Trump 45

[fraurosena]

8 minutes ago, Dandruff said:

Wonder if Trump is healthy enough to recover from COVID-19, even with maximum, taxpayer-supported health care.

Earlier, I was watching the latest Lincoln Project video which had footage of Trump campaigning in 2016, and found the difference in his appearance astounding. He was slimmer, more alert, and energetic. Looking at him now he looks decidedly ill. So no, I don’t think he’ll recover from Covid-19. He has one foot in the grave as is.

[fraurosena]

He’s so stupid he doesn’t even understand that he’s committing political suicide when he says this stuff out loud on national television.

 

[Xan]

1 hour ago, fraurosena said:

Earlier, I was watching the latest Lincoln Project video which had footage of Trump campaigning in 2016, and found the difference in his appearance astounding. He was slimmer, more alert, and energetic. Looking at him now he looks decidedly ill. So no, I don’t think he’ll recover from Covid-19. He has one foot in the grave as is.

Nah.  Mitch McConnell would be there by his bedside making sure it was kept alive with every medical machine known to modern man.  The Repubs would prop up Zombie Trump before they'd give up their gravy train.

[fraurosena]

42 minutes ago, Xan said:

The Repubs would prop up Zombie Trump before they'd give up their gravy train.

Weekend at Bernie’s style... 

Edited March 6, 2020 by fraurosena

[fraurosena]

14 hours ago, fraurosena said:

He’s so stupid he doesn’t even understand that he’s committing political suicide when he says this stuff out loud on national television.

 

Quoting myself, because apparently Trump was told he was an idiot and is now in full on denial mode.

 

[JMarie]

16 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Weekend at Bernie’s style... 

Or find a doppelgänger, a la Dave

"The Vice President is mentally unbalanced"

[fraurosena]

Mark Meadows is being rewarded for his shenanigans during the impeachment hearings. 

Mulvaney is being shipped off to Ireland — punishment for his “We do it all the time! Get over it!” gaffe?

Has Meadows officially been confirmed, or is he yet another ‘acting’?

[thoughtful]

On 2/28/2020 at 10:23 AM, fraurosena said:

But.. what's up with his nose? It looks like the tip fell off and somebody had to glue it back on.

On 3/5/2020 at 11:22 PM, Xan said:

The Repubs would prop up Zombie Trump before they'd give up their gravy train.

8 hours ago, JMarie said:

Or find a doppelgänger, a la Dave

Maybe they're just planning to clone him. Where is Diane Keaton when you need her?

Edited March 7, 2020 by thoughtful
ETA other quotes

[fraurosena]

Sweet Rufus.

 

[Dandruff]

13 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Sweet Rufus.

 

Something's missing.  Unfortunately, it's not him.

[fraurosena]

Ok, what egregious fact did the NYT expose this time?

 

[apple1]

1 hour ago, fraurosena said:

Ok, what egregious fact did the NYT expose this time?

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/07/us/politics/trump-coronavirus.html

Quote

After weeks of conflicting signals from the Trump administration about the coronavirus, the government’s top health officials decided late last month that when President Trump returned from a trip to India, they would tell him they had to be more blunt about the dangers of the outbreak.

If he approved, they would level with the public...

From the beginning, the Trump administration’s attempts to forestall an outbreak of a virus now spreading rapidly across the globe was marked by a raging internal debate about how far to go in telling Americans the truth. Even as the government’s scientists and leading health experts raised the alarm early and pushed for aggressive action, they faced resistance and doubt at the White House — especially from the president — about spooking financial markets and inciting panic...

 

[fraurosena]

Oh Rufus! This made me laugh so hard!

Trump and Scavino are completely oblivious to the Nero reference.

 

[JMarie]

7 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Ok, what egregious fact did the NYT expose this time?

 

If the NYT was dead before he go into politics (so pre-2016), and have continued to be dead, why are they still being published? Could it be that they're not actually dead???

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/new-york-times-subscriber-numbers-are-skyrocketing-in-the-trump-age-2019-02-06

Quote

The New York Times Co. NYT, +0.29% is adding large numbers of digital subscribers and growing its digital revenue.

The Times added 265,000 digital subscriptions in the last three months of the year, the most significant increase since Donald Trump was elected president. The paper has landed repeated scoops on the Trump administration. Trump has a tempestuous relationship with the Times, sitting for interviews with its reporters and executives and soaking up its coverage while frequently complaining about it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/07/business/media/new-york-times-earnings.html

Quote

As digital revenue becomes more central to the newspaper business — and with a small boost from the launch of “The Weekly,” a television show on FX and Hulu — The New York Times Company on Wednesday reported second-quarter revenue growth of 5.2 percent compared with the same quarter last year.

 

[Cartmann99]

3 hours ago, JMarie said:

If the NYT was dead before he go into politics (so pre-2016), and have continued to be dead, why are they still being published? Could it be that they're not actually dead???

Haven't you ever heard of zombies?

