Saturday, July 04, 2020

We're Lookin' For A Leader While Trump And Noem Bring More Death And Destruction To South Dakota

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South Dakota is a mostly rural, sparsely populated state that has drifted far to the right in recent decades, far from a once proud populist history. Today, both U.S. senators and the state's lone member of Congress are supine Trumpist Republicans. The governor, attorney general, lieutenant governor, secretary of state, treasurer and every other member of the state's executive branch are Republicans. 30 of the 35 members of the state Senate are Republicans, as are 59 of the state House's 70 members. In 2016, Trump won 61 of the state's 66 counties and beat Hillary 227,701 (61.5%) to 117,442 (31.7%). Two years later, though, Trumpist gubernatorial candidate, Rep. Kristi Noem, didn't do quite so well in the midst of the nationwide anti-red wave. She did win, but not by very much. She beat Democrat Billie Sutton 172,912 (51%) to 161,454 (47.6%), underperforming Trump drastically, while Sutton out-performed Hillary by even more. Where Hillary won just 5 of South Dakota's counties, Sutton won 22.

Many South Dakotans have lived to regret that outcome. With Noem absolutely refusing to take any precautions against the pandemic-- almost laying out a welcome mat and red carpet for it-- the state went through a horrific first wave, just over 7,000 cases and nearly 100 deaths. South Dakota has 7,944 cases per million residents, extremely high-- and far worse than hard-hit states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Texas, Ohio and Washington and worse than any European country. (By way of comparison, Spain has 6,366 cases per million and Italy has 3,989 per million.) Noem's pandemic criminal incompetence has not only caused severe illness in her own state, but is largely responsible for widespread and deadly pandemic spikes in Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota and Colorado. In some ways Kristi Noem is the worst of the GOP Typhoid Mary governors in the whole country.


On Friday, as South Dakota welcomed Trump for another of his ill-advised hate rallies, the state reported another 85 new coronavirus cases. Today 50 more new cases were reported-- including one that South Dakota won't get "credit" for: after she arrived for the Mt. Rushmore rally, Trump, Jr's mistress, former Gavin Newsom wife  and Fox News broadcaster, Kimberly Guilfoyle, was reported to have tested positive for COVID-19.

The NY Times' Maggie Habberman reported that Guilfoyle, a top fund-raising official for the Trumpanzee campaign, arrived in the state with Trump, Jr. but separately from Señor T. She is the third person in possible proximity to Trump known to have contracted the virus. She is likely to have caught the disease at the Tulsa rally, which is also where Herman Cain, now hospitalized, contracted it.
Even as outbreaks have emerged in the South and West and as states across the country report a record number of cases each day, White House officials-- and Mr. Trump in particular-- have minimized their focus on the virus in public appearances. In an interview on Wednesday, the president indicated that he believed the virus was “going to sort of just disappear.”

The president’s aides recently modified protocols for people entering the White House grounds, abandoning routine temperature checks, for instance. They have counseled people experiencing symptoms typical of the coronavirus to stay away.

But people who come in proximity to Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence are still tested for the coronavirus.


Meanwhile, Trump's July 3rd Mt. Rushmore appearance, featuring a desperate speech written by neo-Nazi Stephen Miller, dripping with hatred and divisiveness and seeking to pit Americans against Americans, is likely to cause South Dakota a whole second spike in cases. While Trump was screaming about "left wing mobs" and stoking racism and white nationalism, 7,500 people-- mostly without masks-- were crammed shoulder-to-shoulder to listen to Miller's ugly, vicious words and watch the fireworks, while shouting and spreading the contagion. This morning's Washington Post noted that VIPs were "seated separately onstage-- not six feet apart, but not amid the storm of exhalations, coughs, vociferous cheers and sneezes."

Trump has continued illegally using the copyright-protected music of artists who abhor him and everything he stands for. On Friday he used 3 Neil Young songs-- Keep On Rocking' in the Free World, "Like A Hurricane" and "Cowgirl in the Sand"-- even though Young has demanded he stop using his songs numerous times and last week shredded Trump with a rewrite and performance of "Lookin' for a Leader" as part of a very political episode of his Porch Episode series:
We had Barack Obama and we really need him now
The man who stood behind him has to take his place somehow
America has a leader building walls around our house
Don’t know Black Lives Matter and we gotta vote him out.

We got our election but corruption has a chance
We got to have a big win to regain confidence
America is beautiful
But she has an ugly side
We’re looking for a leader in this country far and wide
Just like his big new fence
This president’s goin' down
America is moving forward
You can feel it in every town
Scared of his own shadow building walls around our house
He’s hiding in his bunker
Something else to lie about





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4 Comments:

At 5:37 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

how did SD morph from a populist state to a trumpist Nazi hellhole? just curious.

but that still doesn't mean that trump sent the capital police to everyone's home to hold a gun to their heads to make them go to the rally.

whenever trump holds a rally, all it means is that many people are so fucking stupid that they really should not be allowed to vote for their own leaders.

and then there is the other side...

 
At 6:30 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

How did SD morph from a populist state to a Trumpist Nazi hellhole, you ask? I'm going to go with non-stop FOX watching and growing racism against the Native population keeping so much reservation land out of the hands of ranchers and speculators.

While I don't know if this is a fact, if SD has a transit tax for pipelines, a lot of throwbacks would be angry that they didn't get a promised tax cut due to the XL protests.

The only problem with not allowing the stupid people vote is that the fascists taking control of the nation would have no cover of legitimacy. The few sentients who would still have the franchise would have to be suppressed and their submitted votes fraudulently neutralized. That would leave no one to vote, exposing them.

They would have already done this if they could be certain they would get away with it, and probably will soon until they can feel secure in not holding elections at all. Trump's ScrOTUS will finally get to apply Tony "The Fixer" Scalia's observation that the Constitution has no provision to allow any voting to completely end the charade.

 
At 12:20 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

The Economist video is nothing more than a propaganda piece to defend the continuation of globalization, the system which seriously failed the world with such poor response to the pandemic. When the next swine flu comes along this winter, there will be no improvement in response, but the privateers will rake it in again at the expense of everyone else. THAT is what globalization is really intended to do.

 
At 8:50 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

6:30, the sentients already have the democrap party to suppress them. their active voters are, necessarily, dumber than the Nazi voters.

it's ironic, maybe, that the sentient may still outnumber both the Nazis and the idiot democrap voters. But the sentient cannot or will not create a progressive or liberal movement and outvote both idiot demographics.

I'm sure that 90% of those who still vote democrap would love to vote for some actual useful movement along with the majority of sentients.

Are people really that subject to the influences of media lies that they can be cajoled into believing nonsense over verifiable fact?

given what happened in Germany and, now, in the usa... you betcha they are. And the dumber a population is, the more gullible they are, it appears.

 

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