Welcome Back to Pottersville: April 2020

Wednesday, April 29, 2020

Gotham City Digest

(In one month, we've lost as many Americans to COVID19 as we did in 14 years in Vietnam.)

If you haven't gotten your stimulus check yet, it may be because you haven't filed taxes recently. This IRS page could rectify that.

OK, to any right wingers who are still embedded in my friend list like forgotten dingleberries, this graphic is satire and is not to be taken seriously.

However, if you're one of those "rugged individualists", who am I to stand in the way of your determination?

We need more of Brody the dog.

God, I hate reading articles like this.

It's not looking good for Rapey Joe.

Well, they wanted to kick Bernie off the ballot & COVID-19 gave them the perfect excuse to do it without blowback. Or so they thought.

Get this- Despite infecting herself with her idiotic protest, she's pissed off at the government for having to quarantine for two weeks. They call this karma, bitch.

First it was on. Then it was off. Then two hours later it was on again. Moe, Larry, cheese! Woo woo woo woo woo!

Everything about Trump's lumbering approach to coronavirus has been slapdash, improvised, ignorant and frenzied. Why can't everyone see this?

That would be a fitting end to this nightmarish shit show to which we've all been subjected.

Now Trump's stealing from veterans, as well as states, other countries and private companies. Al Capone would blush at this.

Drive-in theaters making a comeback? Yes! Bring them back!

I'm no exception. I know exactly what Scott Carson, Vesey Van Zant and many of my other characters sound like down to their accents.

Meme intermission.

This is why I call the south the Covid Confederacy.

This is what the UK thinks of our "president." I cringe when I hear this coming from the UK, even though it can hardly afford to talk since their last election.

"No, I don't take responsibility at all."

The latest press attack by President "We have 15 cases and soon we'll be down to close to zero."

"Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y) called McConnell’s demand for corporate immunity 'subterfuge' in an interview on MSNBC Tuesday morning, but did not rule out the proposal as part of a broader relief package."

In other words, the pro-corporate Democrat Party is once more setting itself up for a colossal cave-in just as they had with the last relief package.

Oh, good. More stuff for Trump to steal.

We've doubled the number of cases just in the last 18 days. I think we can safely conclude this virus is expanding exponentially.

Our "president" said it would disappear "like a miracle" by April.

I'm surprised Pence didn't demand to walk into an OR during surgery without a mask.

You'd think the Utah GOP would've been tipped off by the fact this startup was named, get this, "Banjo." But these are Republicans we're talking about.

What the FUCK was Michael Moore thinking in making a film that attacks climate activists? This is the kind of right wing dog shit one can expect of Douche D'Souza.

What this self-satisfied, right wing asshole neglects to mention is that before the Never Trump Republicans, REAL liberals like me (Not the fake limousine liberals who are rallying around Biden, a guy who can't even recognize his own wife, anymore) were warning you about Trump way back in 2015. He also goes on to say that Trump is going to unfairly give stereotypes to Republicans.
Bullshit. Trump capitalized on those so-called Republican stereotypes- Hidebound by ideology that's ruinous to civil liberties, the economy and, yes, even national security. Trump exploited them because he knew, as he said on the campaign trail, that he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and not lose a single vote. We saw this hidebound, goosestepping behavior from Republican scum during the Bush years, we saw them grumble during the Obama years. They will ALWAYS put party over country just as their forebears the Nazis did.

"Stereotypes"? Please. those "stereotypes" are very adequate descriptors of the Republican Party and now we're seeing the emergence of this poisonous mindset in the increasingly right wing Democrat Party. But Republicans perfected this treasonous behavior long before the Democrats adopted it in the early 90's.

Uh, isn't it a bit late to be doing this, Justin?

Now you know why vicious pricks like Kenneth Copeland and Tony Spell keep demanding that you tithe and keep going to church. It's all about the fucking collection plates.

Let God provide, you murderous assholes.

And speaking of vicious pricks, these corporations need a fist in their snouts. So, if you can at all help it, don't subsidize these businesses this Friday.

"God is larger than this dreaded virus."
Coronavirus removes glasses and rolls up sleeves...

Meat packing plants and nursing homes are the new hot spots for this virus. Guess what Donnie Dumbo wants to reopen?

      "Wait, did I win that state in 2016?"
      "No, Mr, President."
      "Fuck 'em. Send 'em thoughts and prayers."

