Gotham City Digest: Change the President edition

(Is it time to start pissing our pants, yet?)

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   Yes, Mike Pence shook hands with 44 Sarasota Military Academy cadets whose classmate was quarantined for coronavirus. But if they insist on playing Russian roulette with their lives, who are we to step in their way?

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     We've spent $32,000,000 an hour on war since 9/11. Not a day. Every hour.

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     Words can't describe what a skeevy piece of shit Jailbird Jim Bakker is in trying to capitalize on this coronavirus scare. He knows damned good and well that there are scared and mentally vulnerable people out there that will willingly fork over the $125 for his fake cure. In that respect, he's no better than Trump and his lies.

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    Virginia just became the first state to cap insulin prices at $50 per month. Good. No one should have to pay $4-500 for a few weeks of insulin.

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     Meet Matt Gaetz: The world's oldest frat boy.

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    Speaking of whom: “I think I’m a libertarian populist." No you're not, Gaetz. You're just a Republican punk who wants to smoke pot.

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     Trump is so incurious he didn't even know that his own grandfather died of the Spanish Flu.

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     Republican lethargy in the face of this coronavirus pandemic is breathtaking. Here Ben Carson tells George Stephanopoulos he doesn't feel like previewing the plan to deal with a cruise ship that was approaching Oakland with 3500 passengers and 1100 crew.

     21, 19 of them crew members, tested positive for COVID-19.
     There was no plan, people.

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     In the right wing Washington Examiner, Executive Editor Philip Klein tears Trump a new one for his shoulder shrug of a response to coronavirus.

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    It figures that the one guy who knows what he's talking about is also the guy Trump's trying to muzzle. It's become obvious by now that the closest thing this shit show of a government has to an actual coronavirus policy is, "Don't make the president look like a fool."

     Even though he plainly doesn't need assistance in that area.

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     Boy, is RBG gonna be missed when she's gone.

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   God, this woman is a loathsome toad. In other words, she's a perfect fit for this billionaire administration.

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     Trump is human in strictly a biological sense. And considering the little metal plate we just saw in his head, even that's up for debate.

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     If you've ever refused to shake hands with a Republican because you're afraid of what you might catch, now you have a rational basis for your caution.

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     Oh no. One of the world's great thespians has passed away. RIP Max Vov Sydow.

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    “We are naturally going to endorse the only progressive left in the race.” There was only one progressive ever in the race.

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     I may have previously posted this but, like lions with poachers, it's one of those stories I can't get enough of.

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     So, Trump pushed out his HHS Secretary Alex Azar to brag about, of all things, the economy, even as the Dow Jones was historically tanking in real time. Then he refused to take questions from reporters about the one big issue that should be in his wheelhouse.

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     Meme intermission.

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      Guess what, shithead? Most of the victims are straight people. So either you're completely insane or God has really bad aim. I'm betting on both.

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     I don't usually follow Wall St. but check this out from yesterday. 2014 points, or almost 8%, down in one day. There are two main reasons for this. Brent crude oil falling by 30% because of a price war between Russia and Saudi Arabia and coronavirus. But there's another reason. Trump's horrible reaction to the coronavirus pandemic is shaking investor confidence.

     Or is that an unreasonable theory?

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     "Arizona has five confirmed cases of coronavirus. None are in Pima County."

     WRONG.

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     This failure of historians is a common one going back centuries. One of the more interesting books in my library is PLAGUES AND PEOPLES, which attempts to shed light on the huge yet often overlooked role disease has played in human history. So it doesn't surprise me that modern day historians are overlooking or outright ignoring the role the Spanish Flu played in WW I, which I often thought was strange since the two briefly but catastrophically overlapped in 1918.

      Perhaps American historians are reluctant to bring it up because the US is largely if not solely responsible for bringing it to Europe (one of the first documented cases of multiple diagnoses of Spanish Flu was at an Army training base down south where soldiers trained before going to France and Belgium).

