Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped?

[johnu]

Another of those you can't make this sh*t up moments:

 

Trump Suggests Injecting Disinfectant, Shining UV Light Inside Patients to Kill Coronavirus in Bizarre, Rambling Tangent

 

The title of the article pretty much speaks for itself.

 

“So, supposing we hit the body with tremendous, I don’t know if it’s ultraviolet or very powerful light, and I think you said that has been checked but your’e going to test it,” Trump said, turning to Bryan in a sidebar moment at the end for confirmation. “Then I said what it if you brought the light inside of the body which you could do either through the skin or some other way and I think you said you were going to test that, too, sounds interesting,” he added next, again turning to Bryan for validation.

 

But then Trump even went further, connecting the household bleaching agents in most surface disinfectants to a possible internal treatment for humans, which would be toxic and possibly fatal. “Then I see the disinfectant, one minute. Is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside, or almost a cleaning.

[y66]

Paul Krugman at NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/opinion/mcconnell-coronavirus-states.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

 

Covid-19 has killed tens of thousands of Americans, and will clearly kill many more. The lockdown needed to contain the coronavirus is causing an economic slump several times as deep as the Great Recession.

 

Yet this necessary slump doesn’t have to be accompanied by severe financial hardship. We have the resources to ensure that every American has enough to eat, that people don’t lose health insurance, that they don’t lose their homes because they can’t pay rent or mortgage fees. There’s also no reason we should see punishing cuts in essential public services.

 

Unfortunately, it’s looking increasingly likely that tens of millions of Americans will in fact suffer extreme hardship and that there will be devastating cuts in services. Why? The answer mainly boils down to two words: Mitch McConnell.

 

On Wednesday, McConnell, the Senate majority leader, declared that he is opposed to any further federal aid to beleaguered state and local governments, and suggested that states declare bankruptcy instead. Lest anyone accuse McConnell of being even slightly nonpartisan, his office distributed two memos referring to proposals for state aid as “blue state bailouts.”

 

A number of governors have already denounced McConnell’s position as stupid, which it is. But it’s also vile and hypocritical.

 

When I say that we have the resources to avoid severe financial hardship, I’m referring to the federal government, which can borrow vast sums very cheaply. In fact, the interest rate on inflation-protected bonds, which measure real borrowing costs, is minus 0.43 percent: Investors are basically paying the feds to hold their money.

 

So Washington can and should run big budget deficits in this time of need. State and local governments, however, can’t, because almost all of them are required by law to run balanced budgets. Yet these governments, which are on the front line of dealing with the pandemic, are facing a combination of collapsing revenue and soaring expenses.

 

The obvious answer is federal aid. But McConnell wants states and cities to declare bankruptcy instead.

 

This is, as I said, stupid on multiple levels. For one thing, states don’t even have the legal right to declare bankruptcy; even if they somehow managed all the same to default on their relatively small debts, it would do little to alleviate their financial distress — although it could cause a national financial crisis.

 

Oh, and the idea that this is specifically a blue state problem is ludicrous. Fiscal crises are looming all across America, from Florida to Kansas to Texas — hit especially hard by crashing oil prices — to, yes, McConnell’s home state, Kentucky.

 

And if states and local governments are forced into sharp budget cuts, the effect will be to deepen the economic slump — which would be bad for Donald Trump and could cost Republicans the Senate.

 

So yes, McConnell’s position is stupid. But it’s also vile.

 

Think of who would be hurt if state and local governments are forced to make drastic cuts. A lot of state money goes to Medicaid, a program that should be expanding, not shrinking, as millions of Americans are losing their health insurance along with their jobs.

 

As for the state and local government workers who may be either losing their jobs or facing pay cuts, most are employed in education, policing, firefighting and highways. So if McConnell gets his way, America’s de facto policy will be one of bailing out the owners of giant restaurant chains while firing schoolteachers and police officers.

 

Last but not least, let’s talk about McConnell’s hypocrisy, which like his stupidity comes on multiple levels.

