Prickly City by Scott Stantis for April 23, 2020

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    Darsan54 Premium Member over 4 years ago

    Less of giving up civil liberties than following doctor’s order in order to get healthy again. And if your liberty kills me, where is freedom?

    This whole “liberties” argument is simply emotional manipulation for political purposes. Someone is making a civil rights grab in the guise of freedom. Free-Dumb is just another name for losing.

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    Cheapskate0  over 4 years ago

    Last panel: The truth of it all.

    No one wants a tweet from you-know-who.

    Of course, even guessing what he might want is still not good enough.

    Just as now former Navy secretary Modly (yeah, I probably misspelled it)

    Knew that his predecessor lost his head because he didn’t stop something that Trump wanted stopped.

    Knowing that Trump thought this thing was a hoax, thought to preemptively handle the carrier TR – only to find out that Trump was going to have sympathy on the guy after all.

    So Modly joined his predecessor.

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    pschearer Premium Member over 4 years ago

    Oh no, not a mean tweet! The horror, the horror!

    Hey folks, this Emperor has no clothes!

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    braindead Premium Member over 4 years ago

    Civil liberties?

    You mean like AG Barr laying the groundwork for arresting governors if they displease The Messiah?

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    Silly Season   over 4 years ago

    As Conspiracy theories go…

    I can’t just dismiss this one…

    ~

    It’s about making sure people can’t file unemployment.

    It isn’t about saving lives, certainly. It’s not about the peak of the curve. I think lots of people are going to ignore the governor and stay home regardless.

    This isn’t a decision being driven by epidemiology. It’s the rawest and most lethal of political decisions, and it will kill people.

    Kemp is looking forward to the fiscal discussion in 2021 and 2022, when all of this really starts to hit.

    He got elected by out-yahooing the field.

    His base has been trained to view government spending as a crime, and he knows that he becomes politically vulnerable to an attack if he raises taxes.

    He is not capable of delivering a nuanced message around necessity, because his base doesn’t know how to hear it.

    The state is staring at one million unemployment applications. It probably cannot pay those over six months.

    The unemployment fund has a reserve of about $2.6 billion. Last week it paid out about $42 million — which is about three times as much as it usually does.

    That figure will double in two weeks, give or take. Maybe more.

    At that rate, the fund is empty in about 28 weeks. Probably less.

    Even if things improve later, that fund will run dry in a year, because unemployment isn’t going to return to 5 percent for a long time.

    Georgians did the Kansas thing a couple of years ago and instituted a hard constitutional limit on income taxes of 6 percent.

    If there’s no state order calling for businesses to be closed, the people who are unemployed can no longer claim that their unemployment is involuntary, even if it would be utter idiocy for them to return to work.

    A hairdresser or a massage therapist cannot maintain social distance. But they can certainly file for relief … unless the law says they can work.

    https://decaturish.com/2020/04/dear-decaturish-governors-decision-to-reopen-businesses-is-political-murder/

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    Silly Season   over 4 years ago

    Non-essential businesses, including tattoo parlors, hair salons, movie theaters and bowling alleys, will be authorized to reopen from Friday, if they follow social distancing orders.

    In a state where African Americans make up more than 32% of the population but account for an estimated 54% of known coronavirus deaths, the decision pitted a white Republican governor against mostly black Democratic mayors and critics.

    “By trying to push a false opening of the economy, we risk putting more lives in danger,” Stacey Abrams, the Democrat who lost to Kemp in a controversial election in 2018, told MSNBC.

    Bo Dorough, who is white, is the mayor of Albany, a small city with a cluster of confirmed Covid-19 cases that has ravaged its mostly black community.

    Dorough said he only learned of the Kemp’s announcement after an aide caught the press conference on TV.

    “I’m flabbergasted that the governor would say we can’t take additional precautions to protect our citizens,” Dorough told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

    “This isn’t a mixed signal. It’s a U-turn.”

    Citing “more than 19,000 Georgians” who have tested positive for coronavirus, Atlanta’s mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, who is black, said in a statement she “will continue to urge Atlanta to stay at home, stay safe and make decisions based on the best interests of their families”.

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/22/georgia-reopening-kemp-governor-mayors

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    Silly Season   over 4 years ago

    At bottom, President Trump’s ongoing support for right-wing agitators who want to own the libs by throwing off the oppression of policies limiting their own exposure to a deadly pathogen should sound unsettlingly familiar.

    It’s another expression of the idea that Democratic governance is fundamentally illegitimate — an idea Trump has pushed in many different ways for years.

    In siding with the claim that democratically elected governors are tyrannically oppressing their constituents with these restrictions, Trump is speaking to a small minority of Americans.

    But this jarring juxtaposition will not disturb Trump. That’s because it’s an important feature of what Trump is really up to here.

