Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

“Squeaker” McCarthy

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

The republican caucus is already covering themselves with something, and it’s not glory.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

Eh, that’s media spin. biden’s health is fine and he’s doing a good job.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

After roe, women are no longer free.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

“More of this”, i said to the dog.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

No one could have predicted…

Good lord, these people are nuts.

In my day, never was longer.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

You are here: Home / Archives for Healthcare / COVID-19 Coronavirus

Zombie Apocalypse Open Thread

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Creepy looking people in Trump hats pressed up against a window at the Ohio statehouse screaming.

The Washington Post had a story yesterday about this photo taken at an anti-social distancing protest in Ohio. This particular photo is a thing because zillions of people noted how much it looks like a scene from a zombie movie. It really does!

As you’ve no doubt heard, there were similar protests in other states, and more are planned for the days ahead. It’s AstroTurf bullshit like the tea party nonsense — a nascent rebranding.

MAGA swag was a common denominator at the protests, from Michigan to California. In open carry states, the protesters showed up with guns.

Trump’s own task force supports stay-at-home orders, and Drs. Birx and Fauci credit social distancing with bending the curve. But Trump believes “restarting” the economy can save his ass politically, so he’s openly fomenting the protests.

The crack New York Times Beltway team is as obtuse about this dangerous, irresponsible turn of events as can be imagined. I mean, fucking hell:

We’re going to get the worst of both worlds, I fear: a ravaged economy AND out-of-control spread of the virus. Trump can’t make governors and mayors lift restrictions, but Republicans will go along with the coming monumentally stupid decision to reopen without the testing, tracking and tracing regime that every expert on infectious diseases says we need to have in place to resume normal activities safely.

I live among pig-stupid Trump voters, and during a grocery run, I noticed a marked decrease in the number of people wearing masks. That must mean Fox News is calling the pandemic a hoax again.

Turns out there is a looming zombie apocalypse, and it’s caused by viral stupidity. Dog help us.

Open thread.

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Programming Note — ONE WORLD : Together At Home

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As some of y’all said yesterday, it’s especially nice that Keith Richards is showing up for this, since he’s no doubt as immune to the virus as he is to every other human weakness…

… The event put on by the international advocacy organization Global Citizen in collaboration with the World Health Organization and superstar Lady Gaga intends to “provide a moment of global unity in the fight to end COVID-19,” said its CEO Hugh Evans.

A-listers including Celine Dion, Elton John, Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder are all set to participate.

A six-hour streamed event will precede the prime time televised broadcast, with a laundry list of celebrities set to appear including pop star Christine and the Queens, actors Don Cheadle and Samuel L Jackson, and renowned soccer player Megan Rapinoe.

A Global Citizen publicist confirmed to AFP that all four Stones — Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and Ronnie Wood — would perform during the event…

If you can’t find someone whose work you’ll enjoy on the playlist (click to embiggen), you are extremely hard to please. Like my Spousal Unit, the classicist. So I won’t be streaming it, but I look forward to seeing clips on YouTube after the event, which I can watch while he’s not in the same room…

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Saturday Morning Open Thread: Dispatches

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Cosplay related…

Fifth Horseman - Trump Stupidity / Jeff Danziger

(Jeff Danziger via GoComics.com)

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COVID-19 Coronavirus Update – Friday / Saturday, April 17-18

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Updated GOP Motto: IGMFY I *Want* Mine, Right NOW, Feck You!

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Alexandra Petri, national treasure, in the Washington Post — “Give me liberty and give me death!”:

Yes, I would like things to be worse, please. I do not think things are bad enough, and I would like them to be worse. I look at the number of people who have died in this great state, and I think, frankly, it is a little low. People, if you want to be technical about it, who will never see their families again; people who were not done living; people who cannot be replaced and whose absence will bore an echoing hole through countless other lives — but what is that, weighed against my own convenience and my sense that things should be open rather than closed?…

Given the choice of saving thousands of lives, including, possibly, my own, or getting to buy a can of 730C-2 Sandstone Cove paint now rather than later, I will not hesitate to choose the latter. Do not ask me how many lives I would trade to avoid minor inconveniences, or you will see what a sea of bodies I would be content to wade through to my morning coffee. If I’m willing to die, that should be enough for everyone. No one — as I have established during COUNTLESS interactions with customer service professionals — is worth more than me.

