In this post we cover July, August and the first 23 days of
September 2019.
We pick up
the trail for 9/24-30/19 in a separate post, as the story of Trump
asking the president of the Ukraine for help in the 2020 election explodes in the
president’s face.
***
July 1, 2019: No single day of record-high temperatures,
no single month of highest average temperatures in one state, or one nation, and
certainly no cold snap in winter, wherever Trump has plumped down his fat
fanny, proves nor disproves climate change.
What if it was sixty degrees warmer?
We do
know that climate change, as Trump often claims, is not a “hoax.” The last twenty
years, globally, have virtually the entire science community spooked. In
2018 the world’s oceans—measured at 3,000 locations, down to depths of 6500
feet—had their hottest year ever.
Even
worse, as National Geographic explains, oceans have been acting as giant
“thermal sponges.” They have sopped up 93% of all extra heat generated since
the start of the Industrial Revolution. As a result, slowly rising ocean
temperatures will have long lasting, potentially irreversible effects.
Experts
don’t mince words:
“The
oceans are the best thermometer we have for the planet,” says Zeke Hausfather, an energy and
climate scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who used the ocean
heat data published today in an analysis published last week in Science.
“We can really see global warming loud and clear in the ocean record.”
In fact, scientists say that if the oceans weren’t absorbing all
that heat, the atmosphere might have warmed by sixty degrees.
That’s no typo.
Any other worrisome signs? Globally,
June turned out to be the
hottest June on record, part of a daunting arc. National Geographic
notes that the five hottest summers on record in Europe in the last 500 years
are 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018. This summer is starting off even worse.
In California, to start July, record highs at Bodega Bay, fifty miles
north of San Francisco, left “scores of dead mussels on the rocks, their
shells gaping and scorched, their meats thoroughly cooked.” Christopher Harley,
a biologist at the University of British Columbia, warns, “Mussels are one
of the canaries in the coal mine for climate change.”
Or, a more apt metaphor might be: We humans are
going to end up like the lobster in the pot. (See also: 7/4/19, 7/10/19,
7/11/19, 7/18/19, 7/21/19 and 7/25/19.)
7/2/19: President Trump spends the day putting the final touches on his
“Salute to America (And Look at Me!)” parade and fireworks display. Naturally,
there will be a featured speaker for the Fourth of July show.
Trump.
There is probably no truth to the rumor that
Trump would like to wear a military-style uniform, cut to make him look less
rotund. It is said his epaulets will carry seven stars. That would be more
stars than any general in U.S. history. The president will also have all kinds
of service ribbons to emblazon his chest. There will be a white and black
campaign ribbon, black center, with a white, skeletal foot representing heroism
in the face of crippling bone spurs. He’ll have a ribbon, alternating green and
white stripes, with “oak leaf clusters,” for surviving divorce, representing
two divorces—and a third time Melania found out he was having sex with a porn
queen. Trump will have a “Marksman” ribbon for hitting mostly correct buttons
while tweeting, and a large gold medal on a ribbon of white stars on a light
blue background. This will be modeled after the Medal of Honor, but carry the
words: “Greatest President Ever.”
*
REAL HEROES have their doubts about the parade.
Active duty military are reluctant to criticize the plan and risk irreversible
damage to their careers. Retired officers have been blunt.
“I think
it’s absolutely obscene.”
“This looks like it’s becoming
much more of a Republican Party event — a political event about the president —
than a national celebration of the Fourth of July, and it’s unfortunate to have
the military smack dab in the middle of that,” said retired Army Lt. Gen. David
Barno, who commanded U.S. troops in Afghanistan under President George W. Bush.
“The president is using the
armed forces in a political ploy for his reelection campaign and I think it’s
absolutely obscene,” added retired Army Maj. Gen. William Nash, a veteran of
Vietnam, the Gulf War and peacekeeping operations in the Balkans.
“Military displays like this are
a favorite tactic of those who want to wrap themselves in the symbols of who we
are rather than really celebrating who we are,” said Jason Dempsey, a former
Army major who studies the military and society at the Center for a New
American Security, a nonpartisan think tank. “The military is playing an ever
more central role in American political life,” Dempsey added. “This fits into
this larger, troubling trend of identifying America itself as a military
state.
Barno called the Fourth of July
plans “very unusual.”
“I think one of the big risks is
that the military is being used in some ways as a political prop,” he said. “It’s
looking highly politicized by anybody’s yardstick.”
“I hope the speech doesn’t
become partisan, because troops shouldn’t be listening to the president talk
about the other party,” agreed retired Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré. “Presidents
usually leave their party business out when they talk in front of military
audiences, but people are becoming numb to it [to Trump’s braggadocio].”
No one knows what the total cost of Trump’s “Salute to
America (And Look at Me!)” show will be. Frankly, the White House doesn’t want
us to know.
Still:
The military display on Thursday
could be expensive. For example, flying a B-2 stealth bomber will likely
require a journey from an Air Force base as far away as Missouri or Florida.
“That will be millions of
dollars in and of itself,” estimated Rick Berger, a Defense budget expert at
the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
Berger did say a display like the one Trump has planned might
boost recruiting and that would be a positive.
Just don’t expect a Trump to serve.
7/3/19: The National Park Service has been forced to divert $2.5 million from a fund
intended to improve parks around the country to pay for Donald R. Trump’s
“Salute to America (And Look at Me!)” parade.
Meanwhile, the president has managed to terminate
the Iran Deal (“worst deal in history”) and end up with nothing to show, except
that Iran has decided to restart its nuclear program.
From worst deal ever—to no deal whatsoever—and
most dangerous scenario possible. Way to go, Trump!
Left with few options, the president decides to
tweet a new threat: “Iran has just issued a New Warning. Rouhani says
that they will Enrich Uranium to ‘any amount we want’ if there is no new
Nuclear Deal. Be careful with the threats, Iran. They can come back to bite you
like nobody has been bitten before!”
7/4/19: The nation awaits the kickoff of the “Salute to America (And
Look at Me!)” extravaganza. There will fireworks and tanks, like Tiananmen
Square in 1989, only with less running over of civilians.
Not everyone is thrilled with the concept of
Trump and a whole bunch of GOP VIP’s and big GOP donors watching from front row
seats—reserved just for them—as Trump uses what he has called “his military,”
surrounded by “his generals,” with all kinds of warplanes flying overhead. It’s
all really a backdrop to make himself look less like of a buffoon than he is.
Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, a
retired four-star Marine general and former head of United States Central Command,
for one, has made it clear he’s concerned about the image this parade will
send. “Put troops out there so we can thank them,” he says,
“leave tanks for Red Square.”
(Is that a “Trump loves Putin”
slam?)
Reporters ask retired Gen.
Stanley McChrystal if he’d attend
if he was on active duty. His answer is instructive. “If my soldiers were forced to come on a
holiday and stand in the sun to do an event, I’d want to be there alongside
them.” Of course, McChrystal has been critical of Trump before. Asked last
January if he’d consider working in this administration, he said no. “It’s important for me to work for people I think are basically honest,
who tell the truth as best they know it.”
Trump, of course, responded
maturely….
Nope.
“‘General’
McChrystal got fired like a dog by Obama,” he tweeted. “Last assignment a total
bust. Known for big, dumb mouth. Hillary lover!”
(Trump
has probably insulted more American military heroes and leaders than any other
president in history.)
Speaking
of military leaders—retired, so they don’t have to worry about career
damage—who have been highly critical of the current occupant of the White
House, let’s add Adm. William McRaven, who led the raid that killed Osama bin
Laden. In May, he made it clear. He thought the biggest
threat to the nation was not terrorists, but Donald R. (for “Russia”) Trump.
“An attack on the
press or an attack on the Department of Justice, or to imply that
there are dirty cops at the F.B.I. or to ignore the intelligence
community, I think, really undermines our institutions. And that makes
me fearful of the future direction of the nation.”
This criticism from military
leaders causes Super Patriot Lou Dobbs to lose his red, white and blue marbles,
and rant and rave about generals he says are “snowflakes” and “haven’t won a
war since 1991.”
Dobbs, of course, is one of those
rabid patriots who never served, although he was a perfect age to go to Vietnam
and get shot at had he wished. Like Trump, Dobbs decided he’d rather not get
wounded or killed if he could avoid it.
THE BIG MOMENT arrives. The parade
kicks off without a hitch. Trump gets to give his speech. But it rains a lot.
The fireworks turn out to be cool and nobody gets run over by a tank. So our
freedoms remain intact.
We owe those freedoms to the men
and women who serve, as well as past leaders who believed in the rule of law.
You know: Washington and Monroe, Zachary Taylor and Grant, Hayes and McKinley,
Teddy Roosevelt and Truman, Eisenhower and Bush 41, people who didn’t talk about
having
the military on “their” side.
Guys who served when they had a
chance.
“I
can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the
support of the Bikers for Trump – I have the tough people, but they don’t play
it tough — until they [his political opponents] go to a certain point, and then
it would be very bad, very bad.”
Trump
to Breitbart News, February 2019
The president does have one epic
moment during his speech. Referring to the heroic efforts of our military men
and women in 1781 (Deborah Sampson, anyone), he talks of their hard-won
success. “The Continental Army suffered a bitter winter
of Valley Forge, found glory across the waters of the Delaware and seized
victory from Cornwallis of Yorktown. Our Army manned the air, it rammed the
ramparts, it took over the airports, it did everything it had to do.”
Yes, the Continental Army “manned the air.”
They “rammed the ramparts.” They “took over the airports.”
Apparently, Washington’s soldiers bombed the
hell out of the Redcoats, catching Lord Cornwallis “of Yorktown” by surprise,
making the stunned British wonder where the hell those airplanes came from.
 |
| The Continental Army on the way to the Trenton airport. |
*
IF TRUMP’S SPEECH was good for a laugh, up in
Alaska the people of Anchorage weren’t exactly having a typical Fourth of July.
The city and surrounding area were under a “burn ban” advisory. Sixteen
straight months of above average monthly
temperatures had dried out much of the state. The National Weather Service was
predicting that Alaska’s largest city would hit a high of 85 degrees, for the
day, possibly topping the all-time record.
(In fact, Anchorage hit 90° F
for the day.)
Daniel Swain, a University of California, Los Angeles,
climate scientist, tweeted earlier in the week:
“Southern Alaska’s ongoing
#heatwave is expected to intensify significantly over coming week. Strength of
high-pressure ridge at mid-levels of atmosphere may exceed all-time records
over much of state. Surface temperatures may also reach all-time records in
southern areas.”
A quick visit to showyourstripes.info makes
clear the same trend round the world. Blue bars indicate years which were
cooler than average for the period measured. Around the globe, including
Alaska, temperatures in recent years are shattering records. Temperatures for
Alaska span the years 1901-2018:
*
FINALLY, REP. JUSTIN AMASH (R-MI) announces he is leaving the
party. “Today, I am declaring my independence and leaving the Republican Party.
No matter your circumstance, I’m asking you to join me in rejecting the
partisan loyalties and rhetoric that divide and dehumanize us.”
Trump immediately proves Amash was right to be concerned,
tweeting:
7/5/19: Reporters manage to stop Trump
outside the White House and pose a few questions. Trump never holds real press
conferences because he’d face tough questioning and have to offer follow up.
Then he’d get logic tangled in hopeless wads and have to start lying again.
What happened with that speech, someone asks, the part where
Washington “took over the airports” during the Battle of Yorktown? Well, the
president admitted, rain knocked out his teleprompter.
(Trump and Fox News used to hate it when Obama used a
teleprompter and sounded articulate and spoke in complete
sentences.)
“That’s not a good feeling when you’re standing in front of
millions and millions of people,” he added.
Still, he said his memory was sharp as a bone saw, and his
speech, it would probably live forever in the annals of presidential
speech-making, like the Gettysburg address, only more creative. Luckily, he says,
“I knew the speech very well so I was able to do it without a teleprompter. And
it was actually hard to look at anyway because of the rain.”
So, the part about Washington taking over the airports was in
the original speech? Meaning, whoever wrote the speech was a nincompoop?
And the person delivering it was too dense to realize
immediately, that that couldn’t be right?
*
ANOTHER REPORTER manages to ask the president if he realizes the
Trump Organization has been employing undocumented workers for years?
“I don’t know, because I don’t run it,” the president said. “But I would say this: Probably every
club in the United States has that because it seems to be, from what I
understand, a way that people did business.”
Ironically, Trump was about to board a helicopter for another
trip to his Bedminster, N.J. club, where many of the undocumented worked as
recently as 2018. Once the free press started interviewing workers at Trump
properties who admitted they were in this country illegally—workers who said
their employer knew they had phony papers and even helped them get those phony
papers—the Trump Organization leaped into action.
As the president explained, again in Gibberish, his preferred
language, his clubs were now following tougher standards. “But we’ve ended—whatever they did, we
have a very strict rule that, those rules are very strict.”
*
IT TURNS OUT, the president isn’t the only Trump who knows the
Gibberish tongue. Last January, Eric, who now runs the Trump Organization, along
with Don Jr., claimed the fact that all Trump properties seemed to have hired
undocumented workers and employed them for years—well, that was a sign that the
U.S. immigration system—not the Trump Organization—was messed up.
Eric
did want to make clear. He had a heart. True, it was a Trump heart, but a heart
with real valves and chambers. “I must say, for me
personally, this whole thing is truly heartbreaking. Our employees are like
family, but when presented with fake documents, an employer has little choice.”
WTF! Did he just admit there are good people who sneak into
this country and don’t want to rape and kill?
What about the monsters of right-wing fever dreams, the drug mules “with
calves like cantaloupes?” What about the “animals” crossing illegally so they can join MS-13 and disembowel
Americans in red MAGA hats? What about the “invaders” his dad always describes:
“A lot of young men, strong men.
And a lot of men
that maybe we don’t want in our country.”
Was Eric admitting there were
actual human beings who came across the border, people who were like “family”
to him?
Let’s give the final word to Victoria
Morales, an undocumented worker from Guatemala. She worked for the Trump
Organization for years, both before the president turned over control to his
sons, and after. “How can the president profess to
not know we were undocumented workers if we have all [now] been fired?” she
said recently. “I cleaned his house. I
cleaned Ivanka’s house. He saw me all the time. I’m sure he figured I didn’t
have papers.”
7/6/19: The U.S. added 224,000 jobs
last month. This means 5,613,000 jobs have been added in the first 29 full months of President Trump’s
term. In other words, it’s a good jobs report.
It’s just not as good as the 6,359,000 jobs added in Obama’s
last 29 full months in the White House.
7/7/19: We learn today, that leaked emails from
Sir Kim Darroch, ambassador from the United Kingdom to the United States, paint
a less-than flattering picture of President Trump.
As
the BBC explains:
In a message sent last month, Sir
Kim branded US policy on Iran as “incoherent, chaotic”.
Mr Trump’s publicly stated reason for calling off an airstrike against Tehran
with 10 minutes to go - that it would cause 150 casualties – “doesn’t
stand up”, Sir Kim said.
Sir Kim said it was “unlikely
that US policy on Iran is going to become more coherent any time soon” because “this
is a divided administration”.
“You really had to
pretend you were talking to a seven-year-old.”
Ambassador
Darroch’s files cover the period since the Inauguration, up to the current day.
Early on, he warned 10 Downing Street that media reports of “vicious infighting
and chaos” in the White House were “mostly true,” describing them as “knife
fights” in a “deeply dysfunctional environment.” The crew at 1600 Pennsylvania
Avenue, he warned, was “clumsy and inept.”
As
for allegations that “dodgy Russians” helped Trump win, he warned, “the worst
cannot be ruled out.”
Sir Kim was saying what most fair-minded observers have been saying
since Trump took charge. Trump, he told superiors, fills his speeches with “false
claims and invented statistics.” If you wished to talk to him, you really had
to pretend you were talking to a seven-year-old. “You
need to start praising him for something that he’s done recently,” the
Ambassador advised. “You need whenever possible to present them [policy
suggestions] as wins for him.” In talking to Trump, it was important to keep points
“simple” and avoid stirring him up. “For a man who has risen to the highest
office on the planet,” Darroch explained, “President Trump radiates insecurity.”
 |
| This blogger takes a much-needed vacation to Yellowstone. |
7/8/19: Believe it or not, Trump’s approval ratings are up, to 45.1 percent (vs. 52.4 percent
disapproval).
That upward tick may not last. CNN reports
that previously convicted felon Elliott Broidy, and Trump bosom buddy, is again
under investigation. Federal
prosecutors have requested information about “contacts with foreign leaders and
businesses while working for President
Donald Trump’s inauguration.”
The request comes as part of a probe into whether Broidy, a Los
Angeles private investor, sought to sell his influence with the Trump administration.
The US attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York in
April subpoenaed the President’s Inaugural Committee seeking documents and
records relating to Broidy, five companies associated with him and foreign
politicians—including the presidents of Angola and the Republic of Congo and
two Romanian politicians, the sources said.
The grand jury subpoena also requests information about George Nader, a key witness in special
counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation who was arrested last month on
child pornography charges.
CNN notes that a
representative of the Inaugural Committee declined to comment for the story.
7/9/19: President Trump is by no means
the only big name involved; but when the Jeffery Epstein scandal explodes, he’s
right where you might expect in a story about sexual abuse of young women.
Epstein
and Trump? And Epstein and Bill Clinton?
The fuse is lit on July 6, when F.B.I agents arrest registered
“sex offender” and multi-millionaire Jeffrey Epstein at the Teterboro, N.J.
airport on arrival from France. At that moment, other agents, are using a
crowbar to enter the front door of his 21,000 square foot Manhattan townhouse.
In a locked safe they discover “a vast trove of lewd photos” of young looking
women and girls.
Epstein, of course, had been busted before, for the same kind
of crimes with which he’s charged once more: sex-trafficking scores of girls,
some as young as 13 or 14.
First, let’s admit this sordid tale might have enough juice
to interest decent human beings of every stripe, from flaming liberal to
Neolithic conservative. It turns out Trump was once a friend of Epstein’s. So
was Bill Clinton. And as soon as Fox News hears that last detail, you know
they are going to gear up a hundred “fair and balanced” reports about the
Epstein-Clinton link. Sean Hannity is quick, that same day, to air a show on
the topic and it makes him so mad you almost expect to see spit flying from his
lips.
Clinton! That pervert!
But wait…
Epstein was first arrested in Florida on similar charges
in 2008, where he may have molested as many as a hundred young victims.
Nevertheless, he got off with a sweetheart legal deal. He would plead to one count
of soliciting prostitution and serve thirteen months in jail—but with
work-release privileges six days a week—meaning he spent only one day and
nights behind bars.
The prosecuting attorney who cut the deal?
That would be Alexander Acosta, currently Secretary of
Labor in the “drain the swamp” Trump administration.
Can we find a more direct connection between Epstein and
Trump? As President Obama might have said, “Yes, we can.”
“I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy,” Trump told New
York magazine in October 2002. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even
said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on
the younger side [emphasis added]. No doubt about it – Jeffrey enjoys his
social life.”
Yes, “younger,” as in girls as young as 13. Or, as the Miami Herald put it in describing the charges leveled against
Epstein a decade ago:
Palm Beach multimillionaire
Jeffrey Epstein, 54, was accused of assembling a large, cult-like network of
underage girls—with the help of young female recruiters—to coerce into having
sex acts behind the walls of his opulent waterfront mansion as often as
three times a day, the Town of Palm Beach police found.
A “lot of fun to be with,” for sure.
There’s some good news, however: Namely, Epstein
is denied bail and will remain behind bars till trial.
Alicia Arden comes forward to add testimony to
the case against the alleged child molester. “His weapons were his hands,” she
says, describing her rape when she was a teen.
If you watch Fox News, you already know about the
connections between Epstein and Bill Clinton. But if Clinton is guilty of
questionable behavior, it would not shield Trump if he were guilty himself. We
know that in 1992, George Houraney, a Florida businessman, agreed to fly in 28 young
women for a “calendar girl” party at Mar-a-Lago. As he recently explained to
reporters for The New York Times, there were only two men present
at the party.
Epstein and Trump.
*
AT THE VERY LEAST—and there is a chance Trump is only
tangentially involved—and Clinton, too—calls for Acosta to be booted from the
cabinet are heard.
Could it be worse? And much worse, by far? It could be bad
for Bill Clinton, or Trump, or anyone else, who might have partied in years
past with the pedophile. And here we should note: at least one 13-year-old has
alleged that both Trump and Epstein raped her in 1994 and threatened her if she talked.
(Don’t expect Sean Hannity to mention this.)
Her case was withdrawn from the courts in 2016; but if new
accusers surface her claims may gain validity.
We can’t yet know. But the “rogue’s gallery” of men, as one Miami
Herald reporter describes them, who may be tainted or tarnished or in legal
jeopardy could prove stunning in the end.
According to Gawker, a defunct website, the names of
many powerful men and women appeared in a “little black book” belonging to
Epstein. That book was stolen by his house manager. A copy was provided to Gawker
in 2015.
President Clinton’s name does not appear; but Doug Band’s
name does, above the line, “Office of William Clinton.” A long list of contacts
follows. Not everyone whose name is listed is an accomplice or victim.
Dr. Eli Wiesel, the noted writer and Holocaust survivor, and his wife are
listed. So is Ivana Trump.
So is Ivanka.
Epstein was rich and handsome and ran in rarified circles. Naomi Campbell, the super model, has an entry. So does
Mick Jagger. The Duke and Duchess of York are listed separately, following
their divorce. Ethel Kennedy, Sen. Ted Kennedy and Ted Kennedy Jr., David Koch,
“Miss Manners” and Charlie Rose appear, most likely harmlessly, in these pages.
(Okay, Charlie Rose might be a bad sign.)
But Alfredo Rodriguez, the house manager who
swiped the book (he hoped to sell it for $50,000) also added marginal notes.
There were arrows pointing to specific contacts he believed would be important
in any investigation. He circled dozens of entries, in a book that runs to 92
pages, people he believed were accomplices, addresses and organizations where
crimes were committed, people he thought were “material witnesses,” and
victims. Again, Clinton is not named; but Clinton often flew with Epstein on
one of his private jets, which reporters later labeled “The Lolita Express.” Donald
Trump’s name is circled for reasons unknown. Rock star Courtney Love’s name is
circled, as is the name of former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.
Rodriguez eventually served eighteen months in
jail for obstruction of justice, after taking the address book rather than
provide it to investigators. That was longer than the time Epstein, himself,
spent behind bars.
So, what do we know for sure? Epstein was super
wealthy; but how he made his money remains unclear. His townhouse in Manhattan
is estimated to be worth $77 million. He owned six homes, an apartment in Paris
and a private island in the Caribbean where he went to relax—and allegedly
molest girls.
Authorities now suspect he preyed upon underage
victims not just in Florida and New York, but in Ohio, California, New Mexico,
Paris and the United Kingdom. The name of Les Wexner, the billionaire owner of
Victoria’s Secret and other well-known clothing brands, is marked in Epstein’s
stolen book. Former New Mexico Governor Bruce King and former New Mexico
Governor and presidential hopeful Bill Richardson’s names are circled. The
entry for Peter Soros, nephew of billionaire George Soros, is marked. So, the
rich and powerful may have had reason to hope the story of Epstein’s crimes
would receive a prompt burial in 2008.
Again, the address book hints at how the
alleged sex-trafficking ring worked. One address for New York City is marked
“apt. for models.” The name of Flavio Briatore, an Italian businessman who
served two prison terms for fraud in the 80s, is circled. So is the name of Alan
Dershowitz, the prominent lawyer. Virginia Roberts Giuffre, one of the victims
in the Florida case, said in court filings that Epstein ordered her to have sex
with Dershowitz on multiple occasions. Mr. Dershowitz denies the charge.
According to the Daily Beast,
she was 15 and working a
summer job at Mar-a-Lago in 1998 when British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell
allegedly recruited her as a masseuse for Epstein. Giuffre said Epstein kept
her as a “sex slave” until 2002 and that she was forced to have sex with his
friends, including Prince
Andrew and Dershowitz. (Both men have adamantly denied the
allegations.)
In September 2015, Giuffre filed
a defamation suit against Maxwell after she called Giuffre’s claims “obvious
lies” and, according to the complaint, “undertook a concerted and malicious
campaign to discredit Giuffre and to so damage her reputation that Giuffre’s
factual reporting of what had happened to her would not be credited.” The case was
settled in May 2017, records show.
No one associated with Epstein is entirely safe and no one
has so far been proven guilty. The address book has a separate entry for “65TH
STREET,” in New York City, with the names Joseph and Florina Rueda and Sarah
Kellen (Epstein’s appointments secretary) circled. Under “FINANCE” Colonial
Bank and PB National are circled. Under “FRANCE,” we have, “Paris – Massage.” Under “ISLAND, Massage –” the entry for
Michelle Campos is marked with the notation, “fired S’cty.” Dershowitz’s name
is circled. So is the name of Cindy Buklarewicz Lopez, who ran a modeling
agency, an arrow pointing to her parents’ contact info. Les Wexner’s home in
London, his home in Aspen and his home in New Albany, Ohio are circled. “Massage
– UK” is circled. Under “MEDICAL,” the name of Dr. Bruce Moskowitz is circled.
An entry under “CLEANERS” and another under “RUGS” are circled. “New Mexico –
Massage” is circled. Finally, on page 92, the last entry for “Mr Chow, New York”
is not circled.
 |
| Donald J. and Melania Trump, Epstein and Maxwell. |
*
IN RECENT YEARS, the Miami Herald has done brilliant investigative
work on this story. And remember that next time you hear the president—or anyone
else—attacking the free press. The lawyer for the 16-year-old girl who state
prosecutors say was “the victim attached to the mysterious plea deal given to
multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein says neither he nor his client was informed
that it was her case that ended Epstein’s prosecution.” As the Herald
notes, the victim, now 31, “wasn’t among Epstein’s youngest victims, but she
was among those who were more brutally sexually assaulted, repeatedly, by both Epstein
and others, according to records.”
At Epstein’s sentencing, the
judge asked Assistant State Attorney Lanna Belohlavek whether there was more
than one victim. “There’s several,’’ Belohlavek replied.
“Are all the victims in both
these cases in agreement with the terms of this deal?’’ Pucillo asked. “Yes,’’
Belohlavek said.
But emails and letters show that
Assistant U.S. Attorney Marie Villafaña wanted state prosecutors to tell the
judge as little as possible, telling Epstein’s lawyers “I would prefer not to
highlight for the judge” how many victims were involved — which at the time was
almost three dozen girls, ages 13 to 17.
[Robert] Josefsberg’s client,
labeled Jane Doe 1 for this story, told police what happened to her in a sworn
statement in 2005, obtained by the Herald. In it, she said that sometime
in 2004, when she was 16, she was approached by another girl, Jane Doe 2, who
attended Royal Palm Beach High School in West Palm Beach.
Jane Doe 2 asked the girl
whether she wanted to make some money by giving massages to a man named Jeffrey
Epstein, who lived in a mansion on Palm Beach island. Jane Doe 1 had heard that
a lot of girls at the high school were making money doing these massages, and
she agreed to go, the report said.
She was taken there by Jane Doe
2 and introduced to Epstein and his scheduling secretary, Sarah Kellen. (Kellen
also was given immunity.) Jane Doe No. 1’s description of what happened matched
those of dozens of other girls: She was led up a back stairway to a master
bedroom and bath where Epstein appeared in the room, clad only in a towel. She
was instructed to strip down to her underwear and begin massaging his back.
Shortly thereafter, he flipped
over, dropped his towel and began masturbating while fondling her with a
vibrator. She and Jane Doe 2 were each paid $200.
Jane Doe 1 said she went to
Epstein’s house about 15 times, and each time, the encounters became more
sexual, and eventually led to full intercourse with Epstein and Marcinkova,
according to the statement that Jane Doe 1 told Palm Beach Detective Joe
Recarey, who died last year. She also told Recarey that she brought two other
girls to Epstein’s house, and was paid $200 for each girl.
She was among three dozen
underage girls listed by the U.S. Attorney as victims of Epstein. Sixteen of
those victims were represented by Josefsberg, who was designated to assist them
in receiving civil restitution from Epstein as part of the plea agreement.
After Jane Doe 1 was interviewed
by police, other witnesses, including two of Epstein’s butlers, confirmed that
they had seen several of the girls, among them Jane Doe 2, coming and going
from Epstein’s house at all hours of the day and night.
Police had corroborating
evidence, including phone records and messages with the girls’ names, phone
numbers and appointment times.
Who else might have assisted Epstein is his schemes? According to Washington Monthly, Ghislaine Maxwell,
a 57-year-old British socialite and publishing heir, has been accused of
working as Epstein’s madam. Jean-Luc Brunel, who was partners with Epstein in
an international modeling company might also face legal jeopardy.
For her part, Maxwell, whose
social circle included such friends as Bill and Hillary Clinton and members of
the British Royal family, has been described as using recruiters positioned
throughout the world to lure women by promising modeling assignments,
educational opportunities and fashion careers. The pitch was a ruse to groom
them into sex trafficking, it is alleged.
More accusers soon came forward with similar tales of
massages and molestation in exchange for $200 or even $1,000 per visit. Some
claimed that Epstein would force them to have intercourse with him or a young
woman described as his Eastern European “sex slave.” Epstein’s assistant, Sarah
Kellen, allegedly kept a Rolodex of underage girls to recruit for her employer.