[GreyhoundFan]

I'm so glad Dear Leader didn't let a major international crisis get in the way of his golfing: "After stopping at the CDC on his way to Mar-a-Lago, Trump heads to the golf course two days in a row"

Spoiler

Authorities in Lee County, Fla., on Saturday announced a woman in her 70s had died of an illness related to the novel coronavirus, which has spread across the globe. Details were sketchy, but the woman apparently returned from an international trip where she might have contracted the virus.

Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) expressed surprise at the news during an interview on Fox News.

“We didn’t even know there was even a presumptive case,” he said, adding, “We need to make sure — where did this person travel? We need to make sure, if they traveled into the airport, who was on that flight? Let’s make sure they can get tested.”

“We need to have transparency,” he added, speaking from the state. “Like the case in Lee County. Tell people. We didn’t know there was a case until the person passed away.”

President Trump, the government official ultimately responsible for the response to the coronavirus outbreak, also was in Florida on Saturday. He was three hours east of Lee County, at his private Mar-a-Lago resort. He wasn’t at Mar-a-Lago all day, however. He spent several hours at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach — as he did on Sunday morning, as well.

The exact number of times Trump has played golf as president isn’t known because, unlike past administrations, this White House doesn’t share information about Trump’s activities at his golf clubs. (White House pool reporters who travel with the president and would normally report on what he’s doing are forced to wait out his golf-course visits at nearby facilities — a library, in the case of his trips this weekend.)

By our count, considering contemporaneous reports and the weather at the time, Trump has played about 217 rounds of golf as president, once every five days. He has visited one of his golf clubs on about 250 days as president, including his club in Bedminster, N.J., where he disappears from the public eye for weeks on end during the summer. One tally of confirmed rounds of golf — as when his golf partners reveal that they played or when he is captured by other club members on social media — has the total at 116 rounds, a figure that Barack Obama didn’t hit until months into his second term.

In the abstract, Trump’s habit of visiting properties owned by his private business is remarkable. When displayed visually, the effect is striking. Trump has visited one of those properties a little less regularly than once out of every three days of his presidency. In other words, for every week he has been president, he has spent, on average, at least part of two days at one of his properties.

The amount of time Trump spends at his properties is unusual, for many reasons. It’s also hypocritical, given Trump’s excoriations of Obama’s vacations and time on the golf course. In August 2016, with the general election approaching, Trump told an audience at an event in Virginia, “I’m going to be working for you. I’m not going to have time to go play golf.” The crowd cheered. But it hasn’t worked out that way.

There have been times when Trump apparently recognized politics demanded he scale back his visits to his own properties and leisure activities. When hurricanes hit the Gulf Coast in the summer of 2017, he visited the damaged areas and hunkered down in the Washington area to help lead the response. When the government shut down at the end of 2018, Trump canceled a planned trip to Florida — leading to the longest stretch of his presidency in which he neither played golf nor visited one of his properties.

During the 2016 campaign, he repeatedly accused Obama of playing golf instead of addressing other crises of varying importance, specifically trouble with the Transportation Security Administration and flooding in Louisiana.

The current moment would seem to be one in which politics might similarly demand that the president refrain from appearing to be at leisure. While Vice President Pence is head of the government’s coronavirus task force, it’s clear Trump himself has an active role in shaping how things progress. The Associated Press reported, for example, that the White House scrapped a planned advisory from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urging older or physically fragile people to avoid air travel. The White House denied the report.

During a visit to the CDC on Friday, though, Trump made clear he opposed Pence’s plan to evacuate passengers on a cruise ship anchored off the coast of San Francisco.

“They would like to have the people come off,” he said, referring to the task force. “I’d rather have the people stay, but I’d go with them. I told them to make the final decision. I would rather — because I like the numbers being where they are. I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship.”

The ship is still at sea but has been cleared to dock in Oakland, Calif., on Monday. Since Thursday, when Trump highlighted that only 129 cases of coronavirus were recorded in the United States, the number of cases has more than doubled, with 437 as of this writing. Twenty-one of those cases are from the cruise ship.

One school of thought suggests treating the coronavirus outbreak as limited in scope will help protect the economy from overreacting to the spread of the virus. Medical experts and other observers worry this approach will make the long-term effects of the crisis much worse.

It’s not clear how active Trump has been in that debate. It’s clear, though, that he wasn’t actively engaged in it on Saturday or Sunday mornings from the golf course.

It was Trump himself who argued that playing golf and running the country weren’t compatible. At that August 2016 event in Virginia, Trump’s insistence he wouldn’t play golf as president was coupled with disparagement of Obama for doing exactly that.

“Look at Afghanistan, what a mess. Look at everything,” Trump said. “If we didn’t do anything with Iraq, if we never went there, if our presidents went to the beach, we’d be much better off. If they just went every single day to the beach and took it easy.”

“Let Obama go to the golf course,” he added. “You know what? We’d be better off.”

Update: On Sunday, he played with a number of professional athletes who posted about the round on social media.

 

[47of74]

Jesus what a fucking man baby. 

Quote

Donald Trump will not attend this year’s St Patrick’s Day lunch on Capitol Hill – because Nancy Pelosi will be there.

The lunch, hosted by the Speaker of the House of Representatives, has been held every year since 1983 and has only been skipped by presidents four times since then, Politico reports. The last time it happened was when George W Bush decided not to attend in 2003, shortly before the start of the Iraq War.

