All purpose news and politics thread part VI: This Is Not The Time For Posing

[TriggerWarning]

Not trying to bash Biden by any means so please don't take this as an attack. But I have been wondering this last week what it says about him as a candidate that there is more focus on his VP choice and that his VP seems like she will play a bigger role in the campaign the he will. I mean for what seems like forever the news is not talking about his policies it plans. But his VP choice and what the VP will do.

Thats because many can't imagine Biden making it a full term let alone two terms. So his VP choice may very well have to step in as president during the 1st term and if Biden wins will almost certainly be the 2024 nominee. Which is why I'm so worried that he'll make a novelty Sarah Palin type pick by choosing Stacy Abrams instead of a solid credible pick like Kamala Harris, Susan Rice, or Tammy Duckworth. The latter is my hope though I don't expect it since she is the wrong skin color.

[worstblogever]

People can sit and criticize Biden for not having his VP pick yet... And don't realize that it has people talking about him, and not negatively, with excitement for who he's going to pick. He's not campaigning, but he's starting to steal the spotlight from Trump...

Who hates that. And seems to only know how to get the spotlight by being a vindictive authoritarian ***hole. Which only hurts him, and the GOP more.


This is unfolding exactly as Joe wants it to, save for the parts where Trump is working to try to sabotage mail-in voting.

[worstblogever]

“Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” first profiled Donald Trump on this date in 2015, and continued to post updates in 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019. He is never an easy “revisit” for us. Like… last year, we posted this:

Donald Trump continues to grow worse, in spite of it being seemingly impossible for him to find a way to become so. The Mueller Investigation findings are in, but the public only got a redacted version that showed he is utterly criminal. His lawyer flipped on him, and revealed a series of tax avoidance schemes. His Cabinet continues to rack up record resignations to the extent that virtually every senior level administration official has the word “acting” at the start of their job title. He has started telling Congresswomen of color to “go back where they came from” because he’s that racist. He’s trying to resume the failed “family separation” policy because he’s that cruel. He continues to praise authoritarian dictators. He continues to demonize the press. He put a credibly accused rapist on the Supreme Court AND mocked his accuser on social media. He has cranked up the white nationalism to an extent to where his supporters are committing acts of stochastic terror and literally using the defense of “Trump told me to”. So with the number of lies he’s telling picking up, and his incompetence growing practically exponentially, we’ve only had time as of this post to document days 501-600 of the Trump administration thus far.

Note, that’s the last time that “Trump Timeline” was updated… at Day 600 of the administration, roughly. We’re now approaching Day 1300, and somehow, current events seem to be like the forgone conclusion of what was coming. But why did we stop keeping a day by day, blow by blow account? It’s important to keep track on the dark, authoritarian policies of the Trump administration and keep people informed so they don’t wake up and while they weren’t paying attention, fascism laid its seeds and bore dark fruit. There is also the need to point out how utterly bats*** insane Donald Trump has always been, and how progressively worse he’s getting. Not just in terms of having a complete lack of empathy, not just taking glee in cruelty (especially against minorities, because he’s racist as f***), but the pathological lies.

To which… the timeline was at a point where every day, in our estimation, one would need to dedicate an hour or more of work to scouring news sites to stay on top of this horror show in order to document what’s actually going on. It’s that level of derangement, and of outright malice, that needs to be kept up with. The person who has made it her full time job, to our benefit, and done the best with it is probably journalist Amy Siskind, at her own site: She finds hundreds of troubling headlines a week. HUNDREDS. And it’s easy to understand how, as Donald Trump has lied a documented over 20,000 times since taking office by the Washington Post (again, saluting them for doing the hard, hard work).

The CSGOPOTD blog is a strictly unpaid, volunteer thing. And if we truly “kept up” with Trump, it would leave our profiles of the rest of the party he’s corrupted and twisted in his own image unexplored… and to be perfectly honest, we would probably need alcohol by the barrel or anti-depressants by the truckload to compensate having to do it again, and again. So we’re just going to do our best to summarize and preserve our mental health by not trying to make sense over every breathlessly ignorant moment that we’ve seen from this stupid, stupid carbuncle where a human should be as he’s held this nation hostage for the past three years and seven months.

