We romanticize in so many ways what Dr. King was, and that he was committed to nonviolence. But in many ways, he was fighting for the same thing that the protesters today are fighting for, which is equal justice under the law. And that has to be acknowledged. The pain, and the injustice, has to be acknowledged. So I think about this moment and of course, I will never condone vandalism and violence in these protests. But you have to recognize and appreciate that people have the right to feel pain and to feel anger, with the fact that it is these many years later, and this is still happening.
“Because when that happens, we’re going to have new cases pop up.” – Brian Kemp
While touring a makeshift hospital at the Georgia World Congress Center, Brian Kemp told the AJC that opening businesses would necessarily result in new cases popping up. I thought the governor understood that opening the state while the COVID-19 count in Georgia is still on the climb would be a bad thing.
Silly-ass me. I didn’t realize that was the plan.
Today, according to Johns Hopkins, Georgia has 21,102 cases, 0 confirmed recovered cases, and 846 deaths. The daily confirmed new cases vary wildly. The variability is understandable because our test coverage is shitty. But the trend still points uncomfortably east-northeast.
Georgia is opening the doors of bowling alleys, movie theaters, hair salons, nail salons, massage parlors, and restaurants. I don’t think it’s super brilliant to start by opening the high-touch, close-contact businesses first.
While most states still ban major gatherings, Georgia takes it as a suggestion. States like California, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, Colorado, Maryland, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, and New Jersey are guaranteeing sick leave. Nevada, Louisiana, Kentucky, Maryland, New York, Massachusetts, and Maine all require that the eventual coronavirus vaccine is free. Getting a little crazy, the Netherlands, Denmark, Malaysia, and the United Kingdom will cover a large portion of lost wages. However, with the evidence showing that the cases in Georgia are on the rise with no signs of slowing down until mid-June, Kemp’s plan is to sacrifice just enough people to keep the government from having to figure out a plan to protect its citizens.
It is not unreasonable to conclude that some locales with no cases might see some restriction relief. This could be accomplished by rigorous testing, monitoring, and control. But we don’t have testing coverage. From a per-capita standpoint, Georgia testing is at the bottom. Two weeks ago, there were 5 Coronavirus testing sites, all 5 of them in a parking deck at Georgia Tech. We just recently expanded to drug-store parking lots around the state. Georgia officials say that anyone with symptoms can get the test, but the testers themselves require you to have symptoms and a high-risk factor before you can get tested. Georgia just started ramping up Emory, Georgia State, and our public state health labs at Augusta University just one week ago. We just barely got to a 3,000 test-per-day capacity in a state with more than 10,000,000 people. Shouldn’t we find out if this system is reliable, stable, and capable before we start sending Georgians back together?
Instead, Kemp made sure that cities with large populations and large breakouts, like Atlanta and Albany, cannot use their local information, or their lack of information due to testing infancy, to override his decree. Kemp’s executive order specifically states that local governments cannot expand or minimize his. To quote Savannah Mayor Van Johnson, this plan is “Premature, Irresponsible, and Dangerous”. I’ll add “Spiteful, Insane, and Malicious”. But if the governor is driving the state down this road, you might expect that our testing and monitoring plan is robust. Cue the chirping of one lonely cricket. We haven’t started testing everyone who wants the test. Let alone people with mild symptoms or people that are asymptomatic. A sampling today in New York City suggests that 14% of the entire city might be infected. It’s absurd to think the same thing can’t happen here.
Obviously, the pain is real. People desperately need a paycheck. Other governments are guaranteeing paychecks, preventing forclosure, requiring banks and debt collectors to hold their fire, and governments are covering interest payments. They’re providing healthcare, quarantine, food delivery, and financial support to people falling ill. They are trying, with eyes open, to protect their citizens.
Not our Governor. His plan is to find the right balance of dead Georgians vs. coiffed hair-dos. Cake or death.
As the world struggles to contain a deadly airborne disease, governments, international health organizations, and the media are now wrestling with a new question:
Did the World Health Organization’s subservience to China prevent a malignant narcissist from making an informed decision? Or, did the world’s premier global health organization do its job?
The eye-bleedingly frustrating pattern is starting to play out as expected. There is zero evidence of any of Trump’s claims. The facts of the situation turn out to be much more damning than most of us thought. Trump’s response is to viciously attack everyone that brings this objective truth to light, to the detriment of the country.
