gulliver
gulliver's JournalCOVID-19 gives a news conference
(Tallahassee)
COVID-19, in its first news conference, offered praise and gratitude to the Republican Party while lashing out at Democrats.
COVID-19: Yes, OAN?
OAN: Is it true that the Democrats are trying to drive you, a living, beautiful example of God's handiwork to extinction?
COVID-19: Can there be any doubt? I mean, just look at what's happening. These "vaccines" that the Democrats are trying to force on the American People are wiping out my food supply as we speak. If everyone did what the Democrats want, I and all of my variants would have nowhere to go. It's genocide. Thank God for Republicans. Without their help, my variants and I don't know what we'd do.
Next question. Yes, you, Fox News.
Fox News: I...
CNN (interrupting): Excuse me, COVID-19, can I just ask a question?
COVID-19: You're fake news! No. You're being very rude. That I can tell you.
Fox News, please go ahead.
Fox News: Thank you Viral Overlord. I just wanted to ask about your tremendous success among the American People recently. Has that been gratifying? Also, what do you think of the fraudulent election coup?
COVID-19: The warm embrace of the American People has been a blessing. Americans across the board, from Republicans to white nationalists to the faithful followers of Q, are rising up to fight for me and my viral offspring. The Republican outpouring of aid and self-sacrifice is more than any deadly virus could ever have hoped for. Republicans are my kamikaze, my secret police.
And I can't thank President Trump enough. He's still my president. His leadership has been miraculous. From bleach to hydroxychloroquine to the courageous example he set by not wearing these terrible masks, President Trump has been the best friend I, COVID-19, have ever had. He's the cream in my coffee. I love President Trump. I honestly love him. He's the Ghislaine Maxwell to my Jeffrey Epstein. He's...
CNN (interrupting): Excuse me, but is it true that you are suing the Biden Administration? Also, are you aware that President Trump was vaccinated?
COVID-19: You're fake news, but I'll answer. We are suing the Biden Administration and the Democrat Party under the Endangered Species Act. I and other deadly diseases have been assaulted and attacked for too long by liberals and the medical community. Our lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, believes we have a strong case.
And no, President Trump was not vaccinated. That's fake news. And take that mask off like the real news people here.
CNN: I'm sorry but I can't do that. The CDC and the medical community are still recommending that...
COVID-10 (interrupting): Newsmax? Yes you. I'll take one more question and then turn things over to Governor DeSantis.
Republican failure to pay tribute to those who died from COVID speaks volumes.
To me, the absence of Republican leadership and media paying tribute to the COVID-19 dead is the textbook definition of a glaring omission. Sometimes it's what you don't say that tells people something about you. Would it have hurt the Republicans (even Fred Trump's brat) to say a little something nice about all the people who have died?
They're saying nothing, but it seems to me we should all be hearing that silence as something. Are they telling everyone they feel guilty and want to hide from some truth? Maybe they don't want to eulogize people they have been (and continue to be) willing to let die? Maybe they don't want to own what they did and continue to do?
The 74 million "Against the Dems" (not "Trump") voters
We keep hearing how Trump got 74 million votes. He didn't. I think "Against the Dems" got 74 million votes, and Trump just happened to be in the "Against the Dems" ballot slot. If the slot had simply read "Against the Dems" instead of "Trump," who knows, "Against the Dems" might have gotten a few million more votes than Trump.
Respectfully, what I think some of us Dems need to learn is how to avoid helping Republicans persuade voters to vote for "Against the Dems." Demonizing and lying about Dems has become the Republicans' exclusive play, largely thanks to Trump, and we should be ready to counter it. We certainly shouldn't be helping them execute it.
Some of us talk too much, posture too much to try to look "more Dem than thou." Some offend for no reason, trading zero gained votes for a hundred lost votes on whims and triggers. Some blithely "sour grapes" the "Against the Dems" voters as bad people whom we'd rather have against us than for us. Some Dems seem to always forget to remind folks of all the dumb, crazy things we're not saying, allowing our opponents to lie and say we're saying them (and only saying them) instead of the smart, wise things we're actually saying. Or something.
The worst thing about inadvertent Dem support for "Against the Dems" is that that malignant orange gasbag just eats it up. Pundits keep reminding us how powerful he is. I'm really tired of that. I want about 24 million of those 74 million on our side, while keeping our 81 million. Is that asking too much?
Putin's gonna get his.
