January 19, 2021: Trump Still Working on Healthcare Plan as Final Hours Pass

 1/19/21: With less than 36 hours left to play at being president, we have to believe Donald is putting in some serious overtime to achieve his most cherished goals. His official White House schedule hints at his superhuman diligence. It reads, for the seventh day in a row, “President Trump will work from early in the morning until late in the evening. He will make many calls and have many meetings.” 

We know that the “Art of the Deal”  genius promised in April 2019 that he and the Republicans would roll out a cool new healthcare plan following the November election. 

So, we wait with bated breath.

 

He promised he would eliminate deficit spending. That means he and his advisors no doubt have their pens and paper out, marveling at how the Trump Tax Cuts “paid for themselves.” 

The federal deficit for the first quarter of Fiscal Year 2021 was “only” $572 billion, a mere $216 billion higher than the first quarter of FY 2020. And what a job of deficit reduction it has been! In FY 2020 the deficit set an all-time record, at $3.1 trillion, more than twice as bad as any previous year.

 

No doubt, Donald has penned another love letter to Kim Jong-un, and the North Korean dictator’s response is winging its way to the White House as we speak. We can guess it will read something like this: 

Dear Lover Boy Don,

 

Okay, I surrender all my nukes, since up until now I have not surrendered a single one.

 

I have been busy lately, murdering more of my citizens, and building a submarine that can carry nuclear-tipped missiles. See you at Mar-a-Lago soon.

 

Sorry you lost.

 

XOXO and smooches,  ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

 

Jong-un

 

* 

EVEN MR. TRUMP needs a break sometimes. Safe to say, he takes an occasional peak out a White House window and wonders. Has the coronavirus gone away yet, as he promised, multiple times? 

According to CDC, we passed the 400,000 dead mark on January 13. By the end of this day, we will stand at

 

420,103 lives lost. 

As of yesterday, 123,848 persons were hospitalized with the virus in the United States.

 

After that brief glimpse at the sunlit D.C. streets, we imagine Donald returns to the phones, working tirelessly for the American people, to the bitter end. He’s checking up on vaccine deliveries, which aren’t going so well. He’s hatching plans to get more Americans back to work. 

Because – major bummer – there will be more people unemployed when Joe Biden takes office, than when Trump did. 

And let’s hope he didn’t see Sen. Mitch McConnell’s on television. The “mob” that attacked the Capitol on January 6, McConnell said, was “fed lies.” The attackers were “provoked by the president and other powerful people.” 

We wouldn’t want that harsh assessment to distract Mr. Trump from all his last minute tasks or make him sad. With only hours left in the White House, he’s got serious business to attend.

 

An invitation goes out for current and former members of the Trump administration to attend a send-off ceremony for the president and First Lady, to be held on the morning of January 20. 

The White House staff, what’s left, is so disorganized, or so desperate to bump up the crowd, that invitations go to people who must have been surprised to receive them in the email. One is former National Security Advisor John Bolton, whose book about his time in the White House, Trump lawyers have tried to ban. 

Also getting an invite: Omarosa Manigault Newman, the aide Trump described as a “lowlife” and a “dog,” after she turned against him. 

She responds less than enthusiastically to the multiple invitations she receives, saying, “He’s a disgrace.” 

(They probably should have invited Vladimir Putin.) 

 

POSTSCRIPT: We do know that Trump aide and loyal crewman willing to go down with the ship, Hogan Gidley, hit back at the media Sunday. He said they had been silencing the president – for example, by taking away his Twitter toys. 

In an interview on Fox News, Gidley said he wanted everyone to know how unfair it was, that his boss could no longer communicate with the American people. Gidley said it was terrible to blame Trump for not condemning the January 6 violence with more force. His boss had wanted to condemn it. But how could he get that message out to the public if he couldn’t tweet? 

Mr. Blogger scratched his head briefly, and said to himself, Couldn’t the president hold one last press conference? 

Or go on Fox News? 

Or he could agree to an interview on ABC, CNN or Comedy Central, or show up on the set of The Price is Right, and say whatever he wanted about the violence. If he condemned the violence, we’d listen. 

Now, it’s too late.

