In Minnesota, The GOP Is Running On Bigotry And Against Masks And Wayfair

 

Minnesota is closing in on 100,000 COVID cases and will get there before election day.

Despite a significant and ongoing investment in the state by the Trump campaign, the margin between Trump and Biden continues to grow-- against Trump. The Real Cleat Politics polling average shows Biden up 10.2%-- 51.6% to 41.4%, which has got to be a big letdown for Trump since Hillary barely beat him in 2016-- 1,367,716 (46.44%) to 1,322,951 (44.92%). On the kind of electoral map Trump understands better than numbers, he looks like he could have won the state because he did so well in rural areas and the map is pretty red:

The Minnesota poll by Langer that came out yesterday-- from the Washington Post and ABC News-- shows Trump losing spectacularly among likely voters-- 41% to Biden's 57%. That's a 16 point margin.

Maybe Trump thinks the way to flatten that curve-- since he sure ain't flattening' the other one-- is to use his own brand of bigotry, racism and misogyny to attack Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. Minnesotans, however, enjoy a good fight and Ilhan sure bested Trump on their latest match. She delivered a pretty devastating comeback to The Donald after his dog-whistle attack on her Somali origins at his Pennsylvania rally Tuesday night. Trump’s racist fans jeered Omar’s name when he mentioned it outside Pittsburgh, apparently making him feel bold enough to say: "She’s telling us how to run our country. How did you do where you came from? How was your country doing?"

Jamie Ross for the Daily Beast: "Omar, who was born in Somalia but left as a kid and is a naturalized U.S. citizen, hit back: 'Firstly, this is my country and I am a member of the House that impeached you. Secondly, I fled civil war when I was 8. An 8-year-old doesn’t run a country even though you run our country like one.' As the pièce de résistance, she posted the Mean Girls gif of Regina George asking the pertinent question: 'Why are you so obsessed with me?'"

Minnesota elected a Democratic governor and a Democratic state House, where they told 75 seats to the Republicans' 55. (There are also 4 "New Republicans.") But the State Senate is a problem. The GOP has 35 seats to the Democrats' 32. The state party's and the DLCC's efforts to flip the Senate are being helped by the Minnesota Republican Party is veering off-track and into conspiracy theory and fascism territory.

Writing for the Star-Tribune, Stephen Montemayor reported that "At least a half-dozen Minnesota Republicans running for state legislative seats in November have promoted the sprawling, false QAnon conspiracy that claims Satanists and pedophiles run the government and that COVID-19 is part of a plot to steal the election. Once a fringe fiction, QAnon is quickly seeping into mainstream Republican politics as scores of GOP candidates across the country express support for it. Among them are six candidates endorsed by the Minnesota Republican Party for state House and Senate seats from the Iron Range to the metro suburbs. In some cases, Minnesota candidates have used official social media pages for their campaigns to post slogans in support of QAnon, which the FBI has warned is a conspiracy theory that could inspire domestic terrorism or violence. Some posts include references to a 'Great Awakening' or 'The Storm,' a prophesied reckoning in which elected officials, journalists and other members of 'the Deep State' are rounded up for imprisonment or execution."

One of them, Julie Dupré, the official Republican Party challenger to state Sen. Melisa Franzen in the suburbs southwest of the Twin Cities, called QAnon "a really great information source."

In Trump's first public comments on Q-Anon, he said-- conflating himself with the country-- "I heard that these are people that love our country."

Melissa Moore, a state delegate for the GOP party since 2016, is running for a House seat that covers St. Louis Park and Hopkins. She has posted references to the Great Awakening and popular QAnon phrases like “WWG1WGA,” an acronym for “Where we go one, we go all” on her campaign Facebook page. She also maintains two Twitter accounts, one of which describes her as a #DigitalSoldier and includes frequent QAnon references. That account has more than 1,000 followers and follows 1,450 other accounts-- many of which support QAnon.

Moore did not respond to messages seeking comment. In a recent AP interview, she said she liked following QAnon, describing it as “an exciting movement that opens our minds to different possibilities of what’s going on, of what’s really happening in our world today.”

In a since-deleted video shot outside a church and later posted to Twitter last December, Gary Heyer, the GOP-endorsed candidate for a Minnesota House seat in Bloomington, described “inviting all of the churchgoers to partake in the great awakening.” In the video, preserved by the nonprofit research group Media Matters for America, congregants drove past a sign with “Q” and “Patriots Unite” emblazoned on its front. The sign included a disclaimer that it was paid for by “Gary Heyer for Congress” and included a hyperlink that now redirects to the website affiliated with Heyer’s state House campaign.

On Twitter, Heyer follows nearly 80 accounts that express support for QAnon in their handles or bios. Heyer, who campaigned for Ron Paul in 2012 and traveled as a delegate to that year’s Republican National Convention, declined to comment on QAnon in an interview.

But he predicted that herd immunity would be a pathway out of the COVID-19 pandemic and vowed that, if elected, he would advocate for Minnesota to become the financial technology capital of the U.S. Heyer advocates for cryptocurrency and said he is “working with some different folks right now but I can’t really discuss all the details.”

Julie Buria, a Mountain Iron City Council member, is running for a state House seat. Buria sparked controversy this summer when she posted a graphic image comparing the Holocaust to Minnesota’s response to the pandemic. Minnesota GOP party leaders later said that Buria had apologized but, days later at a council meeting, Buria claimed that she was forced to apologize and did nothing wrong.

Earlier this year, according to images reviewed by the Star Tribune, Buria tweeted several references to QAnon. She tweeted a May 30 report from a QAnon site purporting to show “Black Patriots” protecting a lone police officer from “Antifa Terrorists.” In April, she retweeted a woman who wrote “If only people knew how many Satanists are actually in the government” and “Pedophilia is going to bring the whole house of cards down.”

Elizabeth Bangert, a child-care center owner running for the state Senate in the Mankato area, frequently posts videos recorded from inside her vehicle to her Minnesota Citizen Lobbyist page on Facebook. Bangert has also shared posts in support of QAnon and “the great awakening” on the social media platform, according to a screenshot of her personal account shared with the Star Tribune. About a dozen of the 56 accounts she follows on Twitter allude to QAnon.

Bangert did not respond to requests for comment. In her Facebook videos, references to human trafficking-- a frequent theme of QAnon messaging-- are prevalent.

