Hal Brown blog

 

(click image to enlarge) This is an internationally read blog  with original essays and my  opinions on news stories that pique my interest. My Bio; also Internet search for Hal Brown and Trump 

Sept. 22, 2020

Cuban-American columnist slams Trump’s fraud on Florida supporters: He tried to make money off the Castro regime

On Tuesday, writing for the Miami Herald, Cuban-American columnist Fabiola Santiago, a refugee of the Castro regime, slammed President Donald Trump for courting Miami’s conservative Cuban community with anti-socialism rhetoric — when he spent a good portion of his business career trying to make money off the communist state.

“[Trump] may peddle the hard line to his Republican Cuban-American supporters in Miami, but when he looks south of the city, he only sees dollar signs,” wrote Santiago. “He promises that he won’t do business until Cuba is free of the Castro brothers’ regime — and prohibits Americans from traveling to the island — but Trump and his team have been chasing business opportunities in Cuba for the past decade.”

Whistleblower on Jared Kushner’s COVID task force says he was told to "fudge" death data model

Robert F. Kennedy's grandson revealed that he was the whistleblower who sounded the alarm on the pandemic response

Trump's prerecorded speech to The United Nations shows he's found a way to replace the usual teleprompters on each side of him. My hunch is that he has a giant screen TV with the text placed above the camera. There's no way he could have memorized a speech this long. Below: not a link

Link above: It is clear who the editors meant Moses to be pointing at when they decided to use this picture to illustrate this story.

Trump’s ‘October surprise’ vaccine plan will likely anger voters and blow up in his face: Summary of Wash. Post column

Finland to deploy coronavirus-sniffing dogs at Helsinki Airport

Sept. 21, 2020

Fauci staffer unmasked as COVID-19 truther who writes for right-wing blog under a fake name

I JUST HAD TO EMBELLISH THIS from HuffPost ad: I mean, well duh! Haven't we known this for a long time?

CDC Reverses Guidelines Stating The Coronavirus Is Airborne Virus [insane --UPDATE]

Sept. 20, 2020

Trump’s Fox News interview turns into therapy session as he rants about bad coverage on the network

Who knew God gave Trump his rights? “President Trump will fulfill his constitutional duty to protect our God given rights and do his part to fill the seat,” the White House spokesperson added.

‘He truly despises Black women’: Cohen walks through Trump’s outright ‘hatred’ for women of color

Excerpt: It has become clear to anyone paying attention that President Donald Trump has serious problems with people of color. But his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, revealed that it goes much deeper. 

“Trump is a racist white supremacist” is a story that may as well be “water is wet,” but Cohen explained Sunday in an interview with MSNBC’s Al Sharpton that Trump has a particular issue with women of color. 

“The fact is, as much as he has a disdain for Black people, he truly despises Black women because he doesn’t know how to handle them,” Cohen said. “He doesn’t know what to do.”

At a rally on Friday in Minnesota, Sharpton noted the “mostly white” crowd was one that Trump heralded for having “good genes,” meaning white genes.

Conclusion 

Democrats’ constitutional Jiujitsu: How the party can out-maneuver and decisively vanquish Trump’s GOP

 below left:

The sad passing of RBG underscores the stakes.

Democrats must fight to win.

But this is a complex fight, and it will not be settled by a single blow. Trump and his Republican enablers are not to be taken lightly. But they are vulnerable, and opportunism in responding to RBG’s passing could make them more vulnerable, by mobilizing women and minority voters—including so-called “suburban” Republican women who care about reproductive freedom—to come out in droves in November. There are a range of tactics that need to be employed to position the Republican opponent in such a way that he can be decisively defeated.

Trump and his party must be defeated. They must be out-maneuvered, brought down, and decisively vanquished.

And once they submit, and the Democrats again are in control, the real work of renovating American society and reinvigorating American democracy can and must proceed. It would be a wonderful irony if the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who always argued that only democratic politics can ensure social justice, would help to energize the democratic politics we need now more than ever.

