And now a message from Ruth.

Here's the deal, you can try to distort the system. You can attempt to kill as many of us as you possibly can. But it won't matter, we're taking you down at the polls, no matter how hard you try to rig the election.

For Ruth, we rise.https://t.co/4IUi2hMJ41

— Pattern Integrity Films (@pttrn_ntgrty) October 27, 2020

Despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt.

We do not.

Climbing the water tower to defend Wolf, Fetterman, Shapiro, Peduto and Levine

Yesterday, Trump menaced my governor, Tom Wolf. Weirdly, Trump said he’d been watching Tom Wolf in Philadelphia. Cue Sting and the Police at about the 3:50 minute mark:

Would someone please tell Donald that our state capital is Harrisburg, not Philadelphia?

What the heck could Trump be watching in Philly anyway? That thing the Eagles call football?? All I’ve seen lately from Philly is souls to the polls videos with people in line dancing to the Cha-Cha Stomp.

Anyway, I think our governor has handled the pandemic extraordinarily well. Unlike Cuomo and Whitmer, Wolf has kept a relatively low profile. There was a lockdown but Wolf threaded the needle very delicately. Many of the most rural counties in PA opened as quickly as possible without a significant number of cases. They opened way before the cities here.

Here in Pittsburgh, Mayor Peduto opened up the bars and restaurants in June and then after two weeks of pleading with people to wear masks and socially distance, he closed them again. Grounding us sucked but we flattened the curve after our spike in July. At one point in August we were down to 0 cases in Allegheny county. We’re now up to about 90 cases/day, which sounds like a lot until you consider how big Pittsburgh is. We had 72 cases in Allegheny county yesterday. That’s as many as more sparsely populated but deep deep red York county had yesterday.

Controlling this pandemic *can* be done. It’s been the same kind of disease prevention tactics we’ve been using for millennia.

But that hasn’t stopped the red counties in PA from getting all defiant and taking off their masks. Westmoreland county, just East of us, is seeing a pretty big spike. Trump country. Yeah, baby.

So, Trump came to PA yesterday and menaced my governor and his administration including AG Josh Shapiro, who is fighting the Trump campaign lawsuits in the courts. By extension, he’s insulted Rachel Levine, our excellent transgender health commissioner and Lt Governor John Fetterman who’s been whipping the vote.

Trump is having rallies in Martinsburg and Lititz, two teeming metropolises whose populations combined wouldn’t fill up a football stadium. He’s got to be bussing people in and emptying entire counties in order to get a few thousand people to his infect-a-thons. He’s pissed that Wolf has been restricting his rally venues.

And he’s been menacing Philly.

His voters are going to be going to the polls on 11/3. That should be interesting. By then, the accumulated effect of all those superspreader events in PA should mean that there will be a lot more infected people squeezing into the basements of the local Methodist churches, maskless no doubt, breathing all over the hapless poll workers, while the rest of us mail in ballot voters are in the safety of our homes, waiting for Donald to be soundly defeated.

Then we take to the street to Cha-Cha stomp him out of our lives for good.

****************

Hey, mail in voters in PA, if you just received your ballot, you can still deliver it personally to your board of elections. Do it ASAP. The mail carriers might be overwhelmed this week.

If you don’t need to make the lines any longer on Election Day, don’t.

Got your ballot? USE IT.

Drop it off.

That simple.

— John Fetterman (@JohnFetterman) October 27, 2020

Blitzkrieg or Sitzkrieg?

I’ve heard commentators opine that Roberts will play a waiting game and resist the siren song of the federalist society to make America into another third world country right away.

But then I remember what the lame duck North Carolina and Wisconsin legislatures did to effectively hobble the newly elected Democratic Governors to their states. They removed powers from the governors and if I recall correctly, the state supreme courts upheld most of the damage.

I don’t think that’s a possibility that we can exclude at the moment though I have no idea what shape that would take. It seems to me that stripping the president of executive powers would require some cooperation from the House and that’s not going to happen. Unless Trump gives them no choice.

