Most morally defective human being ever to be president

Yesterday I volunteered with Michigan Democrats to canvas a neighborhood. I didn’t get much actual canvassing done. A good part of that was the organizers didn’t know what to do with someone who didn’t have a phone to download their canvassing app. I got shunted to the side and forgotten about. Another issue was I signed up late Friday afternoon and wasn’t sent the link to that evening’s online training. A third issue was the paper script they wanted me to use was quite different than the script I had read online before heading out. A fourth was one person implied that I was to bring back my paper walk sheets, but once I did another said because of COVID they couldn't take back the pages of which houses I had visited. So why was I to bring them back? Yesterday was beautiful weather for canvassing, sunny and not too cold. I wish I had more time to actually do it. Today is windy with snow flurries. Snow on November 1st is early for the Detroit area. I downloaded Michigan’s data for cases and deaths due to the virus. I had explained before the state tries to assign cases and deaths to the day they happened, not the day they were reported. So some of the numbers in recent weeks gets revised, usually upward. The data for the week before last has been revised to about 2200 cases a day, well above the peak of 1600 set back at the end of March, and there is a spike of 3160 cases a day set a week ago. That’s almost double the high point set at the end of March. The death count has hit 34 in one day. Deaths per day hasn’t been that high since the end of May. The deaths compared to cases is still quite low, probably because the medical term is better at treating the virus. Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reviewed how helpful masks are in preventing the spread of COVID-19. Then he compared that to what Dr. Joseph Ladapo wrote in an editorial in the Wall Street Journal. Sumner discussed the whole editorial. I’ll mention just a bit. First Ladapo (Sumner’s quote began with the ellipsis):

… mask mandates have the unintended consequence of delaying public acceptance of the unavoidable truth. In countries with active community transmission and no herd immunity, nothing short of inhumane lockdowns can stop the spread of Covid-19, so the most sensible and sustainable path forward is to learn to live with the virus.

And Sumner’s response:

As Joe Biden said in the second and final debate, Americans aren’t learning to “live with” COVID-19, they’re learning to die from it. Ladapo, like the White House, is selling herd immunity. And he’s not attacking masks because they don’t work. He’s attacking masks because they do.

Sumner’s conclusion: The GOP wants us to catch COVID, get sick, and die. Laura Clawson of Kos reported CNN looked at virus levels in the fourteen counties where the nasty guy has been holding campaign rallies. In all fourteen the infection rates increased after the rallies. And the nasty guy has five rallies scheduled for today and another five tomorrow. Sumner reported researchers at Stanford University looked at the nasty guy’s rallies between June 20 and Sept. 22 and determined the rallies were the source of 30,000 cases and 700 deaths. He wrote:

That means Donald Trump isn’t just ignoring the pandemic, or even encouraging herd immunity. He’s the nation’s single largest vector of disease.

Kerry Eleveld of Kos added that since the nasty guy has refused to slow the spread of the virus, if he is elected he may be the cause of up to five million deaths, by some estimates. Five million. That’s a death toll of a dictator, which could put him 5th or 6th in list of dictators with the highest kill counts. David Neiwert of Kos reported that a caravan of nasty guy supporters surrounded a Biden campaign bus on its way to Austin, Texas. They slowed its progress as those in the caravan shouted insults. A witness said several were armed. One of the pickup trucks swerved into a campaign vehicle, smashing its fender and forcing it into the next lane. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were not on the bus, though several Democratic candidates for Congress were. The incident prompted a couple campaign events to be canceled because there was fear the threats would escalate. Of course, the whole incident was videoed by several participants so they could brag on social media in hopes the nasty guy would retweet them. And he did. Definitely one reason to attack the Biden bus is have your Dear Leader honor you with retweeting your terrorism. Leah McElrath tweeted about the inciden that included a tweet from the nasty guy including one of the videos. McElrath wrote, “Trump is encouraging domestic terrorism against his political opponent.” Then she included a tweet from Steve Vladeck about a paper asking the Texas Republican Party for comment. The response was to highlight incidents were nasty guy supporters died they claim was at the hands of violent leftists. With the nasty guy glorifying what the caravan did, if you have a Democratic bumper sticker on your car consider you are at risk. Also in Texas, the Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick is already trotting out the reasons if the nasty guy loses. These are not original with him. Patrick said to radio host Mark Davis:

If the president loses Pennsylvania or North Carolina, Mark, or Florida, they'll lose it because they stole it.