Yet, for reasons mystifying to say the least, the Florida plea
deal granted immunity to any alleged co-conspirators, “including but not
limited to” recruiters Kellen, Adriana Ross, and Lesley Groff, and the alleged
sex slave, Nadia Marcinkova.
A woman named Maria Farmer claimed this past April in a new
affidavit that Epstein sexually assaulted her at Les Wexner’s mansion in Ohio
in 1996, and that he molested her 15-year-old sister in New Mexico. She said
that Dershowitz used to frequent Epstein’s Upper East Side mansion as girls in
school uniforms paraded in for “modeling” calls. Dershowitz denies the claims.
As Washington Monthly carefully notes, Wexner and
Epstein did not respond to requests for comment.
7/10/19: U.S. Customs and Border
Protection announces that a vessel seized after docking at Philadelphia in June
was carrying 20 tons of cocaine, with an estimated street value of $1.3
billion.
This would never happen if we had a big, beautiful wall along
the southern border. (See: 7/12/19.)
*
TRUMP NATIONAL DORAL makes news when the club cancels
a charity golf event in the wake of bad publicity. “The Shadow All Star
Tournament” was originally organized by a strip club and the Trump Organization thought it was a good idea. Golfers were going to
have a chance to bid on scantily-clad
“dancers” to serve as caddies.
When it comes to keeping young women safe, canceling a strippers/golf tournament looks like a good idea. Locking up Jeffrey
Epstein forever is an even better idea. Jennifer Araoz,
32, comes forward to add fresh accusations against him. She says she was
approached by a woman several times outside her high school, when she was
fourteen. Epstein, she was told, could help launch her Broadway career.
Araoz said her first few encounters with
Epstein and the woman at Epstein’s home were friendly—they talked, she was
given wine and $300 after every visit. Eventually she began meeting with
Epstein alone, and that’s when the sexual abuse began, she alleges.
At first, she was paid for stripping down to her underwear
and giving him massages. Soon after she turned fifteen, he held her down during
a visit and raped her. She never returned to his home again.
*
IN ANY CASE, if Epstein, his enablers, and his powerful
friends made America unsafe for teen girls, Trump climate change denials have
made Planet Earth unsafe for all 7.6 billion people riding this big carousel
round the sun.
Fresh warnings of danger are issued when scientists note that the Thwaites glacier
in Antarctica, a glacier the size of Florida, is becoming unstable. It could
begin breaking up soon.
The science, if you check the original report, is incredibly complex—and could never be
explained in a Trump tweet.
 |
I'm not even going to try to explain this chart. |
The danger, however, is clear from the first sentence of the
report: “We
also find that the collapse of marine ice sheets makes worst-case scenarios
of rapid sea-level rise more likely in future projections.”
 |
| This one is clear. |
*
MEANWHILE, CBS NEWS REPORTS that the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) is
deserted. The last three staffers left the building June 30. Eleanor Celeste,
assistant director for biomedical and forensic sciences, tweeted, “Science
division out. Mic drop.”
She included the picture
below, before leaving for the last time.
No truth to the rumor that
Trump hopes to create a White House Office of Tweeting and Putting.
7/11/19: Researchers from the
University of Wyoming report unexpected developments with the Greenland ice
sheet. That sheet, in most places, is more than 1.2 miles thick.
“This is a crazy statistic,
which is not good for Greenland or sea-level rise.”
Nathan
Maier
“Mass loss from Greenland’s [ice
sheet] has been increasing and over the last decade is at its highest level
ever recorded,” [Nathan] Maier [a leading author of the latest study] said. “There
have been some really cool papers to come out recently that make this clear.
One by Mouginot et al. in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences looked
at the mass loss over the last five decades and found that it increased six
fold. This is a crazy statistic, which is not good for
Greenland or sea-level rise.”
Furthermore, this June, the ice
sheet experienced a record melt event, according to the National Snow and Ice
Data Center (NSIDC).
Do not expect the president to tweet about the findings of
the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
It is highly unlikely he knows it exists.
*
SPEAKING OF ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE, we learn that the
Department of Agriculture (USDA) has decided to suspend its survey on bee populations,
“pausing data collection for one of the few remaining government sources
tracking bees and their rapid decline.” Bees pollinate one third of all U.S.
crops, including blueberries, almonds, apples and squash, and add an estimated
$15 billion in value to America’s agricultural output yearly. But if the USDA
kept reporting on the drop in bee populations, Americans might get worried
about overuse of pesticides and Trump’s pals in the pesticide industry might
not keep pouring donations into Republican campaign coffers.
As The Hill explains, “The USDA has said it was forced to suspend data
collection on bees due to last year’s budget cuts. In announcing the move, the
department said the decision ‘was not made lightly but was necessary given
available fiscal and program resources’ after the cuts.”
Trump, of course, does not care about bees or the
environment. He cares about the holding properties of hair spray.
7/12/19: It turns out that Carla
Provost, who President Trump appointed to head the U.S. Customs and Border
Patrol in 2018, was a member of a secret Facebook group (recently revealed by ProPublica.).
When the secret group—and it’s often vulgar, racist and
sexist posts—was first revealed, Provost responded forcefully. “These posts are completely
inappropriate and contrary to the honor and integrity I see—and expect—from our
agents day in and day out. Any employees found to have violated our standards
of conduct will be held accountable.”
It turns out that top officials with the Border Patrol
are members of the Facebook group. So is Provost.
Seeing
the humor in “floaters.”
As The Intercept explains,
ProPublica was first to report the existence of the
secret Border Patrol group on July 1, revealing that members used the page to
joke about migrant deaths and share sexually violent and threatening posts
about several Democratic lawmakers, including, in particular, Rep. Alexandria
Ocasio Cortez, D-N.Y. Politico followed up by reporting that
senior officials in the Border Patrol, as well as CBP public affairs officials,
had known about the group for years and used it as an “intelligence” stream to
monitor the sentiment of the workforce.
The
Intercept then reported that the public
revelations sparked an internal purging of the Facebook group’s content, but
not before we archived hundreds of posts shared over multiple weeks.
Agents in the group found humor in describing immigrants who
died trying to cross the Rio Grande as “floaters,” humorously threatened
violent rape of Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and touted their love for Trump. One popular
meme showed the president using a hand at the back of her head to force
Ocasio-Cortez’s face into his crotch.
Rep. Elijah Cummings, chair of the U.S. House of Representatives
Oversight Committee, failed to see the humor and called for an investigation.
Cummings also called on Facebook to “preserve
all documents, communications, and other data related to the ‘I’m 10-15’ group”
including “log files and metadata.”
This demand pisses off the
president—whereas depictions of rape, hey, no big deal. (See: 7/27/19.)
*
WHEN IT COMES to pissing off the president, any criticism
will do. On this fine day in July, Putin’s favorite presidential puppet lashes
out at former GOP House Speaker, Paul Ryan. Ryan has been critical of Trump in
a soon-to-be-released book, American Carnage by Tim Alberta.
Trump deals with the situation in a patented Twitter tantrum.
For the sake of brevity, we will sum up. According to the president, Ryan’s
record of achievement “was atrocious (except during my first two years as
President).” He “quit Congress because he didn’t know how to Win.”
Politico highlights some of the most
damning assessments in the book:
“I told myself I gotta have a
relationship with this guy [Trump] to help him get his mind right,” Ryan told
Alberta in another excerpt released by The Washington
Post. “Because, I’m telling you, he didn’t know anything about
government. ... I wanted to scold him all the time.”
Ryan also said he saw his
retirement from the House in 2018 as an escape hatch after working with the
president for two years.
“We’ve
gotten so numbed by it all,” Ryan said. “Not in government, but where we live
our lives, we have a responsibility to try and rebuild. Don’t call a woman a
‘horse face.’ Don’t cheat on your wife. Don’t cheat on anything. Be a good
person. Set a good example.”
Too bad Speaker Ryan lacked the courage to say all of this
(and more) before he left the building.
*
THE U.S. COAST GUARD releases dramatic footage of crewman
leaping aboard a narco-submarine, busting open the hatch, and intercepting a shipment of 17,000 pounds of cocaine.
The cargo has an estimated street value of $232 million. This brings to 14 the
number of drug-smuggling subs stopped by the U.S. Coast Guard along the coasts
of Mexico, Central America and South America from May to July of this year,
carrying a combined 39,000 pounds of cocaine.
Clearly, the drug cartels are not going to be daunted by the
Great Wall of Trump. (See: 7/10/19.)
7/13/19: Right-wing pundits continue to
attack Megan Rapinoe, star of the U.S. National Women’s Soccer Team. Howard
Kurtz of Fox News complains that Rapinoe is spoiling what might have been “a
wonderful, unifying moment for the country:” Namely, the team’s win of the 2019
World Cup.
Sadly, Rapinoe “has just been constantly giving interviews, dissing
Donald Trump, dissing the White House, dissing the national anthem. I think
that is a shame. She is happy to accept an invitation to go on the Hill from
[Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez], but really attacking the president,”
Kurtz complains.
“She is very
liberal, and she can’t stand this president,” he continued. “She is
using the platform—I’m sorry to say this—to in some ways mar or spoil or tar
what could have been this great unifying moment.”
Kurtz is
appalled because an American citizen has criticized Fox News’ favorite
president. (There was a time when criticizing Barrack Obama was the network’s lifeblood.)
It’s ironic to speak of a “unifying moment” in criticizing Rapinoe, for in many
conservative circles, her lesbianism would exclude her from any “unity.” Rapinoe understands this—feels it in her
core—and realizes the president supports groups and individuals who would cheer
her exclusion.
In fact, Rapinoe
has been clear. Her protests during the National Anthem have to do with
protesting racial injustice and the second-class citizenship experienced by
LGBTQ human beings.
She’s not
against the flag.
She’s not
against this country.
You have to ignore
realities to claim she is.
Rapinoe and her
teammates draped themselves in the Stars and Stripes when they won the
tournament. By their actions on the field, they displayed the drive and
determination and love for the game and each other that should make any
American proud. Even Howard Kurtz.
Indeed,
why would anyone expect Rapinoe to show up at the White House and
stand smiling behind Trump, for another photo op with a president skilled in
hating so many of the people he was elected to serve?
Asked during
a recent interview what her message would be to the president if he was
watching, Rapinoe responded,
You’re excluding me. You’re excluding
people that look like me. You’re excluding people of color. You’re excluding
Americans that maybe support you. I think that we need to have a reckoning with
the message that you have and what you’re saying about “Make America Great
Again.” I think that you’re harking back to an era that was not great for
everyone.
Her
message was simple and clear during a speech earlier in the week, following a
ticker tape parade in New York City. Americans should “love more” she said, and
“hate less.”
Nothing
divisive in that message.
Postscript: In his Fox News diatribe, Kurtz failed
to mention several salient points. First, Rapinoe was not alone in
insisting she would not visit the White House if invited. Several teammates
were on record, including Alex Morgan, the face of the team. President Trump
has failed to invite the team, in any case. He could invite them. He promised
he would, “win or lose,” in a June 26 tweet:
I decided to go to Twitter and check Rapinoe’s feed. You
know—see how the invitation was coming.
Still nothing from the Orange Coward.
As for celebrating the victory, at least one U.S. President
was happy with the team’s phenomenal success:
7/14/19: Sunday morning, a splenetic
president decides to attack four members of Congress, all Democratic women of
color.
Time to tweet:
So interesting to see
“Progressive” Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose
governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and
inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at
all), now loudly......
....and viciously telling the
people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth,
how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the
totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back
and show us how....
....it is done. These places
need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough.
Reaction to this trio of tweets is—shall we say—less than
positive among the general population. First, three of the four women were born
in this country. Second, most Americans still believe in the U.S. Constitution
and checks and balances. Members of Congress are free to criticize the president.
Third, the First Amendment guarantees free speech and expression.
Finally, many Americans sniff racism in the tweets—Trump
attacking people of color, again—“crime infested places” often being code for,
“dark-skinned people are always dangerous.” (See: 7/16/19.)
*
TRUMP’S MOOD does not improve when a new batch of leaked
cables from the British ambassador in Washington has him describing Orange Leader’s decision to abandon the Iran deal
as “diplomatic vandalism” to spite his predecessor. Trump and his advisers, he explains,
had no “day after” strategy on what to do once they killed the deal.
Iran is
now gearing up its nuclear program. (See: 9/15/19.)
*
IN OTHER NEWS, Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) tries to stave off
defeat in the 2020 election (if he’s not jailed for misusing campaign funds) by
putting out an anti-Islamic mailer to raise campaign funds.
On one side, we have a picture of the terrorist attack on the
1972 Olympics. Hunter’s opponent in 2020 will be Ammar Campa-Najjar, whose deceased grandfather is alleged to
have had ties to the attackers. It shouldn’t matter, since his opponent is not
responsible for what happened half a century ago. Still, for context, we should
mention that Campa-Najjar is a Christian. On the back we have this “warning,”
designed to create maximum paranoia among the grossly uninformed. “Ilhan Omar,
Rashida Tlaib and Ammar Campa-Najjar ... these three radical Democrats want you
to forget their anti-semitism or family-terrorist ties!”
Hunter adds, “But as a Marine
I’ll never forget the 1983 Beirut bombings and the 1972 Olympic murders!”
It is worth noting that
Campa-Najjar was born in 1989. So, we can assume he hasn’t “forgotten” the
attacks.
Meanwhile, Hunter and his wife
are accused of misusing campaign funds as recently as 2016. Rep. Hunter has
blamed Mrs. Hunter for the problems, but prosecutors recently submitted
evidence showing Rep. Hunter used some of the funds to carry out a series of
five affairs.
Since polygamy is allowed under
Islamic law, you kind of wonder...did Rep. Hunter ever think of converting?
7/15/19: Kevin Burns, the CEO of Juul
Labs, the leader in vaping technology, wants parents to know how sorry he is
that his company made a product that got their teens addicted to nicotine. Not
so sorry, of course, that he would stop pushing the company’s product. Nor is
he sorry enough to return the $12.8 billion Altira, the leading cigarette
manufacturer, recently paid for a 35 percent stake in Juul.
“First of all, I’d tell them that I’m sorry that
their child’s using the product,” Burns told a reporter he’d tell parents. “It’s not
intended for them. I hope there was nothing that we did that made it appealing
to them. As a parent of a 16-year-old, I’m sorry for them, and I have empathy
for them, in terms of the challenges they’re going through.”
Testimony from teens who spoke before Congress,
however, quickly undercut Burns’ claims. Juul went so far as to pay schools to
be allowed to talk to teens about “healthy lifestyles.” A charter school
operation in Baltimore took a check for $134,000 to allow the
company to implement a five-week summer camp to teach teens about “good
choices.” Others received checks for $10,000 to allow company representatives
to talk about addiction—and these representatives told audiences that Juul
products were “totally safe.”
For one group of ninth graders who listened, this
was reassuring. “For my classmates
who were already vaping, it was a sign of relief because now they were able to
vape without any concern,” remembered one impressionable listener. “I believe
that after this meeting, kids were more inclined to vape because now they
thought it was just a flavor device that didn’t have any harmful substances in
it.”
According to the Food and Drug Administration, vaping is now
an “epidemic,” with one in five American teens using the electronic
“cigarettes,” and many addicted to nicotine.
The CEO of Juul is sorry.
7/16/19: President Trump’s tweets aimed
at four Democratic members of Congress, all women of color, calling on them to
“go back where they came from” are not going over well with many Americans. True,
many Trump fans loved them—which is part of the problem with many Trump fans.
Pollsters say that 7 out of 10 Americans believe the president’s attacks were offensive. That
includes 45% of Republicans who said his tweets were “racist.” It also strikes
many of those polled that telling four women to “go back where they came from”
was stupid, since three of four were born in this country.
In fact, the family of Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), one of the
lawmakers, has been in this country longer than Trump’s.
*
THIS TIME, even a few GOP lawmakers find it in their souls to criticize the Hater-in-Chief.
Asked if she found Trump’s tweets “racist,” Sen Joni Ernst responded, “Yeah, I
do.” Rep. Will Hurd of Texas said the
president’s words were “racist and xenophobic.”
Sen. Mitch Romney said if a measure to condemn the president
reached the Senate floor, he’d support it. “A lot of people have been using the word [racist],” he told a reporter.
“My own view is, that what was said and what was tweeted was destructive, was
demeaning, was disunifying and, frankly, was very wrong. It’s clearly
destructive and it has the potential to being dangerous as well.”
Meanwhile, Rep. Ralph Abraham, for
one, was happy to back the president all the way. “I’ll pay for their tickets
out of this country if they just tell me where they’d rather be.”
Other Republicans sought cover
by criticizing the four women first, then daintily criticizing Trump—as if a president’s words from the
Bully Pulpit don’t carry more weight than the words of four new members of
Congress. Sen. Tim Scott admitted that Trump had engaged in “unacceptable
personal attacks and [used] racially offensive language.” Rep. Chip Roy was correct
in saying Trump “was wrong to say any American citizen, whether in Congress or
not, has any ‘home’ besides the U.S.”
Rep. Fred Upton said both sides were wrong, but admitted he was
“appalled by the President’s tweets.” Rep. Elise Stefanik made it clear she disagreed
with the four Democrats on policies and rhetoric, but added, “the President’s
tweets were inappropriate, denigrating, and wrong. It is unacceptable to tell
legal U.S. citizens to go back to their home country.”
“As Jews, we’re all too familiar with this kind of divisive
prejudice... the president is echoing the racist talking points of white
nationalists.”
Jonathan Greenblatt
Trump couldn’t admit he was wrong and went on to defend his
language, saying without evidence, that the four women “hate our country.” All
four, he said, again without evidence, had talked of “evil Jews.”
Trump
tried to defend himself by saying the four were anti-Israel. But the
Anti-Defamation League, an international Jewish organization that has long
fought anti-Semitism and racism, blasted his position.
“As Jews, we’re all too familiar with this kind of divisive
prejudice,” Jonathan Greenblatt, League CEO and national director, responded. “While
the ADL has publicly disagreed with these congresswomen on some issues, the
president is echoing the racist talking points of white nationalists and
cynically using the Jewish people and the state of Israel as a shield to double
down on his remarks.”
Cynical racism?
That’s the Trump brand.
“The worst president in the history of this country.”
Longtime Texas judge Elsa Alcala announces that she has finally had enough. She
is leaving the Republican Party. “It has taken me years to say this publicly but
here I go,” she said in a Facebook post. “President Trump is the worst
president in the history of this country. Even accepting that Trump has had
some successes—and I believe these are few—at his core, his ideology is racism,”
she continued. “To me, nothing positive about him could absolve him of his
rotten core.”
Worst president
ever?
Presidential
historian Jon Meachem is blunt in his assessment. “And what the president’s done here
is, yet again, because he did it after Charlottesville and I think he did it,
frankly, when he was pushing the birther lie about President Obama,” Meachem
explained to Newsweek, “is he has joined Andrew Johnson as the most
racist president in American history.”
(Meachem later makes it clear he
means the most racist since the Civil War, which ended slavery.)
*
IN NON-RACIST news involving Team Trump, Jason Miller, former communications chief for the 2016 campaign
and the Trump transition team admits in a court deposition that “he hired numerous prostitutes and
visited ‘hand job’ massage parlors as recently as a few months ago.”
Miller is suing the website Gizmodo
for defamation, after a reporter posted a story (based on court documents) saying
Miller slipped an “abortion pill” to a Florida strip club dancer he
impregnated.
In initial court hearings,
Miller puts some dents in his defamation case when he admits visiting “happy
ending” massage parlors as recently as this past spring. And he does recall having
sex with an “escort” in 2015 and again in the early months of 2017. By that
time, President Trump had named him communications director for the new administration.
But Miller’s chances for a plum position were quashed when the “Fake News”
folks began turning up evidence that he had been conducting multiple affairs while
working on the 2016 campaign. At the time, Miller’s wife, Kelly, had been pregnant.
A final dent to Miller’s position
came when defense attorneys quizzed him about those affairs. “Your mistress got
mad at you because she thought you were sleeping with … your [other] mistress;
correct?” an attorney for Gizmodo inquired.
Yes, the plaintiff agreed.
And did we mention that
Miller impregnated one of his mistresses, who did at least go on to have his
child.
Can someone get the guy a
box of condoms!
7/17/19: Eric Trump washes up on Fox & Friends in the morning. He’s
there to defend his father—who is taking heat (again) for sounding like a
racist! Young Mr. Trump insists that nearly every man, woman and child in
America agrees with dad.
Apparently, he carries the same genetic defect as his father
and cannot grasp numbers that involve two or more digits.
“My father is in there,” Eric insists, “and
he’s fighting every single day. And he has to fight against the media. He has
to fight against these lunatics. And guys, I’m telling you, 95% of this country
is behind him in this message. I mean, people love this nation.”
None of the hosts blink at Eric’s math.
This is Fox News where no claim damaging to foes of the president is questioned.
If young Trump had said Obama was known to have been a cannibal the entire time
he lived in the White House, Steve Doocy would have continued to wear a sappy
grin.
Anyway, message delivered!
The real problem is the media—who keep
reporting what President Trump says. And who needs a free press, anyway! The
people who oppose his father and insist he sounds exactly like a racist are
lunatics. And anyone who disagrees with the president should go back to the
country where he or she came from.
*
ON THE TOPIC OF LUNATICS: Nicholas
Zuckerman, 25, is one of those “95% of Americans” who agree with the president
that dark-skinned people should leave the country if they don’t like everything
about it.
Mr. Zuckerman is sentenced to 15 months
in prison for sending threats, via Instagram, to blow up a Harvard graduation
ceremony honoring African American students. “If the
blacks only ceremony happens,” he wrote in 2017, “then I encourage violence and
death at it. I’m thinking two automatics with extendo clips.”
Later that day, the young white man posted under the username
“russian_goalkeeper94” This time he went with a kind of Unabomber vibe:
“#bombharvard and end their pro-black agenda.”
As Reuters noted, “Cara
McNamara, his attorney, in court said that Zuckerman had a history of mental
illness. She sought to frame his threats in broader context, saying he was “operating
in an environment where people every day are pushing the limits.”
Cough, cough.
Trump.
*
ONCE ZUCKERMAN gets out of jail he should make a beeline for the First Baptist Church in Appomattox,
Virginia, where he may find welcome.
After Trump says the four dark-skinned Democratic women
should go back where they came from, Pastor E. W. Lucas decides to capture the
message of Jesus on the billboard in front of his church. “I thought I was
going to make some remarks regarding the situation in Washington,” he told ABC
News. “It just came to me … America, I love it. If you don’t love it, leave
it.”
“People
that feel hard about our president and want to down the president, and
down the country and everything,” he continued, “they ought to go over there
and live in these other countries for a little while.”
As
one of the five percent (according to Trump Family Math) who disagree with the
president and his attacks, and who believe the First Amendment always matters,
I might suggest—tongue in cheek—that Pastor Lucas and Eric Trump and the three
hosts of Fox & Friends go live in North Korea “for a little while.”
Let them test the joys of surviving in a country where critics of the Great
Leader are dispatched with flamethrowers, nerve agents and anti-aircraft guns.
Screw
it. Thrown in Howard Kurtz, too. (See: 7/13/19.)
Postscript: Regarding Pastor Lucas, good
news. The following Sunday his congregation walked out of the 11 a.m. service in protest.
*
AS FOR KEEPING AMERICA SAFE, it would appear the gravest
danger to our country comes not from dark-skinned, female members of Congress
or dark-skinned asylum seekers arriving on our southern border.
The real threat is from within—from drug cartels—namely the
manufacturers of legal opioids, Big Pharma!
A newly released report from the Drug Enforcement Agency finds that
between 2006 and 2012, the big drug manufacturers flooded the streets of this
nation with 76 billion pain pills like oxycodone and hydrocodone. That would be
equal to 234 pills for every man, woman and child in the country.
*
AT A RALLY in North Carolina, Trump fans enjoy chanting,
“Send her back!” after Orange Leader attacks Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Somali by birth,
but now a U.S. citizen and a member of Congress. (See: 7/19/19.)
7/18/19: Andrew Wheeler, the rebranded
Big Coal lobbyist, continues to run the EPA as if the initials stand for “Every
Pollutant Allowed.” Despite warnings from EPA scientists, Wheeler and the
political hacks he brought in to run the agency decide not to ban chlorpyrifos, a chemical linked to
serious health effects in children. This is seen as a victory for the chemical
industry—and farmers.
Children?
Not so much.
According to EPA experts, now ignored
with Wheeler at the wheel, “Chlorpyrifos can cause
cholinesterase inhibition in humans at high enough doses; that is, it can
overstimulate the nervous system causing nausea, dizziness, confusion, and at
very high exposures (e.g., accidents or major spills), respiratory paralysis
and death.” Other recent EPA decisions
allow the increased use of pesticides that beekeepers say “decimate beneficial
insects,” and rolled back
regulations regarding the use of asbestos, a known carcinogen.
Meanwhile, “Snowball” Jim
Inhofe gives a speech on the U.S. Senate floor. He claims
that the “Trump Administration may go down as one of the truly great
environmental administrations” in the history of our country. He has a chart,
showing that since 1970 combined emissions of the six most common
pollutants have declined by 74%.
Apparently,
all environmental progress in the last half century is the result of the
efforts of Donald J. Trump.
Still, for Inhofe (who once said climate change couldn’t be real because he had made a snowball in Washington D. C. in January) to talk about protecting the environment was akin to Jeffrey Epstein
talking about how the Girl Scouts could improve cookie sales.
To prove his point—that the
United States needs to do nothing at all to protect the environment, because
the environment is doing great, Snowball Jim cited the work of Richard Lindzen
of MIT. Lindzen, he said, has been “calling out climate alarmists for years.”
It takes almost no effort to find a letter in which 22 other leading scientists at MIT make clear, Lindzen’s positions regarding climate change and contributing pollutants are pretty much bullshit. (See: 8/29/19.)
IN OTHER NEWS, a “high-end Russian hooker ring” is broken up in Florida, operating out of Trump Tower Miami.
It takes almost no effort to find a letter in which 22 other leading scientists at MIT make clear, Lindzen’s positions regarding climate change and contributing pollutants are pretty much bullshit. (See: 8/29/19.)
*
IN OTHER NEWS, a “high-end Russian hooker ring” is broken up in Florida, operating out of Trump Tower Miami.
You can’t make this up.
7/19/19: George Nader’s legal problems grow. Already locked in the
can, with bail denied, the former Trump adviser is charged with sex trafficking
of an underage minor, a 14-year-old boy.
Nader’s name shows up more than 100 times
in [Special Counsel Robert] Mueller’s report. It details his efforts to serve
as liaison between a Russian banker close to Russian President Vladimir
Putin and members of President Donald Trump’s transition team.
Nader also served as an adviser to the
United Arab Emirates, a close Saudi ally, and in April 2017 wired $2.5 million
to a top Trump fundraiser, Elliott Broidy, through a company in Canada….The
goal was to persuade the U.S. to take a hard line against Qatar, a longtime
American ally but now an adversary of the UAE.
Diplomacy
for sale.
*
THE PRESIDENT takes serious heat, even from allies, but tells
reporters he didn’t like the “send her back chant” aimed at Rep. Ilhan Omar at his rally in North
Carolina. He claims he started talking quickly to quiet the crowd. (See: July 17, above.)
Only video shows he didn’t.
So, the president changes his tune again (also
known as: Trump lying) and says the people chanting were “incredible patriots.”
*
THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION is also pushing the idea of cutting the number of refugees allowed to enter the country to zero.
This attitude of unconcern for those suffering from injustice and abuse is made manifest when Nadia Murad visits the Oval Office. A Yazidi woman who lost six brothers and her mother, and who was repeatedly raped by ISIS fighters, before winning the Nobel Prize, she has a story to share. Speaking to the president, she talks about the deaths of her seven family members.
The president looks like he’s having trouble pretending to listen. His expression is glum. He does not appear shocked or sympathetic in the least. Finally, he asks, stupidly, regarding her family: “What happened to them?”
It’s classic Trump. The man has no empathy and lives to golf and tweet and bitch about the free press.
7/20/19: Donald R. Trump (we are giving
him the honorary “R.” for Russia) spends his morning tweeting, like any other
73-year-old with time on his hands and nothing better to do. Only this time
he’s retweeting posts from Katie Hopkins, a British woman known for her racist
rants.
Naturally, she’s one of Trump’s biggest fans.
How racist is she? In one column, Hopkins compared dark-skinned refugees coming to Europe to “cockroaches.”
As for news that hundreds were drowning in the Mediterranean as they tried to
cross to Europe, she responded, “No, I don’t care. Show
me pictures of coffins, show me bodies floating in water, play violins and show
me skinny people looking sad. I still don’t care.”
After a terror attack in Manchester in 2017,
Hopkins responded to the very real horror by suggesting a far greater horror, a
“Final Solution” for Muslims living in the U.K. It was no coincidence she used
the same slogan Hitler used to describe the extermination of millions of Jews.
Then
admit he’s a hater for sure.
Naturally, a racist is going to support a racist president, even
though Hopkins insists Trump is not a racist. He has, instead, she claims, made
2020 a “binary choice.” It’s Trump. Or it’s those four congresswomen, all of
whom just so happen to have dark skins. It’s Trump’s way. Or it’s socialism—higher
taxes on billionaires—and the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse.
Think Trump’s not a racist? Then admit he’s a hater for sure.