 

At one level, it’s really something to see a man who helped ram through a giant tax cut for corporations — which they mainly used to buy back their own stock — now pretend to be deeply concerned about borrowing money to help states facing a fiscal crisis that isn’t their fault.

 

At another level, it’s also really something to see McConnell, whose state is heavily subsidized by the federal government, give lectures on self-reliance to states like New York that pay much more in federal taxes than they get back.

 

We’re not talking about small numbers here. According to estimates by the Rockefeller Institute, from 2015 to 2018 Kentucky — which pays relatively little in federal taxes, because it’s fairly poor, but gets major benefits from programs like Medicare and Social Security — received net transfers from Washington averaging more than $33,000 per person. That was 18.6 percent of the state’s G.D.P.

 

True, relatively rich states like New York, New Jersey and Connecticut probably should be helping out their poorer neighbors — but those neighbors don’t then get the right to complain about “blue state bailouts” in the face of a national disaster.

 

Of course, McConnell has an agenda here: He’s hoping to use the pandemic to force afflicted states to shrink their governments. We can only hope both that this shameless exploitation of tragedy fails and that McConnell and his allies pay a heavy political price.

[kenberg]

I have come to think of McDonnell as the evil monster behind the mad emperor.

Or something.

At any rate, it is seriously bad.

[Winstonm]

I have come to think of McDonnell as the evil monster behind the mad emperor.

Or something.

At any rate, it is seriously bad.

 

McConnell is but one of the many heads of the Republican Hydra. There is no bottom to their depravity.

[Winstonm]

Barry,

 

Would you please move the above ramblings to the hijacked thread thread? Thanks.

[jandrew]

Another of those you can't make this sh*t up moments:

 

Trump Suggests Injecting Disinfectant, Shining UV Light Inside Patients to Kill Coronavirus in Bizarre, Rambling Tangent

 

The title of the article pretty much speaks for itself.

 

I suppose that if the president were to lead by example, and show us how to inject and/or drink an effective dose of disinfectant, one of the world's major problems might be solved at a stroke. :lol:

[y66]

Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg: Trump’s Disinfectant Idea Is More Than a Silly Soundbite

 

President Donald Trump outdid himself in Thursday’s press conference with an extended riff on miracle cures for the coronavirus that ended with a suggestion that maybe injecting disinfectant into the body would do the trick. (Disclaimer: Do not try this at home. No, really.) It seems destined to go down as the “inject bleach” speech, although he didn’t actually use those words. Jimmy Carter didn’t say “malaise” either.

 

There’s a clip circulating of Dr. Deborah Birx, a member of the coronavirus task force, reacting in resigned disbelief as Trump launches into this digression. It was astonishing in a sense. But also: par for the course. Birx is every trade expert when Trump talks tariffs, every health-policy expert when he talks health care, every defense expert when he talks about the military. He combines uncanny confidence with a total lack of knowledge on topic after topic.

 

To listen to him in his briefings and other appearances is to hear howler after howler if one has a reasonable grasp of politics and government. The U.S. military, he says, was out of ammunition when he became president. NATO allies owe us money because they’re behind on their dues. Trade deficits are simply unilateral transfers of money from one nation to another. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know what “pre-existing conditions” means, even though I’ve heard him discuss the topic dozens of times.

 

All presidents enter the White House with significant gaps in their knowledge of public policy. Every modern one has worked reasonably hard or very hard to catch up. Trump by all accounts (including his own) instead watches hours of cable news every day. As I’ve said, there’s nothing wrong with presidents monitoring the media, even though they have much better sources of information. It’s a good way to get outside the White House bubble and understand what other people are hearing. But Trump appears to use cable news as a substitute, not a supplement, to basic briefings.

 

All of which gets us to the worst moment of Trump’s Thursday session. After a discussion of whether the pandemic might prove to be seasonal, a reporter asked him: “If there is a summer sort of ebb with this virus, what would the federal government need to do to take advantage of that time to be better prepared for a possible resurgence in the fall than we were the first time?” Trump didn’t even appear to understand the question. At first, all he could come up with was, “I think a lot of people are going to go outside all of a sudden.” Then he got distracted and talked about a lab he thought was impressive. Then, when the reporter repeated the question, he looked stumped and asked Vice President Mike Pence to step in.

