Last Call For Getting Sick Of Massie

My own (unfortunately) Congressman, Rep. Thomas Massie, tells Glenn Beck that he tested positive for COVID-19 in January recovered fully, and is now openly questioning why America is worried about something he considers no more dangerous than the common cold.

U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie has tested positive for coronavirus antibodies, he recently said on right-leaning political commentator Glenn Beck's radio show.

Massie, a Republican representing Kentucky's Fourth Congressional District, told Beck that he took both a coronavirus test and antibodies test at the end of July, and he received a positive result for the latter at the end of last week.

"I've had the 'rona, and I have recovered from it," Massie said on Friday.

Massie said he is "convinced" he had it in January "before we knew what 'rona was" while Congress was still adjourned for the holidays. During that time, Massie said he laid out on his couch for four days with a fever, sore throat and low energy — all symptoms of COVID-19.

"I went to the doctor — I hadn't been to the doctor for sickness in like 10 or 15 years. That's how sick I have to be to go to the doctor," Massie said, "and I said, 'look, I gotta go back to Congress, give me whatever you got,' and they gave me a strong antibiotic, shot in an antihistamine and I was feeling better within a day." 

I don't believe Massie for a second. But in grand Trumpian fashion, he's making COVID-19 all about him, about how he's donating his plasma, rather than the sick and unemployed here in KY-4.

Granted, this area is better off than most of the country. Kentucky's unemployment rate is under five percent, but that's because the number of people looking for active work dropped like a rock in the last few months.

The state is still suffering thanks to Republicans like Massie and Mitch, and Massie is babbling about plasma rather than helping people here in NKY.

About five months after Kentucky reported its first loss of life from covid-19, its economy continues to sputter amid the coronavirus pandemic. Many unemployed workers say their benefit checks aren’t enough to afford their bills, and some here simply have stopped looking for jobs. Businesses say they’re also hemorrhaging cash, and local governments fear they’re on the precipice of financial ruin, too.

The economic tumult in Kentucky is vast, and it has added new urgency to the political standoff on Capitol Hill, where the prospect of a prolonged deadlock could worsen the financial woes in a state that was hurting long before the pandemic arrived. Caught in the middle is McConnell, 78, who some critics say has struggled to navigate the priorities of the president, the political desires of a fractious Republican conference and the economic needs in his own backyard.

McConnell declined to be interviewed for this story. His spokesman, Robert Steurer, said in a statement that the Senate majority leader’s efforts have directed approximately $12 billion to Kentucky. The aid originates in large part from previous coronavirus relief legislation, which Steurer said would help “address urgent housing, transportation, health care, education and economic development priorities” in the state.

For Kenny Saylor, the money was good before the pandemic began this spring. The 42-year-old in Corbin, Ky., once a bustling railroad shipping hub in the southeast part of the Bluegrass State, had been driving his own truck, hauling returns six days a week for Amazon to the pallet stores that sell off consumers’ unwanted purchases.

But business began to slow around April, “and that’s when everything went south for me,” Saylor said. Unemployment payments helped fill the gap, but the reprieve proved short-lived after lawmakers in Washington failed to authorize additional coronavirus stimulus aid. A self-described “die-hard Republican” his entire life, Saylor said he has now found himself angry with some of the GOP leaders who had long represented him, including McConnell.

“I’m scared to death of losing everything,” he said.

The country’s economic unraveling — the worst in a generation — has spared no community from severe hardship. But in a state like Kentucky, where some communities already had been grappling with joblessness, poverty and stagnation, the coronavirus often has made matters worse. About half of all adult residents have seen some reduction in their employment income. Meanwhile, about a quarter of a million residents say they do not get enough food to eat, and nearly one-third of households are struggling to pay their rents and mortgages, federal data show.

“We’re seeing huge numbers of people needing help,” said Jason Bailey, the executive director of the left-leaning Kentucky Center for Economic Policy, who added: “I can’t imagine a state that needs additional relief more than Kentucky does.”

Sure wish Republicans gave a damn.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

Trump is not handling the Biden-Harris ticket news well.

Trump has a total meltdown, mispronounces Kamala Harris's name, accuses Obama and Joe Biden of treason, and calls Elizabeth Warren "Pocahontas" all in the same rant. Trump is not handling the Harris news well. pic.twitter.com/z0hePzH5oa

— Sarah Reese Jones (@PoliticusSarah) August 11, 2020

He wanted to run against Liz Warren so very, very badly.

Do note however that Trump is now openly accusing Barack Obama and Joe Biden of committing treason, and that he basically believes both men should be executed.

Trump will not go quietly.

We will have to rip him out like cancer come January.

Hannity made the exact same mispronunciation of Harris's name multiple times on his White Power Hour last night, too.  The attacks are that Harris isn't Desi enough, and that Harris isn't black enough, and will drive both Black and Asian-American voters to stay home.

This is being done on purpose.

