Trump says

President Donald Trump on Thursday said “we are not closing our country” if the U.S. is hit by a second wave of coronavirus infections.

“People say that’s a very distinct possibility, it’s standard,” Trump said when asked about a second wave during a tour of a Ford factory in Michigan.

Oh it’s standard; well that’s ok then. By the same token, it’s standard for fire to burn, so we’re not going to evacuate the building if the alarm goes off. Just deal with it.

“We are going to put out the fires. We’re not going to close the country,” Trump said. “We can put out the fires. Whether it is an ember or a flame, we are going to put it out. But we are not closing our country.”

But we’re not going to put out the fires. We’re not putting them out now, with lockdown in place, so we’re sure as hell not going to be putting them out later if social distancing is abandoned. It’s not true that we can put out the fires; the fires are raging, and the death toll is over 90 thousand and rising.

Trump has previously said there may be “embers” of the pandemic that persist in the U.S. past the summer, but he maintains that they will be stamped out. Health experts, including those in the Trump administration, have said that the virus will likely continue to spread through the fall and winter, and may become even more difficult to combat once flu season begins.

They won’t be stamped out. He is such a moron. They won’t be stamped out because there is no treatment yet. They will burn and spread and leave a smoking desolation. This stupid greedy stupid man doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Another one of these:

Stephanie Douet says more on her blog today:

I have just been expelled from Outpost studios and membership for writing this post that their Committee describes as ‘explicitly transphobic and discriminatory’ and ‘causing discomfort and offence’.

My post may have been ignorant or insensitive, but it was neither transphobic or discriminatory, or was it intentionally hurtful.

My question is this: how is anyone ever gain any meaningful understanding, see someone else’s point of view or change their mind – without asking questions?

She includes a communication from OUTPOST’s board of trustees explaining why they have decided to shun her.

April 15th 2020

Dear Stephanie,

I am writing to inform you that your position as a studio holder at OUTPOST studios, and as a member of OUTPOST has been discussed by the trustees after a public online post you made was highlighted to us. The post contained explicitly transphobic statements failing to show respect and consideration to others. OUTPOST does not tolerate discrimination against individual’s protected characteristics.

What was it she said again?

I want to float my view that for someone to want to change gender is a failure of imagination and visual awareness. If you feel you are in the wrong body, surgically altering that body is not the only possible solution. There is more to being a man or woman than just looking like a man or woman.

For example, David Bowie was a pioneering explorer of what it is possible to do with the raw materials of flesh and hair, as are fashion designers from the wilder shores of creativity, playfully liberating themselves from the binary with cloth and face paint.

Can we instead consider the question ‘what does being a woman/man look like?’ – but consider it only having spent an hour looking through Vogue?” – 10th February 2020

She’s talking about, and thinking about, the ideas behind calling people “transgender.” It’s not “phobic” to do that. It’s more the other way around: it’s thoughtphobic, understandingphobic, analysisphobic, truthphobic to shun and punish people for trying to think about and analyze and understand concepts. Transgenderism is a concept, and it’s a very new and very rapidly expanding and enveloping concept, yet we are not allowed to think about and talk about and question the concept. That is ridiculous; it’s Trump-level ridiculous.

The censoring shunning Board continues, starting with another paragraph from Douet:

“I don’t have a moral or ethical stance with regard to trans matters – I know little about it – it just seems to open the door to possibilities of grief, pain and disappointment, all the things you want to protect your loved ones from” – 14th February 2020

We felt that this breached the studio license agreement in regards to the Key issue of compliance ‘(q) To have a duty of care towards other licensees, the committee and the building’ and jeopardizes OUTPOST’s “equality of opportunity and equal treatment of all persons involved with the organization” as stated in our Equal Opportunities Policy. As you are an active and outspoken member of the OUTPOST community on Facebook and beyond, this means that statements like this are not private but in fact are highly visible to others and to other studio holders. It is for these reasons we are also considering removing your membership of the charity.

It’s as if they’ve all been hypnotized and drugged and threatened and held hostage.

There is further correspondence; the Board’s side of the debate does not become any more reasonable or fair or adult.

