A bit less challenging than Costa Rica (where practically everything is poisonous and wants to kill you), still not Les’ chosen environment (Canada, eh?).
Georgia (the State not the Country) Swamp
Jul 09 2020
Please don’t make me stay home from school again.
Oh, yeah.
NEA Prez: ‘I Double Dog Dare Donald Trump To Sit In A Class Of 39 Sixth Graders And Breathe’
By Susie Madrak, Crooks and Liars
7/08/20
So now Trump is going to bully state governors into reopening the schools — without paying for adequate preparation. New Day’s Alysin Camerota asked Lily Eskelsen Garcia, president of the National Education Association, if public schools are really ready to reopen in September.
“Did you hear the word he didn’t use? ‘Safely.’ Safely. There’s no one that wants their kids back with us more than teachers,” Garcia said.
“Maybe their parent. Maybe their parents beat us out there, but we want to open it safely. We see what happens when they let bars open prematurely and you saw those young adults in there in that nice little bar and they went home and they infected everybody around them. This isn’t a bar. We’re talking about second graders. I had 39 sixth graders one year in my class.
“I double dog dare Donald Trump to sit in a class of 39 sixth graders and breathe that air without any preparation for how we’re going to bring our kids back safely.”
“What you’re saying is that the NEA is insisting on these benchmarks before you can open schools. You would have to equip schools with PPE. Meaning, the protective gear for teachers, et cetera. Deep clean schools using CDC-approved disinfectants. Classrooms should accommodate six feet of physical separation between students. A class of 39, I’m not sure how you do that. Install hand washing stations, hand sanitizer stations, and have more trained staff in trauma and emotional health for when the kids go back after all of this,” Camerota said. She asked who would pay for all of this.
“One of the things that we know is that when Shake Shack needed some money, the Congress joined hands, sang kumbaya and threw money at businesses so they wouldn’t have to lay people off,” Garcia replied.
“There is a bill sitting on Mitch McConnell’s desk right now called the HEROES Act, passed by the House, that has billions of dollars dedicated to schools right now, so we could do this right. Donald Trump said ‘dead on arrival.’ He didn’t have a plan and by the way, all of the funding sources for public schools, the tax base has fallen off a cliff. so we’re not even talking about having what we had last year.”
“What do you say to parents who say, ‘I would be willing to take the risk of not having my kids be 6 feet apart so they could get back into school and I could go back to work and save our family’s finances?’ ” Camerota said.
“So let’s not have false choices here. We have an unsafe school. Do we keep it closed? Do we open an unsafe school? No, you make it safe! And then you say, well, what if Mitch MccConnell doesn’t want to give you the money? What if Donald Trump isn’t going to sign a bill? Then parents right now should be sending e-mails, phone calls. They should be closing down the White House operators, just saying, ‘Come on! You’re saying that you could do this safely, but you don’t want to? Why wouldn’t you want to open a school safely?”
“Mr. Rooney? Have you ever smelled a real School Bus before?”
Jul 09 2020
The Breakfast Club (Abstraction)
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
William Jennings Bryan gives his ‘Cross of Gold’ speech; Britain’s Princess Elizabeth engaged; Boxer Mike Tyson punished for biting Evander Holyfield’s ear; Actor Tom Hanks born; Actor Rod Steiger dies.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
Washington isn’t a city, it’s an abstraction.
Jul 08 2020
Back To School
Sending children to rot for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week in a cesspool of pus is an incredibly stupid idea that I would not allow any child of mine to participate in (no matter how much they wanted to hang with their friends) and would sue to prevent should the District get insistent. See you in Court Assholes.
Unindicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio likes it because he’s a moron and probably figures you can just hire a ringer like he did Joe Shapiro (I need… A… Jew!) for his SATs. UPenn has a new Lori Loughlin rule by the way and can yank your degree for cheating.
Because he is so dumb he seems to also think that by taking the Rug Rats out of the house people will go back to their 2 or 3 Minimum Wage jobs for exploitation by his Oligarch buddies, the Economy will come roaring back (or at least the Market), and everyone will forget the 200,000 Deaths (easily exceeded by November) and 100,000 New Cases a Day.
He might be right. U.S. Citizens are exceptionally unintelligent (“gullible” is not in the Dictionary, look it up). Think of someone you consider to have “Average” intelligence. You’re probably underestimating them, but at least half of the people are more brainless than that.
Scares the crap out of me.
Trump World on Reopening Schools During COVID: Astronauts Take Risks, Too
Erin Banco and Asawin Suebsaeng, Daily Beast
Jul. 07, 2020
On a call with the nation’s governors Tuesday, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos chastised local officials for doing “next to nothing” to provide academic services to students and demanded they reopen schools in the fall regardless of the state of the COVID pandemic.