 

That's a pretty basic question. And Trump’s confused answer underlines the extent to which he is still, even now, disengaged from any real planning to control the pandemic and revive the economy. Perhaps he realized that talking about preparations for the fall might contradict his insistence that the federal response is perfect right now. But even then it’s shocking that he didn't have some kind of prepared answer for a question that’s so central to the crisis.

 

Yes, there’s a long history of presidents who deliberately or otherwise sound worse in public than they do in private. It is possible Trump is part of that tradition. Unfortunately, his own staffers regularly tell reporters that he’s no better in private than he is in public. It’s hard to do a good job as president if you don’t do your homework. And watching hours of cable news won’t cut it.

[Winstonm]

Thank you, Barry.

[Winstonm]

The king of snake oil can raise a "misson accomplished" banner now:

 

April 24 (Reuters) - The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Friday cautioned against the use of malaria drugs, hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, in COVID-19 patients outside of hospitals and clinical trials, citing risks of serious heart rhythm problems.

 

The agency’s announcement comes a day after the European Union’s drug regulator warned of the drugs’ side effects and urged medical professionals to closely monitor patients on the medicines.

 

The FDA said it was aware of increased use of these medicines through outpatient prescriptions and the drugs could cause abnormal heart rhythms and dangerously rapid heart rate.

my emphasis

[Winstonm]

I didn't think The Onion reported real news:

 

And then, of course, there is the Trump supporter:

[kenberg]

Are we at a transition?

 

My understanding is that there are now quite a few Trump supporters who think he is doing a lousy job with covid and certainly listen to local advice or medical advice and ignore the t=president. They will not be injection bleach, but they also will continue social distancing, wear masks, and take care.

 

History is replete with cases where a leader had support until, suddenly, he no longer had that support. A child observes the emperor has no clothes and suddenly everyone sees that the emperor has no clothes.

 

Few anticipated the pandemic. But we can all anticipate that a crisis of some sort will arise fairly frequently. When it happens, it is very useful, to put it very mildly, to have a person in the White House that can be trusted. That does not describe the current occupant and, very importantly, this is now becoming clear to many Republicans. I realize that DT did not actually, not explicitly, tell people to inject bleach. But he speculated about injections, how maybe it could be a good idea, and there are more than a few people out there who get some pretty crazy ideas about what to do. A responsible person does not say what DT said, even if he now wants to say he was just being sarcastic. Everyone understands that. And everyone has heard the excuse "Oh, I as just joking". As president, speaking of the pandemic? Really?

 

So: Time is up. This is no longer R or D, it isn't about conservative or liberal, it is about not having an irresponsible nut as president. This must be becoming clear to just about everyone. People put up with a lot. But most people, at some point, decide they have seen enough. You can always find exceptions, people who drink the kool-aid if told to do so, but most decide otherwise. It's time.

[shyams]

I have previously bored this audience by quoting betting odds of Trump winning a second term. Here is another quote from today.As per a UK betting website, the current odds that Joe Biden will not be the Democratic Party nominee for President are quoted as 7.5%...

 

Interesting! The market still factors a 7.5% doubt!!

... which has, as of this morning, widened to 10.0%. Worth a gamble? A roughly 10% return after costs over a period of (approx.) 4 months :blink:

When I checked this morning, it had widened to 12.3%. Now, this is a British/European betting website but the market is deep (£22.7 million has been traded on this specific outcome -- of which approx. £1.5m of trades occurred in the last 10 days).

[y66]

Fintan O'Toole at Irish Times: Donald Trump has destroyed the country he promised to make great again

 

Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.

 

However bad things are for most other rich democracies, it is hard not to feel sorry for Americans. Most of them did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. Yet they are locked down with a malignant narcissist who, instead of protecting his people from Covid-19, has amplified its lethality. The country Trump promised to make great again has never in its history seemed so pitiful.