“I’m going to go ahead and tell you that if you think that some form of T-R-A-F-F-I-C-K-I-N-G isn’t happening in America or hasn’t been concealed for decades if not longer, then you’ve been duped,” Bangert said in a July 13 video claiming the Wayfair online home furnishings store is involved in child sex-trafficking.

In a statement, a Wayfair spokesperson said, “There is, of course, no truth to these claims.”

Bangert also believes in the Operation Lockstep Theory that COVID-19 is a plot by global elites to control the population. The theory distorts a 2010 Rockefeller Foundation report on how the world could be affected by scenarios that included a global pandemic. It falsely frames the report as an operation manual of sorts to create a police state via a manufactured virus.

Other videos have seen her proudly flout the state’s face mask requirement in public spaces.

In a July 5 tweet in response to Walz asking Minnesotans to don masks over the holiday weekend, Bangert wrote: “You will be removed from office for your treasonous acts, for our safety.”

Joe Thalman, running for a Minnesota House seat that covers parts of the southwest metro suburbs, concluded his remarks at a candidate forum hosted by the League of Women Voters in Bloomington last month by saying, “We’re seeking truth and justice and where we go one, we go all,” the QAnon catch phrase.

The Minnesota Republican Party did not respond to messages seeking comment.

We All Have All The Information We Need To Decide Who To Not Vote For In November

In a "sermon" a couple of years ago, God Has Nothing to Do With Trump Being President, John Pavlovitz reached out directly to evangelicals to remind them that spiritualizing the Trump presidency is "sinful, blasphemous, lousy evangelism and just plain asinine. The hypocrisy on display is historic: after spending the past 8 years straining to find infinitesimal specks in Barack Obama’s eye that they could condemn as deal breakers-- Evangelicals are now perfectly fine with Trump’s rotted forest of Redwoods. In fact, in the most dizzying display of theological spin doctoring, it is now precisely his ever-growing trail of personal toxic discharge that supposedly proves evidence of God’s hand in it all. So Trump’s multiple marriages, his porn star affairs, his mountain of sexual assault claims, his verbal obscenities, his disregard for rule of law, his compulsive lying, his clear racism, his unrelenting attacks on marginalized communities (things these Christians would have figuratively and almost literally crucified Obama for) are now unmistakable signs that God is using this President. This is nonsense of Biblical proportions; to try and draw some line between Jesus of Nazareth and Donald of New York, is about as farcical as you can get without actually spontaneously combusting from the cognitive dissonance... We really should stop pretending God is responsible for this fast food dumpster fire, when it’s clear whose hand is in it all. This reality is the rotten fruit of misogyny, racism, Nationalism, fear, xenophobia, and bigotry-- all released by people who want God to consent to it all so they don’t have to deal with their own culpability or face their own repentance."

Fast forward to... tomorrow. Michael Cohen's book will be officially out and available... a longer and more detailed and less religiously-oriented version of Pavlovitz's 2018 sermon: Disloyal: A Memoir. I have a feeling this may be the most talked about-- if not read-- book out of the dozens of Trump exposés by people once close to him that have come out in the last 4 years. Cohen makes the case that Trump is a criminal, a mentally ill sex psycho and an obsessed racist.

Washington Post reporters Ashley Parker and Rosalind Helderman got their hands on an advance copy and wrote up a preview over the weekend, noting that Cohen "Trump’s longtime lawyer and personal fixer... alleges in a new book that Trump made 'overt and covert attempts to get Russia to interfere in the 2016 election.' ... Cohen lays out an alarming portrait of the constellation of characters orbiting around Trump, likening the arrangement to the mafia and calling himself 'one of Trump’s bad guys.' He describes the president, meanwhile, as 'a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man.' The memoir also describes episodes of Trump’s alleged racism and his 'hatred and contempt' of his predecessor, Barack Obama, the nation’s only African American president." I hate the way Parker and Helderman use the world "alleged" to describe characteristics that have been proven beyond any reasonable double over and over and over for decades and decades and decades.

On Russia, Cohen writes that the cause behind Trump’s admiration of Russian President Vladimir Putin is simpler than many of his critics assume. Above all, he writes, Trump loves money-- and he wrongly identified Putin as “the richest man in the world by a multiple.”

Trump loved Putin, Cohen wrote, because the Russian leader had the ability “to take over an entire nation and run it like it was his personal company-- like the Trump Organization, in fact.”

Cohen also reveals new alleged details about the convoluted effort behind a National Enquirer report smearing Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX). Cohen says that Trump signed off on the baseless report to damage Cruz, one of his rivals in the 2016 Republican primary.

“It’s not real, right?” Trump allegedly asked after being shown a photograph, which the magazine would claim depicted Cruz’s father with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before Oswald killed President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

“Looks real to me!” Cohen responded, according to the book, prompting Trump to laugh as he demanded that the story be run on the tabloid’s front page.

“To say it would be a low blow would be an insult to low blows; can you think of another politician, ever, who would stoop this low?” Cohen writes.

...According to Cohen, Trump’s sycophantic praise of the Russian leader during the 2016 campaign began as a way to suck up and ensure access to the oligarch’s money after he lost the election. But he claims Trump came to understand that Putin’s hatred of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, dating to her support for the 2011 protest movement in Russia, could also help Trump amass more power in the United States.

“What appeared to be collusion was really a confluence of shared interests in harming Hillary Clinton in any way possible, up to and including interfering in the American election-- a subject that caused Trump precisely zero unease,” Cohen writes.

Cohen’s book, however, does not reveal much in the way of new details surrounding the investigations by former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and others into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

...Cohen asserts that another reason that Trump consistently praised Putin was to fulfill his long-held desire to slap his name on a proposed Trump Tower project in Moscow.

Cohen says the Trump Tower plans called for a 120-story building in Red Square, including 30 floors devoted to a five-star hotel with an Ivanka Trump-branded spa and Trump restaurants, and 230 high-end condominiums for Russian oligarchs and leaders.

The plan, Cohen adds, was to give the penthouse apartment to the Russian president for free, in part “as a way to suck up to Putin.”

“The whole idea of patriotism and treason became irrelevant in his mind,” Cohen writes. “Trump was using the campaign to make money for himself: of course he was.”

Trump would later publicly insist that he had no business dealings with Russia. But Cohen writes extensively of his own efforts beginning in the fall of 2015-- several months after Trump had declared his candidacy-- to make the Moscow project a reality.

The project fell to Cohen, he writes, because Trump’s children all disliked Felix Sater, the colorful Russian American developer who served as the Trump Organization’s liaison with Russians interested in the project.

