DDT: Week 201 – A Time of Contrasts

In a CNN op-ed on Thanksgiving Day, President-elect Joe Biden and his wife Jill, in a CNN op-ed, thanked people who keep the nation functioning during the pandemic:

“We are grateful for the frontline workers who have never stopped showing up over these long and confusing months, making sure our food is harvested and shipped, keeping our grocery stores stocked, picking up our trash, and keeping our cities and towns safe.

“We are grateful for the health care workers who put in long shifts and isolate themselves from their loved ones, the nurses who comfort and help people say one last goodbye, and the doctors who fight for every breath.

“We are grateful for the educators who learned to teach in virtual classrooms almost overnight, who did extra work to reach families without technology, or who took late-night phone calls from parents on the verge of tears.

“We are grateful for the parents who have carried their families through the chaos, working or searching for a job, navigating childcare and remote learning.

“We are grateful for the researchers and scientists who have spent this year learning everything they can to understand how to fight this pandemic and working tirelessly to find a vaccine and therapeutics.”

On Thanksgiving Day, in the midst of ranting tweets, Dictator Donald Trump (DDT) held a press conference, the first time he has taken questions since his defeat. He claimed proof for election fraud is people voting for Biden. Reuters reporter Jeff Mason asked DDT if he would concede to Biden, and DDT shouted, “Don’t talk to me that way! I’m the president of the United States.” For the first time, he declared he would leave the White House if the Electoral College selects Biden.

DDT paid Wisconsin $3 million for recounts in two counties. One of them, Milwaukee, announced Biden picked up another 132 votes in the recount. About 65 percent finished, Dane County will be done by the state’s certification of ten electoral votes for Biden on Tuesday. DDT still wants to throw out over 238,000 ballots in the two counties.

Unable to win lawsuits to stop voting and certification, DDT tries to decertify existing certifications. He failed in Pennsylvania this morning when a three-judge panel of the 3rd Circuit Court rejected the case, writing, “Calling an election unfair does not make it so.” Like the other almost 40 rejections to DDT’s arguments, the ruling determined lawyers had no “specific allegations and … proof.” A DDT-appointed judge wrote the opinion. Jenna Ellis, DDT’s lawyer, wrote, “On to SCOTUS!” Biden won the state’s 20 electoral votes by an 80,000 majority.

A Commonwealth court uncertified Pennsylvania’s certified votes until an evidentiary hearing in the case. The same court has rejected GOP arguments two other times. GOP Rep. Mike Kelly challenged 2.5 million mail-in ballots, accusing the state legislature of constitutionally expanding the process. Lt. Gov. John Fetterman pointed out that lack of certification would eliminate “down-ballot elections”:  

“If [votes are] not certified, we don’t have a House or have our state Senate, and those are controlled by Republicans. So they’re literally trying to make the argument that there was fraud with Joe Biden’s race but my race, there was no fraud in that race. So there’s absolutely no basis in reality, but that’s never stopped them from lying.”

Fetterman said Pennsylvania found only two cases of voter fraud, both from Republicans who tried “to vote for Trump with their relatives, whether they were dead or living.” The Pennsylvania GOP legislature approved mail-in voting over a year ago, but no one objected because they thought it could favor the Republicans.

With QAnon queen Sidney Powell as lawyer, Michigan electors and local GOP officials are using her conspiracy theories against Biden in a federal court case. On Monday, Michigan certified the win for Biden. and Powell’s arguments have already been ruled “not credible” by a Wayne County judge. The lawsuit also demands voting machine and software be impounded for inspection. Powell, dropped by DDT’s campaign, also filed a wacko lawsuit in Georgia with both filings marked by inaccurate spelling. Losing in Pennsylvania, she’s heading to Arizona with allegations already rejected in a court case there.  

Rudy Giuliani receives $20,000 a day for his inept lawyering, but Powell asks for the checks to be made out to her personally. She set up her website on November 11, the day after she appeared on Fox’s Lou Dobbs Show.

DDT had a busy week, at least for him, with two major appearances last Tuesday—each about a minute. One of them was the pardoning of the National Thanksgiving Turkeys, this year named Corn and Cob. Hailing from Iowa, the turkeys are returning to their home state after a time in a luxury hotel. He was kinder to these than Carrot two years ago when he ridiculed Carrots for losing the count and refusing to “concede.” Matt Flegenheimer and Maggie Haberman have a great piece on how DDT had expected his time in the Oval Office to be “a rolling turkey pardon.”