Tucker Carlson loses it when a guest corrects his pronunciation of Kamala Harris's name pic.twitter.com/1fHIrPGuwN

— nikki mccann ramírez (@NikkiMcR) August 12, 2020

If this is the right's strangest stuff against Kamala, Biden might actually win 40 states.

Russian To A Vaccine

Vladimir Putin made his move yesterday to help Donald Trump by announcing a "vaccine" for COVID-19, despite the fact that it hasn't been rigorously or thoroughly tested yet. We're supposed to trust him, and the one person we know who will take Putin at his word 100% of the time, even when he's lying, is Donald Trump.

Russia on Tuesday became the first country to approve a coronavirus vaccine, a move that was met with international skepticism and unease because the shots have only been studied in dozens of people.

President Vladimir Putin announced the Health Ministry’s approval and said one of his two adult daughters already was inoculated. He said the vaccine underwent the necessary tests and was shown to provide lasting immunity to the coronavirus, although Russian authorities have offered no proof to back up claims of safety or effectiveness.

“I know it has proven efficient and forms a stable immunity,” Putin said. “We must be grateful to those who made that first step very important for our country and the entire world.”

However, scientists in Russia and other countries sounded an alarm, saying that rushing to offer the vaccine before final-stage testing could backfire. What’s called a Phase 3 trial — which involves tens of thousands of people and can take months — is the only way to prove if an experimental vaccine is safe and really works.

By comparison, vaccines entering final-stage testing in the U.S. require studies of 30,000 people each. Two vaccine candidates already have begun those huge studies, with three more set to get underway by fall.

“Fast-tracked approval will not make Russia the leader in the race, it will just expose consumers of the vaccine to unnecessary danger,” said Russia’s Association of Clinical Trials Organizations, in urging government officials to postpone approving the vaccine without completed advanced trials.

While Russian officials have said large-scale production of the vaccine wasn’t scheduled until September, Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova said vaccination of doctors could start as early as this month. Officials say they will be closely monitored after the injections. Mass vaccination may begin as early as October.

Trump of course will ask Putin to share his "miracle vaccine" with the American people, and his MAGA faithful will line up, some of them. (Some will never take a vaccine if offered, but they will if Trump's cult tells them to.)  Look very soon for an announcement from Trump that the Putin vaccine will be readily available before the election, and that it will have "solved" the COVID-19 problem here in the US just in time to reelect Dear Leader Donald.

Watch the space on the "Russian vaccine" closely.  It's definitely Putin's play for four more Trump years...at the minimum.

StupidiNews!

• French police now say a corpse found in the basement of a remodeled Paris mansion after 30 years is being investigated as a homicide.
• Acting US Solicitor General Jeff Wall told a full panel of DC Circuit Court judges hearing the motion for Michael Flynn's case dismissal that AG Bill Barr had undisclosed reasons for dropping charges.
• Medical and immigration experts are blasting a Trump regime plan that could bar US citizens from re-entering the US if they test positive for COVID-19.
• The Trump regime wants to re-impose sanctions on Iran lifted by the UN as part of an international nuclear deal, something that could cause a crisis on the UN Security Council.
• A UK appeals court has ruled that facial recognition software used by police cameras violates human rights laws and is ordering police to substantially narrow use of it in public areas.

Last Call For Kamala's Karma

The ticket is Joseph Robinette Biden and Kamala Devi Harris. Former Obama strategist David Axelrod, who made it very clear Harris was not his choice, explains why Biden picked her for this historic selection.

It is a measure of these extraordinary times that Joe Biden's historic choice for vice president was also the most conventional. 

In choosing Kamala Harris, Biden selected the candidate who had been the frontrunner among political handicappers and betting markets for months. The senator from California fulfills Biden's pledge to name a woman and responds to the expectation that he would pick the first woman of color ever to serve on a national ticket. 

Pressure to make such a choice has been building since the killing of George Floyd under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer triggered nationwide protests over racial inequity. And beyond the historic nature of Harris' selection, many supporters argued that the presence of a person of color on the ticket was necessary to motivate Black voters. Tepid turnout by Black voters in 2016 helped doom Hillary Clinton in her race against Donald Trump. 

Harris is a charismatic and telegenic politician. And as a US senator and recent presidential candidate, Harris also meets another important test for Biden. People familiar with research the campaign undertook to inform its decision told me voters viewed her as among the most qualified to be president on Day One -- a key positive, given Biden's status as potentially the oldest politician to ever serve as president. 

She is also familiar with the maelstrom of a national campaign, having spent a year running for president, albeit unsuccessfully. Though she was at times less than sure-footed in dealing with incoming criticism from the media and opponents, she understands the pace and nature of it, which will only intensify in a fall race against Trump. 

One of the principal tasks of a running mate is to play a lead role in bringing the case against the other ticket, particularly in the vice-presidential debate. 