The Know Nothing Party of the 1850s was made up of haters of immigrants. Hitler
was a hater of Jews. Members of the Westboro Baptist Church hate LGBQT folks.
Kim Jong-un is a hater of critics. Trump is a hater, too.
At heart, all haters are alike.
7/21/19: Scientists in Iceland plan to
install a monument at the site of the now-extinct
Okjökull glacier, the first glacier on the island to be lost, irrevocably, to
climate change.
The monument will carry a
warning about the bleak outlook for Iceland’s 400 remaining glaciers and point
to the urgent need facing humanity to deal with the growing menace of climate
change.
*
SPEAKING OF THREATS to humanity, Charlie Rispoli, a Louisiana
police officer, picks up the Trump vibe and makes it clear how he feels about
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In a Facebook post he writes, “This vile idiot needs a round. And I don’t
mean the kind she used to serve.”
The Democratic lawmaker used to work as a bartender before
she decided to make a run for office.
Not only did Officer Rispoli sound like a fascist, to make
his fascism worse, he was a stupid fascist. He was responding to a satirical
post, one clearly marked as satire, which made it sound as if Ocasio-Cortez
had criticized the U.S. military and said the troops were paid too much.
And that made him mad.
And that made him want to grab his gun.
Postscript: On a positive note, Rispoli, and a second officer
who “liked” his post, were quickly fired.
7/22/19: Reporters manage to question
the president briefly before a closed-door meeting with Imran Khan, the Prime
Minister of Pakistan. Trump assures them that if the Taliban won’t agree to a
peace deal, he has a plan to end the war in Afghanistan in a week. This is surprising
news, since the U.S. has been bogged down in Afghanistan since shortly after
the 9/11 attacks in 2001.
“I just don’t want to kill 10 million people.”
Trump is frustrated because the
U.S. can’t declare victory and go home. That means he can’t take credit and
brag. “If we wanted to fight a war in Afghanistan and win it, I would win that
war in a week,” he tells the press. “I just don’t want to kill 10 million
people. Does that make sense to you?”
Um…that should make sense to
anyone.
Naturally, his remarks raise “concerns in national security
circles, as the estimated death toll implied a threat of
nuclear force.”
This marks the third time the President Who Cried Wolf has
threatened nuclear holocaust. He once said he would unleash “fire and fury” on
North Korea. He said he would “end” Iran. Now he was talking about obliterating
a third of the Afghan population, people we were there to help.
“I have plans on Afghanistan that, if I wanted to win that war,
Afghanistan would be wiped off the face of the earth,” he said, on second thought
giving himself a bit more flexibility. “It would be over literally in 10 days.
I don’t want to go that route.”
No sane individual would.
7/23/19: Trump suffers fresh defeat in the “War on Coal” when Blackjewel, the
mining affiliate of Revelation Industry, and Revelation Industry, file for
Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. As for the miners, they learn the news the
hard way, when final paychecks bounce.
Suddenly, 1,700 men and women across several states find
themselves blocked from pulling money from 401(k) programs, wondering if
they’ll be repaid for the bounced checks and not sure they have health
insurance.
The
reaction of Mark Turner, a Kentucky miner is typical. “It’s been very hard,” he
tells reporters, “not knowing if you’re going to be able to put food on the
table for your three kids.” He’s not sure he’ll be able to meet his next house
payment, keep the electricity on, or buy new clothes and school supplies for
his children when the school year begins.
The more you delve into this story the more malodorous it
smells. Blackjewel withheld $1.2 million from payroll earmarked for miner’s
401(k)’s. The company failed to deposit an additional $900,000 in matching
funds. The company withheld $8.3 million in social security contributions and
taxes, but neglected to hand it over to local, state and federal governments.
Blackjewel fell in arrears to the tune of $63 million in royalties owed for
mining on federal lands.
Meanwhile, CEO Jeff Hoops was doing well enough, as late as
this past March, to sink $30 million into a resort project in West
Virginia. The “Grand Patrician Resort,” he said, would include an upscale
hotel, a chapel for destination weddings, a nine-hole golf course, replicating
famous par three holes round the world, and a 3,500-seat coliseum modeled on
the Colosseum in Rome.
In a recent court hearing, it was also revealed that Hoops transferred a total of $79 million between Blackjewel
and his private bank accounts—and then sometimes back again the same day. He
may have kept $34 million for himself.
7/24/19: Robert Mueller testifies for
nearly six hours in front of two congressional panels. He refuses to go beyond
what the report he has submitted says. For example, he refuses to say if the
president “took the Fifth” in answering written questions.
Mueller is precise, measured in response, even dull.
The partying at the White House immediately begins. There are
no “bombshells” in the televised testimony! The president will later call
Mueller’s performance the worst in all the storied history of congressional
hearings.
Total exoneration, baby!
*
IF YOU WATCHED all six hours of testimony—and took notes—you
know the president was not exonerated.
Dull or not, the facts Mueller laid out were damning.
It will require a special blog post to address this topic;
but a few highlights should suffice till then. First, Mueller slapped away the
idea that he had hired a team of “angry Democrats” to frame Trump. In
twenty-five years with the Justice Department he had never inquired about the
political leanings of any of his hires. “It just isn’t done,” he told a
Republican lawmaker who questioned him. He hired lawyers he felt could do the
best work, men and women he knew for “integrity,” above all.
In six hours of testimony, not one Republican member of
either committee used the word “integrity” to describe Donald R. Trump.
Meanwhile, Democrats focused on massive evidence of
obstruction of justice. We learned, for example, that Trump called Attorney
General Jeff Sessions at home and tried to get him to un-recuse himself and
fire Mueller. Trump ordered White House Counsel Don McGahn to get rid of
Mueller, too.
“Did the president ask McGahn to lie?” one questioner asked
Mueller. The Special Counsel often answered with one word.
“Yes,” he said.
Dull? Okay. But the Special Counsel had just said the
president lied—and lied in a failed attempt to obstruct justice.
When Louis Gohmert (R-TX) had his turn to speak and rambled
on for five minutes and tried to make Mueller sound like the crook, Mueller’s
response was, “I take your question.” Nothing more.
Mueller had dignity to consider.
Gohmert was a clown.
Jim Jordan (R-OH) spent his five minutes asking why Mueller
never charged Josef Mifsud, a secondary figure in the investigation—as if
something nefarious must have been afoot.
Neither he nor any other Republican wanted to know why the
following members of Team Trump were now convicted felons, or felons before
they joined the Team: Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, General Michael T. Flynn,
Michael Cohen, Felix Sater, George Papadopoulos, George Nader and probably
Roger Stone (currently under indictment for witness tampering and scheduled for
trial this fall).
Mueller was also asked, “Isn’t it true that an unsuccessful
attempt to obstruct justice is still a crime?”
“Correct,” he said. He did not elaborate because the
statement stands as made.
Rep. Mike Johnson had the closing five minutes for the
Republican side during the first hearing and tried to insist that President
Trump had never mislead anyone and cooperated fully.
“I gather you think knowingly accepting foreign help in an
election is an unethical thing to do?”
Rep. Adam Schiff
Mueller
explained that the president and his lawyers had stalled the investigation
for a year, and it was important to turn the report over to Attorney
General William Barr, so he might make the decision about what came next.
Mueller
admitted that Trump left several questions, submitted in writing by
investigators, blank.
“Did he
plead the Fifth?” Demings wanted to know.
Mueller
refused to answer. “I’m not going to get into that,” he replied. He was
sticking to what was in the report.
The rest
of her questioning went pretty much like this:
“Trump
did not answer follow up questions?” Demings asked, trying a different tack.
“No.”
“Many
questions he didn’t answer at all?”
“True.”
“His
answers were often contradictory and incomplete?”
“True.”
Did he
give answers that “contradicted other evidence?”
“Yes.”
Could
the Special Counsel say that “the President was credible?”
Mueller:
“I can’t answer that question.”
Is it
fair to say, she asked, that Trump’s answers “showed that he wasn’t always
being truthful?”
“I would
say, generally.”
Those
are the exact answers Mueller gave—what pundits were saying made for “boring”
TV.
But
Mueller wasn’t a TV prosecutor. He was a real prosecutor, with decades of law
enforcement experience. He was laying out facts. He did not need to elaborate.
He did not need to showboat, like GOP lawmakers trying to make even the most
absurd points. All the damning evidence anyone might need to begin
impeachment was there in the Mueller Report.
The best
exchange of the day may have come when, during afternoon hearings, Adam Schiff,
the Democratic chair of the House Intelligence Committee, asked Mueller a
series of simple questions.
“I
gather you think knowingly accepting foreign help in an election is an
unethical thing to do?”
“And a
crime,” Mueller interjected, his stoic manner momentarily animated.
“And
unpatriotic?” Schiff added.
“True.”
“And
wrong?”
“True,”
Mueller said again, displaying a trace of disgust, no doubt with the current
occupant of the Oval Office.
Republicans and Trump’s avid fans, who purport to love their
country far more than his opponents, should try to remember a time where their
orange hero ever said we need to protect our elections from Russian
interference. Mueller might not have stirred the masses with his precise
answers; but he was perfectly clear when he said Russian interference in our
elections was “among the most serious” challenges he had seen in all his years
in law enforcement. Russia, he said in answer to a question from Rep. Will Hurd,
the only member of his party to ask about Russians all day, did interfere in
the 2016 election.
They were, he said, interfering “as we speak.”
They would interfere again.
A Democrat asked the Special Counsel if he thought this was
the “new normal,” that politicians would accept help from foreign powers to win
future elections.
“I hope this is not the new normal,” Mr. Mueller replied,
“but I fear it is.”
7/25/19: The “new normal” arrives
almost immediately. We won’t know this for some weeks. But the day after
Mueller testifies, President Trump calls up the new President of Ukraine, Volodymyr
Zelensky.
He wants the Ukrainian leader to do him a favor. He want’s
him to investigate Hunter Biden and his dad.
*
IN OTHER NEWS, Daniella Stella, the Republican candidate chosen to run against Trump
nemesis Rep. Ilhan Omar, turns out to be less than an ideal choice. First, she
turns out to be an advocate of the QAnon conspiracy theory.
QAnon believes the president is locked in battle with “a
global cabal of elite liberal pedophiles.”
Stella is also battling demons of her own—namely,
kleptomania. The 31-year-old special education teacher (somebody check her
teaching license) has described Minneapolis as “the crime capital of our
country,” and promised to help “overworked and overburdened” police if elected.
She’s a crime wave in and of herself, having been arrested twice this year for
shoplifting: $2,300 dollars’ worth of merchandise from Target and $40 from a
Cubs Food grocery store.
Following her arrest at Target, Stella told police she
remembered “arriving at Target and then nothing else,” and blamed her sticky
fingers on PTSD, related to a violent assault she says she suffered years ago.
Ms. Stella failed to show up for a court appearance on the
first charge (more PTSD?) and a warrant was issued for her arrest.
Then she got caught, allegedly for shoplifting, again. This
time she was hiding tick spray for her cat and other cat-related merchandise
under her purse when she exited the store without paying.
(Police records also indicate that in 2009, the future
candidate for Congress was arrested for driving while impaired and attempting
to flee.)
*
IN MORE IMPORTANT, but less
eye-catching news, four of the world’s biggest auto makers announce plans to stick with a voluntary agreement they made previously with the State
of California. The state is seeking to impose stricter mileage and emission
standards, starting in 2020, under formulas advanced by the Obama
administration.
Naturally, the Pollution
administration…um…the Trump administration…wants to eliminate those standards
entirely and see just how much smog the average American can inhale.
Ford, Honda, VW and BMW can
see the future, and appear to realize change must come, sooner or later.
*
DID WE
SAY, sooner or later? Probably sooner. Across Europe, record temperatures are recorded all week.
Paris hits 108.6 degrees Fahrenheit, the hottest day in the history of the City
of Light. Thermometers in Cambridge, England touch 100.5 F, only the second
time the British Isles have ever seen triple-digit temperatures. Belgium
(104 F) The Netherlands (105.3 F) and Germany (106.7 F) all record the hottest
temperatures ever measured in those countries.
Scientists
say that Europe’s hottest seventeen summers in the last 500 years have all come
in the last seventeen years. Once again, they issue fresh warnings,
which President Trump and his fans will ignore.
“Such intense and
widespread heatwaves carry the signature of man-made climate change,” said
Johannes Cullmann, director of World Meteorological Organization’s climate
and water department, in a statement on Wednesday. “This is consistent with the
scientific finding showing evidence of more frequent, drawn out and intense
heat events as greenhouse gas concentrations lead to a rise in global
temperatures.”
7/26/19: President Trump is in a foul
mood. It’s like he had a Playboy Bunny mistress and she dumped his lard butt,
and nobody loves him.
(Really, the man desperately needs therapy.)
A Fox News poll shows Trump losing a hypothetical 2020
election to Joe Biden and losing badly (10 points). Trump is having none of it
and that means tweets!
Angry tweets!
This time we have this: “@FoxNews is at it again. So different from what they used to be during
the 2016 Primaries, & before - Proud Warriors! Now new Fox Polls, which
have always been terrible to me (they had me losing BIG to Crooked Hillary),
have me down to Sleepy Joe.”
A quick reality check—because this blogger is not on
hallucinatory drugs—shows that Fox polls had Trump down 4 points to Clinton on the eve of the 2016
election. The polling average had Trump down 3.2 points. Clinton won the
popular vote by a 2.1point margin. That would indicate to non-delusional
individuals that if the election were today, Trump would be in trouble.
Unless…hey…he always has the Russians!
7/26/19: President Trump is in a foul
mood. It’s like he had a Playboy Bunny mistress and she dumped his lard butt,
and nobody loves him.
(Really, the man desperately needs therapy.)
A Fox News poll shows Trump losing a hypothetical 2020
election to Joe Biden and losing badly (10 points). Trump is having none of it
and that means tweets!
Angry tweets!
This time we have this: “@FoxNews is at it again. So different from what they used to be during
the 2016 Primaries, & before - Proud Warriors! Now new Fox Polls, which
have always been terrible to me (they had me losing BIG to Crooked Hillary),
have me down to Sleepy Joe.”
A quick reality check—because this blogger is not on
hallucinatory drugs—shows that Fox polls had Trump down 4 points to Clinton on the eve of the 2016
election. The polling average had Trump down 3.2 points. Clinton won the
popular vote by a 2.1point margin. That would indicate to non-delusional
individuals that if the election were today, Trump would be in trouble.
Unless…hey…he always has the Russians!
7/27/19: The president wakes up in a
sour state of mind Saturday, even though at 11:15 he’ll head for one of his
private golf courses and spend his weekend flailing away at the little, white
ball. He’s sulky because we still don’t have a border wall to keep all Americans
cozy and safe—at least the ones who vote for Trump. Plus, he needs to get busy
on Twitter and do some insulting of Rep. Elijah Cummings and pretty much
everyone else who lives in Baltimore.
Cummings has been critical of conditions under which asylum
seekers and others are being held at the border. Trump decides to strike back.
It’s what Trump does best: insult individuals, and often entire
groups of human beings. He uses the loudest megaphone in the world to spread the
hate.
Alright, then, here we go:
6:14 a.m.:
Rep,
Elijah Cummings has been a brutal bully, shouting and screaming at
the great men & women of Border Patrol about conditions at the Southern
Border, when actually his Baltimore district is FAR WORSE and more dangerous.
His district is considered the Worst in the USA......
(Cummings was upset to learn that a secret Facebook group of
border agents was advocating rape and violence against Democratic women in Congress.)
6:24 a.m.:
Why is so much money sent to the
Elijah Cummings district when it is considered the worst run and most
dangerous anywhere in the United States. No human being would want to live
there. Where is all this money going? How much is stolen? Investigate this
corrupt mess immediately!
(How much is “stolen?” Does the president have any evidence
that Cummings is stealing money? Once again, Trump of Trump University, Trump
of Stiffing Undocumented Polish Workers, Trump of Bankrupting Casinos, Trump of
Not Revealing His Taxes and Trump of Paying off Porn Stars, is projecting. He’s
a giant orange crook. He assumes others have the same morals and ethics—that
is, none—as he does.)
Finally, just before lunchtime, it’s off to Trump National
Golf Club, in Potomac Falls, Virginia. A round of golf is next, then perhaps a
shower, and back he comes to the Twitter attack:
4:35 p.m.: “Elijah Cummings spends all of his time
trying to hurt innocent people through ‘Oversight.’ He does NOTHING for his
very poor, very dangerous and very badly run district! Take a look....
#BlacksForTrump2020”
8:50 p.m.: .@RepCummings, why don’t you focus on your
district!?
8:54 p.m.: “RT @kimKBaltimore: More trash. More concerned residents.
People live in the home with the silver van. This is
@RepCummings district. This h…”
9:02 p.m.: .@RepCummings — your district!
Finally, at 10:35 p.m., the president closes with this: “So
sad that Elijah Cummings has been able to do so little for the people
of Baltimore. Statistically, Baltimore ranks last in almost every major
category. Cummings has done nothing but milk Baltimore dry, but the
public is getting wise to the bad job that he is doing!”
You wonder, of course, why the president didn’t call up
Secretary Ben Carson over at Housing and Urban Development and see what HUD
could do to help Baltimore clean up those trash-strewn areas.
After all, when Baltimore was suffering in 2015, Trump was
clear about who was to blame for the mess.
In fact, Trump was so sure he could work his magic, he
retweeted this from a fan:
So, what has Trump done since taking office to help cities
like Baltimore? He has called for $8.8 billion in budget cuts for HUD for Fiscal Year 2019. Congress
refused to go along.
He’s trying again for
Fiscal Year 2020, asking Congress to cut the HUD budget once more, this time by 16.4 percent.
We know he won’t be going to Baltimore to assess the
situation this week, because he wouldn’t care if all the people in Baltimore
were dead. They won’t vote for him, so why would he help? The man shows no more
empathy than a pumpkin, although if you think about it, they do have a similar
shape and coloring. (See: 7/29/19.)
7/28/19: This turns out to be Stephen
Romero’s last day on earth. The six-year-old is shot and killed, along with two
other innocent bystanders, while enjoying himself at the Gilroy, California
Garlic Festival.
The shooter turns out to be a 19-year-old man armed with an
“AK-47 style” assault rifle (which was purchased legally in Nevada). A
13-year-old girl and a man in his 20’s are also killed and a dozen others wounded.
Police respond within a minute—the proverbial good guys
stopping bad guys with guns—and kill the shooter. Gilroy police chief Scot
Smithee praises the bravery of three officers who returned fire, and unintentionally
hits on a problem facing our entire nation. “Despite the fact that they were outgunned
with their handguns against the rifle, those three officers were able to
fatally wound the suspect,” Smithee says.
They were outgunned; and the gory toll is advanced again, another
fifteen killed and wounded. Americans are gunned down at work, in driveways, at Walmart and Kroger. They are slaughtered in synagogues and churches, at high schools and colleges, in suburban bars and at house-warming parties. They die on baseball diamonds, while pumping gas and minding their business at home, at country music festivals and, now, Stephen Romero, 6,
has been killed at the Garlic Festival.
Trump will not act on gun violence.
Trump will tweet about how we need a multi-billion-dollar
border wall to keep ourselves safe.
*
SEN. MITCH McCONNELL is pissed because the
hashtag #MoscowMitch is trending on Twitter. Trump fans don’t remember—or don’t
care to remember—but when President Obama wanted to issue a warning (before
voters went to the polls) about Russian meddling in the 2016 election, Moscow Mitch
refused to go along until the
warning was watered down.
Now Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch with ties
to organized crime, is offering to build a
$200 million aluminum factory in McConnell’s Kentucky backyard, which looks more
than a little like payback for services rendered.
Next come the moves that earn McConnell a new sobriquet.
The House of Representatives passes a pair of bills to protect the 2020 election.
Senate Democrats demand a vote on the same.
One measure would require states to use paper ballots (or keep paper
ballots for backup, in case computer systems are hacked). It would also increase
funding for the Election Assistance Committee, to protect the vote.
A second measure would require candidates to
report any offers of election-aid from foreign governments to
proper law enforcement authorities. But that might cramp President Trump’s
style.
“Moscow Mitch” blocks both bills from reaching
the Senate floor.
7/29/19: Trump is still bitching about
Rep. Elijah Cummings, who is black. Baltimore is basically a “shithole,” you know he wants to say.
The president hasn’t offered to be dropped into Baltimore to
fix the mess he said Obama should have fixed four years ago, a mess he swore he
could clean up with ease. At least he’s back at the White House for now,
following another weekend of golf. According to Google Maps, Trump National
Golf Club, is 29.7 miles from Washington D.C. But it costs the Secret Service
extra—some say the tab is now more than $102 million—every time the president leaves the White
House to visit another one of his courses.
If Trump really wanted to do the job, he could have demanded
that the Secret Service haul his lazy butt in a different direction, only 38.3
miles north to Baltimore for the weekend. He could have rolled up his sleeves,
talked to people in poor neighborhoods, listened to their problems, and called
a cabinet meeting this morning to see what might be done to address the issues. (See: 7/27/19.)
*
THE PRESIDENT stops to chat with reporters on
the South Lawn. He grumbles that U.S. intelligence communities have “run amok”
and must be reined in—mainly because they keep coming up with conclusions that
bruise his fragile ego.
That means Director of National Intelligence Dan
Coats, highly respected for his work, is out.
Rep. John Ratcliffe, who has virtually zero
experience in the intelligence field, is the choice to fill his shoes.
Why Ratcliffe? Trump loved his performance during the televised Mueller
hearings. That is, Ratcliffe did his best to savage Mueller and shield Trump,
no matter what. He’s a hack. He’s a toady.
He’s the kind of sycophant Donald R. (for “Russia”)
loves.
*
TRUMP BRAGS about being down at Ground Zero on 9/11, right there with all the other first responders.
His claim is both weird and grotesque.
7/30/19: Back in March 2018, the
president was busy patting himself on the back, as he loves to do. He was
bragging about his deal-making skills where China was concerned. The tariffs he had imposed were taking a bite
out of the Chinese economy and the Chinese were ready to give up. “Under our potential deal with China, they will purchase
from our great American farmers practically as much as our farmers can
produce,” the President of the United States said.
Now, Trump is mad. Sixteen months after he made
that great deal, the Chinese have failed to come through.
It was no deal at all.
Trump learns again—or at least should—that diplomacy is a
bitch. And it’s easy to complain about what your predecessors failed to do.
But you’ll fail too.
Capitalism
helping communism to cut its own throat.
This blogger agrees: We should press the Chinese on trade.
But a large part of our problem has been that big America corporations are happy
to shift jobs to China, something Karl Marx could have never foreseen. That is,
capitalism helping communism, as it were, to cut its own throat.
Most of the jobs we’ve lost aren’t coming back. They’ll shift
again, to Vietnam, Sri Lanka or Bangladesh.
It’s a reality Trump and the GOP dare not address. If workers
lack power to make demands for higher pay and benefits, the iron law of supply
and demand decrees: Employers shall seek the cheapest labor available.
It “worked” when slave labor was free.
It “worked” when poor families had no choice but to put young
children in factories.
It “works” today, when companies, including the Trump
Organization, hire undocumented labor.
It “works” when Chinese employees put in ninety hours a week
and aren’t in position to demand overtime.
It “works” in Bangladesh, where safety standards are lax to
the point of non-existence. Big corporations are happy to ask the Bangladeshi
to slave away in unsafe conditions. If a factory catches on fire and dozens of workers are killed, or a
factory collapses on workers’ heads, killing 1,100?
Supply and demand.
Go find some other desperately poor people who haven’t been
smushed and they’ll sew your jeans and assemble your tennis shoes and do it
cheap.
*
TO SAY THAT JULY is not ending well for the 45th President
of the United States is an understatement. The three top religious officials at
the Washington National Cathedral in Washington D.C. decide they must speak.
In a statement titled, “Have We No
Decency?” they write,
As faith leaders who serve
at Washington National Cathedral – the sacred space where America gathers at
moments of national significance – we feel compelled to ask: After two years of
President Trump’s words and actions, when will Americans have enough?
We have come to accept a
level of insult and abuse in political discourse that violates each person’s
sacred identity as a child of God. We have come to accept as normal a steady
stream of language and accusations coming from the highest office in the land
that plays to racist elements in society.
This week, President Trump
crossed another threshold. Not only did he insult a leader in the fight for
racial justice and equality for all persons; not only did he savage the nations
from which immigrants to this country have come; but now he has condemned the
residents of an entire American city….
Make no mistake about it,
words matter. And, Mr. Trump’s words are dangerous.
These words are more than a
“dog-whistle.” When such violent dehumanizing words
come from the President of the United States, they are a clarion call, and give
cover, to white supremacists who consider people of color a sub-human
“infestation” in America. They serve as a call to action from those
people to keep America great by ridding it of such infestation. Violent words
lead to violent actions.
When does silence become
complicity? What will it take for us all to say, with one voice, that we have
had enough? The question is less about the president’s sense of decency, but of
ours.
As leaders of faith who
believe in the sacredness of every single human being, the time for silence is
over. We must boldly stand witness against the bigotry, hatred, intolerance,
and xenophobia that is hurled at us, especially when it comes from the highest
offices of this nation. We must say that this will not be tolerated. To stay
silent in the face of such rhetoric is for us to tacitly condone the violence
of these words.
“When such violent dehumanizing words come from
the President of the United States, they are a clarion call, and give cover, to
white supremacists who consider people of color a sub-human ‘infestation’ in
America.”
Statement from the Washington National Cathedral
7/31/19: The Wall Street Journal breaks the news that the FAA was
aware, after the first Boeing 737 Max crashed in October 2018, killing all 189
passengers and crew, that it “didn’t take that much” for sensors to malfunction
and repeatedly push the nose of the plane
down.
The FAA decided that airlines should warn pilots
that a similar disaster was possible. Nothing more.
This was done, as CNBC explains, “to give Boeing
and regulators enough time to certify a permanent fix without removing planes
from the sky.”
Unfortunately, in March 2019 a second 737 Max
removed itself “from the sky,” nosing straight into the ground.
All 157 passengers and crew died.
Good work, then, Daniel K. Elwell, Trump’s
choice to head the FAA until that second crash. And welcome, Stephen Dickson,
Acting Director of the FAA till last week! Dickson was confirmed by the
U.S. Senate on July 24, in a narrow 52-40 vote. Democrats mostly voted nay,
after senators learned that while Dickson was senior vice president for flight
operations at Delta, he was involved in a whistleblower case—and not in a good way.
When a pilot named Karlene Pettit expressed safety concerns, she was removed
from the cockpit. In retaliation, she claims, she was ordered to undergo a
psychiatric exam and failed. She was grounded for more than a year, “until outside experts overruled Delta’s hand-picked
doctor and determined she was mentally fit to fly. She is now suing Delta in a
Labor Department proceeding.”
The moral of the story: In Trumpistan government
regulations are always bad and businesses should regulate themselves.
Too bad if the passenger jet you’re on plows up
some ground.
*
Heading for the nearest pharmacy, they purchase
life-saving insulin that would cost $340 per vial in the United States, but sells
for $32 in Canada. Canada offers universal health care, which is “socialism” of
the worst sort.
August 1, 2019: Scientists
report
that July beat out June 2016 for the hottest month, globally, on record.
8/2/19: Once again, through the
miracle of Twitter, President Trump proves he’s a giant dick.
The relevant tweet:
The President of the United States, who says he wants a big
beautiful border wall to protect us all from murderers and
rapists, thinks it’s funny that Rep. Elijah Cummings’ house was burglarized.
*
NOT ONLY is Trump a dick, he’s a sap. Fourteen months ago, he
claimed North Korea was no longer a nuclear threat. So
far, he has not convinced Kim Jong-un to give up a single nuke.
The Donald is 0-for-his presidency.
So, while North Korea continues to build its nuclear arsenal,
and has started launching missiles again, Trump can only tweet his way out of
the conundrum.
His tweets, slightly edited:
Kim
Jong Un and North Korea tested 3 short range missiles over the last number of
days. These missiles tests are not a violation of our signed Singapore
agreement, nor was there discussion of short range missiles when we shook
hands [emphasis added]...
....Chairman Kim does
not want to disappoint me with a violation of trust....
....Chairman Kim has a great
and beautiful vision for his country, and only the United States, with me as
President, can make that vision come true. He will do the right thing because…he
does not want to disappoint his friend, President Trump!
His “friend?”
Trump should be learning what every American president
since 1898 has learned. Diplomacy on a world stage is a bitch and it’s hard to
get foreign nations to do what we want.
Only Trump isn’t learning.
*
THE PRESIDENT suffers another blow to the orange ego, when it
becomes clear that Rep. John Ratcliffe, his pick to be the next Director of
National Intelligence is not going to be the next DNI.
That means Ratcliffe, tapped on July 29 to head up one of the most sensitive posts in
the U.S. government, didn’t make it a week before his nomination went down in
flaming wreckage.
Naturally, the president blames Democrats and the “Fake News”
crowd for derailing his fine pick. He tells reporters that news organizations
have treated Ratcliffe “very harshly and very unfairly.”
The president goes on to say that Republicans in the U.S.
Senate would have loved Ratcliffe, if Democrats and the free press hadn’t been mean.
He says he and Ratcliffe decided it wasn’t worth it to go through a
confirmation hearing, even though Moscow Mitch and the GOP had 53 votes in the
upper house and had previously proven willing to vote “yes” on a tomato plant
if Trump sent up a nomination.
