Hopefully Trump Is Self-Destructing Before Our Eyes

The lies and insanity coming from Donald Trump's daily coronavirus briefings is so overwhelming that a number of Republican elected officials are whispering that the briefings need to stop.  Daily, Trump provides Joe Biden and other Democrats with material for future political ads that underscore his utter incompetence.  Trump's latest off the charts batshitery was to suggest that injecting humans with disinfectants would be a cure for Covid-19.  Yes, it would be a cure alright, the patient would be dead and the virus thus defeated. As the New York Times reports, both manufacturers of disinfectants and health officials have rushed to urge people to NOT follow Trump's suggestions: 

[Maryland's] Emergency Management Agency had to issue a warning that “under no circumstances” should any disinfectant be taken to treat the coronavirus. In Washington State, officials urged people not to consume laundry detergent capsules. Across the country on Friday, health professionals sounded the alarm.

Injecting bleach or highly concentrated rubbing alcohol “causes massive organ damage and the blood cells in the body to basically burst,” Dr. Diane P. Calello, the medical director of the New Jersey Poison Information and Education System, said in an interview. “It can definitely be a fatal event.”

Even the makers of Clorox and Lysol pleaded with Americans not to inject or ingest their products.

The frantic reaction was prompted by President Trump’s suggestion on Thursday at a White House briefing that an “injection inside” the human body with a disinfectant like bleach or isopropyl alcohol could help combat the virus.

One has to wonder when my Republican friends will finally admit that the elected a lunatic to the Oval Office.  Not a day goes by without numerous lies and falsehoods being disseminated by Trump.  It's so bad that CNN now has a daily piece that reviews the prior evening's falsehoods.  A column also in the Times speculates that Trump is self-destructing before our eyes (although probably not in the eyes of his knuckle dragging, racist base, some of whom may try Trump's suggested "cure").  Here are column highlights:

Tens of thousands of Americans die; what does the president do? Spreads bad information. Seeds false hope. Reinvents history, reimagines science, prattles on about his supposed heroism, bellyaches about his self-proclaimed martyrdom and savages anyone who questions his infallibility. In lieu of leadership, grandstanding. In place of empathy, a snit. And he’s going to get re-elected.

With that refrain we perform a spiritual prophylaxis. We prepare for despair. . . . We began to treat a verbal tic as inevitable truth.

It isn’t. While Trump may indeed be careening toward four more years, it’s at least as possible that he’s self-destructing before our eyes.

Maybe a toasty beam of sunlight is all that we need to wipe out the coronavirus? What if we just injected disinfectant into our veins? He floated both of those fantasies on Thursday, when he might as well have stepped up to the lectern in a tin foil hat. They’re the ramblings of a dejected, disoriented and increasingly desperate man.

As Katie Rogers and Annie Karni reported in The Times, [Trump] the president feels isolated and embattled and is panicked that he’ll lose to Joe Biden in November. That state of mind, they wrote, prompted his executive order to halt the issuing of green cards, which is precisely the kind of base-coddling measure that he resorts to “when things feel out of control.”

He can read the polls as well as the rest of us can, and they show that while he stands there nightly in the White House briefing room and blows kisses at himself, Americans aren’t blowing kisses back. A month ago there was much ado about a slight uptick in Trump’s job-approval numbers. But the real story was the slightness: Past presidents had experienced greater bumps during crises, when Americans tend to rally around their leader. For Trump there was no such rallying — just a grudging, incremental benefit of the doubt. A fleeting one, too. His uptick quickly took a downturn, reuniting him with his anemic norm. According to the polling average at FiveThirtyEight as of late Friday afternoon, 52.5 percent of Americans disapprove of his job performance. Only 43.4 percent approve. Other numbers tell an even scarier story for Trump. In all three of the battleground states that enabled his Electoral College victory three and a half years ago, he’s currently behind Biden — by 6.7 percentage points in Pennsylvania, 5.5 in Michigan and 2.7 in Wisconsin, according to the averaging of recent polls by RealClearPolitics. That website also puts him behind by 3.2 points in Florida, a state he won in 2016 and must win again. According to monthly polling by Gallup, the percentage of Americans who indicated satisfaction with the way things were going in the country plummeted to 30 percent in mid-April from 42 percent in mid-March. Only twice before in the past two decades has there been a one-month decline that precipitous.