A former prosecutor, Harris is known as a fierce interrogator on Capitol Hill and proved herself, at times, to be a sharp-edged debater during the campaign. Biden knows this well. He famously was her target in the first primary debate 14 months ago, when she theatrically confronted him over his position on mandatory school busing in the 1970s. 

That exchange, in which Harris played up her own experience as a child who benefited from busing, briefly vaulted her to the top echelon of candidates in polling. It also was a source of friction with Biden and his family that could have upended his choice. 

In the end, Biden seriously considered others but returned to Harris as the "do no harm" candidate, unlikely to thrill or outrage many. She may not seem the most comfortable fit as a governing partner, a quality Biden said he was seeking, but Harris was viewed as the safest pick to win in November. 

By naming her, Biden likely also has set the dynamics for the 2024 election, not just the current one. The former Vice President has not said he would stand down after one term, though given the fact that he would be 81 by the next election, it is widely assumed he would not run. 

This also will place Harris in not only an historic but a historically challenging position if the Biden-Harris ticket wins. She immediately would be installed as heir apparent and putative frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination four years from now. 

Imagine a world where a woman of both Black and Desi heritage is the "safe, conventional" choice to put on an American Presidential ticket. It's a world where Donald Trump is currently destroying to country on a daily basis, too.

I can already tell that Harris was the right choice based on the immediate reactions from the Trump camp, that Harris is a communist, an "anti-Catholic", and an authoritarian, attacks all made on Biden that have failed to stick and won't touch Harris either.

I think it's going to not only fulfill the oldest saw in the veep playbook -- "First do no harm to the top of the ticket" -- but it's going to help Biden more than the pundits are saying. The running mate gets to throw the elbows like Biden did in 2008, and Kamala Harris is absolutely up for the task compared to Mike Pence.

She's going to cut them so badly they won't bleed until she says so.

New Tag, Biden-Harris.

 

A Government Held Accountable For Its Failures

Imagine a government that resigned after its failures killed people and destroyed the country's economy? It happened in Lebanon on Monday, just days after a deadly explosion in a port warehouse leveled buildings and killed more than 160 people.

Lebanon's government stepped down on Monday night, less than a week after a massive explosion in Beirut killed more than 160 people and sparked days of violent protests. 

Prime Minister Hassan Diab addressed the nation, announcing his resignation and that of his government in the wake of the blast, which he called a "disaster beyond measure." 

In an impassioned speech, Diab berated Lebanon's ruling political elite for fostering what he called "an apparatus of corruption bigger than the state." 

"We have fought valiantly and with dignity," he said, referring to members of his cabinet. "Between us and change is big powerful barrier." 

Diab compared Tuesday's explosion to an "earthquake that rocked the country" prompting his government to resign. "We have decided to stand with the people," he said. 

Three cabinet ministers had already quit, along with seven members of parliament.
Violent protests erupted outside the prime minister's office in the run-up to the scheduled speech on Monday evening. 

Dozens of protesters hurled stones, fireworks and Molotov cocktails at security forces who responded with several rounds of tear gas. Some demonstrators tried to scale the blast walls outside Parliament Square.  

Lebanon was already suffering through its worst economic crisis in decades, coupled with rising coronavirus rates, and the government has been plagued by accusations of corruption and gross mismanagement. 

Tuesday's blast, which damaged or destroyed much of the Lebanese capital and was linked to a long-neglected stash of potentially explosive chemicals, was the last straw for many Beirut residents. 

Diab, a self-styled reformer, was ushered into power last December, two months after a popular uprising brought down the previous government. His government is composed of technocrats and had been supported by major political parties, including the Iran-backed political and militant group Hezbollah. 

Now the country will be tasked with finding its third prime minister in less than a year, to contend with the spiraling crises Lebanon faces on a number of fronts.

So now, as Lebanon literally tries to put a government and a capital city back together again, the world wonders how long Beirut can hold on.

 

Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

Republicans are running out of time before the election to create a racist, white supremacist backlash against Black Lives Matter and they know it.

For a brief moment after George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis policeman in late May, some members of the GOP joined calls for change as protests exploded onto streets across the country. That moment is over.

Facing possible electoral calamity, Republicans are now turning to a familiar playbook: stoking fear by trying to redefine the Black Lives Matter movement as a radical leftist mob looking to sabotage the white, suburban lifestyle.

Republicans are using two lines of attack: the Trump administration, candidates in safe red seats and right-wing social media channels seek to label the entire movement “Marxist” and anti-family as they try to energize their conservative base. Republicans running in swing districts and states, meanwhile, are tying their Democratic opponents to activists’ demands to defund police departments, while avoiding explicitly mentioning Black Lives Matter. Instead, Republicans running in competitive general election races have focused recent ads on more abstract targets like “left-wing radicals" and the "liberal mob."