DDT’s bad relationship with birds doesn’t seem to have improved since before his inauguration. Over five years ago, Time’s cover story, “The Donald Has Landed,” featured a photo of him and “Uncle Sam” who evidently didn’t approve of bigots and demagogues. Footage for the photo shoot.

Before Michael Flynn’s ruling, DDT pardoned him. DDT fired Flynn for lying to VP Mike Pence, and Flynn pled guilty to lying twice to the FBI about promising Russia in secret conversations before the inauguration that DDT would remove Russian sanctions. Flynn also secretly worked with Turkey. QAnon members are upset because the pardon means “guilt” when they want “exoneration.”

Still struggling to win by disenfranchising millions of voters, DDT called an informal meeting of Pennsylvania legislators at Gettysburg (PA) despite the state’s formal certification of 20 electoral votes. DDT originally meant to appear in person, but his legal team leader, Rudy Giuliani has again been exposed to COVID-19. Giuliani appeared with the group, most of them not wearing masks.

DDT’s conservative Supreme Court increased the rate of infections and deaths from COVID-19 by agreeing with New York religious organizations claiming they were illegally targeted by virus restrictions. In the 5-4 decision, Chief Justice John G. Roberts joined the three progressive justices, writing:

“It is a significant matter to override determinations made by public health officials concerning what is necessary for public safety in the midst of a deadly pandemic.”

Roberts also noted restrictions were already eased, eliminating the need for court intervention. When Ruth Bader Ginsburg was alive, Roberts’ vote created a majority to treat religious groups the same as others. Justice Sonia Sotomayor added the state treated churches equally or more favorably when compared with other groups; thus it did not discriminate. Cuomo increased restrictions because some religious groups turned areas into “hot spots” of spiking coronavirus cases. Changes were temporary, based on numbers of COVID-19 cases and deaths.

In a tweet, Joyce Vance, a federal prosecutor for 25 years, addressed the majority of justices who elevated Christian and Jewish beliefs over public health officials and state laws for other groups:

“Your religious views now give you the right to withhold the services of your business from people whose ‘lifestyle’ you disagree with, withhold healthcare from women & attend superspreader events that let you infect your neighbors with a deadly virus.”

After DDT demanded churches open last summer, the virus surged across areas in which religious groups refused to take precautions. The disease hits not only the people within the church but also others throughout the community as church members become superspreaders. For example, 12 deaths and 213 cases are connected to events at the Charlotte (NC) United House of Prayer for All People earlier this year, and 11 buses brought people for another superspreader event two weeks ago to further spread disease. 

War in the Middle East could add to DDT’s death toll. For the third time in 18 months, he sent several heavy bombers to the Middle East threatening Iran after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s secret meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed ben Salam. Pompeo was supposedly on a diplomatic mission. The last threat was when DDT used an airstrike to assassinate top Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani. DDT’s “maximum pressure” against Iran led to more nuclear material at higher levels of enrichment. Within the next 54 days before he leaves the Oval Office, DDT plans far more sanctions and “covert actions” against Iran to sabotage Biden’s efforts to rejoin the anti-nuclear deal.

DDT may have killed 33 unaccompanied Guatemalan children by deporting them after a judge ordered them to stop a deportation. Agency officials claimed they didn’t know about the order until the plane landed in Guatemala, but they didn’t bring them back. DDT’s administration claims it’s protecting the public during the pandemic, but the permission for unlimited church gatherings shows no protection from the virus. Coronavirus cases and deaths per capita in Guatemala are far fewer than in the U.S.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has lost another member, Lamar Alexander (TN) to a COVID-19 infection, but McConnell keeps punishing people. He plans a pay freeze for all civilian federal workers in the spending package required to keep the government open after December 11.

DDT, Government Create Dangers from Covid-19

Joe Biden accomplished something Tuesday night that Dictator Donald Trump (DDT) couldn’t manage even with a 0.5 percent decrease in the prime interest rate—a spike of 4 percent in the stock market. That increase came after Biden won ten of 14 states toward becoming the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, including delegate-rich Texas. Right now, Biden is ahead of Sanders 565-506 heading into the ten primaries on the next two Tuesdays. Healthcare stocks caused most of the climb with a decreased concern for Sanders’ “Medicare-for-all” program: Cigna and UnitedHealth Group up over ten percent, Humana rising 12.7 percent, and Anthem topped at 14.4 percent increase.  

