Cont: The all-new "US Politics and coronavirus" thread pt. 2

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The governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, was undecided about reopening businesses and, later, schools until he met with Trump when the president visited Georgia. The next week, Kemp ordered everything back to normal. He also refused to mandate masks, saying that was an individual decision. Now that schools are reopening and within a couple of weeks closing because of outbreaks, the White House has thrown Kemp under the bus, criticizing him for reopening too quickly and saying the state should mandate masks, limit gatherings to ten or fewer, and so on. The schools are especially struggling.



What must irk Kemp is that Trump has waffled. First he urged Georgia to re-open, then in less than a week he attacked Kemp for moving too fast, only to walk back his strident criticism two weeks later.
 
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Spektator said:
The governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, was undecided about reopening businesses and, later, schools until he met with Trump when the president visited Georgia. The next week, Kemp ordered everything back to normal. He also refused to mandate masks, saying that was an individual decision. Now that schools are reopening and within a couple of weeks closing because of outbreaks, the White House has thrown Kemp under the bus, criticizing him for reopening too quickly and saying the state should mandate masks, limit gatherings to ten or fewer, and so on. The schools are especially struggling.
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It's awful that people in Georgia are paying for the foolishness of our elected officials with their health.

That aside, it's pretty hilarious watching these enabling Republican leaders scatter in panic as Trump flounders wildly.
 
Spektator said:
The governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, was undecided about reopening businesses and, later, schools until he met with Trump when the president visited Georgia. The next week, Kemp ordered everything back to normal. He also refused to mandate masks, saying that was an individual decision. Now that schools are reopening and within a couple of weeks closing because of outbreaks
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It's like I said the other day; if I didn't know better I'd think they were deliberately trying to kill as many of their own people as possible.
 
Spektator said:
The governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, was undecided about reopening businesses and, later, schools until he met with Trump when the president visited Georgia. The next week, Kemp ordered everything back to normal. He also refused to mandate masks, saying that was an individual decision. Now that schools are reopening and within a couple of weeks closing because of outbreaks, the White House has thrown Kemp under the bus, criticizing him for reopening too quickly and saying the state should mandate masks, limit gatherings to ten or fewer, and so on. The schools are especially struggling.


What must irk Kemp is that Trump has waffled. First he urged Georgia to re-open, then in less than a week he attacked Kemp for moving too fast, only to walk back his strident criticism two weeks later.
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What did he expect? Everyone can see that Trump has no impulse control; that he says whatever comes into his head; that he is totally unfiltered. It comes through in his speeches, news conferences and tweets. Those who deal with him regularly must surely have noticed this.
 
smartcooky said:
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What did he expect? Everyone can see that Trump has no impulse control; that he says whatever comes into his head; that he is totally unfiltered. It comes through in his speeches, news conferences and tweets. Those who deal with him regularly must surely have noticed this.
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I actually think that will be his undoing.

What will get that additional 1% to switch to voting for Joe Biden. Why would a Trump leaning swing voter, who voted for him in 2016 change his mind this time? I think a big factor will be that when handling the pandemic, he has frequently shifted and been inconsistent. People don't like that.

And when I say "big", I mean 1%, because in a close election, that's big.
 
Kemp falls into the long list of people that thought "oh he won't throw ME under the bus" that now have tire tracks on their bodies.
 
Bob001 said:
Except they elected their governor. Let's hope he gives them everything they voted for.
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SuburbanTurkey said:
Not everyone suffering in GA voted for Kemp.
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...Not even close, at last check, before getting to the part of the story where Kemp was presiding over his own election, had been engaging in massive purges of the voting rolls, and shenanigans happened like crazy around and during the election.

Maybe the people of Georgia did elect him democratically. It wouldn't surprise me. What is fairly apparent, though, is that Kemp played dirty to skew things in his favor.
 
Kemp has also dropped his lawsuit against Atlanta Mayor Keisha Bottom's mask mandate. However, "Kemp explained that when his order expires on Aug. 15, he will issue a new executive order "with relevant language." Whatever that means since he hasn't explained what that means.
 
Aridas said:
...Not even close, at last check, before getting to the part of the story where Kemp was presiding over his own election, had been engaging in massive purges of the voting rolls, and shenanigans happened like crazy around and during the election.