Maybe this drop was less a referendum on Trump’s stewardship than a recognition of the coronavirus’s devastation. But maybe not: Surveys reveal that a significant majority of Americans believe that he acted too late to stem the virus’s spread. He’s also out of step with most Americans’ appraisal of what will and won’t be safe in the immediate future.

In a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll, 65 percent of Americans said it could take until June or later for gatherings of 10 people or more to be safe. And in a Yahoo News/YouGov poll, only 22 percent of Americans supported the protesters who have been demanding an end to their states’ restrictions, while 60 percent opposed them. President Trump has egged those protesters on.

Is he following some gut instinct or just flailing? I vote for the latter. Lately he has contradicted himself at a whole new pace and to a whole new degree, and he has undercut his own party’s talking points.

Republicans have developed a strategy to evade any responsibility for Trump’s response to the pandemic by blaming and demonizing China. “But there is a potential impediment to the G.O.P. plan — the leader of the party himself,” Martin and Haberman wrote, noting that Trump has “muddied Republican efforts to fault China” by continuing to curry favor with President Xi Jinping. Also, Trump’s most optimistic pronouncements about imminent deliverance from the current misery represent a bigger gamble than the many others he has taken. If he’s wrong, there’s not going to be any hiding it. If he’s reckless, the toll is Americans’ very lives. There’s incessant talk of how fervent his base is, but the many Americans appalled by him have a commensurate zeal. For every Sean Hannity, there’s a Rachel Maddow. For every Kellyanne Conway, a George Conway. She and her ilk may be wily in their defense of the president. He and his tribe are even better in their evisceration of him.

And what of the diaspora of refugees from the Trump administration: people like Rick Bright, the government scientist who says he was just stripped of his leading role in the search for a coronavirus vaccine because he wouldn’t parrot Trump’s cockamamie talking points? I predict that as November nears, more and more exiles will speak out, sharing alarming accounts of life inside the president’s hall of mirrors. Trump in turn will mutter about the “deep state,” but the phrase won’t fly when he’s left with such a shallow pool of charlatans around him — and when he’s making such a repellent fool of himself.

Don’t tell me that his nightly briefings are just a new version of the old stadium rallies; their backdrop of profound suffering makes them exponentially harder to stomach. Americans who take any comfort from them were Trump-drunk long ago. The unbesotted see and hear the president for what he is: a tone-deaf showman who regards everything, even a mountain of corpses, as a stage.

I sincerely hope the author is correct.

New PPP Poll: Two Weeks Since Inauguration, Voters Yearn For Obama

A new PPP Poll ought to be sending alarm bells off among Congressional Republicans, not to mention among Der Trumpenführer's inner circle. Taken just two (2) weeks after Trump's inauguration, the poll results are damning with in many instances a majority of Americans being firmly against Trump's polices and his conduct.  By a very wide margin, Americans want Der Trumpenführer to obey the rulings of the federal courts even as childish brat like tweets continue to spew from The Orange One.  Perhaps most interesting is the fact that except within the ranks of Trump supporters, the opposition to Trump - and by extension Congressional Republicans - is growing.  Here are highlights from the poll findings:

Less than 2 weeks into Donald Trump's tenure as President, 40%  of voters already want to impeach him. That's up from 35% of voters who wanted to impeach him a week ago. 

Beyond a significant percentage of voters already thinking that Trump should be removed from office, it hasn't taken long for voters to miss the good old days of Barack Obama...52% say they'd rather Obama was President, to only 43% who are glad Trump is.
 Why so much unhappiness with Trump? Voters think basically everything he's doing is wrong:
 -Overall voters are pretty evenly split on Trump's executive order on immigration from last week, with 47% supporting it to 49% who are opposed. But when you get beyond the overall package, the pieces of the executive order become more clearly unpopular. 52% of voters think that the order was intended to be a Muslim ban, to only 41% who don't think that was the intent. And the idea of a Muslim ban is extremely unpopular with the American people- only 26% are in favor of it, to 65% who are against it. . . . Finally voters see a basic competence issue with Trump's handling of the executive order- only 39% of voters think it was well executed, to 55% who believe it was poorly executed.

