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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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.
…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.
…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.”
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.
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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The horrific massacre by a lone gunman in Nova Scotia is even worse than originally reported. It now appears that he killed 22 people during his 12-hour rampage dressed as a police officer and driving a replica of a police vehicle. The increase in numbers is because authorities have found bodies in buildings that he set on fire.
It appears that he had targeted his first victims who were known to him and then went on a killing spree on anyone who had the misfortune to cross his path as he drove around.
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[Sorry for the glitch! I have corrected it. -MS]
We have heard about some church preachers demanding that their churches be allowed to have in-person services and violate the social distancing guidelines. Some may be doing it because of their belief that the god demands the actual physical presence of people close together while others may be doing it for ideological reasons such as that no government can tell them when and where they should go. They use the spurious argument that their god will protect the truly faithful.
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I wrote before about how the coronavirus pandemic is creating the conditions for many natural experiments to be conducted. One is the question of how effective the various countermeasures being taken are. We have seen that in Trumpland, those parts of the country where his followers are dominant, the social distancing guidelines are being ignored or relaxed early, despite warnings by public health experts that this could lead to a resurgence in the number of infected cases. These people, especially in rural areas, seem to think that they are relatively immune from the pandemic because the absolute numbers in their areas so far have been relatively few, though on a per capita basis that may not be the case.
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In the state of Kentucky, heavily armed and masked protestors of the pandemic containment measures entered the state capitol building waving their weapons without any hindrance from the security personnel. What is strange is that umbrellas and stick are prohibited. Even one of the gun-toting people was surprised that they were allowed in so easily.
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