Tag: Stupid

Today in Evil

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Trump and the Republicans want to prevent any sort of accountability for employers who kill their employees through recklessness:

Congressional leaders are girding for a huge fight over the reentry of millions of Americans to the workplace, with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) insisting that employers be shielded from liability if their workers contract the coronavirus. He appears to have the backing of top White House officials.

Democratic leaders have declared they will oppose such blanket protections, putting Washington’s power brokers on opposite sides of a major issue that could have sweeping implications for health care and the economy in the coming months. The battle has unleashed a frenzy of lobbying, with major industry groups, technology firms, insurers, manufacturers, labor unions, and plaintiffs lawyers all squaring off.

The Trump administration and Moscow Mitch want to take basic due process rights from regular Americans, and this is exactly how the Democrats should frame this.

Instead, McConnell will steamroll the hapless Chuck Schumer, and incorporate something minor that the Republicans wanted anyway, and Schumer will declare it a victory, because that is how the Democrats work.

More accurately this is how the Democrats play to lose.

Think of it as Evolution in Action

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The governor of Mississippi took a step back with continuing to slowly reopen the state after health officials said there was the largest increase of coronavirus diagnosis and deaths.

Gov. Tate Reeves was to proceed with his plan to get people back to work, but announced the change of plans on Friday as 397 new coronavirus cases were confirmed and 20 more people died.

Credit where credit is due, this guy understands that reality trumps ideology.

The same cannot be said for Texas, where reopening continues unabated despite a similar spike in cases:

Texas hit a third straight day of more than 1,000 new coronavirus cases Saturday as the state charged into its first weekend of re-opening the economy with residents allowed to go back to malls, restaurants, movie theaters and retail stores in limited numbers.

State health officials reported 1,293 new cases, the second-highest single-day infection rate, marking the first time the Texas has recorded more than 1,000 three days in a row.

Officials also reported 31 new deaths, the first time Texas has surpassed 30 on four consecutive days, although fatalities declined for a second consecutive day after a peak of 50 deaths on Friday.

The Japanese have a saying, “バカにつける薬はない”.*

*Pronounced in Japanese, “baka ni tsukeru kusuri wanai”, which means, “There is no medicine for stupidity.” Apologies for any inaccuracies in the text, I do not know Japanese.

He Is Turning into a Bond Villain

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It’s increasingly clear that Elon Musk is a few bricks short of a load.

Between smoking weed on camera, tweeting out false buyout rumors, the whole submarine pedo libel thing, it’s clear that a guy who made his money by skirting a bank regulations it’s clear that he’s not what one would call a “Very Stable Genius.”

In the latest case Elon Musk launched into a diatribe against Covid-19 isolation measures at an Earnings Call.

This guy has been surrounded by toadies reassuring him of his special genius for years:

Elon Musk unleashed a diatribe against shelter-in-place orders, describing the public health measures intended to stem the spread of coronavirus as “fascist”, during an earnings call on Wednesday.

“This is not democratic,” he said of the orders, which he falsely characterized as stipulating that anyone who leaves home would be arrested. “This is not freedom – give people back their goddamn freedom.”

Musk’s rant came despite a relatively good earnings report for Tesla, in which the company beat analysts’ estimates for first-quarter revenue on Wednesday. It posted its third straight quarterly profit after recording a solid number of deliveries during the period, despite disruptions due to the pandemic.

Earlier on the call, Musk specifically cited the Bay Area’s shelter-in-place order, which has prevented his factory in Fremont, California, from opening, as a concern.

He thinks that he’s a genius because he got rich through connections and luck.

This guy is a nut.

Fire Dean Banquet

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Donald Trump says that people should drink, inhale, or inject household disinfectants to prevent Covid-19 infection.

The initial response of the New York Times was to write that “some experts” found this dangerous.

We’ve deleted an earlier tweet and updated a sentence in our article that implied that only “some experts” view the ingestion of household disinfectants as dangerous. To be clear, there is no debate on the danger.

— The New York Times (@nytimes) April 24, 2020

No, anyone with two brain cells to rub together gets that this is dangerous.

Even if this was not the result of an edict from Dean Banquet, the editor-in-chief of the Times, this is clearly a product of the (toxic) newsroom culture that that he has inculcated there.

Fox Privilege

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This is Shallow Beyond Belief

The folks at Fox News are in a tizzy over Donald Trump’s proposal to suspend green cards, because they will not be able to find immigrants to exploit as their au pairs, and that would an unimaginable horror.

