As an aside, I love Keep Calm and Carry On; I got a mousepad replica of the poster. It so encapsulates the stereotypical British stiff upper lip-edness and under-reaction. (It’s a pity the Brits themselves didn’t see it that way. 
) I imagine the American equivalent would be “It’s OK. We Got This”.
Individual 1 says federal employees who have had their payroll taxes withheld aren’t going to have to pay it back. If he’s reelected.
Nowadays, sure. Back then, We can do it!
That sounds an awful lot like “I’ll pay you to vote for me.”
Individual 1 mumbled his way through the Pledge of Allegiance at the 911 memorial, sort of stopped trying once he reached Under God, and Melania didn’t even bother.
I think nowadays it’s somewhere between “Hold my beer” and “Who cares, burn it all down”.
Trump should be nominated for the Nobble Peace Prize. I’d vote for that.
Are we sure it is not the Pieces Prize?
Yep. And if that happens they won’t have social security to collect when they retire. Wonder who is going to tell folks that?
Ooh, and what if he’s lying?
Why on earth would the Trump administration choose to move the POW/MIA Flag from atop the White House?
This makes no fucking sense.
Why???
They are all suckers and losers, aren’t they?
Someone here credibly suggested that it was taken down so that in a few days, Trump can announce that he is Rescuing the Wonderful POW/MIA Flag (i.e. putting it back up).
“Fixing” something he’s broken is a frequent go-to for Trump.
And he does expect to be hailed as a hero. (No doubt Fox News will comply, with nauseating degrees of groveling.)
I’m guessing that “Keep Calm and Carry On” might have been seen as the government muckety-mucks talking down to the common people–which they might well resent. No one likes having orders barked at them by a poster.
If it had been, instead, something like “We are British: We Keep Calm and Carry On,” the reaction might have been more positive. ‘We’re all in this together’ and that sort of thing, don’t you know.
(The US equivalent “We Can Do It,” mentioned earlier in the thread, is more in that ‘pulling together’ vein.)
Yup, just like the ordered closure and subsequent reversal of the Stars and Stripes newspaper last week. The Pentagon ordered it shut down, and Trump got to rescue it.
But why did the Pentagon order the newspaper shut down in the first place? It’s been around since the Civil War, and has been published continuously since WWII. Does anybody seriously think that SECDEF Esper came up with the idea to shut the newspaper down on his own?
After thinking about it for a long time, I do believe that you’ve hit on it. I think Trump wanted to say “virulent”, a word he’d heard others use, but it’s not in his 500 word vocabulary, so he went searching for the word. He knew it meant “strong”, and it had that exotic long “u” in the middle of it (probably why he sorta remembered it), so he ended up with a word he could recall – one that started out with “strength” but had that long “u” . Strenuous – that was a word, right? They couldn’t make fun of him for coming up with something that wasn’t actually a word.
It was just a completely inappropriate word. But even if it wasn’t quite right (although he didn’t know that), nobody would point it out or make a big deal out of it.
Trump has the Best words.
My wife showed me this
DeVos Defends Trump: “Would a Moron Hire Me?”
It looked really hilarious until I pointed out to her that it’s The Borowitz Report
It’s still hilarious, but not nearly as much.
There’s this bombshell coming about two hours ago from Politico: Trump officials interfered with CDC reports on Covid-19.
The health department’s politically appointed communications aides have demanded the right to review and seek changes to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s weekly scientific reports charting the progress of the coronavirus pandemic, in what officials characterized as an attempt to intimidate the reports’ authors and water down their communications to health professionals.
In some cases, emails from communications aides to CDC Director Robert Redfield and other senior officials openly complained that the agency’s reports would undermine President Donald Trump’s optimistic messages about the outbreak, according to emails reviewed by POLITICO and three people familiar with the situation.
The CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports are authored by career scientists and serve as the main vehicle for the agency to inform doctors, researchers and the general public about how Covid-19 is spreading and who is at risk. Such reports have historically been published with little fanfare and no political interference, said several longtime health department officials, and have been viewed as a cornerstone of the nation’s public health work for decades.
But since Michael Caputo, a former Trump campaign official with no medical or scientific background, was installed in April as the health department’s new spokesperson, there have been substantial efforts to align the reports with Trump’s statements, including the president’s claims that fears about the outbreak are overstated, or stop the reports altogether.
Hmmm…it’s not good to have bombshells pushing each other off the front page. They should be spaced out evenly—one per week until Election Day.
^^^ And this is a good point. The amount of lies and redirection with this admin is too much to consider. The caravans, the Rosie O’Donnell trashing, support for “both sides” in racist outbreaks… We need a news report with just clips of all this without any commentary to remind people how deep this state of crap really is.