Nevertheless, Cohen says the whole family was aware of the project, even as candidate Trump publicly said he had no ties to Russia. Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter, who is now a senior White House adviser, even selected the proposed tower’s high-end finishes, Cohen writes.

Ivanka and her lawyers have previously described her involvement in the Russia project as minimal, noting that she never visited the prospective site.

Cohen also describes in detail the partnership between Trump and David Pecker, the chief executive of National Enquirer parent company American Media and a longtime Trump friend, which included Pecker allegedly sharing the Cruz attack with Trump ahead of publication.

While many of Trump’s critics would obsess over the possibility of Russian interference, Cohen writes, it was a purposeful “disinformation campaign” run by American citizens such as Pecker that was “by far the more insidious and dangerous development of the last cycle-- and the most threatening for 2020.”

Cohen notes that the grocery-store tabloid targeted each of Trump’s 2016 primary opponents in turn. He includes a document in the book, for instance, purporting to lay out the magazine’s plan to take down Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL). [I hope it was all about Rubio's period as a gay prostitute.]

The National Enquirer came through for Trump again later in 2016, agreeing to pay former Playboy playmate Karen McDougal, who claimed she had an affair with Trump, for her life story and then never running the story. Trump agreed to repay Pecker for the $150,000 fee but never did, Cohen writes.

In the case of Daniels, Cohen writes that after Trump agreed to pay her $130,000 for her silence, he strategized with Trump Organization Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg on how she could be paid without attracting notice.

Weisselberg suggested finding a Trump friend to put up the money, in the guise of paying for a membership to a Trump golf course or the club Mar-a-Lago, according to the book. When Cohen countered that perhaps Weisselberg should lay out the money himself, “Weisselberg went white as a sheet-- like he’d seen a ghost,” he writes.

Ultimately, Cohen made the hush payment himself, taking out a personal home equity loan to come up with the cash, all the while assuming Trump would probably fail to repay him as agreed.

“Stuck with the tab for Trump’s sex romp in a hotel room in Utah a decade ago,” Cohen writes. “This was the job I loved?”

Ultimately, however, Trump did repay Cohen-- agreeing to reimburse him in $35,000 monthly installments after he had entered the White House as president, hiding the payments as fees for legal services and naming Cohen his personal attorney. Cohen asserts that Trump would get a tax break and legal services along with the money-- meaning he would actually come out financially ahead for paying off the adult-film star.

The Trump Organization did not immediately respond for comment Saturday.

In 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about the Trump Moscow project, as well as to violating campaign finance laws by paying Daniels to remain silent. Cohen told the court that he had been directed to make the payment to Daniels-- and later reimbursed for the money-- by Trump. He also pleaded guilty to tax evasion and lying to a financial institution, crimes that were unrelated to his work for Trump.

He was sentenced to three years in prison, which he had been serving at a federal facility in Otisville, N.Y., until he was allowed to leave prison and serve his sentence at home because of the coronavirus pandemic. Before he entered prison, he delivered dramatic public testimony to Congress, in which he apologized for his past lies and called Trump a “racist,” “a con man” and “a cheat.” Republicans mocked his self-professed turn to honesty, noting that he had previously defended Trump with similar gusto.

Beyond Russia’s role in the 2016 elections and the Daniels payment, Cohen seeds the rest of his book with snippets of gossip from his time in Trump’s orbit-- some of it new, some of it well-known and much of it familiar.

He describes Trump insulting and dismissing some of his children, including Donald Trump Jr., his eldest son, and Tiffany, his youngest daughter.

Cohen writes that during the 2016 campaign, Trump was dismissive of minorities, describing them as “not my people.” “I will never get the Hispanic vote,” Cohen recounts Trump claiming. “Like the blacks, they’re too stupid to vote for Trump.”

Cohen describes Trump’s obsessive hatred of Obama, including claiming that the only reason the former president got into Columbia University and Harvard Law School was because of “fucking affirmative action.” He also recounts Trump’s “low opinion of all black folks.” claiming that Trump once said while ranting about Obama, “Tell me one country run by a black person that isn’t a shithole. They are all complete fucking toilets.”

After South African President Nelson Mandela died in 2013, Trump said he did not think Mandela “was a real leader-- not the kind he respected,” Cohen writes.

Instead, Cohen writes that Trump praised the country’s apartheid-era White rule, saying: “Mandela fucked the whole country up. Now it’s a shithole. Fuck Mandela. He was no leader.”

Cohen writes that before winning the presidency, Trump held a meeting at Trump Tower with prominent evangelical leaders, where they laid their hands on him in prayer. Afterward, Trump allegedly said: “Can you believe that bullshit? Can you believe people believe that bullshit?”

“The cosmic joke was that Trump convinced a vast swathe of working-class white folks in the Midwest that he cared about their well-being,” Cohen writes. “The truth was that he couldn’t care less.”

Cohen also depicts Trump as being crude toward women, including inadvertently commenting on Cohen’s then-15-year-old daughter as she finished up a tennis lesson: “Look at that piece of ass,” Trump said, according to Cohen. “I would love some of that.”

Cohen details a tawdry 2013 visit to a Las Vegas club, the Act, with Trump and Aras and Emin Agalarov-- a Russian father-and-son oligarch duo. Cohen asserts that the group watched a debauched strip show that included one performer who simulated urinating on another performer, who pretended to drink it.

Trump’s reaction to the show, Cohen writes, was “disbelief and delight.”

Cohen’s book ends with something of a plea-- though one that requires the reader to trust Cohen’s account of his time in the Trump orbit.

“You now have all the information you need to decide for yourself in November,” Cohen concludes.

Trump's Q-Anon Candidate In Georgia Threatens And Incites Gun Violence Against AOC, Ilhan And Rashida

Trump's top Q-Anon candidate, Marjorie Taylor Greene-- who is guaranteed a seat in one of America's most backward districts, the one where they opened the schools where you saw all the crowded hallways... and then shut the schools down again when dozens of people came down with COVID-19. That's GA-14, the northwest corner of the state, where Trump beat Hillary 75.0% to 22.1% and where GOP extremist Tom Graves was reelected in 2018 with 76.5%. There are 12 counties in the district. The least Republican county in the district performed at an R+36 level. Three counties performed at over R+70. Yeah, so Ms. Q-Anon will soon be in Congress... unless they refuse to seat her. Why would they do that?