For people who are making something north of ½ million a year, perhaps paying a fair wage for child care is not an unreasonable sacrifice:

Last night, Trump sounded like he thought he had finally found an answer to dealing with the coronavirus. No, not better testing or more PPE but an immigration ban. He tweeted, “In light of the attack from the Invisible Enemy, as well as the need to protect the jobs of our GREAT American Citizens, I will be signing an Executive Order to temporarily suspend immigration into the United States!”

This morning, cohost Ainsley Earhardt briefly acknowledged that farmers rely on immigrants. Then she launched what looked like a direct plea to Trump, who never seems to let the pandemic interfere with his TV watching:

EARHARDT: Many families here, including mine, we have au pairs, and we rely on them. I go to work at three o’clock in the morning, so I need her there and I need her in my house so that she can help me with my daughter. So, many families rely on child care from other countries. These au pairs come here on work visas, they have to go back to their country to get the visas renewed, and we’ve been talking in my house about how that’s going to happen. So, these are all things, these are questions that we have that, hopefully the president will roll out a plan and we’ll all be informed on how this is going to affect all of our lives.

………

Apparently, when it comes to their own and their pals’ homes, these Trumpers don’t care so much about America first.

The selfishness and hypocrisy is stunning.

Signs of the Apocalypse

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Dana Milbank, the quintessential Washington, DC insider know nothing, just got something right when he noted that the Covid-19 response was a direct result of the movement Republican belief that the government should be drowned in a bathtub.

Well a stopped clock, is right once a day, and Dana Milbank is right (maybe) once a year:

I had been expecting this for 21 years.

“It’s not a matter of ‘if,’ but ‘when,’” the legendary epidemiologist D.A. Henderson told me in 1999 when we discussed the likelihood of a biological event causing mass destruction.

In 2001, I wrote about experts urging a “medical Manhattan Project” for new vaccines, antibiotics and antivirals.

………

I repeat these things not to pretend I was prescient but to show that the nation’s top scientists and public health experts were shouting these warnings from the rooftops — deafeningly, unanimously and consistently. In the years after the 2001 terrorist attacks, the Bush and Obama administrations seemed to be listening.

But then came the tea party, the anti-government conservatism that infected the Republican Party in 2010 and triumphed with President Trump’s election. Perhaps the best articulation of its ideology came from the anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, who once said: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”

They got their wish. What you see today is your government, drowning — a government that couldn’t produce a rudimentary test for coronavirus, that couldn’t contain the pandemic as other countries have done, that couldn’t produce enough ventilators for the sick or even enough face masks and gowns for health-care workers.

The fact that this font of conventional wisdom (the conventional wisdom is always wrong) recognizes that this is a direct result of an ideology is significant.

The pundit class, disdains the discussion of ideology, so the fact that one of their most prominent avatars is assigning the blame to a right-wing ideology constituents a statement against interest, which increases the credibility of the assewrtion.

Thanks, Elon

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After promising to deliver hundreds (thousands) of ventilators to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic, Elon Musk has delivered high end CPAP machines:

Some of you might have noticed that we recently started a series called Corona Tools, in honour of those who are really standing out from the crowd during this crisis. But we needn’t have bothered, really. Because one man is fast emerging from this virus as the Corona Super Tool, leaving all the others in the (space) dust.

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr Elon Musk.

………

After playing down the virus since January, our Elon suddenly last week seemed like maybe he had taken a Trump-style turn, and had decided that maybe Covid-19 was something that needed to be taken seriously after all. Though he earlier said he would produce ventilators but only “if there’s a shortage” (as if there weren’t already one), he then announced on March 24 that he’d bought over 1,255 “FDA-approved ventilators” from China and had delivered them to Los Angeles.

A few days later, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio was thanking him for “donating hundreds of ventilators to New York City and State, including our public hospitals”, saying he was “deeply grateful”.

Fair play, we thought. At least he seems to be trying to help, rather than mounting some silly PR stunt, like, we dunno, building a kid-size submarine or something. We were a bit confused, however, by how it seemed so easy for him to procure over 1,000 ventilators when the rest of the world’s governments seemed to be suffering from such a dire shortage.

On Wednesday, we got a sneak peek of some of these ventilators:

………

You might also be surprised to see there, on top of the boxes, not a ventilator, but a BPAP (Bilevel Positive Airway Pressure, also called a “BiPAP” machine), which is used to treat sleep apnoea by maintaining a consistent breathing pattern at night (it’s very similar to a CPAP machine, but it has two pressure settings rather than just one).

