Never Forget
Dec. 31, 2019. China alerts the W.H.O. to a new virus.
Early Jan., 2020. Trump, at an intelligence briefing, is warned of the danger.
Jan. 21. U.S. confirms first case of Covid-19 in Washington State.
Jan. 22. “Situation is totally under control”, says Trump.
Jan. 23. City of Wuhan is locked down.
***JANUARY 24th, I get covid, from a friend FROM China, they don’t know yet what it is, AND THEY SAID I SHOULD BE DEAD.
Jan. 30. W.H.O. declares an emergency of international concern.
Jan. 30. Trump says “We think it’s going to have a very good ending for us.”
Feb. 1. Trump plays golf.
Feb. 5. Trump administration does not use the successful German test protocol, preferring to create its own. U.S. testing kits are sent to 100 American public health laboratories, but the test is faulty, and the U.S. falls behind other countries in testing.
Feb. 6. First American dies of Covid-19.
Feb. 15. Trump plays golf.
Feb. 16. First death in Europe.
Feb. 23. Italy places towns under quarantine.
Feb. 24. Trump tweets “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the U.S.A. the stock market is starting to look very good to me.”
Feb. 25. The U.S. stock market plunges.
Feb. 27. Australia designates Covid-19 as a pandemic.
Feb. 28. At a rally in South Carolina, Trump described the Coronavirus as “the Democrats’ New Hoax.”
Mar. 5. Greece closes schools, as does Italy and Iran.
Mar. 6. Trump announces “anybody that needs a test gets a test.” Hundreds of emergency rooms are flooded with test requests, but because the U.S. was behind in getting accurate kits made, they can’t get tests.
Mar. 7. Trump plays golf.
Mar. 8. Trump plays golf.
Mar. 8. South Korea tests 189,000 people; the United States tests just 1,700 people.
Mar. 10. Trump says “We’re doing a great job with it, and it will go away.”
Mar. 11. W.H.O. declares a pandemic.
Mar. 13. France closes all schools, as does Ireland and Germany.
Mar. 13. Trump takes no responsibilities for testing failures.
Mar. 13. When asked by a reporter why the Trump Administration abolished a White House pandemic response team in 2018, Trump replies “I just think it’s a nasty question… I don’t know anything about it.:
Mar. 14. Spain goes into lockdown.
Mar. 16. Canada goes into lockdown.
Mar. 16. Trump admits that he dismanatled the pandemic response team in 2018.
Mar. 16. Trump rates his response to the outbreak as a “10.”
Mar. 17. France goes into lockdown.
Mar. 19. Trump admits to Bob Woodward that he knew Covid-19 was a threat to Americans, but decided to mislead them, saying “I always wanted to play it down.”
Mar. 19. China announces zero new cases of Covid-19.
Mar. 19. California issues a stay-at-home order.
Mar. 19. At a press briefing, Trump stated “Nobody knew there’d be a pandemic or an epidemic of this proportion. Nobody’s ever seen anything like this before.”
Mar. 20. When asked by a reporter “What do you say to Americans watching right now who are scared?”, Trump replied “I say you are a terrible reporter, that’s what I say. I think that’s a very nasty question.”
Mar. 23. The U.K. goes into lockdown.
Mar. 24. A doctor at Elmhurst Center in NY describes the situation at the wards as “apocalyptic.”
Mar. 26. U.S. death toll reaches 1,000.
Mar. 26. NY emergency dispatchers receive over 7,000 calls in one day.
Mar. 28. U.S. death toll reaches 2,000.
Mar. 29. Trump suggests that shortages of respirator masks are due to nurses stealing them.
Apr. 6. N.Y. hospitals are at the breaking point as the U.S. death toll reaches 10,000.
Apr. 6. Trump declares “We have to open our country up!”
Apr. 15. U.S. death toll reaches 25.000.
Apr. 16. Trump issues guidance to Governors saying they can start re-opening their states in two weeks.
Apr. 23. Trump suggests scientists investigate injecting disinfectants into Coronavirus patients.
Apr. 24. Official U.S. death toll reaches 50,000.
Apr. 28. Trump states that “The virus will go away.”
Apr. 29. Dozens of decomposing bodies are found in u-Haul trucks at a funeral parlor. The funeral director said he used the trucks because he ran out of space in the chapel. “Bodies are coming out of our ears.”
May 8. Trump says “The U.S. is the world leader in responding to Covid-19.
May 8. A huge Disaster Morgue opens in New York, with over fifty refrigerated trucks parked on Brooklyn’s 39th street pier.
May 23. Trump plays golf.
May 24. Trump plays golf.
May 27. U.S. death toll reaches 100,000.
June 21. Trump plays golf.
June 24. Trump’s insistence on reopening results in a surge of infections across Southern and Western states.
June 27. Trump plays golf.
June 28. Trump plays golf.
July 3. Trump plays golf.
July 5. Trump plays golf.
July 11. Trump plays golf.
July 12. The state of Florida registers over 15,000 new infections in a single day; a record.
July 16. The U.S. records a total of 75,000 new cases in a single day. The virus is surging across the country -It is not going away.
July 18. Trump plays golf.
July 19. Commenting on the surging death toll, Trump tells Fox News “It is what it is.”
July 25. Trump plays golf.
Aug. 1. U.S. death toll reaches 150,000.
Aug. 2. Trump plays golf.
Aug. 7. Trump plays golf [toll roughly 156,000 dead]
Aug. 15. Trump plays golf [toll roughly 160,000 dead]
Aug. 22. Trump plays golf [toll roughly 164,000 dead]
Aug. 23. Trump plays golf [toll roughly 168,000 dead]
Aug. 30. Trump plays golf [toll roughtly 171,000 dead]
Sept. 5. Trump plays golf [toll roughly 175,000 dead]
Sept. 6. Trump plays golf. [toll roughly 180,000 dead]
Sept. 20. Trump plays golf [toll roughly 184,000 dead]
Sept. 21. Trump at a rally states “It affects virtually nobody” – death toll 197,000.
Sept. 22. U.S. official death toll reaches 200,000 people. One in every 1,600 Americans is dead.
Even adjusted for population, America’s death toll is twice as high as Canada’s, five times as high as Germany, eighteen times higher than Australia, and eighty times higher than South Korea.
America’s Covid death toll is the highest in the world.
Oct. 2. President Trump and First Lady test positive for Covid.

