and GOPers on Capitol Hill like Sen. Mitch McConnell adopted Tea Party language to serve their corporate masters.

There’s two ways to remember the Tea Party. In one sense, its size was probably vastly over-inflated. When Murdoch decided by early 2011 that the Tea Party (and its 5 p.m. avatar, Glenn Beck) was becoming bad for business, Fox News stopped promoting it and the movement disappeared overnight. But also, in a world of media-driven fantasy where perception becomes reality and a reality-TV star becomes president, the Tea Party had already accomplished its mission in the 2010 midterms, ginning up enough outrage to lead a surge in GOP voter turnout that took back the House and essentially shut down the Senate with filibusters.

No wonder that — with an even more difficult 2020 election just months away, and with the Trump presidency on the line — they’re trying to reunite the band. It’s not exactly the same puppeteers, but just like in 2009 you don’t have to look hard to see the strings, either...

Nazi sign at Lansing protest was an antifa hoax

Idaho’s Governor as “Little Hitler"

Only pussies will whine about being trolled, and then immediately begin trollig other members posting in the thread.

David Brooks the conservative columnist has repeatedly called Trump a sociopath.

It's called logic--get one of your grandkids in to explain it to you.