The real problem was Ratcliffe’s thin-to-nonexistent
qualifications. First, reporters discovered that the poor dolt had claimed a leading role in prosecuting U.S. v. Holy Land
Foundation, an important antiterrorism case. When ABC News checked, no one
involved in the case remembered Ratcliffe. It didn’t help to find Ratcliffe had
claimed to have put all kinds of terrorists in jail. The “enemies of the
people” (a.k.a. reporters) discovered that the only case he ever prosecuted
involving a terrorist was an Iraq War veteran with PTSD. Finally, Trump’s pick
for DNI claimed he had “arrested 300 illegal aliens in a single day.” That
claim was…how shall we say…fictitious.
Raids across several states, involving multiple
jurisdictions, swept up undocumented workers in various poultry plants. All
Ratcliffe really did was “disarm” workers who were cutting up chickens.
Even Moscow Mitch and his crew knew the only reason Trump
picked Ratcliffe for the job was that Ratcliffe tried to make Robert Mueller
look bad during public testimony on July 24. (See: 7/24/19.)
8/3/19: Saturday morning, Orange
Leader’s Twitter feed reveals again, how dangerous his rhetoric can be.
“Language is the soil of thought.”
James Russell Lowell
Just hours before the massacre in El Paso, Trump is
retweeting a post from Katie Hopkins, a Brit, who has compared migrants and
refugees to cockroaches. This morning, Hopkins happens to be focusing on
a Syrian immigrant (dog whistle: “Muslim”) who used a machete to hack to death
some poor fellow (dog whistle: white gentleman, eating a crumpet) on a London
street.
She is stirring as much visceral fear as she can. Trump
decides it would be great to magnify the reach of her hate.
The morning is still young. Trump retweets Hopkins again.
This time the hate (and hate’s handmaiden: fear) is directed at London’s mayor,
which makes you wonder why the president is at all concerned. Hopkins
has referred to the mayor, who is short of stature and a Muslim as, “The nipple-height
Mayor of Londonistan [who] has NEVER been so unpopular. He has MINUS
approval ratings because we are stab-city.…”
It’s the ultimate, bloody irony. Trump, on Saturday morning,
is focused on the crime problems of London, where a noticeable uptick in
stabbing attacks has occurred. Suddenly, gunfire erupts in El Paso, Texas. “An
Anglo man came here to kill Hispanics,” a local sheriff will say. Heavily
armed, carrying military-style weaponry, he kills and wounds 46 human beings.
Consider the similarities in the language of the hater with
the gun and the hater with the Twitter account. “You look at what is marching up, that is an invasion!” Trump
told fans at a recent rally, warning against migrants approaching our southern
border.
“Language,” James Russell
Lowell once said, “is the soil of thought.”
Trump plants noxious weeds and
claims innocence when they grow. In a Trump 2020 campaign add on Facebook, we
hear him shout: “We have an INVASION! It’s CRITICAL that we STOP THE INVASION!”
And with that, the soil for slaughter in El Paso is prepped.
“This attack is a response to
the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” the killer claims.
The soil of thought.
*
PREDICTABLY, almost as soon as the smoke stops curling from
the barrel of the killer’s automatic weapon, the hypocrites begin offering up
hollow response. In El Paso, 20 are dead, 26 wounded. Many of the victims have
been hit multiple times. Sen. Mitch McConnell, the second most powerful man in
Washington, says the victims are in his and his wife’s thoughts and prayers.
(The N.R.A., however, is in his pockets.)
At that moment, by cosmic mischance, “Massacre Mitch” is
sitting on a bill, passed by the House of Representatives, to require universal
background checks before anyone can purchase a gun. McConnell has refused to
allow the bill to come to the floor for debate. In fact, GOP senators are
terrified that if they address the problem of gun violence, the N.R.A. will
turn against them. The American people, generally, agree that action is long
overdue. A recent Harvard University study found that 83 percent of gun
owners approved of expanded background checks.
Fox News reports that 91 percent of all Americans favor
universal background checks, 84 percent favor mental health checks on gun
buyers and 72 percent support raising the age to purchase a gun to 21. Six in
ten would ban the sale of assault rifles and semi-automatic weapons.
8/4/19: Sunday, shock and anger turn
to outrage. Americans wake to the news that there has been a second bloody
slaughter, this time in Dayton, Ohio. Nine are dead, twenty-seven
wounded.
The shooter manages to inflict this damage in thirty-two seconds. Fortunately, nearby police on patrol arrive quickly and shoot him dead. The killer is using a drum magazine, holding 100
rounds.
He’s carrying an assault-style rifle, of course. We learn
later that he’s wearing a mask, body armor and hearing protection. His attack,
like the attack in El Paso, has been carefully planned.
Numbed by the news, I rub sleep from my eyes and turn to Fox
News to see how the story is covered. Rep. Kevin McCarthy is guest on Maria
Bartiromo’s show. If you watch much Fox, you can predict what she’s going to
ask—and if you’ve ever listened to McCarthy you know his answer.
Bartiromo wonders if McCarthy believes video games are
the problem. “Is this mental?” she adds.
McCarthy refers to the killers as “monsters,” but utters not
a syllable about how we can keep automatic weapons out of such hands.
Bartiromo talks about anger on social media. “Words matter,”
she says.
(Yes, we know.)
We can predict, again, that they won’t bring up the fact
Trump recently complained about crime in Baltimore but failed to offer help.
Instead, he mocked the city and its mostly African American political
leadership (the “other” in the eyes of his predominantly white base), using the
homicide rate to score political points. It should have been a
vomit-inducing moment for anyone possessed of normal human emotions, but it was
no surprise coming from Trump.
Minutes into his Thursday night campaign rally in Cincinnati, President Donald Trump continued his nearly weeklong bashing of
the city of Baltimore.
Early in his speech, the Republican president railed against
cities led by Democrats.
“The Democrat record is one of neglect and corruption and decay,
total decay,” Trump said to applause.
He then turned to Baltimore.
“The homicide rate in Baltimore is
significantly higher than El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala,” Trump told his
supporters. He paused.
“Gimme a place that you think is
pretty bad. Gimme a place,” Trump said, adopting the intonation of a stand-up
comic and motioning to someone in the crowd. “The guy says, ‘Afghanistan.’ I
believe it’s higher than Afghanistan. In our country. Think of that.”
Trump’s voice turned sarcastic.
“If we’re wrong, they’ll tell us
tomorrow. It’ll be headlines: ‘Trump exaggerated.’ I do believe the rate is
higher than Afghanistan,” the president said.
Trump doesn’t really care about the blood and the gore. Trump
is scoring points with his base by instilling fear of the “other.” The African
Americans in a crime-ridden city. The Muslim mayor and the Muslim immigrant in
London.
“Stab city.”
The “other,” in Trump’s telling, those people with menacing,
darker faces.
“Cockroaches,” one might start to think. (See: 8/3/19.)
*
I SOON GIVE UP on Fox News and begin switching between
channels and go online for information.
First, we can start with Trump’s tone-deaf comments about
Baltimore. It’s a city of 610,000 and suffered 318 murders last year. The
president turns this bloody mess into a point of mockery. He’s not going to
visit Baltimore or any of the other cities that have worse murder rates, not
even crime-ridden cities in the reddest of states. He’s going to stick to
private golf clubs every weekend instead. Statistics vary slightly, but in
2018, Baltimore was the seventh most deadly city in the U.S., with .52 murders for
every 10,000 residents. East St. Louis was worst with 1.0 murders per 10,000.
Lakeworth, Florida rounded out the “Top 30,” with .26.
What about London, where a Muslim mayor runs the show
and Muslim immigrants run amok with machetes in their hands?
The city of 8,100,000 had 119 homicides as of November 13 last year, putting it on
pace for 140 for the year.
That rate would be .02 homicides per 10,000.
Stabbings and all.
*
A SUNDAY AFTERNOON spent channel surfing proves grim. We’ve
seen this gory scene play out before. What were the killer’s motives? Pundits
offer theories. Police describe the armament employed. Politicians agree
lessons must be learned. A trauma surgeon in El Paso stands before the cameras
and updates us on the condition of the wounded. Shaken survivors in Dayton
describe what they saw in the dark hours Sunday morning. Then they weep. Even
law enforcement authorities weep. Experts appear on every cable channel and
describe the warning signs if you think someone you know, or know of, might
have violent intent. Journalists look glum.
Jake Tapper on CNN seems unusually stony-faced. Words matter,
of course. He wonders if Trump’s words have fueled the hate. In May, for
example, this exchange at a Trump rally occurred. Tapper plays a clip. Trump asks the crowd for
ideas to block migrants trying to cross the border:
“How do you stop these people?”
he asks.
“Shoot them!” a man in the
audience shouts.
The crowd laughs and Trump smiles.
“That’s only in the Panhandle you can get away with that stuff,” he says. “Only
in the Panhandle.”
So, the killer in El Paso does just that. He drives down to
the border and opens fire, just like the man at the rally said.
*
IT WAS OBVIOUS from
the start. Trump is a hater of the worst kind. We had our first warning
signs when Trump claimed for six years that President Obama (the “other” in
right-wing land) wasn’t a U.S. citizen. Candidate Trump relented in a nine-word
statement in 2016, only because campaign advisers warned his perceived racism
was hurting his chance of winning. But, like Hitler and every other demagogue,
Trump stirred crowds to hate from the start. Hate and fear Obama. Hate
Mexicans, those dark-skinned “others,” those “murderers” and “rapists,” with perhaps
an occasional good person mixed in. Like any other demagogue, Trump set out to foster
the fear.
Since taking office,
he has lashed out in all directions as only a skilled hater can. N.F.L. players
who protested police brutality and protested the president’s policies, were
“sons of bitches.”
That is: You had a
U.S. president labeling the mothers of African American football players
“bitches.” And maybe, he added, those players “shouldn’t be in this country” at all.
No other president has ever hated more
Americans.
Is the president a
racist? Trump hates so many groups and so many individuals, it’s hard to be
sure. Hitler had his “untermenschen” or “under men.” The Jews were “vermin” who
must be extirpated. Trump retweets Katie Hopkins, with her “cockroach”
comparisons and complains about “lowlifes” again and again. Andy McCabe, Ted
Cruz, Elizabeth Warren and Omarosa—who he hired to work at the White House—are lowlifes.
Omarosa is also a “dog.” Criminals are rabid “animals” in Trump’s mind.
As such, they can be shot on sight. Muslims, as a group, are a threat. By the
thousands, Trump claimed, they cheered in New Jersey on 9/11 when the Twin
Towers fell. That hate-based claim won him a “Pants of Fire” rating from
political fact-checking sites; but the seeds of hate took root, exactly as
Trump intended.
Trump hates so many
people, it’s difficult to keep track of all he despises. He hated and still
hates Obama. He hates Alec Baldwin and the producers of Saturday Night Live.
He hates Meryl Streep and Robert DeNiro. He hated John McCain most of all. He
hates Jeff Bezos and Peggy Noonan and Don Lemon and LeBron James. He hates
Rosie O’Donnell and calls her a “fat pig,” and Stormy Daniels, the porn star
with whom he had sex, who he refers to as “horseface now.”
Dehumanization is
Trump’s stock in trade.
Stoke hate. Stoke
fear. That’s what this president does. Race can be Trump’s fuel. Religion can
be his fuel. Hate of the “other” can be his fuel. Fear that America is being
destroyed by “liberals” can be his fuel. “I don’t believe the four
Congresswomen are capable of loving our country,” he says
recently, stirring the anger and hate, referring to four female Democratic
lawmakers. It’s “our country,” he wants supporters to believe. It’s not their
country. The four may be American citizens. No matter. They are “other.”
Two are Muslim American. All four have brown skin. But they are “weak &
insecure people who can never destroy our great Nation.”
“Our great Nation.”
Not the nation of those “others.”
No way.
In tweet after tweet,
Trump employs the word “destroy” to provoke irrational fear. Obama, he claimed,
was out to destroy the “American dream.” Obama didn’t
love this country. According to Trump, his enemies never do. “If
@BarackObama really loved this country, he wouldn’t
be destroying it.” Obama destroyed our children’s futures. He destroyed the middle class.
Trump’s world is
crammed with enemies. Paranoia is a guiding principle. When five police in
Dallas were gunned down by a black man in 2016—a heinous act without
doubt—Trump stoked the fear of “others” again, this time
the “criminal” blacks. “Our convention occurs at a moment of
crisis for our nation,” he warned at the Republican National Convention that
July. “The attacks on our police, and the terrorism in our cities, threaten
our very way of life.”
The killer of those officers was a hater, too.
All haters are fundamentally alike. Some hate the Jews. Some hate the police.
Some hate reporters who question what they say and do.
You might have thought, after these most recent
killings, that Trump would be fired up about all the white mass murderers, who have
done even worse damage than the Dallas murderer. These
attackers are home-grown white men. These are haters who shot up Santa Fe,
Texas (10 students and teachers killed), Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (11 cut down
at the Tree of Life synagogue), Thousand Oaks, California (12 killed in a bar),
Parkland, Florida (17 students and teachers riddled with bullets), Sutherland
Springs, Texas (26 slaughtered at prayer), and Las Vegas, Nevada (58 massacred
with music in their ears). Trump does not rail about these shootings because
the shooters are not “other.” He cannot use them to stir the hate of his base.
No American president
has ever hated more Americans than Donald J. Trump. He hates “liberals” and
Democrats. Special Counsel Robert Mueller headed up a “gang of Democratic
thugs.” The Democratic candidate for governor of Georgia planned to “destroy a great state.” The Mainstream Media
is “corrupt and deranged.” Reporters who criticize the
president are “crazed lunatics.” They are, in his view, “enemies of the people,” a line that echoes Herr Hitler in
1934. People who investigated his campaign and its many contacts with Russians
were guilty of “TREASON.” Democrats who don’t support his border wall are “treasonous,” too.
The punishment for
treason is death.
Trump, you see, is
master of the hater’s game—and his hateful words matter a great deal. Patrick Crusius, the suspect in the El Paso
shooting, says in a 2,300-word “manifesto” that he was “simply defending my
country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.”
“My country,” he says.
Trump’s words echo
loud.
8/5/19: The nation comes to grips with the
tragic events of the weekend. TV screens fill with sad images. Three daughters
of David Johnson talk with Anderson Cooper. They tell him their dad shielded
their mother and a nine-year-old granddaughter when the El Paso killer opened
fire at point blank range. Johnson was hit several times and paid with his
life. All three young women start to cry.
The name of Arturo
Benavides, 60, scrolls across the screen. An army veteran, who liked to talk
about his time in the service, Benavides was killed not on a battlefield but
shopping at a store. Maribel Latin, describes being wounded in the arm and the
foot, playing dead, counting shots fired as she lay. She feared the next bullet
might be for her. Paul Gilbert Anchondo, age two months, was grazed by a bullet
but survived. Both his parents were killed. Now he’s a “mass murderer orphan.”
So are his sisters, Skylin, 5, and Victoria, 2. Javier Amir Rodriguez, 15,
played soccer in high school last year. He won’t be playing again. Angelina
Englisbee, 86, survived eight decades on earth, only to be cut down at Walmart.
The husband of Elsa
Libora Marquez speaks, in a sense, for all the grieving families, when he
remembers his wife in a Facebook post: “I say goodbye to my partner, the most
wonderful woman, a being full of life who will continue to light our path for
the time that life gives us…we will miss you my love!!!!”
The story in Dayton is
equally bloody and grim. Megan Betts, the “bubbly” sister of the killer, is
among those he gunned down. Derrick Fudge, 57, is purchasing food at a taco
truck when caught by a burst of semi-automatic fire. Lois Oglesby, 27, a young
mother, will never tuck her two daughters in bed again. Logan Turner, 30,
described by his mother “as the world’s best son,” is dead.
*
AT 10:00 A.M., President Trump appears before cameras in the White House Diplomatic
Reception Room. VP Pence stands, a step back, at his side. Trump talks about
what he believes must be done.
A “wicked man,” he says, went to Walmart in El Paso and
opened fire. In Dayton a “twisted monster” blasted innocent bystanders at a
popular night-life spot. The president’s speech hits mostly the correct notes,
although Trump seems to be delivering it with the enthusiasm of a child served
lima beans. He appears to be reciting what’s on the teleprompter and doesn’t
appear moved.
“These barbaric slaughters are an assault on our
communities,” he recites, “a crime against all humanity.” It is odd to hear the
words “all humanity” issue from his lips. Trump spent his entire time running
for office, and time since, dividing humanity into groups and pitting group
against group.
Still, he soldiers on, saying, at least three years too late,
that, “in one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry and white
supremacy. These sinister ideologies must be defeated. Hate has no place in
America. Hatred warps the mind, ravages the heart, and devours the soul.”
This blogger freely admits he finds this president to be a
despicable human being. He would credit Trump for such words, if he thought
they came from the heart. But it’s easy to check the internet site which
compiles all of Trump’s tweets. The site allows a search by word or phrase.
The phrase, “all humanity” has never appeared.
Not once.
“Hate,” however, comes up hundreds of times, sometimes in
harmless fashion, often not. Trump howls about political foes who “HATE our
country.” There are “haters and losers,” “Trump haters,” CNN pundits who “hate”
him, and a single “Hate Crime” that riles Trump up.
(Until now, the only hate crime Trump had ever tweeted about
was the case of Jussie Smollett, who faked an attack on himself—and claimed the
attackers were men in red MAGA hats.)
“Since Columbine,” Trump continues with his White House
recitation, we have “watched, with rising horror, and dread, as one mass
shooting has followed another, over and over again, decade after decade.”
“We can and will stop this evil contagion,” he adds, but says
it must be done in “a true bipartisan manner.”
In perhaps the most ironic passage of all, Trump looks at the
teleprompter and intones: “Cultural change is hard. But each of us can choose
to build a culture that celebrates the inherent worth and dignity of every
human life.” In what sounds like an aside, diverging from the script, he
adds, with what seems to be a brief touch of sincere emotion, “That’s what we have
to do.”
The president talks for ten minutes. It’s hard not to notice
he avoids the main point. “We must reform our mental health laws to better
identify mentally disturbed individuals,” make sure they get treatment, but
face “involuntary confinement” if required. He talks about regulating “violent
video games.” He seems to believe all mass murderers are “mentally disturbed,”
but says he wants to add the death penalty in such cases. There’s no evidence a
deranged killer would care. The problem Trump doesn’t dare to address is the
problem itself. Both shooters, as is almost always the case where mass murder
occurs, were armed with military-style weaponry and—more generally—the United
States is awash with three hundred million guns.
Instead, Trump hits a key right-wing talking point in his
speech. We don’t need gun control. “Mental illness and hatred pulls the
trigger, not the gun,” he insists.
His task nearly complete, Trump wraps up the speech he has no
choice but to give. “If we are able to pass great legislation after all of
these years, we will ensure that those who were attacked will not have died in
vain.” He offers blessings to the memory of the people who died in El Paso.
Then: “May God bless the memory of those who died in Toledo. May God protect
them.”
It’s a bizarre slip of the tongue, but Trump doesn’t correct
himself. Moments later, he concludes his performance. He exits the room, as if
making his escape, without taking a single question from the press.
*
THE DAY DOES NOT END, however, before several Republicans
make asses of themselves.
Once again, we hear them argue that banning assault-style
rifles won’t help because killers can still use knives. It’s the same line they
trot out every time a mass shooting occurs. Killers can use cars, too, they
like to add.
Oh, fuck it. Why not just argue that they can use nine irons,
two-by-fours and frozen turkey legs as clubs?
(Now liberals want to take away your drumsticks!)
Ohio state Rep. Candice Keller, the biggest fool of all,
places blame for gun violence right where it “belongs.”
In a Facebook post she writes, “After every mass shooting,
the liberals start the blame game. Why not place the blame where it belongs?”
She kicks off her list: “The breakdown of the traditional American family
(thank you, transgender, homosexual marriage, and drag queen advocates)...”
It’s an idiotic response. And to be fair, the Ohio Republican Party Chairwoman calls on
Rep. Keller to resign.
*
LEST WE FORGET, there are and always have been Republicans
and conservatives who stand for principles any decent human can respect. In
that vein, Nebraska state Sen. John S. McCollister, a lifelong Republican,
issues a series of searing tweets:
The Republican Party is enabling
white supremacy in our country. As a lifelong Republican, it
pains me to say this, but it’s the truth.
I of course am not suggesting
that all Republicans are white supremacists nor am I saying that the average
Republican is even racist.
What I am saying though is that the
Republican Party is COMPLICIT to obvious racist and immoral activity
inside our party.
We have a Republican president
who continually stokes racist fears in his base. He calls certain
countries “sh*tholes,” tells women of color to “go back” to where they came from
and lies more than he tells the truth.
We have Republican senators and
representatives who look the other way and say nothing for fear that it will
negatively affect their elections. No more. When the history books are written,
I refuse to be someone who said nothing...
We all like to cite Abraham
Lincoln’s Republican lineage when it is politically expedient but NOW is the
time to ACT like Lincoln [emphasis added] and take a stand.
With, that, he posts this picture and calls it a day.
Within hours, the chairman of the Nebraska GOP drums
McCollister out of the Republican Party.
And so it goes.
8/6/19: In the wake of a trio of
deadly shootings in California, Texas and Ohio, debate swirls around what to do
and whom to blame.
In a front-page editorial the New York Post (a paper
owned by Rupert Murdoch) calls for a ban on “weapons of war.” The editors
direct their argument to the President of the United States.
God save us all, sir. People all across the nation are scared;
many feel like the country is spinning out of control. They’re looking to their
leaders for more than prayers.
America is terrified.
President Trump, you are positioned to assuage that fear. On gun
control, you are a pragmatic centrist, someone who knows there is a vast majority
of Americans who are not to the extreme left or right on this issue. They just
want the killings to stop.
Yes, we know the president regularly praises the Second
Amendment and received the National Rifle Association’s support in the 2016
race.
But the Second Amendment leaves ample room for regulating gun
rights, just as every other constitutional right has its limits.
…Come up with answers. Now. Beginning with the return of an
assault weapons ban.
Meanwhile, the president is preparing to visit Dayton and El
Paso on Wednesday. Many residents of the Texas city, where 85 percent of the
population is Hispanic, don’t want him to show his mug.
The
killer name-checked President Trump.
Critics on the left are quick to mock his response to the
slaughter, delivered the day before. “Teleprompter Trump,” they admit, sounds
like a president. Trump, in the raw, sounds like a white supremacist, but one
who can’t bring himself to come out of the closet and admit who he is.
New details emerge. We learn that the El Paso killer praised
the Christchurch, New Zealand murderer, who killed 51 Muslims at prayer this
past March. Like links in a diabolical chain, the Christchurch killer
name-checked Trump, calling him “a
symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.” Words matter, of
course, and Trump has vilified Muslims more than once.
*
WHAT ELSE has happened since the triple mass killings? In
Ohio, Gov. Mike DeWine tried to talk to a Dayton crowd and was shouted down.
“Do something! Do something!” the angry throng demanded.
Rep. Mike Turner, a Republican who represents the city in
Congress, made an abrupt about face and called for a ban on military-style weapons and
large-capacity magazines. This change was influenced in part by the fact his
daughter was across the street at the very moment the Dayton killer opened
fire—and by the knowledge that the murderer managed to unleash at least 41
rounds in less than a minute. Turner, who had previously earned “A” ratings
from the N.R.A., because of opposition to a ban on assault-style rifles,
explained his change of heart:
This weekend, a shooter wearing
body armor opened fire in downtown Dayton with a weapon he had modified to be
able to hold 100 rounds of ammunition. Dayton Police ran towards the shooter and
neutralized him in less than thirty seconds, saving countless lives. In those
few seconds, the shooter was able to murder nine people, injure at least 27,
and deeply impact the entire community. If the police had not been present and
able to instantly respond, the casualties would have been astronomical.
President Obama—who has been reluctant to criticize the
current occupant of the White House (who, by contrast, has missed no
opportunity to criticize him)—issues a rare public statement. Without mentioning Trump by name, he takes our
current leader to task for his fearmongering.
We should soundly reject
language coming out of the mouths of any of our leaders that feeds a climate of
fear and hatred and normalizes racist sentiments; leaders who demonize those
who don’t look like us, or suggest that other people, including
immigrants, threaten our way of life, or refer to other people as sub-human, or
imply that America belongs to just one certain type of people.
It has no place in our politics
and our public life.
And it’s time for the overwhelming
majority of Americans of goodwill, of every race and faith and political
party, to say as much—clearly and unequivocally.
Frank Keating, the former Republican governor of Oklahoma
also faults Trump. Keating knows white supremacist extremism from bloody
experience, having been governor in 1995, when Timothy McVey bombed the Alfred
P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. That bombing left 168 Americans
dead. That included 19 children, at a daycare center on the bottom floor of the
building. Another 680 men, women and children were injured in the blast.
Now, Keating warned that the president had to learn how to choose his words. “He needs to
realize the lethality of his rhetoric [emphasis added]. The truth is the
president is the secular pope and he needs to be a moral leader as well as a
government leader, and to say that this must not occur again—exclamation mark.”
The student newspaper at Oklahoma University, where Keating
is a regent, seeks him out for further comment. Keating makes it clear he sees no reason for ordinary citizens to
own assault-style weapons:
“We simply can’t have this
again. When I was growing up, and I believe largely when my children were
growing up, we didn’t have this,” Keating said. “The contempt for human life,
the dismissal of an individual’s right to be left alone, and the use of race,
sex and nationality as an excuse for killing.”
Easy access to “war weapons”
also enabled the attacks, Keating said, adding that the shooters had no previous
criminal records and were able to legally purchase the weapons they used in the
attacks.
“Why are people who are not
fighting wars allowed to buy war weapons,” Keating said. “You can’t buy a
flamethrower, you can’t buy a bazooka, why should you be able to buy an AR-15?”
Keating tells student reporters he owns several guns and uses
them for recreation. He supports the Second Amendment. “This isn’t the (Second)
Amendment, to say that I can arm myself with every weapon of modern warfare,”
Keating adds. “That’s ridiculous in an urban, civilized society.
*
SO, HOW DID TRUMP spend his time before heading off to Dayton
and El Paso. He went to work on Twitter.
In one tone-deaf tweet he decided it would be a brilliant
stratagem to bring the country together by attacking Beto O’Rourke, a Democrat
running for president, based on his name and poll numbers.
Low poll numbers! Low poll numbers in Trump’s mind are
more hideous than torn, bleeding bodies.
Beto (phony name to indicate Hispanic heritage) O’Rourke, who is embarrassed by my last visit to the Great State of Texas, where I trounced him [Trump has previously claimed he had much bigger crowds for a rally] and is now even more embarrassed by polling at 1% in the Democrat Primary, should respect the victims & law enforcement - & be quiet!
It was the essence of Trump, petty and whiny, and anti-First
Amendment rights for critics, all in a single tweet.
*
SPEAKING OF ESSENCE, Monday we had the essence of Fox News.
Fox News—where if President Trump pushed a baby off the top of a ten-story
building, Sean Hannity would claim, against all logic and visible evidence,
that his crime paled in comparison with Hillary’s missing emails.
This time the job of denying reality fell to Tucker Carlson.
As if the shooting in El Paso had never happened, Carlson weighed in on the topic of the day. White supremacist
violence? Not a problem!
Below we provide our assessment.
CARLSON: It’s not the job of this show to defend the
president and everything he says [Carlson claimed Monday night].
BLOGGER: That is his job. It’s the job description of Tucker
and Sean, Ainsley and Brian K., of Lou Dobbs, the perpetually angry host of the
Fox Business Channel, and four of every five panelists on “The Five.”
CARLSON: Some things we are not going to defend [Tucker
continued]. But in point of fact, [Trump] never endorsed white supremacy or
came close to endorsing white supremacy. That’s just a lie. But he condemned it
anyway. Their response, “he didn’t really mean it.”
BLOGGER:
Who thinks Trump might be endorsing white supremacy, besides Democrats running
for president? White supremacists! After the president attacked four Democratic
congresswomen of color, Andrew Anglin, who runs Daily Stormer, a
neo-Nazi website responded:
Man, President Trump’s Twitter account has been pure fire
lately. This might be the funniest thing he’s ever tweeted. This is the kind of
WHITE NATIONALISM we elected him for. And we’re obviously seeing it only
because there’s another election coming up. But I’ll tell you, even knowing
that, it still feels so good.
CARLSON: If you were to assemble a list, a hierarchy of
concerns of problems this country faces, where would white supremacy be on the
list?
Right up there with Russia probably.
BLOGGER: Maybe on Fox News, where Tucker is contractually
bound to defend everything Trump does and says, up to and including urinating
in the punch at a White House press reception, Russia is not a problem.
We who consult other sources of news, know that the following
Trump campaign aides and family members have admitted suspicious and/or illegal
contacts with Russians during the 2016 election cycle: General Michael T. Flynn
(now a convicted felon), Carter Page (not charged), Michael Cohen (felon),
Felix Sater (a felon before joining Team Trump), George Nader (also a felon
before joining the team; currently indicted anew), George Papadopoulos (felon),
Roger Stone (under indictment at this time), Michael Caputo (not charged),
Donald J. Trump Jr. (not charged), Jared Kushner (not charged), Paul Manafort
(felon) and Rick Gates (felon).