Now BPAP and CPAP machines are sometimes called “non-invasive ventilators”, but these are not the ventilators that can be used in intensive care units, which are invasive ventilators that deliver oxygen to the lungs and are used as part of life support.

Well, that’s at LEAST honest as Musk’s promises of self driving mode for his cars, I guess.

Go to Tallahassee, Protest, and Lick F%$#ing Door Knobs!!!

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This is my suggestion for the good citizens of the State of Florida.

The door knobs in question are on the state house and the governor’s mansion.

For those of you who are not aware, the Honorable Ron DeSantis, has decided that instead of addressing problems with a state full of senior citizens with common sense measures to reduce the spread of the disease, he is looking to blame out of state folks.

Seriously, go to Tallahassee, and bring your salivary glands.

Find out What What He’s Been Smoking, and Have a Few Ounces Sent to My Chamber

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Over at The Intercept, Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Grim are suggesting that that there should be a Joe Biden/Bernie Sanders Presidential ticket.

Seriously, which ever person is at the top of the ticket, it is pretty likely that they will be succeeded by their VP, and their policies are diametrically opposed.

Additionally, the DemocraticParty establishment (there is no Democratic Party establishment) would would vociferously oppose Sanders as a running mate, (It would interfere with their keeping their phony baloney jobs)  and Sanders supporters would oppose the selection of Biden with equal vigor given that they consider Biden to have been on the wrong side of every major issue throughout his career.

This isn’t journalism, it’s bad fan fiction.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

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This “smart, simple, sustainable” water bottle requires:
* a custom water bottle
* an iPhone app
* special canisters
* 3 of them actually
* a monthly payment
* I would assume a lithium ion battery?
* yes, it’s a four day lithium ion battery in my sustainable water bottle pic.twitter.com/Qi3BJoMDZU

— Lee Edwards 🏳️‍🌈🦾 (@terronk) March 7, 2020

Seriously, this takes the internet of sh%$ to a whole new depth.

Also, have the people funding this  never heard of the Juicero fiasco?

A Noun, a Verb, and a Travel Ban

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The centerpiece Donald Trump’s announced measures to deal with COVID-19 is a travel ban from Europe.
This is the administration’s default response to any situation:  Build a wall.

In this case, the wall is the Maginot Line:

Donald Trump announced that the US would temporarily suspend all travel from the European Union, as the country reckons with the spread of coronavirus and the White House grapples with the severity of the situation.

The restrictions, which would begin on Friday and last for 30 days, would not apply to the UK, he said. He also encouraged older Americans to avoid all travel if possible.

Trump made the announcement in an Oval Office speech on Wednesday evening on the federal response to what the World Health Organization has declared a global pandemic.

During the speech, Trump defended his administration’s response while laying blame on the European Union for not acting quickly enough to address the “foreign virus”, saying US clusters had been “seeded” by European travelers.

Seriously, this is f%$#ed up and sh%$.

Today in Hack Journalism

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The New York Times has a particularly egregious article about Russian meddling in elections.

Most of the article is non specific threats related by, “American officials briefed on recent intelligence.”

It’s just that there are some people sowing dissent, and maybe some people saying nice things about American Nazis, (Maybe it’s those Nazis we should worry about) and possibly some bogus BLM groups.

They never give specific groups, or posts.

The ONLY specific actions mentioned in the article (actual quotes) wait until the last paragraph, and they are 1 story, and 2 OP/EDs from the Kremlin owned RT:

There is no reason that this editor should not have sent this back with a big red “BS” on the cover.

How Convenient

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Dallas County Elections Administrator Toni Pippins-Poole discovered her office did not count about 10% of the ballots that voters cast on Super Tuesday.

She is now asking a court to let her conduct a manual recount of the votes, after she discovered 44 thumb drives containing ballots that were not included in the final results.

………

Dallas County Elections Administrator Toni Pippins-Poole discovered her office did not count about 10% of the ballots that voters cast on Super Tuesday.

She is now asking a court to let her conduct a manual recount of the votes, after she discovered 44 thumb drives containing ballots that were not included in the final results.

………

“It was initially believed that all of the ballots cast at all of the 454 vote centers had been received back,” wrote Pippins-Poole in an affidavit to the lawsuit. “However, it was later determined that there are ballots from 44 of the precinct scanner and tabulator machines that are unaccounted for. Consequently, I need to perform a paper recount of the ballots from 44 of the precinct scanner and tabulator machines that were not accounted for during the reconciliation process.”

Seriously, every time that we find these sorts of errors, they favor one candidate.

Hoocoodanode?

Also, there should be a recount of ALL of the ballots.