 

Will American prestige ever recover from this shameful episode? The US went into the coronavirus crisis with immense advantages: precious weeks of warning about what was coming, the world’s best concentration of medical and scientific expertise, effectively limitless financial resources, a military complex with stunning logistical capacity and most of the world’s leading technology corporations. Yet it managed to make itself the global epicentre of the pandemic.

 

As the American writer George Packer puts it in the current edition of the Atlantic, “The United States reacted ... like Pakistan or Belarus – like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.”

 

It is one thing to be powerless in the face of a natural disaster, quite another to watch vast power being squandered in real time – wilfully, malevolently, vindictively. It is one thing for governments to fail (as, in one degree or another, most governments did), quite another to watch a ruler and his supporters actively spread a deadly virus. Trump, his party and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News became vectors of the pestilence.

 

The grotesque spectacle of the president openly inciting people (some of them armed) to take to the streets to oppose the restrictions that save lives is the manifestation of a political death wish. What are supposed to be daily briefings on the crisis, demonstrative of national unity in the face of a shared challenge, have been used by Trump merely to sow confusion and division. They provide a recurring horror show in which all the neuroses that haunt the American subconscious dance naked on live TV.

 

If the plague is a test, its ruling political nexus ensured that the US would fail it at a terrible cost in human lives. In the process, the idea of the US as the world’s leading nation – an idea that has shaped the past century – has all but evaporated.

 

Other than the Trump impersonator Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, who is now looking to the US as the exemplar of anything other than what not to do? How many people in Düsseldorf or Dublin are wishing they lived in Detroit or Dallas?

 

It is hard to remember now but, even in 2017, when Trump took office, the conventional wisdom in the US was that the Republican Party and the broader framework of US political institutions would prevent him from doing too much damage. This was always a delusion, but the pandemic has exposed it in the most savage ways.

 

Abject surrender

 

What used to be called mainstream conservatism has not absorbed Trump – he has absorbed it. Almost the entire right-wing half of American politics has surrendered abjectly to him. It has sacrificed on the altar of wanton stupidity the most basic ideas of responsibility, care and even safety.

 

Thus, even at the very end of March, 15 Republican governors had failed to order people to stay at home or to close non-essential businesses. In Alabama, for example, it was not until April 3rd that governor Kay Ivey finally issued a stay-at-home order.

 

In Florida, the state with the highest concentration of elderly people with underlying conditions, governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump mini-me, kept the beach resorts open to students travelling from all over the US for spring break parties. Even on April 1st, when he issued restrictions, DeSantis exempted religious services and “recreational activities”.

 

Georgia governor Brian Kemp, when he finally issued a stay-at-home order on April 1st, explained: “We didn’t know that [the virus can be spread by people without symptoms] until the last 24 hours.”

This is not mere ignorance – it is deliberate and homicidal stupidity. There is, as the demonstrations this week in US cities have shown, plenty of political mileage in denying the reality of the pandemic. It is fuelled by Fox News and far-right internet sites, and it reaps for these politicians millions of dollars in donations, mostly (in an ugly irony) from older people who are most vulnerable to the coronavirus.

 

It draws on a concoction of conspiracy theories, hatred of science, paranoia about the “deep state” and religious providentialism (God will protect the good folks) that is now very deeply infused in the mindset of the American right.

 

Trump embodies and enacts this mindset, but he did not invent it. The US response to the coronavirus crisis has been paralysed by a contradiction that the Republicans have inserted into the heart of US democracy. On the one hand, they want to control all the levers of governmental power. On the other they have created a popular base by playing on the notion that government is innately evil and must not be trusted.

 

The contradiction was made manifest in two of Trump’s statements on the pandemic: on the one hand that he has “total authority”, and on the other that “I don’t take responsibility at all”. Caught between authoritarian and anarchic impulses, he is incapable of coherence.

Fertile ground

 

But this is not just Donald Trump. The crisis has shown definitively that Trump’s presidency is not an aberration. It has grown on soil long prepared to receive it. The monstrous blossoming of misrule has structure and purpose and strategy behind it.

 

There are very powerful interests who demand “freedom” in order to do as they like with the environment, society and the economy. They have infused a very large part of American culture with the belief that “freedom” is literally more important than life. My freedom to own assault weapons trumps your right not to get shot at school. Now, my freedom to go to the barber (“I Need a Haircut” read one banner this week in St Paul, Minnesota) trumps your need to avoid infection.

