What a surprise! Big companies got most of the stimulus money meant for small businesses

One part of the stimulus program was the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) that was meant to enable owners of small businesses to keep paying their employees even while their businesses were shut down. The program was limited to companies that had less than 500 employees. Why did employees of large corporations like Amazon not get similar protections? The assumption by the government seemed to be that these companies could afford to do so on their own without government help though in the absence of any law forcing them to do so, one cannot imagine Amazon’s Jeff Bezos depriving himself of even the tiniest bit of his huge wealth.
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Signs that the right is losing the culture wars

I have noticed that there are an increasing number of ads for products that feature couples and families that are same gender couples and/or different ethnicities. These ads are for everyday products and there were no obvious reasons as to why they did not stick to the traditional pairings. It is clear that these companies feel that there will be no backlash caused by this inclusivity and that there may even be a positive benefit is showing themselves to be enlightened. But as recently as 2013, a commercial that featured an interracial family caused a fuss and produced racist responses.
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The Onion predicted Trump’s disinfectant insanity

The White House has not held a full coronavirus press briefing since last Thursday, which was the occasion when Trump made the widely ridiculed and condemned suggestion that injecting bleach and other disinfectants might be a cure for Covid-19. The next day, he and Pence held a 20-minute session and walked off without taking questions. The weekend went by without any briefings and today they announced that there would also be no briefing. It looks like they may be gone for good. Trump, like the coward he is, does not want to face challenging questions and, like Brave Sir Robin, “When danger reared it’s ugly head, He bravely turned his tail and fled.”
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Uh-oh, I am on Trump’s mailing list

All of a sudden, I am getting daily emails from Donald Trump. Clearly someone has sold his campaign a list of emails addresses that include mine. My first instinct was to block them but then I thought I’d not, just to see what they think appeals to his supporters. For several days he would urge me to add my name to a ‘surprise’ birthday card for his wife Melania, something that was apparently done last year too and the goal this year seems to be to exceed the numbers who signed last year. Given that this is a repeat of last year, she must be someone who forgets things quickly or is easily surprised.
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Donald Trump is America’s first African president

Reporter’s were stunned when at Friday’s White House coronavirus Task Force briefing, where Trump usually rambles on for a couple of hours spewing lies and dangerous nonsense, he and Pence left after making a few comments without taking any questions. The briefing was over in less than 30 minutes. One report says Trump had been told by his advisors that his popularity is going down and that these briefings may be the cause.
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The danger of being too much of a yes man

Josh Marshall writes how Republican Georgia governor Brian Kemp was rebuked by Donald Trump for licking his boots too vigorously, something I would not have thought possible. Trump has been saying that the country should start re-opening soon and no doubt Kemp thought that he could curry favor with trump by being the first to do so. But it backfired.

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) has been outstripping the sizable competition in the race to become President Donald Trump’s biggest, and most thoroughly rejected, flunky.
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On Monday he mounted his flashiest maneuver yet, announcing that he would fling wide the doors of the state’s gyms, nail salons, barbershops, bowling alleys — bowling alleys — by the end of the week, about three laps ahead of even the cadre of his fellow Trumpy governors.
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But Kemp was left alone on the front porch, clutching his boutonniere, as Trump slammed the front door in his face.

“Would I do that? No. I’d keep them a little longer,” the President said of the social distancing guidelines at his Wednesday press briefing. “I want to protect people’s lives.”

“I’m going to let him make his decision,” he added, of Kemp. “But I told him I totally disagree.”

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The idiot president floats more dangerous ideas

Donald Trump is a menace to people’s health. There is no other way to describe his ridiculous suggestions about treating the coronavirus at yesterday’s White House briefing where he floated the kinds of crazy rumors that float around the internet as worth testing, such as injecting oneself with bleach or disinfectant or somehow ‘hit’ the body with light inside it, no doubt because he heard somewhere that bleach kills bacteria and viruses and that sunlight is the best disinfectant.

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The strange world of futures contracts

There was this news report in the last few days about the price of oil going negative to -$40 per barrel, giving the impression that oil producers were now paying people to take their oil. Of course, that could not be strictly true. It is not as if your local gas station was paying customers to fill their tanks. In actuality, gas prices were trading normally, though the prices have been dropping due to the lowered economic activity because of the pandemic leading to an oil surplus.
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