Speaking of Trump gasping every few words this morning…how about that physical he never finished?

It’s been more than six months since President Donald Trump claimed to have started his annual physical at Walter Reed hospital but the White House is declining to explain why he has yet to complete the yearly doctor’s examination.

It’s not because he’s in perfect health, we know that much.

Asked in early March about when he would complete his physical, the president told reporters, “I’m going probably over the next 90 days. I’m so busy, I can’t do it.”

But he’s not “so busy.” We know that. He spends hours every day tweeting, and hours every day watching Fox.

That’s another “how to be normal” item, that photo. That way he flaps his hands out while keeping his arms clamped to his sides so that he looks like a stuffed toy with big webbed feet but no arms and legs. He does it a lot.

God we’re stupid.

In the last few weeks a spate of American stores have made headlines after putting up signs telling customers who wear masks they will be denied entry. On Thursday, Vice reported on a Kentucky convenience store that put up a sign reading: “NO Face Masks allowed in store. Lower your mask or go somewhere else. Stop listening to [Kentucky governor Andy] Beshear, he’s a dumbass.”

What can be the point? It’s a respiratory disease, spread via coughs, sneezes, breathing, spitting – it spreads from the face. Why would you not want to wear a mask around people, given that the disease can kill a lot more readily than, say, a cold? Why turn it into a matter of political flagwaving? You might as well say it’s liberal bullshit to look before crossing the street.

Anti-lockdown protesters have argued that it is anti-American for the government to curtail people’s freedoms in order to reduce deaths as a result of Covid-19. Meanwhile, store owners tell customers what they can and cannot wear before entering, and customers cough in the faces of workers in the name of freedom.

The freedom to infect other people isn’t a human right.

Here he is saying it himself in his own hoarse breathless wheezy is he choking voice.

Notice how long it takes him to figure out what “mosque” spells.

Notice how he’s gasping between words.

“…over the past what now seems like a long period of time.”

Bit of a snag while he spells out “identifying.” That’s a hard word to read, isn’t it. I-denti-fying.

“…churches, synagocks, n………………………………….mosques, as essential places that provide [looks up, glares into the camera] ESSENTIAL servissuss.”

“Some governors have deemed licker stores n abortion clinics essential serivissus” [looks up] “snot right.”

“Sime currecting this injusstiss” [he’s slurring a lot today] and calling [looks up to glare] HOUSES OF WORSHUP ESSSENCHUL.”

“If there’s any question they’re gunna hafta call me but thur not gunna be successful in that call.”

“These are places that hold our society together and keep our people united”

Are they? Really? Is it all one direction? Is there no holding our society apart through rivalry and sectarianism? Is there no keeping people disunited over religious differences? And even if it’s true about the together and united, does it have to happen in groups of people in closed buildings during a pandemic? Can there not be services via Zoom? Don’t religious people want to help and shield their co-believers?

“Many Americans embrace worship as an essential part of life.”

While others embrace lying and bullying and grabbing women by the pussy. We know. Still doesn’t mean they can’t suspend in-person worship during a pandemic; still doesn’t mean they can’t do the worship at home.

He really does sound in bad shape today – breathless, gaspy, unable to speak clearly.

Michigan’s Attorney General was not impressed with Trump’s bratty refusal to wear a mask at the Ford plant yesterday.

“The president is like a petulant child who refuses to follow the rules,” [Dana] Nessel said in a Thursday evening appearance on CNN. “This is no joke.”

Nessel, who wrote a strongly worded letter to Trump ahead of his visit telling him that he had a “legal” and “moral responsibility” to wear a mask, unleashed on the president in an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. Nessel slammed Trump for sending a “terrible message” and said his unwillingness to adhere to Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s executive order and Ford’s company policy mandating face coverings showed that he does not care about anyone but himself.

“He is a ridiculous person, and I am ashamed to have him be president of the United States of America,” she said. “I hope that the voters of Michigan will remember this when November comes. That he didn’t care enough about their safety, he didn’t care about their welfare, he didn’t respect them enough just to engage in the very simple task, the painless task, the easy task of wearing a mask when he was provided one.”

She also said her office is “going to have to have a very serious conversation with Ford in the event that they permitted the president to be in publicly enclosed places in violation of the order.”

