Skip to content

Month: September 2020

This could have been us

Published by digby on September 8, 2020
A Red Cross worker sprays a pupil with a disinfectant at the entrance of a school in Dakar on June 25, 2020, on the opening day of the classes for the students in the examination class in Senegal.

But it wasn’t because we are an enormously wealthy, third-world, shithole country:

COVID-19 test results come back within 24 hours – or even faster. Hotels have been transformed into quarantine units. Scientists are racing to develop a cutting-edge, low-cost ventilator.

This isn’t the pandemic response in South Korea, New Zealand or another country held up as a model of coronavirus containment success.  

It’s Senegal, a west African country with a fragile health care system, a scarcity of hospital beds and about seven doctors for every 100,000 people. And yet Senegal, with a population of 16 million, has tackled COVID-19 aggressively and, so far, effectively. More than six months into the pandemic, the country has about 14,000 cases and 284 deaths.  

“You see Senegal moving out on all fronts: following science, acting quickly, working the communication side of the equation, and then thinking about innovation,” said Judd Devermont, director of the Africa program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a nonpartisan foreign policy think tank. 

Senegal deserves “to be in the pantheon of countries that have … responded well to this crisis, even given its low resource base,” Devermont said. 

Senegal snagged the No. 2 slot in a recent analysis looking at how 36 countries have handled the pandemic. The United States landed near the bottom: 31st of the 36 countries examined by Foreign Policy magazine, which included a mix of wealthy, middle income and developing nations. 

Senegal received strong marks for “a high degree of preparedness and a reliance on facts and science,” while the U.S. was dinged for poor public health messaging, limited testing and other shortcomings.

Senegal isn’t run by a crude, greedy, ignoramus and his party of cowardly brownosers.

Lucky them.

Donald’s charm offensive — heavy on the offensive

Published by Tom Sullivan on September 8, 2020
Trump boat parade sank Wisconsin boat at its dock along St. Croix river. Screen grab from CBS MInnesota.

He really knows how to turn on the charm.

“I’m not saying the military’s in love with me — the soldiers are, the top people in the Pentagon probably aren’t because they want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy,” Donald Trump said, insulting military commanders at a Labor Day press conference at the White House.

“In other words, they are bloodthirsty warmongers,” Jennifer Rubin observes at the Washington Post. “The notion that generals want wars reveals his utter lack of understanding of the sacred responsibility commanders have for the troops and the sacrifices their own families have endured. Only a man shamed for having avoided war could imagine that those who serve are bloodthirsty savages.”

He also imagines he is more popular than he is with soldiers. Half of active-duty troops polled by the Military Times and the Institute for Veterans and Military Families (IVMF) at Syracuse University hold an unfavorable view of Trump and 42 percent “strongly” disapprove.

He might have backed off after reports last week that he had privately called those who sacrificed their lives and limbs for their country “suckers” and “losers.” Instead, he quadrupled down.

That might be a good thing, considering military leaders quietly discuss the prospect of disobeying unlawful orders from Trump, especially in the aftermath of the election:

A critical area of concern is how the Pentagon would respond if Trump invokes the Insurrection Act to put US military troops on the streets to deal with civilian protestors as he continues to stoke divisions across the country in the run up to the election. Trump floated the idea last month and, after he first made the threat in June, Esper publicly broke with him by saying he opposed any such move.

To avoid a new showdown with the White House, for the last several weeks, top military officials — including General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — have been getting regular briefings on civil unrest in major cities across the country. The idea is to be ready with alternative plans for state-activated National Guard and other federal civilian law enforcement rather than have active duty troops potentially clash with protesters, according to several defense officials.

Meantime, Trump believes his charm is simply irresistible.

He’s so fine, there’s no tellin’ where the money went.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.

Girding one’s loins

Published by Tom Sullivan on September 8, 2020

Videographers captured clashes between Proud Boys and Black Lives Matter activists in Salem, Oregon on Monday. A caravan of Proud Boys arrived in the capitol for an American Lives Matter rally and march. Police arrested two.