Capital One Financial hit back on Friday against a lawsuit over its ⁠decision to close the Trump ⁠Organization’s bank accounts ​years ago, stating that it did so after a review by anti-money-laundering experts.

The disclosure marks the first time a bank has formally tied money-laundering concerns to Donald Trump’s family business. Capital One is seeking to dismiss the case by casting doubt on claims of illegally debanking – or denying services on religious or political grounds – the Trump Organization.

The Trump Organization and ⁠Capital One did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Capital One has never accused the Trump Organization of money laundering. ​But Friday’s filing argues that “documents and Plaintiffs’ own ‌allegations make clear that Capital One closed ‌Plaintiffs’ accounts for anti-money laundering (‘AML’) reasons.

“The closures were the result of months of analysis and a careful review by ‌Capital One’s AML team in accordance with bank policies and regulatory guidance.”

Capital One gave notice of its plans to close more than 300 Trump-affiliated bank accounts in March 2021.

The Trump Organization and Eric Trump, the president’s son, filed a lawsuit in March 2025 in a Florida federal court, alleging the accounts were closed because of Capital One’s “woke” beliefs and its desire to benefit from the political mood after the 6 January 2021 riot at the US Capitol.

Capital One said in Friday’s filing that the Trump Organization’s allegations of political pretext were “misguided” and “based on cherry-picked quotations unsupported by the full context” of documents submitted to the court.

“The transaction patterns identified by Capital One are among the types of activity flagged by federal banking guidance,” the filing said.

Since the start ⁠of Trump’s second term, his administration has put pressure on some large banks, echoing conservative complaints ​that the institutions are deliberately targeting ​the political right. Trump signed an executive order in ​August 2025 barring discriminatory debanking.

In January, Trump filed a suit against JPMorgan Chase on the same ​grounds, underscoring the fraught policy ‌environment Wall Street is ​navigating during the president’s second ​term. In 2019, during his first term, Trump sued Capital One and Deutsche Bank in an attempt to prevent them from sharing financial records with Congress as part of a probe led by Democratic lawmakers.

