/death cult/

“I alone can save you from the apocalyptic chaos and nightmarish national collapse that I myself have caused--Tr666p today, Tr666p tomorrow, TR666P FOREVER!

Now drink the Kool-Aid MAGAts!!!”

– Prezinazi AntiChrist, August 2020
Great Moments in American History

"Many Millions More Americans Watched: The speech by the vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris than the one by Vice President Mike Pence. 10.5 million viewers for your white guy; 16.2 million, for the black woman."

Yes, but if you go by Electoral College TV Ratings, that comes out to about a tie.

Also, I'm not quite sure that "white guy" and "black woman" are the most salient and relevant characteristics to distinguish Mike Pence and Kamala Harris.

UW athletics has plenty of money. They can afford to sit a season out. What worries me is that if they’re anything like University of Iowa athletics, the lesser sports (and especially the sports that are considered “clubs”) will get shorted on their funding.

"Whereof one cannot Speak, Thereof one must lie like Hell!"
Projection, projection, all of the GOP is projection.

@3
Nothing about Whatabout?
And whatabout whatabout?
And what happens when Whatabout?
But the Dow's over 28,000 - so Trump can afford to put his "Don't you love me?" ads on my Facebook page.

@7,

That's a pretty bizarre interpretation of socialism there, fax.

@7 that’s capitalism, chap. It’s having your more profitable businesses subsidize your other businesses. The money is coming from TV, endorsements, tickets, sponsors not the government. It’s a for profit sports league that uses free labor for the direct production of the product.

I think Trump "gets away with it" because there are no structures in place to stop him. Previous presidents have been (more or less) constrained by their own ethics. Like Tacitus said a couple thousand years back - good laws won't make bad men good. No system can withstand an actor that doesn't engage in good faith.

The system failed when a degenerate crook like Donald Trump got the nomination - that's the part that had broken. Because once they are in office, there is no safety net.

@12 Not really capitalism either. Your more profitable businesses subsidize your other businesses when you think that the other business have the potential for growth or to turn a profit in the future. Such as Tesla subsidizing Solar City, Musk believes that solar panels will be profitable in the near future so he is willing to subsidize it now. NCAA swimming/fencing etc will never turn a profit.

180,000 dead.

Not 170,000 Americans.

180,000 Americans.

Keep up.

@12, 14,

Yeah, it's a really unique and odd model, born of and constrained by the similarly odd larger institution (the American higher education system) that it exists within. As such, it doesn't come especially close to fitting any sort of pre-existing economic model, though it's certainly not any less flawed than any of them.

@7, @9 - the actual socialism associated with football comes AFTER college, when the NFL owners scam the government into paying for their stadiums. Commies.

The maskless nature of the GOP convention is one of its better features. Maybe the ventilator tubes getting shoved down some of those idiots' throats will demonstrate to their satisfaction that the pandemic is not a hoax.

Covid deaths = 45,000+ Benghazis. 60 9/11s. 3,800 Vietnams. But no concern or investigations from Republicans. The pro lifers love death now.

Within about 2 hours of announcing his victory, we'll be hearing "Let the past stay in the past," from Biden. There will be no investigations. There will be no prosecutions. There will be no justice. I predict he will cut taxes for the wealthy, again, announce more money for the military and the cops, and attempt to privatize social security.

I'm still voting for him. God help us all.

@21 er, 4 Vietnams.

Something tells me the whole concept and execution of the CHOP/CHAZ is not going to age well at all. I'm sure it will cost us millions in lawsuit settlements with many parties.

I'll also take a moment to say that I think The Stranger writers are doing a great job with the blog articles. I appreciate them. Thank you for your efforts!

@21 TacomaRoma, unfortunately spot on. I already see them laying the groundwork in their speeches with all this "unity" talk and "bringing America back together" without acknowledging that we're in this mess because half of America voted for Trump and intend to vote for him again. It's just rinse repeat every election cycle. We're so fucked.

@20,

Yeah, when it was first announced he'd be accepting the nom at the White House, I reluctantly endorsed the idea, envisioning a quiet ceremony likely involving a small-ish camera and production crew and perhaps whatever family and staff/residents might happen to be on hand at the time.

WHAT A STUPID, ASSBRAINED ASSUMPTION THAT WAS!!!

Over 4,000 Americans died while the RNC held it's LIE FEST. More Americans than died on 9/11. I lived on NYC on 9/11 and never in my life would I have imagined so much damage, (over 60 9/11s), being committed by the resident of the White House, his criminal administration, and the complicit GOP and anyone in this country believing we need 4 more years of it.

But hey, over 183,000 dead to date and likely 250,000 dead by the election and ??? how many dead by the end of 2020? SO MUCH WINNING. SO MUCH WINNING DONNIE WANTS 4 MORE YEARS. Any outside entity that caused the catastrophic loss of life and the damage to the economy and the destruction of so many organizations and laws within our government, along with all of the human rights violations committed at our border and throughout the nation and we would be at war. We would be using all of our military might to destroy that outside entity. But Trump, he wants 4 more years, and his daughter promised if he gets them, he will give the United States 4 more years of the same.

@30: Thousands died during the DNC fest as well.

@33 Trump is the IMPOTUS. It was and is his responsibility to handle the pandemic within the United States. The people that died during the RNC died while he lied about it being OVER. It is far from over and his response (which equates to no response at all, in fact equates to the murder of every American that has died) is denial and lies. So if people died during the DNC they died because of Trump and his administration. Your statement is fucking stupid.

