Summations Only

You're replying to what I said two messages ago? You already replied to this. Anyway, replying to your second response: Let me reflect this back to you, but inverted so you can see how absurd and biased it sounds:

quote:

---

But those with a sense of Republican loyalty, mostly religious fanatics, mostly Obama haters,...

---

You'll come across more neutrally if you drop the emotionally charged and politicized accusations. This makes it seem like you think liberals are more likely than conservatives to accept the recommendations of science because it hurts churches and keeps Trump from holding his highly effective political rallies. That's very paranoid. Yes, we will have to disagree on that, because what you said is definitely not what I said. I responded to your accusation that the left wants to keep the country closed as long as possible, saying that I'm sure everyone with a sense of humanity wants the country reopened as safely and as quickly as possible. Why don't you respond to what I actually said instead of making things up. Again. I don't know how to apply your smilie modifier, but I'd encourage you to emphasize fact-based arguments over name-calling and accusations. This isn't true. Truth has neither a liberal nor conservative bias. Calling out lies made by someone of one political view has nothing to do with one's own political view, not if one is being honest. Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace recently called out Trump's new press secretary Keyleigh McEnany for making false accusations against journalists who asked tough questions. Is Chris Wallace a liberal now? The story begins, "A majority of American journalists identify themselves as political independents although among those who choose a side Democrats outnumber Republicans four to one, according to a new study of the media conducted by two Indiana University professors."Also, you're drawing a false equivalence, that "Republican or Democrat (choose one)" equals "unable to conduct objective reporting." Each news story must be assessed on its own merits. Of course the economy is of primary importance to most people, but that doesn't erase Trump's racist, ignorant, misogynistic, xenophobic and crooked behavior. You mean the economy that Obama rebuilt and sustained for six years without being racist, ignorant, misogynistic, xenophobic and crooked? You're making stuff up again. Do even you have any idea how this ties into your argument that the Trump economy means we should ignore everything else he does? If that means what I think it means, are you nuts? The alternative was 2-3 million dead. The right thing to do for the country does not suddenly become the wrong thing to do just because it works against you politically. You're basically arguing that Trump should have sacrificed 2-3 million people in order to avoid being hurt politically.And your reasoning is false, anyway, for two reasons. First, any political advantage the pandemic provides the Democrats stems from Trump's delayed, slow and ineffective response (there's still no federally driven effort on testing and contact tracing), and from his constant bumbling from the podium at the daily briefings (paraphrasing, "We have it under control," "Less than 60,000 deaths," "Hydroxychloroquine," "Bleach, disinfectant and light"). It doesn't stem from the shutdown's impact on the economy because Democrats have been largely in favor of the shutdown. And second, there would have been considerable political fallout from 2-3 million dead anyway. You are making things up again. I'm sure everyone from all positions on the political spectrum condemns the burning of churches. No, Marc, you can't dismiss it by making up more stuff. It was you who presented fictional assertions that wearing masks presented health risks. Your information came from a right-wing website that happened to write what you wanted to believe anyway. You didn't, and still don't, have any facts supporting this. No, Marc, none of it makes sense, because it is all made up. It's what you want to believe, not what the facts say. Instead of engaging in honest and fact-driven debate, it's easier to defeat the other side if you can get constituencies to distrust them by making up and disseminating ugly facts about them. This is the course you have chosen. So you're argument is that Trump was correct in delaying the shutdown of the country, despite that he was privy to information about the growing worldwide pandemic that was not available to mayors and governors and that he could have called them to Washington to brief them about, because it would have cost him politically? That seems like a strong argument that Trump is incompetent both managerially and politically. Calling it the China virus is fine if geographic identification is the goal, but it's not. Trump is playing a political blame game. He's not calling it the China virus because it came out of China but because he wants to blame China. He both takes up and drops the "China virus" label according to whether he's angry with China that day or not. No one's denying the history. SARS came out of China. Most novel strains of the annual flu virus come out of eastern Asia. The first cases of SARS-CoV-2 were in China, and science may eventually conclude it originated there, too. The geographic source is one thing, fault is another.And maybe it was China's fault, but not because it originated in China, and certainly not because it was developed or escaped from a lab in China, but because China hid information about the initial outbreak. The name you give it doesn't matter. What matters is that because of the loss of jobs more and more people are finding they can't buy food, pay their rent or mortgage, make their car payments, pay their utility bills, pay for medical insurance or medical care, and so forth. Shouldn't the government be helping them while the economy is recovering? Now you're making stuff up again. You didn't say anything about free health care or the impact of health insurance requirements on business. You said that the idea of public health as a responsibility of government was an invention of modern Democrats. That was dead wrong and remains dead wrong. You make this claim about news from the mainstream media over and over again but are never able to support it. Here are few New York Times news headlines from right now. Describe for us the liberal bias:

• As the U.S. Honors Memorial Day, Trump Threatens to Move Republican Convention - The New York Times
• Wealthiest Hospitals Got Billions in Coronavirus Bailout - The New York Times
• On a Scottish Isle, Nursing Home Deaths Expose a Covid-19 Scandal - The New York Times
• What the Coronavirus Revealed About Life in Red vs. Blue States - The New York Times
• ISIS Prisoners Threaten U.S. Mission in Northeastern Syria - The New York Times
• Prototype Vaccine Protects Monkeys From Coronavirus - The New York Times

--Percy

Choose whatever source you like, Marc, as long as it has a reputation for quality and accuracy. You're making stuff up again. No laws were passed by Congress regarding anything in the first amendment, and no churches were ordered to close.What's true is that all non-essential businesses, organizations and public facilities were ordered to close, and reopening plans specify which can open by how much according to a timeline. There's no religious discrimination, and there's been very little restraint exerted on protest gatherings. Gee, the science books will have to be rewritten, viruses were actually discovered hundreds of years ago. Marc, get a clue. Mankind has been plagued by viruses throughout his time on this Earth, but we only discovered their existence a little over a hundred years ago. Now you're changing your story. You didn't just claim the founders knew about contagious diseases. You claimed they also knew about viruses: "The founders knew plenty about the possibilities of viruses and pandemics..." Is restricting gatherings to slow a pandemic a legitimate use of government power? In circumstances of this general nature the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that it is.On a narrower plane, when the Board of Health closes a restaurant for violation of health regulations, is that a legitimate use of government power? Of course.About social programs (you called it redistributing earnings), you'll have to explain how that's unconstitutional. Basically you're saying, "I'm not going to actually argue it, I'm just going to assert that if I did argue it I would win." I urge you to go ahead and argue it. Concerning civil unrest, no one was killed in the 1968 Democratic Convention riots. 13 were killed in the 1968 Washington riots. 34 were killed in the Watts riots. Just what kind of civil unrest are you imagining that is going to kill hundreds of thousands of people?And what are these other causes that you are imagining will kill hundreds of thousands of people? You don't mention any, you just return to the excess deaths from unemployment argument that I just explained: Yes, Marc, we know unemployment causes excess mortality, I had just said that and you quoted it. Repeating similar information doesn't add anything.The key concern is how you are going to get to hundreds of thousands of deaths? Let's do a simple calculation using simple ballpark numbers. Not real numbers, just ballpark, just to get a general idea for whether large scale unemployment can cause hundreds of thousands of deaths . Let's say the mortality rate for employed people is .1% and for unemployed people is .163% (this mortality rate is way high, but .1% is a nice round number to start with). If full employment is 170 million then there will be 170,000 deaths. If unemployment rises to the point where half of them lose their jobs then 85 million will be exposed to the higher mortality rate of .163%, and the other 85 million to the original rate of .1%. The total deaths in this case will be 224,000, an increase of 54,000. You still haven't reached the number of deaths that this pandemic is eventually going to cause in a year, I'm guessing around 170,000 (that *is* a guess, though an informed one, but I didn't even do a back-of-the-envelope calculation).And don't forget, my 170,000 estimate is *with* the shutdown. Without the shutdown and with no mitigation the number of deaths would be 2-3 million. You're a couple orders of magnitude away from that.Now remember my .1% approximation was way too high. The actual mortality rate for the 18-65 age group is probably something in the neighborhood of about .035% (informed guestimate). That brings the excess deaths down from 54,000 to about 19,000, much further from the 2-3 million covid-19 deaths in a year from no shutdown and no mitigation.And we haven't even taken into account the fact that the suicide rate drops during recessions. There's no comparison. Drastic measures to fight the pandemic cannot cause anywhere near the number of deaths that the actual pandemic causes.And then there are the economic costs. If a human life is worth $10 million, then it is worth $20 or $30 trillion to save two or three million lives. You're making stuff up again. Here's a bar graph of real GDP growth from 1990 through 2019 from • Real GDP growth rate by year in the U.S. 2021 | Statista. The growth in the Obama years was roughly the same as in Trump's, and Obama had to fix the 2008 financial collapse: You're still not answering the question. This isn't a big deal, it doesn't really matter, I'm just curious how you arrived at your acronym. How do you get TDR from Trump Derangement Syndrome? What does the "R" in TDR stand for? Everybody else uses the TDS acronym.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Typos.

