And the winner is . . .not Chump Trump.

Biden won going away. By more than 5.5 million votes. He blew Don the Con out in the electoral college by an historic landslide. Really. He won 306 electoral college votes, the same amount Trump won by in 2016, when the orange bloviator used to hand out maps of his electoral college victory to visitors and claim it was the greatest wipeout in history. Not the Trump is insecure and craves adulation. Never mind that Tricky Dick won 49 states in 1972. Ignore that Trump won his victory by about 77,000 votes in three states combined, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, the so-called Blue Wall. Biden reclaimed those three states by a quarter million votes combined and flipped three more states Trump won in2016, Arizona, Nevada and Georgia. Yeah, that's right, Georgia. 

I think that when Biden calls at the White House on the morning of January 20th, he ought to bring the Baby Huey president a gift--a framed picture of the electoral college victory that Biden won, entitled An Historic Wipeout of an Incumbent President. Yeah, that's what I think. It'd be perfect, a perfect gift for the departing president perfectly outlining the 306 votes that Biden won over the biggest election loser in presidential history.

Trump should look forward to departing the presidency. Even more time for golf. No more boring briefings which cut into his TV time. He won't have to salute North Korean generals anymore. Angela Merkel won't be around to throw candy bars at. No more annoying powerful women around to feel inferior to like Nancy Pelosi or Angela Merkel. He can surround himself with even more foolish and feckless women than the gibberish-spouting Kellyanne Conway, the stupid, lying bimbo Kayleigh McEnany, the pathetically untruthful Sarah Huckaby Sanders and the hopelessly corrupt Hope Hicks.

It's a shame Trump's going to spend his last two months in office doing nothing about the raging pandemic but everything about subverting our democracy by denying the incoming president classified briefings so he can be fully informed when he takes the reins of power, that is whenever L'il Richie Rich isn't stamping his foot wherever he's sulking and railing that the election was rigged, somehow, thus turning his 71 million cult followers into vacuous conspiracy believers for the rest of their lives. None Dare Call It Treason.

We can now announce . . . .

 I dragged myself off to my motel room in 2016 at 11 pm in Newport News on election night after a 16 hour stint being an inside poll observer in that town (apparently SE Virginia doesn't have any democratic lawyers, so they have to reach 300 miles up to Arlington and Falls Church to find lawyers willing to drive down there for three days). I switched on the TV set and settled into bed ready for an exciting night watching the returns come in leading to a Hillary Clinton victory. Remember how she was 99% certain to win?

I had been inside a bubble all day since 5 am locked into a polling precinct place in the poorest part of town where the tally at the end of the night was akin to 80% Clinton, 11% Trump and 9% those faux candidates the pothead Johnson and the useful idiot Stein so nothing had prepared me for what I saw within a minute of turning the TV on. I have watched enough presidential returns to know that something unimaginable and momentous was afoot. Florida was gone, North Carolina (where I had canvassed) was gone, Clinton was losing in Virginia (where I had canvassed) with 95% of the vote in, but some returns from Democrat-rich Fairfax County were not yet in (where indeed Hillary eked out a thin state victory). I switched off the light and went to sleep with the TV set still on.

At about 4 am the change in the tone of the announcers woke me up in time to hear, "We can now announce that Donald Trump has just been elected as the 45th president president of the United States. I instantly knew, lying there in darkness in a strange bed all by myself in a seedy motel room far from home, that a bottleneck had arrived that my life was flowing through at that very moment. Into the one end my past life entered, a proud, confident American who knew America for all its faults was exceptional, and out the other end was emerging a citizen who knew he no longer knew his country and was fearful of the future, both for himself and his country. I felt like this moment actually might be a death knell of either myself or my country.

Sound overblown? America and its democratic institutions have become empty husks of themselves in four short years, no longer a world leader and having become the laughing stock of the world in its response to the worldwide pandemic with the most deaths and infections from it by far. Me die as a result of the occurrence of that moment? How about the threats or perhaps eventualities of dying by COVID-19, nuclear war with North Korea, a one-off nuclear exchange with a state like Iran (I do live in the DC blast range), shot by a heavily armed militiaman or soldier at a protest or denied necessary medical care by administration-ordered retrenchments in the health-care networks so the super rich could get get another hefty tax cut.

The last four years have been horrible for America and Americans who care to keep informed.