Well, 2 days ago she posted a picture of herself on her official campaign Facebook page holding a gun alongside images of Democratic congresswomen AOC, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib and encouraged going on the "offense against these socialists. We need strong conservative Christians to go on the offense against these socialists who want to rip our country apart... Hate America leftists want to take this country down. Politicians have failed this country. I'm tired of seeing weak, Establishment Republicans play defense. Our country is on the line. America needs fighters who speak the truth."

A few hours after she posted it, Ilhan Omar complained to Facebook that it was "violent provocation" and incitement and Facebook took it down as a violation of the company's policies. Greene told CNN that people who think the picture incites violence "are paranoid and ridiculous."

Iowans May Not Understand The Nature Of Pandemics-- And They May Not Be The Only Americans Who Don't

In all likelihood Americans will go to the polls in November knowing over a quarter million of our fellow citizens had died-- most needlessly-- because of Republican mishandling on the pandemic. By early next year, deaths will tick up beyond 300,000. How do Republicans defend themselves when it has been their policies and their incompetence that are behind the catastrophe? They deny it. It's a hoax; it's the media out to get them; the numbers are fake; it's just a bunch of fat old people who would have died anyway. Yesterday, Joni Ernst hadn't gotten so much national press for her clueless comments about pandemic deaths since it came out she used to be a hog castrator before being elected to the U.S. Senate in 2014. As the Washington Post put it Wednesday: "Ernst’s comments echo conspiracy theories pushed by QAnon followers that have been debunked by doctors and public health experts." She told a crowd of Republicans near Waterloo-- hopefully her Waterloo-- that "These health-care providers and others are reimbursed at a higher rate if covid is tied to it, so what do you think they’re doing?" That's a conspiracy theory straight out of Q-Anon.

Critics lashed out at Ernst over the claim, including Democrat Theresa Greenfield, who is seeking to unseat her in a November election expected to be tight.

“It’s appalling for you to say you’re ‘so skeptical’ of the toll this pandemic has on our families and communities across Iowa,” Greenfield said in a tweet directed at Ernst. “We need leaders who will take this seriously.”

...Her inaccurate figure of 10,000 or fewer covid-19 deaths is similar to a widely spread QAnon meme that misinterpreted a recent study published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That study said the coronavirus was the only contributing factor in 6 percent of reported deaths. The conspiracy theory that claims the U.S. death toll is inflated incorrectly assumes that only 6 percent of deaths should be counted in the covid-19 death tally. The study does not support that claim.

In the other 94 percent of coronavirus deaths, the victims had at least one other contributing factor. Those deaths still count toward the overall number of deaths caused by the virus. Health experts have known since the early days of the pandemic that preexisting conditions, such as asthma, diabetes and heart disease, increase a patient’s likelihood to die of a coronavirus infection.

The suggestion that the U.S. death toll has been inflated has been echoed by QAnon accounts and even retweeted by President Trump. When Trump on Sunday retweeted a QAnon follower named “Mel Q” who made the claim on Twitter, the social media site removed the tweet for spreading false information about the pandemic.

In the past week, new coronavirus cases have spiked by nearly 84 percent in Ernst’s state and the death toll increased by 25 percent. Nightclubs, concert venues and sporting arenas are still closed in Iowa, but most other businesses have been allowed to reopen and children are required to attend in-person classes at public schools throughout the state.

The senator’s unfounded claims inspired backlash from some observers, who viewed the remarks as undermining health-care workers who have been on the front lines of the pandemic.

“Senator Ernst is from Iowa, where currently is having one of the WORST #COVID19 OUTBREAKS hotspot in the entire nation as a region, and some say maybe the world,” Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist, health economist and senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists, tweeted Tuesday in response to Ernst’s comments. “To deny that is to deny the suffering of Iowans.”

COVID-Kim (R-IA)

Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds-- backed by a GOP-controlled state legisalture-- has been responsible for one of the worst over-all responses to the pandemic of any governor in America. A 100% Trump puppet, she has consistently ignored science and public health best practices in favor of partisan and ideological gobblygook that has killed 1,125 Iowans. The state reported 646 new cases yesterday, bringing the total to 66,136-- or 20,962 cases per million Iowans-- a far worse rate than any European country, including Spain (10,073 cases per million), Sweden (8,361 cases per million) and Italy (4,470 cases per million).

In 2016, Iowa nearly ceased being a swing state. After two consecutive wins there for Obama, the state's voters overwhelmingly rejected Hillary Clinton's status quo message and Trump won Iowa's 6 electoral votes 800,983 (51.15%) to 653,669 (41.74%). Hillary won just 6 of the state's 99 counties. Two years later, the anti-red wave returned 2 of the state's 3 GOP congressional districts to Democratic hands. And current presidential polling average is firmly back in swing state territory. Trump leads Biden 46.7-45.0%. (1.7 points). The most recent poll from the Des Moines Register is a dead heat within the margin of error-- 44-43% with Trump ahead.

An even more recent Iowa poll by Monmouth shows registered voters giving a slight edge to Ernst over Democrat Theresa Greenfield, 48-45%. The poll results, though, seem to indicate that many Iowans don't understand the nature of pandemics and it is likely to require many more cases and deaths before Iowans will understand how contagious diseases work and how they can be stopped. With many Iowans opting for simplistic partisan tropes to deal with the pandemic, it will be probably some time before Iowa is part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

What Do Mainstream Republican Careerists Think Of The #CocaineConvention So Far?

Before the #CocaineConvention began yesterday, I passed a TV and noticed that Trump was doing a press gaggle of some kind. Briefly interested in the way you might be attracted to a pile-up on the inter-state shown on TV, I was soon wondering why the TV network didn't just label it "And now an uninterrupted hour of lies from your president." And that was just a precursor of what was coming-- Apocalypse Now, 2020.

CNN, which was thanked by Señor T, for covering his shit-show, noted this morning that it "started off with a parade of dishonesty, in stark contrast with last week's Democratic convention. While CNN also watched and fact-checked the Democrats, those four nights combined didn't have the number of misleading and false claims made on the first night of the Republicans' convention." CNN listed over a dozen of the most blatant and pre-approved lies that, in sum, are the substitute for a party platform.

