32 Days - daily election day countdown
ABOVE: https://www.denofgeek.com/culture/jimmy-carter-rock-roll-president-premieres-at-tff/
Hi readers,
Today's post was going to be an entry about racism and anti-racism in comic books because I have a presentation to give along with my colleague Abbie Leavens on the subject exactly a week from yesterday and TONS AND TONS of tasks in between now and then.
And then, I saw it had been Jimmy Carter's birthday and read this nugget that made me so grateful for such an amazing human as president during my most formative years:
Carter was also invoked in the lede of a Washington Post story Monday, following the big New York Times exposé revealing Donald Trump just plain doesn't pay income tax. Reporter Christopher Ingraham noted,
In 1977, President Jimmy Carter had a problem, according to presidential tax historian Joseph Thorndike. Carter's federal tax burden for 1976 had been zeroed out by a massive investment tax credit he earned for purchasing equipment and buildings related to his peanut farm.
Carter was upset, as he told The Washington Post at the time, because he had a "strong feeling" that wealthy people like him should pay at least some taxes. So he voluntarily paid the Treasury Department $6,000, the equivalent to 15 percent of his adjusted gross income and slightly more than the 14 percent paid by average taxpayers that year.
Carter DID NOT OWE ANY TAXES AND YET HE CHOSE TO PAY TAXES, like a TAX DONATION to the country.
And I was thinking this was a pretty good story and so maybe I should wish Jimmy Carter a happy 96th birthday! So, I was contemplating delaying my comic books and antiracism stuff, which I am still writing anyway.
AND THEN, the BIG news broke.
Trump's main aide has COVID-19.
Trump has COVID-19.
Melania Trump has COVID-19.
And so, what a great post of contrasts.
Happy Birthday to Jimmy Carter who worked for four years to make the country a better a place, to make the world a better place, who cared about the energy crisis in the late 1970s, AND who paid taxes even when he did not owe taxes.
And, hey, Donald Trump has COVID-19, the virus he down played and denied, the virus he has failed to lead the country to confront and control, the virus for which masks reduce transmission to 2% or less and yet he refuses to wear a mask, encourages others not to wear masks, holds packed rallies, sometimes indoors, of maskless minions cheering and screaming in COVIDPALOOZA, and who MAKES FUN OF people, namely Joe Biden, for wearing a mask.
And now, Donald Trump has COVID-19.
Joe Biden does not.
Almost eight million people have come down with COVID-19 by established numbers which are likely low (quite possibly fourteen million or more people have had it or currently have it) and we're fast approaching 210,000 who have died from this very contagious, very serious virus.
![From the Archives] The Real Jimmy Carter | Harper's Magazine](https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/033__HA0319_33-1.png)
Meanwhile, China is about to enter a holiday week in which 550 million people will travel throughout their country and not have to wear masks or not fear infection as the virus is VERY under control there. Because they have a leader. Even though he's an awful dictator who violates human rights...Happy Birthday Jimmy Carter.
Happy first day of infection Donald Trump.
Happy Birthday Jimmy Carter, The Actual #BeBest
The Allman Brothers Band T-shirt: an elegant weapon for a more civilized age.
James Earl Carter, the 39th president of the United States, was born 96 years ago today at the hospital where his mother worked as a nurse in Plains, Georgia. That facility, once the Wise Sanitarium, is now the Lillian G. Carter Nursing Center — it was renamed in 1976, the same year Mr. Carter was elected president.
A spokesperson for the Carter Center in Atlanta said the former president would be celebrating his birthday at home in Plains with his wife, Rosalyn. We hope he has a relaxing day and stays comfortably at home until the COVID-19 pandemic is over. Back in July, the Carters released a photo reminding folks to wear face masks and to keep each other safe.
In March, as the pandemic spread, the Carters sent a message to donors asking them to forgo their next planned donation to the Carter Center and instead give to local groups helping out with the pandemic, because that's the kind of people they've always been: believers in community, and in the power of people to help each other — not just through individual giving, but through making government work for everyone, too.
If you'd like to send the longest-lived American president a birthday greeting, you can do so through the Carter Center; darned if we know where to order one of those face masks, though.
While Carter was out of action for several months in the latter half of last year, hospitalized following surgery for cancer and a couple of falls, he was able to start going to church again in December 2019. He's been unable to return to teaching Sunday school, though, first because of his health, and after that because of the pandemic. But he's stayed busy. He didn't endorse any of the roughly three million Democrats running for president this year until Joe Biden clinched the nomination, but on Tuesday, he endorsed Rev. Raphael Warnock in Georgia's race for US Senate.
Carter has also made it into the news regarding recent stories about current politics. The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg was cause for some journalists to note that Carter first put her on the federal bench:
Carter is the only president since 1850 not to make a single Supreme Court nomination, but he reshaped the lower courts with a record number of nominations of women and non-white jurists, Ginsburg being the most notable.We repeat: That's the kind of person Jimmy Carter is.
In 1980, Carter tapped Ginsburg, then the nation's most accomplished civil rights attorney, for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, considered the nation's second highest court. She was the second woman Carter nominated for the D.C. Circuit, setting her up for a promotion to Supreme Court 13 years later.
"He looked around at the federal judiciary and he said, 'You all look like me, but that's not how the great United States looks,'" Ginsburg said to a Fordham University Law School forum in 2016.
Carter was also invoked in the lede of a Washington Post story Monday, following the big New York Times exposé revealing Donald Trump just plain doesn't pay income tax. Reporter Christopher Ingraham noted,
In 1977, President Jimmy Carter had a problem, according to presidential tax historian Joseph Thorndike. Carter's federal tax burden for 1976 had been zeroed out by a massive investment tax credit he earned for purchasing equipment and buildings related to his peanut farm.And let's say it one more time: He's that kind of guy.