Last night felt pretty much the same as that 2016 moment for me, mingled with incredulity because Americans have seen what's happened in the past four years (caged and orphaned children, separated families, a quarter million Americans dead unnecessarily, unemployment at record-level, a looming depression, racism exposed and coddled, assassination plots against political or governing leaders tacitly encouraged, rampant corruption, allies cast aside, adversaries embraced etc. etc. etc.) , but I when I went to bed last night I still thought Biden would win, barely, the electoral college, perhaps by 270-268.

The political landscape was even more bleak when I woke up this morning, with no chance of the Dems taking the senate, the Dems losing seats in the house and Biden temporarily behind in his Blue Wall reclaiming bid, but I still think Biden will win, barely. We know that Biden will win millions more votes than Trump nationwide--so much for one person one vote--yet he has only one one tenuous path to a nail biter victory. But Dems are used to this; the last two Republican presidents, both tenures being utterly ruinous for the nation, were both outvoted yet entered the people's house (Dubya Bush thanks to a single vote--GOP appointed Scalia's).

Next perhaps I'll recount last night's fevered dream while I fitfully slept, no TV blaring this time to wake me up into an ongoing nightmare.

The Recent Ruination of American Exceptionalism

There is less than a week to go before we can start restoring America to its former greatness. Unfortunately the first priority will be to get some control over the coronavirus and by January 20th, and we will have wasted a full year in that endeavor thanks to the recklessness a minority of American voters four years ago who voted for a crass failed businessman to "Make America Great Again." Any critical thinker then could have seen that was a dangerous put-the-tooth-under-the-pillow wish with ten minutes of Google research.

I voted early over a month ago, and although I have done nothing for any campaign this time, unlike in 2016, 2017 and 2018 when I worked hard for democrats, to good success in 2017 and 2018, and clearly the nation's immediate, rapid decline starting in 2017 wasn't because of anything that I left undone in 2016. Because I am in a vulnerable category for the coronavirus, I have chosen not to put myself at risk by working within the confines of a campaign and potentially become a further burden upon our straining health care system by getting sick.  

Also, I have been hearing hospital administrators lately talking about rationing health care and making choices about who to treat because their hospitals have no further capacity. I understand triage and I have no doubt my care would be placed behind that of reckless, maskless young people who got themselves sick by attending packed GOP functions if health care started to be rationed in Trump's America in the face of all the hot spots everywhere. In other words, people over 65 like me would be sent home to die there with no treatment.

I talked my gardener into voting early and he voted for Biden. I talked my neighbor's live-in adult son into voting early and he voted for Biden. This week I talked the young man living at his parents house across the street into promising that he would vote. So I consider that I multiplied my vote by two and a half times.  

I am retired, my 401K has gone down over 60% this year and my social security check was late this month but I have sent a $25 check to 23 democratic incumbents or challengers, mostly senatorial candidates because the soulless grim reaper, aka Moscow Mitch McConnell, has shown us all that true Machiavellian power in the US resides in the senate where a paltry minority of the population can control negatively the lives of the large majority in this country. But I mailed contributions to a few representatives as well like Wendy Davis in TX and Max Rose in NY. I admire Davis because of her heroic efforts in an 18-hour filibuster while trying to block draconian restrictions being put upon a woman's right to control her own body in \Texas a few years back. I am from conservative Staten Island and I wish good luck to the unflappable, feisty Rose!.  

And I put a Biden sign in my yard and on my car. If I ever meet any of my grandchildren, I won't feel totally embarrassed if they complain to me about the total and hopefully not irretrievable ruination of American excellence under Trump.

Less than two weeks out, and closing in on 225,000 deaths

 There's not much to do for the election since I voted last month.  I get text messages asking me to sign up for inside poll watcher training, like I did in 2016, but I resist it since I have more than one comorbidities concerning COVID-19.  I decided I am not going to spend16 hours in a closed space packed with people working and constantly shuffling in and out, it's a younger person's job now to save our tottering republic--I did my best the last presidential election.

I had chatted up one of the two live-at-home sons of my neighbors who had indicated an interest in the election and offered to take him to City Hall to vote in-person early, but he never answered the door when I knocked at the prearranged time.  (The other son, the one who went to college, brusquely said he didn't vote, go figure.)  I saw him last week on the sidewalk and he told me that he had indeed voted the day I knocked, only later, and he had voted for Biden.  Score!

I watched the second debate in its entirety, and clips of the first one, both gave me a headache to see a snarling, mugging bully hector an aging septuagenarian with utter, lying and nonsensical BS.  And I watch the count of American dead mount steadily each day, about to pass 225,000 in a mere eight months, most of them unnecessary if only there had been leadership from the president and a national plan.  As it is, the coronavirus is raging uncontrollably across the land while Nero fiddles, the U.S. is the laughing stock of the world in its ineptitude.

