The Louisiana legislature just voted to restrict access to mail-in ballots in their primary, which was already delayed because of the coronavirus. In fact, some GOP members tried to block the measure because they claimed that it still gave too much access to mail-in voting.
Their reasons? As usual, the Republicans claimed that voting by mail would invite election fraud. This, despite the fact that election experts and fact checkers have repeatedly shown that the risk of fraud (both with and without vote-by-mail) is extremely low.
The hypocritical part? The lawmakers of Louisiana were reluctant to vote in person on the election plan, so they voted by mail.
The ACLU has a petition to get Congress to pass a law requiring all states to allow vote-by-mail, like Colorado, Oregon, Washington, and other states already do. After you sign it, they will automatically send a message to your congressperson and senators.
This is to avoid the disaster that just happened in Wisconsin, with people putting themselves in danger in order to vote. Dozens of Wisconsin voters and poll workers have tested positive for COVID-19 after their recent primary election, where over 400,000 people voted in person.
The US Supreme Court blocked an effort by the Wisconsin governor to expand their absentee voting system.
According to the site Worldometers, the US has now passed 1 million cases of Coronavirus. They also report that 195,787 cases are closed (either because the patient recovered, or died), which means that there are still 814,569 active cases.
Of course, when you go to the site, those numbers will have changed. For the worse.
The total number of people who are listed as having died from the coronavirus is now 56,797, which means that we are approaching quickly the day when more Americans will have died from the coronavirus than died in the Vietnam War (which the US says is 58,220). Yesterday, 1,384 people died in the US from coronavirus, so it won’t take long.
Also, there is reason to believe that coronavirus deaths (worldwide) have been underreported by around 60%, which means that we have likely blown past the death toll from the Vietnam War.
The following comic is specific to Sacramento California, but it is nonetheless instructive:
The Saturday Night Live cold open last night featured a famous actor playing Dr. Anthony Fauci, Donald Trump’s (soon to be ex-) director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. What you may not know is that a few weeks ago, Fauci was asked by a reporter who he would want to play him on SNL. Fauci replied “Brad Pitt, of course”. SNL made it happen, and Pitt did a fantastic job.
Donald Trump claimed that he has total authority, but backed down in less than 24 hours, and pretended to “allow” the governors to do whatever they want.
But when he said “I take no responsibility” for the failures of the government response to the coronavirus pandemic, I think he was actually telling the truth. Is that a miracle, or what?
You know this was going to happen, based on the recent very sound medical advice from Donald Trump, our very stable genius. Let the memes begin!
And here’s some relevant poetry, sarcastically attributed to Trump:
You know I’m not a doctor – but of course I could have been, That’s why, until a week ago, I touted chloroquine. Now, evidence suggests that might have been an overreach, So I’ll tout another treatment: shooting up with bleach.
The latest news is that Trump is going to dramatically cut back on his daily briefings. Since he started doing his meandering, nonsensical (and dangerous) briefings, polls show that public opinion of his management of the coronavirus crisis has plummeted 16 points.
UPDATE: There was a spike in New Yorkers ingesting household cleaners during the 18 hours following Trump’s claim that such products might be able to cure coronavirus.
Donald Trump campaigns by attacking his opponents. He did it in 2016 against Hillary Clinton. Now in 2020, the need is even more dire, because he can’t campaign by taking credit for a good economy anymore. So he is doing what he always does, throwing out attacks constantly to see which ones stick (in other words, which ones get picked up by right-wing media).
The other interesting thing that Trump does is attack others for the things he is most guilty about himself. For example, he keeps calling Joe Biden “Sleepy Joe” and painting him as too old and incompetent. But that doesn’t seem to be working, maybe because Biden and Trump are both in their seventies (only 4 years apart in age), and more often than not when Trump opens his mouth, gibberish and misinformation flow out.
We also know that Trump tried to get the Ukraine to investigate Biden, but was so ham handed about it that he got himself impeached.
The latest attack from Trump is that Biden is soft on China. Trump has warned that “China will own the United States” if Biden is elected. Their evidence is to point out that Biden’s son did a $1.5 billion deal to manage an investment fund in China when his father was vice president. However, Hunter Biden wasn’t part of that deal and didn’t get any money from it. In fact, he didn’t have any direct involvement in that company until he invested $420,000 in it, receiving a 10 percent stake. And that happened in 2017, when his father was no longer vice president.
Unlike Biden and his son, Trump is pretty much already owned by China. The Trump Tower in Manhattan Trump owes the Bank of China (which is owned by the Chinese government) $211 million. That loan is due in 2022, which would mean that Trump would be scrambling to repay it when he is president. And it is suspicious that this loan was the first time that the Chinese national bank made any investment in the US. What are they expecting in return? Is this why Trump is so desperate to hide his tax returns? Does he even have enough cash to repay his obligations?