 

Usually when this kind of outlandish idiocy is displaying itself, there is the comforting thought that, if things were really serious, it would all stop. People would sober up. Instead, a large part of the US has hit the bottle even harder.

 

And the president, his party and their media allies keep supplying the drinks. There has been no moment of truth, no shock of realisation that the antics have to end. No one of any substance on the US right has stepped in to say: get a grip, people are dying here.

 

That is the mark of how deep the trouble is for the US – it is not just that Trump has treated the crisis merely as a way to feed tribal hatreds but that this behaviour has become normalised. When the freak show is live on TV every evening, and the star is boasting about his ratings, it is not really a freak show any more. For a very large and solid bloc of Americans, it is reality.

 

And this will get worse before it gets better. Trump has at least eight more months in power. In his inaugural address in 2017, he evoked “American carnage” and promised to make it stop. But now that the real carnage has arrived, he is revelling in it. He is in his element.

 

As things get worse, he will pump more hatred and falsehood, more death-wish defiance of reason and decency, into the groundwater. If a new administration succeeds him in 2021, it will have to clean up the toxic dump he leaves behind. If he is re-elected, toxicity will have become the lifeblood of American politics.

 

Either way, it will be a long time before the rest of the world can imagine America being great again.

I appreciate the optimistic note in "will have become" in the second to last paragraph.

[Chas_P]

Fintan O'Toole at Irish Times: Donald Trump has destroyed the country he promised to make great again

 

 

I appreciate the optimistic note in "will have become" in the second to last paragraph.

 

Opinions are just like assholes. Everybody has one.

[johnu]

Opinions are just like assholes. Everybody has one.

The lack of irony displayed is Grifter in Chief worthy. :rolleyes:

[johnu]

Apparently the Manchurian President was blinded by UV light and feeling under the weather after drinking a bleach smoothie.

 

Furious Trump Strikes Wildly At Fox News And Other Media, Insists Reporters Return ‘Noble’ Prizes

 

Trump also called on reporters who wrote about Russia’s interference in the U.S. presidential election to return their “Noble” prizes. There are no Noble prizes for reported stories, nor are there Nobel Prizes. There are Pulitzer Prizes for journalism; there is a Nobel Prize for literature.

 

That particular three-tweet rant about Noble prizes subsequently vanished. But hours later, Trump called his comments “sarcasm” — insisting he meant to say “Noble” prizes all along (even though he had earlier called on the “Noble Committee” to rescind the awards).

 

The Clown in Chief should stick to press conferences about the Noble (sic) Coronavirus where he continues to scoop the news with statements that anybody else would be embarrassed to be associated with.

[kenberg]

Opinions are just like assholes. Everybody has one.

 

I can take pleasure in seeing the opinions of others. Often they are interesting, some are memorable. Sometimes I want to examine their opinions closely. So the analogy has gaps.

 

But I have to ask. Are you still comfortable with Trump as president? No need to explain why you are or are not, but I have been expecting for quite a while that people will change on this, and I am now thinking it is happening, so I am curious.

[cherdano]

I think the bleach episode could be a bit of a turning point. It obviously doesn't matter to Trump when what he says is enraging people. In fact, he seems constantly looking out for it. If you are enraging others, you are the one in the position of power.

But with the bleach comments, the only sensible reaction is to make fun of him. Trump doesn't want to be made fun of.

[kenberg]

I think the bleach episode could be a bit of a turning point. It obviously doesn't matter to Trump when what he says is enraging people. In fact, he seems constantly looking out for it. If you are enraging others, you are the one in the position of power.

But with the bleach comments, the only sensible reaction is to make fun of him. Trump doesn't want to be made fun of.

 

I was just remembering that in 2016 Trump's supporters claimed he should be taken seriously but not literally. It's hard to believe they could still say this.