Excerpt:  If Donald Trump wins reelection in November the U.S. faces the very real threat of a racist, misogynist and deadly dystopia.

That’s the rather dire warning from Dr. Judith L. Herman, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a renowned expert on the traumas of interpersonal violence. Herman is one of the authors of “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.”

Those experts considered a number of possible explanations for Trump’s behavior and performance as president:

“Is he a malignant narcissist?  A sociopath?  Is he psychotic?  Cognitively impaired?  Is he “crazy like a fox” or just plain crazy, i.e., when he lies constantly, does he know he’s lying, or does he believe his own lies?  When he makes wild accusations and promotes conspiracy theories of the far right, is he truly paranoid, or is he consciously manipulating the media?”

Herman’s conclusion is that the answer might be “yes” to all of the above. She adds that while it may not be possible to diagnose Trump’s true state of mind, it is possible to make a professional assessment of his dangerousness. 

Conclusion:

Overkill

Actually, coincidental to the disclosures about using sedition laws, came news that federal officials had been stockpiling ammunition and devices that could emit deafening sounds or singe anyone within range feel like their skin is on fire to clear Lafayette Square in Washington for that Donald Trump Bible photo op. The disclosures came in The Washington Post from D.C. National Guard Maj. Adam D. DeMarco, who led the brigade there, and filed them as a whistleblower.

Are we nuts all of a sudden as a nation or can we see this as the excess of a bad political campaign? Does Barr think we are idiots? He actually compared his own prosecutors to pre-schoolers and asserted that he and Trump are in charge, not those career prosecutors who make daily decisions in individual cases.

Barr was wrong in citing “a dozen cases” each year in which Black citizens are mistreated; there are 250 deaths at the hands of police this last year. He and Trump are wrong to deny that there are systemic elements to racism in this country and to our policing practices.

The federal sedition law is rarely invoked, and something that does not seem to fit the circumstances of the unrest in places like Portland in response to police killings of Black men. So, too, would be ordering the arrest of the Seattle mayor for allowing a protest to cool itself in that city.

Promoting sedition laws to stop protests is an extremist Justice Department policy. Barr has no business being attorney general.

Excerpt:

Trump distorts CDC info and spreads vaccine lies because he thinks faking it is always better than doing any work

Amanda Marcotte

It's hardly new or revelatory to say this, but it's critical to remember the role that "The Apprentice" played in turning Donald Trump, a notoriously bad businessman with a string of bankruptcies, into an American icon of capitalist success. Everything from careful editing to set designers giving the dreary Trump Organization offices a glow-up came together to create the illusion of success where only failure and mediocrity had been before. 

It was an experience so profound for Trump that he did something highly unusual: He learned something. He absorbed the idea that a well-constructed illusion of competence gets you all the benefits of being accomplished, without having to do the hard work of actually achieving anything.

Unfortunately, it was a lesson we are all paying the price for now.

Sept; 19, 2020

Trump threatens to call off 2020 election with executive order saying Biden can’t serve as presidentTrump threatens to call off 2020 election with executive order saying Biden can’t serve as president

Below: From a conservative website:

Lucian K Truscott IV takes a shot at Trump's preening narcissism:

Sept. 18, 2020

  

This is an internationally read blog  with original essays and my  opinions on news stories that pique my interest. My Bio; also Internet search for Hal Brown and Trump 

BACK  

Sept. 17, 2020

This is Trump’s new (what's a word worse than horrifying) plan to steal the election

Another Accusation of Sexual Assault Against the President

How many more times, in how many more ways, can we be told that other people simply are not real to him?

Dr. Scott Atlas says YouTube censorship of coronavirus information reminiscent of 'third world countries'

'We are sort of teetering on the edge of what is done in third world countries,' and “the US is witnessing the 'near destruction of objective journalism' Atlas said

Trump heard about masks from waiters. Trump heard about a lot of things from dubious sources, many of them from Fox News and many from the fever swamps of the fringe Internet. He’s heard all about herd immunity, which his addled mind called herd mentality, from a Fox News doctor named Scott Atlas.

