December 9, 2020

'Alito is deep state now!' ..... MAGA meltdown

Supporters of President Donald Trump believed that conservative Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito would save the presidency from President-elect Joe Biden based on a series of false “voter fraud” claims.

https://twitter.com/annvandersteel/status/1336317779507474433?s=20

While Alito was the one who dismissed the claims, he did so without dispute from other conservative justices, including Clarence Thomas and the three justices Trump appointed to the High Court.

....(snip)....

https://twitter.com/amandalaurenm/status/1336443655805145096?s=20

https://twitter.com/djrothkopf/status/1336433489709838337?s=20

https://twitter.com/brianbeutler/status/1336440094673145856?s=20

..........(more)

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/12/alito-is-deep-state-now-maga-fans-mocked-over-conservative-supreme-court-refusing-to-save-trump-from-election-loss/?

December 9, 2020

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, on the Texas lawsuit:

https://twitter.com/MIAttyGen/status/1336337144575455232?s=20

December 9, 2020

Trump is "delusional at the core," will live in "fantasyland till the day he dies"

(Salon) Contrary to what the hope-peddlers and other members of "the Church of the Savvy" would like the public to believe, none of this is normal or ultimately "harmless". Everything is not OK.

Donald Trump and his allies are continuing with their efforts to nullify the results of the 2020 presidential election and Joe Biden's victory. Trump's attacks on democracy are a de facto coup attempt which includes not just "legal" tactics but intimidation and threats of violence. Last Saturday night, dozens of Trump's unofficial paramilitaries surrounded the home of Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson.

Instead of properly reporting on the unprecedented attempts by a United States president to usurp the will of the American people in order to remain in power indefinitely — and the larger strategy by the Republican Party to create a new American apartheid – too many in the mainstream news media are looking ahead to the Biden administration and convincing themselves that by ignoring or minimizing Trump's attacks all will somehow be fine in January.

....(snip)....

Trump has publicly shown himself to be not just mentally unwell but perhaps even a sociopath or psychopath. Sick leaders attract sick followers. Sick leaders also amplify the various mental and other pathologies of their followers and inner circle. Sick leaders channel and therefore worsen the most unhealthy and unjust aspects of a given society. In all, Trumpism is a type of collective social and civic disease spreading throughout America. .............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2020/12/08/dr-lance-dodes-trump-is-delusional-at-the-core-will-live-in-fantasyland-till-the-day-he-dies/

December 8, 2020

Wow. This Mo Brooks makes Louie Gohmert and Ted Yoho look sane.

https://twitter.com/RawStory/status/1336340006382743553?s=20

December 8, 2020

Chinatown Businesses Face a Particularly Brutal Winter

(Bloomberg CityLab) Weeks before the first reported U.S. case of Covid-19, the future pandemic was already inflicting economic damage in the Chinatowns of several U.S. cities. During what should have been the busiest time of the year in these Asian-American enclaves, business was down.

In January 2020, dim sum parlors and banquet halls in Lower Manhattan’s Chinatown noticed a drop in reservations. A conspicuously thin crowd gathered to watch San Francisco’s Lunar New Year parade on Feb. 8. At a grocery store in Houston’s Chinatown, sales fell overnight.

The downturn was attributed to xenophobic fears of the novel coronavirus that was then racing through the Chinese city of Wuhan. It became a collapse in March, as public health restrictions shuttered restaurants, salons and retailers in many U.S. cities. By summer, even as some businesses partially recovered with relaxed public health restrictions and pandemic fatigue, the streets and shops of Chinatowns remained much quieter than those in surrounding metropolitan areas.

Now, as the country copes with a new surge of infections and braces for a second year of pandemic misery, business owners and community leaders fear that these historic entry points for Chinese and other Asian immigrants may never return to their pre-pandemic stature. Instead, the economic pain that Chinatowns are now enduring could be a glimpse of broader devastation to come. ..............(more)

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-07/covid-19-has-been-a-disaster-for-u-s-chinatowns?srnd=premium

December 8, 2020

Mitch McConnell reaffirms his commitment to being a piece of s*** literally all the time

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has refused to budge from his position on COVID-19 stimulus negotiations, slamming the Democratic Party and saying his bill already addresses a "bipartisan consensus."

A bipartisan group of senators are rushing to finalize the wording on a separate, $908 billion proposal that McConnell has refused to back, preferring his own bill, which is much narrower.