[worstblogever]

• Shortly after our last update, in August of 2019, Donald Trump advocated for Russia to be readmitted into the G7 to make it the G8… even though it seems he was been receiving intelligence briefings that Russia was paying bounties to the Taliban to murder American soldiers in Afghanistan for months. Trump still is, for reasons that should not be mysterious, unable to criticize Vladimir Putin, and claims that the reports of the bounties “never reached his desk” (when it was in his daily intelligence briefings). He still is able to criticize… all the countless people and things that are not a dictator killing Americans. Also in late August… Trump tried to buy Greenland… and then threw a tantrum when Denmark let him know it wasn’t for sale. We should point out that reports have also surfaced that after Hurricane Maria, Trump tried to sell Puerto Rico, because they didn’t think being thrown paper towels from an old fat bastard was adequate disaster relief.
• In September of 2019, and we learn almost literally the moment that Attorney General William Barr’s crooked ass ended the Mueller investigation to rest for Trump, the absolute motherf***er tried to solicit foreign interference in the 2020 election by withholding aid from our ally, Ukraine. The same Ukraine that has had Crimea occupied by Russians on the orders of Vladimir Putin. So around this time, the Ukraine scandal broke, when whistleblowers within the Trump administration immediately threw the flag on Trump’s insane phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Thus began an impeachment inquiry, and every step of the way, the evidence was damning for the next three months.
• In October of 2019, Trump began flailing about impeachment, and in a White House speech, openly solicited for both China and Ukraine to aid him in his 2020 re-election campaign by launching investigations into Joe and Hunter Biden. Meanwhile, associates of Trump and his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani by the name of Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman were arrested while trying to flee the country on a one-way flight.
• Trump has White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney announce his intention to host the G7 Conference in 2020 at his Florida Doral Golf Course. Anyone with a moderate understanding of ethics note what a conflict of interests this is.
• Also in October, Trump abandons the United States’ Kurdish allies in Northern Iraq, pulling out U.S. troops and leaving them woefully unprotected against an invading force of Turkish troops sent by authoritarian dictator Prycep Erdogan.
• November of 2019… the short version? Witness after witness come forward to speak about corruption of the United State’s diplomatic relations with Ukraine. Perhaps the most compelling was Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, who Trump told others “would go through some things” while he fired her.
• December of 2019… The NATO alliance meets in London at Buckingham Palace, and cannot even pretend to hide their contempt for Donald Trump, with world leaders openly mocking him while he sits alone and isolated.
• December 18th, 2019: The sane 60% of the country breathe a sigh of relief as House Democrats vote to impeach Donald Trump.
• January 2020: Sen. Mitch McConnell and the Republican Senate prop up Donald Trump so they can keep nominating judges, deciding that the impeachment trial should have no witnesses, and then voting days later in early February almost entirely along party lines to acquit Trump of the crime they know he’s blatantly guilty of, with only Sen. Mitt Romney defecting from the rest. Also, Trump was briefed twice on the threat of a disease already spreading and killing thousands of people in China, that you may have heard of called Covid-19. Not much was done to further prevent the spread of the pandemic, because Trump and John Bolton had fired the entire Pandemic Response Team back in May of 2018 and never bothered to hire anyone to replace them.
• February 2020: Trump began retaliating against anyone who testified against him during the impeachment hearings, and also the Director of National Intelligence after he briefed Congress with a warning that Russia was already interfering in the 2020 elections with the intent to help Trump win re-election. Trump still did little to nothing to stop the forthcoming Covid-19 pandemic, and his administration seemed bewildered when the stock market crashed ahead of it. In press conferences and on Twitter throughout the month, he lied and claimed the virus was “very much under control”. Trump claimed the initial 15 cases would be “down close to zero”, and that “one day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear”. He went to a rally in South Carolina the next day and claimed Democrats were “politicizing” the Coronavirus, and it was just their “new hoax”.
• March 2020: Covid-19 hits the United States, and fast. In the first week alone, cases rise from 15 to 387 across 28 states, with 19 deaths. By the second week of the month, professional sports shut down after a player on the Utah Jazz tests positive prior to a game. By the Ides of March, there were over 2500 cases across 49 states and 51 Americans dead. Meanwhile, South Korea kept their count of infected below 100. Trump, unable to host rallies, began holding daily press briefings in front of the media, who were flabbergasted by his lies, and how shamelessly he spread misinformation that would leave the public confused about what to do to prevent the disease, like repeatedly comparing Covid-19 to the flu (it’s far worse), continuously giving racist nicknames directed at China for the virus, promoting the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloriquine as a miracle cure for coronavirus (it isn’t). He began a war against his own medical experts. This combination of incompetence and inaction pushed the U.S. to the most cases of Covid-19 in the world by the end of March.
  Trump already began talking about reopening the country on Easter on March 24th.
• April 2020: By the first week of April, Trump was claiming that if 100,000-200,000 are all that die from Covid-19, he will “have done a good job”. Which, would be only numbers seen back in the Civil War and World War II…. But the rate of death climbed to 1,000 Americans falling victim to the virus every day. He continued holding daily press conferences, and by mid-April, was already claiming he had the “absolute authority” to reopen the country, against the advice of his own medical experts, and was cheering on armed militia groups protesting lockdown orders and calling on them to “liberate” their states from public health edicts. By the end of the month, Trump was predicting a full economic recovery (that would not be coming prior to the election, if not for years). Oh, and in perhaps the lowest point of any of his press conferences to date, Trump wondered out loud about injecting “disinfectant” or “UV light” into victims of Covid-19 as a potential cure.

