Slog AM: The US Lost 20.5 Million Jobs in April, Unemployment Is 14.7%, 31% Missed House Payments, Trump Liberates Some Guy Who Lied to the FBI



Just a few quickies from Chuck this morning you've already read about.


"... the US should suspended all mortgage and rent payments for at least 6 months. This, inter alia, would give the fight against the virus extra fire-power."

We have a Government for this purpose.
If not for this, then for what?
To protect the massive Wealth
of the very very VERY few?

Yeah. We tried that.


Is it not my white right to menace the human population with my automobile on socialized roads? Has America no privilege?


If you're in your 20's and there is no current pandemic, Ocean City is a blast. Also, no road sign more ignored than "No Through Traffic."


Sorry about your trips to the amusemnt Park from hell, Chas.

On the other hand (on the Other Ocean) there was an amusment park in LA -- Pacific Ocean Park - that was utterly Delightful. Pay your admission, and all rides were paid for. A roller coaster that went out over the ocean (with Great Whites milling around below, patiently awaiting the next Fool) and bumper cars with nothing better to do than help crash you into other patrons. We formed ad hoc gangs (all White!) and when the bell rang, dashed out and right back in, and if there were other amusements, I never noticed.


Just because Flynn is a Trump sycophant doesn't mean that he shouldn't be treated fairly - even if he lied to the FBI.


@7, and twice pleaded guilty to the offense.


@8: Which is even more reason he should be treated fairly.


Nothing about Trump getting tested EVERY DAY NOW, while all of us are just supposed to accept we'll never be tested?


The entire government - Congress and Administration - is in perfect denial about the magnitude of this crisis. They give a couple trillion bucks to Wall Street, quibble a bit over means testing a 1200 dollar relief check, then head for the hills. Two months later, here we are.

Somebody mentioned a "Manhattan Project" for a virus - more a wistful fantasy than an actual program. The historical Manhattan Project was an immense undertaking - they built three cities in the wilderness. And it all happened during a world war. If our government could manage to make that kind of commitment today, we could have the testing infrastructure to deal with this mess properly.


@11 -- not only Never get tested,
just GO BACK TO WORK Freeloaders!

Messge? Fuck YOU, your Families, Friends, Fellow employees -- we got Gottdamm ECONOMY to SERVE.

Are we Citizens
or are We, the People
merely collaterally damaged
cannon fodder cum (cashless)


If the NFL starts on time, it will quite possibly be with significantly fewer (or zero) fans in attendance.


Sam Zimbabwe's last name is really Zimmerman.


"The Seahawks season is set to open in September in at Atlanta? How is that even possible? 50,000 people in a stadium, in September?"

There shouldn't be anyone in the stands but we are in the great state of Georgia, so who knows? But it may be possible to play the NFL schedule with empty stadiums. There will be a lot of social and political pressure to do exactly that.


Impale Benedict "Piggy" Barrnold with vibranium spears to the rack and roast him alive for the Lord of Light.


How nice of Durkin to close 20 miles of streets. Such a Draconian rule without public/neighborhood input. Well, she did hear from the bike lobby. Taking advantage of a Pandemic 101.


@14 -- forgot to include: the fucking FRONTLINE* and HEALTHCARE WORKERS* in the collaterally-damaged list. Apologies.



Born February 1929, my dad bears witness to BOTH unprecedented days.


Yeah, I'm really looking forward to the drunken cursing fan 1 row up and 2 seats over from me at the Seahawks' games yelling and spewing Covid-19 virus over everyone. NOT!


@22 - Although outspoken and tipsy Seahawks fans are no more likely to be infected than anyone else.


I feel like I'd get a kick outta watching some live sports with no fans if they had some well placed boom mics to pick up the floor/field action. The trash talk in a basketball game or in the low trenches of a football game could be freaking riveting. Though the powers that be will probably ruin it in an attempt to appease the FCC and/or "family friendly" viewing agendas. Also pretty sure team owners and league offices wouldn't be OK for any extended period of such play, as they'll be losing out on millions in gate and concession revenues (which they can surely afford of course, though that's certainly not gonna factor into their thinking in any realistic manner.)


In other news:

‘Black Mirror’ Creator Says the World Is Too Bleak Right Now for Season 6 to Happen


@mikeblob -- mic 'em up pay per view might be kinda fun.

However -- BigTime Sports may find this Pandemci an open door to extinction when they realize they've been replaced by kids with joysticks steering Virtual Jocks or drone races or whateverthe fuck.

Those maybe-soon-to-be-olde Timers better think of something good, and fast, should hordesless football fail.


@27 seems pretty clear given Trump's behavior from the beginning that even COVID-19 wants nothing to do with him.


@23 -- you mean
unless they're




When even a filthy Virus is disgusted
you know you needn't sink lower

yet you still do.

trump 2020


Here's an Interesting one in the NYT
from a (sometimes sane) David Brooks:

We Need National Service. Now.
The formative moment for a new generation.

