The GOP's Race To The Bottom, Con't

Good morning.

Republicans are racists, and they can't stop being racist.

U.S. Sen. David Perdue intentionally flubbed the name of Joe Biden’s running-mate Kamala Harris at a rally Friday for President Donald Trump in Macon, drawing immediate criticism from his Democratic challenger Jon Ossoff and others who called it a “racist tactic.”

As Perdue warned that the Democratic presidential ticket of Biden and Harris would bring “radical socialism” to the country if elected, Perdue dramatically struggled with Harris' name, to the delight of the crowd.

“Kamala? Kamala? Kamala-mala-mala? I don’t know. Whatever.”

Harris and Perdue have served together in the U.S. Senate since 2017, including as members of the Senate Budget Committee. His campaign spokesman John Burke said the Republican “simply mispronounced Senator Harris' name and he didn’t mean anything by it.”

“He was making an argument against the radical socialist agenda that she and her endorsed candidate Jon Ossoff are pushing,” he said.

Ossoff swiftly criticized his Republican opponent on social media.

“We are so much better than this,” Ossoff tweeted, urging supporters to chip into his campaign. He later added: “We are so much better than this.”

And Nikema Williams, who chairs the Democratic Party of Georgia, said he owes voters an apology.

“Senator Perdue’s intentionally disrespectful mispronunciation of Senator Harris' name is a bigoted and racist tactic straight from President Trump’s handbook,” said Williams.

Long a staunch Trump loyalist, Perdue earlier told the crowd that the president had been sent by God.

“This guy is providential. He didn’t happen by accident,” Perdue said. “How in the world in our political system could Donald J. Trump come on the scene in 2016 do what he did? Tell me. God’s watching.”

The Trump campaign scheduled the rally in Macon as a series of recent polls show Trump and former vice president Joe Biden neck-and-neck in Georgia. Trump, who won the state by 5 percentage points in 2016, has little clear path to victory if he loses Georgia in November.

Along with Perdue, state GOP leaders including Gov. Brian Kemp, Sen. Kelly Loeffler, Rep. Doug Collins, former Georgia governor and current Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, and 14th district GOP nominee Marjorie Taylor Greene also attended the rally for Trump.

 

They trashed Obama's name for years and they still do. They'll trash Kamala Harris's name and they will. But they'll have to put President in front of Obama, and they'll soon have to put Vice-President in front of Kamala Harris, and they damn well know it.

 

It's far from just Perdue, too. Look at the crew of assholes at the Trump Georgia rally, Brian Kemp, mask hater and racist voter subtraction master, Doug Collins, who happily defended Trump's racists tweets time and again, Sonny Perdue, corrupt Agriculture Secretary and food shortage guru, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, QAnon racist, anti-Semite, and general conspiracy crank.

 

What white supremacist Republican racists hate that more than anything is that their kids will learn to pronounce Kamala correctly and start to see her as a human being.

Food For Thought, Con't

The looming food shortages across the country, scenes of thousands of car lining up daily for food bank distribution, crops rotting in the fields and chickens being killed because there's no workers to process them, all of this is under the Trump regime and Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue is just as incompetent as the rest of them.

Tens of millions of pounds of American-grown produce is rotting in fields as food banks across the country scramble to meet a massive surge in demand, a two-pronged disaster that has deprived farmers of billions of dollars in revenue while millions of newly jobless Americans struggle to feed their families. 

While other federal agencies quickly adapted their programs to the coronavirus crisis, the Agriculture Department took more than a month to make its first significant move to buy up surplus fruits and vegetables — despite repeated entreaties. 

“It’s frustrating,” said Nikki Fried, commissioner of agriculture in Florida. Fried, who is a Democrat, and much of the Florida congressional delegation asked Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue nearly a month ago to use his broad authority and funding to get more Florida farmers plugged into federal food purchasing and distribution programs as the food service market collapsed. “Unfortunately, USDA didn’t move until [last week].”

Tom Vilsack, who served as agriculture secretary during the Obama administration, put it this way: “It’s not a lack of food, it’s that the food is in one place and the demand is somewhere else and they haven’t been able to connect the dots. You’ve got to galvanize people.” 