It’s a distinction Democratic pollsters and lawmakers attribute to the dramatic shift in public views on police brutality, and who and what people associate with the declaration that “Black Lives Matter.” The new broad support for the movement, they say, makes it harder to tie Black Lives Matter to one person, organization or ideology.

“People putting ‘Black Lives Matter’ signs on their lawns, it's not an endorsement of a particular organization so much as a value statement uniting a lot of people from many backgrounds,” said Democratic Rep. Tom Malinowksi, whose predominantly white New Jersey district was held by Republicans for decades before he won in 2018.

That hasn't deterred Republicans, who have increased their criticism of the movement over the past month. On the same day President Donald Trump tweeted that Black Lives Matter was “a symbol of hate,” his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, declared to a group of reporters at the White House that "Black Lives Matter is a Marxist organization … Black Lives Matter has been planning to destroy the police for three years.”

Other Trump administration officials and Republican lawmakers, particularly those running in tough primaries, followed suit, warning, in addition, that the movement wanted to destroy the “nuclear family.” Fox News hosts, conservative talk radio personalities and think tanks such as The Heritage Foundation joined in, as well. Prager University’s “Black Lives Matter is a Marxist Movement” video released this month has over a million views on YouTube and is one of several popular videos it has produced on the topic.

So far, the GOP attempts to discredit the movement have yet to stick. With just under three months until the election, Black Lives Matter has won mainstream support across racial and partisan lines that would have been almost unthinkable six months ago. But the battle to define the movement is not over, as Trump bets he can turn the suburbs, lost to Republicans in 2018, in his favor by attempting to cast a movement for racial equality as a threat to white voters.

“We recognize that this is not simply an issue fight, this isn't simply a narrative war — what we think we're experiencing is a social and cultural and political realignment,” said Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party and a leader with the Movement for Black Lives coalition. “We continue to give that backlash the adequate concern and respect one would give any dangerous opponent, even one that clearly is on the wrong side of history.” 

The latest iteration of this is concern trolling by Republicans that Black Lives Matter will drive Black voters who fear the "liberal mob" more than police brutality into Trump's arms as LAW AND ORDER!!1! president, a narrative that still isn't supported by actual numbers but is being packaged for White suburban consumption.

When this fails to materialize, how far will the regime go to manufacture it?

StupidiNews!

• A derecho line of severe storms with winds of up to 100 mph slammed into the Chicago area Tuesday downing power lines and damaging cars and trees across the upper Midwest.
• A man who entered the White House grounds and was shot by US Secret Service agents interrupting a Trump White House briefing on Monday was unarmed, according to police sources.
• Seattle's City COuncil has approved a 1% cut to the city's police force, but several Council members say deeper cuts are on the way.
• Saying that Trump's executive orders signed on Saturday aren't Constitutional, Ohio GOP Gov. Mike DeWine says that his state won't go along with extended unemployment benefits.
• A massive recall of California onions tainted with Salmonella bacteria is underway as more than 900 people in 43 states and Canada have already been sickened.

Last Call For California Goes Viral

It's not just red states who are showing massive incompetence at handling COVID-19. The difference is when the blue state public health officials screw up, they resign.

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s director of the California Department of Public Health resigned on Sunday, an abrupt departure of a key advisor in the state’s coronavirus battle just days after the discovery of a computer system failure that resulted in the undercounting of COVID-19 cases.

Dr. Sonia Angell, who held the position for less than a year, announced her resignation in an email sent to department staff that was released by the California Health and Human Services Agency.

“Since January, when we got word of repatriation flights arriving from Wuhan, China, our department has been front and center in what has become an all-of-government response of unprecedented proportions to COVID-19,” Angell wrote in the email to public health staff members. “In the final calculation, all of our work, in aggregate, makes the difference.”

Angell’s decision to step aside comes at a crucial moment in California’s battle against the spread of the virus. More than 10,000 Californians have died from the disease, and 38 of the state’s 58 counties are on a watchlist that has required the closure of businesses that had briefly reopened in the early summer and K-12 schools as the academic year begins. Angell, who frequently has appeared alongside Newsom in his public briefings on the state’s efforts to combat the pandemic, was considered a key player in the coordination with local public health departments across the state.

“I want to thank Dr. Angell for her service to the state and her work to help steer our public health system during this global pandemic, while never losing sight of the importance of health equity,” the governor said in a written statement Sunday night.

Dr. Angell had to go.

Last week, state officials confirmed that as many as 300,000 records had not been processed by the computer clearinghouse system relied upon to provide to local officials the COVID-19 test results reported by labs on a daily basis. Two separate errors were identified — one related to a computer server outage, the other to the expiration of an electronic certificate for data to be transferred from Quest Laboratories.
Administration officials insisted they did not know the extent of the problem until after Newsom’s public event on Aug. 3 in which he expressed optimism that current case numbers — lower than some had expected — meant some progress in the state’s efforts. But some local officials were sent communications the week before from the state Department of Public Health acknowledging a problem with the CalREDIE computer system.

