these leaks are lies designed to impress the Morning Joe green room, republicans don’t actually believe this https://t.co/lnWNQShZkh
— local jack please ban the nazis person (@pleizar) April 25, 2020
Oh, I’m pretty sure the mainstream GOP believes their reality-show clown squatting in the Oval Office could damage The Brand beyond hope of cheating their way into another asterisk’d “win”. They’re just hoping to throw him off the sledge so the wolves won’t eat the rest of them, IMO.
Dutiful beat-sweetner, from the NYTimes — “Nervous Republicans See Trump Sinking, and Taking Senate With Him”:
… The scale of the G.O.P.’s challenge has crystallized in the last week. With 26 million Americans now having filed for unemployment benefits, Mr. Trump’s standing in states that he carried in 2016 looks increasingly wobbly: New surveys show him trailing significantly in battleground states like Michigan and Pennsylvania, and he is even narrowly behind in must-win Florida…
Perhaps most significantly, Mr. Trump’s single best advantage as an incumbent — his access to the bully pulpit — has effectively become a platform for self-sabotage.
His daily news briefings on the coronavirus outbreak are inflicting grave damage on his political standing, Republicans believe, and his recent remarks about combating the virus with sunlight and disinfectant were a breaking point for a number of senior party officials….
Glen Bolger, a longtime Republican pollster, said the landscape for his party had become far grimmer compared with the pre-virus plan to run almost singularly around the country’s prosperity.
“With the economy in free-fall, Republicans face a very challenging environment and it’s a total shift from where we were a few months ago,” Mr. Bolger said. “Democrats are angry, and now we have the foundation of the campaign yanked out from underneath us.”…
If jingoism and xenophobia can’t help us, how can we be expected to ‘win’?
…[A] recent wave of polling has fueled Republican anxieties, as Mr. Biden leads in virtually every competitive state.
The surveys also showed Republican senators in Arizona, Colorado, North Carolina and Maine trailing or locked in a dead heat with potential Democratic rivals — in part because their fate is linked to Mr. Trump’s job performance. If incumbents in those states lose, and Republicans pick up only the Senate seat in Alabama, Democrats would take control of the chamber should Mr. Biden win the presidency.
“He’s got to run very close for us to keep the Senate,” Charles R. Black Jr., a veteran Republican consultant, said of Mr. Trump. “I’ve always thought we were favored to, but I can’t say that now with all these cards up in the air.”
Republicans were taken aback this past week by the results of a 17-state survey commissioned by the Republican National Committee. It found the president struggling in the Electoral College battlegrounds and likely to lose without signs of an economic rebound this fall, according to a party strategist outside the R.N.C. who is familiar with the poll’s results.
The Trump campaign’s own surveys have also shown an erosion of support, according to four people familiar with the data, as the coronavirus remains the No. 1 issue worrying voters…
But if Republicans are comforted by the uncertainties that remain, they are alarmed by one element of this election that is already abundantly clear: The small-dollar fund-raising energy Democrats enjoyed in the midterms has not abated.
Most of the incumbent House Democrats facing competitive races enjoy a vast financial advantage over Republican challengers, who are struggling to garner attention as the virus overwhelms news coverage…
Half a million dead Americans, and counting; a quarter-billion filing for unemployment (if their states’ websites will allow), plus all the newly un/under-employed who aren’t even eligible — hard to ignore, even for the Media Village Idiots!
So … they really, truly didn’t see this coming? ???
— ?????????? (@lacunalingua) April 26, 2020
Figuratively and literally, the @GOP's lack of reflection makes "looking in the mirror" problematic.
— Louis R. Bridgeman (@LouisRBridgema3) April 25, 2020
Trimp can stay. Trump has to go. https://t.co/rymPc1lBAs
— The Hoarse Whisperer (@HoarseWisperer) April 25, 2020
piratedan
more Grey Lady ball washing of the GOP, worried about their election prospects instead of serving the people and getting money out there to keep people in their homes and the lights on, much less finding a way to allow the people battling the pandemic awash in funds and equipment.