The GOP can dump Trump now at their leisure. They don’t need him anymore. And they must know that we are about to make them an ex-party. So, why not pull out all the stops and push through as much crap as they can?

I’m going with Blitzkrieg.

I’m not a shrink but…

… I read Mary Trump’s opinion piece in WaPo the other day. She was making the case for the American Psychiatric Association to drop the Goldwater Rule that prevents them from attempting to diagnose the psychiatric state of presidential candidates.

Now, I’m no psychologist or psychiatrist but as I read Mary’s book and her opinion piece, I found that she dropped very clinical sounding descriptions of his behavior all over the place. Here’s what I think she’s telling us based on her personal observations, Trump’s history and his behavior as an adult and in office.

It’s too simplistic to call him a narcissist. That’s a no brainer assessment. It’s right out there but it’s not everything abc it’s not everything that drives him. In fact, Mary Trump tells us what Donald’s problem is but she couched it in terms of an example:

While psychiatric diagnosis is a technical process, it is entirely within bounds to draw conclusions based on observable behavior. It is one thing to declare definitively that a person has anti-social personality disorder (a specific diagnostic term); it is another to point to behaviors — such as deliberately putting other people in harm’s way for no discernible reason (for example, abandoning our Kurdish allies) beyond one’s own self-interest — and express the general conclusion that it is dangerous to have somebody in the Oval Office who is incapable of empathy.

Basically, Trump is diagnosis is closer to antisocial personality disorder. That can overlap with sociopathy and psychopathy but it also exists with other related personality disorders like narcissistic and borderline personality disorder.

So, what’s new here? I think the thing that nails antisocial personality disorder is that it is frequently preceded in childhood as conduct disorder. You know that kid who was always calling out the teacher in class, throwing you against the wall in the hallway and was never the stellar student? That was Trump. Sometimes CD is exacerbated by ADHD. If you have a hard time concentrating in class, sitting still and controlling your impulses, you start to get negative attention from adults. That in turn can make you anxious, uncooperative, lead to acting out and bullying other kids. Trump was starting to get out of hand in his adolescence and got sent to a military academy, probably as much to get him out of his mother’s hair as to straighten his ass out.

Hey, remember Sandor and Gregor Clegane in Game of Thrones? As kids, Sandor had something Gregor wanted and wouldn’t give it up. So Gregor forced Sandor’s face down in the hot coals of the fire. Yeah, Trump was that kind of kid with his brother Robert. Minus the face burning.

So, I think Mary is telling us that Trump is a dangerous guy. Cold, unempathetic, impulsive, incapable of consuming information the way a president needs to, a bully, unlawful, sadistic and a parasite. He’s had family and business associates cover for him all his life. He puts other people in danger. He’s not capable of sustaining long term relationships. He’s arrogant and does not consider the lives of others.

He’s about to throw another superspreader event for Amy Coney Barrett. It sums up what Trump is all about. He knows it’s dangerous but he’s defying anyone who tries to get him to follow the rules. And he’s throwing this party because he wants to poke the rest of us in the eyes. He enjoys it. It’s not even particularly important to him that she stands for things he doesn’t really care for. The point is the rest of us are pissed off and he’s feeling his Cheerios.

Based on what I read, if he loses, he’s going to go nuclear on us. If he can’t persuade the courts to let him overturn the elections based on his desired expectations, don’t be surprised if he wrecks what’s left of the government on the way out the door. He’s going to be angry, vengeful and destructive.

That’s why the APA should say something now. His base might not GAF (more on them later) but there might be one or two more security minded suburban women per precinct or a couple more Jorgensen voters who will get off the fence.

We don’t have much to lose at this point. Merely pointing it out may lead him to commit the behaviors that would prove the point. Like trying to arrest his opponent, firing what’s left of the “deep state” (already in the works), spilling national security to North Korea, Russia and Iran. We’ve already seen how he treated the blue states during the first peak. Unless Pence can invoke the 25th amendment after the election, Trump might be like that guy who puts all the company secrets on a flash drive on the way out the door and sells it to the highest bidder.