Because that would be dangerous to Florida's tourism industry.

"Buelah, mah fainting couch, posthaste!"

So, this was Baghdad Jared on Fox & Frauds this morning talking about a success story that no one outside the West Wing can see. 26,000,000 out of work, over 1,000,000 COVID-19 cases and nearly 60,000 dead Americans. If this is a success story, I'd hate to see what they'd call a disaster.

"I told Jared that if Trump won a second term, he wouldn't have to worry about running again. And you can really help people. Jared just looked at me and said, 'I don't care about any of that,'" a New York business executive who met with Kushner at the White House last fall told Sherman. "I wanted to tell Jared, 'You don't say that part out loud — even in private.'"

But if you're a massive corporation gobbling up Small Business Association loans, please keep it with our blessings. And finally...

Fascism was actually more deeply entrenched in the United States than many realize. This formed the factual foundation for Phillip Roth's THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA. Luckily for us, the Nazi idiots around today aren't nearly as well organized but that doesn't mean they can't or won't.

Sunday, April 26, 2020

Gotham City Digest

(We will never pump UV or any other light up your ass.)

I'd never heard of David Dobrik before Friday so I wanted to see why he was trending #1 on Twitter. This was why. He had made much of LA happy giving away $10,000 checks, cash under Frisbees and brand new cars. He's a DACA recipient & had done more for any one person in one day than Donald Trump's ever done in seven decades for anyone not named Donald Trump.

"Is now the time for sarcasm?" Excellent question.

"Bridenstine displayed the devices for President Donald Trump during a Friday meeting at the White House. After Bridenstine explained how AMBUStat’s device fogs rooms, leaving every surface in the room sterilized, Trump asked whether people could breathe it in. Bridenstine clarified the cleansing occurs without people in the room."

I can only imagine how he asked it.
"Suppose we, uh, assemble a test group, people who already have coronavirus, and we pack them into a concrete bunker and tell them, uh, they're gonna get showers. Then we let 'er rip and see what happens. Can we do that?"

Figures. We always get screwed in one way or another.

They were better off without Trump.

Trump reveals his strategy for Phase Two of his coronavirus war...

Oh, man, God only knows what they're hiding for him.

Yes, it's the same old Trump. At this point, I'm surprised he hasn't pimped Jim Bakker's Silver Solution.

Meme intermission.

Captain Crozier may be coming back.

"After Trump has heard the bad news about the coronavirus from his medical experts at his daily press briefing, what do Trump and Parscale discuss? 'The latest polling data,' the Times reports."

Because at a time when 50,000 Americans a month are dying, you Republican scum clinging to power is the most important thing.

Duh, thank you, Dr. Obvious. I've been saying that for over a month. Where the fuck have YOU been?

Depression-era poet Vachel Lindsay committed suicide in 1931 by chugging a bottle of Lysol. Trump's essentially telling us to do the same thing.

He's already getting so desperate for attention that less than 24 hours after deciding not to hold any more press briefings, he pushed Mike Pence aside and insisted on assembling 1000 cadets at West Point, in THE coronavirus hotspot on the planet earth and tightly packing them together. How anyone with two neurons to rub together can say this lunatic isn't a mass murderer is beyond me.

What a petty piece of dog shit Trump is.

Apparently, the only time Trump acts swiftly is in unfollowing people who insult him.

I know they're the IRS but I hope there are enough of you out there who can fully appreciate how bottomlessly pathetic and cruel this is.

“Perhaps McConnell has been in Washington too long and has gotten badly out of touch — even with Republicans.”

Is anyone else still wondering why Katie Porter isn't the fifth member of the Squad?

And yet, Dr. Birx can't understand why the media are still talking about Trump's suggestion of injecting disinfectants into our bodies and, literally, pumping sunshine up our asses.

Just because domestic violence isn't being reported doesn't mean it isn't happening.

13 hours of blathering, 270 seconds of empathy... which was also manufactured.

"God's waiting room," Ronnie? Really?

Great. Terrorists are now more scientifically literate than our "president." And finally...

If Australia's right wingers can work with left wingers, they why can't our right wingers? Because our right wingers are hyper partisan assholes who are more interested in polling data.