When marc linked to the Washington Post, I followed the trail and observed this graphic: So apparently the trend is more towards the independent label and less red or blue. In my mind, independent means several things.
1) Fair and balanced.(or at least claiming to be)
2) Open-minded
3) moderate vs extremistComments?

Edited by Admin, : Change image of tweet to the tweet itself.

And from the BBC story on that: The irony is strong with this one.

I was about to post about this but you beat me to it.Trump is very upset that Twitter has slapped a fact-check on this tweet, saying it is based on "fact-checking by Fake News CNN and the Amazon Washington Post." But the facts support nothing Trump says. Trump's effectiveness in promulgating lies is the energetic use he makes of the presidential bully pulpit and Twitter. His lies get exposure when he issues them, when his gullible base hears and spreads them, and when the mainstream media repeats them.There is little evidence of mail-in ballot fraud. The only recent example of any significance that I'm aware of was by a Republican operative in North Carolina's Ninth Congressional District in the 2018 election. The White House has a list from the Heritage Foundation of all election fraud cases across the United States that it could find: A Sampling of Election Fraud Cases from Across the Country.It's a paltry list. If 120 million people vote across the county, 1071 proven instances of voter fraud is .0009%. But it's even less, because their list seems to include all elections going back as far as 2002 and maybe even further. If you say that an average of 120 million people vote every two years then that's a total of 10 elections or 600 million votes. Out of that many votes they were above to scour the country and find 1071 instances of voter fraud, which is .00009%. By comparison, .03% of Americans have died from covid-19, more than two orders of magnitude more. Trump would be far better served by putting his efforts into addressing the pandemic instead of voter fraud - death is forever, voter fraud not so much.But that's why Trump wants to stop putting so much effort into this absurd manic testing. From his perspective all they're good for is making him look bad, and making him look good is all that's important. If we stop all this testing and all this statistic gathering the pandemic will look much better than it currently does.But I didn't intend to drift into the covid-19 lane, let me get back on course and return to Twitter fact checking. Twitter should also slap a fact check on Trump's tweets about Joe Scarborough, a former Congressman. Lori Klausutis, an aide to Joe Scarborough, was found dead in his Florida office in 2001. The coroner ruled the death an accident due to a fall hitting her head due to fainting from an undiagnosed heart condition. Scarborough was in Washington at the time, but Trump has been promoting a conspiracy theory that it was murder and Scarborough was responsible: There is zero evidence of murder or any crime. The family of Lori Klausutis has formerly requested that Trump end this campaign about Lori that is causing the family so much pain, but these pleas are, of course, falling on deaf ears. Twitter should slap a fact check on these tweets, too, but they won't because Trump is a president who wields power callously, indiscriminately, abusively. It took him a couple years to put the people he needed in place and to understand how to handle the reins, but now he commits multiple abuses of power a day.--Percy

Tonight Trump's going to sign an Executive Order about social media.This will definitely be horrible.

And Kellyanne Conway is encouraging harassment of Twitter’s Head of Site Integrity for daring to expose Trump’s lies..Integrity - Conservatives hate it. The Verge

Twitter has flagged another Trump tweet, this one for glorifying violence: It is the second of this pair of tweets that got flagged. The Twitter notice doesn't appear when you call the tweet up through their API, which is what happens here in the background when you include a tweet in a message. You can see the warming on Donald Trump's Twitter Page, and I quote it here:

quote:

---

This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules about glorifying violence. However, Twitter has determined that it may be in the public’s interest for the Tweet to remain accessible.