Scott, Scotland, damn good place for a golf course. For a last name Atlas is perfect. It has a ring to it: Scott Atlas. It is a perfect name for a porn actor. 

Atlas to Trump isn’t a book of maps (perish the thought he’s ever looked in one). Atlas is the guy holding up the earth next to the ice skating rink at Rockefeller Center.

He’s Charles Atlas whose body building ads aimed at the skinny guy who had sand kicked in his face by the bully at the beach were omnipresent when Trump was growing up.

.

Here’s this Fox News personality, who is a smart guy with an impressive background even though his expertise on infectious diseases has been questioned, telling the president that the way to eliminate the scourge of Covid-19 is to not merely allow, but to encourage people to infect themselves and their children. Infect the herd, hell, he’s talking about culling the herd. He’s more evil than that. He wants to cull the herd of the members of minority groups more likely to die of Covid and more likely to vote Democratic.

If you watched Rachel Maddow’s math last night (5 minute segment here) you’ll know she gave herd immunity the benefit of the doubt saying that there would only be a 1% death rate instead of the nearly 3% death rate we have now. Thus instead six million deaths, more deaths than America has suffered in all 20th century wars combined, we’d have “merely” just over two million die.

Wikipedia, always up to date, has a good description of the how Scot Atlas has been involved in the Trump administration here, ending with the following:

Atlas' influence on policy has alarmed many doctors and health experts.[27] In September 2020, 78 of Atlas's former colleagues at the Stanford Medical School signed an open letter criticizing Atlas, writing that he had made "falsehoods and misrepresentations of science" that "run counter to established science" and "undermine public health authorities and the credible science that guides effective public health policy."[4]

As noted in Wikipedia, Scott Atlas, whose colleagues at Stanford Medical School just rebuked for his promulgating 'falsehoods and misrepresentations of science'  now literally has the ear of the president.

But, hey, his name is Scott Atlas and he is telling Trump exactly what he wants to hear.

Here’s a detailed article about herd immunity.

Meanwhile the Director of the CDC, Robert Redfield is contradicting Trump about masks leading reporters to say Trump is throwing him under the bus...

and prompting me to make this illustration...

and wonder how long it is before Redfield, Fauci, or even the nicey-nice Birx resign. Thus my poll question:

POLL

62 votes

DO YOU THINK REDFIELD, FAUCI, BIRX OR OTHER MEMBERS OF THE COVID TASK FORCE SHOULD RESIGN AND MAKE A PUBLIC STATEMENT REBUKING ATLAS AND HIS PROMOTION OF HERD IMMUNITY. 

Yes.

68%

42 votes

No.

15%

9 votes

Uncertain.

11%

7 votes

No opinion.

.2%

1 vote

Not certain.

.3%

2 votes

Other.

.2%

1 vote

prosecutors working beneath him, equating them to preschoolers.

‘You’re an idiot’: Trump drowned in mockery after whining that Twitter is biased against him

.

Click below to enlarge a sample of replies to Trump's inane insane tweet:

Excerpt referring the dark triad:

People with lower cognitive abilities find it difficult to follow directions about when to wear a mask and when it is appropriate and safe not to do so. Moreover, when the rules about wearing a mask are inconsistent, it becomes even more difficult for people with lower cognitive abilities to wear masks consistently and correctly.

Researchers have also found that people who exhibit the "dark triad" of behavior and personality traits (Machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopathy) are also more likely not to wear masks as compared to others. 

Among men, a refusal to wear a mask is connected to a sense of fragile and embattled masculinity, in which masks are viewed as being "weak" and "feminine" and "not cool." For such men who lack confidence in their sense of self and overall identity, not wearing a mask is a selfish act which they view as strength and perhaps as evidence that they are "alpha males" who can win a primitive test of "survival of the fittest."

In Scientific American, Emily Willingham suggests that masks are also viewed as a "condom of the face"by men who are afflicted with "toxic masculinity"...