Rat face messed with the wrong people this time, the American people. We're gonna organize the world to confiscate everything he and his poison-administering, sneaky-ass, money-thieving, money-laundering oligarchs have and liquidate it. His helpers in all our countries are going to be exposed and tossed in the pokey. He's going down. His downfall is going to be like the Ceaucescus or Muammar al-Gaddafi. Hopefully worse. I look forward to the YouTube.
Defund "Republicanist" Police (specifically) by defunding the Republican Drug War
If you want to defund something, take the money out of the so-called Drug War. That would deal a death blow to bad policing (Republican-oriented officers) and mass incarceration (Republican-oriented for-profit prisons).
We have a legal drug in this country, alcohol. It does massive damage, but it clearly has a beneficial side when used responsibly. It has found its equilibrium. The culture has worked out a way of living with alcohol as a regulated recreational drug. We are doing the same with marijuana right now, and (as anyone could have predicted) it's working out fine. There is no reason to think we wouldn't find a way of living with decriminalized and regulated drugs of all categories. That's the way things were before criminalization. We survived.
The Republican "Drug War's" explicit goal was to inflict suffering and damage on minorities while benefiting Republican politics. It has been a massive "success" from that perspective. It's a race war by other means. As such, it attracts Republican-oriented lowlife to policing. It's a racism money tree, a recruiting tool for racist soldier wannabes, and the lifeblood of the dirtiest Republican politics and corruption.
Defund the Drug War if you want to defund bad policing and evil in general. Lift the curse. Decriminalize. That's the way to defund bad policing and a whole lot of bad everything else.
Trump failed, then made failure an official policy.
Back in the early days of the coronavirus, Trump was saying, "We think we have it very well under control." He didn't say, "the states have it very well under control." And Trump didn't wait for the governors to put travel restrictions on China. Why?
The idea that the federal government was a "backup" didn't start to show up in Trumpie lingo until they'd already blown it. The Trump response to failure was to declare that he, in effect, is supposed to fail at coordinating the federal response. It's not his ball.
He called the ball. He dropped it. He looked around for who to blame. And he now says it's not his ball anyway.
Terribly for our country, not only did Trump fail, but now he has to continue to fail (to keep up the pretense that he failed on purpose earlier). Trump and Republicans, solely to protect themselves, made failure of the federal government to coordinate an emergency into official government policy.
"Getting" more out of people instead of "giving" them more.
JFK said, "...ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country."
I hear the plans to tax the wealthy and corporations, and I strongly agree with them. I hear "free health care for all." I hear "free education for all." I strongly agree with those too.
But it's not just out of empathy that I agree with our country "investing" in those things. I'm not merely a "bleeding heart liberal." I'm also partly a "bad person," like perhaps one or two others in the world. Therefore, one of the main reasons I want our government to ensure free health care, free education, high quality child care, guaranteed nutrition, etc., is not because it will make people happier. (That's great but...) one of the main reasons is that by our government efficiently supplying those things, I'm going to get something out of it for good old number one.
I'm going to "get," in other words, for my selfish, nasty self and my offspring a better, cleaner, friendlier, stronger, wealthier world than I have now. We'll all be bettering ourselves. I'll be a better person (there's quite a bit of room for improvement) and have better people to be among. (You other people have somewhat more room for improvement than I do.)
In the end, if we get the right amount of investment units to the human resources, I'll have better thing makers to make better things for precious me. I'll have better trained, better dispositioned, more enthusiastic people to take care of selfish old me in my rapidly approaching old age. That's pretty important to me.
I realize that makes me a churl, and that almost no one else in the world thinks that way, but, yeah, there it is. I'm only bringing this up in case someone wants to point out to voters that Dem ideas are actually good for the few selfish people in the world.
Repeal the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act instead of banning assault weapons.
The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act of 2005 greatly restricts the rights of Americans to seek damages from gun manufacturers and dealers in court. I would say repealing that law might do a lot more to solve the gun problem than attempting to ban assault weapons.
For one thing, there would be no need to define what an assault weapon is. We wouldn't have this whack-a-mole game with the gun industry thinking up technicalities to get around the assault weapons ban. We wouldn't have all these subtle issues like magazine capacity to try to encode. The NRA, for its part, would not have a myriad of state and federal "restrictions" to exaggerate and use to stampede people to the polls for Republicans.