Things are getting weird, at least in the Pacific Northwest.

https://twitter.com/MrOlmos/status/1303107492096794625?s=20

Daily Beast reports that the recently formed “Democracy Defense Nerve Center” is holding Zoom calls with progressive groups for planning out what might happen in the aftermath of November 3:

Over the course of two hours, participants broached the question of what the progressive political ecosystem can functionally do in a series of election scenarios. They began charting out what it would take to stand up a multi-state communications arm to fight disinformation, a training program for nonviolent civil disobedience, and the underpinnings of what one official described as “mass public unrest.” And they pored over a report from the Transition Integrity Project, a bipartisan group formed in 2019, that analyzed various election season scenarios and made clear the type of ratfuckery, corruption, and chaos that potentially was ahead. 

“The potential for violent conflict is high,” the report noted.

Some of the hurdles were straightforward: how you “occupy shit, hold space, and shut things down, not just on Election Day but for weeks,” explained one source familiar with the Democracy Defense Nerve Center operations. Others are more complicated, like what quick transportation options can be in place should poll locations mysteriously close. Others have been simply impossible to plan out. 

“I don’t know what the strategy is when armed right-wing militia dudes show up in polling places,” the same source said. “This [Kyle] Rittenhouse guy is being lionized on the right, right now. If it is being unleashed that you can shoot people and be a hero, I don’t know what preparation we can possibly do for that.”

The expression “gird your loins” comes to mind.

I never gave much thought to what it actually means. Dictionary.com explains the “expression comes from the Bible (Proverbs 31:17) and originally alluded to tucking up the traditional long robe into a girdle (that is, a belt) so it will not hamper physical activity,” i.e., fighting. Thus the inspiration for pants, says this handy how-to video.

Update: A portion of the original post has been removed by request.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.

SF kids’ BLM lemonade stand @spockosbrain

Published by Spocko on September 7, 2020

On my ride during the 100 degree record breaking heat I stopped at Spreckels Lake Model Yacht Facility in Golden Gate Park to get some water.

I sat under a tree eating my almond butter and raspberry jelly sandwich when a masked little boy approached and asked if I wanted some lemonade. As a rule, when riding my bike I always stop to buy lemonade from kids. I also always over pay. I like to chat with the kids (first to make sure there is no high fructose corn syrup in the mix) and then to find out how business is going.

After he found out they used regular sugar, I asked for the strawberry lemonade. I clipped two dollars to my makeshift social distancing tool and had him put the cup down on the ground.

I told him that after I was done I was going to try the regular lemonade.  Like a an excellent server he noticed when I had finished my first and brought me another. “This one is a special mix I made of strawberry and lemonade!” he proudly told me.

I wanted to take his photo so I asked a nearby parent for permission. She thanked me for asking and I told her I appreciated his mask wearing and politeness.

She told me about the girl who started it and how her friends joined in. In mid-sentence she stopped and said, “Excuse me, I need to keep an eye on one who’s heading to the far side of the lake.”

They sold so much lemonade that day they ran out of cups! Another mother, who I’m betting is in logistics said, “The staff is currently sourcing more cups.”  When I left they were pre-selling lemonade for later delivery.

I told one mother I wanted to write about this because it was yet another example of empathy I was seeing from the residents of San Francisco for people who didn’t look like themselves. I follow RW media and know that in some parts of the country instead of seeing the generous spirit of these kids and their parents it would bedismissed as “Virtue Signaling.”

While most of us are thinking, ‘Aww isn’t that nice!” They would question the kids’ imperfect social distancing or mask wearing in order to flip it on its head with, ‘Those liberals tell everyone what to do but they don’t do it perfectly themselves!!!”

Why do they do this? Maybe they can’t bear seeing people showing empathy for others. They are always looking for a chance to shout “Hypocrite!” Maybe they don’t want to acknowledge that if they don’t even try to do the right thing nobody can attack them for not doing it perfectly.

To me these kids and their parents are showing the “San Francisco Values” that I know, it made me proud of my fellow citizens. In the future I expect great things from these kids because they care for others.

By the way, the lemonade was delicious, especially the special mix!
Live Long And Prosper SF kids!
-Spocko

Beating the heat in a pandemic

Published by digby on September 7, 2020

That picture is of Santa Monica Beach this weekend. We’re having a record breaking heatwave so you cannot blame anyone for wanting to be at the beach to cool off. And being outside in a crowd is certainly better than being inside in a crowd.

And keep in mind that the perspective in these shots can give a distorted view. However, I can personally attest to the fact that the beaches are very crowded and so is the beachwalk and there are big crowds in town. The good news is that many, if not all, are wearing masks.