It has been six weeks since President Donald Trump and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention first urged Americans to avoid restaurants as part of national social distancing guidelines to slow the spread of Covid-19 — a move that immediately severed demand for millions of pounds of food earmarked for professional kitchens across the country.

Just 50 miles from Trump’s home in Mar-a-Lago, Florida growers, much of whose produce was destined for restaurant chains, faced an immediate crisis: Find customers for surplus crops or plow the fields under to avoid attracting pests. 

Images of farmers destroying tomatoes, piling up squash, burying onions and dumping milk shocked many Americans who remain fearful of supply shortages. At the same time, people who recently lost their jobs lined up for miles outside some food banks, raising questions about why there has been no coordinated response at the federal level to get the surplus of perishable food to more people in need, even as commodity groups, state leaders and lawmakers repeatedly urged the Agriculture Department to step in.

Demand at food banks has increased an average of 70 percent, according to Feeding America, which represents about 200 major food banks across the country. The group estimates that 40 percent of those being served are new to the system. 

In mid-April, USDA unveiled a long-awaited $19 billion aid program with $3 billion set aside to buy excess food, a pot of money that would cover a major ramp-up of fresh produce purchases, along with dairy and meats. But federal officials predicted it would take the better part of a month before that food is packed and shipped to food banks and other nonprofits in need. At that point, it will be too late for many produce growers who saw a huge drop in demand right at the peak of their season. 

“By the time that comes through, it won’t help Florida,” said Brittany Lee, a blueberry farmer and executive director of the Florida Blueberry Growers Association. Blueberry prices are about half of what they were this time last year, she said.

Sonny Perdue is the former governor of Georgia and cousin to current GOP Sen. David Purdue of Georgia.  He was brought on to the Trump regime to do two things: act as the lightning rod for Trump's Chinese tariffs on farm products, and to get as many Americans off SNAP and other food benefit programs as possible.

He was never hired to handle a national food crisis, and make no mistake, we're deep into one.  The USDA should have had a handle on this six weeks ago and it should have been a top priority.

But now, we've got tens of millions of people needing basic foodstuffs, and tens of millions of pounds of food going to waste. As poultry producer Tyson Foods warns, "The food supply chain is breaking."

The board chairman of Tyson Foods is warning that "millions of pounds of meat will disappear" from the national food supply chain as the coronavirus outbreak forces food processing plants to shutter. 

"The food supply chain is breaking," John Tyson wrote in a full-page advertisement published Sunday in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

"There will be limited supply of our products available in grocery stores until we are able to reopen our facilities that are currently closed," he wrote in the advertisement, which was also published as a blog post on the company's website. 

In recent weeks, the major poultry producer has temporarily suspended operations at plants across the country. The company halted operations Wednesday at an Iowa plant that is crucial to the nation's pork supply. 

"In addition to meat shortages, this is a serious food waste issue. Farmers across the nation simply will not have anywhere to sell their livestock to be processed, when they could have fed the nation," John Tyson wrote. 

"Millions of animals — chickens, pigs and cattle — will be depopulated because of the closure of our processing facilities," he added. 

Four employees of Tyson's operations in rural southwest Georgia died earlier this month after becoming infected with the coronavirus, a company spokesman told The Associated Press. 

Tyson has told NBC News that it is taking steps to protect its workers, including installing dividers between workers and relaxing its attendance policy to allow sick workers to stay home.

 
Great job, guys.

Trump Trades Blows, Con't

As Trump escalates his trade war with China, and China now saying it will no longer buy any crop imports from the US, American farmers are letting the GOP know just how much they stand to lose at the ballot box next year.

Farmers’ discontent over President Donald Trump’s escalating trade war with China erupted into the open Wednesday as his agriculture secretary was confronted at a fair in rural Minnesota.

Gary Wertish, president of the Minnesota Farmers Union, drew applause as he leveled criticism of the administration’s trade policy at a forum with Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue in front of thousands of farmers gathered in a metal barn for a panel discussion.

American farmers took a fresh financial hit from Trump’s trade war over the weekend as China announced a halt to all U.S. agricultural imports after the president threatened Beijing with another tariff increase.