Today DDT drove the Dow down by almost 1,000 points with his lies about covid-19. Last night, he told Sean Hannity to downplay the virus and claimed that the deaths reported by World Health Organization’s (WHO) estimate of a 3.4 percent global death rate from coronavirus is a “false number.” According to DDT’s “hunch,” it’s far below 1 percent. He also failed to discourage people from going to work with symptoms because others gone to work and gotten better. The CDC had already told people with symptoms to stay home unless they are seeking medical care.

Covid-19 has spread to over 70 countries and 21 states in the U.S. Pence said the U.S. has enough test kits for everyone in the country. Nope. He then said that there would be one million kits by today, and they are about 900,000 short.

A cruise ship with 3,500 people is not allowed to dock because of infections on board. People cannot be brought on shore because the U.S. lacks a place where they can be quarantined. Already 21 people are symptomatic, and one person from the ship has died of covid-19.

The conservative press are covering up for DDT’s failure in coping with the covid-19 entry into the United States. Bradley A. Blakeman and Christos A. Makridis wrote about the “rapid federal response to secure the country and create a cure,” lauding the task force led by VP Mike Pence. Blakeman is head of the lobbying 1600 Group with the job of “controlling messages during chaos.” DDT’s administration has focused on this process of “controlling messages,” treating the crisis like a PR campaign.

Conservative media such as Fox frequently use the word “calm” to describe the White House politicians as if people prefer “calm” to facts, which DDT considers hysteria and alarmist. Frequent Fox consultant Dr. Mark Siegel, whose patients gave him 2.5 stars out of five, wrote:

“I have never seen a new virus or bacteria handled as well by our public health officials as this one, with sober attention paid to identifying, isolating and tracing contacts of known or suspected cases along with restricting travel as best they can.”  

The CDC lost valuable time to slow down the spread of covid-19 because it rejected existing tests and devised its own to identify a range of similar viruses. The test did identify covid-19 but had false positives for other viruses in all except six state labs. Only those state labs were allowed to use the test which considerably slowed down the process for three weeks until CDC decided to check only for covid-19.

Almost two weeks ago, a top scientist from FDA was blocked from entering the CDC in Atlanta and made to wait overnight. Timothy Stenzel had been sent to the facility to help coordinate the stalled testing and was expected. Once admitted Stenzel found lab contamination which may have contributed to the delays and other problems.

Other delays:

• The National Security Council’s global pandemic team was disbanded.
• DDT minimizes the seriousness of covid-19 by lying about it.
• CDC didn’t update testing guidelines beyond travel and contact with infected people.
• For four days, CDC delayed testing a person with covid-19 because of narrow restrictions despite a doctor’s request.
• The 80 percent cut to CDC funding for fighting global pandemics reduced the emergency response from 49 countries to ten.
• DDT discontinued the program Predict monitoring the threat of animal-born diseases to humans which had discovered over 1,000 viruses.
• The State Department forced the CDC to put 14 infected people with 300 other passengers on two different flights.
• With no training or protective gear, HHS personnel were told to tend to quarantined people.
• HHS planned to fly infected patients to a FEMA facility in Anniston (AL) that lacked medical capability to operate as a quarantine zone.
• The newly created task force took time off on the second day to attend the Conservative Political Action Convention.
• An infected patient was permitted to leave a San Diego hospital after a CDC test gave a negative result, rejoined the quarantined group flown to the U.S. from China for a day, and was then returned to the hospital.
• CDC also refuses to explain the treatment for patients recovering from the virus so that it can be replicated.

When all other excuses failed, DDT blamed President Obama for slowing down new diagnostic testing, but an aide to Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) said that the Obama administration made no such rule change. It did recommend that the FDA have greater oversight on approving diagnostic tests, but the rule didn’t go through. Peter Kyriacopolous, a policy expert at the Association of Public Health Laboratories, agreed with Alexander’s aide. The White House did not comment on clarification of DDT’s falsehood. In 2004, the Project Bioshield Act allowed the FDA to require agency permission from labs for some tests during a public health emergency. DDT’s administration mandated that the CDC must approve the covid-19 test, keeping private labs from testing without CDC approval.

Alexander also told DDT that he should “let the professionals do the talking” after DDT keeps contradicting medical professionals about the epidemic.

When HHS official Dr. Robert Kadlec said that the U.S. had only ten percent of required respirator masks, 35 million out of 3.5 billion, someone pointed out that this figure is only 1 percent. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of World Health Organization (WHO), said manufacturers need to increase personal protective gear supplies by 40 percent. The 3.4 global percent death rate according to WHO is higher than previous estimates of about 2 percent.