The issue, DeVos stressed at one point, was merely a matter of calculated risk, nothing all that different from those taken by an astronaut heading into space.
“Education leaders really do need to examine real data and weigh risk,” DeVos said. “They already deal with risk on a daily basis. We know that risk is embedded in everything we do. Learning to ride a bike, to the risk of getting in a space capsule and getting shot off in a rocket into space.”
The remarks by DeVos were part of a larger push on Tuesday by top Trump officials to make the case for school reopenings amid growing health concerns by doctors, scientists and state and local officials. But they also resembled something larger about the president’s approach to a virus that has crippled the country and, in turn, his presidency. Months into the pandemic, the administration has settled into a phase of acceptance even as the coronavirus continues to infect thousands of people each day and overwhelm hospitals in the south and southwestern parts of the country.
It’s been six months since the pandemic first began, with more than 3 million people contracting the virus and an estimated 133,000 people having died from it. In that time, officials and advisers working with President Trump’s coronavirus teams say the administration’s response approach has changed drastically, especially in the last several months.
…
Trump has privately griped that Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s leading infectious-disease expert, is “very good at scaring people,” according to a source with direct knowledge. And on Tuesday, he made it clear that he harbored no internal debate about the virtue of getting school’s reopened in the midst of a pandemic.“Now it’s time to be open. Now it’s time to stay open,” the president declared at a separate event on Tuesday geared around schools. “We’re not closing. We’ll never close.”
…
President Trump has consistently pushed the message that testing is bad for optics—that simply stopping it would result in fewer actual cases. And on Tuesday’s governors call, Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told governors that when it came to reopening schools, testing was “not necessary” and said it was a “tool” that states could use to keep students safe if they do choose to allow them back into the classroom this fall.The emphasis on learning to live with COVID—and downplaying testing concerns along the way there—is a messaging push that, three administration officials told The Daily Beast, had been in the works for weeks. One of those officials insisted it was not fueled by a sense of despair or “defeatism,” but rather by a belief in “American resilience” in the face of great death and tragedy.
But for public health experts, the push has an obvious flaw, one already exhibited during the past half year: opening too quickly is part of what led to new outbreaks.
“We very clearly predicted that if you were cautious and slow you were going to do better. In hindsight, our prediction was true,” said Dr. David Rubin, the director of PolicyLab, a group of doctors and scientists from Pennsylvania that brief the White House’s coronavirus task force on data modeling.
“We’re in limbo right now,” Rubin said. “Everything was predicated on getting our counts down. And there is a sense of like, ‘ok, what do we do now?’ We haven’t really thought about what if there is an epidemic that happens in August. That hasn’t been part of the conversations.”
Through it all, Trump has largely lost patience, regularly complaining that public-health professionals who contradict or complicate his declarations of victories and alleged economic rebirth are causing undue panic. In an interview with Axios last month, he said the country had to “get back to business.” And on the Fourth of July, he falsely stated during a speech that 99 percent of all coronavirus cases are “totally harmless.” Pence, too, has focused some of his latest remarks emphasizing economic considerations over public health ones. In the call with the governor’s Tuesday, the vice president noted that he’d recently read a report by the Council of Economic Advisors—a group of economists who advise the president—that said if every school closed it would cost the U.S. economy tens of billions of dollars.
Meanwhile, the Trump-Pence re-election campaign seems to think the rush to reopen schools during an ongoing pandemic will make for some good electoral politics.
“President Trump understands education is the single greatest equalizer in our society and that we need to get children back into the classroom so they do not fall behind and parents can return to work,” Trump 2020 spokeswoman Samantha Zager said in a statement to The Daily Beast on Tuesday. “Joe Biden puts his loyalty to the teachers union ahead of the well-being of students and families in America.”
Space flight is not “safe”. Ask the crew of Apollo 1, STS 51L, or STS 107. Oh wait. They’re dead.
Jul 08 2020
Cartnoon
Circus folk. My Aunty Mame has been wearing Harlequin Whiteface for 50 years.
Walking a tightrope: circuses warn they will go bust ‘within two weeks’
by Dalya Alberge, The Guardian
Wed 8 Jul 2020
The government is facing urgent calls to save Britain’s 250-year-old circus tradition with companies warning that they will go bust within just two weeks without help.
The Association of Circus Proprietors has said that performers have been reduced to using food banks to survive since circuses were shut down temporarily by Covid-19.
On Tuesday, there were clowns in Downing Street, but this time they were professional ones, joined by acrobats, jugglers, fire-eaters and stilt-walkers to deliver a plea for assistance to Boris Johnson.
In a letter to the prime minister, the association said circuses must be allowed to open this month to have any chance of staying alive. They wrote that, without swift action, “a great British institution will be lost for ever”. “Please save the circus … We have two weeks before the end of the road,” they said.
Circuses exist primarily on their Easter and summer seasons, when there are around 50 shows on the road in Britain.