 

POSTSCRIPT #2: We often hear that “all politicians are alike.” Or “all politicians are crooks.” Neither statement is true. Trump is a politician famous for cheating on his wives (all three). Barack Obama was a politician not famous for cheating on his wife (one). Jimmy Carter got in trouble for admitting he sometimes “lusted” after women other than Rosalyn. But no one ever said he followed through. 

Trump? Yeah, he banged a porn star. 

In the same way, my Ohio senators, Sherod Brown and Rob Portman, have not been accused of pilfering from the public purse. Whereas Katrina Robinson, a Democratic lawmaker in Tennessee has. Already facing accusations that she stole $600,000 in federal funds from a healthcare school, she seems not to have learned any lessons as a result. She and two alleged accomplices have been charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money-laundering. 

According to ABC, authorities say Rep. Robinson used some of that $600,000 “to pay for her wedding and honeymoon, a Jeep Renegade for her daughter, her children’s snow cone business, and other things.”

 

One of the joys of a free press – and one of the reasons why this blogger found Trump to be such a menace – is that we want the free press to help us catch crooks in government. We don’t want the crooks (Trump would certainly be one) to be able to get away with their misdeeds. 

Catch a crooked Democrat, and we should be just as thrilled as we would when a crooked Republican is caught. 

Trump couldn’t even figure that out. For evidence of his confusion on this kind of matter refer to Duncan Hunter and Chris Collins. (See: posts for 6/25/19, 12/3/19 and September 1, 2020.)

June 16, 2021: Trump Advisor Wanted to Pull Fire Alarm to Stop His Idiotic Comments

 

6/16/21: June is more than half over, and Team Trump continues to take fresh lumps from all compass directions. 

First, prosecutors in Alaska bring fresh charges of voter fraud against…okay…another Republican lawmaker. Former Rep. Gabrielle LaDoux faces four felony counts,  her legislative aide two.

 

* 

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It was so bad, Hill said, that she considered faking a health emergency or pulling the fire alarm, if it would just shut Trump up.

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SECOND, former Trump advisor, Fiona Hill, makes it clear, with President Biden set to meet Vladimir Putin, how she felt in July 2018. That was the last time she watched a president at a summit meeting with the Russian autocrat. 

When Trump told a worldwide audience that he took Putin’s word over U.S. intelligence, and didn’t see why the Russians would have interfered in the 2016 election, Hill was stunned almost to inaction. “I couldn’t come up with anything that just wouldn’t add to the terrible spectacle,” she admitted recently. 

“It was one of those moments where it was mortifying, frankly, and humiliating for the country.” 

It was so bad, she said, she considered faking a health emergency or pulling the fire alarm, if it would just shut Trump up. 

She compared it to the sinking feeling Dr. Birx has said she had during the Orange Buffoon’s bizarre press conference, where he touted the curative powers of injected bleach in the fight against coronavirus. (See: 3/15/21.)

 

* 

“If we want to avoid catastrophic climate change.” 

IN OTHER NEWS, climate change continues not to be a hoax. It is, in fact, so clearly not a hoax, that Loser Don no longer claims it is. Almost everyone with a thimbleful of brains has come to grips with a threat that is stunningly real. 

Miami, Florida is considering a $6 billion proposal from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to construct a sea wall up to 20 feet high, and six miles long. At issue, rising storm surge, as oceans of the world warm. 

Climate change. 

At the same time, a “megadrought” grips most of the American West, another result of climate change. The governor of Utah is so concerned that he has asked the people of his state to pray for God to send rain, calling this the worst drought in Utah since 1956. And his state is far from alone. 

Most of the West is now primed for a terrible fire season.

“This is like a different world,” Pat Mulroy, former head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, told CBS recently.

 

No single day, no single summer, no single year “proves” that climate change has humanity by the gonads. Yet the evidence accumulates, year by year, with the eight hottest years on record the last eight. This week, record temperatures are expected across much of the bone-dry West, with highs from 15 to 30 degrees above normal. The Las Vegas Valley may see temperatures hit 127°. As far north as Billings, Montana, the mercury is expected to rise to 107°.

 

Meanwhile, the NOAA reports that the level of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere reached its highest level in 4,000,000 years. Every reputable scientist in the world knows we’ve got work to do – as a human race – to address the monstrous threat we all face. 

