Mind you, it’s going to be hard to top a convention whose keynote speaker was Scott Baoi (sp?), who apparently was famous for being a person who liked Donald Trump and/or did commercials or something?
I think they should host it — are you sitting down — in a coal mine that meddling federal authorities have deemed unsafe! That’ll stick it to the libs!
West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice (R) said that any president would be welcome in the state, except “maybe not Barack Obama,” Wednesday while discussing his bid to host the Republican National Convention.
They have contracts with venues - all those bizes will be stiffed by Trump.
They’ve had holds put in 50,000? hotel rooms for the delegates- the news agencies have done me that as well/ for at least a year. And the state works with the City to coordinate this and provide security. With a slapped together plan and manpower not paid for - just imagine the types of huge, very organized protests hitting that inadequate security. It costs a City a ton of money to support a convention. With no lead time of two years to fund raise, under Covina 19 slashed budgets and huge staff layoffs.
He’s either going to back down or we’ll be watching a week of disaster movies.
Tabloid paper Ilta-Sanomat examined the possibility that support levels and influence of populist parties could see a boost once the coronavirus crisis is over and the country tries to rebuild its heavily-burdened economy.
The head of research at polling firm Taloustutkimus, Juho Rahkonen , told the paper there’s a good chance voters will become more insular as it comes time to repay coronavirus-caused debt, likely causing the populist Finns Party to see an increase in support.
The evidence he pointed to were empathy surveys that showed Finns had indeed turned more inward during the coronavirus crisis, noting that the biggest change was seen among Greens supporters. In February, 94 percent of Greens supporters said Finland should help children in foreign countries if they are poor or unable to go to school.
However, a few months later in April - the peak of the coronavirus crisis in Finland so far - just 81 percent of Greens said they agreed with that sentiment.
Rahkonen said he thinks the development could be a boon for populism in the country, noting that even slight changes in values could mean tens of thousands of votes. Rahkonen noted that the Finns Party saw a boost in popularity following the 2008 financial crisis, saying that populism is driven by economic insecurity and people’s fears of losing their jobs.
Thousands of demonstrators in downtown Oslo. Police say they focus on order and not infection control. - We can get a super-spreading situation, warns Deputy Health Director Espen Rostrup Nakstad.
Over 19,000 people had said on facebook that they planned to attend today’s demonstration, but late yesterday the health authorities refused to lift the ban on gatherings of more than 50, and the organizers turned it into a 50 person by-invitation demonstration. However, thousands showed up anyway.
(Incidentally, the Embassy – where the protest started before moving to the parliament – had officially said that it welcomed the protest, even when 19000 were expected.)
Now that Trump has his beautiful jobs report that has made George Floyd happy in whichever heaven black people go to, rest assured that no amount of death will be sufficient for another lockdown.
Instead of focusing on possible Trump interference, many economists wish people would focus on the fact that 21 million Americans are currently unemployed and over 2 million have permanently lost their jobs.
The situation remains dire, they say, even after a few jobs returned in May as the economy reopened.
The constant lie is that “unemployment” figures only track people currently filing unemployment claims. Once those end you are considered to “no longer be seeking work” whether you are or not. Any time you see unemployment figures in the US add at least 5-10% on top.
It was a bit hard to get the MAGA anti-lockdown protests to catch on too much, but imagine what March-May could have been like if Obama had been president. Picture a full rebellion against tyranny from the Kenyan president if the Feds tried to encourage any sort of responsible state action.
There were always mixed messages from the Feds generally and even Trump himself about whether lockdown was necessary. Sure he kept trying to blame liberal governors and pushed to OPEN FASTER, but it was hardly straightforward. Without a clear “villain” to rebel against, the response, while hyped by our media, was pretty muted.
But try to imagine Tsar Obama instituting or just encouraging a nationwide lockdown. Republican governors would have rejected anything the Feds pushed, including fully paid for testing. Large protests in any state with a Dem governor trying to do the right thing. Front page stories in that fucking newspaper dominated by the question of whether OBAMA HAD GONE TOO FAR with whatever meek encouragement they would have used to stop the country from infecting itself to death.
However “good” the Obama administration’s response would have been, in theory, the backlash would have been immense.
I do believe that Joe Biden would receive different treatment from his “good friends” and the media than Obama, for reasons he can’t quite seem to express, but not that much better. I hope someone in his team is ready for that…and willing to fight.
The thing is, it would have seemed very much as if the response was overblown, because an Obama administration would have listened to the experts and shut this shit down hard in February, and we’d be looking at several thousand cases and maybe a hundred-something deaths instead of millions and hundreds-of-thousands. The unfortunate contradiction would have been that, the better the response to the pandemic, the less it would have seemed justified.
