COVID-19 continues as Trump decimates the rule of law

The novel coronavirus is still the biggest, most important story of the day, but we have to ask this question: Why did former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn lie to V.P. Pence and the FBI about his conversations with the Russian diplomat Sergey Kislyak? If all he was doing was talking about easing the sanctions imposed after Russia interfered in the 2016 election, why lie about it?

That’s what makes Flynn unfit to serve in the government, certainly not in the military. It’s what makes him fit for prison, that and his guilty pleas.

This comes up because Flynn changed his legal team to a couple of Trump cronies from Fox News who then changed Flynn’s legal strategy to go after the FBI — for doing their job. This is part of the “Russia is a Hoax, Hoax, Hoax” hoax the president has been dishing out for the past four years and now, breaking news on Thursday: Trump’s favorite new lap dog, Attorney General William Barr, has asked the courts to dismiss the case against Flynn.

That my friends is how you truly fuck the American legal system. You do it from the office of the attorney general. It carries more weight that way. In the Trump world, where everything that was up is now down, where truth and facts are the enemy and the country/dictator that messed in our presidential election is now our ally, where the president sides with and supports the conspiracy theory nuts when it comes to a spreading pandemic, a guy who as the judge in the case said, “sold out your country,” is now considered a hero.

Never mind the firm proclamations from Trump and Pence, via Twitter just over three years ago, that Flynn had to be fired for lying, Michael Flynn is once again a hero. The man is a disgrace and dishonored the uniform he wore for over three decades. But then again, being a disgrace makes Flynn qualified to be a Trump insider. Maybe he can consult on how to deal with the coronavirus.

On Taco Tuesday, Cinco de Mayo, Donald Trump was visiting a Honeywell company in Arizona that makes M-95 masks. He didn’t wear a mask, like all the employees, because, you know, he wouldn’t look good in one. Note to Trump: You don’t look good anyway.

He then did an interview with ABC News in which he openly admits that his plan to reopen the economy will be trading American lives for the economy. Because his campaign for re-election is based entirely on the economy and over 100,000 deaths is a small price to pay for re-election.

If you look at the projection from the University of Washington, 134k deaths by August 4 is a conservative estimate. The top end of their estimate is 240k. The low end of their estimate is 100k. Think about that: We’re losing over 2k per day, over 10k in the past week. On April 29 I had noted that we had just past the 60k fatalities milestone. Today (May 8), we are now at 1.26 million confirmed infections and 74,343 fatalities. If the loss of life is 10k per week, that would mean another 110k by August 4. Good job Mr. President.

Scientists have told us that the COVID-19 infection and death rates have leveled off or gone down in the early hotspots, like New York, New Jersey and California, but the novel coronavirus is growing exponentially in the rest of America. The heartland.

South Dakota governor Kristi Noem is suing the Sioux Indian nations because they require COVID-19 tests to enter their reservations. Noem’s state is the fastest growing coronavirus hotspot in America. Harold Frazier, chairman of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe said, “We will not apologize for being an island of safety in a sea of uncertainty and death.”

Trump wants Americans to be his warriors, to go out there, not fighting the disease, but going to work, going shopping and otherwise carrying on as if this pandemic is behind us. Despite the pandemic experts telling us the worst is yet to come Trump actually told David Muir of ABC News, “There’ll be more death, that the virus will pass, with or without a vaccine. And I think we’re doing very well on the vaccines but, with or without a vaccine, it’s going to pass, and we’re going to be back to normal.” He also said, “The people of our country are warriors. I’m not saying anything is perfect. Yes, will some people be affected? Yes. Will some people be affected badly? Yes. But we have to get our country opened and we have to get it open soon.”

On Wednesday he also told reporters, “We want to terminate health care under Obamacare.” In other words, he wants to take away health care for tens of millions of Americans — during a fucking pandemic. That could include you.

There is no evidence COVID-19 is “going to pass” any time soon, but a lot of evidence that it will be with us for a very long time. We could have a viable vaccine in 12 months, but we really don’t know. It is abundantly clear Trump is lowering the value of human life

He’s getting a lot of help from the conspiracy theory kooks populating the various social media platforms. None more so than the disgraced and disgraceful scientist, Judy Mikovits. She’s in a video that has been removed from YouTube and other platforms because of its disinformation and outright lies.

