Prickly City by Scott Stantis for June 03, 2020

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    RobinHood  over 4 years ago

    Six o’clock, T.V. hour, don’t get caught in foreign tower

    Slash and burn, return, listen to yourself churn

    Lock him in uniform, book burning, bloodletting

    Every motive escalate, automotive incinerate

    Light a candle, light a motive, step down, step down

    Watch your heel crush, crush, uh oh

    This means no fear, cavalier, renegade and steering clear

    A tournament, a tournament, a tournament of lies

    Offer me solutions, offer me alternatives and I decline

    It’s the end of the world as we know it.

    R.E.M.

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  2. Albert einstein brain i6
    braindead Premium Member over 4 years ago

    IF we get out of this without reelecting The Messiah, we will laugh at it substantially less than we do about the invasion of Iraq.

    If He is reelected, the only laughs will be the kind that are elicited when Trump imitates a disabled person — along with gallows humor that involves real gallows.

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  3. Albert einstein brain i6
    braindead Premium Member over 4 years ago

    “We are gonna win, win, win. We’re going to win with military, we’re going to win at the borders, we’re going to win with trade, we’re going to win at everything. And some of you are friends and you’re going to call, and you’re going to say, ‘Mr. President, please, we can’t take it anymore, we can’t win anymore like this, Mr. President, you’re driving us crazy, you’re winning too much, please Mr. President, not so much, and I’m going to say I’m sorry, we’re going to keep winning because we are going to make America great again.”

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    jbmlaw01  over 4 years ago

    Day 41 of the Georgia Economic Recovery. We notice a lot of northern cities are currently undergoing a crowd-sourced urban renewal.

    A couple of great paragraphs from WSJ today, Holman Jenkins:

    If you think the riots don’t have something to do with the virus, you are probably one of many Americans living in a comfortable suburban or country house, with independent means or a high-paying job that can be done from a laptop, who have forgotten previous periods of your own life: what the lockdowns would have been like if you were 15 and stuck at home, or 20 and booted from college, or suddenly jobless in a crummy studio apartment or in a group home full of equally unemployed roommates. Never mind being a member of a large immigrant family jammed in a creaky high-rise or a single parent without savings or safety net.

    At my current stage of life, the lockdown has been quite tolerable but it would have severely taxed my mental and emotional health at 20, 30 or even 40.

    It also is well to remember that in any community some are criminally disposed. Psychopaths are estimated to constitute 1% of the population. There is a compulsion at such moments for just-so explanations. It all comes down to systemic racism. I doubt events are so neatly explained.

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  5. Cheshirecat chandra complg 1024
    Silly Season   over 4 years ago

    Ok…

    Who are you and what have you done with George F. Will?

    ~

    This unraveling presidency began with the Crybaby-in-Chief banging his spoon on his highchair tray to protest a photograph — a photograph — showing that his inauguration crowd the day before had been smaller than the one four years previous.

    Since then, this weak person’s idea of a strong person, this chest-pounding advertisement of his own gnawing insecurities, this low-rent Lear raging on his Twitter-heath has proven that the phrase malignant buffoon is not an oxymoron.

    The president’s provocations — his coarsening of public discourse that lowers the threshold for acting out by people as mentally crippled as he — do not excuse the violent few.

    They must be punished. He must be removed.

    The measures necessary for restoration of national equilibrium are many and will be protracted far beyond his removal.

    One such measure must be the removal of those in Congress who, unlike the sycophantic mediocrities who cosset him in the White House, will not disappear “magically,” as Eric Trump said the coronavirus would.

    Voters must dispatch his congressional enablers, especially the senators who still gambol around his ankles with a canine hunger for petting.

    In life’s unforgiving arithmetic, we are the sum of our choices.

    Congressional Republicans have made theirs for more than 1,200 days.

    We cannot know all the measures necessary to restore the nation’s domestic health and international standing…

    but we know the first step: Senate Republicans must be routed, as condign punishment for their Vichyite collaboration, ✁

    ~

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/no-one-should-want-four-more-years-of-this-taste-of-ashes/2020/06/01/1a80ecf4-a425-11ea-bb20-ebf0921f3bbd_story.html

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  6. Cheshirecat chandra complg 1024
    Silly Season   over 4 years ago

    There, unfolding on live television Monday night, was a dystopian horror.

    Federal authorities attacked peaceful protesters outside the White House with tear gas, flash-bangs and rubber bullets, as Trump, with Orwellian gall, stood in the Rose Garden proclaiming himself “an ally of all peaceful protesters.”

    Trump threatened to mobilize federal troops against U.S. citizens on U.S. soil without permission from governors — an act associated with totalitarian countries — then walked across Lafayette Square to St. John’s Church where he held aloft a Bible.

    Peaceful protesters had been gassed and forcibly dispersed so Trump could have a photo op.

    This disgusting scene was long in the making.

    He ignored an approaching pandemic, turning a crisis into a catastrophe in the United States and worsening the biggest economic collapse since the Great Depression, with more than 40 million out of work and upward of 100,000 dead.

    Meanwhile, his constant tearing at the fabric of civil society, his dismantling of the institutions that bind us, and his glorifying of racism and violence have ultimately set America ablaze.

    The finger-pointing has begun to assign blame for the violence accompanying protests against police brutality. Antifa and anarchists? White supremacists? Opportunistic hooligans?