Martin Burton, the association’s chairman, told the Guardian that the situation was “completely desperate”. “We’ve missed Easter. If we miss the summer, most circuses will go bust,” he said.
“My association has had countless emails from members saying: ‘if you can’t get us open in the middle of July, we can’t see a way to carry on’… [Circuses are] not just going to be dark. They’re going to be gone … about two weeks from now.”
Burton said companies were perplexed because they are classified as outdoor events, yet were not on the list of businesses allowed to reopen last week.
Unlike theatre buildings, they can rearrange seating into any socially-distant pattern and their Big Top tents have airy designs with plenty of ventilation, multiple entrances and outside box-offices, catering and toilets.
The association represents shows such as Circus Extreme, Zippos Circus and Gerry Cottle, which draw an estimated 2.5 million people each year.
In their letter to Johnson, they wrote: “Sadly, circuses seem to have fallen through the cracks of all the rescue package schemes … [Monday’s] announcement that a £1.57bn culture lifeline was to be given to the arts made no reference to circus.”
Referring to an interview given by the culture secretary in announcing the emergency arts funding, Burton said: “When Oliver Dowden read out who was on [the list of recipients], he didn’t say the word ‘circus’… [The presenter] said: ‘And circus?’ He didn’t answer.”
He added: “The first circus was invented by Philip Astley. His circus building was on the other side of Westminster Bridge … Parliamentarians would cross the bridge and go to Astley’s amphitheatre and watch the circus.
“It’s only in Britain – I’m sorry to tell you, considering that we invented [the circus] – that it’s looked down upon so much [today] … There’s a national circus in Hungary. The man who runs [it] is a cabinet minister. The national circus in Switzerland, Knie, are like royalty. The Pope in Italy goes to see circuses all the time. We don’t get that recognition here.”
Burton is the founder and director of Zippos Circus, having run away to the circus “much to my mother’s disgust”. He worked as a clown for years.
Joking about clowns and politicians, he said: “We have to be very careful about the abuse of the word ‘circus’ and the abuse of the word ‘clown’. Let’s not make it too derogatory because it upsets the real ones.”
Jul 08 2020
The Breakfast Club (Beautiful People)
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
Commodore Matthew Perry arrives in Tokyo Bay; Industrialist John D. Rockefeller born; Word of what becomes known as ‘The Roswell Incident’; North Korea’s Kim Il Sung dies; Ziegfeld stages first ‘Follies.’
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of those depths.
Jul 07 2020
More Corona
Sung to the tune of My Sharonna.
From PBS Frontline–
The Virus: What Went Wrong?
The lime is only there to keep out the bugs. You’re not supposed to shove it in the bottle.
Ick.
Jul 07 2020
Pondering the Pundits
Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news media and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.
Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt
Paul Krugman: How America Lost the War on Covid-19
It wasn’t because of our culture, it was because of our leadership.
When did America start losing its war against the coronavirus? How did we find ourselves international pariahs, not even allowed to travel to Europe? [..]
But why did America bungle Covid-19 so badly?
There has been a fair bit of commentary to the effect that our failed pandemic response was deeply rooted in American culture. We are, the argument goes, too libertarian, too distrustful of government, too unwilling to accept even slight inconveniences to protect others.
And there’s surely something to this. I don’t think any other advanced country (but are we still an advanced country?) has a comparable number of people who respond with rage when asked to wear a mask in a supermarket. There definitely isn’t any other advanced country where demonstrators against public health measures would wave guns around and invade state capitols. And the Republican Party is more or less unique among major Western political parties in its hostility to science in general.
But what strikes me, when looking at America’s extraordinary pandemic failure, is how top-down it all was.
Jamelle Bouie: Maybe This Isn’t Such a Good Time to Prosecute a Culture War
Trump has gone to the well one time too many.
Donald Trump made his name in Republican Party politics as a “birther,” a true believer in — and an evangelist for — the racist conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was a foreign-born, illegitimate president. Having stoked a wave of white grievance and resentment, Trump rode it, first to influence — let’s not forget that Mitt Romney came to receive Trump’s endorsement in person during the 2012 presidential race — and then to the summit of power as president himself.
Now, because of a pandemic Trump refuses to address (“We need to live with it,” officials in his administration say), his power is at risk. If the election were held today, Trump would almost certainly lose in a landslide. His sole good fortune at the moment is that the election won’t be held for another four months, giving him time to close his 10-point gap with Joe Biden and turn his campaign around.
But to do that, Trump would have to take responsibility for and respond to events properly. He would have to show the voting public that he is capable of presidential leadership. And this, more than anything, is beyond both his interest and his ability. Trump does not want to govern and could not do it if he tried.
Karen Tumulty: Four more years? Four more months will be hard enough.