But there’s more. Chinese state-owned companies are constructing two luxury developments for Trump in United Arab Emirates and Indonesia. Not to mention the valuable trademarks that were awarded by the Chinese government to Trump and his daughter Ivanka, and Jared Kushner’s dealings with Chinese investors.
11. Make more music over Zoom. I’m beginning to believe that the official music of the coronavirus pandemic is Funk.
Most of you don’t know this, but I’m also an amateur musician (I play bass). Lately (like many musicians) I too have been participating in Zoom calls to make music. It really helps to play songs that have a strong beat, to keep everyone together. So Funk it is!
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Donald Trump wants you to think that the small anti-quarantine protests that took place this weekend in various state capitols were spontaneous grassroots events, but they were anything but.
First of all, Trump’s tweets in support of these protests were all aimed at states with Democratic governors, and ignored Republican governors who also issued stay-at-home orders. So clearly political. And never mind that Trump was inciting people to break laws and guidelines that he himself had endorsed just a couple of days beforehand.
Secondly, the Facebook traffic that coordinated these protests was organized by Ben Dorr (along with his two brothers), who is the political director of Minnesota Gun Rights. And the protests themselves were organized by pro-Trump activists (including some who are surrogates for Trump’s campaign, or are prominent conservative donors.
In fact, the state with the largest and most vehement protests was Michigan, which were organized by Michigan Conservative Coalition, which was founded by a Republican state lawmaker whose wife sits on the advisory board for Trump’s campaign. Also promoting the demonstrations was the Michigan Freedom Fund, which is funded in large part by the DeVos family. Betsy DeVos is Trump’s education secretary, and her husband ran unsuccessfully for governor of Michigan in 2006.
The online activity (mostly on Facebook) was created (and paid for) in order to make it look like opposition to sheltering-in-place is popular and widespread. But this is fake news. Even among Republicans, close to 70% are in favor of a national stay-at-home order. And needless to say, 95% of Democrats are in favor.
So the number of people who demand that the governors “give them liberty or give them death (or both)” is quite small and is being egged on by conservative political activists.
I’ve really been enjoying the posts from historian Heather Cox Richardson, in her free column “Letters from an American“. Here’s an excerpt from her April 12 post, talking about the ongoing destruction of our democracy. Of course there are plenty of mentions of Donald Trump, but then she points out a related problem that many of us may not be very aware of, in the person of Mitch McConnell, the majority leader of the Senate.
Our system has a built-in remedy for a president who abuses his power. Our Constitution requires Congress to check a runaway president. The House of Representatives is trying hard to do so, but the Republican Senate refuses.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has consistently supported Trump as he has attacked our democracy, and a terrific piece by Jane Mayer in the New Yorker today explores why. In a piece entitled “How Mitch McConnell Became Trump’s Enabler-in-Chief,” Mayer argues that McConnell is determined to wield power above all else, and believes that the only way to do that is to control huge financial resources to get his party’s candidates elected. To gather those resources, he needs to work with wealthy donors, including business leaders for whom he does favors.
McConnell is virtually shutting down Congress to avoid taking up anything that would upset Republican donors. “At the end of 2019,” Mayer writes, “more than two hundred and seventy-five bills, passed by the House of Representatives with bipartisan support, were sitting dormant on McConnell’s desk.” These included an enormously popular bill for lowering the costs of prescription drugs, but McConnell, who gets more contributions from the pharmaceutical industry than any other senator, refused to take it up, saying he opposes “socialist price controls.” Political scientist Norm Ornstein of the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute says McConnell “will go down in history as one of the most significant people in destroying the fundamentals of our constitutional democracy.” He told Mayer, “There isn’t anyone remotely close. There’s nobody as corrupt, in terms of violating the norms of government.”
McConnell is no fan of Trump, but needs him. McConnell is enormously unpopular in his home state of Kentucky. Voters there love Trump, though, and McConnell’s ratings go up whenever he bolsters the president. So while he works to keep money flowing into the coffers of Republican Party leaders, McConnell is careful not to cross Trump, no matter what he does. In turn, his fellow Republicans cannot buck McConnell without losing access to the money and favors that will keep them in office.
It is indeed dangerous that Trump has such sweeping emergency powers at his disposal, but the problem is not the emergency powers. The problem is the president and the Republican senators, who could check Trump’s increasing authoritarianism at any time, if only they wanted to.
Also note that four of the top five donors to McConnell’s leadership committee are executives for the Fox News Channel. Lachlan Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch, Viet Dinh (FNC’s Legal Adviser and Policy Director), and the president of 21st Century Fox all gave $20,600.
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