monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

He’s an embarrassment
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/18/trump-calls-out-new-zealands-big-surge-on-day-it-records-nine-covid-cases?fbclid=IwAR2q9aI6tGUZ95vHsMdRM0EqzCAcL8FZSvxgirtr_xnr4EK41sKNNRfjeOU

He's shameless, yes. He's a piece of crap, yes. But he doesn't consider it lying. Lying is de rigueur, fashionable and normal behavior for an egocentric, for a psychopath. He doesn't consider it lying. He just spouts off whatever comes into his mind without any thought of its truth. Truth doesn't matter; only opportunism. His followers perceive his rambling incoherence as coming from the heart. To them it translates as brilliant, impromptu speaking but to us, it's just the malevolent, bumbling of a psychopath.

Trump called New Zealand's new COVID-19 outbreak "terrible" on Monday.
"The problem is big surge in New Zealand."

Even when accounting for the large disparity in population size, around 5 million in New Zealand versus approximately 330 million in the U.S., the New Zealand outbreak is infinitesimal compared to the U.S. outbreak.
While New Zealand, with its five million inhabitants, has registered around 1300 corona infections since the beginning of the pandemic and there are currently around 70 active cases in the country, the USA is the country most severely affected by the corona crisis in the world, with a total of more than five million proven infections and 170,000 deaths.

but we know hes lying . A fart by any other name...

Michelle knocked it out of the park last night...



"So let me be as honest and clear as I possibly can. Donald Trump is the wrong president for our country.
He has had more than enough time to prove that he can do the job, but he is clearly in over his head.
He cannot meet this moment. He simply cannot be who we need him to be for us..."

Nope. It's because he lies constantly.

Bipartisan Senate report details Trump campaign contacts
with Russia in 2016, adding to Mueller findings

The Senate Intelligence Committee released Tuesday the most comprehensive and meticulous
examination to date explaining how Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election and the
Trump campaign welcomed the foreign adversary's help, revealing new information about
contacts between Russian officials and associates of Trump during and after the campaign...

Postal Service backs down on changes as at least 20 states
sue over potential mail delays ahead of election

Embattled Postmaster General Louis DeJoy reversed course Tuesday, saying that all changes
being made to the Postal Service would be suspended until after the November 3 election,
just as 20 Democratic states announced plans to file federal lawsuits.

DeJoy said that some of the deferred decisions mean that retail hours at post offices will not
change, mail processing equipment and blue collection boxes will remain in place and no mail
processing facilities will be closed...

That does not mean mail in voting is secure enough in anyway. So it is kind of a non-story.

''THEY DONT TALK ABOUT THE WALL ANYMORE, I WONDER WHY" ???
Donald Trump leading off with a speech today.

Lemme hazard a guess Donny, Perhaps youve got everybody more paranoid about dying due to your incompetent handling of covid-19. Weve moved our care focus to within our own borders, Mexico is a made up molehill, covid-is a seriousreal-world disease that could affect anyone nd possibly kill a few citizens.

He handled Covid fine. The Blue states have the majority of deaths, and they have governors that ran the response. Not Trump.

youve read youre talk lines just fine pinky, now go get a clue

Except my talk is fact. Tell me how many red states you see on this chart at this link.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covid19-death-rates-us-by-state/

At Homeland Security, I saw firsthand how dangerous Trump is for America

President Trump in the Oval Office on July 20. (Leah Millis/Reuters)
Opinion by Miles Taylor
August 17, 2020 at 1:05 p.m. CDT

Miles Taylor served at the Department of Homeland Security from 2017 to 2019, including as chief of staff.

After serving for more than two years in the Department of Homeland Security’s leadership during the Trump administration, I can attest that the country is less secure as a direct result of the president’s actions.

Like many Americans, I had hoped that Donald Trump, once in office, would soberly accept the burdens of the presidency — foremost among them the duty to keep America safe. But he did not rise to the challenge. Instead, the president has governed by whim, political calculation and self-interest.

I wasn’t in a position to judge how his personal deficiencies affected other important matters, such as the environment or energy policy, but when it came to national security, I witnessed the damning results firsthand.