-It hasn't taken long for voters to develop a pretty dim view of Trump advisor Steve Bannon, and become wary of the extent to which he's being given power within the administration. Only 19% of voters see Bannon favorably, to 40% who have a negative opinion of him. Only 34% of voters approve of his being given a seat on the principals committee of the National Security Council, to 44% who are opposed to that. What's particularly telling is that only 19% of voters think Bannon belongs in that seat on the National Security Council more than the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff  the Director of National Intelligence, to 59% who believe those folks are more deserving of that place at the table. Even Trump voters think he's gone too far on that front- by a 40/35 margin they think the more traditional members should have that position rather than Bannon.
 -Very few voters go along with Trump when it comes to his voter fraud paranoia.  Only 26% of voters think millions of people voted illegally in the 2016 Presidential election, to 55% who believe that's not a real thing. This is another issue where even a significant number of Trump voters become wary of his claim- 47% believe it but 27% don't and another 26% aren't sure. It's been unusual to find things where a majority of Trump's voters don't go along with him.
 -Obamacare continues to become more popular the more talk there is about repealing it. 46% of voters now say they support it to just 41% who are opposed. And only 33% of voters think the best course of action is for Congress to repeal the Affordable Care Act and start over, to 62% who think it would be better to keep it and fix the parts that need fixing.  

Another aspect of Trump's unpopularity is that he's losing all of his fights. In the last week he's gone on the attack on Twitter against John McCain, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and CNN and in each case we find voters siding with Trump's adversary:
 -By a 51/37 spread voters say John McCain has more credibility than Trump.
 -By a 52/41 spread voters say the Washington Post has more credibility than
Trump.
 -By a 51/42 spread voters say the New York Times has more credibility than
Trump.
 -By a 50/42 spread voters say CNN has more credibility than Trump.
 -Only 13% of voters approve of the job Congress is doing, to 68% who disapprove.  Paul Ryan has a 35/43 approval rating, and Mitch McConnell's is 17/55.  Democrats lead the generic Congressional ballot 45/42. 

Going back to Obamacare, one of my favorite poll result is this:

Q16 Which of the following would you most like to see the Congress do about the Affordable Care Act, given the choices of keeping what works and fixing what doesn’t, or repealing it and starting over with a new healthcare law?
 62% Would most like the Congress to keep what works in the Affordable Care Act and fix what doesn’t 33% Would most like the Congress to repeal the Affordable Care Act and start over with a new
healthcare law 5% Not sure

 #NotMyPresident

Poll: Majority Of Americans Want Supreme Court to OK Same Sex Marriage

In more bad news for the Republican Party, a new NBC News/ Wall Street Journal poll has found that 58% of Americans want the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down state same sex marriage bans nationwide.  Meanwhile, would be GOP presidential contenders are fighting to see which of them can be the most anti-gay and strident in their opposition to marriage equability.  It is indicative of the GOP's branding problem and refusal to accept that the world and society are changing and that trying to drag the country back to the 1950's is a recipe for failure.  Here are highlights from NBC News on the poll findings:

Nearly three in five Americans want to see the Supreme Court legalize gay marriage throughout the United States, according to a new NBC News/ Wall Street Journal poll.

 

A total of 58 percent of Americans said that they favor a high court decision to eliminate bans against same sex marriage, with 44 percent of those saying they strongly favor such a result. Thirty-seven percent of respondents said they oppose a court ruling in favor of the case's LGBT plaintiffs, with 29 percent said they strongly oppose it. 

One in five respondents in the poll said that society has gone too far when it comes to accepting homosexuality, while 44 percent said that society has not gone far enough to end discrimination against gays and lesbians.  

Support for a Supreme Court decision that allows nationwide same sex marriage is particularly strong among young voters (73 percent in favor), Democrats (78 percent in favor), Hispanics (71 percent favor) and people with a postgraduate education (69 percent). 