If you had to pick the moment at which the modern Republican Party reached the zenith of its political dominance, it would be the 1984 landslide in which Ronald Reagan picked up nearly 98 percent of the electoral votes — one of the biggest blowouts in history.
“The tide of history is moving irresistibly in our direction,” Reagan said a few months later. “Why? Because the other side is virtually bankrupt of ideas. It has nothing more to say, nothing to add to the debate. It has spent its intellectual capital — such as it was.”
Today, what Reagan once said of “the other side” could easily apply to the Republican Party, which in the course of four short years has remade itself in the backward-looking, intellectually incoherent image of Donald Trump.
There are still nearly 120 days to go until the November election — and it will surely feel more like 1,200. But at this point, polling both nationally and in the battleground states shows Trump falling further and further behind Democratic nominee-in-waiting Joe Biden.
Donna F. Edwards: The game’s in the fourth quarter, and Trump can barely get a first down
It’s not football season yet, but we sports fans are clamoring for any relief during this pandemic devoid of athletics. So in recent days, I have begun to think of the next four months leading up to the presidential election as the last quarter of the biggest game of the year — the Super Bowl. So far, President Trump is playing the championship as if he doesn’t want to win. Who would have predicted that in the face of losing, this president who clearly does not like losers would not alter his game plan in the fourth quarter? But here we are.
In the latest set of national polls, Trump trails Joe Biden by between eight and 12 points depending on the poll. In the key battleground states — Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — Trump is underwater, too. His job approval sits at just 39 percent. He’s hemorrhaging suburban white women and seniors. In short, he’s losing.
On the issue front, Trump’s head is not in the game, either. [..]
It looks bad for Trump, but it’s not over. He’s trailing by a couple of touchdowns. The clock is running out, but he’s throwing five-yard passes. His fans are cheering the completions, but he is also getting sacked and can barely manage a first down. And while Trump has reverted to his division strategy, it is still a 100-yard game, and the winner must play the full four quarters. Given the depths to which he has been willing to go, come November Biden and America will need to be on the lookout for Trump’s Hail Mary.
Amanda Marcotte: Donald Trump’s re-election bet: American voters are still racist at heart
Polling data shows both Trump and racism are unpopular — but he’s going all-in on faith the polls are wrong
On the Fourth of July, a day meant to celebrate American independence, Donald Trump once again focused on creating a racist spectacle. Despite concerns about spreading the coronavirus and starting wildfires, Trump insisted on having a fireworks-heavy celebration at Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, which was clearly a campaign rally no matter how much the taxpayers were bilked for it. Of course the president’s speech was pure culture-war vitriol, complete with classic Trumpian projection, this time when he called anti-racist activists “fascists,” an extraordinary word choice that obviously better suits him.
Despite the propaganda photos equating Trump with the carving of Abraham Lincoln on the mountain, his speech was once again better understood as a celebration of the Confederacy. Trump sniped at those who would “tear down our statues,” “defame our heroes” and “indoctrinate our children,” a slam clearly aimed at Black Lives Matter protesters who object to monuments celebrating white supremacy and who seek to “indoctrinate” people with the revolutionary argument that racism is wrong.
The trolling event played out as intended. The choice of Mount Rushmore, carved by a Ku Klux Klan-linked white supremacist who also carved the infamous tribute to the Confederacy on Stone Mountain in Georgia, helped drive home Trump’s campaign theme to his most overtly racist followers: White supremacy is the truest form of patriotism.
Jul 07 2020
Saving Cristo Redentor
“Bring out your Dead!”
Well thank goodness we’ll be around to do it as Bolsonaro might be indisposed for a while.
Brazil’s Bolsonaro tests positive for coronavirus
By Terrence McCoy, Washington Post
July 7, 2020
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who has sought repeatedly to minimize the coronavirus as he urges the country back to work, said Tuesday he has tested positive for covid-19.
Bolsonaro, who has been an outlier among world leaders in his skepticism of both the coronavirus and preventive measures intended to curb it, was tested Monday evening after developing symptoms that included a fever.
“There’s no problem,” he told reporters on Tuesday. “It’s natural. There’s no dread. It’s life.”
The result adds one more case to what has become the world’s second-worst coronavirus outbreak, after the United States. Brazil has reported more than 1.6 million cases and 65,000 deaths — both believed to be undercounts — an escalating disaster that scientists and health officials say has been exacerbated by Bolsonaro’s frequent dismissal of it.
Bolsonaro, 65, has described covid-19
Tear it down. Thing is an eyesore anyway.
Jul 07 2020
The Breakfast Club (Amazing Waste)
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
Terror bombings strike London’s transit system; Oliver North testifies at Iran-Contra hearings; Sandra Day O’Connor nominated for U.S. Supreme Court; Author Robert Heinlein and musician Ringo Starr born.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
Anyone who considers protocol unimportant has never dealt with a cat.