Sure enough, Donnie Defiant didn’t wear a mask at the Ford factory.

Aw look, isn’t that cute, there’s Jared, too, with his mask on the table in front of him. I suppose that’s the Princess on his left – can’t tell about her mask.

Oh, darn, because the plan was totally for a permanent lockdown. Everybody to get from street, forever.

We’re paying for his campaign rally.

Well, yes, but he doesn’t understand what the purpose is.

Golly.

So he just up and admits right out in the open that he thinks Fox is supposed to be helping him get re-elected.

Trump is on his way to Ypsilanti as we speak.

Hilariously, the transcript crawl renders the question about wearing a mask as “You’re a mess today at the Ford plant”? No doubt it will be corrected any minute now.

Anyway Trump of course doesn’t say he will, and does instantly change the subject. “I wanna NORmalize,” he says idiotically. Well duh, Sherlock, don’t we all; we’re not doing this because we like it. We wanna normalize too, but we also wanna stay alive so that we can enjoy the normal when it comes back, and we also wanna not kill other people, so that they can enjoy the normal when it comes back. The reason things are not normal right now is because of a novel virus that is highly contagious (though not nearly as highly contagious as the 1918 flu) and all too often fatal. Wanting things to be normal again does precisely zero to disempower that virus.

Trump squawks on:

Wunna the other things I wanna do is get the churches open. The churches are not being treated with respect by a lot of the Democrat governors. I wanna get our churches open, an wur gunna take a very strong pozzisshun on that very soon.

So I guess his plan is to tell all the governors they have to exempt churches from the no large gatherings rules, in the hope that tens of thousands of church-goers will die in the next couple of months. Seems a bizarre plan, even for him.

Michigan’s Attorney General has asked Trump to follow the rules.

Ahead of President Trump’s planned trip Thursday to a Ford manufacturing plant in Michigan, the state’s attorney general implored him to wear a face mask on his tour, citing a “legal responsibility” — and said he would be asked not to return if he does not do so.

In an open letter addressed to Trump, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel (D) asked the president, who has consistently appeared barefaced in public and at the White House, to adhere to executive orders issued by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) and Ford’s policy mandating masks to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus. Trump is scheduled to visit a factory southwest of Detroit that has been repurposed to manufacture ventilators.

The workers in the factory don’t necessarily want to get the virus from Trump. A normal person wouldn’t want to risk infecting other people.

“While my Department will not act to prevent you from touring Ford’s plant, I ask that while you are on tour you respect the great efforts of the men and women at Ford — and across this State — by wearing a facial covering,” Nessel wrote. “It is not just the policy of Ford, by virtue of the Governor’s Executive Orders. It is currently the law of this State.”

Asked during an appearance Thursday morning on CNN what she would do if Trump doesn’t comply, Nessel voiced some skepticism about whether he would.

“If we’ve learned nothing over the last several years of President Trump in the White House, it’s that he doesn’t have the same level of legal accountability as everybody else,” Nessel said. “Honestly, if he fails to wear a mask, he’s going to be asked not to return to any enclosed facilities inside our state.”

That is to say, if we’ve learned anything about Trump it’s that he considers himself exempt from any and all laws, rules, norms, and expectations that apply to everyone else, and that he sees himself that way because he cares about no one and nothing outside himself.

A Ford spokesperson told the Associated Press earlier this week that the company informed the White House that it requires everyone in factories to wear masks. But the spokesperson noted, “The White House has its own safety and testing policies in place and will make its own determination,” leaving unanswered the question of whether Trump will cover his face Thursday.

That’s not ok. The requirement exists to protect people, and the White House has no right to have “its own policies” such that Trump gets to endanger people. It’s that simple. Trump doesn’t get to visit a Ford factory with an assault rifle and shoot a bunch of people, and he doesn’t get to refuse to wear a mask.

Bad combination:

Floodwaters unleashed by a dam failure in central Michigan have reached a Dow Chemical facility and Superfund site, the company admitted Wednesday, raising the possibility that the flood could turn into a full-fledged environmental catastrophe.

Because the flood could contain toxic gunk, kind of like the Flint water supply.