CARLSON: [White supremacy?] It’s actually not a real problem
in America. The combined membership of every white supremacist organization in
this country would be able to fit inside a college football stadium.
BLOGGER: Um…that’s a lot of people…and just one guy in one hypothetical
seat went out and gunned down 46 people.
CARLSON: This is a country where the average person is
getting poorer, where the suicide rate is spiking—“white supremacy, that’s the
problem”—this is a hoax. Just like the Russia hoax, it’s a conspiracy theory
used to divide the country and keep a hold on power.
BLOGGER: If you’ve never noticed, there are a lot of “hoaxes”
in the land of the right-wing nuts. Trump himself has called climate change a hoax and said President Obama’s American citizenship was a hoax.
The Parkland, Florida student protesters were “actors” and
their outrage at seeing teachers and classmates murdered was a hoax.
The Trump supporter who sent pipe bombs to more than a dozen leading Democrats and Trump
critics…that was a hoax, too. The Democrats set that one up! They mailed bombs
to themselves!!!
Of course, lawyers for Cesar Sayoc, the man who sent the
bombs, demolished that claim this same week. Their client, they argued in a
plea for mercy before sentencing was handed down, was “a Donald Trump
superfan.”
“In this darkness,” the lawyers
wrote in a sentencing memo, “Mr. Sayoc found light in Donald J. Trump.”
Mr. Sayoc listened to Mr.
Trump’s self-help books and championed him on social media. He watched Fox News
religiously while working out at the gym.
“Because of Mr. Sayoc’s mental
illness, this type of [dangerous] rhetoric deeply affected him because he so
greatly admired the president,” one of Mr. Sayoc’s lawyers, Ian Marcus Amelkin,
said in court. “It is impossible, I believe, to separate the political climate
and his mental illness.”
Last fall, Mr. Sayoc’s lawyers
wrote, the “slow-boil of Mr. Sayoc’s political obsessions and delusional
beliefs” led him to build and send his 16 packages to 13 intended victims he
considered to be Mr. Trump’s enemies.
In other words, Trump’s unhinged rhetoric had further unhinged
the unhinged.
8/7/19: According to President Trump
we now know who the biggest victim of the El Paso and Dayton massacres was.
No—not the dead and wounded. No—not the grieving families. No! It’s not first
responders, police, emergency squad personnel, ICU nurses and trauma surgeons
who deal with the wreckage of bodies. No. No. No. No. No one has suffered more
than….
…Donald J. Trump.
We know this, because Trump is up early Wednesday, preparing
for his trip to Dayton and El Paso, and totally focused on the victims and
families of….
Nope. Not even close.
At 5:32 a.m., he’s rage-tweeting, obsessing over a changed
headline, the day before, in The New York Times.
“Trump Urges Unity Vs. Racism,”
was the correct description in the first headline by the Failing New York
Times, but it was quickly changed to, “Assailing Hate But Not Guns,” after the
Radical Left Democrats went absolutely CRAZY! Fake News - That’s what we’re up
against...
Unlike most Trump supporters, this humble blogger subscribes
to and regularly reads The New York Times. The changed headline
has nothing to do with the gist of the story that followed.
Yes, the first headline indicated: “Trump Urges Unity Vs.
Racism.”
That doesn’t mean anyone thought the president was sincere.
Not under any headline you might conjure.
*
A FEW HOURS LATER, speaking to reporters on the White House
lawn, before leaving for Dayton and El Paso, Trump insists that Democrats are
trying to score political points by attacking him.
A reporter asks, “Do you think your rhetoric is fueling the
violence?”
“I
don’t think my rhetoric does at all,” the president replies. “I think my
rhetoric brings people together.”
With
that, it was off to Dayton, where the visit went off without any serious
problems, with only a few dozen protesters gathered at the hospital and a
couple hundred more at the site of the massacre. The mayor and Sen. Sherrod
Brown, both Democrats, say the visit went “well enough.”
And
away Trump goes!
Here,
Trump runs into the kind of trouble that dogs him at so many points. First,
eight shooting victims and their families at the University Medical Center in
El Paso refuse to meet with
him. Next, he’s filmed talking to medical staff at the hospital. The topic of
discussion? He’s bragging about how big his crowd was when he visited El Paso
for a rally earlier this year. Even worse, Trump can’t get past the tragedy of his
persecution. Yes, 31 Americans have been massacred; but Trump is suffering
the most.
He has been shot in the orange ego.
Flying home to Washington, he goes on the attack. Democrats,
he howls, are trying to politicize the carnage!
Well, take this:
Watching Sleepy Joe Biden making
a speech. Sooo Boring! The LameStream Media will die in the ratings and clicks
with this guy. It will be over for them, not to mention the fact that our
Country will do poorly with him. It will be one big crash, but at least China
will be happy!
In fact, Trump seems to believe the real issue for the day is
“clicks,” website traffic, like “clicks” on cute cat videos and stupid young
men managing to hit themselves in the nuts. And might we point out once more,
there has never been a major stock market crash when a Democrat is in
the White House.
Next, Trump takes a poke at Fox News! “Watching Fake News CNN
is better than watching Shepard Smith, the lowest rated show on @FoxNews.
Actually, whenever possible, I turn to @OANN!”
Ah! Low TV ratings—worse than blood in the streets.
Next, we get bragging:
Leaving El Paso for the White
House. What GREAT people I met there and in Dayton, Ohio. The Fake News worked
overtime trying to disparage me and the two trips, but it just didn’t work. The
love, respect & enthusiasm were there for all to see. They have been
through so much. Sad!
Indeed, the “love, respect &
enthusiasm” for Donald J. Trump is all that Donald J. Trump cares about.
“There’s no longer any doubt that the president has blood on
his hands.”
Governor William Weld
In the meantime (and Trump must have missed this, or he’d
have had to unleash Twitter hell again), former Gov. William Weld, a
Republican, blisters the president’s response to the shootings.
Appearing on MSNBC, Weld is blunt. “There’s no longer any doubt that the president
has blood on his hands. You could draw a direct line from that manifesto from
the shooter in El Paso to the Trump handbook. Every week it seems the president
gets a bit more unhinged.”
8/8/19: Let’s start with a simple
story and work our way up the ladder of horribleness that is life with
President Trump.
A man accused of attacking a
13-year-old boy for not removing his hat during the national anthem at a rodeo
was released without posting bail, despite having a criminal record.
His attorney said his client
believed he was acting on orders from the commander in chief.
Curt Brockway, 39, was released
Monday, but that release comes with a list of the following conditions: He is
required to wear a GPS, he cannot have any contact with the victim, the victim’s
family or witnesses; and he can only leave his parents’ home for work, doctor
appointments and court appearances.
The mother of the victim said
her son is traumatized and is in recovery. The boy was airlifted to a hospital
with a concussion and a fractured skull after the attack.
The attorney for Brockway said
Wednesday his client is a U.S. Army veteran who believed he was acting on an
order from President Donald Trump [emphasis added].
…Brockway told a sheriff’s
deputy that he asked the boy to remove his hat out of respect for the national
anthem before the start of the county rodeo, Mineral County Attorney Ellen
Donohue wrote in the document describing the attack. The boy cursed at Brockway
in response, and the man grabbed him by the throat, “lifted him into the air
and slammed the boy into the ground,” Donohue wrote.
*
MORE GENERALLY, the discussion for the day continues to
revolve around guns, nuts with guns, white supremacist nuts with guns, and nuts
who love white supremacists nuts with guns. The president and the Republican
Party are stuck playing defense, with Democrats running for president either
hinting or insisting that Trump is a white supremacist.
There are a lot of Democrats in the 2020 race and they’re
ganging up on poor Don.
It doesn’t help his case, to say as the president recently
did, that, “I am the least racist person in the world,” when we keep finding
out that avowed racists love what Trump says and does.
An “essential
first step.”
On 8chan, the secretive website where racist speech thrives and the El Paso killer went for support, one commenter described Trump’s recent attacks on four Democratic women of color as an “essential first step.”
First, the president normalizes racism, making it clear he
doesn’t have to put up with shit from brown and black individuals.
Next:
[He makes clear that] it is ok for him not
to want to be swamped by brown scum that clearly despise him, that these
invaders have stepped well out of line making demands of us, and that if they
don’t like the way we run things they can go the hell back. These are the
ideological seeds from which actual revolutions begin. When someone with
perceived authority like Trump comes along and says them, it carries weight
with many people. The jewish media is right to be terrified of these ideas
becoming normalized.
Of course, Trump, and fans of Trump, and Tucker Carlson, and
fans of Carlson, could always insist that Carlson was correct in arguing that
white supremacy wasn’t an issue…
Then, presto!
David Duke rears his head (you can’t always tell when he rears
his head because Duke favors pointy hats and white sheets:
“Tucker is RIGHT!” White Supremacy is a
ZioMedia Conspiracy Theory!” the former Grand Wizard and sometimes GOP
candidate for office tweets. “The term is itself a lie. Millions of White
activists are NOT ‘supremacists’ We seek NOT to oppress or destroy any race!
Human Rights for all - EVEN FOR WHITE PEOPLE! Stop antiWhite racism!”
Was white supremacy a problem? Was Trump tapping into the
hate?
You can read what the Anti-Defamation League says. Again, the
man who runs the Daily Stormer supports Trump and Trump fans who chanted that dark-skinned U.S. citizens should
go back where they came from.
As the ADL explains:
Andrew Anglin again praised the President,
writing on the Daily Stormer the day
after the rally: “Telling those women to go back to their countries is by far
the most racist thing he’s ever said – especially since one of them was a black
American, descended from slaves. And by refusing to apologize, he has
effectively normalized the opinion among the masses of goyim that you can
believe that America is a white country, for white people – and that brown
people are our guests and if they don’t like being guests then they have to go
home.”
Anglin was most excited to see that Trump had included Rep.
Ayanna Pressley, an African American born in Cincinnati, in the group of four. “So this is not
some half-assed anti-immigrant white nationalism. Trump is literally telling
American blacks to go back to Africa.”
If you
go looking for evidence of a certain synergy between “Least Racist Person You
Know” Trump, and really racist persons who wear their racism like badges of
honor, you find there are quite a few links in the chain.
Right Wing Watch, picked out a few Twitter gems:
Paul Ray Ramsey, a white
nationalist who is known as “Ramzpaul” online, tweeted that
the progressive congresswomen were “elected from their fellow tribesmen who
were imported into America” and only love the United States for “the wealth
that they can loot.” He added that “they dance with glee with the thought of
eliminating us.” Patrick Casey, the
leader of the white nationalist organization Identity Evropa (which
has rebranded under a new name), wrote on
Twitter that although he still has reservations about the Trump
administration’s current policy trajectory, “Trump escalating his attacks on
these four horrid women—women who simply do not belong in America, let alone in
our government—is more than a little satisfying.”
…But not everybody’s
happy. White nationalist Matt
Parrott ruefully wrote that Trump “doesn’t create white tribalism” with racist tweets,
but rather “exploits the white tribalism [emphasis added] which has been
bubbling up and boiling over long before he even rode down the gilded
escalator.”
(Blogger takes break to go vomit.)
*
ONE WHITE NATIONALIST who said he was no longer interested in
Trump—or events in El Paso—or the four members of Congress with dark skins—would
be Matthew Heimbach. Heimbach was only recently released from jail after
serving 38 days for a probation violation.
His probation status was the result of a guilty plea
involving Heimbach’s harassment of—you can probably guess—a black protester
at a Trump rally in 2016.
Once known as the “affable,
youthful face of hate in America,” the former head of the neo-Nazi Traditionalist Workers
Party (TWP) has fallen on hard times, as has his now-defunct party.
In the way of much-needed
“comic relief,” let the website Talking Points Memo tell the sad story
of a hater’s downfall.
But TWP’s disarray truly broke into public view in March, when Heimbach
was arrested at his home in the
Paoli, Indiana trailer park that doubled as TWP’s headquarters. The
embarrassing details were laid out in the police report for all to see.
The white nationalist leader is married to Brooke Heimbach,
step-daughter of TWP’s chief spokesman Matthew Parrott. But he was carrying out
an affair with Parrott’s wife, Jessica Parrott, and was caught out when his
wife and then-spokesman watched them canoodling through the Parrott’s trailer
window.
The scene devolved into chaos, with Matt Parrott and Matthew
Heimbach brawling. After police arrived, Heimbach went after his wife, kicking
the wall, grabbing her face, and throwing her violently onto a bed—all in full
view of their two young sons, as Brooke Heimbach told the arresting officer.
Matthew Heimbach was taken into custody and charged with felony
domestic battery in the presence of a child under 16 and one misdemeanor count
of battery.
On the police report, all four listed their professions as
“white nationalists.”
(Blogger takes second vomit break.)
8/9/19: President Trump and “Massacre
Mitch” are daintily considering legislation to require universal background
checks for gun purchasers. It all depends on if the N.R.A. will give
permission.
The N.R.A. normally argues that the solution to gun violence
is guns for everyone, from teachers to preachers to ticket takers at theaters.
But Wayne LaPierre, who heads up the organization, is almost too busy tending
to his own guns and ammo to put up the usual fight. The N.R.A.is riven. Members
are quitting, and those remaining are wondering why the organization was thinking
about buying Wayne and his wife Susan a 10,000-square foot
mansion in a gated golfing community.
With a lake view!
That deal fell through when reporters got on Mr. and Mrs.
LaPierre’s trail. As part of the deal, it was revealed that the couple hoped to
keep the previous owner’s “golf cart if possible.” Mrs. LaPierre was thinking
about renovations. She noticed a lack of space in the men’s walk-in closet off
the master bedroom. And Wayne needs space. That may have much to do with the
fact leaked documents show he spent more than $274,000 at one high-end
Beverly Hills clothing store.
For his part, LaPierre had insisted he needed that big house
for security reasons. He said he feared being “targeted” after the Parkland,
Florida massacre. That was just one of dozens of times he had insisted guns
weren’t the problem—and the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun was a good
guy with a gun. Or a good guy with a $6 million mansion, in a gated community,
where he could hide out.
Whether he and the missus got the house or not, he planned to
struggle along on a salary of $1,370,000 per year.
*
THIS LATEST ROUND of debate over guns and gun
legislation, bloodbaths and assault rifles, and countless deaths and injuries,
made this blogger go back and check the U.S. Constitution.
Ratified in 1789, without a Bill of Rights,
Article I listed the duties of Congress.
Including:
So, the Founding Fathers gave Congress the power to
regulate arming of the militia. And the Second Amendment did not then exist.
That amendment, adopted as part of the great Bill of Rights
in 1791, reads as follows:
“A
well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the
right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
The Bill of Rights
Clearly, both the original Constitution and the Second
Amendment assume the militia will be “well-regulated.” The Founding Fathers
vested the power to regulate the arming of that militia in Congress from the
start.
In other words, if “Massacre Mitch” and President “I’m the
Real Victim” had a modicum of courage, they could start regulating guns with at
least as much fervor as the GOP shows in regulating uteruses.
8/10/19: The president is on vacation
today. So maybe he won’t say anything stupid…
Too late. He’s up and
tweet-bitching early and often:
Maggie Haberman of the Failing
@nytimes reported that I was annoyed by the lack of cameras inside the
hospitals in Dayton & El Paso, when in fact I was the one who stated, very
strongly, that I didn’t want the Fake News inside & told my people NOT to
let them in. Fake reporting!
For a fifth day in a row, Trump is acting like he’s the true
victim of the El Paso shooting, and the true victim in the Dayton shooting and
the true victim of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral.
One would be forgiven for being reminded of the words of
wisdom once supplied by John Wooden, the legendary basketball coach at UCLA.
Wooden reduced his advice for success in life to a few simple rules:
“Never lie. Never cheat. Never steal.
Don’t whine. Don’t complain. Don’t make excuses.”
Coach John Wooden
President Trump breaks at least one of those rules every day,
and on most days, breaks all six.
*
MEANWHILE, WE LEARN that Trump had himself posed with a baby
orphaned during the El Paso massacre.
(That baby, 2-month-old Paul Anchondo, was nicked by a bullet
and suffered two broken fingers before being saved.)
That meant we got a photo—complete with presidential grin—as
if to say, “This is great, maybe this will make it look like I care about the
baby and not just how I want my hair to look.”
The thumbs up gesture says it all.
 |
| Nothing says "tragedy" like a thumbs up and a grin. |
*
IN OTHER GUN NEWS, a Toledo, Ohio man, Timothy Ireland, 41,
is arrested after threatening to shoot Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of
four nemeses of Donald J. Trump. Having posted a threat on Facebook, Ireland
adds, “Can’t fire me, my employer would load the gun for me.” Ireland, who has
multiple felonies to his discredit, which should make him ineligible to own
guns or ammo, is charged by law enforcement authorities with illegal possession of both.
We also learn that Conor Climo, 23, of Las Vegas, yet another
neo-Nazi in the news, was arrested and charged with plotting to bomb a gay bar
and a synagogue in that city. After his arrest, Climo told authorities he had
also hoped to mobilize an eight-man sniper
“platoon” to take out Jews.
It seems there are a lot of white supremacist nuts with lots
of guns.
8/11/19: At 5:01 p.m. Saturday the
president retweets a clip of some random African American guy named
Terrence K. Williams. Williams puts forward, loudly, but without evidence, the
theory that Bill or Hillary Clinton, or both, or Chelsey and the grandkids,
ordered Jeffrey Epstein bumped off.
(Epstein was found hanged in his cell the day before.)
It is of grave importance to understand that the President
of the United States is retweeting drivel.
Someone, perhaps Melania, apparently smacks Trump upside the
head and takes away his iPhone. That makes for a quiet Sunday at Bedminster and
the president does not tweet again for seventeen hours.
When he does, the Trump proves so petty, so consumed with
fury over his image, that he spends vacation time insulting cable news hosts.
There’s “Little Donny Deutsch” with “his own failing show.” Deutsch used to
“beg” to be on The Apprentice “(along with @ErinBurnett & others),” Trump
says. But neither he nor “Erin” had any talent. Then there were times Trump
says he would watch Deutsch get pushed around by “Joe Scarborough &
his very angry Psycho wife(?).”
That’s your president on Sunday, August 11, 2019. Bringing
Americans together in a time of tragedy, once again.
8/12/19: The Trump administration
decides to weaken protections for endangered species, including humans.
First, immigrants who enter the U.S. legally, but are deemed
likely to end up requiring government assistance, will be denied permanent
residency. On the other hand, wealthy immigrants will get green cards and may
stay. So, Russian oligarchs can come and buy Trump Tower apartments and other
Trump properties with a combined value of $109 million, in laundered cash.
(If you have Irish ancestors, as an example, be glad this
policy was not in place in 1848, because your people, and this blogger’s
people, would have been returned to Ireland to starve.)
As for other endangered species, Interior Secretary David
Bernhardt announces plans to gut the Endangered Species Act. First, it will be
easier to remove “endangered species” from the list entirely. (The new list
will simply list them as, “Dead,” one might guess.) Second, protections for
“threatened species” will be weakened. Third, regulators will be allowed to
factor in economic costs when deciding whether any species should be protected.
In other words, people like Bernhardt, a former oil and mining lobbyist, will decide. Hey, these salmon
are swimming in a river near where an oil company wants to drill! Fuck those
fish.
Drill, baby, drill!
You say reefs are dying around the globe as ocean
temperatures rise? Let’s burn all the coal we can find.
Bernhardt is who he is, a shill for the oil and mining
interests. If every grizzly and every bald eagle in America died, covered in
oil, he wouldn’t mind.
Environmental groups explode at news of this fresh approach.
The Sierra Club is blunt in its characterization:
The Trump Extinction Plan would gut critical
endangered species protections by making it much more difficult to extend
protections to threatened species, delaying lifesaving action until a species’
population is potentially impossible to save; making it more difficult to
protect polar bears, coral reefs, and other species that are impacted by the
effects of climate change; allowing economic factors to be analyzed when
deciding if a species should be saved; and making it easier for companies to
build roads, pipelines, mines, and other industrial projects in critical
habitat areas that are essential to imperiled species’ survival.
The Audubon Society condemns the changes, noting that since 1973, decisions
to protect endangered or threatened species have been based, legally, on “the
best available science.” Now “the best available science” is out.
“These changes crash a
bulldozer through the Endangered Species Act’s lifesaving protections for
America’s most vulnerable wildlife,” Noah Greenwald of the Center for
Biological Diversity warns.
Other groups opposed to the
changes include Defenders of Wildlife, the Endangered Species Coalition, Friends of
the Earth, Wilderness Watch, The American Bird Conservancy, The National Parks Conservation Association, grey wolves, bison, most fish, monarch
butterflies and honeybees.
8/13/19: The president is on vacation;
but he’s still working his thumbs to be sure he stays in shape. In a single day
we get 49 tweets and retweets.
Does he
pay any taxes, himself?
Unfortunately, Trump still hasn’t figured out how tariffs
work. In one tweet, he complains because China hasn’t followed through on a
promise to buy more U.S. agricultural products. In another he insists tariffs placed on Chinese products
are a “big gift” to the USA, “pumping vast sums of money into our system.”
“Farmers,” he says, “are getting more than China would be spending.”
It’s more Magic Math from Donald J. Trump. China is paying
the tariffs! U.S. consumers are not. Somehow, if China won’t buy their
products, farmers are getting more money! It’s all going great.
If farmers are getting more money, they’re not getting it
from the Chinese. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue says the Trump
administration will provide a second round of aid to farmers who have lost a
key market—tariff retaliation, by the Chinese, as any fool could have foreseen.
All sympathy to America’s farmers. They work hard to feed the
world; and this liberal does not begrudge them aid. But let’s be honest. The
farmers are being bailed out by America’s taxpayers.
 |
| It must suck to be a Tea Party Republican today. |
8/14/19: R.I.P. Tea Party Republicans.
Your orange hero has watched federal spending reach a record high, $3.7 trillion in Fiscal Year 2019, so far.
As for the vaunted Trump Tax cuts “paying for themselves,”
that pipe dream turns out to have been conservatives smoking crack. The federal
deficit for FY 2019 has already topped $867 billion.
By the time FY 2019 ends on September 30, it is expected the
federal deficit will reach $1,092,000,000,000.
Or,
as the writer Molly Jong-Fast put it: “Maybe electing the guy with all the
bankruptcies and debt was a bad idea?”
As
this graphic shows, deficits with
Trump in charge are getting worse and surpass deficits under President Obama,
once the Great Recession had ended.
For comparison purposes, remember that the worst deficit ever
was for FY 2009, at $1.4 billion, a deficit bequeathed to President Obama
after George W. crashed the economy in 2008.
That deficit was nearly a trillion dollars higher than the deficit for FY 2008. The
deficits for FY 2010 ($1.3 trillion), FY 2011 ($1.3 trillion) and FY 2012 ($1.1
trillion) caused apoplexy on the right. The blame for every dollar was laid at
President Obama’s feet. The right did not want people to remember that the GOP
had put two wars on the nation’s credit card. They didn’t want voters to notice
that the Bush Tax Cuts weren’t “paying for themselves,” and that new Medicare
prescription drug coverage for older Americans, also added under Bush, meant
fresh trillions in red ink.
Slowly but surely, under Obama, and with the U.S. economy in
rebound, deficits declined. The U.S. finished FY 2013 an additional $679
billion in the red. The deficit for FY 2014 dropped to $485 billion, and for FY
2015 dropped again, to $438 billion. FY 2016, with Republicans in control of
both houses of Congress, saw a rising tide of red ink, to $585 billion. The
deficit for FY 2017, with Republicans still grasping the purse strings, was
$665 billion.
Then Trump took charge—with both houses of Congress in a firm
GOP grip. Big tax cuts (especially for people like Trump)! Bigger military
spending! On top of previous bigger military spending!
The first deficit under his watch, FY 2018: $779 billion.
Now, a second Trump budget baby waxes fat. If the deficit
hits projected highs, Trump deficits in two years ($1.871 trillion for 2018 and
2019) will top Obama deficits for three years and part of a fourth ($1.688
trillion for three years, 2015, 2016, 2017, $183 billion during the first four
months of 2014).
8/15/19: The National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration, a government agency which Trump and his fans have
probably never heard of before, makes it official. July was the hottest month, globally, in history. The five hottest
July’s have been the last five years. In just twenty-four hours, on July 31, an
estimated 11 billion tons of ice melted in Greenland.
 |
| July proves to have been the hottest month, globally, ever recorded. |
8/16/19: Sometimes you can lead a horse
to water, but if you hit the horse upside the head with a garden spade, the
horse will still not learn French.
Sen. John Cornyn proves this adage apt. Like “Snowball” Jim
Inhofe, who made a snowball in January and declared therefore that climate
change could not be real, Cornyn proves just as dense today.
First, let’s put up his lunkhead tweet, a response to a tweet
by his colleague, Sen. Chuck Schumer:
Then, let’s mourn the fact that science teachers failed
miserably to educate Cornyn when he was a boy.
Now Cornyn helps baffle and befuddle the GOP base. Note the
more than ten thousand “likes.”
Cornyn is back again tweeting soon after, claiming his first
tweet was a light-hearted attempt at humor. The reaction of the “left” goes to
show, he says, that the “left” is made up of generally terrible human beings.
The humorless “left” in this case would include just about
every reputable scientist, every major scientific body, both the NOAA and NASA
and the 195 signatory nations to the Paris Climate Accord.
All agree climate change is a metastasizing threat and will
be no laughing matter for our children and grandchildren.
8/17/19: Vacation at his private
Bedminster, N.J. golf club is not helping the president’s mood.
Saturday morning, for starters, Trump discovers that the
bathroom scale in his suite has been rigged!
Having lumbered into the bathroom after a restless night,
spent alone, he steps on the scales. The red numbers blink: 260. He’s headed
for William Howard Taft territory if this keeps up.
“Who rigged this damn scale?” he shouts.
Trump sits down for breakfast soon after, a bowl of Fruit
Loops drenched in cream. He turns on the television and tunes to Fox News.
“Holy hell!” he howls. “Fox & Friends has been
rigged!” The hosts are reporting that if the election were held today, he would lose.
“There’s something going on at Fox,” the president mutters
and clicks the remote several times more.
Idly, he channels surfs—the Cartoon Network, a
favorite—the Home Shopping Network, the best! Unfortunately, while
switching channels, he catches a story about large die-offs of salmon, sockeye and other fish in Alaska
rivers. A reporter says unnaturally high water temperatures are to blame…”
“Global warming,” Trump sneers. “Those scientists don’t fool
me. Their thermometers are rigged.”
An aide knocks at his bedroom door, interrupting the
president’s vent. “Sir, the economic reports you wanted…”
“Get in here!” Trump shouts. His economic numbers—his pride
and joy—his reason for being—are ready.
“Sir,” the aide says, “I think you should brace yourself.
Economists say your tariffs are hurting farmers. The stock market is up
a mere 1.7 percent since last August. The deficit
for Fiscal Year 2019 is expected to surpass a trill…”
“RIGGED NUMBERS!” Trump barks. “I promised to wipe out the
entire federal deficit in eight years. I’m right on track!”
“Sir, those deficit numbers come from…uh…the White House
Office of Management and Budget.”
“RIGGGGGGGGGGGGED NUMBERS!” the president screams.
“Signs a recession might be coming are growing,” the aide
tries again. “Even Fox News is reporting that the uncertainty brought about by your
policies may be contributing to a global slow…”
RIGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGED NUMBERS!” Trump shrieks. With that,
he hurls his bowl of Fruit Loops at the aide’s head.
The aide ducks and backs from the room.
8/18/19: The president spends all day
Sunday tweet-fuming. “Rigged, everything is rigged against me!” aides hear him
say as they pass his bedroom during the day. The New York Times, Trump
tweets, is pushing a “Racism Witch Hunt.” He hammers furiously at the buttons
on his iPhone: “‘Journalism’ has reached a new low in the history of our
Country. It is nothing more than an evil propaganda machine for the Democrat
Party. The reporting is so false, biased and evil that it has now become a very
sick joke...#CROOKEDJOURNALISM.” Juan Williams, at Fox News, “is nasty and
wrong.” Anthony Scaramucci, the man Trump once picked to be White House Chief
of Communications, is now “a highly unstable ‘nut job.’”
Trump wiles away the hours which lie heavy on his hands. He
watches golf on TV, tweets, and alternates between self-pity and consoling
himself with his elevated opinion of himself. “Well, I still have my award from
Michigan, where I was declared the state’s ‘Man of the Year,’” he says, to no
one, but himself.
The shadows lengthen. Soon it’s dark. Bedtime approaches.
Trump dons his Sponge Bob pajamas, climbs into bed—alone again—and reaches for
a magazine on the nightstand. We know it was left there by mistake. The man hates to read.
“Newsweek,” he mumbles. “Shouldn’t I be on the cover?”
He flips a few pages, and by pure bad luck lands on the page
where reporters describe having searched all the records available. Trump, they say, has never
been awarded Michigan’s “Man of the Year.”
“RIGGGGGGGGGGGGED!” the president explodes.
And a tough weekend comes to an end.
8/19/19:
President Trump takes another sock in the glass jaw today, after resurrecting
the claim that millions of illegal voters stormed the polls to vote for Hillary
in 2016. He hints darkly: They’ll be back again next year.