[worstblogever]

z

• May 2020: Unemployment jumped to double digits, and the highest point since the Great Depression as Trump pressured governors around the country, particularly in red states, to “reopen the country” in the first few days of May, as the national death toll from Covid-19 approached 3,000 Americans dead a day. Nearly three months into the crisis, he openly mocked Joe Biden for wearing a mask, still refused to wear a mask himself, and was photographed several times not social distancing without one. He also began arguing that the United States “leads the world and testing”, but simultaneously would argue AGAINST testing for Covid-19. As many states did “reopen”, without any mask requirements in place, they immediately saw their Covid-19 cases skyrocket. By May 23rd, the death toll was approaching the 100,000 mark, and Trump just started spending his weekends golfing again, and making hundreds of insane posts on Twitter, including trying to retroactively reshape history to pretend MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough had murdered an intern, accusing Nancy Pelosi of drinking on the job, or beginning to spread conspiracy theories about in-person voting. This sort of insanity led to Twitter specifically creating a label on posts that indicates they have false or misleading information, enraging Mango Mussolini, and having him impotently rage about the decision and threaten to shut the website down… while people kept dying of Covid-19. By Memorial Day, upon learning that social distancing guidelines would be required at the proposed 2020 RNC at its planned location in Charlotte, Trump responded by demanding it be moved elsewhere, eventually settling on Jacksonville (which would also eventually be a plan that would go up in flames).
  
  But why not have two terrible responses to national issues? On May 25th, George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis Police Department officers, being choked to death as he begged for his life in the street for an excruciating eight and a half minutes. Peaceful protests began around the country, which law enforcement, long since emboldened by Trump to be more violent in how they do their jobs, attacked with tear gas, rubber bullets, and batons. Police also grew aggressive towards protesters in Louisville who were outraged over the death of Breonna Taylor. Trump, who later claimed he was quoting former Philadelphia Mayor (and huge racist) Frank Rizzo, said “When the looting starts, the shooting starts”. However, the quote is from the also racist former Miami police Chief Walter Headley, who first uttered the misanthropic promise of violence during Civil Rights protests back in 1967.
• June 2020: John Bolton’s tell-all book about his time working in the Trump administration drops, and reveals that the shakedown of the Ukrainian president that got Trump impeached is standard business for him. Also, Trump’s a moron. Also, don’t buy this book, because Bolton should not be financially rewarded for refusing to testify to Trump’s crimes during the impeachment trial.
  
