Yippee! [DOT 5/3/21]


Grouchy Fauci!

Fauci: US shouldn’t loosen coronavirus restrictions until daily new cases fall below 10,000
https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/04/health/us-coronavirus-thursday/index.html


Meanwhile, deep in the heart of Texas:


In other news…

‘The police just shot’: the terror inflicted on Myanmar’s protesters
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/04/the-police-just-shot-the-terror-inflicted-on-myanmars-protesters


Bret Bug strikes again!

David Brooks of New York Times criticized for undisclosed financial ties to project he praised
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/david-brooks-facebook-weave-aspen/2021/03/04/2493b798-7d06-11eb-a976-c028a4215c78_story.html


Sprots!



Sorry not sorry for the ear worm! Have a great Friday!

avataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravatar

32 Comments

  1. I think Andrew Cuomo should go* but it’s really hard to take conservative voices seriously who are lamenting the deaths of seniors in nursing homes and his probable sexual misconduct. They cheered for any number of other governors who did their damnedest to kill grandma “for the economy” and never once cared that Trump did it 20+ times for decades. So yeah, “neanderthals” hangs pretty good on them. I look forward to seeing people put “OOGA BOOGA” as a point of pride in their Twitter bios.

    * – go live in the sewers, though he can finish out his term as governor. That’s my compromise position.

  2. welp…i think fauci is right
    but..i also think things are becoming untennable…im thinking pretty much everywhere…but definitely over here where weve been locked down since before christmas and partially locked down since march last year
    more and more of my coworkers are buying into the whole rona measures are a gubment power grab shit…and shops bars and restaurants are getting ever more vocal about needing to open for business…ocassionally doing so untill the local authorities warn em to shut down or else…
    pretty sure if the lockdown gets extended again we’ll have a mass act of business disobedience on our hands…im sure the civil will be happy to join
    better get a move on with those vaccines….coz uhhh..well to borrow from Q…i think a storm is coming

    • I think a lot of the problem is the capriciousness of the timing and the limits. Let’s say the baseline is wear a mask and say 6 feet away from strangers. OK. I can do that. But where can I do that? I live in locked-down but now in somewhat open revolt Manhattan, where wounded Wildebeest Emperor Augustus Claudius Julius Lucius Cuomo is starting to lift some of his imperial edicts, more than once because he was on the losing side of a lawsuit.
       
      So I am me. I leave my apartment, don my mask, and vow to stay six feet away.
       
      1. I go to a supermarket, pharmacy, or liquor store. Capacity and distancing rules at the discretion of the establishment.
       
      2. I would like to go inside a restaurant. 35% capacity, up from 25% less than a month ago, up from 0% total closure before that, despite the fact that neighboring counties with worse infection rates have had 50% indoor dining capacity for months.
       
      3. I would like to go to a Broadway show. Now (or soon) open at 33% capacity (not 25%, 35%, or 50%), up from ) for the last year.
       
      4. I would like to attend a wedding. This you cannot keep up with. Indoors or outdoors? Is it 10 people max? 100? 200 if outside? Does the day of the week contain a T? An S? Slaughter a goat in Albany and see what the entrails augur.
       
      This doesn’t even scratch the surface. Are the dog runs open? Did they ever shut down because of fiat or by local decision-making? I would like for my child to attend an in-person classroom. Private and parochial schools, sure come on in, 5 days a week. Public schools? Exactly what grade are they in? In-person may be impossible, maybe 1 day a week, maybe 2, but “in person” might mean seated in front of a computer while a teacher somewhere else conducts a Zoom class. 
       
      This is all madness. We (here in NYC) have been dealing with this for a year now. But it seems like every day is a new beginning and is a lifeboat drill in response to a circumstance no one has ever seen before the sun rose just this morning.  

      • yep pretty much same here…constantly changing rules that dont make a whole lot of sense (like primary schools may open but highschools may not…supermarkets may open as may barbershops but hardware stores may not)
        tho my favourite is from when face masks became mandatory in all public spaces….cept churches…for they are not public spaces and as such also didnt have to worry about how many people were allowed inside
        strangely enough our worst outbreaks were in christian communities

        • That’s interesting about the church situation because we here in ‘Murica love us our religious freedoms but the mask mandates apply. One of the lawsuits Cuomo lost was a capacity limit mandate. I forget even what it was, they change more often than the Kardashian women change boyfriends, but it was a very low limit and he plucked the number out of thin air.  He was sued by a rabbinical group and a Catholic archdiocese, who argued that a similar secular setting (I can’t remember what it was) was classified to have a much higher occupancy allowance. The judge took about four minutes to decide that religious institutions were being specifically targeted by this bone-headed micro-managed intervention, which is a big no-no under the First Amendment (yes, the very first one of the 10 that comprise The Bill of Rights) to the US Constitution. Only God, in His infinite wisdom, knows what Cuomo was thinking.