Before heading to New Hampshire for another one of his
endless campaign rallies—which are not officially campaign rallies, so
taxpayers must foot the costs—Trump stops
to vent to reporters. He should have won the state in 2016, he
claims. But you guessed it—the election was rigged! (See: 8/18/19.)
“New Hampshire should have been won last time,” he
tells the press, “except we had a lot of people come in at the last moment,
which was a rather strange situation. Thousands and thousands of people, coming
in from locations unknown. But I knew where their location was.”
The president doesn’t elaborate. He doesn’t say where “where”
was? So, do we guess? Was it Hillary Clinton’s basement?
Tahiti?
Mars?
Ellen Weintraub, the chair of the Federal Election
Commission, has no choice but to respond. Appearing on CNN on Monday, she faults the president for what—if we were being frank—would
be called a lie.
Weintraub is discreet, saying only, “There is no evidence of
rampant voter fraud in 2016 or really in any previous election.”
In
fact, she tells CNN’s John Berman, she sent a letter to the president the
Friday before, asking him to share any evidence me might have to substantiate
his claim. “To put it in terms a former casino operator should understand,”
she wrote, “there comes a time when you need to lay your cards on the table or
fold.”
“Facts
matter,” she tells Berman. “And the people of America need to be able
to believe what their leaders tell them.”
With Trump in office, most Americans don’t.
8/20/19: Some days, it sucks to be
Trump. In no special order, let’s consider the headaches he has faced in the
last 24 hours.
Signs show the U.S. economy may be slowing. Trump and his
aides consider cuts in the payroll tax to goose consumer spending. This is
amusing, because we were assured that the Trump Tax Cuts, “the biggest tax cuts
ever,” were going to lead to robust economic growth.
Trump also decides to insult American Jews (why not!),
telling reporters, “I think any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat, I think
it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.”
Disloyalty?
To whom? Israel?
Trump?
American
Jews are Americans. They don’t have to be loyal to Israel. And they can vote
for whomever they like. A quick check shows that 71% voted
for Hillary in 2016, only 24% for Trump. Those figures are almost identical to
the average in presidential elections since 1968.
Meanwhile,
a quick check of records shows that Jared Kushner, given the task of coming up
with a peace plan to bridge the Israeli-Palestinian divide, has so far not
produced a peace plan at all.
Kushner
did organize an economic conference in Bahrain in June. The proposal he put
forward, boiled down, was essentially an attempt to pay off Palestinians so
they would accept Israeli occupation of all their remaining lands—by promising
to invest billions in the Gaza Strip and West Bank.
Trump
Tower Ramallah! Wouldn’t that be great!
In
any case, that idea did not sell; and, in fact, 0 Palestinians showed up for
the conclave in Bahrain.
That
matched the 0 Israelis who made the trip.
“I Thank God everyday
President Donald John Trump is President.”
Eric
Lin, alleged neo-Nazi nut
As
for American Jews and Trump, you can see why they might not be fans. On
Tuesday, another neo-Nazi nut was arrested by the F.B.I.
As
has often been the case, this neo-Nazi nut—a man named Eric Lin, 35—proved to
be a big fan of President Trump. First, Lin allegedly checked the
“anti-Hispanic” box, sending a threat to kill a female employee at a Miami
restaurant. He said that it was his fondest dream to wipe out every Hispanic in
the city.
Next,
we had some neo-Nazi love for the President of the United States. “I Thank God everyday President Donald John
Trump is President,” Lin allegedly wrote online, “and that he will launch a
Racial War and Crusade.” Trump, he added hopefully, would handle every “dangerous
non-White or Ethnically or Culturally Foreign group” like Hitler handled the
Jews and the gays and all the other groups he hated back in 1939.
In America, Lin predicted,
these groups—which would, of course, include Jews—would “either be sent to ‘Concentration
Camps’ or dealt with Ruthlessly and Vigorously by the United States Military.”
And
Lin wasn’t the only alleged neo-Nazi nut arrested this week. Joseph Rubino, 57,
a man previously known to authorities for kiting checks, is likely headed for
the slammer, too. A police investigation, launched after Rubino was involved in
a car wreck, led to a search of his vehicle and apartment. That search turned
up quite the stash.
Law enforcement later found more
than 20 weapons including several assault rifles, pistols, and a grenade
launcher, as well as a ballistics vest, high capacity magazines, 70 grams of
methamphetamine and seven kilograms of marijuana in Rubino’s car and at his
home, prosecutors said.
Authorities
also said they found a box containing clothing and bumper stickers with white
supremacist and neo-Nazi symbols and racist propaganda, including a document
that appeared to be an instruction manual for owning a slave.
Or,
as Tucker Carlson said a few days ago (see: 8/6/19), white supremacy
isn’t really a problem in America today.
It’s
a “liberal hoax” to say that it is.
8/21/19: The president catches serious heat, including heat from
leading Jewish-American groups, for saying Jews who vote for Democrats are
“disloyal.”
This forces Trump to dig deep into his Twitter toolbox and
find someone, anyone, to support his position.
Well, there’s always Wayne Allyn Root. “The Jewish people in
Israel love him like he’s the King of Israel,” Root says of Trump. And Trump
promptly quotes him. “They love him like he is the second coming of God...But
American Jews don’t know him or like him. They don’t even know what they’re
doing or saying anymore.”
One thing we can hope American Jews are not doing is
listening to Root. For starters, Jews do not believe in a “second coming.”
Or a first.
In fact, Root is a nut. As CNN explains, he’s famous for saying that President Barack
Obama “was sent here to destroy this country.” He claimed the 2017 mass
shooting in Las Vegas was a “coordinated Muslim terror attack.” He suggested
that the violence in Charlottesville Virginia was perpetrated by “paid actors
& infiltrators hired by” Democratic megadonor George Soros, who happens to
be Jewish. Root is a font of crackpot theories. He insisted Obama attended
Columbia University as a “foreign exchange student.” Chief Justice John Roberts
upheld the constitutionality of Obamacare because he was being blackmailed. The
Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich was murdered by Democrats
because he provided DNC files to WikiLeaks.
Root is a fountain of ridiculous shit. He suggested after the Parkland shooting, that we could
protect schools with armed drones. He told his devoted listeners—people like
President Trump—that both Hillary and Barack had had gay or lesbian
relationships. Root also argued that all liberal men are gay. And when it came
to dating liberal women, watch out. Root warned listeners that if those women
also had cats, they’d “cut your pee-pee off, I promise you!!!!!!”
So, protect your pee-pees! Root is just the kind of guy you
expect to find supporting Donald J. Trump.
8/22/19: More bad news for Trump and his Tea Party troops. The Congressional
Budget Office now estimates that the deficit for Fiscal
Year 2020 will rise to $1.01 trillion dollars. Part of the problem is that tax revenues
have fallen short of estimates in 2018 and 2019 by $430 billion.
The Trump Tax Cuts did not pay for themselves.
CBO Director Phillip Swagel warns that the United States
could well be in trouble in the future.
The nation’s fiscal outlook is
challenging. Federal debt, which is already high by historical standards, is on
an unsustainable course, projected to rise even higher after 2029 because
of the aging of the population, growth in per capita spending on health care,
and rising interest costs.
Good luck millennials, and future generations, whatever you may
be called. You are going to inherit an orange mess.
8/23/19: The president goes off on another Twitter rampage. After Fed Chairman
Jay Powell warns that Trump’s tariff policies are causing “turbulence,” in the
markets, Trump loses his cool.
Again.
“The only question is, who is the bigger enemy, Jay Powel or
Chairman Xi?” he tap-taps.
Fourteen minutes later, he corrects the spelling of Powell’s
last name. But the damage is done. By the end of Friday trading, the threat of
an escalating tariff war causes the Dow Jones average to drop 623 points.
(As much as Trump loves to brag about how great the markets
are doing under his guiding hand, the Dow has been essentially flat since January 2018.)
*
IN OTHER FINANCIAL NEWS, David Koch, head of Koch Industries,
passes away, after a losing battle with prostate cancer. “You can’t take it
with you,” people say. But you can have the gall to protest increased taxes on
people like yourself, as Koch—rest his immensely rich soul—did.
At his demise, it is estimated that after he paid all those abominable taxes he still had a few
dollars here and there. He was worth $50.5 billion when he passed on to the Big
Bank in the Sky.
In 2017, Forbes magazine estimated that Koch
Industries had 120,000 employees. So, let’s imagine a boss wanted to reward
workers for helping him pile up all that vast wealth. He could have said to
himself, “These great people worked hard to help me make my company great. I
didn’t pull this off by myself. I will divide up $12.5 billion among my
employees. That will mean a bonus of $104,167 for each employee.”
Mr. Koch would have had $40 billion left.
Instead, he decided to give hundreds of millions of dollars to GOP
causes and candidates, to ensure that Republicans would fight increases to the
minimum wage and tougher environmental regulations.
8/24/19: President Trump is attending the G-7 summit in France. Experts in
international affairs figure it will be a successful meeting, so long as he doesn’t
grab Angela Merkel you know where. We know the president is lonely, now that
Vladimir Putin is no longer invited to these affairs. Trump has been lobbying
hard for the other six members to let Russia back in and restore the G-8. That
way, he’d have at least one leader at future meetings with whom he could
relate.
*
BACK HOME, there’s fresh evidence that the government should
never regulate big business, because—well—don’t all corporations love their
workers all the time and treat them fairly?
Perhaps not.
Kentucky coal miners—“former Kentucky coal miners” to be more
precise—are blockading a train full of coal.
Why are these former miners upset? Their company, Blackjewel,
Inc., declared bankruptcy without notice on July 1. Also, Blackjewel decided it would be fun if
workers kept showing up to dig coal till the moment the company closed—and
Blackjewel could bounce their last paychecks.
Now the miners aren’t letting the train go, since the
cargo, which they mined, may be worth $10 million.
*
SPEAKING OF STIFFING WORKERS, DoorDash, the nation’s largest
restaurant food delivery service has decided to change pay policies because corporations are always looking out for employees first!
(Liberal sarcasm.)
That is why, starting in 2017, DoorDash applied any tips
customers put on charge cards toward the delivery person’s hourly pay. Instead
of the tip going to the person who brought the food, it offset company
expenses.
The scam was revealed recently, thanks to the free press. Customers
expressed outrage and the CEO said he felt bad and would start paying workers
fairly this month. Not so bad that workers would get back pay they had lost previously,
though. DoorDash is worth an estimated $12.6 billion, which means capitalism is working just the way God and
the GOP intended.
8/25/19: President Trump gets confused at the G-7 summit and garbles his message. A reporter asks him if he thinks
he can force U.S. companies to leave China. He could if he wanted, he says, channeling his inner Benito
Mussolini.
Still,
he adds, “I have no plan right now. Actually, we’re getting along very well
with China right now. We’re talking.”
A reporter puts another question to him. Does he have any second
thoughts about raising tariffs on China?
“Yeah, sure, why not?” Trump replies. “Might as well. Might
as well. I have second thoughts about everything.”
(Including wedding vows.)
Trump keeps insisting that
America’s farmers are doing great. Farm groups which have protested Trump
administration tariff policies include:
The National Pork Producers
Council
Farmers for Free Trade
The Dairy Business Association
Concerned Brussel Sprouts Council
American Soybean Association
(Okay, one of those is made up.)
The collateral damage resulting from the Trump Trade Wars may
be difficult to repair, even if China buckles soon. “Last year,” Bloomberg
reported, “farm debt-to-income was at the highest level since 1984.”
*
TO BE FAIR, we should note that many farmers continue to
support the president. All respect to the hard-working farmers of America.
This liberal blogger does not believe all Trump fans, farmers
or not, are racists or morons. Nor does he believe Trump supporters are bad
people, generally.
Still, one must ask why it is that decent human beings refuse
to acknowledge an underlying current of virulent hate in the president’s
messaging. It should be clear he’s tapping into dangerous currents in American
political thought. “Thought” being broadly defined. (See: 8/6/19 and 8/20/19.)
For example, these guys gathered for fun in Hillsborough, North Carolina this
weekend. Note their banner:
*
THE PRESIDENT insists that even though the stock market took
a dive Friday, he’s still doing a spectacular job and the market is booming, all
because of him. He even caused the market to boom before taking office!
“My Stock Market gains,” Trump tweets, “must be
judged from the day after the Election, November 9, 2016, where
the Market went up big after the win, and because of the win. Had my
opponent won, CRASH!”
We have said this before—and we keep believing Trump lovers
will see the light. There is no evidence whatsoever to indicate that a
market crash would have occurred if Hillary Clinton had won. Under
President Obama, the market recovered from the second worst crash in history
and rose 148.3 percent while he was in office. Under President Bill Clinton,
the market rose 228.9 percent. The market fell 0.7 percent under Jimmy Carter,
but posted gains under Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. The
market did well with Franklin D. Roosevelt in the White House, too, up just
under 200 percent on the day he died.
In other words, no Democratic president has ever crashed the stock
market. Republicans cannot make the same claim. Herbert Hoover helped investors
lose 82.1 percent of their money. Nixon saw the markets drop 28.3 percent
before he was forced to resign. George W. Bush left office with the market in a
catastrophic slide, having lost almost half of its value from a high in 2007,
ending down 26.5 percent by the time he headed back to his Texas ranch.
*
WE ALSO LEARN that President Trump has been kicking around
the idea that we could use some of our nuclear weapons to blow hurricanes up
before they hit the U.S. coast. Aides are reluctant to tell him the truth.
Coming soon: radioactive fish!!!!
8/26/19: President Trump wraps up his trip to the G-7 summit and the other six
leaders are just happy to know he’ll be heading home.
We find, for example, that there was an empty seat when the
heads of Great Britain, Germany, Canada, Italy, Japan, and France met to
discuss climate change. Lard Ass Trump skipped out.
To say that the current President of the United States is
clueless where climate change is concerned would be polite. He’s not just
clueless. After two-and-a-half years in office, with all the best science at
his fingertips, he’s as dumb as he was the day he took the oath to support the
Constitution. (He doesn’t get that, either.) Worse, he’s an active threat to
the health of our planet.
As recently as March 2019, he was tweeting—typically—about a
story he saw on Fox & Friends:
So, more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was good!
Naturally, it was the job of the hosts of Fox & Friends to buy
Moore’s spiel. And since Trump loves the show more than he loves applesauce, he
bought Moore’s spiel, too.
Then 32,400 dupes retweeted the “news.”
Greenpeace quickly issued a statement. Moore was not a founder of Greenpeace. Nor has he been a person
who speaks for Greenpeace for 30 years. Rather, “he is a spokesperson for the
Nuclear Industry.”
Patrick Moore often misrepresents himself in the media as an
environmental “expert” or even an “environmentalist,” while offering
anti-environmental opinions on a wide range of issues and taking a distinctly
anti-environmental stance. He also exploits long-gone ties with Greenpeace to
sell himself as a speaker and pro-corporate spokesperson, usually taking
positions that Greenpeace opposes.
Moore is, to talking about climate change, as President Trump
would be, to acting as marriage counselor.
*
SPEAKING OF FRAUDS, this seems like the perfect time to
mention Stephanie Grisham, newest White House Press Secretary. Her “credentials”
for the job are impressive. For starters, she’s a Press Secretary who likes
talking to the press even less than her predecessor, Pinocchio Sanders. She
hasn’t had a single on-camera briefing in two months on the job. She did,
however, find time to sit down for an interview with Sinclair Broadcasting
Group’s Eric Bolling.
Sinclair, if you’re into good journalism, is the cable TV
giant that requires hosts on all its local channels to read from the same
right-wing scripts.
As for Bolling, he’s a former Fox News guy who had to leave
amid accusations of sexual harassment, a surprisingly common problem at Fox. (See: Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, Bill Shine, et. al.)
Grisham, herself, has a few skeletons rattling in her closet.
As The New York Times reports,
Her career history contains red flags
that most administrations might deem troubling. They include losing a
private-sector job after being accused of cheating on expense reports, a later
job loss over plagiarism charges and two arrests for driving under the
influence, the second while working on Mr. Trump’s campaign.
Speaking of plagiarism, Grisham was working as spokesperson
for the First Lady, when Mrs. Trump was caught, rather embarrassingly, giving a
speech using lines cribbed from Michelle Obama.
If, like most Trump fans, you think The New York Times
is “Fake News,” you can dig around and find details about Grisham’s brushes
with the law at AZCentral:
On Jan. 9, 2013, when she was
working for [Tom] Horne [Arizona Attorney General], Gilbert [Arizona] police
arrested Grisham on suspicion of driving under the influence and driving faster
than reasonable, records show.
She planned to go to trial and
the matter dragged out for more than a year before she pleaded guilty to
misdemeanor reckless driving in August 2014. She spent a night in jail and was
placed on two years’ probation.
The case returned to court twice
over Grisham's failure to pay the $779 in fines and her not completing a
session with Mothers Against Drunk Driving about the impact of impaired
driving.
Grisham failed to learn her
lessons and was back in court on similar charges after going to work for Team
Trump.
On Dec. 5, 2015, months after
joining the Trump campaign, Grisham found trouble again.
Scottsdale police arrested her
that night on suspicion of DUI and driving without her headlights on shortly
after midnight.
She failed to show in court on
Jan. 19, 2016, a day when Trump received the endorsement of former Alaska
Gov. Sarah Palin in Ames, Iowa. Her absence in court cost Grisham her
driver’s license for a month.
Grisham pleaded guilty to
misdemeanor DUI in July 2016, days before her attendance at the Republican National
Convention in Cleveland, where Trump officially became the GOP nominee.
As part of that case, she had to
pay nearly $1,600 in fines and fees, records show.
Two weeks after Trump’s victory
over Democrat Hillary Clinton, Grisham failed to appear in Scottsdale court
again. That was the day Trump convened a meeting with national media
figures at Trump Tower in New York to shred them for coverage of his
campaign.
Grisham finished paying her debt
in the case on Jan. 9, 2017, less than two weeks before Trump was sworn into
office.
Grisham has also been divorced twice, and what with her
ethical lapses and legal issues, you figure she’s exactly the kind of
upstanding individual you would expect to find working for President Trump.
8/27/19: Americans learn this week that
the United States will be responsible for holding the G-7 summit in 2020. Well,
then, where, oh where, would the best place to hold that meeting be?
According to the owner of said property, Doral would be
perfect for such a gathering. Let our Commander-in-Chief explain the joys that
would await leaders of the G-7 (or the G-8, if he can invite Putin):
“Everybody’s that’s coming, all
of these people with all of their big entourages come. It’s set up so — and by
the way, my people looked at 12 sites. All good, but some were two hours from
an airport, some were four hours from, I mean they were so far away. Some didn’t
allow this, they didn’t allow that.”
Yeah, imagine. Trump’s people looked hard at a dozen sites.
And they realized, hey, Doral is the best!!!
With the whole world watching with amaze, and the G-7 in
France wrapping up, Trump continued with his sales pitch.
“With Doral, we have a series of
magnificent buildings, we call them bungalows. They each hold from 50 to 70
very luxurious rooms, with magnificent views. We have incredible conference
rooms, incredible restaurants. It’s like, it’s like such a natural. ... And
what we have also is Miami, and we have many hundreds of acres so that in terms
of parking, in terms of all of the things that you need, the ballrooms are
among the biggest in Florida, and the best. It’s brand new.”
Plus, if hurricanes threaten—we have the nukes.
*
SPEAKING OF THREATS to the safety of millions of Americans, a
judge in Oklahoma penalizes Johnson & Johnson $572 million for its role in marketing opioids
and claiming they were perfectly safe. That judgment won’t bring back the tens
of thousands who have died, of course.
News of that judgment spooks other pushers. Purdue Pharma,
which marketed opioids most aggressively, and claimed they were the safest, has
offered to settle in federal court and pay $10-12 billion in damages.
The victims of greed still won’t rise from the dead.
*
PRESIDENT OBAMA may be gone. The imaginary “War on Coal” he
launched in the fever dreams of right-wingers continues to be fake fought.
U.S. coal demand fell in 2018 to the lowest level since 1979
and is expected to drop further this year.
*
WE MIGHT NOT be getting hurt in the tariff war, according to
President Trump; but lobster fishermen would disagree. In the first six months
of 2018, the Chinese bought 12 million pounds worth of the crustaceans from the
U.S. And then Trump raised tariffs.
China retaliated as anyone could predict.
In the first six months of this year, U.S. sales of lobster to China fell 80 percent, to 2.2 million pounds.
Stephanie Nadeau, owner of The Lobster Company in Arundel,
Maine, explains how tariff wars turn bloody in the real world. “They picked
winners, and they picked losers,” she says of Trump and his economic advisers, “and
they picked me a loser. There is no market that’s going to replace China.”
Loss of market forced Nadeau to lay off seven of the fourteen
people she once had working in wholesale.
Nadeau is hardly alone in her pain. One trade group estimates that Trump’s tariffs cost U.S. businesses $3.4
billion in June.
8/28/19: No. No!
Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!
Say it ain’t so!
The Trump-Fox News romance is dead.
Wednesday morning, the president flicks on the television,
because, let’s be honest, watching TV is what he really loves to do. When he
tunes to his favorite network, he can’t believe his eyes. Fox is letting
Democrats appear on the air and Fox is letting them…wait for it…
…speak!
Trump explodes with anger, grabs his phone and starts to
tweet like a man possessed. (The man also loves to tweet.)
Once again, we must quote him in full to capture the flavor
of his spleen:
Just watched @FoxNews heavily promoting the
Democrats through their DNC Communications Director, spewing out whatever she
wanted with zero pushback by anchor, @SandraSmithFox. Terrible considering
that Fox couldn’t even land a debate, the Dems give them NOTHING!
@CNN & @MSNBC....
...are all in for the Open
Border Socialists (or beyond). Fox hires “give Hillary the questions”
@donnabrazile, Juan Williams and low ratings Shep Smith. HOPELESS &
CLUELESS! They should go all the way LEFT and I will still find a way to Win -
That’s what I do, Win. Too Bad!....
....I don’t want to Win for
myself, I only want to Win for the people. The New @FoxNews is letting millions
of GREAT people down! We have to start looking for a new News Outlet. Fox isn’t
working for us anymore!
A FRIENDLY
LETTER TO THE MAGA FOLKS
Dear Trump fans:
Did you know your favorite orange-tinted authoritarian has
tweeted 1606 times, as of this morning, telling you to tune in to Fox News? In
other words, your president has been raising you on propaganda. It’s not as bad
as Kim-Jong-un, requiring people to clap whenever he appears. Trump has shown
no inclination to order journalists bumped off like his pal, Vlad. But Trump
has pushed Fox & Friends in 577 tweets—which would be included in the
1606 above.
Trump, my fellow Americans, has fed your addiction like a Big
Pharma executive sensing huge profit to be made pushing “perfectly safe” opioid
drugs. He has touted Sean Hannity’s show (235 additional tweets), Tom Fitton’s
show (77), Lou Dobbs’ show (70), Tucker Carlson’s show (44), the Ingraham
Angle (41) and suggested you watch Judge Jeanine Pirro (36 tweets).
You, dear Trump fans—and I trust most of you love this
country, just as I and my liberal friends do—you have been suckered for sure.
Your friend,
The Blogger
8/29/19: According to a number of sources, the president is so anxious to get
the Great Wall of Trump built that he’s ready to ignore environmental
regulations and grab private lands without going through the necessary legal
steps to establish right of eminent domain. Aides have warned him that some of
his ideas are illegal. Others are unworkable.
So, what’s a petty tyrant to do?
“Take it,” he says, in reference to the private lands. He
promises he’ll pardon any aides who break the law.
You might figure this is “Fake News” if you are a big Trump
fan. But when the Washington Post asked for comment, a White
House official did not deny the comments. Instead, the official insisted the
president was joking.
8/30/19: A massive hurricane, gathering strength over unusually warm waters in
the Atlantic, is bearing down on Florida.
It has already sideswiped Puerto Rico, which gave Trump an excuse to call the Mayor of San Juan “incompetent” again.
This is how you offer sympathy to people in the path of a
killer storm!
As of Friday, at 11:00 a.m., however, it is predicted that
Hurricane Dorian will make landfall as a Category 4 storm, striking Palm Beach County, Florida a direct
hit. Palm Beach County is home to Mar-a-Lago, the true love of Trump’s life.
Not that we wish harm on the people of Florida. But if Dorian takes out Trump’s
place, you wonder if Evangelicals might see it as a sign of God’s wrath,
directed against a man who has broken these commandments with delight:
FOURTH: Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six
days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath
of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor
thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant …
This would cut into Trump’s time to play golf—and
also the time undocumented workers that his clubs have hired spend making the beds, grooming the greens,
etc., at his private courses.
Too late.
Much too late.
NINTH: Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy
neighbor.
Lost cause!
TENTH: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou
shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor
his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbor’s.
Pussy grabbing; Trump University; Trump Foundation busted for scamming two
million dollars, etc.
8/31/19: August ends in blood and gore, much as it began, with another pair of
mass shootings. On Friday night we learn that the only way to stop a bad
guy with a gun is if good guys never go outside. This time a shooting at a high school football game in Mobile,
Alabama, leaves six teens wounded, five critically. According to USA Today,
in a news conference, Mobile Police Chief Lawrence Battiste “cautioned
people to be alert in public gatherings.”
Or, to be perfectly safe from now on, one should hunker down
in a bunker. Don’t go to church. Don’t go to elementary school. Don’t go to the
theater, to a concert, to a Walmart, to night clubs or bars, and—now—don’t
attend high school football games.
This afternoon we have another
mass shooting. Texas, again. White guy, again. Heavily armed, again. As far as
we know, the bloodbath began when the suspect was stopped by a Texas Ranger for
some driving infraction. The suspect then wounded the good guy with a lesser
gun and started shooting at cars for no reason. Before the rampage ended,
the murderer had hijacked at least one automobile, then a mail truck, and
killed four bystanders and wounded 20.
So, let’s just be blunt. America has a gun problem and conservative
voices offering up “thoughts and prayers” don’t cut it.
As is so often true, as when a first grader prays for a pony,
and doesn’t get it, this blogger seriously doubts prayers will move President
Trump or the Republican Party. GOP lawmakers fear the wrath of the N.R.A. like
people in West Africa fear the first signs of Ebola.
 |
| Truck hit by gunfire. |
*
HURRICANE DORAIN continues to bear down on the Eastern
Seaboard, with pretty much every scientist worth a nickel saying, “We told you
so.” As oceans warm, and they indubitably are, hurricanes grow stronger.
The latest evidence comes from our friends Down Under. Off the
northeastern coast of Australia, the 1,400-mile-long Great Barrier Reef is
dying. As oceans heat, reefs round the world are “bleaching.” The Great Barrier Reef has
suffered significant bleaching events in 1998, 2002, 2016 and 2017.
The health of the Reef is updated every five years and this
month it was downgraded from “poor” to “very poor.” As the government agency in
charge of monitoring the situation notes, “Significant global action to address
climate change is critical to slowing the deterioration of the reef’s ecosystem
and heritage values and supporting recovery.”
Scientists warned earlier this year, that fresh evidence
shows oceans are warming faster than expected. As that fount of “Fake News,” Scientific
American magazine, notes, quoting Science magazine, that other fount
of “Fake News:”
Multiple studies in the past few
years have found that previous estimates from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change may be too low. A new review of the research, published
yesterday in Science, concludes that “multiple lines of evidence
from four independent groups thus now suggest a stronger observed [ocean heat
content] warming.”
So: Hurricane Dorian is going to be stronger when it hits
than it would have been in the past.
It’s that simple. But it’s still too difficult for the
orange-colored simpleton in the Oval Office to grasp.
Again, “thoughts and prayers,” for the environment.
*
FOX NEWS HOST Tomi Lahren, who likes to push her patriotic
“Freedom” line of athletic wear, admits…um…
Okay, her fine products are made in China!
“Like many American small business owners, Alexo [the company
Lahren partners with] aims to be Made in America. We are working towards that,”
Lahren, who has touted “American made” on her show, explains.
Amy Robbins, the Alexo CEO, tries to make a giant pile of
horse manure look somehow appealing, and talks about how difficult it is to
make clothing in the USA. You know—as if no one used to produce t-shirts in
North Carolina, as recently as twenty years ago. “Due to the increased labor
costs [emphasis added] and heightened regulations many US based
manufacturers face,” Robbins says, “we were left with little option but to
manufacture overseas to start out.”
Yes, you don’t want to have to pay U.S. workers a living wage
to start out, not if you could get the Chinese to work for crap wages.
“We’re working diligently to bring our manufacturing back
home to the US,” she promises, “and work with other hardworking companies that
pride themselves on integrity and quality.”
“Integrity.”
That is not the first word that comes to mind, when one
thinks of manufacturing products in Communist China.
*
SPEAKING OF INTEGRITY, that reminds us that President Trump
ends the month tweet-hating on Fox News, because Fox has started reporting stories (occasionally)
which make him look less than great.
When Trump rises on this last morning in August, he starts
tweeting and retweeting like a fat man possessed. Tweet #1 comes at 6:45 a.m.
The tweets come, fast and furious, from then on. Half an hour later, we get a gem: “Has
anyone noticed that the top shows on @foxnews and cable ratings are those that
are Fair (or great) to your favorite President, me!” Trump twits. “Congratulations
to @seanhannity for being the number one shoe [sic] on Cable Television!”
Yes, a show that is “great” to the president is a great show,
and everyone should watch. But Americans should NOT watch all the mean Fox News
people who are reporting stories that “your favorite President” does not like.