I sit at home, watch the news, go out threesor four  times a week to the store and wait for the virus to be over or quelled.  It's obviously going to be a long wait because absolutely nothing is going to be done to ameliorate the current situation before January 20th, which is still three months away at which time the U.S. under Biden will start at Go, with a full year utterly wasted thanks to the shocking  recklessness of the U.S electorate in 2016 who took a flier on such an obviously utterly unfit candidate and voted him in thanks to the obsolescent electoral college which strips the populous coasts of the power of a democracy's supposed mainstay of one person one vote.  All power flows through the Senate, Mitch McConnell has shown us that with his grim reaping, and every day I send out another $25 check to Democratic senatorial candidates, twenty checks so far.

I can't wait for November 3rd at 7 pm.

I voted . . .

 In these cataclysmic times, I executed my plan to vote on the first day early voting started in Virginia last month, on September 18th.  I drove down to City Hall at 10 am armed with a notice dated in August from my bank which came addressed to me at my residential address indicating that a check I had deposited had in fact been deposited.

I walked in with a face mask on and was met by a sheriff's deputy to whom I announced that I was present to vote.  He directed me towards the city's registrar office without requiring me to go through any security, where there was no there aside from a receptionist behind a plexiglass shield and the registrar and two polling volunteers.  The receptionist asked to see my driver's license whereupon I presented her with my bank account note (Virginia dropped its photo ID law this year after the democrats reclaimed both chambers of the statehouse although it still requires suitable documents) which she examined with a sour face and then handed me a voting slip which I gave to the registrar who gave me a ballot in a folder and a free (the pandemic you know) pen to fill it out with.

The choice for president/VP was easy as were the choices for senator and representative and it took but a second to mark those blank ovals.  I didn't know a single thing about any of the four persons running for three spots on city council so I left those blank and read carefully the two proposed constitutional amendments and marked "yes' on both of those (I'm a democrat you see, and since I discerned through the incomprehensible legalese that they were both measures intent on lessening burdens on poor people and "totally" disabled veterans, in other words giving money away, of course I voted for those), slipped my ballot into the scanning and counting machine and handed my folder back to a volunteer (did she wipe it down for the next voter who showed up?).

I asked if I was the first person there so far and was surprised to hear that 32 other voters had already preceded me that morning and that a third of the registered voters in the city had already made applications for mail-in ballots.  With such a crushing response already in the very first hour of voting seven weeks out from election day it was and remains clear to me that Trump is going to go down in a landslide and the country, and the world, will awaken from this four-year, horrific nightmare.

It finally came . . .

 On the first of the month, I prodded myself out of my numbing COVID-19 self-quarantine and made a plan to address the upcoming election, now a mere five weeks away.  There are 206,000 Americans who tragically won't be voting because they're dead unnecessarily thanks largely to our tax-cheat president's massively inept coronavirus response leading directly to the still continuing lack of reliable testing, contact tracing, provision of PPE, disclosure of truthful, non-divisive information etc.

I went to the city registrar's office and found out that I was indeed registered to vote and when and where early voting started, and I voted thereby on the first available date.  I went to Joe Biden's campaign website and for a $50 contribution, ordered two buttons, a bumper sticker and a Biden/Harris yard sign.

It finally arrived yesterday and I immediately planted it in my front yard.  I took a picture, which I ordinarily would have posted here but a few months go I lost the ability to transfer photos from my computer to my blog, and I no longer have the ability to put photos into this blog except for pictures from previous blog posts.

So now I parse out twenty-five dollar checks to democratic senatorial candidates and wait for January 21st, Joe Biden's first full day in office when patriotic Americans who aren't beholden to foreign money or influence can start making America Great Again.  Meanwhile my Biden yard sign stands out like an evergreen tree in a pine forest as I have yet to see a single Trump sign anywhere in town.

The problem with Act Blue

 I'm trying to do my best to help restore American greatness--I've already voted, in person so my vote won't get caught in any election day invalidation by being mailed in and never arriving or being counted too late after the current president has created the deepest constitutional crisis since the Civil War by declaring the election invalid on election night. I'm not going canvassing door-to-door like I did in 2016 ned 2018 nor doing poll-watching like I did in 2016, 2017 and 2018, I'm in the high-risk group for COVID-19. What I think is most crucial, beyond ousting our corrupt, faux president is to throw the senate out from the corrupt, soulless grip of Moscow Mitch, so that the tail no longer wags the dog, wherein 53 venal anti-patriotic senators representing about 29% of the population jam their values (none that I can discern besides getting themselves rich and maintaining power) and judges (young, pro-big business and rabidly antichoice) down on the majority of Americans, who think otherwise, are patriots and value principles and concern for all our citizens.

