Andy Borowitz is a humorist for the New Yorker magazine. He writes a joke almost every day.
Today, he tells us, Governor Kemp of Georgia has banned science. (Unreal life, Kemp told localities that they could not mandate face masks to protect people from COVID-19).
He writes:
ATLANTA (The Borowitz Report)—In his latest response to the coronavirus pandemic, Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, has issued a sweeping statewide ban on science.
“Over the past few weeks, scientific information has been spreading throughout the state of Georgia like wildfire,” Kemp said. “We need to flatten the truth curve.”
Under the executive order, Georgians can be fined as much as five hundred dollars for visiting Web sites containing evidence-based information.
Additionally, Kemp is issuing a stay-at-home order for all Georgians planning a trip to a library or bookstore.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
If you can’t stop them from voting, just help them die?
Jul. 16, 2020 4:27 pm
By Thom Hartmann A…
Georgia’s governor Brian Kemp, as Secretary of State, did everything he could to keep hundreds of thousands of Black and Hispanic voters in Georgia from having their votes counted or even being able to vote at all.
In the months running up to his own race for governor, he conducted massive purges of the voting rolls, closed polling places in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods, and refused to certify the recent voter registrations of about 50,000 African Americans.
Now it appears he’s decided that if he can’t prevent Black and Hispanic people from voting he should just help them die.
Kemp, like the entire nation, learned on April 7, when the New York Times and the Washington Post both ran front page stories about it, that Black and Hispanic people were dying at disproportionate rates from Covid 19.
No doubt purely by coincidence, that was also the week that everyone from right wing talk show hosts to major rightwing influencing groups to the Trump administration all pivoted from concern and caution about the coronavirus to the message, “It’s time to open America back up and do it now!”
Trump tweeted “Liberate!” And white guys with guns and Nazi and Confederate flags showed up in state capitols to demand that all those disproportionately minority front-line workers get back to work.
It was as if the racists across the country, and Steven Miller and Donald Trump in the White House, figured out that if they wanted to actually reduce America’s Black and Hispanic population, this was their chance. They could use this virus to, “Make America white again.”
Call it the “Republican Party’s 21st Century Eugenics” program?
Doubling down on this apparent strategy, yesterday Georgia’s Governor Brian Kemp officially banned cities in Georgia from enforcing their own face mask requirements.
Georgia cities with large Black and Hispanic populations like Savannah and Atlanta had passed mask ordinances and their mayors were trying to enforce them.
Governor Kemp just put an end to all that.
As Georgia’s hospitals are reaching capacity and the virus is ripping through communities of people who can’t easily telecommute or work from home, the governor is taking an official step that could dramatically increase infection and death rates among low income and minority people across the state.
It’s hard to imagine that elected public officials, even if they won by fraud like Kemp and Trump, would be so craven as to engage in policies that specifically target minority groups for illness and death.
There has to be another explanation, right?
I just can’t figure out what it is.
-Thom
Thank you, Carol. Vote fixing is rampant in Georgia, Florida, and other US states with majority Repugnican legislatures. The only way they can stay in office is to keep black and brown people from voting. Some favored methods:
Closing polling places in black and brown communities and ensuring that there will be long lines. In many cases, there are far, far more polling places in white, affluent communities.
Mailing mail-in ballots late to registered Democrats and to people with Hispanic names
Holding mail-in ballots until after the election. Oops. Sorry, your ballot arrived too late.
Using federal felon registers at polling stations (Fred Smith? Sorry, your name is on the felon registry. You are not that Fred Smith? Well, you can go downtown to the elections office to sort this out and come back later today.)
Requiring ID that the poorest of people don’t have
And so on
In the last gubernatorial election in Flor-uh-duh, white Trump Mini-Me Republican Ron DeSantis defeated the black Democratic candidate, Andrew Gillum, by 0.4 percent of the vote. Without the vote fixing, the outcome would doubtless have been different.
In these states, our elections now look like elections in a third-world country run by a dictator. Banana republics without the bananas.
Florida Republicans passed a law keeping convicted felons who had served their time from voting. The voters of the state overturned that law in a statewide referendum. In Florida, of course, as in the rest of the US, most people convicted of felonies are black or brown because of the unequal way in which we do “justice” here, and they tend to vote Democratic. So, after the referendum, the Florida legislature came up with a workaround: they said that the felons could vote only after they had served their time AND paid all their back fines and court costs.