Sept. 16, 2020

Trump Claims Vaccine Will Be Ready by Fall, Says CDC Director Was ‘Confused’ Daily Beast

Excerpt:

Asked at the briefing to clarify Dr. Robert Redfield’s new timeline, Trump immediately threw Redfield under the bus, saying, “That’s incorrect information.”

“When he said it, I believe he was confused… We’re ready to go as soon as the vaccine is approved,” the president said, insisting that the vaccine would be ready to be administered “really to the general public immediately.” “We’re not going to say ‘in six months,’ we’re going to start giving it to the general public,’” he added.

It's a crime scene. Trump's thrown so many of his people under the bus it will need tire chains to stay on the road.

Excerpts referencing Trump's malignant narcissism and The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump:

The deeper problem is that Trump has a long history not merely of dishonesty but of profound anti-social behavior. This includes his history of racism and birtherism, bragging that he assaults women, mocking a disabled reporter at a campaign rally, cheating contractors and employees, creating a university that defrauded thousands of students, and threatening his opponent with physical harm in the election, all of which "provide overwhelming evidence of profound sociopathic traits" wrote Dr. Lance Dodes in his chapter "Sociopathy" in The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President (p.90).

.........

There are many interconnected threats to U.S. democracy that have been festering for decades, including, but not limited to, the ways we have become a plutocracy. Yet there is a more imminent threat that we tend to assume will not happen here, that is, that we are slipping into tyranny.

In her contribution to The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, "Who goes Trump? Tyranny as a Triumph of Narcissism," available online, the psychologist Elizabeth Mika explains that "malignant narcissism" exhibited by tyrants "manifests in a severely impaired or absent conscience and an insatiable drive for power and adulation that masks the conscience deficits."

In an interview with Chauncey DeVega, a staff writer at Salon, Mika said that Trump's lies are part of his "so-called charm." Charisma is a misnomer because Trump does not exhibit conscience and so "does not experience guilt, or shame, or remorse, so he can say whatever pleases him at the moment to get people to do whatever he wants or needs of them."

Mika, who knows tyranny from her experience growing up in communist Poland, warns of a deadly cultural dynamic in her conversation with DeVega, one that the church and people of faith must address: how Trump is both symptom and disease of "collective narcissism." Tyrannies, she explains, are three-legged beasts constituted by the tyrant, his supporters and society — bound together by the "force of narcissism" or what political scientists call "the toxic triangle."

Trump spent years trying to win over Indian Americans. Then Biden picked Harris.

Just so you know what Fox News is headlining:

Health experts warn that, in the short term, people exposed to these high concentrations of wildfire smoke will be more likely to die of heart attacks or be hospitalized because of asthma and other respiratory problems. The longer-term effects are less clear, but early research suggests that severe exposure to wildfire smoke can cause measurable reductions in lung function that last for at least a couple of years.

Although scientists haven’t yet examined the effect of wildfire smoke on the transmission of the coronavirus, studies have already found that areas with high levels of air pollution tend to have higher rates of COVID-19 cases and deaths — even after accounting for factors like race and poverty known to be linked to higher death rates from COVID-19.

Sept. 15, 2020

On CNN Tuesday, at the end of an interview with President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner about the Middle East peace agreement, anchor Wolf Blitzer confronted him about the president retweeting an image implying Joe Biden is a pedophile.

“I was very disturbed earlier today when I saw the president re-tweet to his 80 million-plus followers a very, very disturbing ugly message, accusing the Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden of actually being a pedophile,” said Blitzer. “Is that appropriate to give publicity to a really disgusting accusation like that, especially at a time when there are all those QAnon conspiracy theories about pedophiles running the Democratic Party, all those anti-Semitic conspiracy theories they’re spreading as well. It’s so disturbing to see that, Jared.”

“Look, Wolf, I haven’t seen the tweet,” said Kushner. “I’ve been focused today on this historic peace deal … I’m happy to come on another time and talk about that, but today let’s focus on the fact that President Trump was nominated this month two times for the Nobel Peace Prize.”

