Well, it seems that advisors around the White House were not able to keep Trump from having the disgusting and embarrassing pressers every day.  He was out there again reading meaningless statistics, not wearing a mask, and becoming incensed when reporters asked him innocuous questions.

I have come to despise that sing-song voice he uses when he reads aloud.  And, he read aloud today.  I am sure his staff tried to get him to confine himself to reading aloud, but of course he couldn’t do that.  And, like usual, he made an ass out of himself attacking a female reporter.

The female reporters in these White House briefings could provoke a total melt down from Trump if they just persisted in asking relevant questions and refused to back down.  Or if one of them, just one of them, asked Trump if he realized that their job was to ask questions and his was to answer them.  But, as it stands now, none of them are prepared to do this.

When I complained once about the servility of the White House press on Twitter, I received multiple replies explaining to me that reporters couldn’t ask pointed questions because they might lose the positions they had worked so hard to attain.  This line of reasoning drives me crazy.

We have evidently become a society in which people simply assume that it is normal to abase themselves in order to keep a job.  I cannot count the number of times I have heard political pundits state in a matter-of-fact manner that members of Congress can’t do this or that because they might then have an opponent in a primary, or God-forbid lose an election.

When did we become a country in which it was assumed that everybody would just do what they were told, sacrifice any standard, abandoned any integrity, kiss any ass just to hold a job?  When did this become normal?

I’m sorry, but what ever happened to doing what is right?  I know, it went out of fashion.  I miss it.

Other notes from the News:

AFP.com (5/10/20)

• The Supreme Court will tomorrow take up whether Trump is going to be forced (like every other person) to turn over his tax returns. He is the first president since Nixon to refuse to do so.  Trump’s lawyers have argued that this request for the tax returns is designed to “torment the president.”
• Trump’s attorneys are arguing that he enjoys total immunity as long as he is in the White House.
• In a friend of the court brief, lawyers argued that if the Supreme court rules for Trump and his lawyers “it will fundamentally alter the basic principles of accountability on which our democracy depends.”’
• There are a lot of people who are still maintaining that our “institutions are holding.” I am not one of them.

Trudo, Hanna and Hunter Woodall (5/11/20) Daily Beast

In an interview on April 30, Joe Biden revealed that “…there’s some major Republicans who are already forming ‘Republicans for Biden.” He then specified that they were “major officeholders.”

• “You don’t want something like this out on the street before it needs to be,” a GOP source said. “It just makes it much harder to do.”
• Names that are being bandied about apparently include Jeff Flake, Bill Kristol, Michael Steele, Steve Schmidt, David Jolly and Mona Charen and John Kasich. .
• Reached for comment, a spokesperson for the Biden campaign said, in part, “Vice President Biden is running for president to unite our country and rebuild the soul of the nation, and to accomplish that we need to bring together Americans from across the political spectrum to build the broadest possible coalition to defeat Donald Trump.”
• At one point in late 2019, Biden even floated the prospect of selecting a Republican running mate.
• In late April, Biden stated that he would consider naming Republicans to his Cabinet.

Derysh, Igor (Salon, 6/19/19).

• In June of 2019, Biden assured rich donors at a New York fundraiser that “nothing would fundamentally change” if he is elected.
• He promised not to “demonize” the rich and that “no one’s standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change.”
• This was just after Biden appeared at the Poor People’s Campaign Presidential Forum where he said that poverty “was the one thing that can bring this country down.” “We have,” he stated “all the money we need to do it.”
• Biden went on to say that the rich should not be blamed for income inequality, pleading to the donors, “I need you very badly.”
• For the rich donors in New York: “I hope if I win this nomination, I won’t let you down. I promise you,” he added.
• Biden also complained that some Democrats criticized his eagerness to work with Republicans after Republicans spent years blocking President Obama’s agenda and moving further right.
• Biden pointed out that his ability to work with segregationists like former Mississippi Sen. James O. Eastland and Georgia Sen. Herman Talmadge showed that he could “bring people together,”
• “I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland,” Biden said. “He never called me ‘boy,’ he always called me ‘son.’”
• “At least there was some civility,” he said. “We got things done. We didn’t agree on much of anything. We got things done. We got it finished. But today, you look at the other side and you’re the enemy. Not the opposition — the enemy. We don’t talk to each other anymore.”

I hate to tell Joe Biden, but the problem here is not that we don’t talk to Republicans.  The problem is that we have listened to Republicans.  They want to establish a one-party Christian Nationalist state that has no room for democracy.

You cannot compromise, bring together, be civil to people who are trying to destroy democracy.  You either fight them or you let them win.  Joe Biden will let them win.  He has done it his entire career.