Opposition is high among conservatives (68 percent oppose) and seniors (55 percent oppose). 

In short, the GOP is alienating younger voters, Hispanics and those who are educated and appealing largely to a demographic that is literally dying off.  Not exactly a formula for long term success. 

Obamacare's Poll Numbers Improve In Republican Districts

Many in the GOP continue to believe that Obamacare is their silver bullet against Democrats come November 2014.  But perhaps such will not be the case - poll numbers for Obamacare are ticking upward even in Republican Districts.  True, some in the GOP base who cannot tolerate anything associated with a black president will rally to sound bites about Obamacare, but perhaps some of the more sane moderate voters will not.  Time, of course will give us the correct answer.  A piece in Huffington Post looks at the improving polling for Obamacare.  Here are highlights:

Attitudes toward the Affordable Care Act continue to shift in the law’s favor, even in Republican-held congressional districts, a new poll set to be released Monday by a Democratic firm will show. 

The poll, which was conducted by Democracy Corps in battleground congressional districts and shared in advance with The Huffington Post, shows 52 percent of respondents want to “implement and fix” the 2010 health care reform law versus 42 percent who want to “repeal and replace” it. Those numbers were 49 percent to 45 percent, respectively, in the firm's December poll.

The favorable trend toward Obamacare has been witnessed not just in Democratic districts but also in Republican districts.

According to the findings, 43 percent of respondents in districts held by a Republican member of Congress now say they oppose the health care law because it “goes too far.” That number was 48 percent in December.

In Republican districts that are the most likely to flip to Democratic control in the 2014 elections, the shift of opinion toward the Affordable Care Act is equally pronounced. Fifty-four percent of respondents from those districts now support implementing and fixing the law versus 40 percent who support repealing and replacing it. In December, those numbers were 48 percent and 44 percent, respectively.

Eight percent oppose the law because it does not go far enough -- a portion of those likely Democratic voters who wanted either single payer or a public option. In December, those numbers were 42 percent in favor, 46 percent opposed and 6 percent who wanted the law to go further.

All told, the polling data supports the findings of other recent studies showing public opinion has become more supportive of the law. Democracy Corps is a Democratic firm. But the numbers that it registered on Obamacare this month are across-the-board better than the numbers it registered in December, when the law’s popularity was at its nadir. Certainly, perceptions of the law have improved enough that Democrats no longer universally view it as an election loser.

Washington Post-ABC Poll: Most Americans Support Supreme Court Gay Marriage Rulings

A new Washington Post-ABC poll provides more bad news for the Christofascists and anti-gay extremists within the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy.  Most Americans believe the Supreme Court got it right in ruling that Section 3 of DOMA is unconstitutional and - to be candid, was motivated by anti-gay animus.  The findings make clear that opponents of gay marriage will largely die off within a generation or less and that the GOP is courting long term disaster by prostituting itself to the Christofascists.  Here are highlights from the Washington Post:

Most Americans think the Supreme Court got it right last week in decisions that bolstered same-sex marriage, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

The court by a 5-to-4 margin struck down part of the the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which withheld federal recognition and benefits from same-sex couples who are married in states where it is legal. The poll found that 56 percent approve of the ruling “providing legally married same-sex couples with the same federal benefits given to other married couples,” while 41 percent disapprove.


By a smaller margin, 51 percent to 45 percent, Americans say they approve of the court’s decision to let stand a lower court ruling that will return same-sex marriage to California.

In the Post-ABC poll, the gay marriage decisions drew strikingly different partisan reactions, while the decision on voting rights showed a deep racial disparity.

On the question about DOMA, support for the court’s decision is defined heavily by ideology, partisanship and age. The poll showed that 79 percent of self-described liberals and 68 percent of Democrats approve of the decision, while 62 percent of Republicans and 61 percent of conservatives are opposed. Over six in 10 independents and moderates approve of the decision.

The age difference was also pronounced: two-thirds of 18-29 year-olds approve, while 56 percent of those over 65 take the opposite view.

The decision was supported in every region of the country except the South, where people were pretty evenly split.