But damn. It’s kind of scary:

That was Saturday. This one was yesterday. It was 95 degrees at the beach.

US-WEATHER-HEAT

We got unlucky with this awful heatwave over the holiday which is both driving people outside in big crowds and bringing people inside in air conditioning in smaller crowds.

It wasn’t just us. This happened all over the country this weekend. Lots and lots of partying. Trump frittered away the first six months and now I think people are just saying “fuck it.” Since nothing seems to improve I suppose that’s sort of understandable. Epidemiologists say this is common and that’s one reason why they wanted to get the virus under control over the summer when it’s easier and they could face the fall and winter from a lower baseline. But no, we did it Trump’s way. (“We call it herd”.)

I have a bad feeling about the next few months …

More boat parade carnage

Published by digby on September 7, 2020
Sinking Ships Deserting Rats Before They Are Eaten Away | New Eastern Outlook

This metaphor is just a little bit too on the nose:

A boat parade in support of President Donald Trump Saturday on the St. Croix River left more than one homeowner contending with property damage.

Keith Smith lives on the river in River Falls, Wisconsin.

“The river was flooded with boats,” Smith said. “Big boats, small boats, all kinds of boats.”

The powerful display of a few hundred boats had some people watching from their docks very impressed, like Trump supporter Ron Claxton.

“It was awesome. It couldn’t have been a better scene to have all those supporters of Trump out there,” Claxton said.

Smith didn’t have time to ogle the spectacle.

“The waves were probably four to five footers pounding my boat into the dock,” Smith said.

The whip holding his docked boat in place snapped, and he says he fought violently for an hour and a half to keep it from sinking.

“Boaters all know they’re responsible for their waves, but nobody cared,” Smith said. “They just kept going and going and hooting and hollering. Luckily I didn’t slip and go off the side of the dock.”

One of Keith’s neighbors wasn’t as fortunate, and did lose his boat.

“There was so much wake from the boats that it actually lifted my dock up three or four feet, and the waves came underneath my floating dock,” he said. “The waves overwhelmed the boat.”

The neighbor says he’s never seen so much water traffic in his backyard. Both property owners say they have no problem with Trump supporters showing out for their candidate. Their issue is with the disregard for boating laws and etiquette.

“It’s not anything political,” Smith said. “Boaters know the laws and the rules, and I don’t understand why they wouldn’t follow them and help their fellow boater.”

Lol. They’re Trump voters. Why would you expect otherwise?

The cult is metastasizing

Published by digby on September 7, 2020

I’m sure Trump is very proud of this. After all, he is very pleased that the QAnon nuts “like him very much”:

Just before hundreds of far-right activists recently tried to storm the German Parliament, one of their leaders revved up the crowd by conjuring President Trump.

“Trump is in Berlin!” the woman shouted from a small stage, as if to dedicate the imminent charge to him.

She was so convincing that several groups of far-right activists later showed up at the American Embassy and demanded an audience with Mr. Trump. “We know he’s in there!” they insisted.

Mr. Trump was neither in the embassy nor in Germany that day — and yet there he was. His face was emblazoned on banners, T-shirts and even on Germany’s pre-1918 imperial flag, popular with neo-Nazis in the crowd of 50,000 who had come to protest Germany’s pandemic restrictions. His name was invoked by many with messianic zeal.

It was only the latest evidence that Trump is emerging as a kind of cult figure in Germany’s increasingly varied far-right scene.

“Trump has become a savior figure, a sort of great redeemer for the German far right,” said Miro Dittrich, an expert on far-right extremism at the Berlin-based Amadeu-Antonio-Foundation.

Germany — a nation generally supportive of a government that has handled the pandemic better than most — may seem an unlikely place for Mr. Trump to gain such a status. Few Western nations have had a more contentious relationship with Mr. Trump than Germany, whose leader, Chancellor Angela Merkel, a pastor’s daughter and scientist, is his opposite in terms of values and temperament. Opinion polls show that Mr. Trump is deeply unpopular among a broad majority of Germans.

But his message of disruption — his unvarnished nationalism and tolerance of white supremacists coupled with his skepticism of the pandemic’s dangers — is spilling well beyond American shores, extremism watchers say.