Eleveld reminds us:

Just to be clear: No credible reports of voter fraud have emerged in a single state so far. There is, however, a lot of evidence that Republicans are shaking in their boots, particularly in Texas where the total number of early votes has already surpassed all the votes counted in 2016.

In another post Neiwert turned to the situation in Michigan. A Detroit News poll shows that nearly ¾ of the state’s voters believe openly carried guns should be banned near polling places. That belief is held by a majority of Republicans. Even so, a state judge ruled that the requested ban was illegal, and a state appeals court upheld it. The ban was a directive from Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, Democrat. Benson has already filed an appeal to the state Supreme Court. The judges say that there are already laws against intimidating voters. Neiwert wrote they seemed to have missed the point that the mere presence of a gun is intimidating. Guns at a polling place are unnecessary and a threat to public safety. The right to vote securely and safely outweighs the need to tote a gun into every venue. akmk tweeted:

For every family impacted by Covid, by wildfires, by hurricanes, by cancer, by floods, by voter suppression..and still found a way to vote..I bow down to your awesomeness.

Greg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup for Kos, quoted Tom Nichols of USA Today. Here’s a paragraph:

But I did not vote in this election based on policy. Neither should you. The election of 2020 is about the moral future of the American nation, and so I voted for a good man with whom I have some political disagreements over an evil man with whom I share not a single value as a human being. Trump is the most morally defective human being ever to hold the office of the presidency, worse by every measure than any of the rascals, satyrs or racists who have sat in the Oval Office. This is vastly more important than marginal tax rates or federal judges.

Laura Clawson of Kos reported that Rupert Murdoch, head of a conservative news empire, including Fox News, says a Biden presidency would be good for business. Fox News could become “the standard-bearer of the resistance.” They would be happy to promote, perhaps even generate, controversy and scandals. Clawson wrote:

The far right is not going to give up. From QAnon and white supremacist domestic terrorists to billionaire Rupert Murdoch, they are going to do their best to tank a Biden presidency—and with it, the nation, if that’s what it takes.

A video has been circulating of the pandemic prince saying the nasty guy’s policies can help poor people but, “he can't want them to be successful more than that they want to be successful.” Translation: they’re not successful because they don’t want to be. McElrath tweeted:

I detest Kushner as much as anyone, but I want to point out he is simply voicing the longstanding GOP perspective on all income inequality. Republicans believe wealth is an indicator of merit and poor people are poor because of the choices they make. That’s Republican canon.

Ruben Gallego, a candidate to the US House from Arizona, tweeted about the same video:

This how the 1% look at minorities. I was a classmate of Kushner let me tell you what I did to get into Harvard compared to what he did. Yes a thread.

As a freshman in high school Gallego saw what it would take to get to college and worked real hard to make it happen – buying used books to prep for standard exams, flipped burgers to pay for extracurriculars that would look good on an application, calling students at Harvard to ask how to get ready to apply, taking public transport to get to the interview (interviewer said she had never had an applicant do that), and a few other things. He was accepted. How the pandemic prince got to Harvard: Daddy gave a several million dollar gift. Gallego wrote, “So I won’t take lectures about who wants to succeed more from a man who couldn’t do it without $$ from his parents.” Mark Eades of the Kos community reported that unions are calling for a general strike of the nasty guy tries to subvert the election. Several unions have already declared they’re in and ask members of other unions to join them. Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants, said:

What we’ve seen is people going about our business during the day and conducting mass protests at night, and that’s not going to be enough to make this president move. He will use those protests to further divide the country. We will have to do the one thing that takes all power and control from the government or anyone with corporate interests in keeping this person in office, and that is withholding our labor.

The Embassy Cultural House was founded in the Embassy Hotel in East London, Ontario. The hotel has been torn down. In this pandemic the ECH has re-envisioned itself as a virtual artist-run space. Their new group exhibit is inspired by the book Hiding in Plain Sight by Sarah Kendzior. I’ve discussed Kendzior’s writings, including her Twitter feed and Gaslit Nation podcast, many times. Her feed quotes the book frequently. Kendzior describes the nasty guy administration as “a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government.” The phrase also fits many other governments in the world because they’re all connected. The exhibit webpage includes art inspired by Kendzior’s book and that phrase. With the art is commentary by the artists.