Anti-money-laundering professionals at Deutsche Bank reportedly flagged a set of transactions, but executives ignored them; Deutsche Bank denied the report at the time.

Senator Tommy Tuberville, an Alabama Republican, on Thursday characterized Social Security as a “scam” and a “Ponzi scheme,” using a speech on the Senate floor to advocate for allowing Americans to retain and independently invest a greater share of their retirement savings.

Tuberville, who is a member of the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging, argued that mandatory participation forces workers to contribute to a federal program that may ultimately fail to deliver expected benefits.

“It’s happening in broad daylight before our very eyes. Politicians here in Washington know what’s going on, but they refuse to speak about it,” the senator said.

“For decades now, the American people have paid into Social Security each month without having any idea if they will ever see a cent of the money that they put in. Since being signed in the law in 1935 by Franklin Delano Roosevelt […] Americans’ money has been going in the front door of the federal government and then going right out the back door.“

This fool is the Republican candidate for governor of Alabama.  And he likely will win.  After all, this is Alabama we are talking about.

It’s like the ending of the 1993 movie “Chinatown” — the last scene in which the old detective said to Jack Nicholson’s character:  “Forget it Jake — it’s Alabama.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci declined to answer senators’ questions at a hearing Wednesday on the origins of Covid and the government’s handling of the pandemic, saying in prepared remarks that he would invoke his 5th Amendment right not to testify to avoid the possibility that Republicans could try to use his testimony to prosecute him for perjury.

The surprise decision shook up the hearing, which was expected to be contentious given Fauci’s previous public clashes with Chairman Rand Paul, R-Ky.

In his opening statement to the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Fauci pointed to Paul’s “obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution, his repeated slanderous comments about me” and his decision to publicly release the doctor’s personal journal.

“The only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, ‘behind bars,’” Fauci said.

“Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion,” he continued. “Therefore, although it pains me to do so because of the respect that I have for the legislative branch of government and my decades long record of cooperating with Congress, under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the 5th Amendment of the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions.”

 

GOOD FOR YOU, DR.  FAUCI.  About time someone stood up to these morons.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At least one Baptist understands.  This article by editor Mark Wingfield was published in the recent edition of “Baptist News Global.”

QUOTE

A common criticism I get here at BNG and that some of my progressive clergy friends get in their congregations is this: “Why do you have to keep talking about Donald Trump and Christian nationalism all the time? Could you please change the subject?”

This question fails to grasp the urgency of our current crisis. It is like saying to a woman who is being abused at home, “Why do you have to talk about your abusive husband all the time? Can’t you talk about something more pleasant?” It is like saying to a person reporting unsafe working conditions in a factory, “Why do you have to talk about these scary things all the time? Can’t you talk about something less stressful?”

Donald Trump is an abuser. He is an adjudicated rapist and predator. Donald Trump is a grifter. He is a well-known con man who gets away with the con because so many don’t want to talk about it. Donald Trump is a liar unlike any liar most of us ever have known. And there are enormous consequences to his perpetual lying. Donald Trump is literally the most dangerous man in the world, and you want to label me with “Trump Derangement Syndrome” for saying that.

MAGA is an abusive movement that preys on the most racist and misogynistic tropes possible and does real harm to people. Real people are dying and starving and becoming ill because of the cruelty and stupidity of the Trump administration. Lives are being ruined. Families are being ruined.

The nation’s house is on fire, and those of us who keep yelling “Fire!” are told to please talk about something more pleasant. While the fire rages.

Most of us would love to talk about more pleasant things but our consciences will not allow us that privilege. We must continue to sound the alarm while the threat remains.

If you want us to be quiet, step up and do something to put out the fire. Admit the urgency of the crisis. Identify with those being harmed. Use your position and privilege to call for change and hold accountable those who are enabling this insanity.

If you want us to shut up, then you must put up. Otherwise, we are not the problem.

END QUOTE

Will other Baptists and other denominations have the courage to speak the truth?

Why do we keep sounding the alarm? – Baptist News Global

Trump traveled today to Dover AFB DE to be present when the bodies of four soldiers killed in his useless war in Iran were returned home.