The Times reports:

With much of Midland expected to be underwater by later on Wednesday, it was likely that the floodwaters would breach the levees designed to protect the Dow compound, said Allen Burton, a professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Michigan. This meant that, at the site itself, flooding could reach storage tanks, potentially releasing chemicals onto farmland and residential areas that line the river downstream, he said.

The Superfund cleanup sites are downriver from the century-old plant, which for decades had released chemicals into the nearby waterways. The concern downriver, Dr. Burton said, is that contaminated sediments on the river floor could be stirred up by the floodwaters, spreading pollution downstream and over the riverbanks.

Take a bow, Don.

Union of Concerned Scientists research scientist Jacob Carter told Common Dreams that President Donald Trump’s assault on environmental regulations bears some of the blame for the current catastrophe.

“This is another example of the Trump administration putting vulnerable communities in harms way by sidelining science” said Carter. “There was an Executive Order that called for Superfund sites to update their infrastructure to protect them from future extreme floods, but it was trashed by the Trump administration a week before Hurricane Harvey hit.”

Because why wouldn’t we want Superfund sites to be vulnerable to floods?

Mitch is all in an uproar because workers are being CODDLED. He’s not having it.

Mitch McConnell promised House Republicans Wednesday that the beefed up unemployment benefits enacted earlier this spring “will not be in the next bill.”

The Senate majority leader told the House GOP minority in an afternoon phone call that he is comfortable waiting to see how the nearly $3 trillion in coronavirus spending previously approved plays out before moving forward on the next relief legislation. And he told them that the ultimate end-product won’t look anything like House Democrats’ $3 trillion package passed last week, according to a person briefed on the call.

Well of course he’s comfortable. He’s been milking his job for $$$ for years. Nice to be Mitch but not everyone gets that kind of comfort.

McConnell warned against trial lawyer “vultures” ready to file lawsuits and said Republicans are “going to have to clean up the Democrats’ crazy policy that is paying people more to remain unemployed than they would earn if they went back to work,” McConnell said.

Starve the peasants!

Right, because the only possible reason to have a woman as a running mate is because he wants to fuck her. Good job of insulting your own sex, KC.

Michigan can’t catch a break.

As if things weren’t already bad enough in Michigan, on Tuesday, dams in Edenville and Sanford flooded. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer declared a state of emergency in Midland County and ordered all residents to evacuate the area immediately.

“If you have not evacuated the area, do so now and get somewhere safe,” Whitmer said in a statement. “This is unlike anything we’ve seen in Midland County.”

It may be unlike anything we’ve ever seen, but federal regulators saw this coming. As other outlets have reported, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has long warned the owners to increase capacity of the Edenville dam’s spillways to prevent a flood, going as far back as 1999. The agency issued another warning in 2004 when the ownership changed hands to a company called Boyce Hydro LLC, and another in 2017, when it declared the dam to be a “high hazard.” In 2018, the FERC revoked Boyce Hydro’s license, prompting years of litigation.

Meanwhile Trump is busy saving us from all this pesky government regulation.

The BBC reports:

A Toronto teenager has become the first Canadian ever charged with carrying out an “incel”-inspired terror attack.

The 17-year-old boy is accused of fatally stabbing a woman in February.

Incel, short for “involuntarily celibate,” is an online subculture focused on members’ perceived inability to find romantic or sexual partners.

Well, that’s a very forgiving way of putting it. It’s an online subculture focused on the evil of women who think they have a right to refuse demands for sex. It’s a male online subculture that rages at women’s sexual autonomy.

The suspect, who cannot be named because he is a minor, had already been charged with murder shortly after the incident, which took place at an erotic massage parlour…

When Toronto police learned the crime may have been motivated by an extremist ideology, they contacted Canada’s federal RCMP, which ultimately decided to press terrorism charges.

It’s not all that far-fetched to see rape as a form of terrorism against women. It’s not just a quick and convenient way to grab sex, at least not always. It’s also an expression of misogyny and a warning to The Others.

“Incel” is short for “involuntarily celibate”. It generally – though not exclusively – refers to online groups of men who feel they are unable to enter into sexual relationships. They blame women for their grievances, which they discuss in internet forums.