The president has tried to turn DHS, the nation’s largest law enforcement agency, into a tool used for his political benefit. He insisted on a near-total focus on issues that he said were central to his reelection — in particular building a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico. Though he was often talked out of bad ideas at the last moment, the president would make obviously partisan requests of DHS, including when he told us to close the California-Mexico border during a March 28, 2019, Oval Office meeting — it would be better for him politically, he said, than closing long stretches of the Texas or Arizona border — or to “dump” illegal immigrants in Democratic-leaning sanctuary cities and states to overload their authorities, as he insisted on several times.

Trump’s indiscipline was also a constant source of frustration. One day in February 2019, when congressional leaders were waiting for an answer from the White House on a pending deal to avoid a second government shutdown, the president demanded a DHS phone briefing to discuss the color of the wall. He was particularly interested in the merits of using spray paint and how the steel structure should be coated. Episodes like this occurred almost weekly.

The decision-making process was itself broken: Trump would abruptly endorse policy proposals with little or no consideration, by him or his advisers, of possible knock-on effects. That was the case in 2018 when then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced, at the White House’s urging, a “zero tolerance” policy to prosecute anyone who crossed the border illegally. The agencies involved were unprepared to implement the policy, causing a disastrous backlog of detentions that ultimately left migrant parents and their children separated.

Incredibly, after this ill-conceived operation was rightly halted, in the following months the president repeatedly exhorted DHS officials to restart it and to implement a more deliberate policy of pulling migrant families apart en masse, so that adults would be deterred from coming to the border for fear of losing their children. The president was visibly furious on multiple occasions when my boss, then-Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, refused.

Top DHS officials were regularly diverted from dealing with genuine security threats by the chore of responding to these inappropriate and often absurd executive requests, at all hours of the day and night. One morning it might be a demand to shut off congressionally appropriated funds to a foreign ally that had angered him, and that evening it might be a request to sharpen the spikes atop the border wall so they’d be more damaging to human flesh (“How much would that cost us?”). Meanwhile, Trump showed vanishingly little interest in subjects of vital national security interest, including cybersecurity, domestic terrorism and malicious foreign interference in U.S. affairs.

How can you run a huge organization under those conditions? You can’t. At DHS, daily management of its 250,000 employees suffered because of these frequent follies, putting the safety of Americans at risk.

The president has similarly undermined U.S. security abroad. His own former national security adviser John Bolton made the case so convincingly with his recent book and public accounts that there is little to add, other than to say that Bolton got it right. Because the commander in chief has diminished America’s influence overseas, today the nation has fewer friends and stronger enemies than when Trump took office.

Trump has also damaged the country in countless ways that don’t directly involve national security but, by stoking hatred and division, make Americans profoundly less safe.

The president’s bungled response to the coronavirus pandemic is the ultimate example. In his cavalier disregard for the seriousness of the threat, Trump failed to make effective use of the federal crisis response system painstakingly built after 9/11. Years of DHS planning for a pandemic threat have been largely wasted. Meanwhile, more than 165,000 Americans have died.

It is more than a little ironic that Trump is campaigning for a second term as a law-and-order president. His first term has been dangerously chaotic. Four more years of this are unthinkable.

I hope the states re-file their suits asking that the sorting machines that have already been shut down...be re-started.

Wow...this crew really is...

What I’m afraid of is that DeJoy has already done irreparable damage, and that this last-minute profession of a change of heart is just to throw everyone off the trail so that he can continue his sabotage.

What happens when Trump wins the election only for x amount of postal ballots to come in a day late which would give the presidency to Biden?

My copy of Reaganland arrived yesterday. Not a small book, as is typical for Perlstein. Two or three years ago, Perlstein wrote that the Trump phenomenon had forced him to rethink some of his ideas on the rise of the conservative movement and I expect that to be a key part of this volume. Looking forward to it.

What do you mean, “What happens?” What happens is that Trump will have a green light to keep f*cking us for four more years.

That’s why I keep repeating that our only hope is to vote early and in overwhelming numbers enough to overcome all the cheating.

I don’t know. It’s an unfamiliar system. I remember when Dubya stole Florida and the election. That didn’t seem right at all, but at least it had the veneer of legality with Supreme Court rulings and all that.

This looks like something out of soviet era Eastern Europe.