"It's Everybody Else's Fault!"

Guess where that comes from:

The Washington Post reports:

“I don’t take responsibility at all.” That’s what President Trump said this month when asked whether he takes responsibility for the slow rollout of testing that public health officials say handicapped the country’s ability to protect Americans from the coronavirus.

But Trump’s desire to not take responsibility could also be extrapolated to the coronavirus crisis in general. Trump has thrown blame in nearly a dozen different directions for the virus’s spread and different aspects of the response to it.

He really does blame -- or wants us to blame -- everyone but him for his regime's inept response to the pandemic.

But his ratings are beating everyone. Says he.

And did anyone expect anything different?

(The WaPo article is behind a paywall, which is why I don't have more extensive quotes.)

Words Fail Me

The plague is spreading, and this is what Trump thinks is important. From Digby:

Here’s an example of what President Trump thought was important to share with his millions of Twitter followers this past weekend as we watched the nation’s coronavirus numbers climb into the tens of thousands:

“President Trump is a ratings hit. Since reviving the daily White House briefing Mr. Trump and his coronavirus updates have attracted an average audience of 8.5 million on cable news, roughly the viewership of the season finale of ‘The Bachelor.’ Numbers are continuing to rise...

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 29, 2020

It goes on . . . and on. This has-been reality show star is puffing up his flabby ego by tweeting about his ratings while we're in a national crisis.

And the irony is that most people don't believe anything he says about the pandemic.

Read Digby's whole post, if you have the stomach for it.

Image du Jour

Posted by charemor in the comments thread to this post at Joe.My.God.

What's New at Green Man Review

Yes, it's Sunday again, and we at GMR have all sorts of things to keep you occupied while you're hunkered down at home:

the first real Celtic Rock album, a Celtic history, Holy Molé chocolate, Ray Bradbury poetry, Silly Wizard live and Other Neat Stuff

Be sure to check out the other neat stuff -- it really is neat.

Review: Bill Willingham: Fables, The Deluxe Edition, Book One

I reviewed most of this series at the late lamented Epinions, although for some reason I never reviewed the first three trade paper backs. Maybe this is why.

Imagine all your favorite (and not-so-favorite) characters from fairy tales, folk tales, and children's literature living in Manhattan right now. (Except for the not-so-human characters, who are living on an extensive farm/estate in upstate New York.) Refugees from their own scattered kingdoms and realms, all conquered by a creature known as the "Adversary," they live in a particular section of town, which they have named "Fabletown." They have their own government and spend a fair amount of effort keeping the "mundys" unaware of their existence. King Cole is the Mayor of Fabletown, and Snow White is his deputy, who manages the day-to-day affairs of the Fables -- the real power behind the throne, so to speak. The Big Bad Wolf, now known as Bigby, is the sheriff. (He has taken on human form for the past few hundred years.)
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The first half of this volume, "Legends in Exile," fills in the background a bit and gives us the first adventure: Jack (of Beanstalk fame) comes huffing into Bigby's office to report a terrible crime: He has been keeping company with Rose Red, Snow's estranged sister, and went over to her place only to discover the apartment a blood-spattered shambles. It's Rose's blood, alright, but there's no trace of her at all. Bigby, being a naturally suspicious sort, immediately comes up with a list of suspects, starting with Jack. The list soon expands to include Snow White and Bluebeard -- one of the few who escaped the Homelands with his fortunes intact.

The second installment, "Animal Farm," finds Snow and Rose (no, she wasn't dead, and no one ever really thought she was) on their way to the Farm on Snow's annual visit. They read the farm to find Weyland Smith, the Administrator, AWOL, and the farm being run by the Three Little Pigs. It soon turns out that there's a revolution brewing, led by Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

I had read this volume of the series as background for a ficlet at Green Man Review, but with the backlog I'd built up of material for review, never went back to it until recently. It's worth following, I think: these are fairy tales for adults, and in many respects probably closer to the originals transcribed by the Brothers Grimm and other collectors than the versions eventually published for children. The characterizations aren't what we might expect -- Snow White is a little rigid, not very sympathetic, and more than a little arrogant (and you'd best not mention the Dwarves in her hearing, if you know what's good for you) -- but the cast is highly entertaining, from the Frog Prince, now in human form, who keeps getting sentenced to community service for eating flies in public, to Beauty and the Beast, whose main marital problem is that the glamor that keeps Beast looking human works more or less, depending on how mad at him Beauty is at any given moment. Reynard the Fox, in "Animal Farm," lives up to his reputation as a trickster, and Goldilocks' relationship with Baby Bear is bound to raise a few eyebrows.