Saturday, April 25, 2020

Whitewashing History Through the Miracle of Bleach

“In a short period of time I understood everything there was to know about health care,” - Donald Trump, 2017, to Time Magazine

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

As of right now, 4:10 PM EST on April 25th, 2020, these are the three most recent posts on Raw Story. One states that Trump's claims that disinfectants can be safely introduced into the human body has resulted in a large spike of calls to New York City's Poison Control Center, another that anti-malarial prescriptions, from physicians, have spiked 46-fold and the last that Democrats should be openly questioning Trump's sanity.

Questioning his sanity after his April 23rd quack press conference, ironically, on World Book Day, should have been done way back on the campaign trail in 2015. It should have been done after Trump got the GOP nomination in July of 2016. And it should have been asked by prominent Democrats and journalists literally every single day since Trump took the oath of office on January 20, 2017 and delivered a narcoleptic paean to the brutality of law enforcement.

Every time I hear Trump speak (and, let me assure you, it is quite a painful daily ordeal, akin to raking one's finger nails down a blackboard or a clean pane of glass but I have no choice but to resolutely sally forth, as this is my job), I think of a marvelous quote from (Sorry, d r i f t g l a s s) David Brooks of the New York Times. In May of 2017, Brooks wrote in, "When the World is Led By a Child", "We’ve got this perverse situation in which the vast analytic powers of the entire world are being spent trying to understand a guy whose thoughts are often just six fireflies beeping randomly in a jar."

It has to be said that, despite Our Mr. Brooks' snuffling, patrician right wing world view, he'd had Trump pegged all along as few had. For Lo, these last several years, many in the mainstream media not only in the United States but all over the world had strained for gravitas, to take this man seriously because that is what convention and journalistic ethics mandated. For to openly doubt his sanity would anger and alienate whatever right wing viewers and readers they'd have but also, accusing the "president" of mental incapacity would be, well, unprofessional. And partisan. And subjective, a violation of a sacrosanct Goldwater Rule, one that is now being seriously tested by the lunatic who, deprived of his Nuremberg hate rallies and golf outings at Mar-a-Lago and Bedminster. is slowly sliding more and more deeply into insanity.

But how professional will it seem both in the here and now and in the pitiless eyes of posterity when media historians look back on these bizarre, surreal days and see that the mainstream media, principally ours, continually took this man seriously? That they somehow kept a collective straight face and described the "president's" latest rant as "controversial" or "ill-advised" or "surprising"? If it holds true during this flaming, rolling dumpster fire of a "presidency" that journalism is history's first draft, then my colleagues are already doing Donald Trump a favor by not uniting in questioning this man's cognitive faculties. As even the most tyrannical rulers enjoy a pendulum shift in opinion across the decades, Trump will one day be viewed more kindly and generously than he is now, especially with the set that also views Hitler favorably.

And this strenuous ignoring of Trump's mental decline has led us to April 23rd: When Trump openly floated the idea, to a horrified Dr. Deborah Birx, the chief coordinator of the Coronavirus Task Force, of injecting disinfectants into the body somehow and/or blasting our innards with black light, something noiselessly but perceptibly shifted. And now we're hearing from the British Guardian that Trump partly got his ingenious idea for bleach from a letter he'd received from some Genesis II huckster promoting the same thing. Yes, Trump got his latest shockingly brilliant idea from Florida Man.

"What the Hell Do You Have to Lose?"

That was an infamous quote in a speech that Trump had delivered in Michigan to a largely African American audience in 2016. Well, back then, the stakes were pretty big and serious, although suddenly this general election doesn't look so important anymore. But it was a quote that Trump had dusted off three weeks ago and redelivered during one of his Baghdad Bob smoke screens this month. And, moreso than in 2016, this time, the stakes are mortal. Frankly, it's a miracle that not one death has been directly attributable to his horrifying home remedies.
However, it hasn't been for lack of trying.
First, after saying at one of his hate rallies last month that it was a "Democratic hoax", he then downplayed the virus as it screamed across the Pacific at exactly the speed of a jetliner. Then he crowed that we had 15 cases, tops and in no time we'd be down to almost zero even as Johns Hopkins' numbers were saying otherwise. Then, when the casualties got too big to ignore, he admitted it was indeed a pandemic and that he knew it was one before anyone else was using the word. Then he said, "like a miracle," it would disappear by April.

