USA Politics

[Daverz]

Covid19 takes out the sickly and those with compromised immune systems - the statistics demonstrate this very clearly. Trump doesn't fall into this category so I'd say he'll survive.

I expect that Trump will survive.  This is the worst timeline after all.  But given Trump's age, weight, and poor habits, I don't expect him to shrug it off like a healthy young person might.  And we still don't know what those previous emergency visits to Walter Reed were about. 

[Pohjolas Daughter]

I expect that Trump will survive.  This is the worst timeline after all.  But given Trump's age, weight, and poor habits, I don't expect him to shrug it off like a healthy young person might.  And we still don't know what those previous emergency visits to Walter Reed were about.

Pardon, "previous emergency visits..."?  Hadn't heard about any.  When were these and where did you read about them?

PD

[Todd]

Maybe the 25th Amendment gets invoked after all . . .

[Karl Henning]

Black humor du jour
Seen on Twitter:

COVID-19 is the only thing Trump has ever acquired in life by actually earning it
Co

[Karl Henning]

Who knew Trump's bullshittery would have consequences?!

Really, this is utter madness. Capitol Hill offices have already seen a steady stream of infections — yet many Republicans keep going out of their way to flout public health measures. Three senators and 15 members of the House, and more than 100 staffers and Capitol Hill workers, have tested positive.

Even GOP staffers are rebelling: A Politico scribe recently reported receiving "a flood of emails" from them complaining of being "forced" to come to the Hill without masks.

It's hard to imagine an event like last Saturday's, or indeed any of this, happening if Trump hadn't set a tone throughout that required members of his party to treat coronavirus as either no big deal or as largely vanquished by his spectacular leadership.

[Daverz]

Pardon, "previous emergency visits..."?  Hadn't heard about any.  When were these and where did you read about them?

PD

Sorry, should have been visit singular:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/05/opinions/trump-walter-reed-visit-presidents-medical-disclosure-reiner/index.html

[BWV 1080]

Don't you all see this is another of Trump's 4D chess moves to own the libs?

[T. D.]

Who knew Trump's bullshittery would have consequences?!

Really, this is utter madness. Capitol Hill offices have already seen a steady stream of infections — yet many Republicans keep going out of their way to flout public health measures. Three senators and 15 members of the House, and more than 100 staffers and Capitol Hill workers, have tested positive.

Even GOP staffers are rebelling: A Politico scribe recently reported receiving "a flood of emails" from them complaining of being "forced" to come to the Hill without masks.

It's hard to imagine an event like last Saturday's, or indeed any of this, happening if Trump hadn't set a tone throughout that required members of his party to treat coronavirus as either no big deal or as largely vanquished by his spectacular leadership.

Karl, being sane and living in a part of the country that recognizes science makes it difficult to comprehend the madness that prevails in GOP country.
This shocking article appeared just yesterday:

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-10-01/covid-19-restrictions-bring-california-county-into-revolt

Notice that the picketer in the lead photo is too dopey to spell Heil properly.    But that's only the beginning of the inanity. I honestly don't know what could possibly induce such morons to change their minds.

[T. D.]

Meanwhile,

https://time.com/5893881/exclusive-as-states-prepared-mail-in-ballots-postal-service-failed-to-update-at-least-1-8-million-addresses/

Exclusive: As States Prepared Mail-in Ballots, Postal Service Failed to Update at Least 1.8 Million Addresses

[Karl Henning]

Trump is no longer a human Powerball ticket—a gamble among voters desperate for change—but a president known to be devoid of competence or character. Nor is Joe Biden a caricature of elitism; he's Middle Class Joe.

[Karl Henning]

Karl, being sane and living in a part of the country that recognizes science makes it difficult to comprehend the madness that prevails in GOP country.
This shocking article appeared just yesterday:

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-10-01/covid-19-restrictions-bring-california-county-into-revolt

Notice that the picketer in the lead photo is too dopey to spell Heil properly.    But that's only the beginning of the inanity. I honestly don't know what could possibly induce such morons to change their minds.

No, indeed.

[Daverz]

Karl, being sane and living in a part of the country that recognizes science makes it difficult to comprehend the madness that prevails in GOP country.
This shocking article appeared just yesterday:

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-10-01/covid-19-restrictions-bring-california-county-into-revolt

Notice that the picketer in the lead photo is too dopey to spell Heil properly.    But that's only the beginning of the inanity. I honestly don't know what could possibly induce such morons to change their minds.

I knew when I saw the URL that this would be about one of our remote counties with a tiny population. I laughed out loud when I saw it was Shasta County.  Population of Shasta County is 180k.  Population of one Los Angeles neighborhood, South Los Angeles, is 192k. 