Trump of course wasn’t going to let that go unshouted at.

The time stamps are local to me; it was 11:14 and 11:20 PM his time. He doesn’t sit up late reading briefs, and he doesn’t go to sleep at a sensible hour to ensure alertness the next day, he stays up ragetweeting at public officials.

In her interview with Blitzer, Nessel said Thursday’s events were “extremely disappointing and yet totally predictable,” likely referring to past instances in which Trump has not respected mask policies — even those implemented by the White House.

Still, Nessel stressed that Trump’s actions are “very, very concerning.”

“He’s conveying the worst possible message to people who cannot afford to be on the receiving end of terrible misinformation,” she said, noting that the virus has now killed more than 93,000 people nationwide. Michigan alone has recorded about 53,500 confirmed cases and more than 5,100 deaths, according to most recent figures.

In other words what he’s doing will cause unnecessary deaths. This raises the interesting question whether Trump does it anyway because he’s too stupid to grasp the point or because he’s too evil to care.

On the subject of taking action against Ford, Nessel did not go into specifics, but she warned the automaker that Thursday’s visit could have jeopardized the safety of its employees.

“They knew exactly what the order was, and if they permitted anyone, even the president of the United States, to defy that order, I think it has serious health consequences, potentially to their workers,” she said. “The last thing we want to see is for this particular plant now to have to close its doors … because someone may have been infected by the president. That is a real possibility.”

Remind us what the plant is making? Oh yes, ventilators. Ventilators.

That’s Trump’s day’s work.

Today Trump is blending theocracy with medical malpractice murder.

But they’re not essential. Religion is supposed to be a spiritual thing, so clearly the bodily presence of a particular human can’t be essential. Religion is surely high up on the list of activities, joys, supports, sources of meaning or enlightenment or consolation or all those that can be conducted in solitude or at home with family as opposed to requiring physical presence during a pandemic. I get that the religious community is a major part of the benefits, but I also get that during a pandemic it’s got to be possible to hold the community in your heart as opposed to risking infecting it.

But not Trump. Not Trump who isn’t even religious himself but uses religion as a club to bludgeon Democrats. Not Trump who has chosen to make the pandemic a political issue instead of a medical one.

So that many more people can be infected, many more hospitals can be swamped again, many more people can die…all so that little Don can get his way.

Bonus: how also to sit normally.

Trump says

President Donald Trump on Thursday said “we are not closing our country” if the U.S. is hit by a second wave of coronavirus infections.

“People say that’s a very distinct possibility, it’s standard,” Trump said when asked about a second wave during a tour of a Ford factory in Michigan.

Oh it’s standard; well that’s ok then. By the same token, it’s standard for fire to burn, so we’re not going to evacuate the building if the alarm goes off. Just deal with it.

“We are going to put out the fires. We’re not going to close the country,” Trump said. “We can put out the fires. Whether it is an ember or a flame, we are going to put it out. But we are not closing our country.”

But we’re not going to put out the fires. We’re not putting them out now, with lockdown in place, so we’re sure as hell not going to be putting them out later if social distancing is abandoned. It’s not true that we can put out the fires; the fires are raging, and the death toll is over 90 thousand and rising.

Trump has previously said there may be “embers” of the pandemic that persist in the U.S. past the summer, but he maintains that they will be stamped out. Health experts, including those in the Trump administration, have said that the virus will likely continue to spread through the fall and winter, and may become even more difficult to combat once flu season begins.

They won’t be stamped out. He is such a moron. They won’t be stamped out because there is no treatment yet. They will burn and spread and leave a smoking desolation. This stupid greedy stupid man doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Another one of these:

Stephanie Douet says more on her blog today:

I have just been expelled from Outpost studios and membership for writing this post that their Committee describes as ‘explicitly transphobic and discriminatory’ and ‘causing discomfort and offence’.

My post may have been ignorant or insensitive, but it was neither transphobic or discriminatory, or was it intentionally hurtful.

My question is this: how is anyone ever gain any meaningful understanding, see someone else’s point of view or change their mind – without asking questions?

She includes a communication from OUTPOST’s board of trustees explaining why they have decided to shun her.