Dr. Mark Ghaly, the secretary of the California Health and Human Services Agency, said on Friday that a full investigation was underway to determine what happened. And although he said that he had become aware of the “magnitude” of the problem only after Newsom’s public statements, some state officials had information on the problem earlier.

“We are aware that individuals there were knowledgeable of some of these challenges,” Ghaly said in discussing both the state Public Health Department and his agency, which oversees those operations.
A spokeswoman for the state health agency would not comment Sunday on whether Angell’s sudden resignation was related to, or prompted by, the database errors.

In other words, the 21% drop in California cases announced by Newsom on Monday was complete garbage. A head had to roll, and it was Dr. Angell's head.

California definitely screwed up, with tens of thousands of unreported cases now being added to the count. But as I said, the difference between California and say, Texas, Florida, or Georgia is that health officials in California get canned for making mistakes.

Health officials in red states get fired for being honest about the numbers.

Hong Kong Crackdown, Con't

China's new national security law making Hong Kong and its citizens subject to Chinese Communist Party draconian diktats has captured its first major global player: Hong Kong pro-democracy media magnate Jimmy Lai and his family.

Police on Monday arrested the media tycoon and activist Jimmy Lai, his sons and several executives of his publishing group for allegedly colluding with foreign forces, a crime punishable by life imprisonment under a sweeping national security law that China recently imposed on Hong Kong.

Officers arrived at the home of Lai and his sons, Mark Simon, a close aide and senior executive at Lai’s media group Next Digital, said in a tweet. Police were executing search warrants, Simon added. He said the alleged crime was colluding with foreign powers. Next Digital is the parent company of Apple Daily, a pro-democracy news outlet critical of Beijing that Lai founded in 1995.

Shortly afterward, more than 200 police entered Next Digital’s offices, according to the company’s Facebook page and a live-stream of the raid, and searched the Apple Daily newsroom. They rifled through reporters’ desks and papers, told employees to show their identification cards, and warned journalists to stop filming and photographing the raid as it unfolded.

The dramatic events were the most drastic use of the security law since it took effect last month, and highlighted the growing threat to the safety of pro-democracy activists and journalists in Hong Kong, where press freedom is supposed to enjoy constitutional protection.

In a statement, the Hong Kong Police Force said it had arrested seven men between the ages of 39 and 72 on suspicion of breaching the security law, without naming the suspects. Police said the operation was continuing. 

The arrests come after the U.S. Treasury Department last week imposed sanctions on Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam and 10 other officials, including Beijing’s envoy in the city, the police commissioner and his predecessor, for eviscerating political freedoms in Hong Kong. The city’s government said it would support Chinese countermeasures, calling the sanctions “shameless and despicable.”

“I have expected this day would come, but I did not expect it to come at this moment, after the U.S. sanctions,” said a journalist at Apple Daily, speaking on the condition of anonymity over fears for their safety. “These arrests are about revenge. They are targeting us, a media outlet which is the most outspoken against the Hong Kong government and Beijing.”

A senior journalist at Apple Daily, also requesting anonymity to protect their safety, added that arresting Lai was “just the first step.”

“Shutting down Apple Daily and threatening other media organizations is the goal — so that no one dares to speak the truth at the end. It is not excessive to say this is the end of Hong Kong press freedom,” the person said.

As bad as things are in the US, they're much worse in China and Hong Kong. The Trump regime wouldn't hesitate to march Jeff Bezos off to federal prison and shut down the Washington Post given the opportunity to do so, and I'm surprised he hasn't done so already.

I fully expect another round of massive protests in Hong Kong to free Jimmy Lai. We'll see how the world responds to China over this. My guess is other than toothless US sanctions, we won't see much.

It would be good for Joe Biden to come out very forcefully this week against China here. Just saying.

Apple Daily is among Hong Kong’s most-read media outlets, and Next Digital employs thousands of staff in the city. Several Next Digital executives were among those arrested Monday, a person familiar with the situation said.

A Conspiracy Of Dunces, Con't

Georgia's runoff election for the GOP primary is Tuesday, and that means avowed racist and conspiracy nutjob Marjorie Taylor Greene will be on the ballot against against neurosurgeon and founder of Cortex Toys, Dr. John Cowan. Georgia's 14th is an R + 27 district on the Cook PVI, so there's little hope for Democratic candidate Kevin Van Ausdal, but the larger problem is since the GOP is a white supremacist racism-tolerant party, Marjorie Greene is favored to win and is receiving no pushback from the GOP leadership.

House GOP leaders raced to disavow a Republican congressional candidate who made racist Facebook videos and embraced the QAnon conspiracy theory. But less than two months later, the party has done little to block Marjorie Taylor Greene from winning a seat in the House. 

Now, Republicans could be days away from adding their most controversial member yet to the conference in a runoff election in Georgia on Tuesday — a scenario that some lawmakers say should have been entirely avoided. 