And the Republican majority Supreme Court just upheld that, in contravention of the will of the people of the state of Florida, as expressed in the referendum.
great word for what they just did: CONTRAVENTION
Here are the statistics:
10.43% of the Florida population is disenfranchised
1,686,318 total Floridians are disenfranchised.
Florida has the most disenfranchised citizens in the United States.
Florida has the highest disenfranchisement rate in the United States.
23.3% of black voters in Florida can’t vote because of felony disenfranchisement.
The people of Florida voted to allow convicted felons the right to vote. Then, Florida said felons had pay fines in order to vote. The courts struck the fines down saying it was a ‘poll tax.’ What will they dream up next?
This went all the way to the Supreme Court, retired teacher, and the court refused to hear the felons’ argument. So, it effectively upheld the Flor-uh-duh poll tax and disenfranchised over a million voters who will not be able to pay the exorbitant fees that Florida charges ex-cons. See this: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/07/supreme-court-florida-felons-poll-tax.html
As the last few months have made abundantly clear, during previous administrations, scientifically minded persons infiltrated the highest levels of our government, our intelligence agencies, and even our military. Even some of our Republican governors have been shown to be, on occasion, secret science sympathizers. This is why it is so important that we reelect Trump/Pence/Putin 2020. Our very way of life, as a nation of proud anti-intellectual know-nothings, is under attack. Our investigations have revealed that even in Flor-uh-duh and Georgia, agents have infiltrated schools to indoctrinate students on the Krebs Cycle, the electromagnetic spectrum, and the periodic table.
Trump/Pence/Putin 2020. Because eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge is a sin.
Climate change is just weather. Send astronauts to the sun. Exercise just uses up your total available energy. Inject disinfectants. Stealth planes are invisible, so you can’t see them. I have the best genes. –Donald J. Trump
Georgia governor sues to block Atlanta from enforcing coronavirus mask order
July 16, 2020 at 7:41 p.m. CDT
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) on Thursday sued to stop Atlanta from enforcing some of its coronavirus-related rules, including its recent mandate to wear a face covering in public.
The lawsuit alleges that Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms (D) lacked the authority to implement a mask requirement and that she must obey Kemp’s executive orders, including one signed Wednesday night that explicitly bans municipalities from enacting their own mask ordinances.
An unpublished report by the White House Coronavirus Task Force dated Tuesday suggests that at least 18 hard-hit states — including Georgia — enact stricter measures such as mask requirements and increased testing. The report was first published by the Center for Public Integrity.
Here are some significant developments:
The governors of Arkansas and Colorado on Thursday issued statewide mask requirements, bringing the number of states with mask mandates to 28 and the District of Columbia. Target, CVS and the grocery chain Publix also announced new policies requiring customers to wear masks, a day a day after Walmart, Kroger and Kohl’s did.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/07/16/coronavirus-live-updates-us/
Governor Kemp is a COVIDIOT.
Codependent on the Idiot.
Gov. Kemp is another who should be indicted for murder.
Reality has made it increasingly difficult to satirize America today…..
Where’s Galileo when you really need him? Probably hanging out with Frederick Douglass!
LOL
The U.S. keeps making progress!! Number ONE in the world again!! Trump and his sycophants would be SO proud.
Dang.
This article originated from CNN…fake news. There really is NO virus. There are many, many testing sites all over the country giving out 100% invalid positive numbers and they are magnified by CNN to make Trump look bad./s [It’s true that if we did NO testing, the virus would disappear.]
U.S. Shatters Coronavirus Record Again With 77,000 New Cases
Jamie Ross
Reporter
Published Jul. 17, 2020 5:01AM ET
It’s becoming almost routine now—but Thursday was yet another record day for the novel coronavirus in the United States. An astonishing 77,255 new virus cases were reported across the nation on July 16, shattering the previous record of 67,791, which was set just two days ago. The numbers come from Johns Hopkins University—the leading authority on keeping track of the global pandemic.
Florida saw a particularly sharp spike in cases Thursday, recording its second highest ever daily total of 13,965, according to CNN. In total, the U.S. has now recorded 3,576,430 cases of COVID-19 and at least 138,359 people have died. Many prominent public-health experts now expect that, some five months from now, half of all Americans could have been infected, and more than 800,000 may die in the outbreak.
Read it at CNN
People like Borowitz and Randy Rainbow have added some much needed insightful humor to the past three and half dark years. I just hope they keep it up even if we get a new Occupant because things aren’t going to get much lighter.