Here’s a link with the complete debunking of her video.

Sadly, I see a lot of people in my Facebook friends list believing what this kook and her cohort have to say. It amazes me how many people, friends even, buy into the misinformation campaigns, that COVID-19 is somehow a government plot, led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, or Bill Gates or Barack Obama’s Deep State, to subjugate the American people and force us into a police state.

All the people I know on social media that think this way, who believe their rights are being taken away, that they are being oppressed, is depressing. They have no fucking clue what oppression is, what it’s like to live in a totalitarian system. Just because they can’t go to the beach or get a haircut.

You know what oppression is? Doctors being thrown out of 10-story windows for revealing the facts of COVID-19, like what happens in Russia. Doctors disappearing for reporting the facts of COVID-19, like what happened in China. Oppressed is being prevented from marching on your state capital, armed with assault weapons and body armor. You sad sacks aren’t oppressed, your rights are not being taken away, you are being asked, or told, to participate in a plan to slow down the spread of a deadly disease until there is a vaccine so we can go about our business the way we did before 2020.

You little pansies, you little weenies, you snotty little, pampered and spoiled little babies. You know how funny you look with your fat gut and ass sticking out of your body armor? You have those big, tough guy guns, yelling at police guarding the legislators; do you think most people respect that kind of behavior? It’s a fucking joke. You’re a fucking joke.

No one likes living through these times, it isn’t any grand scheme to keep the people down or a plot to keep Donald Trump from being re-elected. Over 33 million people have lost their jobs in the past two months because this disease is spreading faster than the flu and is far deadlier as well.

And this all falls on one person: Donald J. Trump. He has done nothing to stop or slow down the spread of the disease.

Earlier this year, in February, the administration had an offer from an American company, Prestige Ameritech, to make millions of M-95 masks, before the pandemic became overwhelming. The Washington Post has a detailed article, based on the whistleblower complaint by Dr. Rick Bright and emails It details how the Trump administration blew it early on, before hospital and medical professionals were facing shortages. Of course the Trumpers will claim it’s fake news.

Speaking of the Trumpers — again: Just out of curiosity: How does/did the government lower our immune systems? We can enrich our immune systems with the foods we consume, providing we eat good, healthy food, along with a healthy amount of time out in the sunshine. The only way to “lower” the immune system is to starve it. Then there is the small percentage of people who suffer some type of immune system disease.

I guess the government could pump us full of chemicals in the same fashion cancer patients get chemicals for chemo therapy. That does a number on the body ‘s immune system. But something tells me that isn’t happening. I was just at the V.A. Medical Center and as far as I can remember I was not pumped full of chemicals. My experience with emergency rooms is they don’t give a patient much time to get any sleep, so there wasn’t any time when they could have secretly pumped me full of chemicals. They did, however, take some blood and administer a COVID-19 test. It was negative and they confirmed what I suspected about my medical condition.

Just a note to any younger readers: Getting older can be a bitch. Take care of your health now.

Getting back to the premise. Believing the government can lower our immune system is next level conspiracy theory nuttery.

Speaking of younger people many, if not, most, of whom are Bernie supporters: not voting or voting for some loser third party candidate is the worst thing you can do in 2020. I’ve been reading and watching what these anti-Biden, Bernie supporters have been saying lately and it is absolute shit. It was absolute shit in 2000 when I fell for it and voted for Ralph Nader and it’s absolute shit 20 years later.

You want a third party system? You have to build it from the grassroots up. Get your third party candidates on the local city/town council. Then get them in the mayor’s office and then in the state legislature. Then to Congress. Make it an organized national movement. Then challenge the two major parties in a national, presidential election.  Unless you have the voters — THE VOTERS — behind him or her, your third party candidate is just going to be a distraction and siphon off needed votes. And this year that could mean another four years of Trump.

You want to believe Tara Reade’s story about being sexually molested by Joe Biden? Great. My thought is: Take every allegation seriously, then investigate the hell out of it. And people already have. Tara Reade is not a credible witness. It’s time the Democratic Party put this stupid shit to bed.

This is from a guy who voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2020 California primary. Senator Sanders’ policies are in line with my views and have been for decades. True universal healthcare, free college or trade school at all public colleges and trade schools. Universal Basic Income (UBI) of $2k a month for everyone 16 and older. Yes, 16 because many young people go to work at that age because of the dire financial straits their families are in. Removal of all obstacles to voting, once and for all. Restore and strengthen the Voting Rights act of 1965. Outlaw voter ID laws.

