It is not nice to ridicule handicapped people so I am not going to say anything else.
Author: Paul Murphy
GOP is now officially the party of chickenshit.
I refer – this time – to their attempt in state and federal court to throw out 127,000 Houston ballots because they were cast in those early voting drive-thru set-ups to minimize the spread of the virus. They lost in the Texas Supreme Court and have now lost in Federal Court. Next stop could be SCOTUS where Trump thinks he has the votes to overturn the choice of the people. We will see.
How Trump Blew It.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/02/opinions/donald-trump-covid-lessons-election-lockhart/index.html
We know that Trump’s response to the virus has ignored the science. Veteran political analyst Joe Lockhart explains just how wrong Trump’s coronavirus response was fatally wrong politically and made it all but certain that he would be a one-term President.
Trump rallies are killers.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3722299
Careful regression analysis of the impact of 18 Trump rallies by Stanford University researchers concludes that approximately 30,000 cases of Covid-19 and approximately 700 deaths were the direct result of the large mask-free gatherings. These are cases and deaths that would not have occurred absent these rallies.
The tragic thing is that anyone who believes the very basic science could have – and should have – seen this tragic outcome as very likely. Sponsoring such gatherings amounts to criminal negligence if not manslaughter. Trump’s dismissal of this KNOWN science is why we are now going through the roof on new Covid-19 cases and are locked into avoidable deaths of a thousand or more per day for the foreseeable future.
Trump in perspective.
Bill Moyers and several prominent historians put the rise of Trump into historical perspective. This piece was produced in early 2017 but is even more relevant today.
The Last Hurrah of the man who created modern “conservatism.”
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/10/rush-limbaugh-donald-trump-right-wing-media.html
A look back at the career of Rush Limbaugh. Of local interest, Rush is identified as the source of some of the fizzling “bombshells” that have been aired on this forum.
I will resist the temptation to editorialize about the corrosive role that Rush has played in the civic and political life of our country. His career speaks for itself.
The long, insightful and very interesting retrospective end with this . . .
“This is the right wing we’re stuck with, even if Trump loses, even after Limbaugh dies. And a Biden victory can only make it worse, for there is nothing conservative media like more than playing the victim. Spinning spurious grievances into bullshit extending beyond the horizon is the quintessential talk-radio trick. Limbaugh pioneered it. Trump perfected it. It’s a potent, brilliant idea that will outlive them both.”
Yet another massive Trump scandal!
For those who do not subscribe or have used up your free quota, the story is that Turkey’s state-owned bank was funneling hundreds of millions of dollars to Iran in violation of American sanctions. The Southern District of New York was in the process of investigating and prosecuting the individuals behind this crime when AG Barr tweeted that SDNY Prosecutor Geoffrey Berman had abruptly resigned. You may recall that Berman threw the bullshit flag on that tweet and that he had no intention of resigning. So Barr fired him.
This report reveals the reason for that firing. Trump buddy Erdogan had been pressing Trump to quash this investigation because members of his own family were making millions with these Iran transactions. Berman would not go along. It is noteworthy that the SDNY investigation pre-dated Trump and that Erdogan directly asked Biden and Obama to remove the prosecutor who was then running the case. They politely, but firmly, refused to interfere.
Why is Trump so eager to please the Turkish dictator? That is anyone’s guess, but we do know that Trump has extensive business interests in Turkey generating millions in profits. Is there something more?
In a normal Presidency this would be a massive “October Surprise” that would destroy Trump’s chances – working with criminals to funnel money to Iran. Good grief. But this is not a normal Presidency. What is another scandal among so many.
In case you missed it.
This piece of video from the recent Senatorial debate between Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff and Republican Senator David Perdue has gone viral. In it, Ossoff very sharply calls out Senator Perdue for his votes to end the ACA and its protections for pre-existing conditions and neatly puts it in a frame consisting of Republican lies about Covid-19 and personal profiteering with insider knowledge of how serious the pandemic was going to be. Perdue’s response paraphrased – “You are a socialist.”
By way of background, Ossoff is referring to the scandal where several GOP Senators – including Perdue – were caught making stock transactions based on private security briefings about the pandemic while still soft-pedaling the danger to the public.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Congressional_insider_trading_scandal
Breaking news : Perdue has pulled out of the final scheduled debate.
Frat Boy Wonder
This week Justice Brett Kavanagh demonstrated for all to see that he has no place on the Supreme Court. His opinion that Wisconsin cannot count votes arriving in the mail after 8:00pm on election day was based explicitly on “logic” that says such late arriving votes might “flip” the election. Justice Kagan, in her dissent from this partisan bullshit decision, had to straighten him out. There is nothing to “flip” until all votes are counted. Duh!
The Frat Boy Wonder added in his opinion that keeping the count open waiting for all legal ballots to arrive in the mail would prevent states from declaring a winner on election night. That is one of the lies that Trump is peddling but again, DUH! States do not declare winners or losers on election night. The media tries to do so but that is an entirely different matter. States frequently take days and sometimes weeks to finalize an election.
This anti-Democratic and anti-democratic and obviously partisan decision is a taste of things to come. It is what happens when hyper-partisans pack the courts with ideologues. Time for Democrats to play hardball the way Mitch McConnell and Trump have been doing.
America’s Pandemic
This excellent three part documentary puts the pandemic in a recent historical perspective and presents “the first draft of history” of how we got to the state we are in. A little over an hour altogether but worth the time and effort.
Tidewater News and Opinion Forum 