There is now a vast army of young people ready and yearning to serve their country. There are college graduates emerging into a workplace that has few jobs for them. There are more high school graduates who suddenly can’t afford college. There are college students who don’t want to return to a college experience. This is a passionate, idealistic generation that sees the emergency, wants to serve those around them and groans to live up to this moment.

Suddenly there is a wealth of work for them to do: contact tracing, sanitizing public places, bringing food to the hungry, supporting the elderly, taking temperatures at public gathering spots, supporting local government agencies, tutoring elementary school students so they can make up for lost time.

Dr. Tom Frieden, former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has said we will need as many as 300,000 contact tracers alone.

The obvious imperative right now is to join workers with the work. It’s to expand national service programs to meet the urgencies of this moment.

We Americans suck at regimentation and blindly following orders from the top down. But we’re pretty good at local initiative, youthful dynamism and decentralized civic action. We need a Covid response that fits the kind of people we are. National service is an essential piece of that response.

As my mentor William F. Buckley once put it, “Materialistic democracy beckons every man to make himself a king; republican citizenship incites every man to be a knight.” We have a generation of knights in waiting.
By David Brooks


katie miller aka pence’s spokesperson aka stephen miller’s wife tested positive


@34 oh how sweet it would be if Miller got infected, since he's been vilifying and deporting immigrants under COVID-19 policy.


they all deserve it after strutting around without distancing or wearing masks like they’re too good for it


What exactly constitutes "a fair treatment" of Michael Flynn?


@37 Wringing him out like a sponge and leaving his desiccated husk to the ants.


The President of the United States should be getting tested every day. The President of the US should also have the highest security detail in the world, and all of the other protections they receive. Now trust me, I'm not a Trump supporter, but the President is one of the most critical heads of state in the world and deserves every protection necessary.

But Trumps' response to this privilege is so child like, it's frightening. It's kind of like when your parents give you a helmet and tell you to wear it, but the second you are out of their sight, you take it off. That's Trump and his anti-mask wearing in a nutshell. His handlers make him get tested, but once they are out of sight, he's off shaking hands and not wearing a mask. Kids will be kids I guess.


RE: praying mantis

Saw that vid on another site yesterday and someone posted a video of a praying mantis catching and eating a hummingbird.


@37: That's a premise afforded to all and actualized by due process in a court of law. I don't have exculpatory commentary in Flynn's regard, I just want him to be treated fairly.


And what makes you think he wasn't treated fairly?


@36: I suggest being careful with the "deserve" shade. Last time we heard that sentiment was during the AIDS crisis.


@42: For starters, being cornered into a perjury trap. There was nothing inherently wrong with his meeting with the Russian foreign ambassador in the first place.


@44. "Hitler did nothing wrong."


So why did he lie about it?


raindrop the crime is lying to the FBI not having the meeting. There were also several charges that were prosecuted including unregistered foreign agent for Turkey. The guy broke the law, admitted to it and deserves punishment. Dropping the charges was only to avoid issuing a pardon. The judge doesn’t have to drop the case. I’d bet the judge doesn’t drop the case and I’d also bet on pardons for both Flynn and Stone before election day.

Chuck the White House isn’t going to help. If that’s not clear to you by this point you’re going to need to adjust your expectations. Same with getting another package through the Senate. Staged reopening needs to start happening where possible. You’re lucky you still have a job. Many don’t nor will they have one after we fully reopen.


oh wow! the economy is tanking! says the paper in line with the NYT style of front-running the virus and recession and dragging feet to have any semblance of cautious normalcy about a bug that killed way less than you bed wetters predicted. 2 Million with no quarantine? And now from NYC we get news that a bunch of covid patients from recently had been observing quar, which is going to go down as an overshoot. I agree that there is a time for caution and shutting down in the face of a fucking plague threat - and shitty as covid was for the many people that had bad cases of it, it's time to open the fuck back up. cry into your fucking bandanas and wipe the shit off of your legs with your NYT digital copy.


Trying hard to feel sorry for Miller's wife. Not working. Just hoping that they are still enough in love that she's been giving him big sloppy kisses every day up to and including yesterday.


I have to say, at least up here in Greenwood, closing this street is a non-issue. Very narrow street that no one really drives down anyway. The actual problem with it is that more than half the cars that cross it blow right through the stop signs, while it is supposed to be one of those neighborhood greenway things that is safe for kids to ride their bikes on, etc. It's only a matter of time until some 8-year-old who ( justifiably) thinks its a good place to ride gets nailed by a car.

City needs to either enforce things like stop signs on these streets or get rid of them. At least that way people would know what the risks really are.


@40 - A Murder Hummingbird?


"the average age of death for coronavirus victims is older than the average age of death"


Holy shit! This guy is a supposed genius? Christ almighty. This guy builds spaceships?!

Now I'm going to use small words so maybe you'll understand:
The average age of death from almost ANY single disease is older "than the average age of death."

Once you factor out trauma, overdoses, auto accidents and suicide and childhood diseases you get the same conclusion. Holy fuck are you stupid. HAHAHAHA.


Anyone looking at these numbers and believing we're good to go to re-open everything has a death wish. And they, just like Trump, believe the virus will infect and/or kill someone else, certainly not them, so who cares?