        • strangely enough our worst outbreaks were in christian communities

           
          Not surprised by that at all. Here in Idaho, some of the hardest hit communities were Mormon churches and Pentecostal revivals.

      • Most of it is theater, but it’s also that we missed our window — last year, and via a fully engaged national response without turning grandma’s death into a culture war item.

        I have friends in other countries who went through lockdowns that would enrage your local militia member … but also, they just now go to brunch and school and the market and it’s like wow did we ever blow this one.

        • I completely agree. I have friends who live in Australia and the lockdowns the Melbourne residents have endured, more than once, would be unbelievable to Americans. But we’re Americans where no international news ever filters in so 99% of Americans have no idea what goes on in Australia, and a great majority couldn’t place it on a map.
           
          I was once at a party, a pretty cosmopolitan group, and I said something about how sad I was that the Canadian border was closed down, because it had been a while since I last visited and was planning to make a swing-through in 2020. New York borders Canada, although that’s very far from Manhattan. “Who’s the President of Canada?” “No one. They have a Prime Minister. The very handsome Justin Trudeau. The name might sound familiar.” “Why?” “Because of his parents? Pierre and Margaret?” “What did they ever do?” These “cosmopolitans” were in their 40s and 50s, not pre-teens.

          • And I now realize I am lapsing into Orwellian pandemic newspeak. By “party,” I mean this was early on in the pandemic and we were all led to believe that this would all be over soon. In the meantime, we thought it would be fun to experiment with this new virtual way of socializing. We didn’t use Zoom, though, I think we used Google Meets, or whatever it’s called. “It’s like FaceTime, but it’s a group, not one on one. Like you see on news shows where many correspondents beam in.” “This could be interesting. I wonder if it will catch on?”

          • Yup, I was on a video chat with friends, including one from Oz a few weeks ago and he was like “Oooh, gotta run, taking the family to brunch” and the FOMO just hit me in a way I wasn’t fully prepared for.

            My other Aussie pal is a tattoo artist, and he was lamenting a few months back that he would have to wear a mask for appointments because he hadn’t needed one for months, and my jealousy perked right up.

            Since I’m from further north than you in NY, we’re a little more plugged into the border issue — but what people don’t quite seem to get here is that THEY close the border on US and not the other way ’round. That hurts some of our economy (plenty of Canadians would come this far south for clothing deals and holidays) but lots of people can’t get it around their head that someone would dare do to us what we do to other furriners.

            And like c’mon on “Trudeau” — it’s like never hearing of the freakin’ Kennedys!

    • Honestly, this has been obvious from Jan. 6. It was very clear that officials colluded to keep support from arriving at the Capitol. Pretty sure I posted my opinion about it that day. This was an orchestrated attempt to overthrow the government, and I’m still saying it was planned and funded by Trump supporters, including the Flynns. 
       
      And now guess what? The collaborators in Congress are getting investigated:https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/3/5/2019499/-Josh-Hawley-was-right-to-worry-because-the-FBI-really-is-reading-his-communications-with-insurgents
       
      This whole thing runs a LOT deeper than anyone is saying. I hate to sound like a reverse QAnon nut, but we came very close to a bloodbath and martial law on Jan. 6. I suspect the only reason the coup failed is because the insurrectionists didn’t have enough time to plan and organize. And yes, lawmakers like Hawley, Cruz, Boebert, and others were completely in on the plot. 

      • ” I suspect the only reason the coup failed is because the insurrectionists didn’t have enough time to plan and organize. And yes, lawmakers like Hawley, Cruz, Boebert, and others were completely in on the plot. ”
         
        This, ON TOP OF the fact that the secessionist looked  “low class” is probably the other part of why Trumpty-dumpty was so reportedly pissed off, after things went south for them…
         
        Not because they broke in, or anything else of that nature…
         
        But because I’m sure he was assured over & over, that “these guys are former military,they have a plan, they’ll get the job DONE!!!”
        🙄😒🤮

        • I’m sure in his mind this was his Bin Laden raid moment rightfully taking back his rightful throne.  Pure psychopathic idiot watching his soldiers on TV.  Too bad his commandos were more of the Bubba & Billy Bob variety than Rambo.  

        • I probably should have also pointed out that amateurs aren’t known for top-notch operational security, so that probably contributed to the bungling. When Bubba and Billy Bob get drunk at the local strip club, they’re going to start blabbing about their “big plans.” And even with Miller in the Pentagon squelching info, some of that might have leaked through. 
           
          But on that note, there were other collaborators in other agencies,  including the Capitol Police and the FBI. There was WAY too much chatter about this event beforehand, and it was willfully ignored at a bunch of levels in a bunch of agencies. 
           
          I’ll say it again — look hard at the people who are screaming the loudest about abandoning investigations and that this was a non-event. Those people were in on it. 

      • While I think that is the least likely of things that Trump will have to pay for, I do think some of these others could.  Let’s just hope the investigators have the balls to follow this through.  

