October 29, 2020

5 minutes of how good it was ...

October 29, 2020

wore my Joe Biden mask to work today and they said it was disruptive and made me remove it ...

I work at the White House.

October 17, 2020

DU has been a very important part of my Pandemic and Trump era survival strategy ...

thank-you DU Admin and members for being here for me!!!!

Thank-you, thank-you, thank-you!

October 16, 2020

"Sorry Sunshine, wrong room!"

October 15, 2020

Voted today - cancelled my absentee and voted in person. Yesterday they had 1,700 voters ...

today there was a short line and I voted even with the process of canceling absentee ballot in about 15 minutes. Two people with no masks: one of the workers and one voter a recognized as a local tea partier.

But most important is most of the Democratic candidates were women running again Republican men.

Made my goal of voting for as many women candidates as I could very easy.

I voted for one Republican, a Mexican American who I think is RINO, who's also done a very good job as county attorney, with whom I've had a chance several times to talk to, including in his official capacity. He also has run the last five or six elections unchallenged. If there's a Democrat and its a woman next time, I think Eddie Arrondondo has lost a supporter.

October 14, 2020

"When you're in the White House, why would you ever want to golf?"

October 14, 2020

Grampa, did you vote for Donald Trump?

October 12, 2020

Proud Boy interview at Trump Rally ...

October 12, 2020

The Kremlin Is Starting to Worry About Trump

The Kremlin Is Starting to Worry About Trump

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-soviet-union-is-gone-but-it-s-still-collapsing


-snip-

The search for a key to Trump’s mind-boggling and miscellaneous gusher of policy directives has tended to focus on his disturbingly erratic, vindictive, simplistic, narcissistic, insecure, and occasionally delusional personality, due exception being made for those conspiracy theorists who treat him as a kind of Manchurian candidate or sock puppet of the Kremlin. What most observers have been late to recognize is the extent to which, behind his mask as a showman, Trump views himself as a revolutionary insurgent with a mission to dismantle America’s “old regime.”

-snip-

Russian policymakers, obsessed as they are with the fear of “color revolutions,” may understand better than Americans and Europeans the radical nature of the political change that has descended on Washington. Indeed, when it comes to the ongoing Trump revolution, Russian policymakers are in much the same position as the German General Staff one century ago. In 1917, the German government concluded that the best hope for a German victory in World War I was for a revolution to erupt in Russia. It thus allowed some of the leaders of the Bolshevik party, Lenin among them, to pass through Germany and make their way back to Russia. The hope was that a revolution in Russia would pull the country out of the war — and the plan worked. But by the beginning of 1918, the German government started to fear that the virus of revolution that it had surreptitiously help spread to Russia might circle back calamitously to Germany itself.

-snip-

There is no way of knowing if Russian interference contributed decisively to Trump’s upset victory. But it’s fair to say that the Kremlin viewed the outcome as a divine gift. Since at least 2011-2012, when Russia witnessed widespread popular protests, and particularly after the Ukrainian Maidan uprising — events that elicited heartfelt praise and encouragement from then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — Russia’s leadership had been convinced that her election would spell disaster for Russia and that it might even lead to war. So Russians did what they could to prevent Clinton from getting into the White House. But while they welcomed her defeat, they were wholly unprepared for the ensuing regime change in Washington.

-snip-

With Trump in the White House, moreover, Putin has lost his monopoly over geopolitical unpredictability. The Kremlin’s ability to shock the world by taking the initiative and trashing ordinary international rules and customs has allowed Russia to play an oversized international role and to punch above its weight. Putin now has to share the capacity to keep the world off balance with a new American president vastly more powerful than himself. More world leaders are watching anxiously to discover what Trump will do next than are worrying about what Putin will do next. Meanwhile, using anti-Americanism as an ideological crutch has become much more dubious now that the American electorate has chosen as their president a man publicly derided as “Putin’s puppet.”

October 12, 2020

Trump Failed the 3 A.M. Test

Trump Failed the 3 A.M. Test

Don’t let him answer another call.
October 11, 2020
Conor Friedersdorf
Staff writer at The Atlantic

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/10/trump-failed-3-am-test/616678/

-snip-

Joe Biden has never held the top job, so voters can only speculate. But a pandemic began on Donald Trump’s watch, so no speculation is needed. Trump showed us how he did perform in a crisis: He failed. Trump is obviously not responsible for all of the COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. But the U.S. has fared much worse than the median developed country. And among wealthy nations, its per capita deaths rank in the top five. Trump can’t avoid blame for America’s subpar performance, because voters can identify specific actions he took that contributed to the country’s failures. Especially damning is that Trump couldn’t even protect himself from the disease.

-snip-

Trump’s carelessness didn’t just jeopardize his own health, and that of his wife, his aides, and the Secret Service. The September 26 White House event for the Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett appears to have compromised the health of many important officials. “More than 100 people gathered,” NPR reported. “Guests mingled, hugged and kissed on the cheek, most without wearing masks. An indoor reception followed the outdoor ceremony. Seven days later, at least eight people who were at the ceremony have tested positive.” Someone may die because of the White House’s bizarre laxness at an unnecessary event. And because U.S. senators are among the infected, its consequences could conceivably delay or even derail Barrett’s nomination. Nothing like this could have happened to a president exercising good judgment.

-snip-

Mendacity was his most avoidable failure. Presidents in a public-health crisis should tell the truth. Trump lied to Americans from the outset of this life-threatening emergency. In early February, he privately told Bob Woodward that COVID-19 spread through the air and was more dangerous than the flu, even as he downplayed the seriousness of the disease in public. “I wanted to always play it down,” he later told Woodward. “I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.” The false impression he gave was echoed by his allies through the conservative media. Millions would have taken COVID-19 more seriously if Trump hadn’t repeatedly downplayed it. But instead of leveling with Americans, Trump kept lying month after month.

-snip-

A better president would have shored up America’s public-health infrastructure prior to the pandemic rather than letting it continue to decay. A better president would’ve seen the earliest failures of the regulatory state and used the powers of his office to correct them as quickly as possible. But rather than constantly insisting that the regulatory state treat COVID-19 more like an emergency and emphasizing that brief bureaucratic delays could cost thousands or tens of thousands of lives, Trump repeatedly focused on downplaying the challenge that America faced. As Ronald Klain, who served as chief of staff to two different Democratic vice presidents, told my Atlantic colleague Ed Yong, “In the best circumstances, it’s hard to make the bureaucracy move quickly. It moves if the president stands on a table and says, ‘Move quickly.’ But it really doesn’t move if he’s sitting at his desk saying it’s not a big deal.”

-snip-