Nothing against Shasta County, by the way; beautiful country up there.  Try to catch the strawberry festival if you can. 

[Kontrapunctus]

[T. D.]

I knew when I saw the URL that this would be about one of our remote counties with a tiny population. I laughed out loud when I saw it was Shasta County.  Population of Shasta County is 180k.  Population of one Los Angeles neighborhood, South Los Angeles, is 192k. 

Nothing against Shasta County, by the way; beautiful country up there.  Try to catch the strawberry festival if you can.

180 k population "tiny"? In New York, that would rank 20th out of 62 counties. I live on the Western edge of a county (Ulster) with population 177k, but nearby counties have only 75 (Sullivan), 45 (Delaware) and 31 (Schoharie) k.

[Karl Henning]

180 k population "tiny"? In New York, that would rank 20th out of 62 counties. I live on the Western edge of a county (Ulster) with population 177k, but nearby counties have only 75 (Sullivan), 45 (Delaware) and 31 (Schoharie) k.

I.e. the laughter was at how mistaken was the initial supposition that it was a tiny county.

[T. D.]

I.e. the laughter was at how mistaken was the initial supposition that it was a tiny county.

Oh, OK, sorry about that. Maybe the article took me so far down the GOP/conspiracy rabbit hole that it further addled my brain. 

Meanwhile,
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-03/republican-war-on-covid-orders-grinds-on-despite-trump-s-illness

Republican efforts to roll back virus-fighting measures have been steaming ahead for months, and little could halt their momentum Friday even as President Donald Trump became one of more than 30,000 Americans hospitalized with Covid-19.

In Michigan, the state Supreme Court invalidated dozens of Governor Gretchen Whitmer's pandemic executive orders. In Wisconsin, Republican legislators filed a brief in support of an effort to block a mask requirement amid one of America's most dire outbreaks. And in Mississippi, Governor Tate Reeves defended his move this week to end his own mandate, the first such move in the U.S.

[JBS]

180 k population "tiny"? In New York, that would rank 20th out of 62 counties. I live on the Western edge of a county (Ulster) with population 177k, but nearby counties have only 75 (Sullivan), 45 (Delaware) and 31 (Schoharie) k.

For perspective: I live in a city whose population is about equal to that of Shasta County. It is not the biggest city in my county (Broward), which has a population only slightly less than that of 3 states (S Dakota, N Dakota, Wyoming) combined (about 1.9 million vs about 2.1 million). And it's not the biggest county in my state (Florida).

So from certain perspectives Shasta County is tiny.

OTOH, Daverz has Newsom, you have Coumo, and I have...DeSantis.

[amw]

I mean, I'm from a city of 8 million people, and it certainly has large neighbourhoods dominated by people as conservative and covid-denying as any rural California county, if not more so. (Cuomo has recently reimposed a lockdown on a few of these neighbourhoods—Borough Park, Bensonhurst, Midwood and Williamsburg—which are all full of heavily religious people who decline to wear masks and broke about 80-20 for trump in 2016.) The idea of blue/red states or counties is always flawed. "Red states" like Mississippi and Idaho have some pretty significant "blue cities" like Jackson and Boise which in turn have "red neighbourhoods" etc. At best you can probably speak of blue and red precincts; politics has become universalised to such a degree that a Republican Orthodox Jew from New York City has more in common politically with a Republican Evangelical Christian from Stuttgart, Arkansas (probably follow the same Facebook pages, YouTube channels, Twitter accounts, or TV programs) than a Democratic Orthodox Jew from down the street.

This is not to say that there's not still an urban/rural divide in US politics but it's much less significant than it was, say, ten years ago. I always found it funny that New York Times reporters were travelling to rural Wisconsin in search of Trump supporters when they could have just taken the subway down to Brighton Beach and found just as many.

[Daverz]

180 k population "tiny"? In New York, that would rank 20th out of 62 counties. I live on the Western edge of a county (Ulster) with population 177k, but nearby counties have only 75 (Sullivan), 45 (Delaware) and 31 (Schoharie) k.

Yeah, I shouldn't have said "tiny" population.  Shasta actually has a larger population than Humboldt County.  I was thinking of one of the almost empty counties like Alpine County.

[milk]

The very last thing Trump would wish to imply is that his life is worth any more than the lives of all those people who were dying when he was joking about masks, joking about Joe Biden and masks, joking about Biden being practically dead ... to say nothing of all those times past when he joked about Hillary Clinton's pneumonia, or had his proxies joke speculatively that she had suffered a stroke, or was afflicted by dysphasia, or had secretly suffered a serious brain trauma ... I'm sorry, I'm running very low on space here. The point is, this is what he'd WANT – because he loves the lulz. Please honour him thusly.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/02/trump-joked-covid-president-diagnosis-maga-virus?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other