 

Birx says social distancing could last for months. Trump says, well, who knows or cares? It changes daily or hourly, and previous statements are dismissed as fake news or sarcasm. It appears that almost no one now takes Trump's words either seriously or literally. Supporting someone who has become irrelevant, except as a totally unpredictable menace, must be tough. Change will come and I think/hope it has started.

[y66]

Donald Trump has pulled the plug on daily White House press briefings just as the number of US deaths attributed to coronavirus neared 50,000, accusing the US media of asking hostile questions and inaccurate reporting.

[barmar]

Are we at a transition?

 

My understanding is that there are now quite a few Trump supporters who think he is doing a lousy job with covid and certainly listen to local advice or medial advice and ignore the t=president. They will not be injection bleach, but they also will continue social distancing, wear masks, and take care.

The strange thing is that Trump's approval rating is not currently at its lowest place. According to https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/ it was at its worst in late 2017. Another trough was in January, 2019, and has been worse than now for all of 2019 and 2020. For some reason his approval rating peaked at the beginning of April (was that when he finally admitted that this was a national emergency?), and has been on a decline since then, but it's still better than much of his term so far.

[hrothgar]

Opinions are just like assholes. Everybody has one.

 

Newsgroups are just like people

 

Both are blessed with assholes

Ours is named Chas

[Winstonm]

The strange thing is that Trump's approval rating is not currently at its lowest place. According to https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/ it was at its worst in late 2017. Another trough was in January, 2019, and has been worse than now for all of 2019 and 2020. For some reason his approval rating peaked at the beginning of April (was that when he finally admitted that this was a national emergency?), and has been on a decline since then, but it's still better than much of his term so far.

I think the article that y66 linked to from the Irish Times spelled it out. These two paragraphs, especially:

 

There are very powerful interests who demand “freedom” in order to do as they like with the environment, society and the economy. They have infused a very large part of American culture with the belief that “freedom” is literally more important than life. My freedom to own assault weapons trumps your right not to get shot at school. Now, my freedom to go to the barber (“I Need a Haircut” read one banner this week in St Paul, Minnesota) trumps your need to avoid infection.

 

Usually when this kind of outlandish idiocy is displaying itself, there is the comforting thought that, if things were really serious, it would all stop. People would sober up. Instead, a large part of the US has hit the bottle even harder.

 

These people who are displaying "outlandish idiocy" used to be a quiet minority who held their tongues due to an outpouring of public shaming and humiliation if they dared share the nonsense; somehow, that nonsense has been proclaimed valid because it is now considered "opinion", and as everyone has a right to his or her opinion, all opinions are equal, no matter how bizarre or non-evidence based.

 

That is basically the argument used by the "Intelligent Design" desciples - that theories are only unproven "opinions" and thus ID is every bit as valid as evolution. How did we get to the point that crazed is normal? More importantly, can we escape to a predominantly fact-based culture?

[y66]

Jill J. Karofsky at NYT: I’m the Judge Who Won in Wisconsin. This Principle Is More Important Than Winning.

 

On April 7, I was on the ballot in an election that should not have happened.

 

I was running for a 10-year term on the Wisconsin Supreme Court against an appointed incumbent. I came to find out after the election that incumbents in Wisconsin have lost Supreme Court elections only twice in the last half-century — had I known that when I started, I might never have run.

 

The central theme of our campaign was a message of restoring the public’s trust in the judicial system. It was a winning message: We pulled in a resounding 55 percent of the vote.

 

And it will guide me as a Wisconsin Supreme Court justice. I will make decisions based on the law — we must get away from a partisan view of the law.

 

The election was a good example of what should not happen. Gov. Tony Evers had formally called on the Legislature to postpone it. Deadlines for returning ballots were extended.

 

But in a mad flurry of activity the day before the election — probably never seen before and hopefully never seen again — partisan court majorities in cases at the Wisconsin and U.S. Supreme Courts reinstated the election and removed the deadline extension for absentee ballots to be returned.

 

Scant hours before the polls opened, the people of Wisconsin were confused and worried: On one hand, their government was telling them clearly to stay away from one another. On the other, they were being told that if they wanted to continue having a democracy, they had to show up in person, stand in long lines and vote.