So I contribute $25 to contested senate races, so far sending a check to Dr. Barbara Bollier (KS), Mark Kelly (AZ), Amy McGrath (KY), Maggie Hassan (NH), Jaime Harrison (SC) and MJ Hegar (TX). The trouble is, except for one example, those are in response to solicitations that come in the mail that I can return a check to. For Harrison, I googled his name and found a site where it listed an address I could send a check to for his campaign. For the rest, like the Georgia, North Carolina, Colorado, Montana, Iowa and Virginia races, I get mired in an inescapable maze of the Act Blue payment system for those democratic candidates, with no way to get to a page which tells me where I can send a check to. First off, these pages want too much information from me and I don't trust their security in terms of safeguarding my on-line payments. I can't understand exactly what I'm supposedly paying for or how many times. I learned in 2018 about "recurrent payments" that appear a fortnight later on my credit card no matter how closely I read the fine print and that are a pain to get rid of. 

Never again, democrats, sorry! I'm retired and watch my nest egg go down dramatically each month in Trump's Amerika and fear for the future of Social Security under the administration of the kleptocrats in charge. So I sit and wait each day for the mail to arrive (or not as has been happening lately) in the hope that another solicitation will arrive for a democratic challenger for senate so I can contribute. I voted in person already--have you?

Past time for change of administration

Careful now!

Moving forward.

DeJoy's Contribution to Amerika

 In Trump's Amerika: 

He is busy destroying the United States Post Office, an institution enshrined within our constitution. The vehicle for this demolition is his lackey mega-donor Postmaster DeJoy, who is busy removing sidewalk postal boxes, high-speed mail sorting machines (selling these million-dollar machines for scrap-metal) and prohibiting overtime or trips back to the PO by carriers for more mail.

Is it working?  Within this past month, I mailed out a credit card payment on August 17 that was due on September 8.  It is still not there, the bank is calling daily for its money and I have been assessed a late charge.

I have a rental unit that is one of the pillars of my retirement stream of money.  The tenant who has lived there for ten years has never missed nor been late with a payment.

The rent that was due for September still hadn't showed up by Monday, September 14.  I called my tenant and he said he had mailed it out on the first or second as always, which I fully believe.  He sent out a second check by expedited mail at an excessive cost, which I told him to take off the rent, which showed up today.  The original check is still in a place unknown. Do you think the mail has been slowed to a point approaching disablement?

Voter supression of vote-by-mail during this pandemic?  Absolutely.

My Plan To Vote

What's your plan to vote? I have mine. 

Last month I went to the City registrar's office to research it and I discovered: 

i.) I am registered; 

ii.) Early voting opens at City Hall on Friday September 18; 

iii.) The ID requirement now is that I have to bring proof that I live at my registered address. A current utility bill addressed to me at that address will suffice--so I have put my last electric, and gas, bill next to my passport to bring;

iv.) There is no dumb requirement anymore of attesting to a reason why you're voting early. Formerly I always swore that I would be outside of the city limits on that day (it didn't matter when during the day or how far or for how long) and so on election day I would always walk up to the McDonalds a few blocks away and buy a cup of coffee there--it is across the street from Falls Church in Fairfax County; and 

v.) I did NOT make application for a mail-in absentee ballot. If I had, and I did it correctly, I would have to present the actual ballot sent to me by the state or, if I didn't receive it yet (or ever, given the current state of the Post Office under the direction of Trump's yes-man Postmaster DeJoy) or the dog ate it or I lost it or forgot it--no vote for me till I came back with that actual ballot. Or I could mail in the ballot, if it ever came, or I found it, or I taped it together after I got it away from the dog, hoping it would be received by the Friday following the Tuesday election, postmarked before or on November 3, and it fulfilled the proper requirements such as the signature was placed in the proper spot and it matched, by some stranger's scrutiny, the signature on file at DMV or on my original registration. Your signature doesn't change over time, does it? Did you impatiently scrawl that signature because you were in a hurry?

vi.) Voting early in person, and not by mail-in, assures that my vote will be counted immediately at 7 pm on November 3, because the ballot will already be in the polling machine and can be run off instantly electronically along with all the other votes cast in person on November 3. Thus I will not potentially contribute to Trump's possible "red mirage," where he could declare victory on November 3 if he is ahead before the absentee (mail-in) votes can be added to the total and give the true result. Absentee (mail-in) ballots are opened only after 7 pm on November 3 and need to have the envelopes examined for a proper signature, the envelopes slit open and the ballot extracted, smoothed out, and fed into the machine to be counted, a laborious process that could take up to a minute each. Trump could use the time delay inherent in counting these votes to sow confusion and declare further (true) results invalid and give his uneducated, unstable and infatuated supporters all the time and excuse they need to go home and get their long guns to take to the streets in an effort to enforce an illegal vigilante result.