Carter was upset, as he told The Washington Post at the time, because he had a "strong feeling" that wealthy people like him should pay at least some taxes. So he voluntarily paid the Treasury Department $6,000, the equivalent to 15 percent of his adjusted gross income and slightly more than the 14 percent paid by average taxpayers that year.
This year, while Carter may not be getting out much (and good for him!), the Carter Center is working to ensure free and fair elections in the USA, the kind of thing Carter used to promote in foreign countries whose democracies needed the kind of work that ours now does, too. For the first time ever, the Carter Center has labeled the US a "backsliding democracy," explaining in a statement that such governments are
often characterized by polarization, a lack of public trust, ethnic or racial divisions and injustice, and fears that election results won't be seen as credible or could trigger violence.Our birthday wish for President Carter: May you see democracy restored in the United States of America.
Gosh, we hope it's not too tacky for our birthday wish to Jimmy Carter to be a little selfish.
We want that, too.
[CNN / ABC News / CNN / Carter Center / Carter Center birthday message linky]
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Ho. Lee. Shit.
Well, it's finally happened. President Trump and the First Lady joined the 7.3 million Americans who have tested positive for the coronavirus.
After months of downplaying the danger, and promising we'd turned the corner, and bullying the nation's governors to open up the schools, and telling us all to drink bleach, and blaming Democratic governors for their own sick citizens, and making fun of Joe Biden for wearing a mask, and shitting all over his own experts, and deliberately depriving Americans of accurate public health information ... the president and his wife have finally tested positive for COVID-19.
It was probably inevitable. That jackass has been flying around the country, refusing to wear a mask, and claiming it was fine to stand close to him because he gets tested constantly. It's amazing it didn't happen sooner, frankly.
Oh, does that sound churlish? Sorry, not sorry! Just two days before revealing to the world that he was carrying a highly communicable disease, this feckless wastrel's entire family refused to wear masks — in violation of the law! — as they crowded into an indoor venue with the entire Democratic campaign team to watch their father scream inanities at Joe Biden from a few feet away.
Hope Hicks, who is constantly by Trump's side, tested positive on Wednesday after returning from a MAGA rally with the presidential entourage in Minnesota. Minnesota! In the midst of a viral pandemic, they all hopped on to a plane with a bunch of reporters and breathed in each other's exhalations for hours on end, just to visit a state where Joe Biden is NINE POINTS AHEAD.
And still, even after Hicks tested positive, the rest of the team hopped on a plane yesterday to press the flesh at a fundraising speech and intimate roundtable with donors in New Jersey. So while we never wish sickness or harm on another human being, we're having a difficult time channeling our better angels for people who were so arrogantly reckless with the health of every single person they came into contact with.
And they came into contact with a lot of people. Here's a graphic helpfully compiled by MSNBC before Trump's announcement just of people who were on the plane with Hope Hicks.
Twittertwitter.com
NBD, just the entire senior campaign staff, that wax figurine who inexplicably runs the White House, a member of Congress, the White House spokesditz, the asshole who's been chaperoning the SCOTUS nominee around the Senate, Nostradamus, and that rancid little immigrant-bashing weenus.
How many additional people came into contact with Hicks, Trump, and Melania in the past week? It could be half of Washington!
HOT. MESS.
Trump has canceled all scheduled campaign appearances, and his minions at Fox are currently suggesting that Biden do the same. (Haha, eat shit.) Whether this impacts the timeline for Amy Coney Barrett's confirmation hearing likely depends on exactly how much of DC has to go into quarantine thanks to Commander Superspreader.
Fox is reporting that Meadows has tested negative. But Fox is also reporting, via the president's former physician Ronny Jackson, that the president has no comorbidities so he'll probably shrug this whole thing off without even developing symptoms. Which makes complete sense if you shut your eyes and imagine the president as a healthy young stallion with 8 percent body fat, rather than an obese 74-year-old who golfs for "exercise" and wouldn't eat a salad if it was deep fried and dipped in Velveeta.
But we sure as hell hope Dr. Ronny the Candy Man is right, because it is really bloody dangerous for democracy when the president's health becomes an issue during an election. Here's a nice splainer from election law expert Rick Hasen on what happens if a candidate dies. The answer is, the parties choose a successor. Or at least, that's what the answer should be. But we currently have eight Supreme Court Justices, a divided Congress, a Republican Party that has collapsed in on its leader like a black hole absorbing all light, millions of votes already cast, and a heavily armed population that is freaking the fuck out. We really don't need another thing!
So, God willing, this asshole will get better! Then we can beat him fair and square and have an orderly transition of power. Let the GOP understand that they didn't get spanked on a technicality — the country really, really hates what they've allowed themselves to become.
Because these people have already stolen enough from us. They've taken our time, and our peace of mind, and our friendships, and our faith that we live in an orderly, democratic country of good and decent people. For four years we've endured daily chaos and bullying and degradation and humiliation. And now through their own pig ignorant carelessness these amoral ghouls have plunged the country even deeper into uncertainty by risking their own lives and the lives of thousands of people who come into contact with them.
And for what? For an election they were probably always going to lose because they couldn't be bothered to lift a finger to keep the country safe?
So, best wishes for a speedy recovery, honestly, we mean it. Get well soon, you country-ruining son of a bitch. Get well, and get back here and finish what you started. You owe us that much.
Keep Wonkette going, this is going to be A LOT.
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2010.02 - 10:10
- Days ago = 1918 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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