How much damage can Trump do in the next few months? A LOT.

OoOOooo!! I got targeted by some psyops texting.

I feel special now:

Golly, I wonder who bought that phone number this year.

Barrett’s Notebook

Add your own text.

I’ve heard the White House is planning another superspreader event for this evening when they swear her in.

Tacky? Yes.

Is she being hired to screw the voters? I think we can confidently say yes.

Is she going to participate in the coverup of Trump and the Republicans corruption? I wouldn’t be surprised.

Does she care that she’s going to be forever known as the justice appointed by the most corrupt president in history?

No. Zealots keep their eyes on the prize.

The ends justify the means.

Whipping the PA vote

Lt Governor John Fetterman is whipping the vote this weekend. If you have a mail in ballot in your hot little hands, please get it to the Board of Elections this weekend or mail it in NOW.

There’s no line if you mail it in.

— John Fetterman (@JohnFetterman) October 24, 2020

It sounds like the thing bothering the governor, Tom Wolf, and Fetterman, is the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett on Monday. There is real concern that she’s going to reverse some rulings once she’s on the court, the most relevant being that if your ballot isn’t at the BOE on ELECTION DAY, it won’t be counted. Right now, we have a three day extension because of Justice Roberts. But Let’s face it, only a zealot and fanatic would accept a position on the court under these circumstances. So, we can count on her to carry Trump’s water.

Yes, it is disgusting.

Just get the ballots in ASAP. The line at the City County building in Pittsburgh is about 1.5 hours for early voting but if you’re just dropping off a ballot, the line is short.

Let’s do it.

PA -Gov. Tom Wolf says get your mail in ballot in ASAP

I'm asking all PA mail ballot voters to take action this weekend.

Mark, seal in both envelopes, sign, and return your voted mail ballot to your county election office:

📮 By mail (ASAP)
🏛 In-person
📩 At an official drop box location

Learn how at https://t.co/JEARQHgldw.

— Governor Josh Shapiro (@GovernorShapiro) October 23, 2020

I hope he doesn’t know something I don’t know. For some reason, I’ve been super anxious this week. I haven’t been able to concentrate or sleep.

Yeah, I’m kinda skerred. If you’ve got a mail in ballot, git’er in.

Last “Debate”: Anything could happen.

I’m not predicting anything.

Have at it.

If anyone is being unfair, it’s Trump

Trump is constantly whining about how unfair everyone is to him when they question him, expose his lies or try to hold him accountable.

By the way, who was it that lately sent me a “If Trump was Churchill during the Blitz (in the style of Covid)”? So true.

Anyway, if anyone is being unfair these days, it’s Trump. After all, he’s threatening Americans with pre-existing conditions, seniors who are retired or about to retire by threatening to permanently suspend the payroll tax, and taking every state that wants a free and fair election to court. He says he won’t agree to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses. He’s installing a hard right wing zealot on the Supreme Court, making it difficult if not impossible for working people to get justice again for a generation. Some of us will be dead by the time Amy Coney Barrett dies on the job. It’s going to be THAT LONG.

And then there’s Covid and the unfairness of watching Trump scoff at science and discredit the scientists everyday while millions of us get sick, get thrown out of our jobs or die.

I’m sick of hearing about how unfair life is for this ignorant, bully of a “president”. Why should any of us care about what is unfair to him? He’s gotten away with bad business deals, bad social behavior and irresponsibility his whole life.

These whole four years, and the 20 years that preceded them, have been grossly unfair to the rest of us.

Someone needs to call him on it and tell him once and for all that life is not fair, Donald. He’s had it much better than most people. But if he really finds the expectations we have of him to be unfair, there’s the door. Don’t let it hit you on the way out.

We really don’t give a damn.

Jeezus, Republicans really are the daintiest snowflakes.