This is how dictators function. This is how cults are formed and this is how democracies die. Absent a boogie-man, a cult leader invents one. Those of us committed to the truth furiously aim to protect the attacked institution. Cult followers need only the insistence of their leader as proof. They see the fervent response of the defenders as evidence of their own righteousness. Facts be damned, and the pursuit of truth is viewed as an attack. A neutral entity is turned into a test of allegiance, and neutrality is lost. Cult leader’s followers become more hardened and impenetrable. Opposition hardens.
This is why demagogues are dangerous.
Donald Trump has committed so many bizarre atrocities that it is hard to keep track. As a sampling, he attacked John McCain after he died and then he fought his own administration to prevent our nation from honoring him. He viciously continues to attack the press as the “Enemy of the United States”, effectively proclaiming the First Amendment of the Constitution as anti-American. He has attacked the parents of American soldiers killed in service to our nation. He repeatedly praises Nazis, Rodrigo Duterte, Kim Jong Il, and Vladimir Putin. He has stripped infants and kindergarteners and school children from their mothers and fathers, terrifying a generation of people for no reason other than they have no power. But nothing has absolutely infuriated me to the white-hot edge of sanity than his attack on the World Health Organization. In a pandemic.
The power grab he is going for is nothing short of monstrous. There is a pandemic changing the world as we know it and we have no idea what it looks like on the other side. A deadly virus has forced the country closed. Donald Trump, after failing to maintain the systems that our government put in place for this exact problem, is now acting like the disease is just a choice.
The United States is trying to rescue an economy through an emergency spending of $2,000,000,000,000 and we have no idea if it will work. Jobless claims are an order of magnitude higher than they were just a couple of weeks ago and unemployment percentages are approaching the Great Depression. The $349 Billion SBA paycheck protection loan program ran out of money in days. The United States reports COVID-19 infection numbers that are 3 1/2 times higher than the next highest country, and that’s with the President of the United States blatantly refusing to create a testing plan. “Now they scream ‘Testing, Testing, Testing,’ again playing a very dangerous political game. States, not the Federal Government, should be doing the Testing.”
Fantastic. Now his followers have a new foe. The “they” who play a very dangerous political game. On this point, I agree. However, the difference between the President’s position and mine is that I can name the “they”.
He is averse to a national plan for a national problem, even though national organizations used to be supported and national programs used to be maintained by every one of our past Presidents, all of which actually liked this country. And the reason he does not try to protect our nation is either that he does not want to do his job, or he is incapable. Neither are acceptable.
This incompetent fuck is blind to the fact that a national testing plan is the only chance of getting the economy back running before a vaccine is available. And now we’re stuck with a president that has a history peddling anti-vaccine talking points.
In the middle of that atmosphere, against the advice of the medical professionals in his own administration that are trying to advise him of the best course of action for the country, Donald Trump has decided to turn the World Health Organization into a boogie-man as a test of loyalty. It is the largest test of loyalty he has pressed for.
If Donald Trump gets away with attacking the World Health Organization in the middle of a pandemic, there is literally no floor to the depth of his depravity. He is betraying the country, betraying our foundations, and now betraying his most loyal supporters by enlisting them to endanger their lives by demanding that they “LIBERATE.”
In the same breath that his administration made the absurd claim that his fomenting domestic rebellion is “not fomenting domestic rebellion”, the White House made sure to clarify that governors are “more concerned about controlling the populations than protecting them.”
Donald Trump will always find the worst possible course of action. It’s not a superpower, nor part of any grand strategy. It’s just a natural outcome from his insatiable need to feed his ego by grabbing headlines anyway possible, married with his need to find someone, anyone, anything at all to blame for his outrageous, incompetent, un-American, illegal, or traitorous behavior.
That’s why he makes up shit like he has “Total Authority” to open the states before some poor bastard has to remind him that he is not a dictator, despite his best wishes and efforts, and the Constitution is still in effect. And they may have informed him, that before it became inconvenient for Dear Leader, most Republicans champion the 10th Amendment. And then the same poor bastard probably had to tell him what the 10th Amendment is. And Trump probably got bored with it after the words “can’t” and “Constitution”, since he stopped reading long ago after he concluded that Article II gave him “the right to do whatever I want as President.” But then, Trump was informed that everyone would ignore him and he would look weak. So he graciously retreated from his new and inventive anti-American banana-republic power grab by simply pretending that he has power over them. “The governors are responsible. They have to take charge. If we disagree with it, we’re not going to let it open.” Got it both ways. Neat trick.