Again, it’s not so much that the men “feel they are unable to enter into sexual relationships” – it’s that they feel rage and hatred toward women who refuse to Put Out. Women are withholding bitches who have that thing between their legs but won’t share it.

In 2018, Alek Minassian allegedly drove a van into a busy Toronto commercial street killing 10 people and wounding 16.

He later told police the attack was retribution for years of rejection by women, and that he identified as a member of the incel movement. He was charged with 10 counts of first-degree murder and 16 counts of attempted murder, but he was not charged with terrorism.

…

Minassian was allegedly inspired by Elliot Rodger, who killed six people in a stabbing and shooting spree in Isla Vista, California, in May 2014.

Because those sorority bitches wouldn’t spread for him.

Trump is getting excited about the G7 summit and toying with the idea that maybe just maybe it should be in person after all (so that he can insult people to their faces, dammit, like a real American).

“Now that our Country is ‘Transitioning back to Greatness’, I am considering rescheduling the G-7, on the same or similar date, in Washington, D.C., at the legendary Camp David,” Trump wrote in a tweet. “The other members are also beginning their COMEBACK. It would be a great sign to all – normalization!”

Yeah! Never mind that the curve isn’t flattening! Let’s do this thing!

Trump is clearly eager to look ahead to the next stage of reopening the country, but the number of US coronavirus cases and deaths continues to climb. The country’s death toll is expected to hit 100,000 in the coming days.

With that in mind, it’s hard to imagine that world leaders will feel comfortable traveling to the US as it continues to grapple with the crisis.

Wimps! Sissies! Weenies! They need to get over here and round up some cattle in a thunderstorm, that’d show them.

Aw, now the Trumpies are ruining a perfectly good misogynist nickname by appropriating it from all those right-on lefty dudes. No fair!

It’s SO KAREN to tell Twitter to do something just because the president of the United States called some guy a murderer. Who does she think she is??

Don Junior is using it??? Aw, no, that’s got to ruin it.

Did god make a clerical error?

35 of the 92 people (38%) who attended services at a rural Arkansas church March 6–11 tested positive for the coronavirus, ultimately killing three, according to a case study released Tuesday by the CDC.

…

Contact tracing found that an additional 26 people were infected after interacting with attendees of the church, and one person from that group died.

The CDC has mostly left it to the states to decide whether churches should close or not. It’s not hard to figure out why – who needs the hassle?

In Arkansas, the state banned indoor gatherings of more than 10 people, but exempted religious services.

Why? Because the state doesn’t want to tangle with godbotherers, or because the state actually thinks god will wipe out all contagion inside the church and also as far as the parking lot?

Kentucky and Kansas both had federal court rulings against their governors’ orders to temporarily ban mass gatherings at religious services.

Getting the virus at the supermarket would be silly, but getting it at church would be ad majorem dei gloriam.

Oh look, more filth.

In yet another assault on checks and balances, President Trump abruptly removed the Department of Transportation’s (DOT) independent watchdog late Friday – the same night he announced plans to fire the State Department Inspector General (IG). At DOT, the acting IG was overseeing a high profile investigation of Secretary Chao’s alleged favoritism benefiting her husband Senator Mitch McConnell’s political prospects, but has now been replaced with a political appointee from within the agency. The acting IG’s ouster calls into question the future of the Chao-McConnell investigation, other critical oversight, and whether the watchdog was dismissed for unearthing damaging information. 

This move is the latest salvo of Trump’s assault on oversight. And it looks like the President made sure to cover all his bases to block accountability, not only nominating an IG to succeed the experienced watchdog who held the post, but also demoting the acting IG who was investigating Chao, and installing a political appointee to serve in his place while the Senate considers a permanent replacement. To make matters worse, Trump’s pick to be the new acting IG, Howard “Skip” Elliott, already has a job overseeing the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), an office he will now also be in charge of policing. 