  Trump opened up June looking to distract from his disastrous Covid-19 response by leaning in hard on the racism at his core in regards to protesters calling for reforming American policing. On June 1st, he had U.S. troops in Washington D.C. fire tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse peaceful protesters at St. John’s Church, near Lafayette Park so he could run over to the church and without permission, take a photo op of himself holding up a bible upside down. As the protests became even more a national movement, and the DC one grew to a size that would apparently threaten Trump, he began to retreat into the bunker under the White House, and order even more perimeter fencing upon his redoubt.
  
  The bluster began to fade, and around this time, if it wasn’t already clear to Donald Trump, his re-election hopes began to look like he was going to fall on his bronzer-caked face. His campaign announced he would hold a “comeback rally” scheduled in Tulsa on Juneteenth, and after criticism that amidst racial unrest that they would go to the city where Black Wall Street was attacked by the KKK a century earlier to have one of his white power rallies on Juneteenth, an anniversary commemorating the end of slavery in the United States… well, they delayed the Tulsa rally a day. But they boasted of a million RSVPs, and planned for up to 40,000 to 60,000 people to attend both inside the convention center, as well as gather around an outdoor stage in an “overflow area”. Trump campaign aides literally tore social distancing signs off of displays inside, and the most rabid Trump fans attended without masks… but only to the tune of 6,200 attendees. Over 500 people of that number contracted Covid-19 as a result, including former presidential candidate Herman Cain, who would end up dying of his infection. A defeated, dejected Trump arrived back at the White House in the wee hours of that morning, apparently seeing enthusiasm for his farce of a presidency disappearing before his eyes, and the video of him skulking into the residence askew and in shame went viral.

z

[worstblogever]

• July 2020: Trump goes to Mt. Rushmore on July 3rd, again trying to reestablish his momentum by going to a red state and being super racist, this time towards Native Americans. Only an estimated 3700 people showing up for this rally that expected 7500 may not have been a surprise. Because trying to milk a patriotic holiday like Independence Day for all it was worth was kind of hard, though, considering reports came in regarding Russia paying Taliban troops in Afghanistan bounties for murdering U.S. troops, and the Trump administration had done not just f*** all about it for months, but had actually been arguing to invite Russia back into the G7 to make it the G8. The best defense for the scandal was that Trump and Mike Pence claimed that they had never received any prior intelligence regarding this shocking activity by the Russians, or pretending it was “fake news”… but the intelligence community confirmed it was in more than one presidential daily intelligence briefing from over a year prior, and that it definitely was happening as they recovered cash paid out to Taliban troops by the Russians.
  
  While not paying any mind to those Russian bounties, Trump was more concerned about trying to stop protesters from removing Confederate monuments. We’ll repeat that, he cared more about monuments to dead racist traitors to the Union than he did actual living American soldiers. On Twitter, Trump thanked supporters physically attacking protesters in Florida while screaming “White Power! WHITE POWER!” which gives you a good idea about how healing the racial divide was going for him.
  
  The Covid-19 response continued to be embarrassing, including Trump yet again claiming it would “just sort of disappear”, claiming he didn’t wear a mask because it made him “look like the Lone Ranger” (the Lone Ranger wears a domino mask over his eyes, not any mouth and nose covering), a report that 40 Trump donors raided the PPP loan program for $10 billion while most small businesses were denied loans, and an expose by 60 Minutes that the Trump administration knowingly allowed the use of flawed Covid-19 testing kits that would report negative results and justify them reopening the country. Still, by the second week of July, Trump was calling for parents to send their kids back to school and risk getting Covid-19, and his administration dug in to further attack the reputation of Dr. Anthony Fauci, their own expert. By the end of the month, the death toll exceeded 150,000.
  