Speaking of which, at The Atlantic this morning, David Frum ran down the unspoken GOP platform, which the party has decided not to publish. "This omission," he noted, "has led some to conclude that the GOP lacks ideas, that it stands for nothing, that it has shriveled to little more than a Trump cult. This conclusion is wrong. The Republican Party of 2020 has lots of ideas. He listed 13 ideas that "command almost universal assent within the Trump administration, within the Republican caucuses of the U.S. House and U.S. Senate, among governors and state legislators, on Fox News, and among rank-and-file Republicans. Once you read the list, I think you’ll agree that these are authentic ideas with meaningful policy consequences, and that they are broadly shared. The question is not why Republicans lack a coherent platform; it’s why they’re so reluctant to publish the one on which they’re running." I'll summarize, using Frum's words:

• Adjusting the burden of taxation down on society’s richest citizens.
• Coronavirus is a much-overhyped problem. It’s not that dangerous and will soon burn itself out. States should reopen their economies as rapidly as possible, and accept the ensuing casualties as a cost worth paying-- and certainly a better trade-off than saving every last life by shutting down state economies. Masking is useless and theatrical, if not outright counterproductive.
• Climate change is a much-overhyped problem. It’s probably not happening. If it is happening, it’s not worth worrying about.
• China has become an economic and geopolitical adversary of the United States. Military spending should be invested with an eye to defeating China on the seas, in space, and in the cyber-realm.
• The trade and alliance structures built after World War II are outdated. America still needs partners of course, especially Israel and maybe Russia.
• Health care is a purchase like any other. Individuals should make their own best deals in the insurance market with minimal government supervision. Those who pay more should get more. Those who cannot pay must either rely on Medicaid, accept charity, or go without.
• Voting is a privilege. States should have wide latitude to regulate that privilege in such a way as to minimize voting fraud, which is rife among African Americans and new immigrant communities. The federal role in voting oversight should be limited to preventing Democrats from abusing the U.S. Postal Service to enable fraud by their voters.
• Anti-black racism has ceased to be an important problem in American life. At this point, the people most likely to be targets of adverse discrimination are whites, Christians, and Asian university applicants.
• The courts should move gradually and carefully toward eliminating the mistake made in 1965 when women’s sexual privacy was elevated into a constitutional right.
• The post-Watergate ethics reforms overreached. We should welcome the trend toward unrestricted and secret campaign donations. Overly strict conflict-of-interest rules will only bar wealthy and successful businesspeople from public service.
• Trump’s border wall is the right policy to slow illegal immigration; the task of enforcing immigration rules should not fall on business operators.
• The country is currently gripped by a surge of crime and lawlessness as a result of the Black Lives Matter movement and its criticism of police.
• Civility and respect are cherished ideals. But in the face of the overwhelming and unfair onslaught against President Trump by the media and the Deep State, his occasional excesses on Twitter and at his rallies should be understood as pardonable reactions to much more severe misconduct by others.

"So, concluded Frum, "there’s the platform right there. Why not publish it? There are two answers to that question, one simple, one more complicated. The simple answer is that President Trump’s impulsive management style has cast his convention into chaos. The location, the speaking program, the arrangements-- all were decided at the last minute. Managing the rollout of a platform, as well, was just one task too many. The more complicated answer is that the platform I’ve just described, like so much of the Trump-Republican program, commands support only among a minority of the American people. The platform works (to the extent it does work) by exciting enthusiastic support among Trump supporters; but stated too explicitly, it invites a backlash among the American majority. This is a platform for a party that talks to itself, not to the rest of the country. And for those purposes, it will succeed most to the extent it is communicated only implicitly, to those receptive to its message. The challenge for Republicans in the week ahead is to hope that President Trump can remember, night after night, to speak only the things he’s supposed to speak-- not to blurt the things his party wants its supporters to absorb unspoken."

Frum just neglected to mention one big and rapidly growing part of the unwritten Republican Party Platform-- Q-Anon, the new Republican Party Religion, which is disrupting the GOP and the already crackpot religious right churches. "Once the fascination of far-right commentators and their followers, QAnon is no longer fringe," wrote Katelyn Beaty for ReligionNews. "With support from Trump and other elected officials, it has gained credibility both on the web and in the offline world: In Georgia, a candidate for Congress has praised Q as “a mythical hero,” and at least five other congressional hopefuls from Illinois to Oregon have voiced support. One scholar found a 71% increase in QAnon content on Twitter and a 651% increase on Facebook since March." 

Jon Thorngate is the pastor at LifeBridge, a nondenominational church of about 300 in a Milwaukee suburb. In recent months, he said, his members have shared “Plandemic,” a half-hour film that presents COVID-19 as a moneymaking scheme by government officials and others, on Facebook. Members have also passed around a now-banned Breitbart video that promotes hydroxychloroquine as a cure for the virus.

Thorngate, one of the few pastors who would go on the record among those who called QAnon a real problem in their churches, said that only five to 10 members are actually posting the videos online. But in conversations with other members, he’s realized many more are open to conspiracy theories than those who post.

  Thorngate attributes the phenomenon in part to the “death of expertise”-- a distrust of authority figures that leads some Americans to undervalue long-established measures of competency and wisdom. Among some church members, he said, the attitude is, “I’m going to use church for the things I like, ignore it for the things I don’t and find my own truth.

“That part for us is concerning, that nothing feels authoritative right now.”

For years in the 1980s and ’90s, U.S. evangelicals, above nearly any other group, warned what will happen when people abandon absolute truth (which they located in the Bible), saying the idea of relative truth would lead to people believing whatever confirms their own inward hunches. But suspicion of big government, questioning of scientific consensus (on evolution, for example) and a rejection of the morals of Hollywood and liberal elites took hold among millennial Christians, many of whom feel politically alienated and beat up by mainstream media. They are natural targets for QAnon.

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Yep. As the meme says, he really did say that and, of course, the 2020 Republican Death Cult Con-Vention is upon us and we're already hearing much more of the same. Along with their usual NAZI words and Third Reich symblism, we can expect to hear little else from such a collection of grifters, con artists, and white supremacy goons. Here's the prelude to the uber fear-mongering quote in tonight's meme:

If you want a vision of your life under Biden presidency think of the smoldering ruins in Minneapolis, the violent anarchy of Portland, the bloodstained sidewalks of Chicago, and imagine the mayhem coming to your town and every single town in America. You're not gonna have law and order.

He could have just added, "You already have that with me so what have you got to lose! Stay the course! Stay with the chaos you know!"

Speaking of Trump saying "What have you got to lose?," Mr. Grand Wizard of Presidents also recently said:

Many blacks did go out and vote for Hillary 'cause they liked me. That was almost as good as getting the votes, you know, and it was just great.