Here he is, awaiting the first of the transfer cases to be removed from the aircraft.  Guess which of the officials here is Trump.

Last night, Donald Trump essentially told us exactly what he will do this November. When reports start coming in that the Democrats are winning this fall, he will send in the troops.

He’ll point back to last night‘s speech and tell the nation:

“I told you so. I warned you. They rigged the election for the Democrats and now I have to stop it.”

He’ll mobilize ICE and the National Guard’s “Rapid Reaction Force” that he’s assembled over the past six months to seize ballot boxes and crush the inevitable “insurrection” — protests in the streets against his seizing ballot boxes — by “left-wing communist radical domestic terrorists.”

He’ll declare a state of emergency, invoke his NSPM-7, and blame it on a foreign country and/or “Antifa.” He’ll declare protesting a crime, and tear gas will fill our streets.

And those same white supremacists Trump has already pardoned can also easily imagine how it should play out when he calls them out to attack protesters; they’ve been terrorizing minority communities for centuries and are very good at it.

This includes his tens of thousands of well-armed loyalist cult members who’re salivating at the idea of splitting that $1.776 billion they believe they’ll get when he seizes absolute control of the country.

As Senator Amy Klobuchar said on MSNOW last night:

“This is a man desperate to hold onto his power and he will do anything to keep that power.”

Would he actually be so audacious as to try that? Could he actually pull it off?

He could, he will, because he’s already tried it once.

The difference is that six years ago — the last time he tried to overturn an election he lost — his Attorney General, FBI Director, Director of National Intelligence, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, DHS Secretary, and Chief of the National Guard would all have refused such an order, so he called on thousands of violent thugs to attack the Capitol, stop the election certification, and murder the vice president.

This time, in a classically Putin-esque move, he’s replaced all of those people with lickspittles like Blanche and true believer fanatics like Miller and Homan who’ll do exactly what he tells them to.

Many of them sat in the room with him last night, in the front row in front of the teleprompter, watching and nodding along with his lies. They know that if Democrats win and the election is certified this fall many of them, too, will end up on the wrong end of civil and criminal investigations.

Trump has recently declared, officially, that Democrats are traitors, communists, potential terrorists, and should be deported. The only thing he hasn’t demanded is for Democrats to be arrested for our politics, and that may well come in just a few months.

After all, he can’t afford to allow the House or Senate to fall into Democratic hands, because then he’ll be investigated with the power of law and subpoena for the many crimes he is currently committing.

He wouldn’t survive that politically, and he believes the Senate this time will actually convict him: they know that once he’s convicted and has thus lost his power, there’s no way he can regain it and he’ll no longer represent a threat to their political careers.

This is all why he’ll say or do anything to hang onto his power, because he knows if he loses that power his entire house of cards collapses.

He and his children go to prison or are forced into exile. His wife gets to reinvent her life the way she wants. What’s left of his properties gets sold off at auction like his casinos were the last time he went bankrupt.

This is what he’s imagining at 2 o’clock in the morning when he’s rage tweeting. He’s also remembering the terrifying hours he spent sitting in a courthouse charged with 34 felonies for which he could go to prison.

It’s easy for him to imagine, because it’s exactly what he constantly tries to do to people he thinks have slighted him, from Jim Comey to Leticia James to Adam Shiff and dozens of others: he tries to break them financially while threatening them with long and brutal imprisonment.

He’s done this repeatedly, and his most recent threat to break or jail somebody was issued the day before yesterday.

But none of what he’s planning works without a lot of ordinary people saying, “Yes,” and that’s also where we may have a say.

That’s the thing about these operations that gets lost when we talk about them as if they’re just the work of one man, America’s Hitler, to quote JD Vance. It’s never one man who pulls the whole thing off, although it does take a lying psychopath with charisma and some leadership skills to get the process rolling.

Ultimately, though, it can’t work without the National Guard captain who decides the order is lawful enough, the county clerk who hands over the machines because a federal agent showed her a piece of paper, the local cop who puts on the riot gear because his sergeant did, and the poll worker who turns his ballots over to masked ICE agents because it feels safer.