So in summation, here in Falls Church, Virginia, three days from now on Friday September 18th, I will be knocking on my neighbor's door at 10 am and three of us will drive down to City Hall. I will have my utility bill in my pocket, with my driver's license as a backup, and we will vote in this existential election for the democracy we formerly knew.

Oh, and bring a mask. And leave your guns at home, you'll have to pass through a metal detector, and the last time I was there they put my name and phone number down on a contact tracing list.

A Negative Experience

I was dreadfully sick for two weeks with a respiratory ailment in February that, in retrospect, I was sure was COVID-19.  Not that recovering from it makes you immune to getting it again, perhaps even worse the next time; no one knows. I  haven't felt 100% since then in any case.

I tried to get an antibody test in June from my health-care provider Kaiser to determine whether I was a survivor but a doctor called me when I requested such a test and told me after listening to my symptoms back in the winter that what I had had was "the flu" and not coronavirus because I hadn't been to China around that time and she said Kaiser didn't do antibody tests anyway, because what was the point?  My respect for Kaiser fell a long way then and I wondered what they do for the $12,000 in premiums I and my former employer pay to them each year for health care which costs me a co-pay each time I use it anyway.

But now Kaiser does do antibody testing, as I discovered earlier this month when I called to schedule an appointment for a flu shot.  So six months after I was so sick I went in for a blood draw to test for the presence of sufficient antibodies left over in my bloodstream that would mark a response to the coronavirus by my immune system.  It came back a few days later negative.

After four years of living in the dystopian chaos of Trump's corrupted America, where everybody has their own alternative facts in this formerly great country, where an American used to be able to trust a test result but now nothing is what it seems to be and we've fallen down the rabbit hole of anti-science and the politicization of everything, here's what I am left with.  I am happy to have had the test finally given to me but half a year passed by before I could wheedle the test, and the antibodies likely have diminished to an unmeasurable degree by now but at least now I know that I will never know if I had COVID-19 when I was so sick in February.  The test result also might be a false negative, because nobody in America trusts test administrations or results (or vaccines) anymore after four years under Trump, he of the falsity of "If you want a test you get a test, they're beautiful" and the idiocy of "Just inject bleach, it'll clean the lungs in a minute."

Person, Woman, Man, Camera, TV.

A few weeks back, our very stable genius was reveling during a jaw-dropping interview on TV how smart or normal he was, how a year or so ago he had heard and repeated back during a simpleton's cognitive test the simple phrase "person, woman, man, tv, camera;" and how amazed the doctors were that he could repeat back this trite five-word word salad, that basically constitutes two descriptive adjectival groups, humans and photographic devices a few minutes later.  I received a simple "psychological" test yesterday after responding to an appointment to have my annual flu shot at the local Kaiser facility.

The nurse explained that in these times of isolation imposed by the COVID-19 crisis, there was concern afoot that there were many in the general population that were "depressed" because of or during it, and would I mind responding to two questions handwritten on a sheet of paper she left with me while she went off to prepare my extra-special dose of flu vaccine, because I was over 65.  The questions were: I wake up and don't feel like doing anything at all---; and I feel out or sorts or despondent or depressed or hopeless---; and the answer to each query came from these four possibilities: 0) never or not at all; 1) occasionally; 2) several days each week; or 3) all the time.

When she returned, and before she jabbed my arm with the special cocktail she prepared (my arm aches today!), I said the supposed general feeling of ennui or perhaps hopelessness in our society only half related to the devastating, deadly pandemic, the other half of the current chaotic conditions afflicting our lives would addressed on November 3d, and she smiled, either knowingly or sympathetically.  For question one, the answer was three, and for question two the answer was one.

She said in a sympathetic voice, "I think you should speak with your doctor about these feelings."  So there you have it, I'm apparently either depressed or suicidal, as shown by this simplistic simpleton's test, during these depressing times that started on November 8, 2016 and have steadily and then increasingly only gotten much worse. 

What's this?! A test? In America?