---

On Trump's Twitter page you must click on the warning to see the tweet.One hopes that it isn't cliche to say that with great power comes great responsibility. Trump doesn't know what the saying even means, doesn't understand that with 80 million followers comes a profound responsibility for truth and accuracy and sound judgment. Zuckerberg of Facebook believes current law absolves his company of any responsibility. Only Dorsey of Twitter seems to think his platform shouldn't serve as a means to spread lies, false and sometimes dangerous information, and political propaganda.When Joe Blow with his 200 followers dangerously encourages people to take hydroychloroquine the impact is minimal because he has few followers and they probably already have a measure of his credibility, but when Donald Trump with all the power of the presidency and its bully pulpit blasts a tweet to his 80 million followers it has the potential to cause much damage and mayhem. Since Donald Trump won't rein himself in, and the Republicans who want to ride the Trump horse until the ride runs out certainly won't, others must do it for him.And as I've said before, the mainstream media does the most to spread Trump lies and propaganda just by reporting what he says. The common format for their stories is to trumpet Trump's lie, like "Trump says mail-in ballots a fraud," and then in paragraph 10 say, "There is no evidence that mail-in ballots lead to electoral fraud to any meaningful degree."--Percy

Normally apolitical Taylor Swift has posted about Trump on Twitter: I don't know if Taylor Swift is an informed voice or not. I distrust celebrities because they tend to take advantage of their fame in entertainment to make pronouncements about things they know nothing about. But during times like this we need all voices.My claim to fame: I went to the same college as Taylor Swift's father, we graduated the same year, and it's possible I met him once. --Percy

Conservative columnist George F. Will just came out with his most damning ever column about Trump: Trump must be removed. So must his congressional enablers. Required reading. Some excerpts:

quote:

---

This unraveling presidency began with the Crybaby-in-Chief banging his spoon on his highchair tray to protest a photograph a photograph showing that his inauguration crowd the day before had been smaller than the one four years previous. Since then, this weak person’s idea of a strong person, this chest-pounding advertisement of his own gnawing insecurities, this low-rent Lear raging on his Twitter-heath has proven that the phrase malignant buffoon is not an oxymoron.
...
The person voters hired in 2016 to take care that the laws be faithfully executed stood on July 28, 2017, in front of uniformed police and urged them please don’t be too nice when handling suspected offenders. His hope was fulfilled for 8 minutes and 46 seconds on Minneapolis pavement.
...
The measures necessary for restoration of national equilibrium are many and will be protracted far beyond his removal. One such measure must be the removal of those in Congress who, unlike the sycophantic mediocrities who cosset him in the White House, will not disappear magically, as Eric Trump said the coronavirus would. Voters must dispatch his congressional enablers, especially the senators who still gambol around his ankles with a canine hunger for petting.
...
We cannot know all the measures necessary to restore the nation’s domestic health and international standing, but we know the first step: Senate Republicans must be routed, as condign punishment for their Vichyite collaboration,...
...
In 2016, the Republican Party gave its principal nomination to a vulgarian and then toiled to elect him. And to stock Congress with invertebrates whose unswerving abjectness has enabled his institutional vandalism, who have voiced no serious objections to his Niagara of lies,...
...
Those who think our unhinged president’s recent mania about a murder two decades ago that never happened represents his moral nadir have missed the lesson of his life: There is no such thing as rock bottom. So, assume that the worst is yet to come.

---

--Percy

Wow. That’s a little bit, uh, scathing. And I used to think Mr Will was too right wing....
He probably is still way right of me, but I’m liking him more now.

The news conference is ongoing at this moment: Minnesota governor Tim Walz holds news conference on protestsI will update this message when there's a video of the entire speech, and hopefully there will also be a transcript.AbE: Here is the video: --PercyEdited by Percy, : Add video.

Fascist president pours gasoline on national fire.

The fact that Barr ordered protestors in the area to be cleared out - with tear gas - only shows how bad it’s got.For even more fun it seems that Ted Cruz was asked if the act was an abuse of power. He said it was an abuse of power - by the protestors. So much for the right to peacefully protest.No wonder Trump wants to ban opposition to fascism.