Fuck both the Grey Lady and the GOP, be thankful we live in a civilized society where their heads are less likely to end up on pikes where they belong
Patricia Kayden
To Gohmert: If Speaker Pelosi impeaches Trump again, that’s because he has committed more impeachable offenses since his treasonous behind was last impeached. So?
debbie
They’ve all assimilated Trump’s narcissism.
Ella in New Mexico
I’ve never understood why Louie Gohmert’s neighbors haven’t done a Rand Paul on him yet. You know he has to be the most annoying motherfucker ever to live next door.
He’s the kinda guy who’ll sneak out in the middle of the night to dump all his excess trash in your can because he’s too cheap to pay the city $6.95 a month for an extra.
Steeplejack
Where are you getting these numbers, or are you exaggerating for rhetorical effect? A quarter billion (250 million) is more than the entire U.S. workforce by a large margin.
Benw
“We’re not worried about all the dead and distressed people! We’re worried this stupid racist fool we’ve defended at all costs the last three years will make us look bad!”
Suzanne
@Steeplejack: I had the same question…. we just hit over 50K deaths due to COVID. Half a million is ten times larger than that.
Duane
At a time when so many people are facing existential crises, the republicans have the gall to whine about their political future. Complete disgrace and criminal sentencing should be their future.
JaySinWA
@Steeplejack: They may have fallen “off the sledge” as the GOP was prepping for the throw. (1984 Apple preview style?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIE-5hg7FoA
catclub
Again, only Democrats have agency. There is not a suggestion that the GOP needs to consider doing the right thing during this crisis… EVEN IT MEANT THEY MIGHT LOSE THE NEXT ELECTION.
Democrats on the other hand.
debbie
Kurt Eichenwald has what he calls his angriest thread
but then follows it up with an even angrier one:
Luciamia
GOP knew exactly what Trump was from the beginning. Spare us your buyer’s remorse now.
Krope, the Formerly Dope
Democrats on the other hand…
will be held responsible for not managing to bring the Republicans on board when the Ds, in fact, will have done the right thing.
I’m playin’ the odds on this assessment.
rikyrah
@piratedan:
phuck all those muthaphuckas ?
sherparick
@Steeplejack: I think Ann got a little to riled up. 54,000 deaths as of 27 April and nearing 1 million infections is bad enough. The U.S. appears to be going up like a rocket with at least 30,000 new cases a day.
Adam L Silverman
@Patricia Kayden: She’s not impeaching him again. She’s established a special committee to review what is being done and oversee how the stimulus funding is being disbursed.
HumboldtBlue
Fuck all these motherfuckers as so eloquently stated just above.
Adam L Silverman
@Ella in New Mexico: Probably doesn’t live anywhere with a HOA.
sherparick
I also would say, looking at these stories from a different angle, these articles could be centered on theme of “Republicans in Disarray.”
catclub
I think every Democrat should start repeating this regularly:
Every Unified GOP government since 1928 has led to a financial crash
NotMax
We’re almost to the “Some people say the virus was created by Hunter Biden” stage.
//
Adam L Silverman
@Steeplejack: And while the estimates are we’re undercounting the COVID-19 fatalities between 40% to 60%, officially we’ve only got 55,383 COVID-19 facilities in the US. Though we’re over 200,000 reported worldwide, which is still a major undercount.
Brachiator
It should be a breaking point for anyone with a working brain. Reporting about Trump’s insane ravings from a political perspective may soften the magnitude of his failure.
His entire approach to dealing with the pandemic has been a profile in cowardice.
lahke
The Boston Globe had 18 pages of obituaries today– the little itty bitty ones for ordinary people, none of the half page spreads that celebrities get among them. And still the neighbors across the street are flying their Trump 2020 flag. Can’t imagine what it will take to change their minds.
catclub
@Krope, the Formerly Dope: Oh, I also meant to write that there is not a hint of a wisp of a scintilla of a suggestion….
but you got my drift.