 I was terribly sick for two weeks in the last half of February with a severe respiratory ailment, coughing my lungs out the first four or five days.  I started coughing with a scratchy throat on Valentine's Day while I was watching the movie Parasite in a theatre and by bedtime I was coughing continuously and could barely sleep.  

I woke up, more or less, on Saturday and got on the phone to Kaiser, my health-care provider, about what I was going to do about this sudden, dreadful cough I had developed in a matter of hours.  My GP wouldn't be back until Tuesday (Monday was a holiday) and the advise nurse suggested two courses of action: to go to the Kaiser Urgent Care Center ten miles away for double my normal co-pay or go to a pharmacy and buy an over-the-counter decongestant Mucinex expectorant, which I did and started to tough it out.

A day or two later I was coughing so long and hard during the day that I feared the oncoming night and thought that I was dying.  A few nights I woke up coughing so hard that I had to sit up in bed to catch my breath, several times.

But after two weeks I got over it, sort of.  I coughed occasionally, not too hard, I was occasionally short of breath, especially at night, my lungs ached, I was generally fatigued and I won't tell you the details about my all-day every day GI issues.  Now six months later I am still sometimes short of breath, I "go" several times a day and my lungs still feel inflamed so I haven't run a single mile since February because I don't want to further aggravate them and invite further inflammation.

I wonder what I had.  Everyone tells me I certainly didn't have Covid19 because it was too early (apparently the coronavirus first started roaming the land in March) and I didn't come from China.  Besides, there are no reliable tests in America even half a year later because, well, this is Trump's America and we have become a piteous country with no exceptionalism anymore, mocked or walked all over by the rest of the world.

I tried to get an antigen test in July so I could participate in blood plasma therapy if I had had Covid19 in February, but a Kaiser doctor called me and said: Naw, we don't do antigen tests, why should we; and if you think you are sick with the virus, call Kaiser and follow its long dance correctly and we'll get you a Covid test.  She assured me that what I described had in February was merely the flu.  I wondered aloud to her why the hell I got a flu shot in the fall if I still got so sick from the flu.  She assured me my ordinary flu sickness would have been even more severe if I hadn't gotten that shot.  Whatever.

Kaiser, which won't even let me in the door without going through the nth degree at the door ("Do you have shortness of breath? Nope, not me. Diarrhea? Nope.") and then taking my temperature, sent me a postcard to get a "driveby" flu shot this year.  I called for an appointment and got to complaining about Kaiser not doing any antigen tests and my, how things have changed.  I was referred to a nurse who got me an appointment this very day for a blood draw to be used for an antigen test.  I like operating on real information.  I'll keep you informed.

 

Three months to go . . .

Thank goodness that hot, long July is behind us.  Three months (and three days) to go to starting to restore America's former greatness, which is all gone now in three and a half chaotic, unstructured  years, poof!

Postpone the November election, really?  That wasn't done even during the heights of the Civil War or World War II.

Mail-in voting is "a mess?"  Sez who, the liar is chief?  Mail-in voting has been going on for years, decades, without any problems and it works well, especially in these times of a totally mismanaged national pandemic which has already killed 154,000 Americans in a mere five months because of Trumps's disorganization, incompetence or laziness, or all three

.

I'll be visiting city hall on the very first day of early voting to cast my ballot.  I can't wait.

What?

A 32.9% drop in the annual GDP was announced yesterday, the greatest drop in history by a staggering amount.  Yeah, I'm tired of winning.

The faux president yesterday tweeted that he thought the November election should be postponed.  Is this what you voted for in 2016?

Over 153,000 Americans have died from Covid-19 in five months in America (over 1400 on Wednesday) because of the criminally negligent response by our president to the arrival of the coronavirus on our shores months after it was unearthed in China.  That's the greatest number of deaths in the world by far, making America great, uh huh.

Herman Cain, a 74 year old businessman who in 2012 was for awhile the leading Republican candidate in the GOP's presidential primary that year as the self-declared ABC candidate (American Black Conservative) attended President Trump's "relaunch" of his 2020 reelection campaign late last month in an indoor arena in Tulsa, packed in with other attendees, none of them wearing masks or socially distancing, has died of the coronavirus.  It was criminally negligent to hold such a rally at such a time.

The Dog Days . . .

What do I do in semi-lockdown when I'm not witnessing the demise of our formerly great democracy live on cable news every day?  I used to walk three times a week for three or four miles but now it s too hot for that.  Besides, I still don't feel right from the virulent respiratory ailment I had the last half of February, and my spells of shortness of breath come and go (with, fortunately, no accompanying debilitating cough as happened in February) and the past few days, I'm in a short period.