That's one more revealing statement from from a white supremacist president. One more revealing statement for the white supremacy movement. In that statement, Trump points up, in just a few words, his cynicism, his contempt for African-Americans and how much it matters to him that people show their love for him. Blow in my ear and I'll follow you anywhere. That's not a good quality in a president of anything and some of the world's most evil leaders have used it to play Trump like the diseased orange fiddle that he is. Which brings us to QAnon, the new love of the Republican Party and their Dear Leader.

QAnon's popularity is growing by leaps and bounds within the Republican Party and will continue to do so because now Trump has embraced this group of mega-MAGA conspiracists. They can be seen in force at Trump rallies and other places wherever large numbers of maskless Republicans get together to spread COVID-19. They proudly wear their QAnon T-shirts and buttons right along with their MAGA hats.

The merger of QAnon and the Republican Party was a natural. It was inevitable. QAnon people actually believe that Hollywood, the Democratic Party, and the world are being ruled by a satan-worshipping cannibalistic cabal of child-eating pedophiles. They believe Trump will protect them from the flesh eaters just like all Republicans believe he will protect them from the kind of chaos he's already created. Somehow that all makes sense to their fawlty minds. They believe that people such as Tom Hanks and Hillary Clinton are card carrying members of the cabal. I guess it just wasn't enough for Republicans to believe that Planned Parenthood locations are wet markets for "baby parts." Tom Hanks? They believe Hillary Clinton is running a pedo sex slave ring out of a pizza shop in the "suspiciously named" Friendship Heights, Maryland, but Tom Hanks? This is Salem stuff, folks. Of course, they believe those Salem women deserved to be burned. "Nasty women." It's a republican thing. Anyway, Trump embraces these wackos not just because he apparently believes as they do, no surprise there, but because, as he says, "They like me."

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Sunday Thoughts:

Yeah, Rick Wiles, but what's YOUR excuse? What made you so inhuman? What altered your DNA? Or, were you just born that way? Did your god play a little trick on you? Is it just a lifestyle choice that you made?

For decades, I've always noted that republicans always need someone or some group to hate or at least use for stoking fear to motivate their voters. It's the conservative M.O that they have taken in with full fervor; so Christian of them, but, that's their brand of Christianity.

When I started out, the target was people whose name ended in a vowel, "commies," or the tried and true targets of conservatives and other NAZIS, i.e. "The Jews" and "The Blacks." Nixon's tapes are full of proof of that and I heard plenty of it in my little Republicam hometown in New Jersey when I was growing up. Gradually, they added "longhairs." Then, they freaked out about gay people coming out. Then Muslims. Oh and I forgot "The Catholics." The righties used to burn their churches down. Now, they seem to just go after black churches, mosques and the old favorite, synagogues, although the later is usually reserved just for shootings and defacements with swastikas, not burnings.

The Republican Party actively looks for groups of people to hate. It hasn't been enough for them lately to focus on Chinese people because their Dear Leader tells them to. They're even now more bizarrely zeroing in on Tom Hanks now that their president has wholeheartedly embraced QAnon and their idea that Tom, Ellen DeGeneres, Oprah, Hillary Clinton and who knows who else are part of a satanic pedophile ring and vast child-eating cabal. Pizzagate wasn't enough. Republicans needed more. You know their list of supposed pedos and cannibals and pedo-cannables, or what have you, will grow and grow until practically every celebrity and sports figure you can think of will be on it. Republican voters have even recently voted for QAnon supporters to represent them in Congress. Republican leaders like Trump focus their base on such groups and causes while they fleece the very people who vote for them. It's quite a game! A big Republican Jesus vs. Satan game. To join, just send cash.

Still, I always wonder, who's next? Judging by Flor-i-Duh Pastor Rick Wiles, a man who called the impeachment a "Jew Coup," a man who called for his buddy Trump to use "the Obama bullets" on BLM protestors, a man so cherished by Republicans that he gets White House press credentials, the next republican target for their pent up hate might be vegetarians. Vegetarians! Who knew they were so profoundly unAmerican! What kind of American doesn't eat meat? How dare they! That's communism, or something! C'mon Repugs! At least give the vegetarians credit for not eating babies! Just a few days ago, Vice President Mikey Pence even got his leather panties in a twist warning that nobody better ever mess with his meat! Not to worry, Mikey. The thought had never crossed my mind, but, Mikey, you'd better watch out for that Lindsey Graham fella!

Build A Wall! Around Georgia's 14th Congressional District

Congresswoman-elect Q-Anon

Georgia has elected some real nut cases to Congress in recent years. When I first introduced Jody Hice to DWT readers in 2014, right after he won his primary, I noted that "presuming Hice wins in November, he will enter Congress as the craziest and most extreme Member, and most observers have remarked that he almost makes lunatics like Paul Broun and Michele Bachmann, both of whom are retiring, look vaguely conventional. The only outside spending in the primary was from 2 gun-nut/domestic terrorism groups who find the NRA 'too liberal,' Gun Owners of America (who hasn't run ads for anyone in the country but Hice) and the National Association for Gun Rights (whose only other race this cycle was opposing Thad Cochran and supporting Chris McDaniel in Mississippi). Why are the gun worshippers so wild about Hice? Watch this clip from his crackpot radio show: 'It is my belief that any, any, any, any weapon that our government and law enforcement possesses ought to be allowed for individuals to possess in this country, provided they can afford it.' He goes on the explain why people should have cannons and bazookas and missiles. Really. He just got 54% of the vote against a former congressman's son-- not despite his views but because of them... With the Republicans still hoping to change their image before the midterms in order to appeal to a broader swath of the population, Hice is having none of it. He regularly lambasts the LGBT community and Muslim-Americans and he insists that gals who want to run for office get permission from their husbands."

Today Hice is one of the incumbents in his party's dominant and growing neo-fascist wing. So are fellow-Georgians Barry Loudermilk and Doug Collins. And they're about to add another, further extreme and overtly dangerous to American democracy than any of the others-- Marjorie Taylor Greene, sure to be one of the new Q-Anon Members of Congress. Who would put this stinking sack of garbage into Congress? Georgia Republicans that's who.