Is the Mormon Church In Talks to Write LGBT Utah Non-Discrimination Bill?

Are you reaching for your smelling salts after reading the caption of this post?  Yes,  it is shocking in some ways.  On the other hand, with anti-gay positions being cited as one of the largest reasons the under 30 generations are leaving organized religion, perhaps the Mormon Church is recognizing the inevitable and seeking to minimize its loses.  As the charts above indicate, the general consensus revealed by a new Southern Baptist Convention Poll is that gay marriage nationwide is inevitable and a significant majority of people see gay rights as a form of civil rights akin to struggles based on gender and race.  Here are highlights from Right Wing Watch:

The Southern Baptist Convention’s polling arm LifeWay is out with a new poll revealing widespread support for gay rights, particularly among young people. According to the survey, a clear majority of Americans believe that “homosexuality is a civil rights issue like gender, race and age,” agree that same-sex marriage is “inevitable” and oppose employment discrimination against gays and lesbians.

Key findings from the poll include:

• 64 percent of those polled agreed “it is inevitable that same-sex marriage will become legal throughout the United States.”

• “80 percent of Americans disagree that employers should be allowed to refuse employment to someone based on their sexual preference.”

• 58 percent of respondents agreed with the question: “like age, race, and gender, homosexuality is a civil rights issue.”

• A majority of Americans believe rental halls and landlords should not be allowed to discriminate against same-sex couples.

• “More Americans do not believe homosexual behavior is a sin than those who believe it is a sin.”

The poll also found that women, young people and people with college degrees were more likely to favor gay rights.

But back to the Mormon Church.  Could the Church be undergoing a sudden case of enlightenment as occurred with blacks and those allowed to be members of the Mormon priesthood?  If nothing else, over the years the Mormon Church has proved itself pragmatic if nothing else.  Would that the Roman Catholic Church could take some hints from it.  Here are details from EqualityonTrial:

Another report says the language was finalized and the bill passed out of a Senate committee.
The Mormon Church is reportedly working on language for a statewide LGBT non-discrimination bill in Utah. The church supported a similar bill in 2009, according to a report:

The church actually endorsed a similar ordinance in 2009 in Salt Lake City.This is momentous, surely, but the Mormon faith, whether real or done for politics, is changing. In December, Mormon leaders launched a website called mormonsandgays.org, and the church stressed that homosexuality is not a choice, that all the brothers and sisters need to be treated with compassion, that we all “need to love one another.”

The church is well-known for its efforts to pass Prop 8 banning marriage equality in California.
The Salt Lake Tribune first broke the news on Thursday. According to their story:

Sen. Curt Bramble, R-Provo, opened a bill file on Thursday — the last day to request attorneys draft legislation — titled Housing and Employment Amendments and will sponsor the legislation should an agreement be reached.

The newspaper notes that talks have been ongoing for the past eight months and there is not a bill yet, though other sources suggest that all the parties to the negotiations are close to final language. The report suggests that if the LDS church signs on to the bill’s language, it’s likely to pass.

  

An Early Prsidential Projection Map

There will be countless versions of maps that claim to project the outcome of the 2012 presidential election.  The map above from Huffington Post cannot make too many Republicans feel warm and fuzzy.  The back up analysis based on recent polls can be viewed here.  Not surprisingly, Virginia is viewed as a toss up state.  While I am by no means in love with Obama, the GOP and the ever flip flopping Mitt Romney make it difficult not to be rooting for an Obama victory in November.

Is Obama Pulling Ahead of the GOP Clown Car?

A great deal can happen between now and election day in November, but some polls suggest that Obama is beginning to pull ahead of Mitt Romney, his most likely opponent at this time. Some of the improvement may come from what some see as a brightening of the economic horizon. Others see it as a result of the negativity and bashing that has been so prominent in the GOP nomination contest. Then there's also Romney's foot in mouth statement about not caring about the poor. For LGBT voters, since virtually all of the GOP candidates want to keep us third or fourth class citizens - Rick Santorum would like to re-criminalize us - many will feel that like Obama or not, they will hold their nose and pull the Democrat lever. A piece in the Washington Post looks ate the latest polling. Here are highlights:

Boosted by improved public confidence in his economic stewardship, President Obama for the first time holds a clear edge over Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in a hypothetical general-election matchup, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

Romney, who notched his second consecutive victory Saturday by easily winning the Nevada caucuses, continues to solidify his position as the front-runner in the race for the GOP nomination. But as the contest has grown more negative, public impressions of the top Republican contenders have soured, as has the former Massachusetts governor’s standing as a general-election candidate.