Of the top three GOP leaders in the House, only House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (La.) has helped Greene’s opponent, neurosurgeon John Cowan, raise money and contributed to his campaign. Outside groups have not made any significant investments in the primary runoff for the solidly red seat, despite pleas from rank-and-file Republicans. And there hasn’t been a tweet from President Donald Trump that could signal to his supporters that they should oppose her.

POLITICO reported in June that Greene had posted hours of Facebook videos where she made a trove of racist, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic comments — including an assertion that Black people “are held slaves to the Democratic Party,” and that George Soros, a Jewish Democratic megadonor, is a Nazi. 

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said in June — through his spokesman, Drew Florio — that he found those comments “appalling,” and he had “no tolerance for them.” But Florio said last week that the California Republican is remaining neutral and letting the primary process play out — a stance that likely does not signal urgency to donors or outside groups. 

“This is the kind of race and kind of situation where you need those groups,” said Rep. Buddy Carter (R-Ga.), who is actively supporting Cowan. “So often, they only get involved when they have someone that they are trying to get in. But I think it’s just as important they get involved when there’s someone they’re trying to get out.” 

The lack of intervention from national Republicans — despite their public rebukes of Greene — has frustrated and baffled GOP lawmakers, strategists and donors, who worry Greene’s victory would be a black eye for the party at a time when they are still grappling with a national reckoning over racial inequality. 

The GOP needs the racists in order to win.  In an overwhelmingly Republican district, given a choice of a dozen candidates, they're going to end up with the screaming, black-hating anti-Semite because that who the GOP are.

They're okay with racists, and need them to win.

Dig?

StupidiNews!

• Some of the worst flooding in decades has China's Yangtze River Basin inundated, with hundreds of acres of crops destroyed and tens of thousands evacuated from low-lying villages and towns.
• Health officials fear the effectiveness of any COVID-19 vaccine in the US could be limited by the country's growing obesity epidemic, with one in three American adults now obese.
• Protests in Beirut continued for a third day as demonstrators filled the streets after last week's devastating port warehouse explosion that killed hundreds and injured thousands.
• Trump regime officials say that the White House will move to crack down on foreign election interference, but with few details on what the regime will actually do.
• Major security flaws in Qualcomm Snapdragon mobile device chips could put as many as one billion Android phones and tablets at risk of data theft exploits.

Last Call For Europe Sees Us Going Viral

Europeans are flabbergasted that we've allowed Trump to take us to five million COVID-19 cases and rising and want to know what we plan to do about him. Even the Italians think our government is broken.

With confirmed coronavirus cases in the U.S. hitting 5 million Sunday, by far the highest of any country, the failure of the most powerful nation in the world to contain the scourge has been met with astonishment and alarm in Europe.

Perhaps nowhere outside the U.S. is America’s bungled virus response viewed with more consternation than in Italy, which was ground zero of Europe’s epidemic. Italians were unprepared when the outbreak exploded in February, and the country still has one of the world’s highest official death tolls at 35,000.

But after a strict nationwide, 10-week lockdown, vigilant tracing of new clusters and general acceptance of mask mandates and social distancing, Italy has become a model of virus containment.

“Don’t they care about their health?” a mask-clad Patrizia Antonini asked about people in the United States as she walked with friends along the banks of Lake Bracciano, north of Rome. “They need to take our precautions. ... They need a real lockdown.”

Much of the incredulity in Europe stems from the fact that America had the benefit of time, European experience and medical know-how to treat the virus that the continent itself didn’t have when the first COVID-19 patients started filling intensive care units.

Yet, more than four months into a sustained outbreak, the U.S. reached the 5 million mark, according to the running count kept by Johns Hopkins University. Health officials believe the actual number is perhaps 10 times higher, or closer to 50 million, given testing limitations and the fact that as many as 40% of all those who are infected have no symptoms.

“We Italians always saw America as a model,” said Massimo Franco, a columnist with daily Corriere della Sera. “But with this virus we’ve discovered a country that is very fragile, with bad infrastructure and a public health system that is nonexistent.”

Italian Health Minister Roberto Speranza hasn’t shied away from criticizing the U.S., officially condemning as “wrong” Washington’s decision to withhold funding from the World Health Organization and expressing amazement at President Donald Trump’s virus response.

After Trump finally donned a mask last month, Speranza told La7 television: “I’m not surprised by Trump’s behavior now; I’m profoundly surprised by his behavior before.”

With America’s world’s-highest death toll of more than 160,000, its politicized resistance to masks and its rising caseload, European nations have barred American tourists and visitors from other countries with growing cases from freely traveling to the bloc.

France and Germany are now imposing tests on arrival for travelers from “at risk” countries, the U.S. included.

“I am very well aware that this impinges on individual freedoms, but I believe that this is a justifiable intervention,” German Health Minister Jens Spahn said last week.