“I congratulate you and the president and the administration on this historic deal,” said Blitzer. “But please tell your father-in-law that it’s really bad, it’s really disgusting to re-tweet those kinds of ugly, disgusting tweets about his Democratic rival. As you can tell, Jared, I was pretty upset when I saw that.”

Here's a tweet in response (click to enlarge):

Start watching at 5:45 mins.

 story below

Read story below

Excerpt:

And he’s still out there acting as if we didn’t hear the tape and know that he knows how bad the virus is. And still somehow trying to claim that there was this conspiracy against him, that democratic governors are willingly tanking their own economies just to hurt Donald Trump.

It’s a whole new level of bonkers that I didn’t think this president would hit, but the man continues to surprise me on a daily basis. Look, folks, here’s the thing. Trump knows how dangerous this is. Trump knows how deadly it is. He has been briefed from the very beginning and based on the Woodward tapes themselves, it’s clear that a lot of it did sink into his brain. He knew it. He was able to relay that information articulately and accurately. So he does get it. The thing I don’t think he understands is that the States were shut down because of how dangerous the virus is. I honestly don’t think he thinks that I do believe that he believes his own conspiracy because due to his narcissism, his clinical pathological narcissism, he is physically incapable of seeing anything in other terms, other than how it affects him personally, that is what his narcissism does. You know, if there’s a traffic jam for somebody with severe narcissism, it’s because the universe is plotting against them wanting to make them late.

The state shuts down because there’s a deadly virus, infecting hundreds of thousands of people. They’re not shutting down to prevent the spread they’re shutting down so that people lose their jobs. The economy loses tons of money. The government loses tax revenue, all to hurt Donald Trump, eight months down the road and have an election. That’s what it is. It’s his narcissism that tells him this. And that is a very dangerous trait to have for somebody in his, but that’s what it is. He knows how deadly the viruses. We’ve all heard him say it at this point, but he also truly believes these conspiracy theories that he has concocting in his head because that is the only thing that actually mesh With him, His narcissism and his need to believe that everything good happens because of him and everything bad happens because others are plotting against him. Not because he’s horrible at making decisions.

Donald Trump appears to be seceding from the Union, which is bizarre given his status as the president of it. Make no mistake: Trump appears to be deliberately marginalizing himself by repeatedly insisting that he's not responsible for certain states and cities, despite technically being the president of the entire United States.

We've all heard him say it. On topics ranging from poverty to crime to COVID-19, Trump never hesitates to defer all the blame for whatever onto state and local Democrats rather than acknowledging that he's supposed to be the president of those cities and states, too.

TRUMP the KILLER

President Donald Trump on Tuesday confirmed a damning piece of journalist Bob Woodward’s reporting, roughly two years after he denied it.

During an interview with “Fox & Friends,” Trump confirmed a 2018 report from Woodward that the president ordered then-Defense Secretary James Mattis to assassinate Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad.

“I would’ve rather taken [Assad] out,” Trump said. “I had him all set. Mattis didn’t want to do it. Mattis was a highly overrated general.”

According to Woodward, Trump in early 2017 ordered Mattis to “f*cking kill” Assad after he launched a chemical weapons attack against his own citizens.

Mattis, reported Woodward, told Trump he would do so — but then ordered staff to ignore the president’s orders after he left the room. STORY

This is unrelated to Trump. Rather is is for those interested in photography. I had to go to the dentist today (wore my O2 smoke mask) and on the way back noticed I could barely see across the Willamette River so I took the photo on the left below. I got home and made a simple enhancement, on the right. As you can see it showed more than I could see with the naked eye.

I decided if I could manipulate the shoes even more and there are two of the versions I cam up with.

Photoshop another software which cost around $500 used to be the only way you could make these changes. They some less expensive versions came along. However, I can do this with built in software on my Mac.

Sept. 14, 2020

Trump retweets Duty to Warn account that thinks he’s nuts and (last I checked an hour later) it is still online

The “Duty to Warn” campaign was formed with hundreds, then thousands, of experts by my associate John Gartner. I was one of the first therapists to join. The article says we were "concerned" about what they were seeing in public from the president. Hell, we were alarmed.