This just in:

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In a test result that he called “a tremendous relief,” the Attorney General, Bill Barr, has tested negative for integrity, Barr confirmed on Friday.

Barr submitted to the test after learning that he had come into contact with career Justice Department prosecutors who were found to be integrity carriers.

“When I learned that there were still people at the Justice Department with integrity, I was understandably furious,” Barr told reporters. “I told them to go home at once.”

More on ze morons @


@McBikey -- we should Rejoice: social distancing WORKS.

Not storm the streets rejoice hunker down and hang tight rejoice.

Let's let The Experts continue to call the shots.
And let the Government Write Checks
That's what they're THERE FOR.


Also @McBikey -- the FBI under Director Hoover (and especially, later under Nixon) was a fascist organization with dirt on EVERY one and a willingness to utilize it where and however J. Edgar chose to.

Puting one's Faith in the FBI in any Era will lead to serious disillusionment.


"An amazing quote from last night's Joe Rogan podcast (with Elon Musk) - "the average age of death for coronavirus victims is older than the average age of death."

Sure glad we locked down for this!"

I've been looking for the data on this and can't find anything to back it up...


56, <1% of americans have been exposed. It’s just getting started and 70,000 are already dead.


61- less than 1%? you sure? I'm in nyc, and a LOOOT of people I know including my family and I had bad worse than flu symptoms back in the period the holy NYT recently expanded to include the bug being stateside (at least january, could have been here since november.) also when dealing with these weird, large raw numbers, just for perspective, remember to divide by the national or state population, which in the case of the US has a lot of zeros shrinking that 70k way back below zero into decimal city.

the left is losing it's moral high ground with a quickness. it's definitely lost me.

mueller dirt on trump? nope. russiagate? nope. millions dead? nope. major social programs uplift or enable? a lot of enable. united or divided? divided. investigate bush era war crimes? never. next up? the climate change scam. look up any speech from patrick moore, former founder of greenpeace canada who is still an environmentalist, but has gone whistleblower on the scam that is the CO2 obsession, that will ultimately be a huge power and money grab. He's a good starting point if any of you are curious what some of the reasons are that people question the manipulatively called "consensus." (Carbon is a huge power grab, because carbon runs through everything, and to control carbon would literally be an epic shift on the chessboard.)

Democrats seem to mostly see people and wings of government grabbing power as innocent helpful public servants. granted the republican party has been on crack for a long time, but wake up to your shitty ass power hungry, expansionist neo-liberal democratic party. for example, learn a little about your boy fauci. MFer is way more of a player than he looks. And Teodros... is it simply racist to get hip to his corruption and sketchy past? Inslee seems pretty good, but who knows what he's hiding on his way to the high level he is at. whatever we're all in this together - getting fucked and looted by this fake ass 2 party system. it just so happens the reds actually have a few good points about the left-driven over-reaction to covid and anti-trump positioning that we are all dealing with and TANKED THE ECONOMY that this paper claims to care about.

also if the fucking bug was here since at least january, thats a lot less exponential than initially advertised, and has a bulge much more similar to winter/spring flu curves of every other year. when you pull out your excess deaths graph, divide by the population and watch your number turn into hundredths and thousands of a percent. OPEN THIS SHIT BACK UP PLEASE


"I would really like The Stranger to start highlighting the fact that this virus wasn't nearly as bad as we thought it was going to be."

How much crack are you smoking?

Holy fuck. You just see what ever you want don't you.


62 nyc is the biggest outbreak in the country so that tracks but anecdotes are not data

1.3M confirmed cases / 328M people = 0.4%

Even if we’re undercounting cases by a factor of 10 (possible but unlikely) we’re still hundreds of millions of cases away from herd immunity



Highlight this:

Three Children Have Died in N.Y. of Illness Linked to Virus: Live Updates

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said New York was working with the C.D.C. to investigate mysterious illness linked to the coronavirus that causes life-threatening inflammation in children.

As of Saturday, more than 73 children in New York have been sickened by the rare illness, which has some similarities to Kawasaki disease.

Governor Cuomo said many of these children did not show respiratory symptoms commonly associated with the coronavirus when they were brought to area hospitals, but all of them tested positive either for Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, or for its antibodies.


What a shock, raindrop is providing cover for deplorables and criminals, while David subscribes to the alt-right's mainstream normalizer.


That David is also quoting some dumbshit former MMA fighter's rectum-borne "statistics" as justification for what America should be doing to combat a historic pandemic should also come as no shock to anyone familiar with David's level of intelligence.


Oh, I see I missed a comment. Apparently this bullshit was coming from Elon Musk, not one of Rogan's house toadies. So, a new source for bullshit then. I'm sure there's also nothing to read into the fact that Musk has been having a very public meltdown over the last week, or that he's desperate for California to reopen so he can protect his billions, or that Musk is known for being an absolute moron on topics where he is not an expert, and a high-functioning psychopath/unrepentant asshole on topics where he is.

Sorry, I don't know how I made that oversight.