April 15th 2020

Dear Stephanie,

I am writing to inform you that your position as a studio holder at OUTPOST studios, and as a member of OUTPOST has been discussed by the trustees after a public online post you made was highlighted to us. The post contained explicitly transphobic statements failing to show respect and consideration to others. OUTPOST does not tolerate discrimination against individual’s protected characteristics.

What was it she said again?

I want to float my view that for someone to want to change gender is a failure of imagination and visual awareness. If you feel you are in the wrong body, surgically altering that body is not the only possible solution. There is more to being a man or woman than just looking like a man or woman.

For example, David Bowie was a pioneering explorer of what it is possible to do with the raw materials of flesh and hair, as are fashion designers from the wilder shores of creativity, playfully liberating themselves from the binary with cloth and face paint.

Can we instead consider the question ‘what does being a woman/man look like?’ – but consider it only having spent an hour looking through Vogue?” – 10th February 2020

She’s talking about, and thinking about, the ideas behind calling people “transgender.” It’s not “phobic” to do that. It’s more the other way around: it’s thoughtphobic, understandingphobic, analysisphobic, truthphobic to shun and punish people for trying to think about and analyze and understand concepts. Transgenderism is a concept, and it’s a very new and very rapidly expanding and enveloping concept, yet we are not allowed to think about and talk about and question the concept. That is ridiculous; it’s Trump-level ridiculous.

The censoring shunning Board continues, starting with another paragraph from Douet:

“I don’t have a moral or ethical stance with regard to trans matters – I know little about it – it just seems to open the door to possibilities of grief, pain and disappointment, all the things you want to protect your loved ones from” – 14th February 2020

We felt that this breached the studio license agreement in regards to the Key issue of compliance ‘(q) To have a duty of care towards other licensees, the committee and the building’ and jeopardizes OUTPOST’s “equality of opportunity and equal treatment of all persons involved with the organization” as stated in our Equal Opportunities Policy. As you are an active and outspoken member of the OUTPOST community on Facebook and beyond, this means that statements like this are not private but in fact are highly visible to others and to other studio holders. It is for these reasons we are also considering removing your membership of the charity.

It’s as if they’ve all been hypnotized and drugged and threatened and held hostage.

There is further correspondence; the Board’s side of the debate does not become any more reasonable or fair or adult.

Sure enough, Donnie Defiant didn’t wear a mask at the Ford factory.

Aw look, isn’t that cute, there’s Jared, too, with his mask on the table in front of him. I suppose that’s the Princess on his left – can’t tell about her mask.

Oh, darn, because the plan was totally for a permanent lockdown. Everybody to get from street, forever.

We’re paying for his campaign rally.

Well, yes, but he doesn’t understand what the purpose is.

Golly.

So he just up and admits right out in the open that he thinks Fox is supposed to be helping him get re-elected.

Trump is on his way to Ypsilanti as we speak.

Hilariously, the transcript crawl renders the question about wearing a mask as “You’re a mess today at the Ford plant”? No doubt it will be corrected any minute now.

Anyway Trump of course doesn’t say he will, and does instantly change the subject. “I wanna NORmalize,” he says idiotically. Well duh, Sherlock, don’t we all; we’re not doing this because we like it. We wanna normalize too, but we also wanna stay alive so that we can enjoy the normal when it comes back, and we also wanna not kill other people, so that they can enjoy the normal when it comes back. The reason things are not normal right now is because of a novel virus that is highly contagious (though not nearly as highly contagious as the 1918 flu) and all too often fatal. Wanting things to be normal again does precisely zero to disempower that virus.

Trump squawks on:

Wunna the other things I wanna do is get the churches open. The churches are not being treated with respect by a lot of the Democrat governors. I wanna get our churches open, an wur gunna take a very strong pozzisshun on that very soon.

So I guess his plan is to tell all the governors they have to exempt churches from the no large gatherings rules, in the hope that tens of thousands of church-goers will die in the next couple of months. Seems a bizarre plan, even for him.

Michigan’s Attorney General has asked Trump to follow the rules.

Ahead of President Trump’s planned trip Thursday to a Ford manufacturing plant in Michigan, the state’s attorney general implored him to wear a face mask on his tour, citing a “legal responsibility” — and said he would be asked not to return if he does not do so.