This was referenced in a second article in RawStory...

and then the subject of A THIRD:

Trump ridiculed by mental health association: ‘Dementia on top of ADD make it hard to read’

DUTY TO WARN RESPONDED - CLICK BELOW TO READ REPLIES

AND HERE'S MY RELY TO MY FRIENDS AT DUTY TO WARN:

Trump’s 9/11 ad said ‘support our troops’ — but featured images of Russian Mig fighter jets

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Trump escalates the signals to his followers: Use lethal violence to help me hold power

After the shootings in Kenosha and Portland, Trump is telling right-wing militias to help him crush the left

Black church leaders demand apology for Trump ad

Leaders of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the pastor of an AME congregation in Wilmington, Delaware, are condemning a Trump-Pence campaign ad that uses footage of Joe Biden kneeling in the sanctuary of a Black church, describing it as racist and demanding an apology.

The Rev. Silvester S. Beaman, pastor of Bethel AME Church, which is featured in the digital spot released Wednesday (Sept. 9), said it encourages viewers to see Black church leaders and their flocks as “thuggish rule breakers.”

“The ad is overtly racist and offensive on numerous levels,” Beaman told Religion News Service on Saturday (Sept. 12). “It is a racist attack on the African American church, and because it was an attack on the Christian church, it should be offensive to every Christian and person of faith.”

Beaman was joined by leaders of the AME denomination, who are preparing a statement to be released on Monday decrying the ad.

"This ad subtly incites white terrorism against people of color and attacks the Black Church and Black people for refusing to bow down to the idol called white supremacy," reads a draft of the statement provided to RNS.

The advertisement mostly featured scenes from protests against police killings that roiled several American cities this spring and summer, emphasizing violent clashes between demonstrators and riot police.

But as the advertisement ended, it cut to slow-motion footage of former Vice President Biden kneeling at Bethel in front of a group of Black leaders, including Beaman. It was followed by a slide that read “Stop Joe Biden and his rioters” before an audio clip of Vice President Mike Pence that said “you won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America” accompanied by the sound of cackling.

The disinformation campaign against Joe Biden: First read about this website on Media Bias and about it's founder Thomas Lifson... and then it if you can stand it read what crap they are putting out here.

Malignant narcissist Trump saying  he's not afraid of indoor rallies — because he’s far away from potentially infected fans

 

September 14, 2020

President Donald Trump is downplaying worries about holding indoor rallies during the COVID-19 pandemic on the grounds that he doesn’t feel like he will be infected with the disease.

In an interview with the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the president dismissed concerns about potentially spreading the disease with indoor rallies, which epidemiologists have warned could serve as super spreader events.

“I’m on a stage and it’s very far away,” Trump said. “And so I’m not at all concerned.”

Of course, the concern with holding indoor rallies isn’t so much about the president getting infected, but that thousands of rally goers may get infected and then spread it back to their families and communities when they return home.

From The New York Times: 

Michael Porter, a member of the Nevada Task Force Urban Search and Rescue team, taking a break with Dexter, a dog trained to find human remains, in Talent, Ore., on Sunday.

Credit...

Trump to visit California, and face the reality of climate change. Excerpt below left.

When President Trump flies to California on Monday to assess the state’s raging forest fires, he will come face to face with the grim consequences of a reality he has stubbornly refused to accept: the devastating effects of a warming planet.

To the global scientific community, the acres of scorched earth and ash-filled skies across the American West are the tragic, but predictable, result of accelerating climate change. Nearly two years ago, federal government scientists concluded that greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels could triple the frequency of severe fires across the Western states.

But the president has used his time in the nation’s highest office to aggressively promote the burning of fossil fuels, chiefly by rolling back or weakening every major federal policy intended to combat dangerous emissions. At the same time, Mr. Trump and his senior environmental officials have regularly mocked, denied or minimized the established science of human-caused climate change.