The bipartisan plan has attracted the backing of leading Democratic figures such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who dropped their earlier demand for a $2.2 trillion plan in order to move bipartisan agreement along. The bipartisan plan also has growing support among Republicans. ..........(more)

https://news.yahoo.com/mcconnell-lashed-democrats-over-covid-114122263.html

December 8, 2020

Is Trump staging a coup or just running a con? No reason he can't do both

Is Trump staging a coup or just running a con? No reason he can't do both
Trump's odds of overturning the election were always low — now they're zero. But suckers keep on giving him money

By BOB CESCA
DECEMBER 8, 2020 1:00PM


(Salon) It's pretty damn obvious what's going on with Donald Trump and the election, and it's probably not an attempted coup. At least, that's not necessarily Trump's primary intention with his laughably unserious procession of 50-some failed legal challenges to the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

Trump and his Republican enablers lost five cases on Friday alone, with more in Michigan and Georgia over the weekend. Meanwhile, his perpetually shvitzing lead attorney, Rudy Giuliani, tested positive for COVID after appearing in court on multiple occasions without a mask. And yet Trump and his gullible Red Hats keep reacting like Lloyd Christmas in "Dumb & Dumber." Faced with one-in-a-gazillion odds of actually winning a case, their response continues to be, "So you're telling us there's a chance!"

These suckers happen to be Trump's target customers, especially now.

Sure, Trump wants to be president for another four years. In fact, he'd probably be happy to serve in the post for the rest of his miserable life. Consequently, if there were to be an evidentiary breakthrough, which I suppose is always possible, he'd absolutely bask in the results and start planning his inaugural address.

....(snip)....

It turns out that the performative coup, including the bogus "whistleblowers" and all of Trump's various "lookits" ("Lookit Philadelphia! Lookit Dominion! Lookit Detroit!" ), is only half of our transactional president's latest transaction. He's selling his Red Hats a stack of lies and nonsensical conspiracy theories about the election disguised as hope. In return, these badly deluded suckers are handing over their checking accounts to Trump's Save America PAC in the midst of a crushing recession. ............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2020/12/08/is-trump-staging-a-coup-or-just-running-a-con-no-reason-he-cant-do-both/

December 8, 2020

Separated at botox, err, birth?

?

December 7, 2020

Trump lost the election -- but his legacy of coronavirus denialism is here to stay

Trump lost the election — but his legacy of coronavirus denialism is here to stay
Refusing to wear masks or maintain social distance is part of a larger right-wing assault on the common good

By AMANDA MARCOTTE
DECEMBER 7, 2020 6:00PM


(Salon) Donald Trump encouraged coronavirus denialism for months for one simple reason: He thought it would help him win re-election. Ever the believer that appearances matter more than reality, Trump felt that as long as people acted like there was no pandemic — by refusing wearing masks and continuing to crowd into public places, especially his rallies — that was as good as there being no pandemic. The mounting death toll and hurricane-like effects on our health care system didn't matter to him, as long as he could pretend everything was doing well and take credit for it.

That was why I held out hope, in the days after Joe Biden was declared the winner of the presidential election, that Republicans would finally drop the act and start taking the pandemic seriously. After all, as Heather Digby Parton argued Monday morning at Salon, conservatives have a remarkable ability to discard their current enthusiasms the second they lose political value, and pretend that particular lunacy never happened. (You'd never know from its current behavior how gung-ho the American right was for the Iraq war 15 years ago.) It seemed entirely possible that in the face of rising case counts and Trump's defeat, the right would suddenly embrace public health measures and begin casually acting as if coronavirus denialism was never really a thing.

Unfortunately for the health of the nation, the opposite has happened. If anything, coronavirus denialism is as powerful a force as it was a month ago, when the media finally called the election for Biden.

On Saturday, Trump attended a rally in south Georgia, supposedly to support the Senate campaigns of Republican incumbents Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue. In practice, it was just another opportunity for Trump to whine at length about how he supposedly "won" Georgia (which he didn't) and how Republican state officials had conspiring to steal the election away from him (blatantly false, and also preposterous). The crowd ate these lies up, chanting "fight for Trump!" when Perdue and Loeffler bothered to peek their heads out at what was supposed to be their rally. ............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2020/12/07/trump-lost-the-election-but-his-legacy-of-coronavirus-denialism-is-here-to-stay/

December 7, 2020

'Existential Peril': Mass Transit Faces Huge Service Cuts Across U.S.

In Boston, transit officials warned of ending weekend service on the commuter rail and shutting down the city’s ferries. In Washington, weekend and late-night metro service would be eliminated, and 19 of the system’s 91 stations would close. In Atlanta, 70 of the city’s 110 bus routes have already been suspended, a move that could become permanent.

And in New York City, home to the largest mass transportation system in North America, transit officials have unveiled a plan that could slash subway service by 40% and cut commuter rail service in half.

Across the United States, public transportation systems are confronting an extraordinary financial crisis set off by the pandemic, which has starved transit agencies of huge amounts of revenue and threatens to cripple service for years.

The profound cuts that agencies are contemplating could hobble the recoveries of major cities from New York to Los Angeles and San Francisco, where reliable transit is a lifeblood of the local economies. ..............(more)

https://news.yahoo.com/existential-peril-mass-transit-faces-130025755.html