Europe is now treating us like we should have been treated for decades now: as a broken, white-supremacist theocracy that is a threat to the globe. I can't imagine Americans actually being welcome in a foreign country for the rest of my lifetime at a minimum.

We shouldn't be.  The rest of the world has every right to laugh at us. Removing the Trump infection and regaining the trust of the world will take decades, and it's going to cost us dearly.

Folks, even Italy got their shit together enough to fix the COVID-19 problem.

Italy.

But some of us decided Trump would make a good president. And we'll all have to live with that forever.

Some of us won't live much longer though. 165,000 and counting.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

As Republicans in Congress have failed to pass a COVID-19 relief deal leaving tens of millions of Americans stranded as one in three renters are now expected to miss their August rent payments entirely, Donald Trump has decided that he can now do whatever he wants to through executive order and Congress and the Supreme Court be damned.

President Trump on Saturday attempted to bypass Congress and make dramatic changes to tax and spending policy, signing executive actions that challenge the boundaries of power that separate the White House and Capitol Hill.

At a news event in Bedminster, N.J., Trump said the actions would provide economic relief to millions of Americans by deferring taxes and, he said, providing temporary unemployment benefits. The measures would attempt to wrest away some of Congress’s most fundamental, constitutionally mandated powers — tax and spending policy. Trump acknowledged that some of the actions could be challenged in court but indicated he would persevere.
Trump bemoaned how Democrats had refused to accept his demands during the recent negotiations but attempted to brush it aside, saying four measures he signed Saturday “will take care of pretty much this entire situation.”

But there were instant questions about whether Trump’s actions were as ironclad as he made them out to be. A leading national expert on unemployment benefits said one of the actions would not increase federal unemployment benefits at all. Instead, the expert said it would instead create a new program that could take “months” to set up. And Trump’s directive to halt evictions primarily calls for federal agencies to “consider” if they should be stopped.

Trump also mischaracterized the legal stature of the measures, referring to them as “bills.” Congress writes and votes on bills, not the White House. The documents Trump signed on Saturday were a combination of memorandums and an executive order.

The White House and Democrats have clashed for weeks about what to do with the $600 enhanced weekly unemployment benefit that expired at the end of July.

One of the measures Trump signed on Saturday aims to provide $400 in weekly unemployment aid for millions of Americans. Trump said 25 percent of this money would be paid by states, many of which are already dealing with major budget shortfalls. The federal contribution would be redirected from disaster relief money at the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Those funds are not likely to last more than two months, and Trump would not say when the benefits would kick in.

Another document signed by Trump on Saturday attempts to defer payroll tax payments from September through December for people who earn less than $100,000. The impact of this measure could depend on whether companies decide to comply, as they could be responsible for withdrawing large amounts of money from their employees’ paychecks in a few months when the taxes are due.

The president said that if he wins reelection, he would seek to extend the deferral and somehow “terminate” the taxes that are owed. He also dared presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden to try to recoup those tax dollars if elected in November. The payroll tax funds Social Security and Medicare benefits, and it’s unclear where those programs will get funding if the taxes are deferred.

Trump is now fully behind doing whatever he wants to keep Trump in power. He promised he would simply eliminate the payroll tax completely, meaning there would be no tax revenue for Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid and he's now daring Joe Biden and the Democrats to do anything about it.

Even worse, he did all this as performative nonsense at his Bedminster resort in New Jersey on a Saturday.

It's ridiculous, and we have months of this ahead, and politically Trump can actually win here because he once again refuses to play by anyone's rules but his own. There's a 99.9% chance he gets away with this and eliminates Biden's lead. Your Trump friends on Facebook will gladly tell you in a couple of weeks how he "saved" us even though it's his fault we're in this mess.  He creates a disaster and then takes the credit for a minimal cleanup effort while Dems scream and point and by the time anyone pays attention, he's on to the next disaster.

The one issue here is that Trump has officially jettisoned any need for Mitch McConnell anymore. It's not Republicans running away from Trump, it's now Trump running away from McConnell. I predict this is going to blow up in his face very quickly, because if there's anything old white Republican senators will not stand for, it's being made irrelevant by the guy in the Oval Office.

Already Pelosi and Mnuchin want to restart talks. But nothing matters unless the Senate GOP plays ball.

We'll see how this goes.

Sunday Long Read: The Final Torch Job

In this week's Sunday Long Read, Dvora Meyers asks that if in the Age of COVID and Black Lives Matter, the Olympics can and should even bother to exist. There's a non-zero chance that we've already seen the final Summer and Winter Games of the modern Olympics era. 

A year ago, back when we were still allowed to gather in groups larger than a minyan, activists convened in Tokyo to talk about how they were going to end the biggest global gathering of them all — the Olympic Games.

The activists came from all over: past host cities like Rio, London, Nagano, and Pyeongchang; future host cities Paris and Los Angeles; cities that had managed to derail their bids, including Boston and Hamburg; and places like Jakarta, which is gearing up for a 2032 bid.