    • *takes deep breath*

      …I’ve been back & forth on this stuff since jan 6th…& there’s no question in my mind that it is/was/will-always-be entirely fucked up…but…I stumble at the last fence on the plan being to “have others murder the Vice President and Speaker of the House” part 

      …on the one hand the various sketchy paths hinted at (or outright stated) by mango unchained & his little cabal of malicious chucklekfucks were always so tenuous that most of the time I felt like they must know that there was no chance of them actually coming to pass…so from that perspective even arranging for events on jan 6th to get as out of control as possible would seem more probably to have primarily been a way to keep the MAGA faithful whipped up into a frenzy that they’d been cheated of the outcome that “should” have followed than to use them (or at least a sub-set of them) as a hit squad

      …obviously he never gave a fuck about any of them so he wouldn’t just happily throw them under the proverbial bus but volunteer to drive the thing himself…that wouldn’t make any of the stuff referred to in that piece less fucked up or indicative of guilt (to me, anyway) since the mob of crazies he used to be able to point at people with a tweet remains the big stick he favoured when it came to threatening the GOP into protecting him from the consequences of his abuse of the office…& he for sure needs to keep that in effect

      …but it’s also obvious that he never has understood how any of this shit works…so he could totally have bought into it actually being plausible to force things to go the 12th amendment route & believed that would keep him in the white house

      …& though I find it honestly hard to believe that he genuinely planned on that happening because people were murdered by rioting MAGA types…it is hard to discount that deaths were a real possibility that he actively sought to make more rather than less likely to happen…& the option to take the threat he personally incited as an excuse to declare martial law as an emergency response & segue from there to the 12th (which – for a given value of plausible – seemed like the more plausible target outcome) though equally hard to believe as a realistic scenario is unpleasantly plausible as being one he believed he could engineer to produce his desired outcome

      …but alongside the bullet points listed at the end of the rundown you linked to the thing that struck me as particularly damning in terms of mr all-time-most-impeached-president being “in the loop” about what went down was that while all the shit at the capitol was going down & senators & congresspeople were being (to varying degrees) held in secure locations they left him where he was…no evacuation to a secure location…they were obviously of the opinion that nothing that was happening implied any kind of threat to him

      …to me that’s one set of optics that looked plenty fucking bad on the day & just gets worse with hindsight & more information…like the fact that his pal (& convicted-if-pardoned-criminal) roger stone’s personal crew of militia-sourced “bodyguards” left his tricky-dick-tattooed ass at the hotel while they went to the storming party…just as a for instance

      …but (iirc) pence had not only his family with him but the damn nuclear football…so I don’t think my credulity can stretch to the idea that any of the assholes that stormed the capitol had any chance of taking him or it into any kind of custody…let alone executing the man…whereas a bunch of rioting civilians being killed by the secret service when they attempted to lay hands on either does seem a lot like the sort of thing that could have escalated the situation to a point where they had a shot at that emergency declaration of martial law?

      …like bryan said, I don’t relish the role of reverse-Qanon-nutcase I seem to be leaning into at this point…but it beggars belief that after all they did to provoke the events of that day they didn’t at least think they had a gameplan for it resulting in subverting the election result…& sacrificing a bunch of his own supporters to provide the necessary pretext currently seems to me to be the play that ockham’s razor leaves me with, I guess?

      • I think it was all put together on an ad-hoc basis after it was clear that Biden won and Trump had no shot at overturning it through the courts. That’s when Flynn et al. started trying to figure out how to pull off an overthrow. So in that respect it wasn’t a carefully-thought-out plot, more of an rushed Hail Mary play — nobody could seriously think these buffoons had a chance of getting to Pence, but they could have easily dragged other lawmakers out to the gallows and started executions.
         
        And if they’d gotten their hands on Pelosi, Schumer, AOC or any of their other “targets” they’d have done exactly that. THAT would have been enough for martial law declaration, and Trump would have absolutely tried to declare himself president-for-life. Considering how many lawmakers were hiding in locked offices with a single door between them and attackers, it’s pretty damn miraculous that none of them got killed. Which further suggests that some of them were part of the conspiracy. 
         
        I’m not sure Trump would have gotten away with it — I still have trouble believing the military would back him to any significant degree. But again, I think they were just hoping to create massive chaos and see what they could put together from the pieces. 

    • I get emails about that sometimes that jarringly come from “Anthony Scaramucci” himself. 

      Also, did his wife take him back after he MISSED THE BIRTH of their child? I believe she did. 

      • My husband Better Half™ may be sent to this as his company’s representative, since he is An Executive and the only one who “sits” in New York. I would find this hilarious. It’s going to be pretty grim and dull, this is the kind of crap that Hillary Clinton was speaking at during her campaign that got her in so much hot water. But there is usually branded swag and meet-‘n-greets, so it’s all good. If I can get a free tote bag and a self-serving ghost-written book out of it it will be worth sacrificing a day of his life for.

Leave a Reply