The district: GA-14 in the northwest corner of the state, has an R+27 PVI.. In 2016 the district gave Trump a 75.0% to 22.1% win over Hillary. Two years later, the so-called "blue wave" never reached GA-14. Far right congressman Tom Graves won all 12 counties and racked up a 175,743 (76.5%) to 53,981 (23.5%) win over Democrat Steven Foster. Brian Kemp did as well in his gubernatorial campaign. Today GA-14 is leading the nation into in a failed school reopening program that will send first Georgia and then the rest of the country into coronavirus Hell. Frankly, America would be better off if GA-14 became part of Russia. Oh... and their new soon-to-be member of Congress, Marjorie Greene is exactly what you would expect from that district-- exactly; she is them and they are her. Yesterday Washington Post reporters Rachel Bade and Isaac Stanley-Becker framed her primary runoff victory precisely how it should be framed: Trump, House Republicans embrace candidate who has made racist statements, drawing attention to party's tolerance for bigotry.

Trump's response to her win Tuesday was to call her a "future Republican star... a real WINNER." Q-Anon goes to Capitol Hill, even though Trump isn't likely to be in Washington next year and the Republican Party will be rushing to disassociate itself from having ever supported him for his agenda of hatred and divisiveness. Still, Kevin McCarthy said he'll seat Greene as a Republican on congressional committees.

The decision has left many House Republicans privately griping about irresponsible leadership, even as they do little publicly to challenge the party’s position or to state their opposition to Greene’s joining their conference if she is elected in November, as is expected, in a reliably Republican district.

Greene promotes the QAnon conspiracy theory, whose followers believe Trump is battling a cabal of “deep state” saboteurs of his administration who worship Satan and traffic children for sex. She has also made racist, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic comments, asserting that Black people are “held slaves to the Democratic Party,” likening the election of the first two Muslim women to Congress to an “Islamic invasion of our government” and calling George Soros, the liberal Jewish donor and Holocaust survivor, a “Nazi himself trying to continue what was not finished.”

Some retiring members spoke out against the party’s accepting Greene into its ranks, but those seeking reelection were reluctant to do so.

“How can we warmly receive someone that’s publicly stated some of the things she stated in her videos?” asked retiring Rep. Paul Mitchell (R-MI). “You can’t dismiss people because of their religious beliefs and their ethnicity. You can’t... It’s just wrong.”

The rise of Greene shines a spotlight on the GOP’s internal debate over how to handle fringe groups and candidates who support Trump and whom he often supports in return. Republicans privately acknowledge that there is no future for a party that antagonizes people of color and has members who make statements or take policy positions supported by white supremacists. But they also have done little to stand up to Trump, a president who embraces such rhetoric, and candidates who make those remarks.

...[Greene] has only doubled down on her controversial comments over the course of her campaign, offering a preview of the sort of oratory she might bring to Washington. On Wednesday, Greene used the Republicans’ online fundraising tool WinRed to solicit donations off using a vulgar and sexist expletive to describe House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).

“Nancy Pelosi impeached @realDonaldTrump. She put our country through hell with the Russian collusion conspiracy,” Greene wrote. “She’s anti American & we’re going to kick that bitch out of Congress. RT & donate below to help make this happen.”

Those remarks are in line with the type of rhetoric Greene has used on the campaign trail. One ad depicted her racking the slide on a semiautomatic rifle while warning antifa, a loose collection of activists who oppose fascism and have sometimes embraced property damage and violent protest in recent years, to “stay the hell out of northwest Georgia.”

Facebook removed the material from its website, citing policy violations. She also rejected the notion that inequalities exist.

“Guess what? Slavery is over... Black people have equal rights,” she said in another video, first reported by Politico.

In response to the controversy over her comments, Greene defended herself in June and criticized House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) and House Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney (R-WY), both of whom condemned her remarks.

“Every Republican, every Christian Conservative is going to be called a racist and a bigot by the Fake News Media, as have Steve Scalise and Liz Cheney,” she said in a statement. “I’m sorry my future colleagues are unable to stand up to the pressure and fight back.”

...The division among Republicans over how to handle Greene’s runoff victory was apparent in Georgia on Wednesday. Some Republicans took to social media to congratulate her. Among them were Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) and her primary challenger Rep. Douglas A. Collins (R-GA), who are locked in a heated special election matchup.

Others, such as Sen. David Perdue (R-GA) withheld praise, reflecting the distinct political pressures at work in the state. Unlike Loeffler and Collins, who are competing for support in Georgia’s Republican strongholds, Perdue is fending off a challenge from Democrat Jon Ossoff.

Greene’s ascension could cause headaches for McCarthy, who faces growing discord within his ranks. More than a half-dozen members implored McCarthy to personally involve himself in the race. His own No. 2, Scalise, donated to and hosted a fundraiser for Greene’s primary opponent, John Cowan, a neurosurgeon, in hopes of stopping Greene.

Yet McCarthy-- after initially distancing himself from Greene-- decided to stay neutral. According to the candidate, he recently phoned her and signaled his support, though McCarthy’s office did not comment in response to questions about the encounter.

...“We look forward to Georgians Andrew Clyde and Marjorie Taylor Greene-- and all of our Republican candidates across the country-- winning in November so that we can enact policies to renew the American dream, restore our way of life, and rebuild the greatest economy in the world,” McCarthy’s office said in a statement. “It’s clear that the Democrat Party does not share those goals.” (Clyde is a Republican candidate in Georgia’s 9th Congressional District [the only Georgia district more backward and politically primitive than GA-14].)

Greene’s embrace of QAnon elevates within the party what many see as a dangerous conspiracy theory identified by the FBI as a potential domestic terrorism threat. But many of the president’s supporters have embraced parts or all of the theory, as has his campaign, to some degree.

Just hours after Trump tweeted praise for Greene, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), who served in the U.S. Air Force in Iraq and Afghanistan, said on Twitter that there is “no place” for such beliefs in Congress and mocked Q, the supposed person working within the bureaucracy to protect Trump from the “deep state.”

“Qanon is a fabrication,” he wrote on Twitter. “This ‘insider’ has predicted so much incorrectly (but people don’t remember PAST predictions) so now has switched to vague generalities. Could be Russian propaganda or a basement dweller. Regardless, no place in Congress for these conspiracies.”

That observation, which mentioned neither Greene nor the president by name, drew a swift and critical response from the Trump campaign.

“When will @RepKinzinger condemn the Steele Dossier fabrications and conspiracy theories pushed by Democrats? That actually WAS Russian propaganda,” a campaign spokesman, Matt Wolking, wrote on Twitter.

But though Greene’s association with QAnon has trained a national spotlight on her district, many Republicans said they are more concerned about her racist comments tainting their ranks at a time when the party and Trump are already unpopular with communities of color.