Now, as he battles for a second term in the White House, Mr. Trump has doubled down on his anti-climate agenda as a way of appealing to his core supporters. At a rally in Pennsylvania last month, he blamed California’s failure to “clean your floors” of leaves, threatening to “make them pay for it because they don’t listen to us.”

The lethal fires spreading across the West — like the coronavirus that has ravaged the country for months — are a warning for the president that many voters may hold him and his administration accountable for brushing aside scientific experts and failing to effectively mobilize the government to minimize natural disasters that have claimed lives, damaged property and threatened economic prosperity.

“Talk to a firefighter if you think that climate change isn’t real,” Mayor Eric M. Garcetti of Los Angeles, a supporter of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Mr. Trump’s Democratic opponent, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. “It seems like this administration are the last vestiges of the Flat Earth Society of this generation.”

CNN media critic on his new book and the "unhealthy relationship" between Fox News, Donald Trump and the audience

Dean Obeidallah

Do executives at Fox News secretly hope that Donald Trump loses this November because that would be good for the network's ratings? Before you dismiss that as crazy talk, given the record ratings Fox News has seen during Trump's presidency, realize that Fox could see even higher ratings when it no longer has to defend Trump's unpredictable words and deeds and can solely focus on what Brian Stelter calls its "secret sauce": attacking Democrats and liberals.  

Stelter, the host of CNN's "Reliable Sources" and author of the new book, "Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth," raised that very scenario during our "Salon Talks" conversation. As he explains it, Fox News has always been more comfortable attacking Democratic administrations, which traditionally has yielded a ratings boon for the network. "The network in a Biden presidency is almost a situation where tails you win and heads you win," he said. Fox News might face other problems with Trump as a former president, however. Stelter describes Trump as the Frankenstein monster that Fox News helped create, and as in the tale of Frankenstein, he could end up turning against his creator and starting a competing right-wing network. 

Excerpt from The Bulwark: President Trump attempted to hold an unmasked, indoor superspreader  event in Henderson, Nevada on Sunday night, running afoul of Nevada regulations and his own administration’s guidelines. (Due to meager turn out, I have taken the liberty to downgrade it to a Category 3 minispreader.) This was Trump’s first indoor rally since the Tulsa disaster that cost Brad Parscale his job and after which Herman Cain lost his life.

This latest public-health monstrosity came on the heels of the president, at a separate maskless gathering earlier in the weekend, mocking his opponent Joe Biden for having followed responsible social-distancing protocols.

I tuned in last night because the president’s brazenness in the face of this obvious public health threat was a curiosity for me. Weren’t we told that he was a germophobe? And didn’t he admit to Bob Woodward that he knew the virus was airborne? So shouldn’t the screaming plebes freak him out a bit? Was the germophobe bit also a lie? Maybe he just didn’t like it when people of color touched him? Or has his narcissism and deep-seated desire to downplay the virus overwhelmed his germophobia?

While I wasn’t delivered any answers on this point, I was reminded about just how absolutely jarring it is that this man is ostensibly at the helm of our government in these trying times....

............

Nevada Governor Steve Sisolak rightly and responsibly took Trump to task for his insanely reckless behavior in holding the rally at all.

But it is easy for those who cover the politics of this to let that slip into a tit-for-tat between two political actors fighting over pandemic politics in an election year.

This event was so much worse than that.

Everything about it was fucking appalling.

In fact it was so appalling that it would stand out as the single most appalling and reckless political event hosted by any presidential nominee in my lifetime before yesterday by a long shot, if you just didn’t count anything else that Donald Trump did.

And that’s the problem. Somewhere along the way he removed many people’s ability to be appalled. We have become numbed. Too many regional news outlets either won’t cover the event at all or will have headlines like “Donald Trump Makes Appeal to Hispanics At Nevada Rally.” The national Democrats will let Gov. Sisolak get in his licks, but otherwise move onto something else.

Just because we have become immune to his behavior doesn’t mean it should be treated as if it is one side of a two-sided coin. Just because he lies so cavalierly doesn’t mean he should be allowed to get away with it. Just because his oh-so-unsubtle race-baiting is part and parcel of his presidency doesn’t mean we should just let All Lives Matter chants pass by the wayside. Just because we have become bored by our #takes and have run out of new and clever angles for analyzing our malign president doesn’t mean we should say nothing at all.

