one of these things is not like the other.
i loved that sanders was never apologetic about what was necessary to balance the books
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Everybody criticizes naming until they have to do it. Sniping from the sidelines is fun but incredibly unproductive.
How about “Generic Campaign Slogan”?
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Yeah I do kind of wish they hadn’t used the word “back” and had instead focused on the concept of building a better future. But… Eh… I suppose the idea is to focus on returning to a sense of normalcy for what’s probably becoming a very conservative base.
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Then the key question becomes, black letters on white background or blue letters on white background?
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Dark Navy #152329 for body copy and headlines, Electric Blue #41C4F2 as primary accent colour, Navy #002D58 as supporting colour, Americana Red #EF483F for items of high interest that need to stand out.
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Not generic enough. Think bland, not bold! 
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That’s where the font(s) enter into it.
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July 13, 2020 (Monday)
Media coverage of Trump’s commutation of his associate Roger Stone’s prison sentence has pushed the Russia bounty story out of the headlines. Knowing Trump’s skill at distraction, it’s hard to believe this is a coincidence.
It’s a big story. In late February, Trump’s Presidential Daily Brief (the “PDB”) informed him that Russia’s military intelligence unit, the GRU, had offered cash payments to Taliban-linked fighters to kill American and allied soldiers in Afghanistan. The willingness of a foreign power, with whom we are theoretically not at war, to pay to have our soldiers killed is a huge deal.
But instead of retaliating, Trump actually worked more closely with Russia after he learned of the bounties, issuing a joint statement with Russian President Vladimir Putin about cooperation between the nations, trading coronavirus supplies, and urging that Russia should be readmitted to the G7, from which it was excluded after it invaded Ukraine in 2014.
When the story leaked two weeks ago, Trump first called it a hoax, then said he had not been “briefed,”—apparently suggesting that the report had not been delivered orally, so as far as he was concerned he had not been told—then said the information had not been verified, then went on a hunt for the leakers. But what he hasn’t done in all this time is denounced Russia for putting a bounty on U.S. soldiers.
On Sunday, Douglas London, a CIA veteran of 34 years who was the CIA chief for counterterrorism in south and southwest Asia from 2016-2018, wrote that Trump steadfastly refused to push back on Russian aggression in Afghanistan when London oversaw operations there. London noted that Trump retaliated against both Iran and Pakistan when they supported the Taliban… but he did nothing about reports that Russia was similarly involved.
"As any observer of Russia knows, neglecting aggression inevitably invites more of it — to expand Russian influence and power at American expense,” London wrote. “The president must explain to the American people, and especially to those who risk their lives for their country and our families, why he continues to abide Russian threats to our troops, our security and our democracy.”
London is not the only one worried about Trump’s defense of Russia. On Saturday, July 11, former Special Counsel Robert Mueller finally broke his silence about his investigation into the efforts of Russia to interfere in the 2016 election. In an op-ed in the Washington Post, Mueller said he felt “compelled to respond both to broad claims that our investigation was illegitimate and our motives were improper, and to specific claims that Roger Stone was a victim of our office.”
These charges are coming primarily from Trump and his aides.
Mueller revisited the findings of the Mueller Report, which proved that Russia hacked and dumped emails from Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign, as well as managing an on-line social media campaign to hurt Clinton and help Trump. It found that a number of officials from the Trump campaign—including Stone-- had links to the Russian government. While it did not establish that the campaign conspired with Russian spies, it did conclude that the Russian government worked for a Trump victory. And the Trump campaign expected the stolen and leaked emails would help Trump win. (The actual report notes that if Mueller felt he could exonerate the Trump campaign from conspiring with the Russians, he would have.)
A jury later convicted Stone of lying to Congress. He lied about his contacts with an intermediary to Wikileaks, and lied when he denied telling the Trump campaign about the Wikileaks release of emails. Stone also demanded a witness lie to Congress. “Stone was prosecuted and convicted because he committed federal crimes,” Mueller explained. “He remains a convicted felon, and rightly so.”
Today, the judge in Stone’s case, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, received the Justice Department’s documentation on Stone’s clemency. Trump’s commutation of his sentence not only wipes away his 40-month jail term, but also his two years of supervised release and his $20,000 fine. Stone told reporters today that he will do everything he can to get Trump reelected in November.
It feels like we are also seeing presidential distraction on the coronavirus pandemic. We learned today that 5.4 million Americans have lost their health insurance. At the same time, Trump has continued to insist that our spiking numbers of infections are due to more testing, and that guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (the CDC) are “impractical” and “very tough & expensive.”
