Because 2020, our neighbor’s house caught on fire at 2am last night.  The humans are fine, the pets are not.  It looks like it started in the garage.  The whole right side of the house is totaled.   It’s very tragic.  It’s also very 2020.  2020, the nightmare year that will not end.

Looks like Trump has cobbled himself the fascist’s tool of a national police force and is inflicting it on that hotbed of violence and radicals, Portland, Oregon.  A city best known for its hipsters and its microbrews.  The Founders didn’t even want a standing military because they were afraid a President would use it as a tool of oppression.  But as we’ve found, the military isn’t too interested in fascist repression.  So Trump reaches for his goons.

We worried about this when GWB set up DHS in the first place.  Homeland Security was a centralized clearing house where someone unscrupulous could do something bad.  We were told at the time that no one unscrupulous would come along.  Ha ha, weren’t we had there.  Because someone unscrupulous has come along and the only governing principle he seems to understand is bullying brutality.

All those right wingers for years warning their people to get their guns because the liberals were coming for them.  And when someone actually does roll out straight up fascist repression with unmarked goons, unmarked trucks, and rogue data collection, they all give a collective shrug and mutter something about statues.  The GOP doesn’t even stand for the things the GOP has actually gone on and on about for years.    That’s how spineless they are.

I don’t know how this Portland thing is going to end, but I assume not good.  And I’m concerned this is a preview to country-wide voter repression in November.  Are they going to have goons grab people waiting in lines to vote and take them to some kind of concentration camp?  We have no idea.  We know they’re capable of building concentration camps — they’re all along the southern border.  What we don’t know is the final point of these DHS creeps.

Somehow, Trump thinks this will help him get re-elected.

This whole thing is freaking me out completely.  And they want to deploy this to Baltimore.  You know, right up the street, up 95 Baltimore.  Baltimore does not need DHS creeps running around.  Baltimore can handle itself.  We don’t want them.  Hogan doesn’t want them.  The Baltimore police don’t want them.  No one wants these people.

No one wants them.  No one wants jack booted thugs.  Except, apparently, Donald Trump.

But back in the world of “people dying at 900 a day” and “everything is terrible,” I have a Biden quote I like:

Joe Biden slammed President Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic in a MSNBC interview, claiming that the president has “raised the white flag.”

Said Biden: “I think he’s right, no country has ever done what he’s done — walk away. There is no leadership here.”

He added: “He raised the white flag. He has no idea what to do. It’s zero. It’s only one thing he has in mind — how does he win reelection? And it doesn’t matter how many people get COVID and or die from COVID because he fears that if the economy is strapped as badly as it is today that, in fact, he is going to be in trouble.”

Surrender monkey indeed.

Stats:

  • 46,469,524 total tests completed
  • 3,843,941 total cases of COVID-19
  • 143,266 dead
  • 79,251 cases in MD with 3,487 dead
  • 1 in 103 people have it in Howard County

That case load number is probably lagging by up to 10 days because the labs are backed up.  And in Maryland, the case rate is shooting up again because everyone is hanging out in bars and giving it to each other.