Wertish criticized Trump’s “go-it-alone approach” and the trade dispute’s “devastating damage not only to rural communities.” He expressed fears Trump’s $28 billion in trade aid will undermine public support for federal farm subsidies, saying the assistance is already being pilloried “as a welfare program, as bailouts.”

Others joined in. Brian Thalmann, president of the Minnesota Corn Growers Association, complained about Trump statements that farmers are doing “great” again. “We are not starting to do great again,” he said. “We are starting to go down very quickly.”

Joel Schreurs of the American Soybean Association warned American producers are in danger of long-term losses in market share in China, the world’s largest importer of soybeans.

Perdue sought to soothe the crowd as he defended the president’s policies. “Obviously this is a popular opinion. A lot of applause,” he joked after the audience reacted to Democratic Representative Angie Craig saying aid is not substitute for a strategy on trade. “There is a lot of stress out there.”

If farmers are laying into Sonny Perdue out in the open like this, then Trump may have badly miscalculated the support of farmers heading into 2020.  They're no longer willing to wait 15 months to vote for Trump if the China trade war explodes and their farms go under in six.  By no means does it mean farmers will start voting for Democrats in 2020, but they're not going to vote for Trump much either if the man's personally responsible for wrecking their farms.

One major miscalculation by either the US or China on this and it's global recession time anyway.

Going After Her Lunch

The Trump Regime continues its erasure of the Obamas in every way, this time completely dismantling former First Lady Michelle Obama's championed programs for kids, including global education for girls.

The Trump administration is discontinuing a signature girls education initiative championed by former first lady Michelle Obama, according to officials. 

The "Let Girls Learn" program, which she and President Barack Obama started in 2015 to facilitate educational opportunities for adolescent girls in developing countries, will cease operation immediately, according to an internal document obtained by CNN. 

While aspects of the initiative's programming will continue, employees have been told to stop using the "Let Girls Learn" name and were told that, as a program unto itself, "Let Girls Learn" was ending. 

"Moving forward, we will not continue to use the 'Let Girls Learn' brand or maintain a stand-alone program," read an email sent to Peace Corps employees this week by the agency's acting director Sheila Crowley. 

" 'Let Girls Learn' provided a platform to showcase Peace Corps' strength in community development, shining a bright light on the work of our Volunteers all over the world," Crowley wrote. "We are so proud of what 'Let Girls Learn' accomplished and we have all of you to thank for this success." 

Gotta get "Moochelle's" name off the letterhead I guess.  But the real hatred against her has always been over her efforts to make school lunches healthier, a national initiative that fostered unending, volcanic, inchoate and incandescent rage among conservatives.  Those standards are now in the dumpster as newly confirmed Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue's first move.

Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue took steps Monday to roll back healthy school lunch standards promoted by former first lady Michelle Obama in one of his first regulatory acts.

In an interim final rule, aimed at giving schools more flexibility, Perdue and his department are postponing further sodium reductions for at least three years and allowing schools to serve non-whole grain rich products occasionally as well as 1 percent flavored milk.

The rule allows states to exempt schools in the 2017-2018 school year from having to replace all their grains with whole-grain rich products if they are having a hard time meeting the standard.

USDA said it will take “all necessary regulatory actions to implement a long-term solution.”

“This announcement is the result of years of feedback from students, schools, and food service experts about the challenges they are facing in meeting the final regulations for school meals,” Perdue said in a statement.

“If kids aren't eating the food, and it’s ending up in the trash, they aren't getting any nutrition – thus undermining the intent of the program.”

The real issue was of course healthier meals are something that A) poor black and brown kids who can't pay for school lunches don't deserve apparently, and B) something that Big Ag was furious about having to help provide when they could be selling snacks and soda to kids in vending machines in every school in the country instead.

For this, Michelle Obama was treated as an object of pure racist hatred, for the unforgivable crime of wanting kids to eat healthier and for girls to learn more.  Thank goodness we're making school lunches great again, or some garbage like that, cause that Obama bitch needs to be put in her place, right boys?

God some days I hate this country.  I really do.