     According to the latest data from the COVID Tracking Project, we've lost 51,000 Americans thus far in April and we still have five more days to go. In Massachusetts alone, since yesterday we'd recorded 7325 new cases, by far an alltime high, and have lost 370 Bay Staters since yesterday. So, April is the cruelest month, indeed.
    Undeterred, ever the optimist, our Dear Leader had been desperate to give us good tidings and cheer by promising testing kits that don't work, hydroxychloroquine that could kill you, UV light that doesn't do shit and injecting disinfectants that could also kill you. The poor man's so heartbroken, he lumbered out of the James Brady briefing room last night after not taking a single question and is not planning on doing these Happy Talks any longer.
     So, top Democrats like Pelosi and Schumer need to start doing more than waggle their gnarled fingers and tut tut the "president" when he threatens to get people killed by preying on their colossal ignorance and hanging on his every word. At this point, he's hardly any better than Jim Jones. They need to start putting into the Congressional Record as well as into the historical record that begins with the 4th Estate that this man, for want of a better word, is irretrievably, irrevocably insane.
     We need to start doing this and pushing for the activation of the 25th Amendment so at least future generations will know that We the People did more than hunker down cowering in fear, hoarded toilet paper and drank bleach out of fear of dying. That tens of millions blindly followed the King Lear of "presidents" whose only infallibility was in always making the worst possible decision every. Single. Time.

Friday, April 24, 2020

Gotham City Digest

(Measure twice, cut once.)

It's as if these Tammany Hall 2.0 scumbag Dems are daring us to vote for Trump.

Abigail Disney: You go, girl.

Elizabeth Warren's oldest brother died of coronavirus.

Yes, MUCH better than supporting a wildly popular candidate. Let's play it safe, instead.

"Why has Iran so terribly botched its response to the outbreak of the coronavirus? The regime has had no consistent policy, at first denying the scale of the outbreak and then dealing with it in a haphazard way. The number of the infected and dead remains underreported, as the regime basks in its own campaign of misinformation."

You'd think this right wing Bozo would be talking about the US, not Iran. (Tip o' the tinfoil hat to Constant Reader, CC.).

This is what passes for TV journalism in right wing circles. Fine, let's make fun of Ingraham's battle with breast cancer and see how she likes THAT. All's fair in love and war, right?

Meme intermission.

I don't know if Trump thinks he's killing vampires with ultraviolet light or what but what possible reason could he have for suggesting we get injected with disinfectants?

People who audit my blog may think I'm resorting to hyperbole when I say with absolute seriousness that Trump. Is. Trying. To. Murder. Us. All. This, if anything, vindicates me. This man is completely, criminally, genocidally insane.

Well, well, looks as if Ruth's Chris dug down and found its conscience.

Or maybe it was the massive petition threatening to boycott them by the hundreds of thousands if they didn't give back their ill-gotten PPP loot.

We need to get rid of this stupid prick, stat.

I wanna buy this guy a drink.

How pathetic is this, that companies have to warn, well, let's face it, Trump voters, not to inject their products.

On Wednesday, we lost 2133 Americans, a new one day record. As of 4 PM yesterday, we'd tested only 4,660,250 in a nation of 328,000,000. We've lost 50,114 Americans so far and 49,605 of them have died just in the past month.

"When Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick of Texas doubled down this week on prior remarks elevating commerce above life — There are 'more important things than living,' he said on Fox News — he was speaking for a significant slice of his party. People are disposable. So is income. But one is more important."

Keep that quote in mind on election day. "more important things than living," You will never hear a Democrat say that (Well, maybe Biden would- After all, he allied with the Wisconsin GOP and exhorted people to go out and vote for him).

This afternoon, Andrew Cuomo tore Grim Reaper Mitch McConnell a new one.

Oh, now it was sarcasm, huh? Well, Bret Baier calls bullshit on that. If Trump wasn't sarcastic and was serious, he was an asshole. If he actually WAS being sarcastic, he's still an asshole. Either way, he has no cover.

"But on 6 March the first Covid-19 case was confirmed positive – an elderly woman whose family had visited her after traveling to Europe. Soon after that, Camden had the fastest-growing number of cases, and deaths, in the state. At one point it had the most coronavirus cases per capita in the country."

Say thank you to the GOP, y'all.

Biden raped Tara Reade and the transcript of her mother's call to a TV show that year has just emerged.