“We are adding roughly 40 billion metric tons of CO2 pollution to the atmosphere per year,” Pieter Tans, a senior scientist with NOAA’s Global Monitoring Laboratory, said in a statement. “If we want to avoid catastrophic climate change, the highest priority must be to reduce CO2 pollution to zero at the earliest possible date.” 

That’s the warning. Nobody denies meeting it will be a challenge. But if you are a QAnon freak, 

Trump fan, or singularly uninformed (there’s a lot of overlap in those categories), the loudest voices you are hearing on the right are still dedicated to filling your heads with hippo poo. 

For example: Joe Biden is going to take away your hamburgers! Fox News was forced to admit that that story, which it was peddling in April, was nothing more than a bit of hocus pocus. 

And, if you missed the point, again, that would be more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than at any time in the last: 

4,000,000 years.

 

Let us pause, finally, to remember how President Trump and the rest of the Republican Party “dealt” with this crisis. You had Sen. James Inhofe show up in January in Washington D.C. with a snowball. He insisted existence of that handful of carefully packed snow disproved climate change. Trump made a huge deal out of the fact the terminology had morphed, from “global warming,” to “climate change,” as if that was the main issue. 

Or any issue, really. 

This blogger also fondly remembers the “eloquent,” miss-the-main-point argument Sen. Rand Paul made in favor of old-fashioned high-capacity flush toilets and personal choice.

 

In any case, that’s the entire plan Republicans have for addressing this crisis. It’s like their “new” healthcare plan. 

Which no human has ever seen. 

 

POSTSCRIPT: This humble blogger did not realize until later that at the time of the snowball stunt, Sen. Inhofe was chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. 

Even the aide (below) is clearly thinking along these lines: “This guy is a vacuous old codger. Since I’m young I’m going to have to deal with the fruits of his failure to understand simple science.” 

“If I only had a snowball of my own, I’d bean the fool”

August 20, 2021: Afghanistan's Military Collapse

 

8/20/21: The collapse of the Afghan government dominates headlines, with Republicans thrilled to blame Mr. Biden.

 

____________________ 

“The defeat of the arrogance of the White House in the face of the white turban.” 

Taliban spokesperson reacting to deal with Team Trump

____________________

Afghan unit before the collapse.

This blogger will have to do a great deal of reading before he can ever sort out this mess. However, h will venture this thought. He can recall a story from February 2020, which indicated that Team Trump would start negotiating with Team Taliban – and cut the regular Afghan government out. 

That seemed odd even then. 

The deal that was reached was hailed as a “huge milestone moment” by elated Team Trumpers, who agreed, as part of the negotiations that 5,000 imprisoned Taliban fighters would be set free. 

As Axios reported, by way of The New York Times, “Sher Mohammad Abas Stanekzai, the Taliban’s deputy negotiator, called the signing ceremony a ‘day of victory.’ The group’s multimedia chief celebrated ‘the defeat of the arrogance of the White House in the face of the white turban,’ per the NYT.”

 

This blogger can also remember, back in September 2020, when then-President Trump floated the idea of meeting, fact-to-face, at Camp David with representatives of the Taliban. He wanted a moment of glory, like Jimmy Carter with Israel and Palestine. He wanted to claim victory, and be done. The blogger remembers thinking that Trump was far too anxious to get all our troops out and claim a foreign policy coup, just in time to convince voters to grant him a second term. It seemed clear to the blogger, that these Taliban guys were going to realize, all they needed to do was bide their time. Trump was going to run out on his Afghan allies for sure. 

(See also: Trump abandons the Kurds.) 

It has been reported that astonished aides talked Don out of that idiocy, meeting the Taliban just days before the anniversary of 9/11.

 

As for the blogger, he supported the idea of removing troops from Afghanistan. That wasn’t the issue. In fact, he felt, back in 2003, that the invasion of Iraq was a huge mistake. He thought it distracted from our focus on fighting the Taliban. Like many a good liberal in 2003-2004, he felt we should crush the Taliban, get our troops home, and save all the money that fighting faraway wars entailed. 

(In those days, a liberal could be accused of hating America, hating the troops, hating the flag, and secretly being a pal of Muslim terrorists, if said liberal opposed the War in Iraq. Strange to say, Trump later became a darling on the right, for saying pretty much the same.) 