Trump’s decision to sideline DOT acting IG Mitch Behm (who has 17 years of experience with OIG) was lost in the shuffle of outrage following the announcement that Trump planned to fire the State Department IG, but potential conflicts of interest abound. The most high profile is the DOT OIG’s review of allegations that Secretary Chao gave Senator McConnell’s constituents special treatment and helped steer millions of federal dollars to Kentucky as he is facing low approval ratings and a tough reelection bid. 

Are we drowned yet?

He had a reason.

There was a specific reason for President Trump’s sudden announcement on Monday that he was taking the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine. His goal was to undermine a whistleblower who had raised questions about the administration’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, a whistleblower who claimed that it was his skepticism about the utility of the drug that led to his firing. How could hydroxychloroquine be as dangerous as former top vaccine official Rick Bright suggested, Trump offered, given that he himself was using it?

Ah. So by the same token, if Trump gets some disinfectant inside his body, that will show it’s safe. Somebody point that out to him.

“The only negative I’ve heard was the study where they gave it — was it VA?” Trump said, referring to the Department of Veterans Affairs. “With, you know, people that aren’t big Trump fans gave it.” He then went on to express surprise at this perceived disloyalty from VA, given the legislation he had signed to support it. (The legislation he mentioned was in fact first signed by President Barack Obama.)

It’s funny that he’s such a belligerent insulting mean shithead yet he’s surprised when some people don’t like him. I wonder if anyone actually likes him.

Speaking to reporters Tuesday afternoon after a meeting with Republican senators, he again disparaged the study.

“If you look at the one survey, the only bad survey, they were giving it to people that were in very bad shape. They were very old. Almost dead,” Trump said. He described the study as “a Trump-enemy statement.”

A few hours later, again pressed on his use of the drug for an unproven purpose, Trump again suggested that opposition to it was simply political.

“There was a false study done where they gave it to very sick people, extremely sick people, people that were ready to die,” he said. “It was given by obviously not friends of the administration.” He later added that it “was a phony study and it’s very dangerous to do it.”

Unlike getting disinfectant inside the body.

The Trump Show resumed after all the burgers and ice cream were gone.

But wait! It turns out he does respond to her!

Just minutes after saying he would not respond to Nancy Pelosi calling him “morbidly obsese,” Trump unexpectedly unleashed an attack against the House speaker.

“Pelosi is a sick woman,” Trump said while answering a reporter’s question about his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn. “She’s got a lot of problems, a lot of mental problems.”

But he doesn’t respond to her. Make a note of it.

He says a lotttttttt of stupid shit in that one clip. The question is “Why is it ok for you to promote the use of this drug [Trump interjects “K”] when you’re not a doctor?” Trump starts with “Welll I’ve worked with doctors an if you look at the one survey, the only bad survey, they were giving it to people who were in very bad shape, they were very old, almost dead…”

Trump went to Capitol Hill to have lunch with the Republicans, and guess what he didn’t wear.

But his long run of not-mask wearing may be about to hit a wall.

Trump is scheduled to tour a Ford Motors plant in Michigan tomorrow, and the company has said it will require him to wear a mask for the visit.

That should be interesting.

Pence says he’s not taking hydroxychloroquine – but also that he totally would.

According to the Fox News reporter who interviewed the vice president, Mike Pence said he was not taking hydroxychloroquine because his doctor had not recommended it.

But Pence added that he “wouldn’t hesitate” to use hydroxychloroquine, even though there has been little evidence that the anti-malaria drug is an effective treatment against coronavirus.

More to the point, even though people with medical knowledge say it would be dangerous to take it. Pence is too cowardly and self-serving to warn against taking it even though, unlike Trump, he probably has some clue about why it’s not a good plan.

In a memo last night, Trump’s physician, Dr Sean Conley, said of the president’s use of the drug, “After numerous discussions he and I had regarding the evidence for and against the use of hydroxychloroquine, we concluded the potential benefit from treatment outweighed the relative risks.”

That makes no sense. Trump is taking it as a prophylactic rather than treatment, and anyway how did “we” arrive at that conclusion? What would that even mean? Trump knows nothing about medication or biology or any other relevant body of knowledge, so what relevance could his “conclusion” have? That physician is a lousy rotten example of a physician.