...Greene is among numerous pro-Trump congressional candidates who have seemed to signal support for QAnon. More than a dozen of them will appear on the ballot in November. Unlike Greene, however, most stand little chance of being elected because their districts vote dependably for Democrats.

Some Republicans have justified the move to embrace Greene as the lesser of two evils. Sue Everhart, a former chairman of the Georgia GOP, said she disapproves of some of the candidate’s statements-- especially the talk of Satan common to the QAnon worldview. But she said she prefers Greene to a Democrat, arguing that no candidate is perfect and expressing optimism that Greene will change her ways upon arriving in Washington.

“She is a Republican, and I’m glad she got it, but let’s just say I wasn’t close to her,” she said. “I wish her all the luck in the world... I don’t speak ill of other Republicans.”

Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-VA), doesn't have to worry about offending Trump and Q-Anon. He was just defeated in his primary reelection bid. He maddest completely clear yesterday what he thinks of Greene: "If she’s the future of the Republican party, we’re in trouble… Q-Anon is the mental gonorrhea of conspiracy theories. It’s disgusting and you want to get rid of it as fast as possible." I'm told that a majority of Republicans in Congress feel exactly the same way... but are afraid to say so.





Yesterday, Trump was on Fox Business News with Wall Street shill/GOP spokesperson Maria Bartiromo, blithely gaslighting away, completely unchallenged. Claiming the GOP is going to take back the House-- when it looks like they will lose another 2 dozen or more seats in an anti-red tsunami-- Trump also warned Republican Senate incumbents that if they don't embrace his increasingly insane and unpopular pronouncements they're going to lose in November. "We’re fighting very hard in the Senate, political commentator Donald J. Trump pronounced. "I’ll be honest [which would be a first], the Senate is tough. We have a couple of people that aren’t as supportive of Trump as they should be, and those people are going to lose their elections. The ones that don’t support, and I’m just talking, take a look... you have a few people that want to be cute, and those people are going to lose their elections. And that’s a problem for the Senate." He didn't say who, but he was clearly talking about Susan Collins (R-ME) and, to a loser extent, Cory Gardner (R-CO). I wonder what he would have said had Bartiromo read him the Kinzinger quote.

Trump Has Also Triggered A Mass Mental Breakdown-- An Economic Meltdown Will Only Make It Worse

If you're a regular DWT reader, you probably wonder, at least some of the time, how prevelent is mental illness among Trump supporters. Most people think rabid Trumpists are just stupid, but there is a big difference between mental illness and low IQs. Yesterday, USA Today published a report by Kelly Tyko about the Arizona woman, Melissa Rein Lively, who, earlier this month filmed herself tearing down a mask display at a Target in Scottsdale. She spent a week in a mental-health facility after the incident, and is using the public meltdown as a warning to others to seek help for issues related to mental health, especially during the coronavirus pandemic. She said what happened to her "was scary and it changed my life forever. I felt I had absolutely no control over my actions."

Nicknamed "Q-Anon Karen," Lively, who was arrested at her home after the incident, claimed she worked for the Trump regime. Her husband filed for divorce and she also lost all the clients she had at her public relations firm, the Brand Consortium Public Relations. Lively told Tyko that extreme stress from the pandemic triggered what she called a "manic bipolar episode... I can absolutely see that how I acted was unbelievably inappropriate not to mention classless and just completely out of character for how I conduct myself, professionally and personally."

Though police spoke to her at Target and let her go, when she got home, she said, her husband called police out of concern about her mental state. She livestreamed the exchange on Instagram. It was in that video that she told officers she had connections at the White House, asked officers to call President Trump and said she was a spokesperson for Q-Anon.

Q-Anon Karen

"Everything that I was kind of doing was facetious and sarcastic and I realize now the world, obviously, took everything I was saying seriously like I really believed that," she told USA Today. "I was not arrested, I was taken in for a mental health evaluation. That was something that like really opened my eyes to this whole process."

Her husband, Jared Lively, said he feared it was an escalation of a days-long decline in his wife’s mental health and a continuation of a problem that he said had manifested itself the year before. The Republican Party has the exact same problem. In fact, the party is now running almost a dozen Q-Anon candidates for Congress, at least some of whom are in districts red enough to guarantee that there will be Q-Anon believers in Congress next year, part of a dwindling and increasingly irrelevant Republican congressional minority.

And then this happened today too

Although they don't all act out the way Lively did, the stress we're all going through, is especially hard to deal with for someone who supports Trump, since Trump supporters are likely to be angry, paranoid, self-centered and self-righteous (as well as stupid). A psychologist friend of mine wrote today that "Here he is in front of us, an insane, narcissistic, ignorant, destructive loon who has excelled his whole life at lying, destroying things and cheating people, and a third of the country still worships him. Even though he hates them and hates everyone and is immune to others’ deaths and suffering. Social psychology at its worst... Lively obviously had a lost moment, when she did what she did. Yes, people will be having mental breakdowns. Abuse in the home will be rising drastically out of frustration. There will be many more deaths. Iraqi psychologists talked about the lost generation of mental health in the children exposed to all the horrors there. We will have our very own lost generation, too, of children exposed to horrors at home, captive with no outlets-- school? I suspect many won’t open and of those districts that do, many parents will not send their children. I think we have only seen the tip of the iceberg of destruction so far."

Yep... tip of the iceberg for sure. The upheaval is just beginning. Early this morning, the NY Times reported that the economy has been collapsing and that "Economic output fell at its fastest pace on record last spring as the coronavirus pandemic forced businesses across the United States to close their doors and kept millions of Americans shut in their homes for weeks. Gross domestic product-- the broadest measure of goods and services produced-- fell 9.5 percent in the second quarter of the year, the Commerce Department said Thursday. On an annualized basis, the standard way of reporting quarterly economic data, G.D.P. fell at a rate of 32.9 percent... The collapse was unprecedented in its speed and breathtaking in its severity. The only possible comparisons in modern American history came during the Great Depression and the demobilization after World War II, both of which occurred before the advent of modern economic statistics."



NPR listeners heard it termed "the sharpest economic contraction in modern American history... The economic shock in April, May and June was roughly four times as sharp as the worst quarterly decline during the Great Recession."

And another 1.43 million people filed for unemployment-- just as Trump and Senate Republicans are signaling that they don't want the federal government helping. Anyone think this isn't going to help trigger even more mass psychosis?