Still chafing against the Constitution, now Donald Trump’s grand plan is to call on his followers to “LIBERATE” themselves against the government isolation efforts that each one of our states has put in place to protect their citizens. Trump wants states to open their economies “very quickly”, and yesterday he boldly proclaimed that “America wants to be open.”
No shit that America wants to be open. This is hard. Nobody wants this virus and nobody wants to see an economy on-hold. Nobody wants the unemployment numbers at the Great Depression levels and nobody wants to have to wear a mask and live in fear if they go to the grocery store.
Today there are 2,240,000 people infected with COVID-19 and cases in the United States just topped 700,000. That’s a quarter million people since my post 2 days ago. 34,180 Americans are dead, and yesterday posted the largest single-day death count of 4,591 Americans.
For reference, terrorists killed 2,977 Americans on 9/11/2001.
What Trump doesn’t get is that he cannot change reality through his sheer force of will. He can’t just demand that the virus goes away. This virus is vying for the leading cause of all American deaths. Americans, by-and-large, do not want to die. He could, however, coordinate a national testing program that governors of all parties have been begging him for, but his government continues to fail to develop a national testing plan. It’s fucking malpractice.
So what will happen if we re-open too early without data and without testing and without control? We are sheltering in place to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. So if you reverse that, there’s an obvious, non-partisan answer. Brian Kemp gets it. “We’re going to have new cases pop up.”
Trump wants to kill Americans so that he has a sliver of a chance of improving the economy before November. He does not have direct authority to do it, so he’s trying to get it anyway by directing his followers to mount an insurrection against their state governments.
The Prez of the United State Runs a country he obvi’sly hate Senate trial was denied us Germaphobe beat by a virus And I hope that will make him irate.
See, it’s funny because Trump is famously a germaphobe and his incompetence in leading this country through the pandemic is inescapable by his normal blame-shifting and “alternative facts”. And after surviving bragging about rape, priming his “second amendment people” to assassinate his opponent, gloating about being a tax cheat, enlisting an adversary to help his campaign, trashing one of this country’s most beloved and dedicated statesman because he prefers his war heroes uncaptured, attacking families of American soldiers killed in service to our nation, defending our own very fine Nazis, et cetera, et cetera, it’s ironic that he’s getting bested by a virus. So because the pandemic provides no cover for his utter unfitness to the Presidency, the People will vote him out of office. I have confidence that will piss him off more than anything in his life, with no one to blame but himself. He’ll never admit that, of course, but he’ll know.
Oh and for Fox viewers, he hates this country because he’s a wannabe dictator and hates the very idea of democracy and everything America used to stand for. And Senate Republicans, with the exception of Mitt Romney, failed to uphold their oath to the Constitution in service to this traitor. Senate Republicans decided that instead of answering tough questions about why they support a president who extorted an American ally to fabricate evidence against American citizens, they would hold the world’s first trial with no witnesses and no documents. That’s why the joke works.
When Donald Trump got the fewest votes and was elected, God help us, the whole country wondered out loud about what he would do in a crisis. The majority of us assumed correctly that he would be an absolute nightmare, but not in my wildest dreams did I think he could possibly be this bad. At least not at the time.
But now we have a familiar pattern that some hoped would be set aside by the gravity of the situation. Unsurprisingly, “The buck stops with everybody” president that we are stuck with for another couple months has stayed true to form. Dear Leader’s godlike brilliance and foresight were hampered only by someone, anyone, else. And in showing us all the leadership we have come to expect from this walking disaster, on his very first address to the nation about this growing pandemic, he grabbed his lectern and bravely proclaimed that “I don’t take responsibility at all.”
Now we’re in the middle of the fourth month since “Coronavirus” took all the headline space away from Dear Leader. Confirmed Global COVID-19 cases just topped 2,000,000, with the United States taking a full 30%, and more than 26,000 Americans are dead.
Our president assured us that our nation’s tragic response to the pandemic did not at all lie in his deliberate mismanagement of the White House and his breathtaking incompetence, but was instead the fault of China, past Presidents, Obama, the Media, Governors, General Motors, and Hospitals. And on the same day that he fired his first shot against Dr. Anthony Fauci, he unleashed his bold plan to defund the World Health Organization. In the height of a pandemic. To assuage his fucking ego.
How any American can support this fucking terrorist is beyond my comprehension.
Since it is becoming abundantly clear that the right-wing echo chamber will follow Dear Leader’s orders to trash the one organization chartered to coordinate the global response to this pandemic, it’s important and infuriatingly futile to point out that Trump’s words are, per usual, entirely fabricated.