Here, it would seem appropriate to provide the definition of
propaganda: “information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to
promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.”
(By 8:07 a.m., when “your favorite blogger” takes time to
check, President Trump is on Tweet #49.)
Speaking of “propaganda,” the White House announces that
Trump is spending the weekend at Camp David, where he is focused on the threat
from Hurricane Dorian. In other words, Trump is acting like a real president,
albeit a real president addicted to tweets. Checking back later, we see that
tweets #50-53 come by 10:18 a. m. Then Trump’s Twitter feed goes silent for
three-and-a-half hours. Pool reporters explain that Trump has headed off to
Trump National Golf Club in Potomac Falls, Virginia.
Okay, a little less presidential…
Next, The Hill posts a video which they say proves Trump got bored focusing on Hurricane Dorian and snuck off to go
golfing.
Way less presidential, if true.
Reporters (a.k.a. the “enemies of the people”) pin down White
House Press Secretary Grisham. Did Trump go golfing? Grisham doesn’t dare say
“no,” lest more damning evidence surface.
She responds, lamely, “I have no idea what that video is.”
The video is not definitive. But does that mean Grisham has
no idea where her boss has gone and she’s not going to bother to find out?
Or does she know where he is, what putter he prefers, and
just doesn’t want to admit it? (See: 9/3/19.)
Even more August news: Jennifer Horn, former two-term chairperson of the New Hampshire GOP,
quits the party, saying there is no way she could endorse Trump for
re-election.
In her resignation letter, Ms.
Horn notes that the president’s “regular verbal assaults against women,
immigrants, elected members of Congress … and his willingness to stoke
racial anger and unrest in order to advance his own political ambitions all
subvert the founding principles of our great nation.”
We also learn that White House staffer Madeleine Westerhout has
left the building for good. During an off-the-record discussion with reporters
in a Washington D.C. bar, Westerhout, whose post had been right outside Trump’s
door, had one drink too many. Or four.
First, she bragged that she had a better relationship with
the president than his daughters. As for Tiffany, Westerhout laughed, her
father probably couldn’t pick her out of a crowd. She added helpfully that
Trump did not like to be seen in photographs with his youngest daughter,
because he thought she looked fat.
That’s how bad this man is.
Trump was said to have grown quite fond of the attractive
28-year-old. Now that she was being relieved of her duties, there seemed to be
concern about what Westerhout might say about how Trump behaves behind closed
doors.
Of course, that meant a tweet:
While Madeleine Westerhout has a
fully enforceable confidentiality agreement [emphasis added] she is a very
good person and I don’t think there would ever be reason to use it. She called
me yesterday to apologize, had a bad night. I fully understood and forgave her!
I love Tiffany, doing great!
Yes, a fully enforceable confidentially agreement—which of
course there would be no reason ever to enforce!
(Didn’t Trump say Michael Cohen was a “very good person” some
time back?)
 |
| Unlike her dad and brother, Don Jr., Tiffany never tried to get help from the Russians. |
*
MORE PROOF, not even counting recent mass shootings, that the
Great Wall of Trump might not keep us all toasty warm and safe from harm. The
DEA launches a series of raids, netting 300 suspects, and
shuts down a dozen Florida pharmacies, which are part of a highly organized
drug ring. Forget undocumented immigrants with murder and mayhem in their
hearts! Your pharmacist wants to kill you. More than 200,000 opioid pills, 35
weapons and $3.3 million in assets are seized.
In related news, a Utah man, Aaron Michael Shamo is convicted
of running a multi-million dollar opioid ring, selling fake prescription pills
laced with fentanyl, an extremely dangerous synthetic pain killer. He’s not a
dangerous undocumented immigrant. He’s some white dude, whose lawyers describe
him as “a clean-cut
millennial who grew up in a family that belonged to the Church of Jesus Christ
of Latter-day Saints.” And no drug mule snuck fentanyl across our southern
border.
Shamo
found it on the dark web and had it shipped from China by mail. Shamo and an
assortment of native-born white guys were soon doing a booming business. They
were selling tens of thousands of potentially deadly, fake pills monthly.
*
AS FOR KEEPING us safe with that big beautiful wall, which
Trump swears is being built, but even Fox News admits is not, we will now be “Keeping America Great”
by guarding against young immigrants who want to kill us by running us over in
wheelchairs.
Due to a change in policy by the
Trump administration, hundreds of immigrant children receiving medical care in
the U.S. are facing possible deportation. The children are in the country
legally and many suffer from serious diseases, including cancer.
A vibrating vest, nebulizer and
special medication help keep 16-year-old Jonathan Sanchez alive. He’s battling
cystic fibrosis, a life-threatening disorder damaging his lungs and digestive
system. It also claimed the life of his sister Samantha, back in Honduras, when
she was just 6 months old.
The family came to the U.S.
legally in 2016 and applied for “medical deferred action,” a program that
allows immigrants to receive life-saving treatment for up to two years. But,
this week they received a denial notice [for renewal], giving them 30 days to
leave the country or face deportation.
“To receive that letter is like
a big hit,” said Gary Sanchez, Jonathan’s father. “I don’t know what will
happen with the future.”
In fact, Jonathan knows exactly what will happen. “The
letter, in the words, it said that we need to leave the country in 33 days. But
in my perspective, it’s making legal homicide,” he says.
This new policy is so heartless that when CBS News seeks
comment from officials at Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S.
Citizenship and Immigration Services, which share responsibility for
implementing the change, no one “would appear on camera.” An ICE official said
the agency “was not consulted about the policy change and only learned of it
once those letters were sent out.”
 |
| If Bueso is sent back to Guatemala she'll die. |
Typical of those facing deportation and a tacit sentence of
death, is Maria Isabel Bueso. Now 24, she came to this country at age 7, to
receive treatment for a rare genetic disorder. Doctors enrolled her in several
studies. With her help they managed to improve care for others suffering from
the same crippling disability.
“I have been feeling super
scared and overwhelmed,” Ms. Bueso told a reporter this week. As The New
York Times explained, her lower body is paralyzed from the disease,
an enzyme disorder that inhibits cells from processing sugars. “The treatment
that I receive keeps me alive,” she says.
Well, too bad for you, young lady. Back to Guatemala, which
you hardly remember, you go!
*
AS FOR “keeping us safe,” let’s give General James Mattis,
first Secretary of Defense under Donald R. Trump, the final word for the month.
Mattis pens an editorial which is seen as highly critical of the president and his “America
First’ foreign policies. Mattis does not mention the president by name.
“Nations with allies thrive, and those without them wither.”
General James Mattis
It doesn’t take a genius to read between the lines. “When
you’re going to a gunfight, bring all your friends with guns,” Mattis writes. “Nations with allies thrive, and those without
them wither. Alone, America cannot protect our people and our economy. At this
time, we can see storm clouds gathering.”
That is: Category 5 Hurricane Trump.
Jeffrey Goldberg, who has talked at length with Gen. Mattis,
who went into a lot of gunfights during forty years with the U.S. Marines,
explains that the general adheres to the belief that military men do not
criticize the Commander-in-Chief. Mattis is going as far as he believes he can
while keeping his integrity.
He may not stay silent forever.
GOLDBERG: Jim Mattis has unique
insight, and we know he’s on record with his [resignation] letter, with other
things, things he said to me that he does not believe Donald Trump is a good
president. I think that’s fairly clear from everything that he’s written.
His book is one long indirect critique of the president.
GREENE: Wouldn’t that be a
violation of the duty that he said he’s so committed to if he does come out and
start talking at some point?
GOLDBERG: I think he has in his
mind, and I don’t know what they are. I think he has red lines in his mind. I
think he does have—and, you know, one could argue that that Trump crossed them
again and again—he quit over one of those red lines obviously. But I think he’s
a little bit burdened by this dilemma. Everything in his character tells him—I don’t
talk, but this is an unusual circumstance.
As in, Trump is a terrible leader, a terrible human being,
and a threat to the long-term safety of these United States.
September 1, 2019: Hurricane Dorian, a Category 5 storm, and the most powerful storm
since modern records have been kept, pummels the Bahamas, and threatens the
Eastern Seaboard.
We don’t even know
what’s coming at us. All we know is it’s possibly the biggest. I’m not sure, I’m not sure I’ve ever even heard of a Category Five [emphasis
added]. I knew it existed, and I’ve seen some Category Fours, you know you
don’t see them that much, but a Category Five, is something that I don’t know
that I’ve even heard the term, other than I know it’s there, that’s the
ultimate. And that’s what we have, unfortunately.
This proves that the
president is on top of the threat, save for the fact that he missed the
following Category 5 storms that have hit since he took office. In September
2017, Hurricane Irma pounded parts of nine states. Hurricane Maria pulverized
Puerto Rico the same month. Hurricane Michael tore apart communities in the
Florida Panhandle in October 2018.
Other than that…okay,
yeah, Dorian is a Cat 5, too.
*
MEANWHILE, THE DEATH
TOLL in the Odessa, Texas mass shooting rises to seven as two of the wounded
succumb. We learn that a 17-month-old baby has been shot in the face but should
survive.
The killer, Seth Ator,
was born in Amarillo in 1982, and was carrying an assault-style rifle during the
shooting spree.
One man who knows
exactly what must be done to end this scourge of heavily armed killers roaming our streets and slaughtering the
innocent, is Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council.
As might be expected, he
shows up on Fox News, where he makes it clear, guns aren’t the problem.
“It’s tragic and at some point we have to realize we have a
problem as a nation, and the problem is not the absence of laws. It’s an
absence of morality,” he insists, “really the result of a decades-long march
through the institutions of America, driving religion and God from the public
square.”
And you thought the problem was killers using assault-style
rifles, able to unleash hails of bullets!
“We’ve taught our kids,” Perkins continues, “that they come
about by chance through primordial slime and we’re surprised that they treat
their fellow Americans like dirt.”
Of course! We’ve got to stop teaching evolution!
9/2/19: Apparently, not enough people in Ireland binge on Fox News, because
the Irish are planning to plant 440 million trees in the next twenty years, to
address the threat of climate change.
The planned mix will involve 70 percent conifers and 30
percent broad leaf trees and should create roughly 40 square miles of new
forest annually.
9/3/19: We learn that President Trump went golfing twice this past weekend. The White House had been trying to make it
appear as if he was focused on hurricane preparedness, like a real leader.
Press Secretary Grisham did her best to tap dance round the
topic when asked about it by reporters. (See: 8/31/19.)
At the same time, Trump got mad after he said Alabama was one
of several states likely to get hit hard by Hurricane Dorian. The National
Weather Service quickly corrected his mistake and assured Alabamians they were
safe. ABC
News chief White House
correspondent Jonathan Karl then fact-checked the president and
Trump got mad because facts made him look bad.
So: he picked a fight with the weathermen and weather women.
*
IN OTHER NEWS conservatives won’t like, McKrae Game, who ran
the nation’s largest “gay conversion” ministry for twenty years, has come out
and admitted he’s gay. He says he’s sorry for all the gays who had to suffer through
his conversion sessions over the course of two decades. “Conversion
therapy is not just a lie, but it’s very harmful,” he now admits, “because it’s
false advertising.”
Game joins the likes of David Matheson, once a prominent
“gay conversion” expert who turned out to be…gay…Norman Goldwasser, big
proponent of making the choice to quit being gay, who posted on gay hookup websites…and got caught…Rev. Ted
Haggard, who had to resign as president of the National Evangelicals
Association…after a male prostitute said he smoked meth with Haggard and was
paid for having sex…and assorted hypocrites on the right.
9/4/19: Vice President Jesus earned a few extra frequent flier miles this week,
at taxpayer expense.
When President Golfing Fool decided to cancel a trip to
Poland and focus on Hurricane Dorian—and his putting—he sent Mike Pence in his
stead. On the way back, Pence made a stop in Ireland to speak to President
Michael D. Higgins.
Tuesday morning, a dapper looking VP (you have to admit, the
man looks good in a suit and tie) rose early, in a chipper mood.
Alas, his meeting was 181 miles away from the hotel where he
stayed. He would need to down his waffles quickly and jump on Air Force Two and
wing away. To Dublin, then—where for some odd reason, Pence had decided not to
stay. By 5:00 p.m. all meetings and discussions were ended. VP Jesus hopped
aboard Air Force Two and flew back from whence he came.
Night two, for the VP—his wife—his sister—and his mother—at that
conveniently located property on the other side of Ireland. Namely: Trump International Golf
Links & Hotel in Doonbeg.
VP
Jesus’s family has roots on his mother’s side in Doonbeg, and we should not begrudge
Clan Pence a visit to their ancestral home. Still, did they really need to fly
back and forth on the public dime?
That
answer, in Gaelic, would be: “Chan eil.”
“No.”
*
AS
HURRICANE DORIAN slowly churns its way north, the catastrophic damage inflicted
on the Bahamas is revealed. Scientists point out once again what has been
obvious for some time.
“Was it caused by climate change?” Katharine Hayhoe, a
climate scientist at Texas Tech University, asks rhetorically in a Twitter
post. Could the fearsome power of the storm have anything to do with climate
change?
“When it comes to hurricanes, that’s the wrong question,” from
now on. “The right one is, ‘How much worse did climate change make it?’”
Florida
was lucky this time; but, yes, Mr. Trump there are hurricanes that are measured
as Cat 5’s. (See: September 1, 2019.)
*
LAST BUT NOT LEAST, several large retail chains, including
Kroger, decide to tell shoppers not to bring their guns into stores.
This means that shoppers armed with AR-15’s will no longer be
able to defend themselves from rogue cans of baked beans.
9/5/19: President Trump spends his morning studying climate science and boning
up on how Category 5 hurricanes form.
You wish!
In fact, rather than address the growing threat, the Trump
administration rolls back rules first passed in 2007 to require more energy
efficient light bulbs in every socket in the land. Had the standards gone into final effect next year, they would have saved as much energy as can be produced by 25
large power plants. That would have been enough to light all the homes in
Pennsylvania and New Jersey for the year. And, in the end, consumers would have
saved money, switching out old bulbs.
It doesn’t matter, because Trump is busy trying to prove he
was right when he said Hurricane Dorian was going to hit Alabama hard. He had a
map from the National Weather Service he wanted everyone to see. With cameras
in the Oval Office running, and an aide to help him hold his display, Trump shows
reporters the evidence. But someone appears to have added a line,
apparently using a black Sharpie, to show that the people of Alabama could have
been wiped off the map.
 |
| The president's ludicrous map. |
Let’s just say the “enemies of the people” were less than impressed. First, they found the original National Services map and
posted pictures—showing—well—not showing a black line.
 |
| The original. |
Nothing more than an ill-informed buffoon.
The dastardly New York Times had the nerve to go to
sources and inquire about the bizarre discrepancy. “A
spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security said that he was unclear what
the black line on the map was referring to and that he needed to gather
additional information,” reporters noted. “He later referred questions about
the map to the White House.”
This is how we pass the buck in Trumpistan.
Next, reporters asked the president, himself, how the black
line could have ended up on the map he displayed.
“I don’t know,” he replied.
In any case, the President of the United States kept
insisting he was right—even though, while other governors had declared states
of emergency as Dorian threatened, the governor of Alabama did not.
This meant White House aides were forced to tap dance around
hard facts, and spurred a new bout of lying by the president. Trump soon tweeted a new map, this time provided by the South
Florida Water Management District. He said it supported his claim that the
people of Alabama had been doomed. “This was the originally projected path of
the Hurricane in its early stages,” he said. “As you can see, almost all models
predicted it to go through Florida also hitting Georgia and Alabama.
“I accept the Fake
News apologies!” he said.
Alas, sharp-eyed
reporters noticed that the latest map Trump was waving around carried a
disclaimer. Any information from the National
Hurricane Center or local emergency officials would supersede it. “If anything
on this graphic causes confusion, ignore the entire product.”
Trump
had proved again that after 31 months in office, he was still nothing more than
an ill-informed buffoon.
Once again, we check the numbers: Jobs added in Trump’s first
31 full months as president:
5,846,000 (188,581 per month).
Read ‘em and weep, liberal commie scum!
Then again, in Obama’s last 31 full months in office
6,910,000 jobs were added (222,903 per month)
9/7/19: Here in Ohio, three drug companies are forced to settle lawsuits with
Cuyahoga and Summit counties.
Having pushed opioids as perfectly safe, despite evidence
that the drugs were much less than safe the Big Pharma companies
admitted, they were facing significant civil penalties. They knew they’d lose
at trial. So, they settled. Allergan forfeit $5 million, Endo, $11 million
(including free drugs to counteract addiction). Mallinckrodt coughed up a total
of $30 million.
9/8/19: For the love of god, how often does this president play golf! Once
again, Trump spends Sunday on the links. This follows on the heels of his last round of
golf, way back on…Saturday.
He’s a golfing machine!
Also, a deal-making machine! Trump hatched another great deal
which he was planning to close over the weekend. Here was his plan. He would
invite representatives of the Taliban to Camp David for peace talks. (You’d
think he might want them to stay at one of his plush clubs—like everyone else
he meets—but no.) If all went well, he would close the deal with the killers
who made it possible for Osama bin Laden to wreak havoc on our nation eighteen
years ago.
Trump had a plan.
Trump would be the hero of Trump’s plan. Trump would end a
long, expensive war. Trump would brag about ending that long, expensive war.
Especially, the expensive part. Trump has no empathy for the dead or the
maimed. Trump only cares about dollars. Best of all, there would be
reporters and cameras. Those reporters and cameras would focus on Trump. Trump
would love watching “President Trump” close the deal.
Trump would boast to the world. “President Trump achieved
this historic peace all by himself! No one else helped President Trump.” He
would refer to himself in the third person, as is his wont. At last, the people
would love Trump more than his predecessor, Mr. Obama.
Even Melania would love Trump again.
There was only one problem. The Taliban is a blood-thirsty
crew. And the Taliban kept doing what the Taliban likes to do. The Taliban kept
on blowing innocent human beings to bits. In August they sent a suicide bomber
to a wedding and he or she blew him- or herself up, killing 63, injuring 182. In July, they bombed the University of Kabul, killing 10 students and maiming 33.
The Taliban doesn’t like higher education much.
And, lo, it came to pass. Trump invited the Taliban to come
to Camp David last week, and sit down, hands still red with innocent blood,
three days before the eighteenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
But there was one giant, gory fly in the soup of Trump’s
plan. The Taliban could not resist doing what the Taliban does best. In the
days leading up to the secret meeting at Camp David, they kept blowing other
people up. A series of suicide bombings killed and wounded 54 Afghan civilians.
Another bombing killed an American, Sgt. First Class
Elis A. Barreto Ortiz, the third American to die in
Afghanistan in a week. The Art of the Deal president was stumped.
With that, the secret meeting was off. Trump headed for the links, instead, and yet
another round of golf.
 |
| Aftermath of Taliban bombing. |
9/9/19: Trump starts Day 962 of his presidency the same way Day 961 ended.
He’s up and tweet-hating by 5:21 a.m.
By 5:58, he’s warmed up and floats his first insult, mocking
Mark Sanford, who plans to challenge him in the primaries next year. The former
governor of South Carolina is famous for running off to Argentina to be with
his mistress—but you figure Trump won’t bring that up, because…well…Stormy…and
the Playboy Bunny…and the housemaid Trump knocked up.
This is Trump. So,he does bring it up:
When the former Governor of the
Great State of South Carolina, @MarkSanford, was reported missing, only to then
say he was away hiking on the Appalachian Trail, then was found in Argentina
with his Flaming Dancer friend, it sounded like his political career was over.
It was,....
Okay, one clueless tweet—one person insulted. But there’s
more undignified work to be done:
...but then he ran for Congress
and won, only to lose his re-elect after I Tweeted my endorsement, on Election
Day, for his opponent. But now take heart, he is back, and running for
President of the United States. The Three Stooges, all badly failed candidates,
will give it a go!
There you are. A pair of insulting tweets before most people
are up and eating scrambled eggs and toast.
The question then becomes: Is Trump totally losing his
marbles? He has recently picked a Twitter fight with the actress Deborah
Messing. He picked another with the singer John Legend and Chrissy Teigen, his
“nasty mouthed wife.” Now he’s calling opponents “The Three Stooges.”
9/10/19: National Security Adviser John Bolton has been fired. Or resigned. Trump
says he fired Bolton. Bolton says no. He resigned. So, the Trump White House
can’t even get that right.
And on a similar note, the Trump administration can’t get the
story of the Hurricane that Almost Hit Alabama right, either.
The story, unimportant in itself, encapsulates much of what
makes Trump unfit to lead this nation, or any other. Nobody will remember
this tale in ten years, save for the scientists involved. Alabama was not hit. Alabamians
will not look back in a decade and remember the day Trump said they should head
for cover because the storm was a killer, headed their way.
But this story is the story of who Trump is. It begins with a
harmless mistake. Trump tweets dozens of times about Hurricane Dorian. In one
tweet, possibly a simple mix-up, he says Alabama will be hit hard. The
Birmingham office of the National Weather Service finds itself swamped with
frightened callers inquiring about what to do. A correction is quickly issued. Alabama
is NOT under threat.
When news services pick up on Trump’s mistake, he’s too petty
to admit an ordinary mistake. First, he tries to lie his way out of a predicament—that
should have been predicament at all. That brought us the famous Sharpie Weather
Map, which only opened Trump up to merciless mockery.
That caused him to explode. Orders went out to federal
agencies. Come to his defense. Make it sound the president was right all along.
If not, heads will roll.
Three sources tell The New York Times that Secretary
of Commerce Wilbur Ross, whose department includes the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration—which includes the National Weather Service—leaped
into the fray. Back up the president’s claim, or firings at the National
Weather Service would result. An unsigned statement was issued, saying Trump
was right all along.
The only problem was that scientists were not amused. Alabama had not been under threat. Peggy E.
Gustafson, inspector general for the National Weather Service wrote in a
message to staff that the agency “must, maintain standards of scientific
integrity.” The circumstances behind the change to back Trump, she wrote, “call
into question the NWS’s processes, scientific independence, and ability to
communicate accurate and timely weather warnings and data to the nation in
times of national emergency.”
Gustafson wasn’t the only scientist to smell a skunk.
Director Louis Uccellini said
forecasters in Birmingham did the right thing Sept. 1 when they tried to combat
public panic and rumors that Dorian posed a threat to Alabama. It was only
later that they found out the source of the mistaken information, he said.
Speaking at a meeting of the National Weather Association, Uccellini said
Birmingham forecasters “did what any office would do to protect the public.”
“They did that with one thing in
mind: public safety,” said Uccellini, who prompted a standing ovation from
hundreds of forecasters by asking members of the Birmingham weather staff to
stand. Earlier, the president of the 2,100-member association, Paul Schlatter,
said any forecast office “would have done the exact same thing” as the Birmingham
forecast office.
Kevin Laws, science and operations officer for the weather
service in Birmingham, was asked if he’d like to add further comment. “I think
the speech speaks for itself,” he told reporters.
“My understanding is that this intervention to contradict the
forecaster was not based on science but on external factors including
reputation and appearance, or simply put, political.”
Craig McClean, National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration
Craig McClean, acting chief scientist at the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration, also made clear what he thought of a misguided
effort to back Trump up. “My understanding,” he wrote in a memo to staff, “is
that this intervention to contradict the forecaster was not based on science
but on external factors including reputation and appearance, or simply put,
political.”
McLean was scathing in his letter. First, he insisted that the
Birmingham staff “corrected any public misunderstanding [due to the president’s
tweets] in an expert and timely way as they should.”
Second, he noted that the NOAA Scientific Integrity Policy
tells all agency employees to “approach all scientific activities with honesty,
objectively, and completely, without allegiance to individuals, organizations,
or ideology.”
Finally, McClean warned that the NOAA press release backing
Trump up, “compromises the ability of NOAA to convey life-saving information”
and “violated NOAA’s policies of scientific integrity.” That policy states that
individuals higher up the chain of command should not “intimidate or coerce
employees, contractors, recipients of financial assistance awards, or others to
alter or censor scientific findings.”
So, there you had it: On one side, a petty, dictatorially
inclined President Trump, backed by his usual minions.
On the other side you had truth and science—and plenty of
witnesses to prove Trump and his side lied.
*
That story highlighted the dangers posed by an increasingly
unbalanced, erratic, enraged President Trump.
“No one knows what to expect
from him anymore,” one former White House official [told Business Insider].
“His mood changes from one minute to the next based on some headline or tweet,
and the next thing you know his entire schedule gets tossed out the window
because he’s losing his s---.
“People are used to the
president saying things that aren’t true, but this Alabama stuff is another
story. This was the president sending out patently false information about a
national-emergency situation as it was unfolding.”
“You’re
basically stuck looking after a 4-year-old now.”
The story continues, with sources asking for anonymity,
because they feared retribution from Trump.
“He’s deteriorating in plain
sight,” one Republican strategist who’s in frequent contact with the White
House told Insider on Friday.
Asked why the president was
obsessed with Alabama instead of the states that would actually be affected by
the storm, the strategist said, “you should ask a psychiatrist about that; I’m
not sure I’m qualified to comment.”
Nor was this behavior entirely new.
More than that, one person who
was close to Trump’s legal team during the Russia investigation told Insider
his public statements were “nothing compared to what he’s like behind closed
doors.”
“He’s like a bull seeing red,”
this person added. “There’s just no getting through to him, and you can kiss
your plans for the day goodbye because you’re basically stuck looking after a
4-year-old now.”
At this point, some White House aide should take away all of
Trump’s Sharpies before he pokes himself in the eye.
9/11/19: It is a day for solemn
memories—of Twin Towers imploding—of a Pentagon in flames—of heroism on Flight
93—and so much more.
It’s a time for reflection and introspection, unless you are
Donald J. Trump. The president is up early on the anniversary of the 9/11
attacks. By 5:14 a.m. he’s tweeting away. China is “being hit very hard” by
tariffs! Trump is winning! He attacks Jay Powell, his choice to lead the
Federal Reserve, and calls him naïve. But what really has the president riled
up are a series of recent opinion polls. Those polls show that if the election
were held today, he and the Republicans would get smoked.
First, the “good news,” as far as Trump is concerned. The
Republicans did eke out a narrow win in a special election in the Ninth
Congressional District in North Carolina the night before.
This allows the president to boast, because, as he insists,
he saved the day himself.
Of course, for those who prefer facts, it pays to check his
math. He didn’t save the day, so much as the blood of the bleeding patient
clotted. That’s just what blood does. The Ninth has long been a GOP bastion.
In 2016, the GOP candidate for Congress won by 16 points, 58 to 42 percent.
Trump carried the district by 12 points, himself. In 2018 the Republican
congressional candidate won again, but by less than a point. Even that
narrow victory was a result of rank ballot fraud perpetrated by the “winner’s”
campaign. The results were tossed by the courts.
Oddly enough, while Trump often complains about “rigged”
votes, without any evidence votes were rigged, it has never bothered him that
the 2018 election in the Ninth was definitely rigged.
So, on Tuesday, Trump wanted everyone to believe he had
pulled a little magic out of a red MAGA hat. He rallied hard for Dan Bishop,
the new GOP candidate in the race. (The old candidate was facing felony
charges. So he dropped out.) And, with the weight of the presidency thrown into
the balance, Bishop did defeat his opponent by a whopping two points, 50.7 to
48.7 percent.
Still, the president, could not resist an urge to bitch. It
took three tweets to get the hurt off his chest. What he wanted all Americans
to know on the anniversary of 9/11, was that he was winning and winning and the
polls couldn’t be right.
First angry tweet:
In a hypothetical poll, done by
one of the worst pollsters of them all, the Amazon Washington Post/ABC, which
predicted I would lose to Crooked Hillary by 15 points (how did that work
out?), Sleepy Joe, Pocahontas and virtually all others would beat me in the
General Election....
Trump
was lying again.
I checked Trump’s math. No poll done by the Washington
Post and ABC ever had him down 15 points in 2016. In fact, on the eve of
the election, the same poll had him down only 3 points.
Second angry tweet:
....This is a phony suppression
poll, meant to build up their Democrat partners. I haven’t even started
campaigning yet, and am constantly fighting Fake News like Russia, Russia,
Russia. Look at North Carolina last night. Dan Bishop, down big in the Polls,
WINS. Easier than 2016!
First, Mr. President, stop attacking the free press. Second,
for God’s sake, check your facts! Bishop’s win was in no way “easier” than the
Republican win in 2016, as already mentioned. For that matter, polls in North
Carolina had never shown Bishop “down big.” Three polls showed the election was likely a dead heat.
Bishop was expected to garner 44.67 percent of the vote, Dan McCready, his
opponent, 44.33 percent. Another 8 percent of voters were unsure.
Third angry tweet: “If it
weren’t for the never ending Fake News about me,” he sobbed (if you can sob in
a tweet), “and with all that I have done (more than any other President in the
first 2 1/2 years!), I would be leading the ‘Partners’ of the LameStream Media
by 20 points. Sorry, but true!”
It was clear, then, that the president was having a very bad
day; and trashing John Bolton, his ousted National Security Adviser, during a
question and answer session with reporters later, did not assuage the hurt in
his heart that Donald J. Trump was feeling.
The polls painted a painful picture for Trump and his party.
Even Rasmussen, his favorite poll, showed him with an approval rating of only
47 percent, and a disapproval rating of 53 percent.
And that was the best poll of all.