Reduce the military budget and increase the V.A. budget. As Bernie has said, ““If you can’t afford to take care of your veterans, then don’t go to war. These people are bearing the brunt of what war is about. We have a moral obligation to support them.”

The biggest issue at the V.A.: a shortage of health care workers, 30,000 at last tally. Put enough money into the V.A. budget to hire the doctors, nurses and other employees and open more community clinics, especially in rural areas. If we can spend $10 trillion going to war we can spend an additional a quarter trillion more to the V.A. to take care of our veterans. And stop making vets and service members pay co-pays for their health care.

I write all this because I want people in the White House, Senate and House of Representatives who represent my views. For better or worse, we have Joe Biden as the presumptive nominee and between him and Trump, Biden best represents my views.

He ain’t perfect. In fact, I thought Barack Obama was too conservative for my tastes, but I accepted him as our nominee. Same with Bill Clinton in 1992. In 2000 Al Gore was at least in tune with climate change concerns, but I voted for Nader anyway. As I said, a mistake. Politics is compromise. What I’ve learned after 40-plus years of watching politics and voting: Holding out for the perfect candidate is a fool’s errand.

Bernie Sanders talks about getting the grassroots to apply pressure on the politicians that are in office. That won’t work on Trump or Moscow Mitch, but it can have an effect on a President Joe Biden and a Democratic-controlled U.S. Senate. “We voted you in and this is what we want done to fix America.”

But you can’t sit on your fat (or skinny) ass doing podcasts telling people we have a political system that is one party with two different flavors. If you haven’t noticed, the two parties are quite different from one another and the Democratic Party is trending left as new voters join the party.

If you want to create a third party get some voters and candidates behind the movement. Or, push the Democratic Party to become more progressive. It’s already happening anyway.

I’m with Bernie: Vote for Joe Biden and vote out the Republicans. Then lean on our elected representatives — stop calling them “elected leaders,” we lead them, not the other way around — lean on them to make the laws we know will make America better. And if there are Democrats in Congress we don’t agree with, vote them out too. Just ask Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez how that is done. By the way: Joe Crowley isn’t a bad person. He just wasn’t (isn’t) progressive enough for his constituency. If I lived in Nancy Pelosi’s district I would vote to re-elect her in November because we need a bad-ass political pro leading the House of Representatives. Then I would lean on her to be more progressive.

The last point here: Black Lives Matter and once again we see why there is a BLM movement. Two white men brutally murdered a Black man who happened to be jogging — in his own neighborhood. After about two months the killers were arrested and charged with the crimes. It looks like the Justice Department won’t investigate it as a hate crime.

But Attorney General William Barr is letting a confessed felon off the hook.

We will see if a Georgia jury will convict the two killers of Ahmaud Arbery. There are two videos showing the crimes. But then, the man who murdered Trayvon Martin was found not guilty, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

Black Lives Matter.

This post has to end, but every day that ass hat in the Oval Office does or says something ridiculous, immoral, or dangerous and always couched in a lie. His favorite bit of misinformation being, “The cure can’t be worse than the disease.”

The shutdown wasn’t intended — by anyone — to last a long time. It was to give the federal government breathing room to mount a serious response and acquire all the equipment and people to fight the pandemic. Trump hasn’t done any of that and if it wasn’t for the actions of many governors, the infection and fatality rates would be much higher.

With over 30 million people applied for unemployment and millions more unable to apply due to systems that are overwhelmed by the demand, sending people back into the workforce seems like the right thing to do. But how many people feel safe enough to go out as if the disease is behind us?

As of Sunday Morning the United States has over 1.35 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 with 80,186 deaths. In California: 64,561 confirmed cases and 2,678 deaths. We are in the second phase of the state’s four phase reopening plan. Now the L.A. Times is reporting the firefighting infrastructure in the state is already planning new strategies for fighting wildfires with a force that is greatly reduced by the novel coronavirus.

Then there is the flu season. We are not even close to the bottom of this shithole.

Take care and stay at home.

If you wish to read all my posts regarding COVID-19 click here.

Top photo of Michael Flynn is a YouTube screenshot