The art is a group effort by Lan Medina, Mark Buckingham, Steve Leialoha, and Craig Hamilton. There's good stylistic consistency throughout, and while layouts tend to hew closely to the standard frame-follows-frame of Western comics, there's a nice openness to the renderings that keeps it from getting monotonous or claustrophobic, even in the crowd scenes.

Collects Fables #1-10.

(Vertigo, 2009)

How Does "Petty and Vindictive" Sound?

It's always been part of the acting president's make-up, but now it's out in the open. This time the target is Michigan:

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer suggested Friday that a growing rift with the White House is affecting shipments of medical supplies to Michigan amid exponential growth in confirmed coronavirus cases.

"When the federal government told us that we needed to go it ourselves, we started procuring every item we could get our hands on," Whitmer said Friday on WWJ 950AM. "What I've gotten back is that vendors with whom we had contracts are now being told not to send stuff here to Michigan. It's really concerning."

Whitmer didn't say who has told vendors to stop sending medical supplies to the state, but strongly implied the order came from President Donald Trump's administration.

If that seems a little circumstantial, how about this?

During a Friday evening press conference, Trump said he's instructed Vice President Mike Pence, "don't call the woman in Michigan."

"If they don't treat you right, I don't call," Trump said of Whitmer.

If you find this unbelievable, consider again what we're dealing with: a sociopath with severe ego problems whose only talent is duping the unwary. Who thinks he should be president for life.

Via Joe.My.God.

Herons

I saw what I think was the first black-crowned night heron to arrive at Lincoln Park this afternoon. Black-crowned night herons are endangered in Illinois, but there are a couple of nesting colonies in Lincoln Park, one in the Children's Zoo at Lincoln Park Zoo and one farther south.

Originally, there was a small colony on the island in South Pond. The Zoo staff, being very conservation minded, immediately set it up as a sanctuary, with signage on the boardwalk and everything. The herons, as perverse as any other creature, decided they liked the red wolf habitat in the Children's Zoo better -- they seem to prefer nesting in somewhat spindly trees, such as birches, which I find odd -- they're fairly clumsy clambering around the branches. In the beginning, there were maybe eight or ten nesting pairs, making a racket and dropping guano all over the place. Over the past few years the population has grown until they've pretty much taken over the Children's Zoo during nesting season -- if you want to visit the Children's Zoo in the summer, you'll find it wise to take an umbrella.

At any rate, it looks like they're back (although it's a bit early, I think).

Any Excuse Will Do

Via Joe.My.God., the EPA has decided to suspend all the rules for the duration of the pandemic (maybe) because reasons:

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a sweeping suspension of its enforcement of environmental laws Thursday, telling companies they would not need to meet environmental standards during the coronavirus outbreak.

The temporary policy, for which EPA has set no end date, would allow any number of industries to skirt environmental laws, with the agency saying it will not “seek penalties for noncompliance with routine monitoring and reporting obligations.”

Pardon me if I fail to see how the pandemic would impact compliance with environmental laws, especially in those companies who are up and running and not laying off workers.

Read the whole thing. It's another D.C. boondoggle.

As for Andrew Wheeler, current EPA administrator -- well, in his last life, he was a coal lobbyist, among other things.

This seems an appropriate place to remember an old favorite:

Today's Must-Read: Onward, Christian Soldiers!

I'm not the only one who's noticed the rabid support Trump gets from evangelical "Christians" -- from Franklin Graham and Robert Jeffress on down. And I'm not the only one who's noticed how the evangelical movement has taken over the Republican party -- at least, the part not already owned by corporate America. It's not by chance, as Val Wilde points out in this post at Friendly Atheist:

This I guarantee: You know the “Seven Mountain Mandate.”

You’ve read about it online. You’ve watched it on the news. You’ve seen it in action, even if you’re not aware of it. Most Americans aren’t. Yet it’s a concept that inflects nearly every part of U.S. politics, touching the lives of all Americans as well as plenty of others around the world.

It is the battle plan for an American theocracy that has been in the works since the 1970s. At least, that’s when the movement’s founders claim God spoke to them individually and directly about the seven “mind molders” of culture and how to claim them for Jesus Christ.

Wilde goes on to lay out the game plan, from its beginnings in the '70s to now. From a video by Lance Wallnau:

What we need to be doing now, in this complicated world that we’re having such a limited impact, is we should be going into all the systems instead of all the nations… The Christians in the West are not shaping culture because they don’t understand the game. The game is: not souls only, but nations. If you get a nation you can win souls. It’s not about just focusing on eternity, it’s about focusing on what’s happening now.

What's happening now is that they've got someone in the White House who will give them free rein in return for their support.

Read the whole thing.

Culture Break: Carl Orff: Carmina Burana (Flash Mob)

"Flashmob Oradea - Carmina Burana". Oradea is in Romania.

