On Meet The Press today they were talking about who Biden should pick as his vice presidential running mate. My own personal favorite choice so far is Susan Rice, National Security Advisor to President Obama and also his US Ambassador to the United Nations.
Why her? She's smart (a Rhodes Scholar), she's tough, she's competent. If Biden were to die in office, she would have the political experience (worked for Clinton and Obama) and personal capability to be a good president. And I guess I just like her, based on the times I've seen her speak.
Here she is on Rachel Maddow's show at the time of the Ukraine scandal ...
UPDATE - 5/29: ah, now Trump is tweeting that he will call in the National Guard (they were already there) and then he tweets "when the looting starts, the shooting starts" so he's back to his original pro-violence stance. That didn't take long.
Trump is pretending he's upset about the death of George Floyd by police. I say "pretending" because it wasn't that long ago that he was encouraging police brutality ...
Memorial Day: Biden wore a mask and Trump didn't. What this says to the vast majority of Americans who do wear masks is that Biden cares about others, while Trump only cares about himself.
It's been reported that Trump is terrified that if a photo is taken of him in a mask, people will make fun of him, so let's share this photo surreptitiously taken of him when he toured the Ford plant ....
I would say that church services are not essential, since people are free to pray and worship on their own any time they wish to ...
Beware of practising your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven ....
‘And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you ...Matthew 6
And it's not just about essentialness, but the safety factor. Trump apparently is too dim to notice that hundreds of people don't congregate together in close quarters for extended times in order to buy a bottle of whiskey or get an abortion, as they do at church services, thus upping the chances of spreading the virus.
Or maybe he does know that and just doesn't care - everything he has done and failed to do regarding the virus has caused *more* deaths, so maybe that's his plan.
I assume this was a message to his Evangelical base ... "Vote for me because I'm in favor of churches, while the Democrats only care about liquor and abortion". At the end of the day, what Trump wants the governors to do doesn't matter - he doesn't have the power to make them open anything.
[...] The combination of meat shortages and President Trump’s decision to order slaughterhouses open despite the protestations of endangered workers has inspired many Americans to consider just how essential meat is.
Is it more essential than the lives of the working poor who labor to produce it? It seems so. An astonishing six out of 10 counties that the White House itself identified as coronavirus hot spots are home to the very slaughterhouses the president ordered open ...
A really good article that touches on all aspects of the consequences of meat-eating, from climate change to human health to animal cruelty, and more. I doubt many people will read it, though.
How many times has the pro-life movement harped on the woman in the landmark Roe v. Wade case becoming anti-abortion? Now it has come to light that the notorious pro-life organization, Operation Rescue, lied. Again.
When Norma McCorvey, the anonymous plaintiff in the landmark Roe vs. Wade case, came out against abortion in 1995, it stunned the world and represented a huge symbolic victory for abortion opponents: “Jane Roe” had gone to the other side. For the remainder of her life, McCorvey worked to overturn the law that bore her name.
But it was all a lie, McCorvey says in a documentary filmed in the months before her death in 2017, claiming she only did it because she was paid by antiabortion groups including Operation Rescue ...
Personally, I don't see how one person's opinion changing would make a difference about anything, but this news just brings to the public's attention once again how morally bankrupt the pro-life movement actually is. Operation Rescue has lied, harassed clinic workers, bombed clinics, and murdered doctors. Why anyone would give credit to anything they promote is beyond me.
If I sound partisan, I am. When I was a volunteer at a local Planned Parenthood one summer during college, it was about the same time when anti-abortion violence was really taking off ...
[...] Incidents of violence have included destruction of property, in the form of vandalism; crimes against people, including kidnapping, stalking, assault, attempted murder, and murder; and crimes affecting both people and property, including arson and bombings. Anti-abortion extremists are considered a current domestic terrorist threat by the United States Department of Justice ...
That's what I think of when I hear the term "pro-life movement".
Two medical experts say issuing social distancing measures just two weeks earlier could have drastically changed the trajectory of coronavirus deaths in the United States ...
Trump and the people who have enabled him are responsible for these thousands of unnecessary deaths.
So, Manafort, who is keeping all of Trump's secrets, is rewarded with a release from prison, while Cohen, who told the truth about the crimes he committed *at Trump's order* must stay in the virus petri dish that prisons have become.
In what has now become our banana republic, Trump's friends are rewarded and his enemies are punished.
Hilarious to hear Mike Pence say *now* that Mike Flynn is "an American patriot" and that he was wrongly accused of lying and that he would be happy to see him back in the Trump administration. This, after he earlier accused Flynn of lying to him and said that Trump was right to fire him. This is all on video, of course, but the Trump cult members will believe whatever Pence and Trump say, despite any facts.
And we aren't even mentioning the fact that Mike Flynn was a paid agent of the Turkish government, something that he did not disclose as is required by law, but kept secret (The Trump team's first ethics scandal).
Yeah, let's hire him back to the White House - what could go wrong? At least he'll fit in with the other grifters there.
Why has Trump so consistently, since Flynn was first arrested, worked to have him let off the hook, first trying to coerce James Comey to "let Flynn go" and then later dangling a pardon for him, and finally getting his sycophant A.G. to free him? Many think it's because of some damaging information Flynn has against Trump that Trump can't let see the light of day.
For the first time in my life I have bought a cellular phone. I never got one earlier because I worried it was too expensive and that I would have trouble reading the tiny screen, but when I began having trouble with my landline I decided to look into a change. It *is* hard to see and I have to use a magnifying glass to read it, but I found that a used phone is less expensive and that I could get a plan that was not bad. Now all I have to do is learn how to use it ;) I am so looking forward to making videos with it that I can post here.
Virus deaths are going up everywhere in the country except in New York, but Trump keeps insisting on opening up the economy, while still refusing to put in place (except for himself, of course) the robust testing that would mitigate the deaths.
This isn't because he's too incompetent to have figured out a plan. He has a plan and he's been implementing it ... let people die so that the economy will come back, while sowing confusion about who's responsible. All the vulnerable Americans - the old, the poor, the uninsured, minorities, those in nursing homes and prisons and in front line jobs - they are the sacrifice his re-election demands.
Trump could not get away with this on his own. Those who are enabling him, from Republican lawmakers to his big donors to his voting base, share the responsibility for the unnecessary but inevitable deaths that will follow his handling of the pandemic.