While undermining Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who has been one of the administration’s key advisors on the pandemic, Trump today retweeted a post from gameshow host and commentator Chuck Woolery saying that “Everyone is lying…. The CDC, Media, Democrats, our Doctors, not all but most, that we are told to trust. I think it’s all about the election and keeping the economy from coming back, which is about the election. I’m sick of it.”
Not all Trump’s loyalists buy this: former White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, who has remained loyal to the president, said today the economy cannot recover until Covid-19 is under control, and that the country’s current testing abilities are “simply inexcusable.”
Today, after repeatedly changing instructions, officials from the Department of Health and Human Services finalized new data reporting protocols for hospitals. The new system will eliminate the CDC as a recipient of data. Instead, health-care institutions will report information about infections to a federal contractor or to their state, which will turn the information over to the federal government. The argument for the change is that the data has been faulty, but hospitals maintain they are delivering the best information they can as the government keeps changing the reporting system.
But there is another layer to this change, as well. The administration wants the states to call out the National Guard, sending troops to hospitals to help with data collection. Originally, the request was going to be a demand, but it got watered down over the weekend. HHS general counsel Robert P. Charrow opposed the decision. He wrote in emails to an HHS official, “I believe that using National Guard troops to gather these data would be counter-productive…. As a practical matter, I cannot imagine how the National Guard would be able to collect data at the hospital itself nor the number of Guards who would be exposed to COVID-19 in the process.”
President of the American Hospital Association Rick Pollack told Washington Post reporters Lena H. Sun and Amy Goldstein, “Given our track record of being cooperative to evolving data requests, it’s perplexing that the possibility of using the National Guard has been suggested…. It makes no sense. Certainly the expertise of the National Guard can be used in a more productive way.”
For my part, I am leery of any unprecedented move on the part of this administration to use troops around the country. Last Saturday night, federal agents from Homeland Security, dispatched to Portland, Oregon under Trump’s order to protect monuments, shot a protester who was standing alone, across the street from them, holding speaker above his head. According to his mother, the “less-than-lethal” munition fractured his skull and broke the bones in his face, requiring facial reconstruction surgery.
Oregon Governor Kate Brown (D) noted that Trump seems eager to escalate tensions. The deployment of federal officers to a U.S. city is unusual, and it brings “unnecessary violence and confrontation.” Local rules in Portland prohibit tear gas or less-than-lethal rounds unless lives are in danger, and Portland’s mayor, Ted Wheeler (D), demanded that the agents begin abiding by those rules. City Commissioners note they did not ask for the officers and do not want them. Portland Deputy Police Chief Chris Davis said it complicates things to have the federal officers in town because they do not coordinate with local police.
Oregon Senator Ron Wyden (D) said: “Trump & Homeland Security must now answer why fed[era]l officers are acting like an occupying army.”
On a lighter note, Tucker Carlson tonight announced that he was going on a “long-planned” vacation, trout fishing. CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy noted that Carlson always seems to have long planned vacations in the middle of a scandal. Carlson is in trouble for the news that his senior writer, Blake Neff, had been posting racist, sexist, and homophobic posts on social media for years, and that the language of some of those posts made it onto Carlson’s show.
Neff stepped down, and now Carlson is going fishing.
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These two things are not exclusive.
But the very IDEA of using troops in a regular hospital for data documentation purposes seems batshit crazy. This is another fnord. Or HCR is right and this is a preparation for something else entirely.
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Both of these statements strike me as people without the shadow of a clue flailing around to be seen as “doing something.” That sort of action almost inevitably makes things worse.
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Because packing even more people into centers of infection is such a brilliant idea. Seriously. WTF. Is trump trying to intimidate hospitals into not reporting now?
How about the national guard start helping food banks gather and distribute food? Or go gather infomation about all the people who are dying at home without COVID testing. Or contact tracing. I bet the national guard could be really good at that.
Leave the medical professionals to get on with their jobs.
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You know, trout rarely eat human flesh, but I hope they make an exception.
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Perhaps Fish and Wildife could release a half-dozen problem bears in the immediate vicinity of Tucker’s camp?
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I wonder if Trout and Piranha are inter-fertile 
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The short answer is YES!
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what goes around, comes around mr. woolery.
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July 14, 2020 (Tuesday)
This afternoon, Trump held a press conference in the Rose Garden of the White House to announce that he had signed into law the Hong Kong Autonomy Act, clearing the way for sanctions on Chinese officials and entities that undermine Hong Kong’s autonomy. As soon as he had made the announcement, he launched into a rambling attack on presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, using the official press conference as he had done the official coronavirus briefings when he held them: as an opportunity for a campaign rally-type speech.