Bye Felicia Tweety

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It appears that Chris Matthews has been fired from MSNBC. (Technically, it’s a retirement ……… with basically no advance notice ……… It’s a firing)

What took them so long?  This guy has been an embarrassment for well over a decade.

Chris Matthews, the veteran political anchor and voluble host of the long-running MSNBC talk show “Hardball,” resigned on Monday night, an abrupt departure from a television perch that made him a fixture of politics and the news media over the past quarter-century.

Mr. Matthews, 74, had faced mounting criticism in recent days over a spate of embarrassing on-air moments, including a comparison of Senator Bernie Sanders’s campaign to the Nazi invasion of France and an interview with Senator Elizabeth Warren in which the anchor was criticized for a condescending and disbelieving tone.

On Saturday, the journalist Laura Bassett published an essay accusing Mr. Matthews of making multiple inappropriate comments about her appearance, reviving longstanding allegations about the anchor’s sexist behavior. By Monday, his position at the news network he helped build had become untenable.

Accompanied by his family, Mr. Matthews walked onto the “Hardball” set inside NBC’s Washington bureau shortly before 7 p.m. to deliver a brief farewell. His longtime crew members, who had been told of his plans roughly an hour earlier, looked on stunned.

“I’m retiring,” Mr. Matthews told viewers in a solemn and brief monologue as his broadcast began at 7. “This is the last ‘Hardball’ on MSNBC.”

His sudden signoff took many colleagues by surprise — “Wait. What?” the MSNBC anchor Katy Tur wrote on Twitter — but it followed days of discussions with Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC and one of the early executive producers of “Hardball.”

Mr. Griffin, who is close with Mr. Matthews, traveled to Washington over the weekend to discuss his future in person, according to three people who requested anonymity to describe sensitive conversations.

On the air on Monday, Mr. Matthews made clear that the timing of his exit was not entirely his choosing. “Obviously, it isn’t for a lack of interest in politics,” he said, going on to apologize for his past insensitive comments.

Paging Upton Sinclair

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Upton Sinclair once observed that, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Reports that the Democratic establishment is willing to burn the party to the ground so that they can preside over the ruins is proof of this.

The army of overpaid incompetent consultants, and their friends on the revolving door track at the DNC, realize the iff Bernie Sanders wins, then their personal gravy train comes to an end.

Of course they are willing to produce long lasting damage to the party in order to preserve their position within the party.

It’s the Iron Law of Institutions, “The people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself. Thus, they would rather the institution “fail” while they remain in power within the institution than for the institution to “succeed” if that requires them to lose power within the institution.”

Dozens of interviews with Democratic establishment leaders this week show that they are not just worried about Mr. Sanders’s candidacy, but are also willing to risk intraparty damage to stop his nomination at the national convention in July if they get the chance. Since Mr. Sanders’s victory in Nevada’s caucuses on Saturday, The Times has interviewed 93 party officials — all of them superdelegates, who could have a say on the nominee at the convention — and found overwhelming opposition to handing the Vermont senator the nomination if he arrived with the most delegates but fell short of a majority.

Such a situation may result in a brokered convention, a messy political battle the likes of which Democrats have not seen since 1952, when the nominee was Adlai Stevenson.

“We’re way, way, way past the day where party leaders can determine an outcome here, but I think there’s a vibrant conversation about whether there is anything that can be done,” said Jim Himes, a Connecticut congressman and superdelegate, who believe the nominee should have a majority of delegates.

In the words of Mel Brooks, “We gotta protect our phony baloney jobs.”

Harrumph.

Fredrick Samuel Hiatt, Would You Please Go Now?

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Normally, I’d suggest that the most batsh%$ insane bit of punditry over the past week or so would be Chris Matthews likening Bernie Sanders’ victory in the Nevada caucus to the Nazi defeat of France in 1940.

This week, I’d be wrong, because Washington Post editorial editor Fred Hiatt just penned an article stating that Bernie Sanders is the real climate change denier because he isn’t listening to the opinions of oil company executives:

………

Unfortunately, there is no magic wand to make such things happen, as Patrick Pouyanné told me last week. Pouyanné is one of those people whose hatred Sanders might welcome; he is chairman and chief executive of Paris-based Total, one of the world’s biggest oil and gas companies.

As Dan Froomkin pithily notes,(Cleaned up from a Twitter post) “The author of this piece, Fred Hiatt, runs the Washington Post’s opinion side. And as I have long argued, he has done more damage to the Post brand than anyone since Janet Cooke.”

Indeed.