Thankfully one person alone cannot tarnish something beyond repair. Trump is an oaf and a buffoon. And anybody with a brain realises that he basically strolled into the office of President on the backs of the stupid and guillable. If it's a one off thing, people (hopefully) will chaulk it up to America had a brain fart, elected an idiot and our Republic will correct itself accordingly. Next President goes on an apology tour (a real one, not the fake type the Right said Obama did) and reasssures the world that the grownups are back in charge. And then takes a pen and restores every protection/regulation Trump dismantled.
If he is re-elected or someone equally as dump is elected, then the office is officially fucked. And we only have ourselves to blame.
Pandemic threatens nation and the world.... "Nothing to worry about, it will just go away, doesn't matter at all" (a few months go by) "ok ok we will do something.."
Twitter calls President on a lie... "EXECUTIVE ORDER THE NEXT DAY GOD DAMN IT!"
So the US Attorney says Trump is well aware of the ongoing investigation into what's happening in Minneapolis, not a single peep from him himself on the whole thing going on there, hmm wonder why... Can't focus on real issues, covid 19. Nope, gotta focus on twitter being evil for proving he's a liar. Worst President ever.
UPDATE: Lindsey Graham is still a piece of shit.
Graham urges senior judges to step aside so Trump, GOP can replace them
Boy, the GOP really is just trying to throw so much bullshit out at once along with Trump that we can't keep track of it all, eh?
Still a little early for my update, but here's why the Wisconsin GOP-led Supreme Court can go get fucked.
Wisconsin reports record number of new coronavirus cases, deaths
This is absolutely a result of the Wisconsin Supreme Court striking down the governor's Stay At Home order. Trump's insistence that states open before they are prepared to do so is still getting people killed. His pathetic "THEY WERE MEAN TO ME" EO that is DOA is just a distraction from this.
My hope is that people will pay closer attention in the future.
I'm not sure if it helped Trump ultimately win the day, but there certainly was an air of "Trump can't possibly win/What's the worst that could happen?" going into the 2016 election. These past four years have been a painful reminder that yes, morons can win and yes, things CAN go wrong because of it.
If Trump loses, the democrats really need to go on a sweep of "this man was awful, he was a failure, and THIS nominated republican in your state supported him!" The republicans need to be afraid for their positions: they sold their souls to the devil, and now they need to, electorally, burn.
“Do not lose time on daily trivialities. Do not dwell on petty detail. For all of these things melt away and drift apart within the obscure traffic of time. Live well and live broadly. You are alive and living now. Now is the envy of all of the dead.” ~ Emily3, World of Tomorrow
Words to live by.
I can think of 100,000 reasons this statement is a lie.
Speaking of which, Snopes.
Trump Continues to Claim Broad Powers He Doesn’t Have
"That's a wall of text. Why didn't you quote only the important stuff?"Threatening to shut down Twitter for flagging false content. Claiming he can “override” governors who dare to keep churches closed to congregants. Asserting the “absolute authority” to force states to reopen, even when local leaders say it’s too soon.
As he battles the coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump has been claiming extraordinarily sweeping powers that legal scholars say the president simply doesn’t have. And he has repeatedly refused to spell out the legal basis for those powers.
“It’s not that the president doesn’t have a remarkable amount of power to respond to a public health crisis. It’s that these are not the powers he has,” said Stephen Vladeck, a University of Texas School of Law professor who specializes in constitutional and national security law.
First it was Trump’s assertion that he could force governors to reopen their economies before they felt ready. “When somebody’s the president of the United States, the authority is total,” he claimed.
Trump soon dropped the threat, saying he would instead leave such decisions to the states. But he has revived the idea in recent days as he has tried to pressure governors to allow churches and other places of worship to hold in-person services, even where stay-at-home orders and other limits on large gatherings remain in effect.
Asked what authority he had to enforce such a mandate, Trump was cagey.
“I can absolutely do it if I want to,” he said. “We have many different ways where I can override them and if I have to, I’ll do that.”
The White House declined to spell out any specific statute, but White House spokesman Judd Deere said in a statement that “every decision the president has made throughout this pandemic has been to protect the health and safety of the American people.”
“Getting the nation back to work, back to sporting events, back to churches, back to restaurants, and doing so safely and responsibly is the president’s shared goal with governors and the private sector, but the cure cannot be worse than the disease,” Deere said.
Trump “certainly does not have the power under any reasonable reading of the Constitution or federalism to order places of worship to open,” said Matthew Dallek, a historian at George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management who specializes in the use of presidential power.
But Dallek said that just because Trump doesn’t have the authority to do most of the things he’s threatened, doesn’t mean he won’t, for instance, try to sign executive orders taking such action anyway — even if they are later struck down by the courts.
“What has limited Trump previously? Not very much. So I think he will do whatever seems to be in his best interest at any particular moment,” Dallek said.
Trump, he said, also could try to abuse his powers to leverage other instruments of government, from the Department of Justice to the IRS, to push for investigations or launch regulatory crackdowns to punish states, cities or companies. Trump also has showed he’s willing to exercise powers that modern presidents have largely avoided, including his recent purging of inspectors general.
When the president declared the pandemic a national emergency back in March, he activated more than 100 different statutory authorities. Yet Trump, said Vladeck, has failed to exercise many of them.
“I think one of the real ironies of this entire moment is that the president actually has a remarkable array of powers that he hasn’t brought to bear. All the while he continues to claim stunning powers that he doesn’t have,” he said.
That includes the Defense Production Act, which Trump could have used far more aggressively to force companies to mass produce supplies including masks and ventilators. Instead, he used it in more limited ways. And while the Justice Department has threatened to join lawsuits against states that move too slowly, a statement of interest filed by the department in Illinois last week didn’t raise any federal constitutional claims.