  Trump’s war with tech giants escalated, with Twitch deleting Trump’s channel for hateful rhetoric, and Reddit deleting the entire Trump subreddit. Trump, still thinking a winning strategy was, “be more racist” started getting to the point where he was nearly invoking the Nazis' “14 words”, while moaning about Fox News coverage not being favorable enough to him by asking, “Where are you Roger Ailes?!?” (Ailes had been dead for 3 years.) Meanwhile, Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested by the FBI, and everyone began sharing photos of Trump partying with the alleged child sex traffickers. Oh, and he started using the office of the presidency to shill beans from the Resolute Desk. No, literally.
  
  Meanwhile, AG Bill Barr began a series of firings and level-pulls aimed at trying to insulate Trump from any potential arrest after he leaves office, including a botched attempt at firing the US Attorney for Brooklyn, having masked federal agents kidnap peaceful protesters off the streets of Portland without reading them their rights or having committed a crime, and after Trump had Barr meddling in the Roger Stone case for months, Trump granted him clemency for his crimes to assure Stone wouldn’t roll over on him if he was forced to go to prison.
  
  Also, Trump’s niece published a tell-all book that revealed some shocking new revelations, like that he paid someone to take his SATs for him and his sister did his college homework for him, and an explanation of the Trump family’s tax avoidance schemes. While promoting the book on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show, Mary Trump confirmed she has heard her uncle use racial slurs several times.
• August 2020: Everything sucks. Trump is trying to sabotage the U.S. Postal Service in a desperate attempt to suppress mail-in-balloting to aid in his own re-election hopes. He’s talking about giving his acceptance speech for the GOP nomination in 2020 from the White House Rose Garden, which is illegal, and the third option he’s floated after the Republican Party’s efforts to host an in-person convention in Charlotte and Jacksonville without social distancing guidelines were thwarted. The SDNY Attorney’s office reveals in a court hearing that they got Trump’s tax returns from Deutsche Bank, and there’s widespread evidence of bank and insurance fraud by the whole company.

So… all of this. And by Election Day, another tell-all book from former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen. Covid-19 deaths look to be in the 300,000 range by year’s end. Or, y'know, 100 of the dreaded 9-11s. We will have endured 100 9-11s in ten months. F***. Almost a dozen hurricanes are due to hit during this hurricane season, and half of those could be Category 3 or stronger. Legal threats towards Trump for past crimes loom, from everything from his alleged assault of E. Jean Carroll to the Trump Foundation's alleged tax and insurance fraud schemes.

This tinpot, crackpot dictator has done more to damage this country in four years than should be possible, were he not enabled to do so by the rest of his party. Should he steal the election to pull out another electoral victory fluke, and rest assured, he’s going to try… his own niece doesn’t think the country will survive it, which is probably why the Russians are working to get him elected again, and he says, “I DON’T CARE” as if he was reading it off the back of the First Lady’s coat.

This madness must stop. We shouldn’t have to write about it. People shouldn’t have to wake up to it every day. It’s just so much unnecessary suffering and death that no one should be enduring, but we are, because we’re being patient during this particularly ugly phase of the experiment that is American democracy, or what passes for it. Given the amount of perimeter fencing being set up around the White House, the actions of AG William Barr, and federal agents kidnapping people off the streets at protests… should there be bad news about the presidential in election in November… expect things to get uglier than the protests that erupted four years ago. Trump will be in power when they happen this time, and not just be a president-elect. And he will turn loose the goon squads on them with chemical weapons and rubber bullets with glee, for daring to show any resistance to him.