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     This is a bullshit article. We don't need to understand Biden's stutter. A stutter didn't make him announce that he was running for the US Senate. A stutter didn't make him say he wakes up some mornings thinking it's 1920. A stutter didn't make him say his son Beau was the US Attorney General or call an Iowa voter a "lying, dog-faced pony soldier" or to make up a story about him being arrested in South Africa.
      Those were all products not of his stutter but his demented mind. And that's what the MSM can't bring themselves to say, that in their mad obsession to keep Bernie (again) from getting the nomination, they've hitched their wagon to the falling star that is Joe Biden, because he's the anointed one the crooked Democrat Party picked. They can't bring themselves to admit this substitute for Bernie is simply senile and about a decade past his shelf life. (Tip o' the tinfoil hat to Constant Reader, CC.)

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      Cruel, stupid and craven. That's the Trump way. Four hours after the Miami Herald exposed this shocking example of cruelty, the administration did a 180 and cancelled the order.

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       Joe Biden's day so far in MI:
       Called an AR15 an AR14.
       Said it holds 100 rounds.
       Told a voter he's "full of shit."
       Threatened to slap his face.
       He's expected to win MI in a landslide.

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     So essentially, we go to the polls again today to vote for the septuagenarian we think is the least senile. This is the choice the two monolithic parties have made for us.

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    This is the same psycho judge who actually suggested to a Congressman that the House should send the Master at Arms to the DOJ building with guns blazing to get the full Mueller report.

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      Remember Mr. Burns', "Smithers, release the hounds"?

     Stephanie Grisham is the hound. This is all she's good for, barking at reporters during the few times a year she accidentally runs into them.

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      Oh, the irony is strong with this church.

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      I'm assuming in this case that DWI stands for Drooling Without Intelligence.

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      The first problem here is the inflammatory and disingenuous uses of the adjectives "Rich" and "Poor." Journalists learn while still in Journalism 101 classes in college to use inflammatory words when it suits them or aids their political bias. Of course, highly-educated people like us know that "rich" and "poor" are not only abstract concepts, they're also highly subjective. What is rich and poor? In Italy, the locals thought all Americans were rich even though Air Force servicemen like my father barely made enough money to keep our bodies and souls together.

      And, as I'd just said it's a dangerously disingenuous use of the words. Just because you tax the rich a few extra percentage points, does that make them "poorer"? No, it just makes them less obscenely bloated. As I'm sure some of you oldtimers know, the wealthiest in the US were taxed a full 90% during the Eisenhower years and they still lived like kings and queens.
      Yet, by the same token, if you lower taxes a few percentage points on the poor, does that make them richer? No, it just means they won't be quite as impoverished. Plus, unlike the 1%, who get vast sums of money back every winter/spring, when the poor see a reduction in their taxes (and we found this out after the Trump tax scam bill went into practical effect), the poor generally saw a slight elevation in their paychecks to the tune of a few bucks a week. Then they discovered the following year their tax didn't really go down, their withholding went down, meaning they wound up OWING the IRS. So much for making the poor "richer." (Another tip o' the tinfoil hat to Constant Reader, CC.)

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      Fuck you and your "Bernie Bro" bullshit, you senile pedophile. You're a bridge, all right- From the nightmare of the Reagan years to the hardly better neoliberal corporate machine Tammany Hall 2.0 Democrats of today, with Obama and Clinton being the bridge towers.

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      Americans can always be counted on to vote against their best interests. While Congress routinely has an approval rating that's barely in double digits, we still end up re-electing 89% of them. We'd rather deal with the devil we know than the devil we don't. And Democratic Socialism is the Devil we don't even want to know. And finally...

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    You read it here first, folks. I predicted just last week that this flaming shit show of an "administration" would use the coronavirus pandemic as a cheap excuse for a corporate bailout.

       How scary is that, that I'm starting to understand and be able to predict how Trump will think?