Even if he doesn’t follow through on threats, Trump’s statements still can have consequences as he uses his bully pulpit.
“He’s still trying to wield his often outrageous interpretations of the law as a cudgel to bludgeon others,” said Joshua Geltzer, founding executive director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown University Law Center.
Trump is now on a tear against Twitter after the social media platform, which he uses to speak directly to his more than 80 million followers, slapped fact-check alerts on two of his tweets claiming that mail-in voting is fraudulent.
On Thursday, he was preparing to sign an executive order aimed at curbing liability protections for social media companies.
“Twitter is completely stifling FREE SPEECH, and I, as President, will not allow it to happen!” he tweeted Tuesday. A day later Trump added that: “Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices. We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen.”
While Congress could pass legislation further regulating social media platforms, Trump “has no such authority,” said former federal judge Michael McConnell, who now directs Stanford Law School’s Constitutional Law Center. “He is just venting.”
“There is absolutely no First Amendment issue with Twitter adding a label to the president’s tweets,” added Jameel Jaffer, executive director at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, who won the case that prevents Trump from banning his critics from his Twitter feed. “The only First Amendment issue here arises from the president’s threat to punish Twitter in some way for fact-checking his statements.”
But Jack Balkin, a Yale University law professor and First Amendment expert, said that’s not Trump’s point.
“This is an attempt by the president to, as we used to say in basketball, work the refs,” he said. “He’s threatening and cajoling with the idea that these folks in their corporate board rooms will think twice about what they’re doing, so they won’t touch him.”
For Rutgers University media professor John Pavlik, who studies online misinformation, Trump is simply trying to fire up his political base.
“For Trump,” he said, “this is about politics.”
I did. This is a good summation of Trump's dictatorial power grab -- one that's doomed to fail in any serious challenge. He doesn't have the powers he claims to have. I's either a show, more precisely, when "they" stop him he can claim it's rigged.
Simply put, Trump can only campaign and run on a contradiction. He has to both be the most powerful, most bigly, most yugest and most smrt of all the people ever ever, but also, Someone Else has to be able to shut him down so that everything that happened was their fault not his. He has to be omnipotent, yet blocked. I will further add "I could do it, but I don't want to" must also be taken as allowing things he doesn't like to continue. In other words, incompetence.
103,330 dead, 1,223 on the 28th (GMT), no word yet on how many have died due to Trump pushing conspiracy theories on Twitter.
22,658 new cases and ACTIVE cases continues going up. As I linked before, cases are on the rise in Wisconsin where Trump's GOP-led Supreme Court overturned the Democratic governor's "Stay At Home" order. Texas and other areas also continues to go up in cases and deaths.
Fuck Florida (it's not "47" every day now but it's almost always within a stone's throw each time--44, 49, 45, 43, 44, etc. etc. as if someone said "Hey, let's not make it TOO obvious").
From what I'm seeing it appears we'll be above a 1k dead per day average for a little while longer, at least. Mainly due to the new outbreaks.
Don't let Trump's DOA EO distract from the rest of the TRUMP SHITSHOW.
Stay safe, folks.
But he's not a moron.
This move, this sudden and unethical move right now, is an indication he knows 2020's election will not be his best friend. And I don't mean he personally could lose his office (he might), I mean he legit fears the flipping of the Senate and the Oval Office.
And we all know how turtles hate to be flipped.
- - - Updated - - -
What do you think the real numbers are? We know the official numbers are being hidden.
Folly and fakery have always been with us... but it has never before been as dangerous as it is now, never in history have we been able to afford it less. - Isaac Asimov
Every damn thing you do in this life, you pay for. - Edith Piaf
The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. - Orwell
No amount of belief makes something a fact. - James Randi
Infected we'll never know. Not just because of numbers being fudged but also because of asymptomatic people never knowing they had it or people who are afraid of losing their jobs/not having enough to cover medical costs so not reporting being sick. I'm sure it's SEVERAL thousand more a week than is reported.
Deaths is probably not TOO far off from the official total, but I'm 100% certain we actually hit the 100k milestone last week, contrary to what's been reported. The numbers from Florida in particular are absurd--but they're likely the worst offenders. I think I read that Nebraska is also failing to report everything, but it's Nebraska. There's an average of, what, 20-30 people per square mile there? Their reported totals are 13,261 infections and 164 deaths, but even if it was double what they're reporting it's still a drop in the bucket of overall cases and mortalities.
New York was obviously far and away the worst hit in the whole thing and I'm pretty damned sure they're reporting as accurately as possible, so their steady decline in numbers is the main factor in the national totals dipping below 1k on the "lull" days and not going above 1500-1600 on the other days. If they get another flareup there, however, we could very well see the numbers shooting up past 2k again very easily, so I imagine Cuomo's going to be doing everything he can to secure things.
Hospitals have also, for the most part, been able to adapt to the influx of cases by now so I'm fairly certain national deaths are also decreasing due to the simple fact that people are actually receiving care instead of doctors and nurses having to literally choose who lives and who dies.
If I had to guesstimate--and I know some people HATE that word--I'd say we've probably passed 2.5 million infections and 105k deaths. The current mortality rate is about 17%, but that's based off of confirmed, KNOWN cases and obviously it's not really that high, so I'm certain there were a lot more unconfirmed cases and at least a thousand or so deaths that have been conveniently scrubbed from the record in some states.
Last edited by Benggaul; 2020-05-29 at 01:27 AM.
Trump says he'd love to get rid of his Twitter account, but he needs it because the media is so unfair.
Wanna see the video?
Incidentally, the media is "unfair" because they report on his words and actions. Kind of like Twitter just did.