Latest numbers
United States
Coronavirus Cases:
6,083,027
Deaths:
185,546

Trump pretends his and his administration's response to this pandemic and how it has been handled in this country is AWESOME, BETTER THAN ANY OTHER COUNTRY IN THE WORLD AND INSISTS IT IS SO OVER, SO OVER YOU NEED TO SEND YOUR KIDS BACK TO SCHOOL AND RE-ELECT HIM!!!

At this rate there will more than a quarter of a million dead by election day and who knows how many by the end of the year.

31 - I gotta disagree about prosecuting a former President or member of his administration. I agree that doing for political reasons is a no-no, but when the crimes are clear to all reasonable people, and the evidence is clear and readily obtainable, I think it's irresponsible not to pursue obvious crimes, if they're apparent.

Not pursuing the Hatch Act violations, for example, means any future party who holds one house of Congress will feel perfectly free to turn the White House in to an official campaign HQ complete with campaign banners flying from the awnings. That's to say nothing of clear corruption in other arenas.

So, if by the reasonable person standard, such prosecutions have a whiff of the political, don't pursue them. But when any reasonable person recognizes the criminal aspect of the past administration's criminal actions...prosecute them. Severity could be a factor, but if it rises to a particular level of severity, and the evidence is clear...

@35: Donald didn't say the pandemic was "over" in his acceptance speech, he just said that a vaccine will be out before the end of the year:

"We are delivering lifesaving therapies, and will produce a vaccine BEFORE the end of the year, or maybe even sooner! We will defeat THE VIRUS, end the pandemic, and emerge stronger than ever before."

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/read-full-text-president-donald-trump-s-acceptance-speech-rnc-n1238636

All that so-called Black support of Trump is fake, as in not Trump like fake "fake news," but actually, reality based, fake.

Viral pro-Trump tweets came from fake African American spam accounts, Twitter says
Disinformation experts are anticipating that social media platforms will continue to be central to foreign and domestic efforts to mislead voters.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/viral-pro-trump-tweets-came-fake-african-american-spam-accounts-n1238553

The Republican convention's coronavirus denialism isn't fooling anyone but Trump's cultists

In the span of about 30 seconds, Trump went from "following the science" to gaslighting the country about a safe "return to work and to school" and ordering Democratic lawmakers to "get back" to business as usual without precondition. The stanza encapsulated the entire Republican convention's approach to the pandemic response that Trump has bungled from the very start—assert competence, project the myth normalcy, and then claim the threat over.

Overall, speaker after speaker either pretended the pandemic never existed or that whatever threat it posed had long since past.

The White House's chief economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, provided one of the starkest examples of the convention's coronavirus revisionism, using past tenses as if the virus wasn’t still killing some 1,000 Americans a day.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/8/28/1973068/-The-Republican-convention-s-coronavirus-denialism-isn-t-fooling-anyone-but-Trump-s-cultists

@42 - Fair enough; I don't come by my view without considering all that, and it's all valid. I agree we cannot have a judicial bloodbath based on political score-settling every 4 years...or eventually just plain ol' bloodbath bloodbaths. We do not want to become even more of a bananaless banana republic than we already are.

Still, smarter people than me have got to figure out some enforceable standards to hold past administrations accountable for actual crimes committed when the evidence of them is plain to any reasonable, even half-informed person.

Maybe there could be a permanent commission similar to the supreme court that ensures compliance with the law, a semi-secret panel of judges or some such. Of course, in our current environment, even those entities would quickly end up riven with rank partisanship. Then what? A U.N. panel of some kind that would make non-binding recommendations? Some other outside, which is to say foreign, system of review? Something...

This slog AM post was refreshingly brutal, I loved it. I don't know why so many people praise our police. Sure, some good people work for the police but the police as a whole do not work for you or I. We pay them, but they protect the wealthy, as they always have. I encourage everyone to educate themselves on how police forces came to exist because not much has changed: https://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/

@47 - Well, to my mind, I always worked for you, or always tried to, but I mostly agree with your overall point. For years, I’ve said it’s not so much that the poor are overpoliced (although that may be the case in some respects), it’s that the wealthy are not only underpoliced, but they’re effectively not policed at all.

As to your history, the stated mission of the police is obviously different now, and people think the US is unique in having police. Don’t forget that virtually every country on earth has some sort of police force. I suppose the police worldwide could be considered as having as their primary role protecting the monied from the masses, tho.

But crimes, often terrible crimes, do happen. 2-million gun-related crimes in this country alone each year. That requires a force to try to deter that and an armed force to apprehend perpetrators. What’s missing is a force to deter crimes of the wealthy and to apprehend them.

I tell friends every time a Stone or Flynn gets off after years of interminable legal maneuverings that that would not have been the least bit imaginable if they were named Tyrone or Jose from South Dallas...or even Billy Bob from the holler, anyone not rich, powerful, connected or some combo of the three.

@48 Like I said, good people work for the police, and I think they should still serve some purpose. I just think there are options. Police could respond to violent crimes, just like our navy responds to seaborne attacks; but maybe they aren't appropriate for things like shoplifting or traffic stops. Or maybe consider that, due to the professional standard we expect from them and pay them considerable amounts per year (plus pension), it might even just be cheaper to do things like pay businesses directly for stolen merchandise or vandalism. I think it's worth at least looking at, speaking as a middle class taxpayer.

Or just give the money to folks so they don't need to steal of course. That's socialism though!

@50 - I chuckled!

Me too, I remember when I was well-off and wanted to steal :)

I know all about where Division I athletic funding comes from, basically, and, frankly, the UW football program can go up in flames.