They were in Tokyo exactly a year out from the scheduled start of the 2020 Summer Olympic Games, attending the first-ever transnational anti-Olympic summit, which was organized by Hangorin no Kai, a group of unhoused and formerly unhoused people based in Tokyo. The activists, along with academics and members of the media, talked about common Games-related issues, like displacement and police militarization, and discussed strategies for resisting local political forces and the IOC to protect their communities. Elsewhere in Tokyo, Thomas Bach, President of the International Olympic Committee, and the rest of the IOC crew had arrived to mark the start of the 365-day countdown to the Opening Ceremonies.

Eight months after these two very different gatherings in Tokyo, the IOC announced that the 2020 Olympics were going to be postponed by a full year due to the COVID-19 global pandemic. By the time they made the announcement, most other major sports tournaments planned for the summer had been canceled or postponed and the athletes, many of whom were shut out of training facilities due to lockdowns, were calling on the IOC to act for over a week. Once the IOC made the inevitable official, the athletes were able to reset and refocus their training on July 2021.

That even a stripped-down version of the 2021 Games will happen is hardly a foregone conclusion. The pandemic may not be under control by then. Even if it is, and even if an effective vaccine against the coronavirus is developed in time, the Games still might not happen. The postponement is likely going to add billions to a budget that was already triple that of the original projection of the Tokyo bid that the IOC had accepted in 2013. Public opinion in Japan seems to be swinging against the Games, too. In a recent survey, 77 percent of respondents said that the Olympics could not be held next year. In another poll, a slim majority of Tokyo residents said the same thing.

The horrors of the pandemic are real and massive. Yet COVID-19 has offered an opportunity to derail the Games — one that didn’t exist just a few months ago and certainly hadn’t existed when the activists came to Tokyo last July. Dr. Satoko Itani, a professor of sport, gender, and sexuality studies at Kansai University, told me that the pandemic is a “powerful wake-up call to the people who otherwise wouldn’t have given a thought about the costs of the Olympics.”

“Now that a lot of people in Japan are counting and monitoring the government’s spending to fight the pandemic, it became ever more clear actually just how much taxpayers’ money we had allowed the TOCOG [Tokyo Organizing Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games] and the government to spend on the two-week-long sport spectacle while we don’t have enough money to equip ‘essential workers’ with the essential protective gear,” they wrote in an email.

The Games’ postponement is happening not just against the backdrop of a global pandemic, but also that of a global uprising against state-sanctioned murders of Black people by the police. The catalyst for this movement was the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis by Derek Chauvin, but the protests quickly spread beyond the Twin Cities to the rest of the U.S. and then around the world, including Japan.

The pandemic, police brutality, and the Olympics are not unconnected events. While COVID-19 might be a virus incapable of racial bias, the course it has taken through the population of the U.S., wending its way through Black, Latinx, and poor communities, was determined by decades of racist policy and discrimination. American police forces have killed Black people for decades with impunity as part of the same system that allowed more African Americans to die from COVID-19 than any other group. It’s also the system that has allowed the Olympic Games in the post-war period to reshape the cities that host the event, rarely for the benefit of all citizens. The Games have been a driving force behind displacement, police militarization, increased surveillance, and violence against the working class and poor people, especially Black and Brown, in the cities where they’ve touched down. The very same groups that the pandemic has disproportionately killed and that the police disproportionately target are those who become the victims, rather than the beneficiaries, of the Olympics.

But people are growing wise to what the Olympic Games are actually about. “It wasn’t 15, 20 years ago you could say, ‘We’re going to have a bid in our city,’ and stand behind the podium and jabber on about jobs and economic upticks floating everybody’s boat, and people just nodded along,” Jules Boykoff told me. (Boykoff is a professor at Pacific University and author of Power Games: A Political History of the Olympics and NOlympians: Inside the Fight Against Capitalist Mega-Sports in Los Angeles, Tokyo and Beyond.) “Today, no way. People aren’t nodding along like they once did.”

Over the last decade, residents of potential Olympic host cities have voted overwhelmingly to reject the Games. The IOC and local organizers have lost referenda in Hamburg, Calgary, Graubünden, Krakow, Munich, Sion, Vienna, and Innsbruck. Activists in other cities like Boston, Budapest, and Graz/Schladming managed to turn public opinion against the Games so decisively that the bids were pulled before the IOC and Olympic boosters could be embarrassed by yet another referendum loss. If the anti-Olympics activists have their way, soon no city will be a safe harbor for the Games.

The arguments after Beijing, London, and Rio especially were that the Olympics were a sign of governmental excess, that the billions each game cost should have been used on citizens, infrastructure and programs, not expensive stadiums and sports facilities.

The calculus on that just got a lot harder to use to justify holding the Games anymore.  I don't think we'll see much of them in the future.