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Today in “Who The Fuck Cares What The Fuck You Think?”

Please please please, let’s continue to not let the stupid in this country dictate how things are going to be.

Things are bleak right now to be sure. Just a few days ago we had some dumbass opining about the efficacy of “injecting” disinfectants and shining “really strong light” at people to stop this coronavirus thing.

That’s not the way it works, “stable genius.”

Besides the moron-in-chief’s continuing effort to undermine both the public health and our democracy, I say this:

Don’t let stupid rule. Keep doing what we’re doing instead: stay home. Stay healthy. Don’t be a vector for this pernicious disease. Continue to flatten the curve.

The end of this terrible thing won’t get here immediately. But please don’t delay its arrival by listening to ANYTHING that fucking idiot in the White House has to say.

Care for each other. Be kind. We will get through this together.

President Trump has relentlessly used his bully pulpit to decry Latino migration as ‘an invasion of our country.’ He has demonized undocumented immigrants as 'thugs’ and 'animals.’ He has defended the detention of migrant children, hundreds of whom have been held in squalor. And he has warned that without a wall to prevent people from crossing the border from Mexico, America would no longer be America.


'How do you stop these people? You can’t,’ Trump lamented at a May rally in Panama City Beach, Fla. Someone in the crowd yelled back one idea: “Shoot them.” The audience of thousands cheered and Trump smiled. Shrugging off the suggestion, he quipped, “Only in the Panhandle can you get away with that statement.”


On Saturday, a 21-year-old white man entered a shopping center in El Paso, according to police, and allegedly decided to 'shoot them.’ Inside a crowded Walmart in a vibrant border city visited daily by thousands of Mexicans, a late-morning back-to-school shopping scene turned into a pool of blood. Twenty people died, and dozens were wounded.


After yet another mass slaying, the question surrounding the president is no longer whether he will respond as other presidents once did, but whether his words contributed to the carnage.


Since the moment Trump rode down his gold-plated escalator four years ago to start his renegade run for the White House, us-against-them language about immigrants has been a consistent and defining feature of his campaign and now of his presidency. Absent from his repertoire has been a forceful repudiation of the white nationalism taking rise on his watch.


Authorities in El Paso have not announced a motive in what they call an act of domestic terrorism, but at the center of their investigation is an anti-immigrant manifesto. Officials believe the shooter posted it shortly before he opened fire but continue to investigate.

The Washington Post“’How Do You Stop These People?’  Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric Looms Over El Paso Massacre.”

Smells like complicity to me.

(Those last four posts were for posterity, natch.

Hello.  Be back soon.)

A man armed with a shotgun and smoke grenades stormed into the newsroom of a community newspaper chain in Maryland’s capital on Thursday afternoon, killing five staff members, injuring two others and prompting law enforcement agencies across the country to provide protection at the headquarters of media organizations.


The suspect, Jarrod W. Ramos, 38, was taken into custody at the scene and was charged on Friday morning with five counts of first-degree murder. He had a long history of conflict with the Capital Gazette, which produces a number of local newspapers along Maryland’s shore, suing journalists there for defamation and waging a social media campaign against them.


“This was a targeted attack on the Capital Gazette,” said William Krampf, acting chief of the Anne Arundel County Police Department. “This person was prepared to shoot people. His intent was to cause harm.”


A bail hearing for Mr. Ramos was scheduled for 10:30 a.m. Friday in Annapolis, according to Maryland court records, which did not list a lawyer for him but said Mr. Ramos was eligible to be represented by a public defender.


The chilling attack was covered in real time by some of the journalists who found themselves under siege. A summer intern, Anthony Messenger, tweeted out the address of the office building where the newsroom is based, saying, “please help us.” A crime reporter, Phil Davis, described how the gunman “shot through the glass door to the office” before opening fire on employees.


“There is nothing more terrifying than hearing multiple people get shot while you’re under your desk and then hear the gunman reload,” Mr. Davis wrote.


Even as the authorities continued to pore over the newsroom for clues, the Capital Gazette announced Thursday that it would be publishing an edition on Friday.


Shortly after 9 p.m., several tired reporters and a photographer from the Capital Gazette were filing stories and photographs from their laptops, set up in the back of a silver pickup truck in the parking lot of the Westfield Annapolis Mall, across the street from their newsroom.


E. B. Furgurson III, a reporter, stood in a blue shirt and khaki pants with his colleagues. He had decided to go get lunch around the time the shooting happened, so he was not in the building at the time.


When asked if they were putting out a paper on Friday, he said fiercely: “Hell, yes.”


His colleague Joshua McKerrow, a photographer, said he was going to pick his daughter up for her birthday when he was called about the shooting. He rushed back. He had a hard time finishing sentences.


“Our newspaper is one of the oldest newspapers in the U.S.,” he said. “It’s a real newspaper and like every newspaper, it is a family.” He began to cry. Then he added:


“We will be here tomorrow. We are not going anywhere.”

The New York Times“5 People Dead in Shooting at Maryland’s Capital Gazette Newsroom.”

A reminder that 1) Guns are still being used in mass murders, and 2) our president has labeled journalists as “the real enemy.”

Front page, The Capital-Gazette, Annapolis, MD, Friday 29 June 2018.
When asked if the paper was going to print today – following the massacre of five of its journalists and staffers – one reporter answered “Hell, yes.”

Front page, The Capital-Gazette, Annapolis, MD, Friday 29 June 2018.

When asked if the paper was going to print today – following the massacre of five of its journalists and staffers – one reporter answered “Hell, yes.”

(via the Newseum)