In another serious concern, Chinese scientists report that covid-19 may have mutated after they found another strain of the virus. The more aggressive coronavirus accounted for 70 percent of analyzed strains, and the remainder were linked to a less aggressive type.

The greatest asset in a crisis is credibility, and DDT and his administration lack that asset. VP Mike Pence followed DDT’s lies about covid-19 with orders that all federal health officials must run their appearances and information through himself. Following complaints about lack of transparency, DDT said that no one was muzzled and even pushed his medical expert Dr. Anthony Fauci to say that he wasn’t muzzled. Yet Pence replaced five of Fauci’s scheduled appearances the following day on Sunday news shows with himself and HHS Secretary Alex Azar.

Pence was lucky: interviewers didn’t ask him about the HIV epidemic he caused in Indiana or his “health” beliefs that “smoking doesn’t kill” and condoms don’t stop STIs.

Fauci appears increasingly frustrated with DDT’s ignorance and refusal to listen. DDT doesn’t understand how vaccines work; he thinks that a new one can be spun off from the flu vaccine and won’t need testing. In a meeting with ten pharmaceutical executives, Fauci asked them to educate DDT:

“Would you make sure you get the president the information that a vaccine that you make and start testing in a year is not a vaccine that’s deployable? So he’s asking the question, ‘When is it going to be deployable?’ And that is going to be, at the earliest, a year to a year and a half, no matter how fast you go.”

When DDT rushed pharmaceutical executives to quickly create a vaccine, one of them said that a bad vaccine could make a disease worse. He said, “You don’t want to rush and treat a million people and find out you’re making 900,000 of them worse.” DDT answered, “Good idea,” but he wasn’t listening. The next day he said at the National Association of Counties:

 “We’re moving at a maximum speed to develop the therapies, not only the vaccines, but therapies. Therapies is sort of another word for cure.”

DDT told airlines executives last Wednesday that there was no danger in continuing flights. About hygiene, he said he hadn’t “touched his face in weeks.” (The photo was taken two days earlier.)

DOD Secretary Mark Esper has also muzzled U.S. military commanders, ordering them to tell the DDT administration before urgent decisions about protecting service members from covid-19. Gen. Robert Abrams, commander of U.S. forces in South Korea, told Esper that he would make decisions without permission to keep safe.

Banks have a solution for taking care of the epidemic—roll back regulations. DDT has another one: more tax cuts for the wealthy and big business.

Republicans held up funding appropriations for the covid-19 emergency on Monday with the excuse that guaranteeing affordability of vaccines would stop research and development. A senior Democratic aide explained:

“Democrats want the supplemental to include significant funding for the federal government to purchase large quantities of coronavirus diagnostics, treatments and vaccine [when it becomes available], which will then be made available to the public without cost.”

By Wednesday, bipartisan negotiators from the House and Senate agreed to an $8.3 billion emergency spending package to fight COVID-19. The House passed the bill 415-2 with only Andy Biggs (R-AZ) and Ken Buck (R-CO) dissenting. The bill passed the Senate with only Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) voting against it.

Pence’s anti-science bungling and DDT’s lies have cost time–and lives.

GOP Protests Immigrants, Filibuster Control

The House GOP passed its ridiculously restrictively anti-abortion bill yesterday, re-alienating women. Now they’re moving on to reject Hispanics with bigoted their stand against immigrants. GOP Congressmen have worked hard to tell anyone that letting minorities into the United States is counterproductive because most of them will vote Democrat, especially those from Latin America.

Tea Party representatives have put House Speaker John Boehner between the proverbial rock and a hard place by demanding that he not allow any immigration reform bill on the House floor unless a majority of Republicans is willing to vote for it—meaning that he must reject all bills that the Tea Party opposes. Unless he doesn’t. When he was asked yesterday if a bill would require majority GOP support to get to the House floor, he said, “We’ll see when we get  there.”

Immediately after the 2012 election, when the GOP was pursuing ideas to move their voting base beyond white men, Boehner said that he and President Obama could find common ground to immigration reform because “a comprehensive approach is long overdue.” Fast forward seven months, and he said that the idea that he is “pushing a comprehensive immigration bill” is “just not true.”

Media have spent a great deal of time trying to determine exactly what Weathervane Boehner means when he says, “I don’t see any way of bringing an immigration bill to the floor that doesn’t have a majority support of Republicans.” One side says he’s bluffing; the other side claims that he will join the GOP in killing immigration reform.