Maybe the people of Georgia did elect him democratically. It wouldn't surprise me. What is fairly apparent, though, is that Kemp played dirty to skew things in his favor.
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True, he did. His opponent was Stacey Abrams. Kemp, as Secretary of State, purged voters most vigorously in majority black precincts. In a neighboring country to ours, his poll watchers refused to allow elderly registered black voters from an assisted living home to enter the polling place because they arrived on a bus. Conflict of interest and shenanigans, indeed. A former teaching colleague of mine and his wife were turned away because they were "not registered," though they had voted in every election for twenty-four years and had lived at the same address all that time. They were not even allowed to file provisional ballots. Oddly, both had worked on Abrams' campaign.
 
Spektator said:
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In a neighboring country to ours, his poll watchers refused to allow elderly registered black voters from an assisted living home to enter the polling place because they arrived on a bus.
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How can anybody even pretend that's legal? Was there a complaint? Was there an investigation?
 
Bob001 said:
How can anybody even pretend that's legal? Was there a complaint? Was there an investigation?
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For what it's worth, Republicans (and Democrats especially before political realignments like the Southern Strategy), have a long history of using not particularly legal tactics like that to skew the vote - especially in relation to voters with different skin colors.

It gets worse, though, for 2020 -

The 2020 election will be the first in almost 40 years where Republicans will be allowed to engage in a massive, nationwide coordinated effort for a so-called “ballot security” campaign. During those 40 years, Republicans were under a federal consent decree to curb their poll “monitoring” efforts because, back in 1981, Republicans sent armed, off-duty police officers to patrol the polls in minority neighborhoods for a gubernatorial race in New Jersey. The chief strategist for the Republican in that race was a man you might have heard of: convicted felon Roger Stone.

The Democrats sued and won, and the Republican National Committee (RNC) promised to behave. The courts kept the Republicans more or less in line, although the Republicans always tried to work around it. Unfortunately, 2020 will be much different. A federal judge allowed the federal consent decree to expire in 2018. Free from any judicial oversight, the RNC will be able to conduct their dream voter intimidation campaign, and the Republicans are already planning on taking full advantage of this in November.
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There's plenty more poked at in that link, with a couple notable things being -

As recently as 2016, Roger Stone was ready to “help” again with a Trump-supporting group called “Vote Protectors,” who planned to send volunteers into nine cities with large populations of color, purportedly to “monitor” polling places. Volunteers were encouraged to make fake badges, conduct fake exit polls, and even videotape voters as an intimidation tactic. The scheme fell apart when the Huffington Post found out about it and confronted Stone.
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And for Georgia specifically -

Some Peach State polling stations had no working voting machines; a large location in Atlanta had just three machines for the entire place. At some stations, African Americans stayed after midnight to vote. At one polling location in Georgia, the police were called on them because they refused to leave until they cast their ballot.
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To tie this back to the thread, though, COVID is creating and exacerbating a lot of problems, but the foundation that we've had has been subject to many, many, many years of attacks by people who don't want undesirables to have power for a large range of motives.
 
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Parts of the US really are a dystopian, third world hellhole. And I'm getting this increasingly uneasy feeling that the whole sordid joint going down the tubes is approaching a 50/50 proposition. The protesting at this point has got to transition beyond Black Lives Matter, to The Rule of Law Matters. And in massive numbers. Or in a general strike.
 
https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/15/politics/cdc-trump-deployment-announcement/index.html

Trump makes another useless effort to help schools reopen. He announced that the CDC is ready to deploy teams to help schools reopen. Of course he didn't bother to tell the CDC they were doing that. What the hell are they going to do? There's no vaccine and we already know how to prevent the spread of the virus. Will a team being in a school change what they have to do? The CDC can say masks, social distancing, hand washing just as easily from Washington DC as they can from anywhere else.
 
Bob001 said:
How can anybody even pretend that's legal? Was there a complaint? Was there an investigation?
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There were legal challenges the courts dismissed. The couple (who were mysteriously back on the voter rolls a month after the election) are still litigating, last I heard. The courts are heavily politicized and in the past couple of years three or four cases of judicial corruption have come to light.
 
Craig4 said:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/15/politics/cdc-trump-deployment-announcement/index.html

Trump makes another useless effort to help schools reopen. He announced that the CDC is ready to deploy teams to help schools reopen. Of course he didn't bother to tell the CDC they were doing that. What the hell are they going to do? There's no vaccine and we already know how to prevent the spread of the virus. Will a team being in a school change what they have to do? The CDC can say masks, social distancing, hand washing just as easily from Washington DC as they can from anywhere else.
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Europe doesn’t have a problem opening schools
https://www.wsj.com/articles/school...batebut-more-masks-and-distancing-11597423822
 
I saw a headline that said Trump disagrees with the head of the CDC on something virus related.


That really speaks volumes about why we are in such a mess. I just hope enough people realize that this November.
 
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