Just as matter is countered by antimatter and light countered by dark, right wing scum on Wall Street have begun heavily backing another right wing scumbag just recently branded a "Democrat", a Latina, just to prove they're not at all racist and are offering another. "sensible" alternative to AOC.

She wrote a book a decade ago calling Medicare and Social Security "pyramid schemes" and called for their abolition. But have no fear. The DCCC said it would back AOC. Unless they discover this Joe Biden "Democrat" and swoon over her, first. (Another tip o' the tinfoil hat to Constant Reader, CC.) And finally...

Maybe Donnie Dumbo should take it easy on China- They hold the note on Trump Tower, after all. (A third tip o' the tinfoil hat to Constant Reader, CC.)

Wednesday, April 22, 2020

Gotham City Digest

(Justice is blind. It Can't See Rich People.)

So what does the future hold in store for Hollywood and talent and literary agencies? Who knows? But eventually, once this pandemic recedes for good, people will want to be entertained. A lot. But it'll take a while for theaters to fill up again. And trying to get production and demand in synch is going to be the tricky part.

I suppose by next week they'll be holding up signs asking where are their rations for Soylent Green. And, without knowing it, they're being exploited by assholes like the ones below:

When billionaire scum say they want "America to get back to work", they're really saying they want THEIR employees to get back to work for them so they can resume making money for them they plainly don't need. Take the Uihlein scumbags, for instance...

Come on, you didn't think the Trump crime family wouldn't take their turn at the trough, did you?

This article about the Doomsday glacier came out three years ago. Imagine how much worse the situation is now.

Remember when President Dumbo said there were no deaths from COVID-19 in February? WRONG. The first fatality was in the first week of that month. Shocking, I know.

The anti-Trump anthem we need right now.

US Postal Service employees are 37% female, 21% black, 8% Latino and 8% Asian since the 1960s. You'd think Democrats would be fighting harder for them. You'd be wrong. Absolutely nothing has changed in the Democrat Party's position in the nine years since this was written.

Happy Earth Day, motherfuckers.

I don't recall reading that the first Civil Wat resulted in the mass suicide of the confederacy.

The numbers don't lie. The Democrat Party does.

It's official: Watching Sean Handjob can actually kill you.

Sometimes, Andrew Cuomo can be a REAL piece of shit. Today was one of those days. Today he told unemployed workers to go and get jobs as essential workers. In other words, "Ya wanna work? Ya gotta put your life in danger."

What good is a sheriff who won't enforce the law? And speaking of morons in Washington state...

Excuse me but don't these morons live in the first state to be Ground Zero for coronavirus in the US? (Tip o' the tinfoil hat to Constant Reader, CC.).

Great. Now we're using the Defense Production Act to steal from companies.

Meme intermission.

This was last month in Brooklyn, before things REALLY got bad. The last and only time I ever saw piles of dead human bodies moved by mechanized means was in file footage shot right after the Holocaust.

     Trump: "Redfield, go out there and say the Washington Post misquoted you!"
     Redfield: "The Washington Post accurately quoted me."
    (Close up of Trump, roll closing credits to the tune of CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM, fade to black.)

This was poor Anderson Cooper doing a double face palm talking to the thick-as-a-brick right wing mayor of Las Vegas who wants to reopen the casinos, without social distancing guidelines. Southern Nevada is a place with 2,500,000 largely transient people who jet in and out from all over the planet, principally the United States.

We're creeping up on 50,000 fatalities, the most of any one nation. So, you were saying, Donnie Dumbo? And finally...

Dr. Bright told the truth about Trump's miracle cure and was demoted by President No So Bright.

Tuesday, April 21, 2020

Gotham City Digest

(The one whore Jesus wouldn't have cavorted with.)

Looks as if America's most beloved rubber-haired psychopath is at it yet again.

Kim Jong Un might not make it after doctors had to surgically remove Trump's head from his ass.

So, hair and nail salons and massage parlors are essential businesses in Georgia? Really, Brian?

"Because PPP is written so that chain restaurants qualify as a small business so long as they don't employ more than 500 people at a single location, a qualification that effectively makes companies like McDonald's a small business."

So, you want to know why the PPP money got gobbled up so quickly? Because of corporate scum like this and a joke of a bailout.

Looks as if coronavirus accepted the challenge and proved him wrong. Darwin approves.

