Breezy and bright this early-afternoon Wednesday in California’s Central Valley. There’s some big clouds and along with the wind, keeping the temperature down. At least in the shade.
Backyard blogging again, getting to be habitual and enjoyable, at least until summer.

(Laptop work-table amongst the foliage).

As the outside world boils along, I have the feeling we’re on the cusp of some time-changing, shape-shifting events in human life, big deal as big deals go, supposedly, and to all indications. This pandemic is a watershed moment, a twist in the historic table of some sort. Maybe still too early to yet fully grasp of what the semi-near future holds on just about any level.
Not only is there COVID-19, but there’s also the T-Rump. Imagine a world without him, and how much better off, most-likely, we’d all be if someone else with care and sense had been in charge just three months ago. The rest of the world seems to be making headway with controlling the virus, but the US is leaving itself to die.

So bad is the T-Rump the bar is lowered every day — he appears shit-bent on out-ass-holing himself every chance he gets. And it’s beyond any kind of pulp fiction.
Yesterday, I missed this video, as if staged for darkest, most-alarming effect (h/t Digby):

They blasted “Live and Let Die” while Trump walked around a Honeywell plant today in Arizona without a mask. It’s hard to believe this clip is real. pic.twitter.com/M1dMe8KaMK

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 5, 2020

Lunacy without any regards whatsoever to even the slightest hint of optics, an immature and cruel Bobby Newport-like appreciation for shit — via the Guardian‘s live blog this afternoon:

Trump said that the White House coronavirus task force would be adding two or three members by next week, after the president announced the group would continue working “indefinitely.”

The president told reporters in the Oval Office, where he signed a proclamation recognizing National Nurses Day, that the task force would wind down at some point in the future.

Asked why he reversed himself from yesterday, when he signaled the task force would move into a different phase, Trump said, “I thought we could wind it down sooner. But I had no idea how popular the task force is until actually yesterday when I started talking about winding down … It is appreciated by the public.”

Idiot! Heartless idiot!
A good read on this is from Amanda Marcotte this morning at Salon and the T-Rump’s pure-apathy-induced laziness in a deadly moment in time:

In March, after months of ignoring the looming threat of the novel coronavirus, Donald Trump decided to recast himself in a new role, declaring he was now a “wartime president,” clearly imagining himself in the mold of FDR or, more likely, as Bill Pullman’s presidential character in the 1996 film “Independence Day.”

This was a total joke from the beginning, as Trump’s behavior wasn’t hard to predict.
As a sociopath and narcissist, Trump would enjoy a stint play-acting as president while doing nothing.
But when it began to dawn on him that waging war is like, hard work, he would just drift away, letting the “war” effort fail.
…
Unsurprisingly, that is what exactly happened.
As Heather Digby Parton explains in her Wednesday column for Salon, what has “become clear in the last few days is that the Trump administration has made a decision” to give up any semblance of trying to flatten the curve, stop the spread or do anything meaningful to defeat the coronavirus.

Instead, Parton writes, Trump and his advisers “have apparently decided to let the virus ‘wash over the country’ as Trump wanted to do from the beginning.“
…
It’s tempting to imagine that Trump is motivated by some clever political strategy — or by any strategy at all — in making this move now.
But it’s probably just that he’s getting bored with this whole coronavirus crisis and, now that things are getting really hard, he’s ready to abandon it and move on.
That’s exactly what he did during his entire career in the real estate business — and in his marriages — abandoning one failed venture after another the second things turned rocky.
Now he’s doing it to the entire country.
…
People are dying, hospitals in many parts of the country are about to face what New York City just went through, and unemployment is soaring.
But Donald Trump is bored and unhappy.
This coronavirus TV show isn’t any fun for him anymore, and he wants to move on.
So he’s abandoning even the pretense that he ever cared about American lives.

Go read the whole thing, background for the reality. And do go read Digby’s post mentioned above, really good. Hullabaloo the pride of the blogsphere, best stuff all day long.

(Illustration: Pablo Picasso’s ‘Seated Pierrot,’ found here).