Ksmiami
@piratedan: They will be lucky to leave alive. No mercy – Most of the GOP needs to be tried and imprisoned
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Adam L Silverman:
I’ve heard that some of the stimulus money has been distributed to cronies involved with Trump’s campaign. I can’t fucking even.
Also, do you have an opinion on Kim Jong Un’s condition? The ROK says he’s “alive and well”, but how would they know for certain? If this is the case, why doesn’t Kim just make a video of himself to prove it?
MisterForkbeard
@Adam L Silverman: Do we have sourcing on those estimates? Just curious, because my thinking was that we were undercounting by maybe 20-30% according to the elevated year-over-year death numbers.
Though the last time I looked st it was a few weeks ago, so maybe things changed.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@lahke:
When the leopard eats their faces, of course, and someone they know dies from the virus
Dog Dawg Damn
Heard from my FIL that watching Trumps press conference is the highlight of his day so he gets information. Just utter disbelief but his cult has not abandoned him and won’t. Vote.
dmsilev
@Adam L Silverman:
Perhaps Gohmert, in a moment of unusual and indeed unprecedented insight, realized that a committee overseeing Trump’s spending of government money is bound to find massive amounts of fraud.
Adam L Silverman
@MisterForkbeard: Give this Financial Times reporting a read:
https://www.ft.com/content/6bd88b7d-3386-4543-b2e9-0d5c6fac846c
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Dog Dawg Damn:
Did you ask him what he thought about Trump’s advice to inject disinfectants?
dmsilev
@lahke: I was out for a walk a week or so ago and came across a house with a T2020 sign. My thought at the time was that this was an extremely successful social-distancing measure, independent of any viral pandemic.
Adam L Silverman
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): It has.
My opinion is that the open source reporting tells us that something strange appears to be happening in the DPRK. It is being interpreted that Kim Jong Un may be seriously ill or dead. Or it may be nothing at all. And since the DPRK is largely opaque, at this point, who knows.
Adam L Silverman
@dmsilev: Nope. Gohmert understands everything solely in partisan political terms. So he knows what the House GOP’s real purpose was in the Special Select Committee on Benghazi in 2015 and 2016, which was to trash Secretary Clinton to harm her campaign. Because of how he understands the way things work, he interprets what Pelosi is doing as the 2020 equivalent.
MisterForkbeard
@Adam L Silverman: Ah. It looks like they didn’t do this analysis for the US, but looked at a bunch of countries that didnt include the U.S.
So while the worldwide number is probably over 60% undercounting, it might be different in the US.
Thanks!
The Moar You Know
@Suzanne: Correct. At the current rate of infection we will pass 500,000 deaths approximately seven weeks from now.
joel hanes
@sherparick:
The US is now suffering about 2,000 new officially-counted COVID-19 deaths every day. That’s leveled off, but hasn’t really started to diminish.
There are 191 days left until the scheduled election on 3 November. Taking today’s cumulative total as 58,000, that would make 440,000 COVID-19 deaths before election day. That’s not counting the deaths that governors such as DeSantis are covering up. That’s not counting the people who die at home and whose corpses are never tested.
That’s if we kept doing everything that we’ve been doing for the last month.
But we’re not going to do that. Red state governors are chomping at the bit to “re-open”, and some are already starting to do so.
And the stock market is living in a dream world. The economic metrics for April and May are going to be brutal.
Adam L Silverman
@MisterForkbeard: I’ve seen similar estimates for the US based on the excess deaths, year on year, in NY and other of the hotspot areas.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Adam L Silverman:
Ok thanks, Adam!
@joel hanes:
I’m worried that as well as DeWine has handled this epidemic, I fear that he’s going to open up too soon. While he takes great pains to stress that any reopening will be slow, that social distancing measures will be put in place, and contact tracing will be set up, I fear a second wave will happen unless we extend the stay-at-home order until late May.