Rabbits Are Magical

We have a couple of rabbits on our block. I see them sometimes munching away at a patch of lawn across the street, usually only one, but sometimes two, usually in the evening, but sometimes in the morning. They also browse around the garden at my place.

And they appear and disappear without warning. This morning I was out and saw one across the street, and when I turned to come back inside, the other one had appeared. They do that. The other evening I was out and the one across the street suddenly just vanished.

I've seen that happen before -- I was at the Zoo just outside the south entrance, and there was a rabbit browsing just inside the fence, next to a shrub. There was a squirrel foraging on the other side of the shrub, and sure enough, they were suddenly face to face. The squirrel levitated about three feet and the rabbit just disappeared. Gone. Poof.

They're also really good at holding very, very still, so they're hard to see to begin with.

Today's Must-Read: Conservatives to the Rescue . .(Update).

of the economy. This post from Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo is a good summary of the sickness that is the American conservative movement:

American conservatives faced with addressing the COVID-19 pandemic are grappling with the Trolley problem before our very eyes. The classic thought experiment in ethics involves a runaway trolley headed towards five people who will be killed on the track ahead. But you can throw a switch sending the trolley down a side track where only one person will be killed. What would you do?

As an American conservative, you save the trolley company.

He goes on to look at the Senate bailout bill which, as you might expect, is not oriented toward helping workers, He quotes this tweet summarizing the horror:

THE POSITIONING BEGINS — here are some problems with the bill, as flagged by a democrat.

Big four plus mnuchin meeting this am. pic.twitter.com/dlKVKO7WBG

— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) March 22, 2020

They consider it a "Randian act of courage." If said it often enough, but I'll repeat myself: Randian conservatism, also known as "libertariansim", born of the philosophy of Ayn Rand (who, you will remember, had no hesitation about sucking at the government teat when it suited her), is the most morally bankrupt excuse for a philosophy that I've ever run across.

Read the whole thing.

Update: I'm making this a twofer, adding on this post from Digby:

If I’m reading the tea leaves correctly it appears Trump plans to announce that he has personally cured the virus with hydroxychloroquine, the epidemic is pretty much over and everything can now go back to normal. Because he wants that to be true[.]

There's a lot of analysis going into Trump's anxiety about the economy right now. I'll put it simply: If Trump has learned one thing about elections, it's something you may remember from the Bush-Clinton campaign in '92: "It's the economy, stupid." Trump is worried about the economy for one major reason: he's knows damned well that if the economy tanks, his chances of winning in November go down the toilet. And that's what it's all about for him: the election. That's why he's been campaigning for the last three years (aside form the fact that's all he knows how to do -- he has no idea how to govern). It's the ultimate popularity contest. It's ratings.

He thinks he's starring in another reality show.

Sign of the Times

I just got this from my friend Terry in Arizona:

How apropos.

The Great Outdoors -- Sort Of

For those of us who are pretty much housebound, here's a nice post from Water Girl at Balloon Juice with links to remote cameras at various zoos, aquariums, and outdoor parks.

Here's a sample from Chicago's own Shedd Aquarium:

Sea otters make everything better.
💙 🦦 Let’s all pause, take a big breath and watch Yaku play! pic.twitter.com/TiNslLvQhW

— Shedd Aquarium (@shedd_aquarium) March 21, 2020

Is Anyone Surprised?

Trump seems to want the economy back on track in spite of the pandemic:

President Donald Trump made clear in an all-caps stroke of midnight tweet he’s done with sacrificing the economy to save millions of lives.

“WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF,” Trump tweeted at 11:50 PM Sunday night.

Now reports from several news organizations are giving that disturbing tweet even more disturbing context.

“President Trump and some of his senior officials are losing patience with the doctors’ orders,” Axios reports. “Senior Trump officials, including the president himself, have only limited patience for keeping the economy shut down. They are watching stocks tumble and unemployment skyrocket.”

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Maybe if the response had been other than a bunch of tweets downplaying the seriousness of the pandemic, the economy wouldn't be in trouble.

and of course, this just illustrates once again the priorities of Trump and the sociopaths he has surrounding him -- money first, people last.

About Comments

I had thought no one was commenting on the posts here -- I had, at one time, disabled comments because I was getting to much spam, but I must have enabled them again. However, I didn't know anyone was commenting -- I don't get alerts, for some reason, and I almost never go back and look at previous posts.

So, feel free to leave a comment. I'll try to be better about keeping track.

Review: Wim Wenders: Once

Another Epinions orphan. Another review of this book appears at Green Man Review.

To be quite honest, I’m not familiar with Wim Wenders’ films. After leafing through Once, I have a feeling I’d like them. Characterized on the jacket flap as “autobiographical sketches,” they seem to me to be more on the order of Ned Rorem’s “high gossip” – familiar, diaristic, a little gossipy, dropping names like crazy – Kurosawa, Francis Ford Coppola, Harry Dean Stanton – the names one might expect. There are also encounters with the anonymous – a little girl in Russia, an unknown actor in Hollywood – that are illuminating of the richness found in the mundane.

