It’s a busy day, here in the CatBox.  Diana should be here in a short time change my patch.  Then, it’s a grocery delivery day.  Store to Door should be here at around Noon.  I scheduled an appointment on the morning of Friday 10/23 for a CAT Scan to get an idea of how bad my tumors are and to what extent, if any, the immunotherapy infusions are helping me.  May all your Republicans be unemployed.  However, those who are where they deserve to be may have prison jobs.  (Diana just left.)

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 4:06 (average 5:13).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Cartoon:

Trump* Virus Update:

Click for more maps

US Cases: 8,156,124
US Deaths: 221,895
Plus all the Trump*/GOP Plague murders Republicans are hiding from us

Short Takes:

From Daily Kos: Every Republican Supreme Court nomination follows the same pattern:

1. Nominee builds up a record of statements showing their allegiance to the most extreme positions on a set of topics dear to the far right.
2. Federalist Society vets the nominee against strict ultraconservative checklist on the same list of topics.
3. Republican senators pretend that 1. and 2. never happened, as nominee protests they couldn’t possibly speak to any of those topics. Or to anything else.

It’s become commonplace for a candidate who has spent their career signing their name to statements calling the Roe v. Wade decision barbaric to suddenly discover that they have nothing to say on the subject while in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Nothing, that is, except for meaningless hand-waving about “precedent.” But sometimes a non-answer can speak more loudly than a scream. That’s the case when a nominee is confronted by a question that should generate a response as automatic as breathing. That was certainly the case on Tuesday morning, as Trump nominee Amy Coney Barrett weasel-worded her way through an answer that left absolutely no doubt: She intends to be there if Trump needs her to overturn the results of the election.

Earlier in the session, Barrett had been asked if she would recuse herself on a series of cases in which she had a personal or political position. Barrett’s response on all of these was the same—she would follow the rules of the Supreme Court.

This answer has a simpler meaning. It means “no.” That’s because, unlike lower courts, there are no actual rules requiring a Supreme Court justice to step back from any case. Since there are no spare justices to substitute for a recused justice, each is given absolute personal latitude to determine if they feel they need to recuse themselves on a particular topic. No one can make a Supreme Court justice recuse themselves from a case, even if that case is ruling on something in which they have a deep personal involvement or even a fiscal interest.

That also means that every appeal to Supreme Court guidelines is nothing but a dodge. Because there’s essentially nothing to those guidelines but “whatever you think best.” Barrett repeating that she would follow these guidelines is simply a refusal to answer, nothing more.  [emphasis added]

Lets be real for a minute. Nobody in their right mind could think Barrett would have been nominated had she not made it cleat that the will overturn the election on behalf of her Fuhrer, if he needs it!  While SCOTUS may use conscience as a guideline, Republican Injustices in SCROTUS (Republican anti-Constitutional Venereal Disease) have no conscience.  RESIST!!

From NY Times: On the afternoon of Feb. 24, President Trump declared on Twitter that the coronavirus was “very much under control” in the United States, one of numerous rosy statements that he and his advisers made at the time about the worsening epidemic. He even added an observation for investors: “Stock market starting to look very good to me!”

But hours earlier, senior members of the president’s economic team, privately addressing board members of the conservative Hoover Institution, were less confident. Tomas J. Philipson, a senior economic adviser to the president, told the group he could not yet estimate the effects of the virus on the American economy. To some in the group, the implication was that an outbreak could prove worse than Mr. Philipson and other Trump administration advisers were signaling in public at the time.

The next day, board members — many of them Republican donors — got another taste of government uncertainty from Larry Kudlow, the director of the National Economic Council. Hours after he had boasted on CNBC that the virus was contained in the United States and “it’s pretty close to airtight,” Mr. Kudlow delivered a more ambiguous private message. He asserted that the virus was “contained in the U.S., to date, but now we just don’t know,” according to a document describing the sessions obtained by The New York Times.

The document, written by a hedge fund consultant who attended the three-day gathering of Hoover’s board, was stark. “What struck me,” the consultant wrote, was that nearly every official he heard from raised the virus “as a point of concern, totally unprovoked.”

The consultant’s assessment quickly spread through parts of the investment world.

No matter what fallout effects the economy, some investors will make money and other investors will lose money. The Republican Reich made sure the 0.1%, the super-rich, had the insider information to protect themselves financially, while Trump* lied to the rest of us.  RESIST!!

From YouTube (a blast from the past): Billy Joel – Piano Man (Video)

Ah… the memories! Protest like the 60s!  RESIST!!

Vote Blue No Matter Who Top to Bottom!!