I also think too many people are out and about where I live. I was driving the other day and it traffic almost seemed normal
@Adam L Silverman:
There was local Republican state rep who died last month after experiencing chest pains. Don’t know if that was virus related or not; I thought I read that the virus has some affinity for the receptors in cardiac cells or something. Could be wrong. Anyway, he did this stupid thing:
MisterForkbeard
@Adam L Silverman: The last ones I saw for NY had us undercounting by 30% or so but again: I havent checked for some time.
Would not be surprised to see it’smich higher, particularly given our lack of testing.
Steeplejack
@joel hanes:
“Champing at the bit.”
MisterForkbeard
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I don’t think gradual reopening will work, tbh. Not really.
We’ve seen pictures of re-opened restaurants and people are super close to each other, not wearing masks, etc. We’ve seen people going to opened beaches and not following safety directives. People are just going to fuck this up.
I saw an interesting interview with a barber in Georgia. He was kitted out in a full gas mask and was saying he didnt want to re-open… but that he had to. Because if he didn’t, some other barber would and he would lose his entire customer base.
Re-opening is going to cause a ton of problems. It may be that we have to fail disastrously at it once in order to have a chance at getting it right.
L85NJGT
@Adam L Silverman:
They may have confirmed he is dead or in a vegetative state, but are waiting on an official announcement. This could be for a number of reasons, including not wanting to rock the succession boat.
joel hanes
@Steeplejack:
Thanks. I regret having screwed that up.
Pedantic corrections are always welcome on my comments.
Steeplejack
@joel hanes:
Working on my P-score early this week. Been letting it slide. If you see “flack/flak,” let me know.
SFAW
@joel hanes:
Interesting number, as those of us who remember Vietnam could tell you. [Pretty sure you know that, too.]
SFAW
@Steeplejack:
Thank you. Yet another of my pedantic pet peeves.
SFAW
@Steeplejack:
Should it be “flak,” oder “FLAK“?
ETA: Never mind. I thought it came from three words, not one, as Google tells me. Ich bin ein Dummkopf
Tenar Arha
NB @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
via @DrDenaGrayson on Twitter
joel hanes
@SFAW:
Does Roland Hedley Burton wear a flack jacket?
Steeplejack
@SFAW:
Don’t saw the sawdust too fine. An old copyeditor with sleeve garters and a green eyeshade taught me that.
dww44
@Luciamia: This is what I keep saying to my spouse everytime he recounts another Trump utterance. Everyone who voted for Trump knew what he was from the outset, yet they voted for him, ostensibly because he was a “business” man, and anything was better than the hated Hillary. They all really did hate Hillary. And sadly for her and for us and the whole country she didn’t have the personal charisma that Obama did. Never mind that the election was truly stolen from her.
Speaking of Obama, Saturday evening C-Span replayed a couple of prior White House Correspondents Dinner events and led off with the 2011 one where Obama stuck the knife into Trump. Obama was genuinely relaxed and charming. Interesting to rewatch that dinner from the perspective of today.
randy khan
I just want to read this sentence over and over again.
Trump’s re-election always depended on there not being a big crisis of some kind so that his manifest deficiencies would not become so obvious to the voting public that they could not be ignored. And the timing really couldn’t be wore for the GOP. It warms the cockles of my heart.
Jackie
@Tenar Arha: I tried to read and was denied due to ad block. Could you expand?
patrick II
Why are Trump voters still alive? How can you be smart enough to not mainline Clorox and dumb enough to vote for Trump?
RepubAnon
@Brachiator: The GOP is worried that Trump has shown people what Republicans have long planned for the country- while there’s still ways for their opponents to vote against them.
SFAW
@joel hanes:
I thought he talked with flacks, but was not one himself?
smike
@randy khan:
Plenty are trying to ignore (it’s what they do), and it’s good to behold the pathetic effort.
By the way, you should have somebody look at that cockled-heart thingie.
Kent
You have clearly never been to Marshall Texas. That part of east Texas makes the rest of Texas look enlightened and liberal. When we lived in TX we used to drive through there on the way to camping at Caddo Lake and it is mind-numbingly insular and ignorant. The perfect storm of bible belt intolerance and deep-south racism. It’s basically the Mississippi of Texas
He represents his people perfectly. He was even a judge before running for Congress if you can believe that. He has a law degree from Baylor and was reportedly class president. So he knows his people.