A couple of things jumped out about the speech. First, it is clear that Trump is enormously concerned about being attacked for the trade deal he made with China in January, in the early days of the coronavirus epidemic. Trump’s former National Security Advisor John Bolton’s account of his time in the administration revealed that in June 2019, Trump begged Chinese President Xi Jinping to help him win reelection by agreeing to buy more U.S. agricultural products. This purchase was central to the January trade deal. But the trade deal, which Trump and his people touted as a game-changer for the economy, hurt America’s response to the coronavirus as Trump’s cheery support for Xi Jinping and the way in which the Chinese leader was handling the coronavirus helped slow our own response to the crisis.
Now Trump is eager to distance himself from the earlier deal. The constant refrain of his speech was how hard he has been on China in contrast to how easy Biden had been when he was vice president. “Make no mistake,” Trump said, “We hold China fully responsible for concealing the virus and unleashing it upon the world. They could’ve stopped it. They should’ve stopped it. It would’ve been very easy to do at the source when it happened. In contrast,” he continued, “Joe Biden’s entire career has been a gift to the Chinese Communist Party and to the calamity of — of errors that they’ve made.”
He then launched into a rambling tirade against Biden, including an aside claiming wildly that Biden’s son Hunter “walked out with 1.5 billion,” presumably a reference to a debunked story seeded by Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani that China paid Hunter off to curry favor with then-Vice President Biden. Trump’s speech was full of debunked talking points like this one—claiming falsely again, for example, that “the military was totally depleted” when he took office. These claims play well at his rallies but sound unhinged in the Rose Garden in daylight. In a speech that went on for 63 minutes, he characterized Biden’s positions in such wildly exaggerated terms it seemed a caricature. He suggested, for example, that Biden intends to curb carbon emissions by getting rid of windows in homes and offices.
Trump defended his administration’s handling of the coronavirus, claiming it has saved “millions of lives…. It could be 2 to 3 million.” (“But if we had listened to Joe Biden,” he said, “hundreds of thousands of additional lives would have been lost.”)
It was the speech of an embattled man.
It seems clear that pressure is building on him. Coronavirus cases in the U.S. approach 3.5 million and deaths have topped 136,000. Cases of infection are surging across the country. Florida has just set a single day record for deaths and Arizona and Texas are bringing in refrigerated morgue trucks.
Yet Trump continues to insist that schools must open fully and on schedule, and today, in a really unusual public hit on one member of an administration from another, Trump’s trade advisor Peter Navarro published an op-ed in USA Today attacking Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who is one of the administration’s key advisors on the pandemic. The highly respected 79-year-old Fauci has served every president since Ronald Reagan and has been instrumental in preventing epidemics in the U.S. since the worst part of the AIDS crisis. He insists that Americans must do more to combat the surging disease, and has warned that premature reopening of businesses and schools will continue to spread the illness. Nonetheless, Navarro—who is not a doctor— urges a faster reopening, and announced in his op-ed that Fauci “has been wrong about everything I have interacted with him on.”
Still, Americans are not eager to put their children into harm’s way. An Axios-Ipsos poll released today revealed that 71% of Americans—including 53% of Republicans—think it is risky to send their children back to school.
Some administrators are listening. Two of the largest school districts in the country, Los Angeles and San Diego, just announced they will resume coursework on-line in the fall. Together, those districts enroll more than 700,000 students. Their resistance to Trump’s edict are paving the way for others.
The administration had tried to pressure colleges and universities to reopen as normal this fall by threatening to deport foreign students if their schools went to online instruction. As universities and 20 states immediately sued, the administration today dropped the plan.
Talk radio host Rush Limbaugh offered today that Americans must “adapt” to the coronavirus, taking our cue from the Donner Party, a group of pioneers snowed into the Sierra Nevada Mountain range on their way to California in 1847, who “had to turn to cannibalism to survive.” “It’s just what was," he said. “They didn’t complain about it, because there was nothing they could do. They had to adapt. This is what’s missing. There seems to be no concept of adaptation. There seems to be no understanding in the Millennial generation that we can adapt to this, and that we’re going to have to.”
Interestingly, Limbaugh left out half the story of what happened to the Donner Party. After it was rescued and news of what had happened to the members of the group raced back east, Americans were horrified. Determined to guarantee that no other travelers would ever have to endure such a fate, Congress backed government policies to place army guides on the route to California and Oregon. The government did its best to make sure that those crossing the dangerous mountains would arrive safely at their destination.
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Begs the question how many “interactions” had Navarro, and what was the subject of those?
Before anyone gets distracted by that question: it doesn’t matter, since whatever it was and how often it was, that’s just your opinion, mate. The rest of the world looks in horror at your media stunt.
We already had Alex Jones threatening to eat his neighbours. What’s the thing with the US American right wing nutter and eating people? Possibly never rich ones, either.
Context is for … cannibals?
Oh, yeah, and 2022 is looming: Soylent Green™ is people.
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