In an open letter addressed to Trump, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel (D) asked the president, who has consistently appeared barefaced in public and at the White House, to adhere to executive orders issued by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) and Ford’s policy mandating masks to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus. Trump is scheduled to visit a factory southwest of Detroit that has been repurposed to manufacture ventilators.

The workers in the factory don’t necessarily want to get the virus from Trump. A normal person wouldn’t want to risk infecting other people.

“While my Department will not act to prevent you from touring Ford’s plant, I ask that while you are on tour you respect the great efforts of the men and women at Ford — and across this State — by wearing a facial covering,” Nessel wrote. “It is not just the policy of Ford, by virtue of the Governor’s Executive Orders. It is currently the law of this State.”

Asked during an appearance Thursday morning on CNN what she would do if Trump doesn’t comply, Nessel voiced some skepticism about whether he would.

“If we’ve learned nothing over the last several years of President Trump in the White House, it’s that he doesn’t have the same level of legal accountability as everybody else,” Nessel said. “Honestly, if he fails to wear a mask, he’s going to be asked not to return to any enclosed facilities inside our state.”

That is to say, if we’ve learned anything about Trump it’s that he considers himself exempt from any and all laws, rules, norms, and expectations that apply to everyone else, and that he sees himself that way because he cares about no one and nothing outside himself.

A Ford spokesperson told the Associated Press earlier this week that the company informed the White House that it requires everyone in factories to wear masks. But the spokesperson noted, “The White House has its own safety and testing policies in place and will make its own determination,” leaving unanswered the question of whether Trump will cover his face Thursday.

That’s not ok. The requirement exists to protect people, and the White House has no right to have “its own policies” such that Trump gets to endanger people. It’s that simple. Trump doesn’t get to visit a Ford factory with an assault rifle and shoot a bunch of people, and he doesn’t get to refuse to wear a mask.

Bad combination:

Floodwaters unleashed by a dam failure in central Michigan have reached a Dow Chemical facility and Superfund site, the company admitted Wednesday, raising the possibility that the flood could turn into a full-fledged environmental catastrophe.

Because the flood could contain toxic gunk, kind of like the Flint water supply.

The Times reports:

With much of Midland expected to be underwater by later on Wednesday, it was likely that the floodwaters would breach the levees designed to protect the Dow compound, said Allen Burton, a professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Michigan. This meant that, at the site itself, flooding could reach storage tanks, potentially releasing chemicals onto farmland and residential areas that line the river downstream, he said.

The Superfund cleanup sites are downriver from the century-old plant, which for decades had released chemicals into the nearby waterways. The concern downriver, Dr. Burton said, is that contaminated sediments on the river floor could be stirred up by the floodwaters, spreading pollution downstream and over the riverbanks.

Take a bow, Don.

Union of Concerned Scientists research scientist Jacob Carter told Common Dreams that President Donald Trump’s assault on environmental regulations bears some of the blame for the current catastrophe.

“This is another example of the Trump administration putting vulnerable communities in harms way by sidelining science” said Carter. “There was an Executive Order that called for Superfund sites to update their infrastructure to protect them from future extreme floods, but it was trashed by the Trump administration a week before Hurricane Harvey hit.”

Because why wouldn’t we want Superfund sites to be vulnerable to floods?

Mitch is all in an uproar because workers are being CODDLED. He’s not having it.

Mitch McConnell promised House Republicans Wednesday that the beefed up unemployment benefits enacted earlier this spring “will not be in the next bill.”

The Senate majority leader told the House GOP minority in an afternoon phone call that he is comfortable waiting to see how the nearly $3 trillion in coronavirus spending previously approved plays out before moving forward on the next relief legislation. And he told them that the ultimate end-product won’t look anything like House Democrats’ $3 trillion package passed last week, according to a person briefed on the call.

Well of course he’s comfortable. He’s been milking his job for $$$ for years. Nice to be Mitch but not everyone gets that kind of comfort.

McConnell warned against trial lawyer “vultures” ready to file lawsuits and said Republicans are “going to have to clean up the Democrats’ crazy policy that is paying people more to remain unemployed than they would earn if they went back to work,” McConnell said.