I just want nothing about my life to change, including my indifference to the lives of others. So please stop demanding that I bend to the will of the people or their elected officials. The last time I checked, this was a democracy.

Have you considered that, actually, I don’t want to be safe? You think you are protecting me, but whom are you really protecting? Others? If I am willing to take this risk for myself (my top favorite person!), why do you think I would not be willing to take it for “others,” many of whom I don’t even know personally and some of whom are the very people who once asked me to escort myself out of a Red Lobster because I was making a scene?…

Toddler-in-Chief wants his rallies!…

Darwin nods, judiciously.

Updated GOP Motto: <del>IGMFY</del> <em>I *Want* Mine, Right NOW, Feck You!</em>Post + Comments (74)

Repub Insanity Open Thread: These People Are Monsters

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Last night:

.
Today:

Call out the serfs!…

The fiction-writing professionals find themselves outdone:

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Friday Morning Open Thread: TGIF, for Damned Sure

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Thanks to commentor Debbie (Aussie). I like the idea of a national anthem that people could actually sing, y’know? (And one stanza is plenty, although I think much could be done with stanzas 3 & 4 of ‘America the Beautiful’… )

The world changes, and sensible people change with it…


Good on Charlie Baker, despite his (R) credentials. For one thing, there’s many thousand people need a job right now, and surely we can find enough candidates to do this job right. For another, yeah, there’s a great many bored/anxious programmers at loose ends in the Boston area right now… and if you don’t think some of those programs would find a way to hack ‘an app’ within the first day it was released, you don’t have my faith in the ingenuity of Masshole (and LiveFreeOrDieTrying) tech geeks.

… “It’s not cheap,” Governor Baker, a Republican, said. “But the way I look at it, the single biggest challenge we’re going to have is giving people confidence and comfort that we know where the virus is.”

The state is currently experiencing a surge of cases that is expected to last for the next week, after which it may start to consider easing social-distancing rules. Robust contact tracing, combined with ramped-up testing, could smooth that process, the governor said.

“It’s hard to see how we create a sense of safety if we don’t have a program like this in place,” he said…

The Massachusetts program is staged by the nonprofit Partners in Health, whose doctors have led responses to infectious disease — Ebola, Zika, drug-resistant tuberculosis, cholera and typhoid fever, among others — in the world’s poorest countries.

It is built around one-on-one telephone interviews of newly diagnosed patients and their contacts, so that subjects must answer the phone when it rings. Paul Farmer, a physician-anthropologist and one of the group’s founders, said there was no substitute for the bond of trust formed by a human contact tracer.

“Somebody needs to say to people who are worried and not feeling well, ‘We got you,’” he said. “‘If this is Covid-19, we got you. And we’ll look out for your contacts, your spouse and your children.’ And I think that’s another thing you can do remotely or virtually, is reassure people that there is no reason to believe everything is lost.”…

“I have people reaching out to me all day with theoretical things that we could do, God love ’em,” he said. He said he had also heard from “everyone who had a phone-pinging program,” and that digital tracing may be integrated into the state’s program later, but that human outreach was critical to reaching people without an easy way to isolate themselves.

“You’ve got to be able to connect to people in some way that’s meaningful that’s beyond a ping on the phone,” he said.

Already, Massachusetts’ local departments of health had been carrying out contact tracing, assisted by 1,700 volunteers from the state’s academic public health community…

Read the whole thing. People want to help — people want something to do besides sit & worry. This is good!

Friday Morning Open Thread: TGIF, for Damned SurePost + Comments (201)