I have thrown over Facebook posting, which I formerly did once a day, for the month of July in protest of the unAmerican posture of its founder and Chief Officer Mark Zuckerberg, who wittingly or unwittingly allowed the Russkies to throw our close 2016 election to Putin's Puppet by spreading misinformation and verifiably untrue bot posts (but fully believed by Trump's cult followers--like the Pizzagate conspiracy nonsense which brought an armed gunman into the Comet Pizzeria in the District looking for supposed children sex slaves kept in the basement there (no basement) by Hillary Rodham-Clinton) on Zuckerberg's platform.  He still won't fix the problem dangerous conspiracy theories flourishing on his platform, hiding behind the First Amendment while both our democracy and greatness goes down the drain.  Perhaps I'll go back in August, or perhaps not.

I haven't even been to Westover, a flourishing two-block commercial area, with free parking, only four miles away in Arlington that has plenty of free parking, a library, an old-style hardware store and several popular restaurants with outdoor seating, not even to return a library book I took put in early March.  A friend comes over once a week and we have bagels on my porch, or perhaps a pizza or a salad on my porch along with some appropriate beverage.   She started throwing small balls of bagel dough to the birds who cluster in my yard and make a godawful racket all day long; now they're all my "friends" and even come up onto the porch looking for scraps whenever I am out there.

I nap sometimes in my bedroom as it is the only relatively cool place in the house because it has a decrepit window A/C unit, and I retire there to read while lying on the bad.  Daytime dreams are different from nighttime dreams which often are nightmares, and I dreamed recently of my middle child (seen below at age two, now the lad is in his thirties) that he had stopped by my house recently.  As I haven't heard from the lad in a decade and a half, ever since he wrote to me and asked me to provide for payment of his full tuition and fees at his four-year university, which I did gladly; but his silence since then indicates his otherwise loathing for me and all Lambertons, who he hasn't contacted in two decades; I guess that was a teasing, taunting daymare.

A Horrible July

This month has been horrid, just like the year has been so far.  Over 1,000 Trumpvirus deaths in America for the fourth day in a row yesterday, with no end in sight thanks to NO national leadership from the Republicans with a stranglehold on the country even though, in the Senate as a representation, they represent about 20% of the population.  Two days ago the Pacific rim of countries like Australia and South Korea, with a conglomerate population of 325 million, recorded four such deaths, the US with a population of 330 million had over twelve hundred deaths.

Woodrow Wilson was a racist president, it turns out (he segregated the Federal bureaucracy which till his first term had been integrated), and he presided over the 1918-19 Spanish Flu pandemic (it actually arose in America and was given to the world by us) with 640,000 American deaths due to Wilson's absolute hands-off what-are-you-talking-about role.  Trump is on track to produce an even greater death count if Americans turn out to be so ignorant or blindly cult-driven (addictive personalities, you know, like druggies, or alcoholics, or gambling-addicted wrecks who lay down their last chip to turn their luck around to start winning back the thousands they've lost) to return him to power in 100 days.  Meanwhile, the red hinterland is now burning up, just as the blue states did months ago with much Fox News condescending clucking about the "radical left" controlled states.

The country is burning up, not the Democratic cities as Trump falsely claims in his bid via the secret and anonymous DHS Palace Guard to give him the mantle of authoritarianism, but the country's Covid-19 infection rate (we lead the world in confirmed infections, with over four million).  My region's rate of positivity is climbing again.  And the weather where I live has seen a record-breaking string of 90-plus temperature days, made to feel like over 100 degree days due to the humidity.

These months I hang out in my bedroom with its twenty-year old dilapidated window AC unit that cools the room a little (the rest of my non-airconditioned house feels like 100 degrees at all times) and read The Liberation Trilogy by Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Atkinson, having enjoyed volume one on the American war in Africa, and plowed through the penultimate volume covering the excruciatingly interminable Italian campaign, and now in the final volume the Allies, having broken out of Normandy, have sprinted to the German border where their armies have been rebuffed, having smacked headlong into stout resistance at the West Wall (the Siegfried Line) while suffering from an acute lack of critical daily combat supplies and munitions like winter clothing and artillery shells.  The spring flowers I planted are all dying or gone, I shirk from any human contact closer than twelve feet, and I wish I had more than two or three people I could call who will answer their phones.  The month of July has been horrid, as has been the year, and I can't wait for the opening of early voting in Virginia, on which day I will don my mask, drive or walk down to City Hall and cast my vote for a return to a formerly great America.

If you want a test...