If you were to tell these right wing asshats they should stand up for athletes who take a knee, they'd say the difference is they're showing their patriotism whereas the players were disrespecting the flag.

You know they would.

Another red letter day for Tony Spell, America's most beloved rubber-haired psychopath.

Thanks a lot, you Republican scum.

This was decided just a day and a half ago. You have until the day after tomorrow to file.

And the party that refused to give them food stamp assistance in the new relief bill and screamed bloody murder about giving an extra $600 a week to unemployed workers is going to pull that off, huh? Good luck with that.

Then again, the Democrat Party's presumptive nominee is a senile child molester who's been after our Social Security, Medicare & Medicaid for decades.

Big Oil gave this asshole over $1,000,000 in 2016. People on food stamps did not. Now Big Oil's calling in the note.

This newest coronavirus cure was endorsed by OJ Simpson! What could possibly go wrong?

Meme intermission.

“There’s a protest tomorrow and if things don’t change, a civil war is coming, and the police can’t stop me,” he said just before police stopped him.

Another part of Fox's wonderful demographic heard from.

This is a pretty shitty time for tort reform, wouldn't you say?

Because my conspiracy theories are equal to your facts, figures and data.

If they were really Nazis, Bubba, you'd be in a gas oven right now. That is, if they could stuff you in.

Another right wing example of, "For me, not for thee, motherfuckers." They're insisting on the right to make others sick and to force others to abide by the GOP's death cult guidelines.

"Dr. Andrew Artenstein, the chief physician executive at Baystate Health in Massachusetts, revealed in a letter published in the New England Journal of Medicine that he was questioned by the FBI after the hospital staff worked “around the clock” to secure a shipment of PPE."

From Dr. Artenstein:

"Deals, some bizarre and convoluted, and many involving large sums of money, have dissolved at the last minute when we were outbid or outmuscled, sometimes by the federal government. Then we got lucky, but getting the supplies wasn’t easy... Two semi-trailer trucks, cleverly marked as food-service vehicles, met us at the warehouse. When fully loaded, the trucks would take two distinct routes back to Massachusetts to minimize the chances that their contents would be detained or redirected,” he recalled. “Before we could send the funds by wire transfer, two Federal Bureau of Investigation agents arrived, showed their badges, and started questioning me. No, this shipment was not headed for resale or the black market. The agents checked my credentials, and I tried to convince them that the shipment of PPE was bound for hospitals. After receiving my assurances and hearing about our health system’s urgent needs, the agents let the boxes of equipment be released and loaded into the trucks. But I was soon shocked to learn that the Department of Homeland Security was still considering redirecting our PPE. Only some quick calls leading to intervention by our congressional representative prevented its seizure.”

Our government and its law enforcement agents have literally turned into mafia highwaymen. That is no exaggeration. This is exactly what low-level mafia thugs do right before they say, "It fell off a truck!"

One of our best vaccine researchers just got seriously demoted after butting heads with yet another Trump lackey.

Because the talking head on TV told him to. Seriously.

Thanks to this sadistic shitshow of an "administration", if you married an immigrant who doesn't have a Social Security number, you're shit out of luck. And finally...

Democrat Party caves yet again and gets no concessions whatsoever in next corporate welfare bill. And we should give them the Senate and the White House... why?