    The answer, likely, is all of the above — and all must be condemned.

    But they are only the proximate cause of the violence.

    Don’t for a moment doubt the source: Trump has made America hate again.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/01/this-is-consequence-trumps-reign-rage/

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    paul GROSS Premium Member over 4 years ago

    Never stopped laughing.

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    William Robbins Premium Member over 4 years ago

    Isn’t Carmen black? Shouldn’t she have something to say about protests?

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  9. Cheshirecat chandra complg 1024
    Silly Season   over 4 years ago

    Dear Secretary Esper,

    I resign from the Defense Science Board, effective immediately.

    When I joined the Board in early 2014, after leaving government service as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, I again swore an oath of office, one familiar to you, that includes the commitment to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States . . . and to bear true faith and allegiance to the same.”

    You recited that same oath on July 23, 2019, when you were sworn in as Secretary of Defense. On Monday, June 1, 2020, I believe that you violated that oath. Law-abiding protesters just outside the White House were dispersed using tear gas and rubber bullets — not for the sake of safety, but to clear a path for a presidential photo op. You then accompanied President Trump in walking from the White House to St. John’s Episcopal Church for that photo.

    President Trump’s actions Monday night violated his oath to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” as well as the First Amendment “right of the people peaceably to assemble.” You may not have been able to stop President Trump from directing this appalling use of force, but you could have chosen to oppose it. Instead, you visibly supported it.

    ~

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/02/secretary-esper-you-violated-your-oath-aiding-trumps-photo-op-thats-why-im-resigning/

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    Kip W  over 4 years ago

    “A Free and Open Press being essential to the Existence of a Free and Open Society, we have declared Open Season on Reporters.”

    bOINGbOING presents 100 documented instances of police violence against the press during the present demonstrations: https://t.co/6t9got6Owz?amp=1

    And Barr is siccing the DEA on protesters now. I guess the regular cops aren’t as willing to use advanced military equipment on citizens as these gallant defenders of the Lost Cause.

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    Bruce1253  over 4 years ago

    Continuity! We have a problem in panel two!!

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    jbmlaw01  over 4 years ago

    The ‘excess deaths" data is in. From today’s WSJ, 1/2:

    32,000 people died in New York City between March 11 and May 2—a period that captures the epidemic’s peak and most of its toll. In typical times, there are some 8,000 New York City deaths between those dates. That means there were 24,000 excess deaths, of which only 14,000 were confirmed as Covid-19.

    In the entire country during the same period, there were 82,000 excess deaths, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. New York City, with 2.5% of the U.S. population, had 29.2% of the country’s excess deaths.

    Why has New York been hit so hard? A familiar explanation is blunders by the Trump administration… But if you exclude New Jersey and New York state, U.S. excess deaths were only about 10% above normal—compared with 5% for Germany, 25% for France and 40% for Italy. Another explanation is that New York is unique in America in its population density and reliance on public transportation. True, but Hong Kong—almost as dense and adjacent to mainland China, where the virus originated—has reported only four Covid-19 fatalities in a population of 7.5 million.

    A more credible explanation is the incompetence of state and local governments…Their shutdown orders came too late, after a few critical weeks when the disease was being transmitted exponentially. [T]he New York State Department of Health ordered the transfer of some 4,300 Covid-19 patients from hospitals to nursing homes. This exposed the oldest, frailest and most vulnerable to the virus.

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  13. Cheshirecat chandra complg 1024
    Silly Season   over 4 years ago

    Televangelist Pat Robertson joined the religious leaders criticizing President Trump for his “law and order” response to the nationwide unrest following the killing of George Floyd in the custody of Minneapolis police.

    Robertson, a onetime GOP presidential candidate, has been generally supportive of Trump during his administration, but he blasted the president’s approach to the protests in the opening remarks of his television show “The 700 Club” on Tuesday.

    “It seems like now is the time to say, ‘I understand your pain, I want to comfort you, I think it’s time we love each other,’ ” said Robertson, 90.

    “But the president took a different course. He said, ‘I am the president of law and order,’ and he issued a heads-up.”

    ~

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2020/06/02/pat-robertson-trump-isnt-cool-protests/

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    Kip W  over 4 years ago

    Scared the mask right off her for a second, there.

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  15. Cheshirecat chandra complg 1024
    Silly Season   over 4 years ago

    Overhead video included of the tear gassing and smoke of the peaceful (at least, until the smoke & tear-gassing) protesters for Trump’s walk….

    ~

    Tensions between President Trump, law enforcement and protesters demanding justice for George Floyd reached ominous new heights Monday night when military personnel fired tear gas into a crowd of demonstrators just outside White House grounds.

    At about 6:45 p.m. and without warning, law enforcement sent canisters of tear gas and smoke bombs hissing and spinning down the concrete, creating ear-rattling explosions and fireworks that caused panic in the streets and sent the crowd of hundreds stampeding for safety.

    ~

    https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/500593-how-trump-cleared-the-park-around-the-white-house

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    PaulKmecak  over 4 years ago

    Yes, Winslow, someday we will look back on this and laugh. Then the nurse on duty will come in and give us an extra big dose of our meds.

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    kentmarx36  over 4 years ago

    Laughs will be about as plentiful as live dinosaurs in your backyard. ) < : }

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    Night-Gaunt49[Bozo is Boffo]  over 4 years ago

    He has reversed the characters for his own version.

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