Most of the sketches come with photographs, which are usually spare, lean, uninflected – the kind of casual, “dumb” imagery that comes out of Pop Art, the photography of Gary Winogrand, and deconstructionist semantics. I happen to find them quite wonderful, almost magical in many cases – in spite of (or maybe because of) their leanness, they are often tremendously evocative, and to me offer insight into Wenders’ aesthetic stance – some of the series are almost like film, a slow pan through a desolate landscape with surprising and sometimes surreal details. As Wenders says in his introduction,

A photograph is always a double image,
Showing, at first glance, its subject,
But at a second glance – more or less visible,
“hidden behind it,” so to speak,
the “reverse angle”:
the picture of the photographer
in action.

This is a good book to just wander through, touching ground here and there, backtracking, taking another look at a certain view, absorbing the stories (the prose is cast as verse, even though it’s not, really), and finding little treasures here and there (the “Mighty Mouse” sketch is delightful, even though regrettably lacking photographs). It’s a world-wide ramble, with stops in Australia, Russia, Germany, the US, India, Algiers, and some surprizing places as well – Butte, Montana, for example. There are reproductions of unfixed Polaroids that Wenders found in a drawer, which are some of the most haunting images in the book.

How much do I like this book? I bought it. I don’t usually buy art books, because they are an addiction that I finally broke (after learning the hard way that it’s very easy to run out of space and money), but this one is too rare and wonderful to pass up. Be warned, however – liking this book depends on a certain degree of openness and sophistication in both visual art and literature, and, to be quite honest, if you can’t stand photographers like Lewis Baltz or Robert Frank, you will have trouble with this book. On the other hand, if you are one of those who is constantly looking for ideas and images, places to jump off from and go wandering through your own imagination, I think you’ll like it just fine. I know it’s going to have some impact on my own work – I’m looking forward to it.

(Distributed Art Publishers (orig. Shirmer-Mosel, 1993), n.d.)

What's New at Green Man Review

Lots of good stuff this week, as usual:

A Folkmanis Mouse with Cheese, Wim Wenders’ Once, Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Stevenson’s ‘Solstice’, Hot Chocolate, A Parcel of Steeleye Span and Other Matters

Hop on over and forget the world for a while.

Thought For the Day

Given our present regime's yearning for autocracy, this is worth pondering:

⚡️ https://t.co/fXgEzPrrQf

— Paul Rieckhoff (@PaulRieckhoff) March 19, 2020

What's New at Green Man Review

It's that time again, and in spite of everything, here we are, with our usual mix of goodies, so hop on over and enjoy.

Culture Break: The Evolution of Dance, 1950-2019

With thanks to comments Max_1 at Joe.My.God.

This Week at Green Man Review

Once again, it's that time of the week when Green Man Review has reviews of all sorts of things:

A Book About Writing, a Film from the Rom, Chocolate and Peanut Butter, Music by Moby, Fables, a Short Story, and there’s always more. . .

Yes, there is more, and it's all right here.

Today's Must-Read: Where Do We Go From Here?

From Adam L. Silverman at Balloon Juice, this very cogent and right-on-target post about what our choices are in the upcoming election. It's almost impossible to pull a quote, so I'll just give you the beginning:

We ended up here because of a combination of four things. The first is that Senator Sanders has been running non-stop for president since 2016. He never really stopped running when that election ended. This has allowed him to build a large organization to support his candidacy, keep his name recognition high, and mobilize his supporters. The second is Vice President Biden’s name recognition and connection to President Obama. The third is the sad reality of our news media, especially our political news media and how they frame and shape and weight things in a campaign. The fourth and final reason this happened is that the 2020 presidential election is not about Medicare for All or any other specific policy or plan. It is solely a referendum on the President.

Read the whole thing. It's not all that long, but it's the best item I've seen on what the 2020 election actually means.

Culture Break: Shaka Ponk : Palabra mi amor

With thanks to commenter jaspersdad at Joe.My.God. I had never heard of them, but here's the Wikipedia entry, if you want to learn more.

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The Administration's Response to the Possibility of a Pandemic

Trump appointed Mike Pence to head up the administrations coronavirus response team. Yes, the same Mike Pence to did nothing to halt the worst outbreak of HIV in Indiana when he was governor.

Here's the team hard at work:

And do notice how representative it is of America -- well, the Republican part of America, at least.

Why do I think we're really in for it?

This Week at Green Man Review

Quite a mix this week:

Bacon and Tea Considered, John Fogerty Live, An SF Play and Other Interesting Things

And they really are interesting things. Check it out.