The GOP business community wants the reform bill to pass, not only to get cheap labor but also to win the 2016 presidential election. Yet the party base is dead set against immigration reform. Most likely most of the GOP legislators are bad-mouthing the bill in public while demanding in private that it be brought to the floor. Boehner may think that his language gave him wiggle room, but his base won’t agree. The question for Boehner is how much he is willing to endanger his position as Speaker of the House.

Today the far-right members of the House made themselves very clear in their rejection of immigration reform through a day-long press conference, organized by Reps. Steve King (R-IA) and Louie Gohmert (R-TX). Scheduled for the west side of the Capitol, the group was joined by Tea Partiers who were there to protest the IRS. In addition to the usual far-right suspects from Congress, Glenn Beck, who had decided that he should stop trying to divide the country and then developed paralyzed vocal chords, returned with his toxic rhetoric.

Yesterday he used his television show to draw a comparison between the immigration reform advocates peacefully protesting outside the home of Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach and the Ku Klux Klan. “The left is set up on revenge,” Beck said, comparing the demonstrators to Greece’s Golden Dawn party, a neo-Nazi group with ties to anti-immigrant hate crimes. Kobach was not home during the protest, as the Sunflower Community Action knew, but he threatened to shoot them if necessary. One of Kobach’s achievements is writing Arizona SB 1070, an anti-immigrant law that drove thousands of people out of the state in fear.

King’s six-hour anti-immigration reform press conference/rally today opposed “amnesty” for “illegal aliens,” Sharia law, and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL). A sizeable group of the conservatives booed Rubio’s name and carried anti-Rubio signs including “Marco Early Advocate of Muslim Brotherhood Takeover. Obamas [sic] Idiot.” Once in favor of the immigration reform bill, Weathervane Rubio opposed it and then appeared on ABC’s This Week last Sunday to say that “95, 96 percent of the bill is in perfect shape and ready to go.”

Rubio is one of the many GOP presidential wannabes of 2016. Meanwhile Allen West, former representative from Florida, has said that he’s considering a run against Rubio, if God sets his feet on that path. In addition to being virulently anti-government, West has shown himself to be sexist, anti-Muslim, pro-corporation—the list continues.

King has compared immigrants to dogs and livestock. For years he has tried to “clarify” the 14^th Amendment that provides U.S. citizenship for anyone born in the country. In 2010, he said, “The framers did not consider the babies of illegals when they framed the 14th amendment because we didn’t have immigration law at the time, so they could not have wanted to confer automatic citizenship on the babies of people who were unlawfully in the United States.”

When DREAMers came to his office to advocate for immigration reform after the House voted to deport them, King tweeted:

20 brazen self professed illegal aliens have just invaded my DC office. Obama’s lawless order gives them de facto immunity from U.S. law.

#Gof8 You promise border security. How, when we can’t secure Congress from Obama amnesty? Schumer, McCain, come guard my door.

Here are the fearsome 20. King would never survive a high school classroom.

While part of the GOP Congressional caucus stands on the Capitol steps to alienate Hispanics, House Republicans are planning a series of meetings with Hispanic-Americans in the nation’s capital as part of a GOP effort to woo minority voters. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), the one woman allowed to be on the House leadership team, is planning four meetup sessions between Hispanic-Americans and GOP lawmakers at the Capitol Building this summer, starting today. Wonder how that went with the anti-immigration talk outside.

The situation in the Senate is growing so dire that even Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) is finally considering the so-called “nuclear option,” ending filibusters of administration nominees in the upper chamber, after years of opposing the loss of the filibuster. If this were to happen, judicial nominees and Senate-confirmed administration positions, including the presidential cabinet, could be approved with a simple majority rule. To employ this option, he would need almost unanimous support of the chamber’s Democrats, which he most likely can’t get, starting with the retiring Carl Levin (D-MI).

GOP senators are coming unglued about the possibility of returning Senate procedures to a few decades ago before they mandated 60 percent of the vote on even the simplest action. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) has threatened Reid if he were to follow through with his plans. If the GOP were to take over the Senate, Alexander said that the GOP agenda would repeal Obamacare, convert all federal education funding into school vouchers and scholarships, open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling, and repeal the estate tax.

This threat is the most hollow of any I’ve heard in a long time. The minute that the GOP gets a Senate majority, this is exactly what they will do—and far worse!