NotMax
@Steeplejack
Hmm.
;)
Mike G
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Some people are addicted to hate and conflict, and President Clorox Injection gives them what they crave.
Poe Larity
We should take them at their word an offer Donald a 24×7 channel. Comedy Central or the History-Alien Visitation Channel.
Kent
It’s fucking pointless to worry about Trump’s MAGA 40%. They are unreachable and have always been unreachable in any election. Just like most of us here would be unreachable for the GOP no matter what kind of centrist candidate they run. Who here would drop Biden and jump on the Kasich bandwagon if given the opportunity? Anyone?
Elections are won at the margins and by turnout. Not by convincing your racist old MAGA uncle to pull the lever for a Dem for the first time since Kennedy.
Mary G
There was another big protest out here today, at Pacific Beach in San Diego. No Confederate flags and of course no guns, but I did spot a couple of placards with “Q” on them. A lot of beach junkies and surfers mixed in with the Trumpies, which is stupid because the beach reopens tomorrow.
Kent
Just curious. Is anyone here listening to Biden’s podcast “Here’s the Deal”?
I didn’t know it even existed until I just read about it in a Washington Post Article and promptly subscribed. But I haven’t listened to any episodes yet. How is it that a fairly tuned in political junkie like myself who listens to other political podcasts and reads lots of news and blogs didn’t know it existed? That strikes me a problematic.
opiejeanne
@SFAW: Last week, when we were at about 43,000 COVID-19 deaths, I remarked that we were nearing the number of American deaths in Vietnam, but couldn’t do the math and guessed that it would be Wednesday or Thursday when we hit that number. A couple of people said it would be sooner, probably Monday or Tuesday. I am stunned that we are looking at this number so soon.
mrmoshpotato
Holy shit! How did Dump turn our party in “a shitpile of bigots and imbeciles” (-Driftglass) in less than five years?! We don’t understand what happened!
joel hanes
@SFAW:
Roland Hedley Burton is not a reporter nor journalist.
He’s a flack attempting to pass as one of those, just like Geraldo, after whom I have always thought he was modeled.
joel hanes
@Kent:
Biden’s podcast “Here’s the Deal”
Are there transcripts? I read better than I listen. Faster, too.
TriassicSands
Gym Jordan is a Republican. He feels nothing inside…unless it directly affects him.
TriassicSands
Comment behaving badly. Weird. This was a double post without a double click.
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
@Kent: It got mentioned right here on this almost top 10,000 type blog less than a week ago. Not sure which thread since I’ve missed most of them.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
burnspbesq
@Ella in New Mexico:
Ever been to Tyler? There are hordes of people there far worse than Louie Gohmert.
burnspbesq
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
There were some very preliminary, very ambiguous indications that a couple of classes of BP meds (ACE inhibitors and ARBs) might, in some cases, make it easier for virus particles to successfully attach to and invade lung tissue. To the extent there can be said to be a consensus in the cardiology community right now, it’s the all-purpose, handy-dandy “we don’t know enough yet.”
I take an ACE inhibitor, and I have a lomg-scheduled appointment with my cardiologist this week. He and I will be talking about this.
https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/929276
Chris T.
@burnspbesq: A very recent (last few days) study on the effect of ACE inhibitors on coronavirus patients suggested that there is no adverse effect, but I’m sure your cardiologist will have better info than my half-remembered glance at a web page summary.
Edit: it looks like your link might very well be the page I half-remember.
SFAW
@joel hanes:
I see/saw him differently — more as the Dunning-Kruger version of the “intrepid reporter,” and someone who thinks a story is big because he’s covering it (rather than vice versa) — but I can’t/won’t argue, because I see the merit in your view.
Jinchi
Sure. Let me know when these a**holes decide to stop hiding and do something to save us from this idiot.