Resist. Our lives depend on it.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

And remember, it's not just about getting rid of Trump come November, the ax has to fall on Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham and the legion of stooges, sycophants and asskissers in the Republican Party who've enabled the Orange Menace from day one. Republicans could've ended this nightmare back in January during the impeachment hearings, but chose to put party and power over the Constitution, and they're still doing that today, willingly turning a blind eye and deaf ear to all of Trump's endless transgressions that have LITERALLY put democracy in this country on the brink. I've said this before and I'll keep on saying it: retaking the Senate is every bit as important as the White House, because Biden winning the presidency will be meaningless if McConnell is still around to be a human roadblock. There has to be a clean sweep of the GOP scum in the Senate if this country is to recover.

[Kirby101]

But WPP, isn't the GOP destroying American Democracy and the Democrats not doing everything progressives want the same thing?

[Tami]

And remember, it's not just about getting rid of Trump come November, the ax has to fall on Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham and the legion of stooges, sycophants and asskissers in the Republican Party who've enabled the Orange Menace from day one. Republicans could've ended this nightmare back in January during the impeachment hearings, but chose to put party and power over the Constitution, and they're still doing that today, willingly turning a blind eye and deaf ear to all of Trump's endless transgressions that have LITERALLY put democracy in this country on the brink. I've said this before and I'll keep on saying it: retaking the Senate is every bit as important as the White House, because Biden winning the presidency will be meaningless if McConnell is still around to be a human roadblock. There has to be a clean sweep of the GOP scum in the Senate if this country is to recover.

Getting McConnell out would be fantastic, however it looks like a tough mountain to climb. The next best thing is if the Democrats take control of the Senate along with the House. Not just control, but ideally a large enough control to make McConnell a Non-issue.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

But WPP, isn't the GOP destroying American Democracy and the Democrats not doing everything progressives want the same thing?

Progressives! Pfft! Spare me! The only progressives I care about are Flo and Jamie, and they have lots more sense than those yahoos.

Getting McConnell out would be fantastic, however it looks like a tough mountain to climb. The next best thing is if the Democrats take control of the Senate along with the House. Not just control, but ideally a large enough control to make McConnell a Non-issue.

That would be the only way to neuter that turtle faced bastard. But, I'd rather McConnell be voted out altogether and avoid that drama.

[Kirby101]

Progressives! Pfft! Spare me! The only progressives I care about are Flo and Jamie, and they have lots more sense than those yahoos.

No love for Mara?

[WestPhillyPunisher]

No love for Mara?

Well, she’s okay. I’ll add her to the list.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Russia registers virus vaccine, Putin’s daughter given it

Russia on Tuesday became the first country to officially register a coronavirus vaccine and declare it ready for use, despite international skepticism. President Vladimir Putin said that one of his daughters has already been inoculated.

Putin emphasized that the vaccine underwent the necessary tests and has proven efficient, offering a lasting immunity from the coronavirus. However, scientists at home and abroad have been sounding the alarm that the rush to start using the vaccine before Phase 3 trials — which normally last for months and involve thousands of people — could backfire.

Speaking at a government meeting Tuesday, Putin said that the vaccine has undergone proper testing and is safe.

“I would like to repeat that it has passed all the necessary tests,” he said. “The most important thing is to ensure full safety of using the vaccine and its efficiency.”

Okay, show of hands for everyone eager to take a dose of Bad Vlad's Miracle Vaccine....

* crickets *

Are you kidding me? I think I'd rather inject Lysol than take something that came out of left field from Russia. How long before Drano Don takes to Twitter to crow about his buddy's breakthrough?

[The Cool Thatguy]

Russia registers virus vaccine, Putin’s daughter given it



Okay, show of hands for everyone eager to take a dose of Bad Vlad's Miracle Vaccine....

* crickets *

Are you kidding me? I think I'd rather inject Lysol than take something that came out of left field from Russia. How long before Drano Don takes to Twitter to crow about his buddy's breakthrough?

I wonder if it treats the Russian COVID symptom of defenestration?

[Gray Lensman]

I wonder if it treats the Russian COVID symptom of defenestration?

Pooty is just jealous that even after all this time, and all those people thrown out of windows, that the Czechs still have the coolest defenestrations. He will never match the Defenestrations of Prague no matter how hard he tries.