 

In cities like Milwaukee and Green Bay, the wait ended up being as long as three hours. And because the U.S. Supreme Court majority created — just hours before the polls opened — a new “postmark” requirement for ballots that in actuality probably wouldn’t be postmarked because of the type of mail they were, even those who voted on time were concerned that their votes wouldn’t count.

 

Now, over two weeks later, we have an uptick in Covid-19 cases, especially in dense urban centers like Milwaukee and Waukesha, where few polling places were open and citizens were forced to stand in long lines to cast a ballot. It will take time to compile and analyze the data, but the number of people who voted in person and have tested positive is growing.

 

It’s important to note three significant facts. First, both court decisions — from the U.S. and Wisconsin Supreme Courts — are seen as being along partisan lines, with allies of Republicans refusing to delay the election. Second, because of the pandemic, the justices of neither of those courts actually met in person when discussing and voting these cases — but they forced many people who wanted to vote, to vote in person. And third, every member of the Wisconsin Supreme Court had already voted early. They weren’t putting themselves at risk.

 

It’s my view that these decisions were wrong on the law, and they were wrong on process. We shouldn’t legislate from the bench. There was no time for full briefs or oral arguments and no time to fully examine the issues. The U.S. Supreme Court especially erred by writing into law a postmark requirement that they didn’t have the time to think through and that caused tremendous confusion in my state.

 

Most observers assume these last-minute decisions not only contributed to chaos, but also weren’t respectful of the law or a deliberate process. Even if one believed that the governor’s moves to postpone the election were wrong, it was incumbent on these courts to take the time to review the situation completely — instead of granting the governor only minutes to file a response to a lawsuit the day before an election.

 

I find it unconscionable that Wisconsin voters were forced to choose between their safety and having their voices heard in our democracy. The right to vote is fundamental to the American creed. Courts making partisan decisions, sending people out to vote in the middle of a global pandemic, is exactly what’s wrong with a judiciary that has become too political, and I think a deliberate attempt to suppress the vote in Wisconsin.

 

On Election Day, my daughter and I set up on our back porch to field phone calls and text messages and to monitor the in-person voting. The pictures we viewed from across the state were gut-wrenching. Usually Milwaukee has 180 polling places, but because of the pandemic causing a lack of poll workers, only five were open. The entire City of Waukesha had one polling place. These consolidations meant thousands of voters were funneled into a handful of sites, some in masks, some wearing gloves, standing a few feet apart for blocks and blocks.

 

As we started to field calls and text messages a common theme appeared. People who had requested absentee ballots days and weeks earlier had not received their ballots. Because of the court rulings, each and every one of these voters had to make the excruciating decision between staying safe at home or voting amid a global pandemic.

 

People were frustrated and outraged. The calls and the texts did not stop. My daughter cried.

 

In the end, my campaign was rewarded for our persistence and patience. But victory is bittersweet. It was unacceptable to hold an election under circumstances in which people were forced to choose between their safety and voting. It disenfranchised countless people and raised serious concerns for the future of our democracy.

 

It can never happen again. Now, more than ever, we need to instill confidence in our institutions. I hope I’ll be judged on following the law, not the party line.

[johnu]

The Narcissist in Chief needlessly endangers West Point grads and anybody who comes in contact them:

 

President Trump's West Point Commencement Speech Will Require 1,000 Cadets Return to Campus

 

Army brass kowtows to the Grifter in Chief's every whim and fancy. After being informed by the press that Pence was going to deliver a commencement speech at the Air Force Academy, the Manchurian President made a split second announcement that he would be giving a speech at West Point. Army brass felt obliged to recall 1000 cadets back to New York which is the state with worst coronavirus situation in the USA.

 

According to the New York Times, 1,000 West Point cadets are being summoned to return to the New York-based university from across the country for Trump's commencement speech during graduation, now planned for June 13.

 

Officials and cadets from West Point were previously sent home once graduation was initially postponed due to the COVID-19 outbreak. But on April 17, Trump confirmed the event was back on — for now.

These cadets must make round trips from every part of the country just to satisfy the mega ego of the Narcissist in Chief.