Trump’s newfound aggression to the WHO ignores entirely that Trump’s high praise of China’s response to the Coronavirus was central to his own downplaying of the Coronavirus threat all the way through February. It ignores that the WHO declared a global health emergency on January 30, the same day that Trump told the country that “We think it’s going to have a very good ending for it. So that I can assure you.”
Trump’s current excuse is that the WHO is subservient to China, therefore something, so he’s cutting their funding. Highly sighted by Dear Leader is that the WHO “missed the call” about human-to-human transmission by initially calling it unconfirmed.
A silly point since this fucker doesn’t understand how science or words work, I’d like to point out that “unconfirmed” means “not confirmed” and nothing more. Furthermore, scientists and science-based organizations, like the WHO, change their tune based on facts and evidence.
On January 14, when just 41 people were confirmed infected and the world was scrambling to figure out as much as they could about the virus, the WHO declared that human-to-human transmission remained unconfirmed, but their lead technician on the Coronavirus stated that, based on SARS and MERS, human-to-human transmission would be unsurprising. On January 19, the WHO reported on confirmation of human-to-human transmission and on January 21, the WHO declared that sustained human-to-human transmission will make the Coronavirus difficult to stop. The very next day, our great and glorious leader assured America that “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China.”
In holding firm in always being the last person on the planet to figure something out, Trump was busy telling America that “We have it totally under control. It’s going to be just fine.” (Jan 22, 2020). “I think the virus is going to be — it’s going to be fine.” (Feb 10, 2020). “I think it’s going to work out fine. I think when we get into April, in the warmer weather, that has a very negative effect on that and that type of a virus. So let’s see what happens, but I think it’s going to work out fine.” (Feb 19, 2020). “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. Stock Market starting to look very good to me!” (Feb 24, 2020). “When you have 15 people — and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero — that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.” (Feb 26, 2020). “It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.” (Feb 28, 2020). “No, I’m not concerned at all. No, I’m not. No, we’ve done a great job.” (Mar 7, 2020). “Just stay calm. It will go away.” (Mar 10, 2020). “I think we’re going to get through it very well.” (Mar 11, 2020). “So it could be right in that period of time where it, I say, wash — it washes through. Other people don’t like that term. But where it washes through.” (Mar 16, 2020). “This is a pandemic. I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.” (Mar 17, 2020).
And even if we do take the absurd position that Trump was misinformed or underinformed by the WHO, it was Donald Trump who left the United States’ seat on the WHO Executive Board vacant since 2018. And as he rants that China didn’t inform the United States fast enough, Donald Trump defunded the American embedded at the Chinese Center for Disease Control in July of 2019.
But now Trump fancies himself as a wartime president. His visionary leadership has let the nation’s stockpile of respirators fall into disrepair by refusing to renew the maintenance contract in 2018. He failed to stockpile protective equipment making states compete against each other for face masks. He caused an international panic by declaring that all flights to the United States would be stopped but forgot the piece about Americans being able to get home, immediately overcrowding international airports with COVID-19 carriers heading to the United States.
Despite killing the White House’s National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense, the organization President Obama created in response to the latest Ebola outbreak, which was specifically chartered to inform the White House of any emerging pandemic and biodefense hazards and coordinate a national response, Trump was officially briefed on the Coronavirus on January 3rd. He did nothing but spread false hope, completely on-brand with zero evidence, and rage against his own administration for telling him things he did not want to hear. He didn’t order any tests, he didn’t order any face masks, he didn’t form a plan, he didn’t do anything at all for 70 days. And then we got Jared Kushner. And then he fired Captain Crozier for trying to protect his crew.
What a goddamn failure. His disdain for Obama destroyed the infrastructure that Obama built to protect us from this exact problem. This is what the President of the United States sounds like when they aren’t spitefully fucking up the country:
And now Trump strips the WHO of its single largest funding source. The WHO’s role is to coordinate the global response to the Coronavirus, analyze cases and responses from different countries and governments around the world, centralize coordination between doctors and technicians developing a vaccine, oversee the production, distribution, and administration of the eventual safe and effective vaccine, coordinate testing and testing protocols, administer healthcare to poor and underdeveloped nations, and on top of all that, is still fighting to eradicate polio. We know how our white supremacist president feels about brown people in Shithole Countries, but it is obvious that this organization’s work is in our national interest. But Trump’s ego needed a scapegoat, and we are all lambs to the slaughter.