In a fast-expanding universe of disinformation, that message holds real risks for Western democracies, they say, blurring the lines between real and fake news, allowing far-right groups to extend their reach beyond traditional constituencies and seeding the potential for violent radicalization.

Mr. Trump’s appeal to the political fringe has now added a new and unpredictable element to German politics at a time when the domestic intelligence agency has identified far-right extremism and far-right terrorism as the biggest risks to German democracy.

The authorities have only recently woken up to a problem of far-right infiltration in the police and military. Over the past 15 months, far-right terrorists killed a regional politician on his front porch near the central city of Kassel, attacked a synagogue in the eastern city of Halle and shot dead nine people of immigrant descent in the western city of Hanau. Mr. Trump featured in the manifesto of the Hanau killer, who praised his “America First” policy.

In Germany, as in the United States, Mr. Trump has become an inspiration to these fringe groups. Among them are not only long-established hard-right and neo-Nazi movements, but also now followers of QAnon, the internet conspiracy theory popular among some of Mr. Trump’s supporters in the United States that hails him as a hero and liberator.

Germany’s QAnon community, barely existent when the pandemic first hit in March, may now be the biggest outside the United States along with Britain, analysts who track its most popular online channels say.

Matthias Quent, an expert on Germany’s far right and the director of an institute that studies democracy and civil society, calls it the “Trumpification of the German far right.”

This is what Steve Bannon was trying to foment. Too bad he’s been indicted on fraud charges or he’d be able to go over to Germany and advise the new movement.

Labor Day “press briefing” highlights

Published by digby on September 7, 2020

If you happen to be one of the lucky people who don’t have to watch these shitshows on a regular basis, this one was a pretty good example of how demented the president of the United States has become as his desperation grows.

He persists in believing that the more people see of him the better he will do. And it’s true that he’s got about 50 million people in this country mesmerized by his bizarre public performances in which he demonstrates that he’s a crude, dishonest ignoramus.

This is what we have to grapples with as a country if a miracle happens and he actually leaves office. How do we deal with that?

What happened to all that money?

Published by digby on September 7, 2020
Donald Trump Is A Rich Man's Idea Of A Rich Man | by Katherine Cross | The Establishment | Medium

Why are they pinching pennies?

Money concerns are very real for President Trump’s campaign — an unusual predicament for a sitting president, and one that worries veteran Republican operatives, with Trump so far behind in swing states as the race climaxes.

Why it matters: The campaign’s view is that Trump will get his message out, and he depends less on paid media than normal politicians. But the number of states Trump has to worry about has actually grown, and Joe Biden’s massive August fundraising haul has given his campaign a lift as early voting begins.

The New York Times leads today’s paper with a big Labor Day scene-setter with several intriguing references to money problems for Trump:“The light television spending and advertising blackouts in some key states have mystified allies,” The Times reports.

Trump is expected to increase television spending next week, but several Republicans said that Bill Stepien, Mr. Trump’s campaign manager since July, was taking a cautious approach after the former leadership spent huge sums on television and digital ads earlier this year, to no discernible effect.”

Last Monday, AP’s Brian Slodysko reported that the Trump campaign had pulled most TV ads over the previous week, ceding the airwaves to Biden, who was outspending Trump by more than 10 to 1.

Trump and the Republicans have raised a boatload of money. What have they spent it on? Is it all one big grift? (Don’t answer that …)

That’s as of July. I don’t think they’ve reported their haul for August. The Biden campaign raised a record shattering 365 million so maybe Trump’s hands feel small so they aren’t reporting it. (Or they’re trying to find a way to make it look like he collected more.)

I read somewhere that they are spending 10 million a week on (deceptive) facebook ads. Maybe that’s one place where the money has gone. But it’s September. People are already starting to vote in some places. This makes no sense.

This New York Times article mentioned above delves deeply into the current thinking in the two campaigns. Whether it’s real or spin in always hard to know but It’s interesting nonetheless. The Trump campaign has completely given up on the popular vote, which makes sense since he is highly unlikely to win it. So they are gaming out otheir strategy based upon winning the electoral college without it, which it really should be emphasized is a new thing. Not that campaigns didn’t always game out the electoral college and aim for that victory, but to hope for an inside straight like 2000 and 2016 is new. The GOP has clearly settled comfortably into the idea that they can rule this country from their cramped, racist , white minority and that’s just fine.

The undemocratic chickens in our system have come home to roost.