In an average of all polls, Trump had an
approval rating of 43.1 percent, and a disapproval rating of 53.9 percent.
Postscript: To be fair, Trump has time to recover
and could look to his nemesis’ success in 2012. On September 11, 2011,
President Obama had an approval rating of 43.3 percent, and a disapproval
rating of 50.7 percent.
The difference? Obama didn’t believe the polls were rigged
and didn’t whine as if they were.
9/12/19: President Trump travels to Baltimore to deliver a policy speech before
GOP lawmakers. Protesters decide to float a large balloon outside the venue
where he is speaking, a rat with a striking resemblance to Trump. It’s their
tribute to a man who called their city “disgusting,” and described Baltimore as
a “rodent infested mess.”
He is orange.
During his policy speech, the president dives into energy
policy and the topic of climate change. “The lightbulb. People said what’s with
the lightbulb?” he asks in rhetorical fashion.
“I said here’s the story,” Trump continued. “And I looked at
it, the bulb that we’re being forced to use, number one to me, most
importantly, the light’s no good. I always look orange. And so do you. The
light is the worst.”
That was pretty much all Trump had to say about one of the
critical issues facing humanity today.
He didn’t want to look orange.
(Professional photographers told the Washington Post the
bulbs weren’t the problem. The problem was the president is orange.)
9/13/19: We all live in Trumpistan now.
In Trumpistan, reporters are the enemy. All migrants want to kill us—at least,
if we’re white. All Big Business types can be trusted all the time. All
Democrats are “socialists,” and in some bizarre lexicon, all socialists are
“communists.” Nazis—just look at the name of their party—are also “socialists,”
not right-wing fascists. According to Tucker Carlson even a leading neo-con
like John Bolton, the now canned, third National Security Adviser to President
Trump, “was fundamentally a man of the left.”
That claim earns Carlson a coveted “Pants on Fire” rating from Politifact. A
quick check of Bolton’s career shows he volunteered in 1964, to work for the
campaign of that famous “lefty” Barry Goldwater, author of Conscience of a
Conservative. Next he interned for Vice President Spiro Agnew, a politician
who liked to talk about the “criminal left,” and the “whimpering
isolationism” of “ultraliberalism.” Bolton spent the 80s working in the Reagan
administration. He went on to work for George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush
(Bolton thumped the drum for the invasion of Iraq in 2003). He endorsed Mitt
Romney for president in 2012. He worked for the American Enterprise Institute
and finally washed up on the shores of Fox News. In the employ of Fox,
he was paid more than $500,000 in 2017, for spouting pro-Trump opinions.
*
PUTTING BOLTON aside, let’s hear it for Big Business, the folks
we can always trust with our pensions, prescription drugs and perfectly safe
consumer products. We know, for instance, that Juul produces excellent
flavored vaping devices and never tries to lure teens to use them, which
might lead to damaged lungs and death. We know MyPayrollHR and its
CEO Michael Mann would never steal $35 million from employees. The socialists probably
did it, not him.
Finally, the Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma would
never, ever hide a billion dollars in profits, shifting money through secret Swiss bank accounts,
knowing their company may soon declare bankruptcy. All because a few people
swallowed a few too many OxyContin pills and ended up dead.
I, for one, can hardly wait for Big Oil to start drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, because
I know they will never spill oil all over the place. Oil spills are the work of
“lefties,” I’m pretty sure.
I believe Mr. Carlson would like viewers to understand that
Donald J. Trump and Big Oil want the world to look like this:
*
FOR SOME ODD REASON—probably vestiges of human
decency—Sen. Mitt Romney says he will not be endorsing anyone for president in
2020.
As a good Republican, he can’t bring himself to support a
Democrat. As a man of integrity, he can’t stomach Trump.
9/14/19: In news you may have missed,
the Trump administration is working hard to keep us safe from killer immigrants
who want to slit our throats while we sleep, but in the meantime also work construction. You know…people who tunnel
underground to…run storm water systems and subways.
New rules mean that 400,000 people from six nations, who were
granted temporary protected status when their countries were hit by war,
natural disasters and waves of crime, may be asked to leave the U.S.
Many have been living in the United States for twenty years.
Most have deep roots in this country. Combined, they have nearly 200,000
children born here, all American citizens.
Those 200,000 might have to abandon the only country they
have ever known if they want to remain with their parents.
Ever Guardado, 38, is typical. He works in construction, pays
taxes, owns a home in Sterling, Virginia, and has three children, all citizens by birth. “I thought I would be secure forever,” he told reporters.
“Now I’m scared every day.”
We can assume his children are equally scared.
So, “good job,” President Trump.
9/15/19: President Fire and Fury is
hoping some punk will make his day, like Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry,
only with Stealth bombers.
Someone has attacked Saudi Arabia’s oil refineries. That
someone could be Iran. Or that someone could be Houthi rebels, fighting Saudi
forces in Yemen. The Houthis are backed by Iran.
Dirty Don decides to address possible military action in a
tweet:
Saudi Arabia oil supply
was attacked. There is reason to believe that we know the culprit, are locked
and loaded depending on verification, but are waiting to hear from the Kingdom
as to who they believe was the cause of this attack, and under what terms we
would proceed!
Did Dirty Don just say he was going to attack Iran once the
Saudis laid out the terms for that attack? The Saudis? The guys who hacked up a
journalist with bone saws and couldn’t tell us how that happened or why? The
purveyors of Wahhabism, the most militant brand of Islam in the world?
And weren’t the Saudis going to buy hundreds of billions of
dollars in U.S. war-fighting tools and technology?
Why can’t they do the fighting themselves—or at least pay us
handsomely to get our young men and women (but no Trumps) killed—as once suggested by a
brilliant tactician named Donald J. Trump:
Citizen Trump, in 2014 and 2015 was clear when faulting Mr. Obama’s
strategy in the Middle East. He’d be willing to send troops into harm’s way,
but NO FREEBIES. The Saudis could sit back and watch us do their fighting—as
Trumps always sit back during wartime, themselves.
But it would cost them, as Trump made clear in a number of
tweets:
Have you been watching
how Saudi Arabia has been taunting our VERY dumb political leaders to
protect them from ISIS. Why aren’t they paying?
I just want to know how much
is Saudi Arabia and others who we are helping willing to pay for our
saving from total extinction. Pay up now!
Tell Saudi Arabia and
others that we want (demand!) free oil for the next ten years or we will not
protect their private Boeing 747s. Pay up!
If Saudi Arabia, which has
been making one billion dollars a day from oil, wants our help and protection,
they must pay dearly! NO FREEBIES.
We are getting ready to
protect Saudi Arabia against Iran & others-sending ships. How
much are they going to pay us toward this protection.
Saudi Arabia should be
paying the United States many billions of dollars for our defense of them.
Without us, gone!
Oh, and Trump wants it to be clear. He’s no fool. He never
said he’d meet with the leader of Iran, “without conditions.”
Once again, he tries performing delicate diplomacy via a tweet: “The
Fake News is saying that I am willing to meet with Iran, “No Conditions.” That
is an incorrect statement (as usual!).”
This is probably confusing to:
1.
Iranians
2.
Saudis
3.
U.S. allies
4.
U.S. military
5.
Houthi rebels
6.
Secretary of State Pompeo
7.
Treasury Secretary Mnuchin, and,
8.
“Fake News” reporters.
That confusion probably relates to the fact that Mnuchin told “Fake News”
reporters last Tuesday, “Now the president has made clear, he is happy to take
a meeting [with Iran] with no preconditions, but we are maintaining the
maximum pressure campaign.”
Then Secretary Pompeo added to the dilemma by saying, “The
president has made clear he is happy to take a meeting with no preconditions.”
In fact, this “Fake Blogger” was so confused by all the “Fake
News,” apparently a result of relying on “Fake Eardrums,” that he decided to check some non-fake news sources, such as The
Times of Israel.
Yeah, Mnuchin and Pompeo said that.
Indeed, as USA Today and many other news outlets report, Trump said that, too, and said it “repeatedly.”
9/16/19: Once again, we learn that we
have nothing to fear, but fear itself, and homegrown nuts with guns.
Alexis Wilson, an 18-year-old Oklahoma waitress, is arrested and charged with making terroristic threats. Ms.
Wilson allegedly showed a co-worker videos of herself with a new AK-47, and
said “that she was going to shoot 400 people for fun and that there were so
many people at her old school that she would like to do it to,” according to an
arrest report. Police said the threats were aimed at McAlester High School in
Pittsburg County, where the young woman had attended school.
After being tipped off, sheriff’s deputies went to the home
where Wilson lived. There they confiscated an AK-47, a 12-guage shotgun, and
ammo.
A school resource officer for the McAlester Public Schools
confirmed that there had been previous incidents involving Wilson. Those
incidents include bringing a knife to school and having swastika symbols on
personal belongings while in class.
9/17/19: Former Trump 2016 campaign
manager Corey Lewandowski reluctantly appears before Congress.
Forced to testify under a subpoena, issued by the House Judiciary
Committee, Lewandowski proves combative in the extreme. He’s almost impossible
to pin down on facts, and appears dumbfounded that anyone would think Trump ever
asked him to obstruct justice, although all signs point to the fact he did.
We can pretty much ignore almost everything Republican
lawmakers on the panel said. Boiled down to simple phrases, their argument
would be this: “Democrats are mean to President Trump.” “The Mueller Report
found no collusion.” (It’s a stone cold fact: Mueller made it clear that
“collusion” wasn’t a legal term and so he ignored the issue outright.) And:
“Trump was totally exonerated. Democrats should move on.” (Mueller specifically
stated that his report did not exonerate President Trump.)
Your humble blogger is a well-known liberal and convinced
Donald J. Trump is a liar from weird coif to toe. So, let’s be as factual as we
can. Lewandowski did not deny any of the following points. In June 2017, the
President of the United States requested that he, a private citizen, deliver a
message to Attorney General Jeff Sessions. That message would be: Un-recuse
yourself.
Take charge of the Russia investigation—which began that
May—again.
Lewandowski reluctantly admitted under questioning that he
was indeed asked to deliver such a message.
(At best, this would be an oddity. President Trump could have
sent any White House lawyer over to see AG Sessions. For some reason he did
not.)
Questioned in detail about the matter, Lewandowski was by
turns contemptuous in his responses or unwilling to answer. Lewandowski
insisted he was acting on White House orders, to limit his responses to what he
had already said in the Mueller Report.
Again, if we stick to basic facts, we know that by the time
Trump spoke to Lewandowski about meeting with Sessions, he had already asked
White House counsel Donald McGahn II to fire Special Counsel Mueller. We know
McGahn—almost surely sniffing out an attempt to obstruct justice—refused.
Two days later, Trump called in Lewandowski for help. He
wanted Corey to go to Sessions and ask him to give a speech. Trump even
dictated ideas for what he wanted Sessions to say. First, the Attorney General
should un-recuse himself. Second, he should explain that he was taking control
of the Mueller probe again. Third, he should proclaim that Donald J. Trump
had done nothing wrong. Finally, Sessions was to announce that Mueller would
be limited to investigating “election meddling for future elections.”
If Sessions would do that, everything would be cool.
(Author’s note,
12/24/19: Trump, of course, would later ask the Ukrainians to meddle in the
next election.)
He
should tell the Attorney General he was fired.
For some reason—probably because Lewandowski knew he was
tiptoeing the line where obstruction of justice begins—he failed to act. Trump
made this first request on June 19. Lewandowski did ask the Attorney General to
meet. Sessions refused. A month passed before Lewandowski saw Trump again. On
July 19, Trump and his former campaign manager met at the White House again.
The president wanted Lewandowski to meet with Sessions in person. If Sessions
refused to meet again, he should tell the Attorney General he was fired.
Again: the line where obstruction of justice begins was at
Lewandowski’s feet. He appears to have known it, too.
He passed off the message to White House deputy chief of
staff Rick Dearborn, a former aide to Jeff Sessions, and left it to him to do
what Trump desired. According to the Mueller Report, Dearborn said he never
delivered the message.
The next question was obvious: Why didn’t Lewandowski or
Dearborn act on a request from the President of the United States? Did
Lewandowski know the was being asked to step over the line?
Corey sneered in response when a Democratic lawmaker asked.
He wasn’t worried about that. He didn’t carry out the president’s request, he
explained, because he had to take his kids on vacation.
He took them to the beach.
(Use sunscreen, sir, by all means.)
Lewandowski did clarify a number of points under pressure,
rather than risk a finding of contempt in the end. Okay, he admitted, vacation
lasted only two weeks. He also said he had hoped to meet with Sessions away
from the Department of Justice, because he and Jeff were friends.
He wanted to talk to the AG in a “relaxed setting.”
The Russians
wanted to talk.
The Mueller Report lays out a far different scenario. “Lewandowski
wanted to pass the message to Sessions in person rather than over the phone,” investigators
say. “He did not want to meet at the Department of Justice because he did not
want a public log of his visit and did not want Sessions to have an advantage
over him by meeting on what Lewandowski described as Sessions’s turf.”
Despite some Democratic bumbling in regard to questioning,
Lewandowski eventually had to admit that he had received messages from campaign staff in 2016, indicating
the Russians wanted to talk.
“Shouldn’t you have contacted the F.B.I. with this news? “ a
Democratic lawmaker asked. Lewandowski admitted somebody should have done so—it
just wasn’t him. At another point, Republicans tried to make it sound like the
F.B.I. failed to alert the Trump campaign to what the Russians were up to—and
that what they were up to was up to no good. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) suggested
that the F.B.I. was “trying to trap the president.” That didn’t even make
sense.
To Lewandowski, however, it did.
Someone from the F.B.I., he agreed, should have told him the
Russians were up to no good. In fact, he was fired from the campaign on June
20, 2016. The following month the F.B.I. specifically warned the campaign
that Russians were trying to make inroads in various ways.
Rep. Jordan didn’t want to bring that up.
Nor did Jordan or Lewandowski dare mention one
incontrovertible and highly damaging fact. Eleven days earlier, three
individuals at the pinnacle of the campaign, namely Paul Manafort, Donald
Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner, had enthusiastically agreed to take a secret
meeting with Russians. Those Russians had promised to bring damaging info on
Hillary Clinton.
“If what you say is true,” Don Jr. had famously replied, “I
love it.”
Yet, none of these three people told Lewandowski that
something that sounds nefarious, was afoot?
In the end, Trump’s old campaign manager stonewalled
lawmakers to good effect (assuming “good” to you means avoiding getting pinned
down by the truth). He refused to answer most questions point blank. His
conversations with the president were covered under the blanket of executive
privilege, he and his lawyer both said. This, despite the fact Lewandowski was
a private citizen at the time, and—it would seem likely—was being asked to
commit a crime. Testimony related to criminal activity is never shielded
by “executive privilege,” if you don’t know.
Finally, a lawyer for the Democrats, Barry Berke, had 30
minutes to wrap up the hearings for the day. Mr. Berke showed a series of news
clips, during which Mr. Lewandowski told reporters he had never been asked by
President Trump to talk to AG Sessions about un-recusing himself.
“Was that a lie?” Berke asked.
Lewandowski was evasive at first. Finally, he replied that he
was under “no obligation” to tell reporters (and by extension, the American
people) the truth.
At the end of the day, pundits seemed to agree that Democrats
had failed to gain much traction in an effort to build a case for the
impeachment of President Donald J. Trump.
But if you watched Corey Lewandowski perform, you knew, if he
avoided stepping over the line where obstruction of justice begins and actions
become crimes, he teetered on the very edge of the legal cliff.
Did Trump want Lewandowski to obstruct justice? An
open-minded observer would conclude that he did.
9/18/19: At this point it should be
clear to all Americans: President Trump has no more empathy than a potato.
This week, we have fresh evidence of Trump’s lack of compassion.
During a flight on Air Force One, reporters ask him to comment on the death of
Cokie Roberts, renowned ABC reporter. Roberts died this week, at age 75, from
complications from breast surgery.
This was, of course, the perfect time for Trump to mention
Trump. “I never met her,” he said. Then, he couldn’t help himself.
“She never treated me nicely,” he added. Yes, Ms. Roberts was
dead; but the real tragedy was how much Trump’s ego
was hurt.
Today, the president had another chance to get simple human
emotions right. He blew it again. Trump was traveling in California, and had
supposedly taken an interest in the state’s growing problem with homelessness.
Would he, then, suggest ways the federal government could
help? Would he focus on mental illness and other primary reasons most homeless
people end up living on America’s streets? Surely, a president who touts his
love for “my military” on an almost daily basis, would address the need to help
homeless veterans. They make up a large percentage of those who sleep in
doorways, shelter under bridges, and live in tattered tents, where they recline
on the seats of busted up cars.
Then again, this is Trump.
Here’s how he’s quoted in Fox News (although Fox News is not inclined
to parse his words):
We have people
living in our…best highways, our best streets, our best entrances to
buildings...where people in those buildings pay tremendous taxes, where they
went to those locations because of the prestige.
In many cases,
they came from other countries and they moved to Los Angeles or they moved to
San Francisco because of the prestige of the city, and all of a sudden they
have tents. Hundreds and hundreds of tents and people living at the entrance to
their office building. And they want to leave. And the people of San Francisco
are fed up, and the people of Los Angeles are fed up.
Oh, god, those poor rich people—even those poor rich people
who immigrated to the United States—they came for the prestige. And they have
suffered horribly, what with less prestige than hoped. Also, tripping over
those human wrecks on the sidewalks in front of their high-rent homes.
And, oh, those ugly tents, where people with mental illnesses
live, and where veterans with PTSD hunker down and don’t shower for a month.
Oh, the smell. How the suffering folks who pay high taxes stand it, walking
right by, god only knows! Right there, too! Right on our “best streets.”
If only the homeless would go live in some crummy
neighborhood, with the rest of the poor! Out of sight.’
Out of mind.
Empathy? Trump?
None.
Postscript: Once again we learn that the
“enemies of the people” are spreading more “Fake News!”
President Twitter Thumbs posts a link on his account showing
Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Muslim-American woman, a woman Trump loves to hate, dancing
and celebrating on the eighteen anniversary of 9/11.
“The new face of the Democratic Party,” he warns.
All across the land, you can almost hear his 64 million
Twitter fans yelping, “Damn unpatriotic Muslim bitch. Time to polish up my gun.
We gonna have to take that traitor out.”
Alas, the “Fake News” is being put out there by Twitter
Thumbs himself.
It has now been conclusively shown that the clip Trump linked
to on his account shows Omar dancing at a celebration on September 13. Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive
Change Campaign Committee, hosted a celebration for Omar and other Democratic
lawmakers that evening, and posted the clip of the dancing that night. Ah, but
Trump didn’t bother to check. When some Twitter idiot posted a doctored clip to
make Omar look bad, the president passed it along.
Now he has had to take the tweet down.
No apology has been issued by the White House; and again, we
learn, Trump has no empathy at all.
 |
| Rep. Omar was not dancing on the anniversary of 9/11. President Trump was lying, however. |
9/19/19: It’s monsoon season in Texas.
Just as scientists warned, climate change increases both the rate of water
evaporation and the amount of water the atmosphere can hold. The science is
simple. This will cause more frequent “extreme weather events.”
This week, Tropical Storm Imelda dumped almost four feet of
rain along the Texas coast. Catastrophic flooding resulted. Five people died,
gas stations, homes, businesses and towns were submerged. Flights into and out
of Houston (a city which also drowned in 2017) were canceled. Runaway barges
striking the I-10 bridge over the San Jacinto River forced closure of the
highway. Thousands of people, pets and even livestock had to be rescued. Gov.
Greg Abbott, a dedicated climate change-denier, was forced to declare a state
of disaster for 13 counties.
Meanwhile, Imelda had dumped the seventh highest amount of rain ever recorded
in U.S. history. Hurricane Harvey, which dumped 60 inches on Texas in 2017, set
the all-time mark.
In Trumpistan, of course, all efforts to protect the
environment are viewed as job-killing, commie plots. According to President
Trump windmills cause cancer and we’re all going to die if we don’t burn all
the coal we can mine.
The
birds and the bees are dying.
A new study, just released by commie scientists and published in Science
magazine, warns that the commie bird population in Canada and the United States
has fallen by 2.9 billion since 1970. That’s a decline of 29%.
The commie scientists warn that the decline is evidence of a
“widespread ecological crisis.” They also warn that climate change has made the
situation worse. Overuse of pesticides is a major factor.
Well, screw it! Who needs birds?
By the way, bee populations are also in dramatic decline across the United States; and commie
beekeepers have faulted the Trump administration for approving use of chemicals
they blame for the precipitous fall.
Well, who needs bees!
As President Trump likes to say, climate change is a “hoax.”
In fact, protecting his supply of hairspray is more important
than protecting the ozone layer, itself.
*
IN OTHER NEWS, Daniel McCarthy, running as a Republican for a
U.S. Senate seat in Arizona, has proposed a novel solution for the immigration
crisis on our southern border. McCarthy would like to shift the border slightly, by annexing Mexico and turning
Mexico into a bunch of new states.
The idea of a bunch of new states—probably sending more
Democratic senators to D.C.—would likely cause “Moscow Mitch” McConnell to
start shouting about “full-bore socialism” again.
Speaking of “Moscow Mitch,” the Senate Majority Leader did
finally allow a vote on legislation yesterday which allocates $250 million to
help states improve voting security before the 2020 election.
On the other hand, Republicans in Congress are freaking out because the people of Washington D.C. are
talking about becoming a state. For some bizarre reason the 702,000 people who
live in the District think they have a right to have one vote in the House of
Representatives and two in the Senate.
Republicans oppose the idea because—hey—the Founding Fathers!
Rep. Jim Jordan, nutjob GOP lawmaker from Ohio, made that
point clearly during hearings yesterday. “This is not what the Founding Fathers
intended,” he pointed out. Then again, the Founding Fathers certainly did not
intend that a president could pardon himself. Jordan likes that idea.
Nor did the Founding Fathers, in their infinite wisdom,
intend that women should vote.
Or African Americans, either. The Fathers did think, however,
that it was a great idea to count every five African Americans the same as
three white folks in determining state populations. (I think it is only a
matter of time before Rep. Jordan or some other GOP stalwart suggests a return
to that system.)
Here’s where debate stands. Republicans already in Congress,
representing heavily-populated states like Wyoming (572,000), Alaska (735,000)
and North Dakota (761,000), believe that the people of those states should have
just as much say in the U.S. Senate as the people of California (40,000,000).
But, as “Moscow Mitch” sees it, it would be “full-bore
socialism” to let D.C. residents have a voice.
During congressional hearings yesterday a map was submitted.
Advocates of statehood suggested that the federal government retain control
over the National Mall, the White House, Capitol Hill and all federal
properties. The rest of the District would become the fifty-first state.
Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who represents the 755,000
people of the Fourth Congressional District in his state, homed in on the key
issue of the day. Why did the proposed map leave Trump International Hotel
under jurisdiction of the new state? Massie, a Republican, was in a
position to raise such a stupid objection because he speaks for the people of
the Fourth Congressional District in his state.
Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-VA) pinpointed the root cause of
Republican opposition to statehood, saying, “When they say it’s not about race
and partisanship, you can be sure it’s about race and partisanship.”
A witness for the Republicans at the hearing called on Rep.
Connolly to take his words back. Because who would ever think the Republicans
would stoop to race-based partisanship!
“Never,” Connolly responded.
9/20/19: Technically, Bruce Bartlett is
listed as an “Independent” in politics; but I will quote him on Trump because
he worked in both the Reagan White House and the George H. W. Bush
administration. A British reporter wanted to know if Bartlett thought Trump
lied so much because he was dishonest. Or were his false statements a function
of profound ignorance?
…former Deputy Assistant
Treasury Secretary for Economic Policy Bruce Bartlett said it would be easier
to list the number of subjects Trump understands than the ones he doesn’t
understand. “Other than how to pander to right-wingers and get busty women to
have sex with him, I can’t think of anything,” [that he actually understands].
Bartlett agreed with the assessment of Harvard economics
Professor Jeffrey Williamson, who insisted that Trump couldn’t tell the
difference between business debt (hey, let’s declare bankruptcy) and sovereign
debt (federal deficit; we’re ballooning the budget again). Both men told
reporters they feared,
that Trump’s apparent ignorance
was exacerbated by his advisers’ sycophancy. “The real problem isn’t Trump’s
ignorance and stupidity—it’s that he is surrounded by people like [Treasury
Secretary Steven] Mnuchin who are just as ignorant and stupid, or too cowardly
to tell him when he’s wrong.”
*
Bartlett and Williamson are not alone in suspecting that the
President of the United States is an uninformed numbskull. Former National
Security Adviser John Bolton trashed his former boss behind closed doors earlier this
week. He told a gathering of conservatives that Trump’s decision to invite the
Taliban to Camp David was “disrespectful” to the victims of the 9/11 attack. He
said negotiations with North Korea and Iran were “doomed to fail,” and said
Trump’s decision to call off a retaliatory strike on Iran after they shot down
a U.S. drone in June convinced Iran they could get away with the recent strike
on Saudi Arabia’s oil refining facilities.
Of course, we know Bolton. We know what Bolton is like. He
says Iran’s attack on the Saudi facilities is “an act of war.” If it was up to
him, the United States would bomb Iran back—if not to the Stone Age—at least to
631 A. D., before Mohammed got the idea of spreading a new religion.
*
IN OTHER NEWS, the National Rifle Association has made it clear it considers a White House proposal on
enhanced background checks a “non-starter.” Guns aren’t the problem an NRA
spokesman insists. You just think they are, because every time we have a mass
murder in this country the murderer uses a gun.
Well, the NRA is not buying that “guns are the issue” crap.
The White House proposal ignores “what actually matters: fixing the broken
mental health system and the prosecution of violent criminals.” Senate Leader McConnell
agrees. Why, there’s nothing he can do! He’s waiting to see what President Trump says he thinks we
should do. “The administration is in the process of studying what they’re
prepared to support, if anything,” McConnell explains.
Yeah, “if anything.”
9/21/19: The president spends another Saturday
at one of his private golf courses, the 299th day, since taking
office, that he has spent completely or in part at one of the properties he
owns.
9/22/19: President Trump is busy
preparing for meetings in New York City at the United Nations.
He’s plans to insult our allies again and tell the world the
United States will now go it totally alone.
Okay. He’s ready. That means he can jump on Air Force One and
fly to Texas for a rally with Indian Americans (that is Americans born in
India), which will feature the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi.
Then Trump will jump back on Air Force One and fly to Ohio
where he will attend the opening of a Pratt Industries facility and talk about
all the jobs he’s creating. The new plant will produce 100%
recycled packaging.
What?
An environmentally aware President Trump?
9/23/19: Okay. False alarm. We do not
have an environmentally aware President Trump. Rather, the only question seems
to be, “How dumb is this man?” When it comes to climate change, he proves
infallibly ignorant.
Again.
At the U.N. General Assembly today, he sat in for fifteen
minutes as world leaders discussed the threat. The topic couldn’t hold his attention
for long. As he exited the session, reporters managed to stop him briefly and ask why he bothered to stop in at the
Climate Summit at all.
First, the basics. The Climate Summit was discussing global
climate and how that climate is changing. Also: what should be done by the
nations of the world to address rising global temperatures.
Got it? Climate. We already know that the president is unable
to differentiate between weather and climate. It’s as if he can’t tell the
difference between a tuna fish sandwich and a delicious Thanksgiving spread.
In fact, a U.N. report released this week notes that the
period ending on the last day of 2019 is on pace to be the hottest five-year span in recorded history. Trump and his merry
MAGA band will hear the initials “U.N.” and close their minds like bear traps.
So we should probably try NASA, instead, which warns that, globally, eighteen of the hottest nineteen
years are the last eighteen (2001-2018). And 2019 is on pace to be the
nineteenth out of twenty.
So how did the Climate-Denier-in-Chief respond?
The president
proves immovably ignorant.
“I’m a big believer,” he told reporters, “in clean air and
clean water, and all countries should get together and do that, and they should
do it for themselves. That’s very, very important.”
Again, the president proves he is immovably ignorant.
Yes, sir, clean water is nice. Yes, Mr. President, clean air
is also nice. The cleanliness of water and air have nothing to do with climate
change. You might just as sensibly have said, “I like banging porn stars.”
The response given made no sense.
If the air is hotter, we have a serious problem, no
matter how clean it is. And if the air is hotter, water will evaporate more
quickly, and it won’t matter if the water is clean. More water will remain
suspended in hotter air. Hotter water will give greater power to
hurricanes. And when hurricanes do come, the clean water will be dumped out
of the clean air in torrents and cities will be drowned. See: Hurricane
Imelda (2019), Hurricane Florence (2018) and Hurricane Harvey (2017), all of
which dumped record rainfall on the areas they hit.
Finally, President Trump decided to wrap it up by mocking an
autistic teenager, Greta Thunberg.
Thunberg is a 16-year-old climate activist and on Monday
issued an impassioned call for action at the United Nations. It was the time to
fight climate change, she said, past time for hollow words from world
leaders—“thoughts and prayers,” as it were, for Planet Earth. Trump could have
been a mature 73-year-old leader of a world power and just let it go.
But he had to be an asshole, instead:
Thunberg has a different way of speaking. That’s true. But
her message resonates with her generation, which will reap the winds Trump and
his geriatric fan base are now happy to sow.
And don’t forget: the President of the United States just
wasted his time picking on a Swedish teenager!
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