Starve the peasants!

Right, because the only possible reason to have a woman as a running mate is because he wants to fuck her. Good job of insulting your own sex, KC.

Michigan can’t catch a break.

As if things weren’t already bad enough in Michigan, on Tuesday, dams in Edenville and Sanford flooded. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer declared a state of emergency in Midland County and ordered all residents to evacuate the area immediately.

“If you have not evacuated the area, do so now and get somewhere safe,” Whitmer said in a statement. “This is unlike anything we’ve seen in Midland County.”

It may be unlike anything we’ve ever seen, but federal regulators saw this coming. As other outlets have reported, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has long warned the owners to increase capacity of the Edenville dam’s spillways to prevent a flood, going as far back as 1999. The agency issued another warning in 2004 when the ownership changed hands to a company called Boyce Hydro LLC, and another in 2017, when it declared the dam to be a “high hazard.” In 2018, the FERC revoked Boyce Hydro’s license, prompting years of litigation.

Meanwhile Trump is busy saving us from all this pesky government regulation.

The BBC reports:

A Toronto teenager has become the first Canadian ever charged with carrying out an “incel”-inspired terror attack.

The 17-year-old boy is accused of fatally stabbing a woman in February.

Incel, short for “involuntarily celibate,” is an online subculture focused on members’ perceived inability to find romantic or sexual partners.

Well, that’s a very forgiving way of putting it. It’s an online subculture focused on the evil of women who think they have a right to refuse demands for sex. It’s a male online subculture that rages at women’s sexual autonomy.

The suspect, who cannot be named because he is a minor, had already been charged with murder shortly after the incident, which took place at an erotic massage parlour…

When Toronto police learned the crime may have been motivated by an extremist ideology, they contacted Canada’s federal RCMP, which ultimately decided to press terrorism charges.

It’s not all that far-fetched to see rape as a form of terrorism against women. It’s not just a quick and convenient way to grab sex, at least not always. It’s also an expression of misogyny and a warning to The Others.

“Incel” is short for “involuntarily celibate”. It generally – though not exclusively – refers to online groups of men who feel they are unable to enter into sexual relationships. They blame women for their grievances, which they discuss in internet forums.

Again, it’s not so much that the men “feel they are unable to enter into sexual relationships” – it’s that they feel rage and hatred toward women who refuse to Put Out. Women are withholding bitches who have that thing between their legs but won’t share it.

In 2018, Alek Minassian allegedly drove a van into a busy Toronto commercial street killing 10 people and wounding 16.

He later told police the attack was retribution for years of rejection by women, and that he identified as a member of the incel movement. He was charged with 10 counts of first-degree murder and 16 counts of attempted murder, but he was not charged with terrorism.

…

Minassian was allegedly inspired by Elliot Rodger, who killed six people in a stabbing and shooting spree in Isla Vista, California, in May 2014.

Because those sorority bitches wouldn’t spread for him.

Trump is getting excited about the G7 summit and toying with the idea that maybe just maybe it should be in person after all (so that he can insult people to their faces, dammit, like a real American).

“Now that our Country is ‘Transitioning back to Greatness’, I am considering rescheduling the G-7, on the same or similar date, in Washington, D.C., at the legendary Camp David,” Trump wrote in a tweet. “The other members are also beginning their COMEBACK. It would be a great sign to all – normalization!”

Yeah! Never mind that the curve isn’t flattening! Let’s do this thing!

Trump is clearly eager to look ahead to the next stage of reopening the country, but the number of US coronavirus cases and deaths continues to climb. The country’s death toll is expected to hit 100,000 in the coming days.

With that in mind, it’s hard to imagine that world leaders will feel comfortable traveling to the US as it continues to grapple with the crisis.

Wimps! Sissies! Weenies! They need to get over here and round up some cattle in a thunderstorm, that’d show them.

Aw, now the Trumpies are ruining a perfectly good misogynist nickname by appropriating it from all those right-on lefty dudes. No fair!

It’s SO KAREN to tell Twitter to do something just because the president of the United States called some guy a murderer. Who does she think she is??

Don Junior is using it??? Aw, no, that’s got to ruin it.