Monday, April 20, 2020

Give Me Liberty and Give Me Death

     OK, so you don't like the phrase "death cult" when appended to you and like-minded people.
     Tough shit, That's what you are.
     A death cult.
     You unquestioningly obey the merest dictates of a child molester on Twitter who's telling you to take your sorry selves (and, in the case of Virginia, its guns) straight to your state capitals, provided there's a Democrat governor who works within it to tie up traffic and put your screaming, red pusses on TV screens all over the country. And he's telling you to do this at a time when coronavirus / COVID-19 is spreading literally like wildfire in a nation that accounts for about 25% of the world's fatalities without giving the slightest thought as to whether or not doing this will get you infected with a fatal illness.
     That's a death cult. There's no two ways about it.
     You want to take your motorboats out. You want to get your hair done. Spring's here and you want to enjoy it. We all do. I get it.
     What I don't get is your willingness to risk not only your own lives but the lives of others who aren't quite as suicidal. And when you take to the streets to say stupid shit like, "I don't believe there's a coronavirus because I don't trust the Democratic party" and, "It's just another flu," you're running the risk of sending yourselves and innocents to hospitals that are already overworked, undermanned and short-supplied because said pedophile on Twitter currently masquarding as the president of the United States is actively stealing supplies from various states (perhaps even yours) as well as nations who are supposed to be our allies.
     Jesus Christ, Trump might as well be on a throne with a microphone in his tiny hand and telling you all to drink the Koolaid or armed security will shoot you.
     What few of you who are actually complaining about not being able to go back to work seem to forget is that if the SBA and the management of the CARES funds were worth a shit, your employer just might be able to get a loan to keep your paychecks coming and an assurance your jobs would be waiting for you when things return to a semblance of normal. Then you wouldn't need a onetime stimulus check of $1200 that you deride as "welfare" (while being blithely ignorant of the half a trillion dollars that Wall Street got after just a few weeks after the economy began to tank or the $1.4 trillion tax scam bill of 2018 in which 83% of that money, which would sure come in fucking handy right now, was vacuumed straight to the 1% but, please, continue railing about what little your Republican reps on Capitol Hill were willing to give you after pissing and moaning about it).
     What you recycled teabaggers don't seem to realize is you're being used. You're being astroturfed yet again just as you were a decade ago. Your idiotic, bullshit protests in various state capitals are organized, timed, funded and publicized by right wing astroturf organizations with close ties to the DeVos family and other rich scumbags who'll never know if you contract coronavirus or care if you die from it. You're being used as window dressing. Fuck all, they even make your signage in the same exact font and that they pathetically try to pass off as actual homemade signs. Who put them in your hands? Did you even ask how they could pay for it or who had?
     You're all being used as loud window dressing, stage props in a sick, right wing drama that might as well be entitled, "Give Me Liberty And Give Me Death."
     It's all supposed to manufacture consensus that really isn't there, the Nixonian "silent majority" trope that all fascists like to use to gin up anger and resentment at people who hold elected office within a certain political party that's currently out of favor with the current fascist in the Oval Office.
     You've been had. And you keep falling for it because, like a pathetic incel who gets all his hot dating tips off men's room walls, you get 100% of your news from Trump's Twitter feed and Fox "News", both of whom busting a nut trying to gin up the fake outrage they've decided you should feel. And why are they doing that?
     Because Election Day is in less than seven months. And the "president" is anxious that his one big campaign platform plank, the economy, is still going to be in the shitter come November 3rd and that, once he's thrown out of office, he'll be vulnerable to all sorts of litigation. He wants to get Wall Street's numbers back up and had even admitted that if 200,000 of us die, it'll still be a job well done.
     That's why he wants you back at work. That's why, when the federal response to battling this pandemic still hasn't even really begun, he'd already organized a task force to get America back to work and is even tying it to your individual liberties that he never gave a flying fuck about. Because he knows that, plus the 2nd Amendment, are always guaranteed to push those buttons in your simple, reptilian brains.
     And now you're even going after your Republican governors in states such as Arizona and Idaho, deeply crimson states in which even those governors issued shelter-in-place orders. You're even invoking Holocaust imagery, a Holocaust that many of you actually believe never happened.
     Look, guys, I personally don't give a fuck about your lives and if you choose to put them at hazard but I care about the ones of more sensible-minded folk who are trying to take the necessary precautions and aren't making idiots of themselves in public screaming about Socialism and how social distancing is "Communist." You're putting innocent people at risk and threatening to make the lives of hospital workers infinitely more difficult.
     Just stop with the death cult bullshit and try to responsibly ride this out like the rest of us without making things worse. This isn't about you, your uncoiffed hair or your motorboats or unpainted sheds. This is about the survival of the human race. This isn't a seasonal flu bug, this isn't a Democrat hoax and this isn't liberal alarmism. I wish to God it was.
     This is the decimation of the human race. This disease is now in at least 184 of the world's 194 sovereign nations. It has infected nearly two and a half million people, had killed 170,000 human beings, 42,560, or a quarter of them, from right here in the United States, which for the second month running is the planet's new Ground Zero.
     And part of that is because of morons like you.
     Just fucking stop it.

Gotham City Digest

(When in doubt, go with the classics.)

Tomi Lahren Freedom line made in country in which freedom doesn't exist.

Trump's just pissed that Pritzker wouldn't give him the chance to steal his shipment as he has those of countless other states as well as Germany and Canada.