My friends who are there in Germany in 1933 told me, as does history, that that country didn’t fall to a majority; the Nazis never got a legitimate victory at the ballot box.

That nation fell, as others have throughout history, because tens of thousands of people in unremarkable jobs did the small thing that was asked of them in the moment it was asked, and told themselves it was only temporary, and it must be okay because somebody higher up must know something I don’t.

Every one of those people made that decision cold, under pressure, with a stranger in a uniform standing in front of them and about four seconds to think.

Which is why the useful work right now isn’t reactive, and it isn’t something we do in November. It’s finding out, before November, what the people around us are going to do.

— Go meet your county election officials; they’re mostly your neighbors, and in a lot of counties they’re the ones who’ll be standing between a federal agent sent by Trump and a ballot box with nobody backing them up.

— Ask your sheriff, on the record, at a public meeting, whether he takes orders from Washington or from the county.

— Ask your state legislators what the plan is if the National Guard shows up, because most of them probably haven’t thought about it and they damn well should. Ask your governor and state attorney general.

— Find out which lawyers in your town do election work and whether they’re organized. Get to know the people on your block well enough that you can call them at midnight, if necessary.

— Get to know your local elected officials and, in the few months ahead, show up at your local Democratic Party meeting.

People who’ve already decided what they’ll do, and who know that the folks around them decided the same thing, behave completely differently when the moment arrives than people who are trying to figure it out on the spot.

That’s not optimism. It’s just how it’s always worked, in Selma and Kiev and Manila and everywhere else people have looked at an illegal order or an out-of-control authority figure and said, “No.”

What matters most in the next four months is going to happen at the local level, in county commission meetings and election offices that nobody’s watching.

One of the keys to understanding the current catastrophe enveloping this country because it chose to make Donald Trump president (twice, so far) is that for no doubt complex sociological and psychological reasons lots of elite actors have to pretend to themselves and everyone else that what is happening is something other than what it is, which is to say complete madness.

Commenter Cereal makes a crucial point about this description in the WSJ of Trump’s totally imaginary 20% toll for ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz:

“Officials had been sent scrambling on Monday after Trump announced the policy.”

That’s not what policy means. Trump sharted out some imaginary brain juice with BIGLY NUMBERS and a bullshit boast and the headless chicken henchmen ran around trying to bridge the gap between his idiocy and some kind of reality.

That’s a concise description of something that now happens on a practically daily basis. The levels of denial here are truly mind-boggling.

First, Trump has no power to impose a 20% toll on ships passing through the strait. To do that, before we even start getting into trivial details such as what the legal or pseudo-legal mechanisms for doing this would look like exactly, the US would have to defeat Iran in a war that the US is currently losing, and quite badly.

Second, even if we enter into a fantasy world in which the US government would have the power to impose such a scheme, attempting to do so would completely destroy the economic viability of using the strait in the fashion it was being used in during the Before Time. Indeed the 20% number is classic Trump: it’s something that he pulled out of his feculent ass because, as Cereal notes, it sounded bigly and powerful, even though attempting to impose such a toll would destroy the commerce upon which it was imposed.

Third, and more globally, this is just some insane bullshit that Trump spewed on social media, which then has to be treated as if it’s something else, because the alternative would be to admit that we as a nation have done what we have in fact done, which is install a demented narcissistic madman as president.

Which, obviously, is not really an option.

. . . Commenter Tzimiskes sums up something that I’ve been feeling in an inchoate way for just about exactly eleven years now:

Trump is really helping me to understand history. If our elites can lie to themselves this much to rationalize their own power, I can much better understand how people in the past thought that some useless inbred king was divinely ordained by God. All that stupid stuff from the past that seemed unbelievable seems so much more plausible now that I am seeing people engage in the same stupidities in real time.

Especially since unlike in the past we had better options immediately available in very recent memory and our elites choose to go along with this insanity anyway. Anything is better than having their authority challenged.

That’s it, right there.

Trump has redecorated the White House using the same style as he did with the Oval Office.

 

Excuse me, but this is TRASHY.  That gold stuff on the walls and around the fireplace is plastic decorations that were spray-painted gold then glued onto the walls.  The man is white trash all the way.