It’s going to take a long time to sort out what has gone wrong in Afghanistan in the last month. We do know this. We spent tens of billions of dollars to prop an Afghan army up. A few days ago, they supposedly had 300,000 troops ready to fight. How that force melted away, is hard to grasp. Then again, Italian forces melted away in 1943, when ordinary soldiers lost faith in their government. South Vietnamese units fell apart in 1975, in much the same way. 

Now, we see it again in Afghanistan.

 

Has the withdrawal been botched? Perhaps. There is chaos in every war, and the only plans that ever “work” are plans not tried. Those plans are put forward by experts on the sidelines, who never have their plans tested on the ground. Where the blame will ultimately lie, and how much blame there is, will be open to dispute. This blogger remembers, to cite one instance, a story from NPR, from November 17, 2020. It’s not “Fake News,” if you’re a Trump fan and don’t like what you read. It’s real news, quoting Robert O’Brien, Trump’s National Security Advisor, at the time: 

The White House announced Tuesday that it will pull thousands of troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan by Jan. 15. A force of 2,500 service members will remain in both countries, but the Trump administration aims to have all remaining troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan by Spring 2021.

 

“By May, it is President Trump’s hope that they will all come home safely – and in their entirety,” national security adviser Robert O’Brien said. “I want to reiterate that this policy is not new. This has been the president’s policy since he took office.”

 

In other words, Trump wanted an even hastier pull-out than Mr. Biden was prepared to implement. Trump wanted to draw down troops to even lower levels, which would likely have made any final stages of withdrawal even more complex. So, you can blame Trump for haste. Or you can blame Biden for how he implemented the withdrawal. Or you can blame both – and have plenty of blame left over to spread among countless others, including our generals and the worthless leaders of Afghanistan. 

As we always, always say at this blog, “Diplomacy is a bitch.” I don’t think either Trump or Biden were wrong for withdrawing our troops. Twenty years of effort, and the Afghan military still collapsed! 

One feels sorry for the Afghan people, now that the Taliban is returning, with a 14^th century view of the world.

 

* 

SPEAKING OF backward thinking, a right-wing type showed up in a black pickup truck in front of the Library of Congress last week. His plan, he said, was to blow up himself, truck, and anyone in or around the library, unless he got to talk to President Biden and tell him what scumbag he is. 

Floyd Ray Roseberry, 49, livestreamed parts of the standoff with police on Facebook, until the site took his videos down. After several hours, he surrendered without blowing himself or anyone else up, proving that while he thought like a Taliban suicide bomber, he wasn’t ready to go to heaven just yet.

December 3, 2021: Former Fox News Contributor Calls Tucker Carlson Documentary "Garbage."

12/3/21: President Biden padded his lead over Trump this week, regarding jobs added to the economy. Figures for September were revised upward, to show a gain of 379,000 jobs, and for November, another 210,000 jobs were added. That means the rebound under Mr. Biden is approaching six million jobs. The total, subject to revision, currently stands at 5,860,000 jobs added from February to November.

 

_____________________ 

Biden pad gigantic jobs-created lead over Trump.

_____________________

  

That would be in sharp contrast to the nearly 3,000,000 jobs subtracted during Loser Don’s time in office. 

In fact, with the unemployment rate declining again, to 4.2%, President Biden has sliced the rate more in eleven months, than Trump did in his first three years in office – even before the pandemic hit. 

Trump took over with unemployment at 4.7% and cut it to 3.5%. By the time he trundled off to Mar-a-Lago, whining all the way, the rate had risen to 6.3%.

 

Biden took charge with the rate at 6.3% and has shaved off more than two percentage points already. 

Plus he has reduced the number of presidential tweets by 98% and cut the “daily-insults-to-Americans-he-was-elected to serve” to essentially zero. 

The Labor Participation Rate advanced to 61.8 percent in November, also a good sign, as more people began reentering the job market.

Jobs created under Trump: 0.