Remember, this is the same asshole who told Democratically-run states that they they were on their own and to get their own damned medical supplies. Pritzker just wanted no part in our kleptocratic federal government stealing supplies and openly bidding against the various states for those supplies. I don't blame Pritzker one bit for doing what he had to do to get supplies for the medical workers of Illinois.

Billionaires in Biden's Cabinet? Oh, yes. Much, MUCH better and different than Trump.

Shadow puppets. Yes, Ivanka actually suggested we make shadow puppets.

These right wing assholes are gonna get us all killed.

I'm frankly a little amazed Trump didn't make him the head of his Space Force.

The Green Party candidate for president just got his Twitter account terminated for impersonating himself. In that case, Twitter should also terminate Trump's account for impersonating the President of the United States.

Meanwhile, during the wave of "Give me liberty and give me death" right wing rallies across state capitals yesterday, this wonderful blast from the past was seen in Ohio. (Click to expand.)

These greaseball, rubber-haired hucksters are pure scum.

Ilhan Omar's rent & mortgage relief bill is humane, necessary and popular. Therefore, it'll die in committee on Capitol Hill.

Yes, because staying in the comfort of your own home is exactly the same as having your possessions and home taken from you, being separated from your family, starved, beaten, getting painfully gassed to death with Zyklon-B and your corpse incinerated in a gas oven. 🙄

The Governor of Idaho, incidentally, is a Republican.

“We built an economy with no shock absorbers. We made a system that looked like it was maximizing profits but had higher risks and lower resiliency.” -Joseph Stiglitz

Meme intermission.

I will always look at Jennifer Rubin as a useful, right wing idiot (pardon the tautology) but I heartily agree with her idea here: Bring these Republican scumbag governors up on murder charges.

K Street is booming. Of course it is. Grifters are gonna grift. "Never let a crisis go to waste," and all that.

Wow and I thought the Trump test kits would be as fabulous a success as Trump Water, Trump Ice, Trump Taj Mahal, Trump Steaks, Trump Shuttle, Trump the Board Game and Trump University.

When you've lost Tom Friedman, you've lost Bullshit Mountain. He might as well have named his article, "This Presidency* Brought To You By Coronavirus."

"Yeah, I'm still holding a grudge because I stopped maturing at the age of seven."

Trump went after Weijia Jiang again.

Harvard University is essentially a massive $41,000,000,000 hedge fund with a tiny college attached to it. So how come they scarfed up $9,000,000 in CARES aid?

And speaking of large amounts of our money falling into the wrong hands, why the fuck did the SBA give $10,000,000 to fast food giant Shake Shack?

Remember just a few short months ago when limousine "liberals" gasped in horror and clutched their pearls at the very thought of Bernie turning us into a Socialist nightmare like Venezuela? Yeah, we really dodged a bullet there, huh? 🙄

Over 41,000 Americans have died of COVID-19. This is the story of one of them.

We're looking for concessions from Biden on a VP pick? Fuck you, we are.

Yep, Tony Spell, America's favorite Max Headsroom-headed psychopath, is at it again.

Trump Golf just posted a video from a lush who claims that drinking a bottle of vodka can kill coronavirus.

Bottom line- Anti-government people who refuse to obey state government guidelines apparently have no problem being coerced by the federal government.

I wonder how many of those goobers already cashed their $1200 checks before going out to rail against "welfare"?

So, Donnie Dumbo's now reduced to blaming our last REAL president for not developing a testing kit for a disease that didn't exist, yet.

OK, so my question is, why in God's name are we diverting much-needed medical supplies from states that need them most and putting them in the hands of private industry?

Yes, Amazon is actually using a "heat map" to track which Whole Foods stores are most in "danger" of unionizing. It's based on factors such as a race and "loyalty." This alone is proof of the necessity of Whole Foods unionizing.

Seriously, we're just one Trump brain seizure away from Soylent Green. The right wing isn't even trying to hide or disguise their active loathing for the labor force at this point.

If the price of crude oil just dropped 105% to minus 37 dollars a barrel, yes, you read that right, why are we still paying two dollars for a gallon of gas here in Massachusetts?

Yes, he had another praise roll set up... or he thought he did. You KNOW the White House butler got flogged last night. And finally...

I guess hearing that fewer than 500 of my fellow New Yorkers died yesterday is supposed to pass for good news.