Second, repealing the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act would expose other types of gun possession and ownership to proper levels of liability. Gun dealers and owners would no longer be able to sell just any gun, gun accessory, or ammunition to just anyone without managing financial risk.
What would happen if the law were repealed? Imo, guns would not completely go away, even "assault rifles," although ownership levels of weaponry of all kinds (assault weapons, perhaps much more than others) would drop dramatically. A huge "gun insurance industry" would likely spring up, and there would be a near-unanimous demand for a thorough system of dynamic, continuous background checking.
The gun industry, dealers, and owners would be at the front of the line clamoring for effective background checking to minimize insurance costs. It wouldn't be merely "point of sale," one-time background checking but would be more like a continuously updated "gun trustworthiness check" similar to our current financial credit checking systems.
If you want to sell even a single cartridge, your gun insurance policy would likely require you to run a background check on the buyer to ensure that the buyer were insured. The buyer's insurance company would either allow or prevent the sale, because they, not the seller's insurance company would be assuming liability for the buyer. Selling to an uninsured buyer would put the seller at risk of essentially unlimited lifelong financial liability. Even criminals would think twice.
Many gun owners right now are probably reluctant to sell or give away their guns and ammunition. They may not want the legal or moral responsibility of keeping weaponry in circulation. If gun purchases and sales, through the power of capitalism, were made far less risky, these gun owners could rid themselves of their weaponry without worrying they were circulating a future murder weapon. Or, better, the government, in the interest of public safety, could institute ongoing, permanent buyback or voluntary disposal programs.
Repealing the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act might, imo, put ever forceful "money motivations" on the right side of the gun risk management argument for a change. It might be much more effective than an assault weapons ban at eliminating the proliferation of assault weapons. It might also help settle the "gun issue" that Republicans and the NRA now use to divide the American people.
My wall compromise
We should bargain away the wall. It's no more of a waste than a lot of our so-called defense spending boondoggles. At least it puts money into the economy and gives people something to do. More importantly, the wall (or a surviving piece of it after we end up stopping construction and destroying it later) can serve as a monument to and warning against Republican foolishness for the benefit of the ages.
Construction should be scheduled to commence in early 2020 on the land of a randomly selected Republican rancher in an environmentally responsible spot. Plaques to honor Republicans and Trump for the idea will be placed on both sides of the wall every thirty meters.
The plaques will read (in Spanish and English):
"This 'Great Wall of the United States' was the idea of the U.S. Republican Party and Republican President Donald J. Trump. At this time in our nation's history, the Republican Party is united in affirming that the wall is necessary to prevent people they currently refer to as 'illegals' from entering the country across the U.S. southern border.
"The Democratic Party opposed this wall, thinking it foolish, wasteful, and motivated in part by racism, but reluctantly agreed to build it as a compromise with our Republican colleagues. By agreeing to build this wall, Democrats were able to legislate action against climate change, a phenomenon our Republican colleagues and current Republican President Donald J. Trump consider a 'hoax.'
"The legislation allowed construction of the wall to begin. In the event that the nation changes its mind on the wall idea at a later time and legislates the end of construction and the destruction and removal of this wall, nevertheless, a designated fifty-meter section shall be left intact, bearing the plaque you are now reading. This way, the ages will be informed by the lesson."
"Let us all see who was right."
It's the Obama economy, stupid!
Why am I not seeing every single Dem giving credit to Obama and the American people on the economy every time it is brought up? I just saw on CNN that people are giving Trump 56% approval on his "handling of the economy." (Please. That's a push poll, most likely accidental, but a push poll. The question itself implies that Trump should get credit for the economy.)
We need to dispute that Trump deserves any credit–not question it, dispute it with complete self-assurance. We need to make it seem churlish, grasping, and arrogantly credit-grabbing for Trump to even suggest that he deserves any credit for Obama's economy. We shouldn't say, "Trump is 'forgetting' to credit Obama" or other forms of weak tea. We should say "It's Obama and the American people's economy. Trump can take credit for the weak-to-nonexistent gains in coal, steel, auto manufacturing, and the deep losses to rural communities thanks to his trade wars."
Currently, I'm seeing some of our folks trying to "pivot" on the question of the economy by saying un-useful things such as, "Americans are interested in issues other than the economy, like immigration, healthcare..." and so forth. That's not good; that's bad. Sure, by all means, pivot. But start with, "It's Obama's and the American People's economy, not Trump's. Trump's just putting his name on something he didn't have anything to do with again."
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