All the president’s grotesqueries matter. This is just the latest.

What's wrong with this notion? Ivanka Trump to campaign for father in four states this week

 Ivanka Trump’s trips also come as the president struggles to win over suburban female voters, a group that could be key to Trump holding onto some of these battleground states. 

Trump will also be in Arizona on Monday, where he will host a “Latinos for Trump” roundtable in Phoenix.

Really? Ivanka will win over suburban female voters and Latinos? Ivanka? Who among these groups sees her as someone they can relate to?

Astronomers Spot Possible Signs Of Extraterrestrial Life In Venus’s Clouds

There may be bizarre microbes living in the sulfuric acid-laden clouds of the hothouse planet, scientists said.

Sept. 13, 2020

The homoerotic letters of Kim Jung Un and Trump

Brainless twit’ Trump buried in ridicule for boasting about a fake award named after a ‘failed US invasion’

Understatement of the Day: Trump won't like this.

and he particularly won't like this:

Fox News poll shows Trump losing to Biden on ‘mental soundness’

My tweet for the day:

Sept. 12, 2020

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I have this mask. It's not inexpensive at $70 but I am glad I bought it last month for Covid considering the dangerous levels of air pollution due to the wildfires.  I am still staying inside but do have to go to the dentist Monday and will wear it then even for the 20ft. walk from car to office. Reports are that staying outside even for a short time here in Portland, which now has the worst air quality in the world, can be equal to smoking a pack of cigarettes. This is based on a Feb. 2019 Canadian study.

 

As Wildfires Rage, Portland’s Air Quality Is Currently The Worst In The World

Unfortunately readers of The Daily Beast (and RawStory where this was republished) are already going to vote for Biden. I just wonder about his recent withdrawal from The Lincoln Project to "spend more time with his family" and presumably to work on his relationship with his wife. I wonder how Kellyanne reacts if or when she realizes he's still making his views known, albeit in the progressive media.

Sept. 11, 2020

Trump scorched by ex-judge in new Flynn case filing: ‘Corrupt and politically motivated favor unworthy of our justice system’

A retired judge scalded the Department of Justice and President Donald Trump in a new filing in the case against Michael Flynn.

Former judge John Gleeson filed a brief Friday accusing the president of improperly pressuring the Justice Department to drop the case against his former national security adviser, who pleaded guilty to lying to FBI agents about his contacts with Russia, reported Bloomberg.

“In the United States, presidents do not orchestrate pressure campaigns to get the Justice Department to drop charges against defendants who have pleaded guilty — twice, before two different judges — and whose guilt is obvious,” Gleeson wrote.

Gleeson was named a “friend of the court” and tasked with arguing against dismissal in the Flynn case.

‘We’ll put them down very quickly’: Trump threatens to quash election night riots

“Look, it’s called insurrection,” the president said.

“Look, it’s called insurrection,” he added. “We just send in, and we do it very easy. I mean, it’s very easy. I’d rather not do that because there’s no reason for it, but if we had to, we’d do that and put it down within minutes.”

Trump drew bipartisan criticism in June after police officers and National Guard troops fired rubber bullets and deployed flash-bang grenades to force largely peaceful protesters from Lafayette Square outside the White House.

The incursion against protesters by U.S. law enforcement officials allowed the president, top White House aides and senior administration officials to walk across the street to the historic St. John’s Episcopal Church — where Trump posed with a Bible for a political photo opportunity.

Amid other mass demonstrations this summer against police brutality and racial injustice, Trump has faced further scrutiny for his treatment of protesters and at times unwelcome federal intervention.

PTSD expert Seth Norrholm: Americans "are being psychologically abused by Donald Trump" also from Salon

Leading neuroscientist says America will face a health crisis from "post-Trump syndrome" for years to come

Also on Salon:

Kim Jong Un showed off executed uncle’s headless body: Trump

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