The poll results underscore how important framing the contest could be to the outcome. If the fall campaign becomes largely a referendum on Obama’s tenure in office, as Republicans hope it will, he could struggle to win a second term — barring an economic recovery that vastly outperforms expectations. If, however, it becomes a choice between the incumbent and the challenger, as Obama advisers predict it will, the president’s prospects would be brighter.

Overall, 55 percent of those who are closely following the campaign say they disapprove of what the GOP candidates have been saying. By better than 2 to 1, Americans say the more they learn about Romney, the less they like him. Even among Republicans, as many offer negative as positive assessments of him on this question. Judgments about former House speaker Newt Gingrich, who denounced Romney on Saturday night in Nevada, are about 3 to 1 negative. Meanwhile, the president’s recent remarks are better reviewed.

Among political independents, who are likely to determine the outcome of the election, 47 percent approve and 50 percent disapprove of the way he is handling his job. The president’s approval rating among independents had dipped as low as 34 percent in the fall, and just a month ago, he faced a 10-point deficit here.

In a general-election test, Obama leads Romney 52 to 43 percent among all Americans; more narrowly, 51 to 45 percent, among registered voters. Among all adults, it’s Obama’s first time topping 50 percent in a head-to-head matchup with Romney since July; it’s his first time ever above that point among registered voters.

The new survey also tested Obama against Gingrich. In that matchup, the president is ahead by 15 points overall and 11 among registered voters, both similar to the numbers from January.

[I]n other areas, Obama has big leads, including on the question of who would better protect the middle class, handle foreign policy and fight terrorism. Romney has been criticized as being out of touch with average Americans, a view that has been reinforced by several verbal gaffes he made on the campaign trail, including remarks about “the very poor” that were perceived as dismissive.

Poll: 70% of LGBT Respondents Support Noninclusive ENDA

Some have perhaps thought me harsh for wanting an non-inclusive version of ENDA passed as opposed to no version at all. From my past political involvement, the reality is that you get what you can when you can and keep pushing for the long term goal This new poll being reported by The Advocate (http://www.advocate.com/news_detail_ektid50267.asp) would seem to indicate that I am hardly alone. I by no means want transgendered thrown under the bus, but some of the LGBT rights organizations would that have demanded an inclusive version or none at all apparently need to get better in touch with those they claim to speak for. Here are some story highlights:

According to a new poll, 70% of LGBT Americans prefer passing an Employment Non-Discrimination Act that does not cover transgender people over not passing the bill at all. The poll, commissioned by the Human Rights Campaign and conducted on October 26, surveyed 500 members of the LGBT community across the country.

HRC president Joe Solmonese said the poll numbers weren’t immediately obvious to him or the organization before they conducted the polling. There were so many people out there speaking so emphatically about where the entire community was that I thought maybe we should get a sense of it, and that’s why we did the poll,” he said. “So it was surprising to me, but I think it really speaks to the fact that there’s a big diverse community of GLBT Americans all across the country.”

The poll also asked people if they agreed that “national gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender organizations should oppose this proposal because it excludes transgender people.” Only about 20% of the people agreed with that statement. However, about 70% of people polled still believe that protections for transgender people should be included in the ENDA proposal, as they did in a poll conducted in 2004 -- but they also favor passing a noninclusive ENDA as a path to gaining those protections for transgender workers.

The version of ENDA sponsored by Rep. Barney Frank, which does not include job protections for transgender Americans, was voted out of the House of Representatives rules committee Monday night and is very likely to be voted on Wednesday. Rep. Tammy Baldwin may offer her amendment to add transgender protections to H.R. 3685. If she does, it will be debated but will likely pulled from the floor without a vote as soon as the debate ends.