White House spokesman Judd Deere told Politico: “Since the Speaker has chosen to tear this nation apart with her actions and her rhetoric, the president will not participate in moments where she so often chooses to drive discord and disunity, and will instead celebrate the rich history and strong ties between the United States and Ireland at the White House on 12 March.

 

[47of74]

Gotta hurl now

[GreyhoundFan]

I'm not happy about my 401K (or as the mango moron calls it, my 409K) tanking, but the fact that the stock market actually halted trading for a period today to stop a free fall may help get some Dumpy voters to switch sides. The bestest economy was one of the biggest things he crowed about.

Quote

The threat of a coronavirus-fueled oil war and continued panic around the outbreak brought markets to new lows Monday, triggering a forced halt on trading after the Standard & Poor’s 500 index sank 7 percent shortly after the open. The Dow Jones industrial average cratered as much as 2,000 points before clawing back.

The forced freeze was a sign of volatility for Wall Street amid the most turbulent trading in recent memory. Another 15-minute halt will be triggered if the S&P 500’s losses hit the 13 percent threshold. In the event of a 20 percent decline, markets would shut down for the day.

“The bull market’s 11-year birthday is today but investors are not in a celebratory mood with trading halted shortly after the open as markets plunged,” Greg McBride, chief financial analyst at Bankrate.com, wrote in commentary Monday. “The uncertain economic impact of coronavirus continues to grip markets, with stocks, commodities and interest rates all dropping sharply. Markets hate uncertainty and there is a ton of it currently in play.”

But the first-ever halt seemed to have a stabilizing effect, spurring a rebound in all U.S. indices. Less than an hour after the freeze, the Dow was down more than 1,380 points, or roughly 5.3 percent. The S&P 500 was also down 5.3 percent and the Nasdaq was 4.8 percent in the red.

Oil prices tumbled into the $30s, after Saudi Arabia and Russia deadlocked over production. The Saudis had been pushing for a cut in output to prop up prices, but did a reversal when Russia balked and decided, instead, to flood the market with hundreds of thousands of additional barrels per day at a steep discount — a move analysts fear may trigger a price war.

“Cheap oil is one thing. Super cheap oil is another,” said John Kilduff of Again Capital. “The stock market is looking at the oil price plunge as a canary in the coal mine of a disinflationary one-two punch, driven partly by cratering demand for transportation fuels and a wanton price war among the major oil producers” that will result in big losses for U.S. and Canadian producers.

Global markets were apoplectic. Japan’s Nikkei closed down more than 5 percent, while Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index shed more than 4.2 percent. European markets were tumbling more than 7 percent across the board in midday trading.

Panic pushed the yield on the U.S. 10-year Treasury below 0.4 percent for the first time in history Monday as investors fled for safe havens. The trajectory could be an ominous sign of a weakening economy, because a low yield can indicate a lack of confidence in economic growth. Yields decline as bond prices rise. Gold, another safe haven, was up 0.4 percent in early trading.

Confirmed U.S. coronavirus cases surpassed 500 over the weekend, with cases in 30 states and the District of Columbia. Americans are beginning to face disruption to their work and travel, and the list of major events canceled in the face of the outbreak grows by the hour.

“The broader stock indexes … finally succumbed to the unraveling of an unbelievable period of excessive optimism on the part of the investing public and speculators,” said Steve Craig, chief energy analyst at Elliott Wave International, in an email. “It’s easy to blame the global selling panic on fears of a coronavirus pandemic, but it has more to do with the unwinding of excessive investor optimism than anything else.”

...

This is from a live updates article that is being updated frequently.

[GreyhoundFan]

Cue the twitter whining from the mango manboy:

 

[fraurosena]

 

[mamallama]

4 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

 

Reuters says that's a fake text.  So hard to tell these days.

[JMarie]

1 hour ago, mamallama said:

Reuters says that's a fake text.  So hard to tell these days.

Still has me picturing a room full of women named Joan.

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[Xan]

When is it finally going to be enough?  Will there ever be anyone in the president's circle who'll look him in the eye and tell the emperor that he has no clothes?  

He lies -- all the time.  He met with Putin and had the notes destroyed.  He said that Kim Jong-il wrote him a "love letter".  He hasn't built "the wall".  The stock market is tanking.  He hasn't been pro-active about the coronavirus.  He's charging the Secret Service millions to stay in his own hotels and they're there to protect HIM.  He's destroyed our image abroad.  He's cozies up to our enemies and insults our allies.  He's telling American citizens that the press is the enemy.  He has his kids in the White House handling sensitive materials even though they don't have clearances.  He's had three wives and has cheated on all of them.  He was a great fan of abortions until it became politically expedient to be against them.  He bankrupted a casino.  He has refused to pay vendors and crews.  He's had several companies that went belly up.  He's too lazy to work.  He doesn't read.  He isn't even coherent.

When will enough be enough for the Republicans??

Here he was the other day saying that pretty soon the few American patients with the virus would be getting better.

For the record, at this moment -- even with limited testing -- the US has 605 people identified as having the coronavirus.

 

Edited March 10, 2020 by Xan