    Trump’s assertion that people’s lives were “taken away” by these governors could theoretically be just a figure of speech.

    But, given that Trump has repeatedly called on people to “LIBERATE” states from such governors, the phrase doubles down on the idea that this “taking” was an illegitimate usurpation.

    Underlying Trump’s suggestion that their rule is illegitimate is a kind of cross between the concepts of herrenvolk democracy and minority rule, or what you might call “counter-majoritarian populism.”

    It’s the idea that the only people who constitute the true essence and makeup of the political community are Trump’s people, a standard right-wing populist trope Trump has at times expressed explicitly, but in this case, this is so even as they constitute an electoral minority.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/20/trumps-support-right-wing-protests-just-got-more-ugly-dangerous/

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    stellans Premium Member over 4 years ago

    You mean like when Bush-the-Younger rammed through the Patriot Bill all in the name of keeping us safe from a threat that wasn’t a deadly, fast-spreading, infectious disease? The threat to civil liberties seems to come far more frequently and severely when it’s a GOP leader — whether state local or federal — than any other political ideology. Hmmm…

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    RobinHood  over 4 years ago

    “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

    Benjamin Franklin

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    Silly Season   over 4 years ago

    In the early years of the American Revolution, George Washington faced an invisible killer that he had once battled as a teenager.

    While the earlier fight had threatened only his life, at stake in this confrontation were thousands, including military and civilian alike, the continued viability of Washington’s army, and the success of the war for independence from Britain.

    The unseen killer was smallpox, which Washington described in 1777 as a potentially greater threat “than…the Sword of the Enemy.”

    Smallpox was typically brought to eighteen-century America by either English immigrants or recently-arrived slaves.

    Within days of taking command of the army at Cambridge, Massachusetts during the summer of 1775, Washington wrote to assure the President of the Continental Congress that he had been “particularly attentive to the least Symptoms of the Small Pox,” quarantining anyone suspected of having the disease in a special hospital.

    https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/smallpox/

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    Brain Pudding  over 4 years ago

    “It is in war that the State really comes into its own: swelling in power, in number, in pride, in absolute dominion over the economy and the society.” Murray Rothbard

    It is time to end the statist dream of total house arrest and government designation of “essential” people. Time to reclaim our freedoms and tell the leftist tyrants to shut up and serve us or get out of our way.

    A staged, phased opening is safe and Americans are smart enough to be responsible in such a recovery of our society. The hospital system and other domestic preparedness systems are strong enough now to handle any echo surge in infection.

    If leftists want to keep themselves in lockdown, leftsists can do that. The rest of us are free to choose as well.

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    William Robbins Premium Member over 4 years ago

    People breaking quarantine are making a statement that they don’t care who dies by their action. Most of us do care.

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    William Robbins Premium Member over 4 years ago

    This made me tear up: Andrew Cuomo “those who are upset … don’t blame your local official. Blame me.” https://twitter.com/NYGovCuomo/status/1252991812618387460

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    Bruce1253  over 4 years ago

    Whenever someone chooses to live in a society they give up a certain amount of personal freedom. In order to stay in that society you must follow their rules – no killing, no stealing, cross with the light, on and on. Of course you don’t have to live in a society, you can be totally free but you will have to move away, a long ways away to have that type of freedom. People who do, tend to find their life to be ‘Nasty, Brutish and Short.’

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    dogday Premium Member over 4 years ago

    This whole thought process is a case study in the utter lack of critical thinking today. Does anybody strike or rebel because their body “forces” them to breathe? Or eat..at least occasionally? The only reason the government is issuing stay-at-home orders is because people who can are too stupid and/or selfish to realize that, to avoid a potential infection that transmits VERY easily from people with no apparent symptoms, is to avoid contact in every way possible. This is completely different from the government placing people under house arrest for political purposes, people. PLEASE….while you can’t do anything else, read a book on HOW TO THINK!!!!!

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    NaturLvr  over 4 years ago

    Some things need to be put on temporary hold during extenuating circumstances. Not being able to go get your hair dyed or cut, get a tattoo or buy lawn supplies are not a loss of your civil liberties. Get real, people.

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    braindead Premium Member over 4 years ago

    More tests, but NOT just more tests.

    Tests that are accurate.

    Tests that are targeted according to a PLAN to know what to do with the results.

    Tests that determine who HAS the virus AND tests that determine who HAS HAD it.

    Collection of the data. Analysis of the data. Determine what to do according to the results and analysis.

    Tracing to determine how/where the virus was contracted.

    And maybe not lying.

    .

    Trump is absolutely incapable of grasping such a complicated concept.

    Evidently, so are His Disciples.

    Especially the last one.

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    Scoutmaster77  over 4 years ago

    The last time I looked the US Constitution is still in effect even with these restrictions. Just an excuse to wave their guns around.

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