 

* 

CHRIS STIREWALT, formerly of Fox News, called Tucker Carlson’s fairy tale series, Patriot Purge, about the January 6 attack on Capitol Hill “garbage.” Or, to be more detailed, he said in an interview: 

What Fox allowed in Tucker Carlson’s documentary, which said that January 6 was a potentially false flag operation undertaken by the federal government and that Americans were being put in Guantanamo over pictures of waterboarding was beyond reckless and is another mile marker down the road to the kind of Alex Jones-ian Info Wars-ian garbage that makes it impossible to have any kind of a conversation. If you can say stuff and don’t support it, except for without conspiracy theorizing gobbledygook. That’s no good.

December 28, 2021: No Real Voter Fraud Found. Again.

12/28/21: Loser Donald takes another sock in the orange chops, when Georgia officials release results of a review of claims of illegal voting by dead people. Trump has claimed that at least 5,000 deceased individuals voted in the 2020 election – and he has implied that all 5,000 voted for Joe Biden. 

This is just another example of “Trump Math,” which involves taking big numbers and then lying. 

How many of the dead voted? 

Four. 

Meaning Trump math was off by 99.92 per cent.

 

Even better, as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution noted, in one case a 74-year-old woman voted for Biden, but then sent in her deceased husband’s vote for Trump, because they used to joke about canceling each other’s votes out. 

So, even assuming the other three individuals cast illegal votes for Joe Biden, Trump gains only two votes in the final tally. 

Not even four.

January 7, 2022: More than 6.2 Million Jobs Added Under Biden

Yesterday, the blogger covered the anniversary of the attack on Capitol Hill in a separate post. We can fill in a little here. Attorney General Merrick Garland has made it clear that the cases the DOJ are building against some of the most important players in the attack on Capitol Hill could take years. 

Wire fraud, for example, may be involved, on the part of organizers of the “Stop the Steal” rally.

 

* 

THE JOBS REPORT is out for December – disappointing to some – with 199,000 jobs added. Figures for November were revised upward, from 210,000 to 249,000. With figures subject to revision, that means 6,215,000 jobs have been added and/or recovered in eleven months, since Joe Biden took office. 

Trump fans may remember when the good job numbers were “rigged” under President Obama. Then the good job numbers were “real” once Donald took office. 

Then in his four years in charge he became the imaginary “greatest jobs president in history.” During his one term in office more than 3,000,000 jobs were lost. He came into office with unemployment at 4.7%, and “slashed” it to 3.5% in three years. Even during that stretch, he added fewer jobs per month during his first 36 months in charge, in pre-pandemic times, than President Obama added during his last 76 months in office. Trump lovers refused to do even the simplest math – or face the facts if they did. Then the pandemic punched the economy in the face. By the time Don departed the White House, unemployment had risen again to 6.3%.

 

Cue “Sleepy Joe” to the White House. Old “Sleepy” has now cut unemployment by twice as much, from 6.3% to 3.9% in his first eleven months in charge as Donald did in his first three years. 

The labor participation rate has also ticked up from 61.4% when Trump blew town, pouting all the way, to 61.9% in December. 

If you like unemployment to go down, you vote for Democrats. Clinton did it. Obama did it. Biden has done it.

 

* 

IN OTHER NEWS, anti-vax podcaster Doug Kuzma dies of COVID-19. Kuzma, 61, need not have died, had he been willing to get the shots. From his pictures one could assume he had at least one comorbidity factor – that being obesity. No offense intended. His daughter called him a “great father.” 

“I really loved him,” she added, “and I would do anything for him.” 

Mr. Kuzma is also said to have believed in the QAnon myths, and in his final social media post posed in a photo with the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin. Now he leaves behind a grieving family.

 

Also succumbing to the disease: Cirsten Weldon, who had said she wanted Dr. Anthony Fauci “hung from a rope.” The QAnon promoter had had a habit of telling her listeners, and even people she passed on the street, not to get vaccinated. She and Roseanne Barr had even recorded QAnon videos together. 

Only “idiots” got the shots she claimed, prior to her demise. 

According to The Daily Beast, 

After Weldon’s death, her QAnon allies threatened to pursue violent action against staff at the hospital where she died. Scott McKay, a QAnon personality known as the “Patriot Streetfighter,” said he would publicize the names of doctors and nurses involved in treating Weldon, saying he wanted to “put the fear into these medical professionals” in a Telegram post. McKay proposed the hospital staff be sentenced to death, or be murdered in vigilante violence.