Repeating a fallacious claim he made in early March, President Trump said on Monday, "If somebody wants to be tested right now, they'll be able to be tested." Not that anyone with an IQ merely equaling his or her age to go along with a 6th grade education could possibly believe this charlatan anymore, it's just not true. I communicated with my health care provider Kaiser this week about my desire to get a Covid-19 test and was turned down cold.

A doctor called me back and after listening to my tale of how I thought I contracted the coronavirus in February which led to two desperate weeks of continuous coughing fits, especially all night long, and I still feel fatigued generally and short of breath two months later. I said I'd like an antibody test to confirm I had it and recovered to put my mind at ease that I probably won't get it in my depressed condition and also I would participate it blood plasma therapy which has been said to ameliorate the conditions of afflicted, desperately ill patients, as I have donated blood products at least 140 times in my lifetime anyway. The doc was unimpressed and said Kaiser doesn't offer antibody testing, period. She added the speculative diagnosis that I probably had "the flu," even though I dutifully received my flu shot in the fall.

Then I asked that, because there was no chance of my knowing if I was already afflicted by it in the past and being in the risk group (over 65), if I felt sick again, how would I go about getting a test? Or should I protectively hunker down alone in my house till 2021 or 2022 when the pandemic might, or might not, be over. She laid out the many guidelines, which were daunting and not very promising of leading to a test anytime soon.

If I got sick with the supposedly typical characteristics of this novel and poorly understood virus, fever, diarrhea, nausea, loss of smell, respiratory distress and pressure in the chest, and not least, where I had traveled to (nowhere) and who I was in contact with (nobody), then I could call Kaiser and set up a video exam. Then if the doc thought I merited further diagnosis, they would prescribe a flu test. When that came back negative days later, they would send me a long medical questionnaire to fill out. Then maybe if I fit into all the right boxes, I could be prescribed to receive a test which in itself would come back days after that.

Only in Trump's America. I'm still in Lockdown, with no test available for the likes of me because I am not currently desperately sick and had traveled to somewhere suspect or was in contact with someone who somehow had gotten a test that came back positive.

The Month That Wasn't

I'm housebound due to adherence to my governor's lockdown orders, for the good of all of us (the herd), I'm not going out like those asinine Trump cultish losers with all my guns strapped to my fatigue clothes (I have one or two, having been a police officer for 9 years) and, displaying my guns prominently (big gun little dick), scream Open Up ('liberate") the state!  Nope, I've been hunkering down in my house and I go off my property twice a week for staples.

Every day blends into the last and the next, and I think I might be going bonkers but each morning I try to remember what I had for dinner the last night and that gets me oriented once I go downstairs to view the deitrus of the last night's dinner preparation and determine what I ate. Because I'm utilizing this housebound opportunity to work on getting rid of all of the formerly discounted old dented cans on my back porch and all the 2017 and later frozen meat in my basement freezer.

It's working, I threw out some 2011 boxes of rice a roni and a 2013 dented can that hissed when I opened it.  On my birthday this month, I spoke to some persons on the phone and fielded a birthday text from a Trumpite relative who wished me well then demanded that I list the accomplishments of the president and then I'd see, and I didn't see, or touch, or have in-person communication with anyone else.

The month that wasn't.  I tell my girlfriend we have two more years of this existence, under President Biden, and she howls that Trump will be re-elected (which depresses me that she thinks that because I don't think so), and that we'll be out of our desultory existence by early 2021 at the latest which I absolutely dispute.

Inject disinfectant?

What?  Is the president of the US, on a nationally televised public broadcast, actually suggesting that shining a powerful light inside the body or that disinfectant placed inside the body will cure the patient of the novel coronavirus?  This is crazy stuff.

World headlines trumpet banners of "dangerous," "bizarre," "insane" and "horror" in reference to this manchild's bloviating for two hours of dangerous claptrap and medical nonsense.  Who voted for this giant three-year old toddler who somehow got ahold of the car keys and is behind the wheel with the engine running and everyone in the family strapped into their seatbelts looking on in horror.

Maybe we could pour a little spic and span in a glass, top it off with water to the fill line and--down the hatch-- or shine a heat lamp into, what, your rectum?  Your open mouth?

Yeah, that'll keep covid-19 at bay.  "Thank you, Mr. President [Dear Leader]."

50,000 deaths and counting now in about forty days to the virus, and 20% unemployment in the same time frame due to the virus.  No national strategy on ramping up reliable testing or mapping out a game plan for when the virus comes back strong in a second wave.  Even when a sane person takes the White House in January, it'll take a year or more to immediately mobilize national resources under a coherent hand to ramp up a rational response to this deadly peril.