FlyingToaster
@lahke:
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
These are the unreachable. The only thing that will affect them is when they themselves die from COVID-19. They’ll be wearing MAGA hats when they’re put on the ‘vent.
Tenar Arha
@Jackie: I’m so sorry, I went to sleep. I got in fine on that one. The info was in the SF Chronicle & Mercury News. Try this link
Summary: they’ve backdated the first appearance in US of COVID to early February. NB there’s been more & more articles about some people suffering apparent heart attacks & strokes. This ?linked article talks about one of those early deaths. that she tested positive for C19 after her death & the virus apparently severely damaged her heart as seen in her autopsy etc.
Ben Cisco
@FlyingToaster: With their last breath, they’ll spit at us.
evodevo
@joel hanes: Wellll, you are not necessarily wrong…as a person who raised horses for 50 years, champing is correct, but chomp comes from the same root word, and for a time in English history was used interchangeably. Sooo…..
Horses “champ” at the bit when they are impatient or nervous…the bit lies in a diastema between the incisors and the molars, and so they aren’t actually biting it, they are clacking their upper and lower jaws together (and often drooling at the same time) and it makes a distinctive noise.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
I think people are missing stuff in the disaster porn
1) The pressure is on for the virus to be less deadly over time, not more. As it is do note the the vast majority don’t even have symptoms. This is why, as always, social distancing and quarantining work, because it removes the more dangerous strains of a virus from circulation. That 80% who get ill, without knowing it, and then get better in a month can’t spread the disease after that.
2) The second deadly wave of Spanish Flue happened because of WWI; the soldiers who were sick and could function stayed in the trenches and were isolated along with their less dangerous strains. The seriously ill were packed into hospitals in the rear were they could spread their more dangerous strain to everyone else (and wasn’t the hospitals the major disease vector in Italy, and the European strain the virus more deadly than the US strain?)
3) Spanish flue died out at 1/3 of the population infected, not 70%. Likely at the point to many people had the anti-bodies and that blocked transmission. And let us note that was 1918 were all transportation was trains or ships, cities really didn’t have suburbs (odd, isn’t that those evil soulless suburbs our liberal better lecture us so much about started up in the 1920s, isn’t it?). Oh yes, and millions men packed together and moving around for the war. Between peace and more dispersed population it may just reach the runs out of easy victims to infect even earlier. Going by 1/3 infected is when the pandemic ends, that’s 98 million infected and 450,000 dead when in the US.
So if we assume +60% dead, because California, Chicago and New York are carrying water for Trump, then it’s 80,000 dead and 40 million infected. That’s might be why the CDC is prediction it will die down this summer because at this rate we are two months away from the enough of the population getting the anti-bodies the hard way to break up the pandemic into local epidemics.
But, what ever, Iceland doesn’t count because they aren’t Americans, it’s all hopeless so it’s 250 million Americans will die before the end. like the black death
leeleeFL
@Suzanne: I assumed too many zeros were employed. Not good, because it may give ppl a reason to discredit all of it.. proofreading is our friend.
leeleeFL
@rikyrah: Perfect, as usual! Prime example of KISS
eddie blake
@Ben Cisco:
ok, ahab…i mean KHAAAANNN!!
eddie blake
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
“because California, Chicago and New York are carrying water for Trump”
..umm..what the fuck are you talking about?
SteverinoCT
@Steeplejack:
You had better tow the line, mister.
J R in WV
@Kent:
still remember the amazing job the (FTF) NYTimes did for those who died in the Twin Towers airliner attack.
Every person they could identify got an individual detailed obit, double trucks full of them for months. It was obviously a huge assignment, with at least a couple of dozen reporters working to ID everyone, find someone who knew them, worked with them, knew where they were from, etc.
I hope we end this epidemic with a hige list of obits of everyone who died, partly because the vast majority of the dead will have died because of the total incompetence of President Trump and his selections to run out government.
schrodingers_cat
@Steeplejack: How are you holding up? Are we going to hear stories of HouseCat 2.0, or is too soon?