October 9, 2019: Trump Claims the U.S. Military Was Ammo-Less when He Took Over

 

10/9/19: If it’s a bad year for fish (see: 10/8/19), it’s a good year to be a billionaire! According to detailed new studies from 2018, America’s richest 400 families paid an effective tax rate of 23%, less than the 24.2% rate paid by the bottom half of American households.

 

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“A breathtaking and heartbreaking experience.” 

GOOD YEAR for billionaires, bad year for glaciers. Fox News posts pictures of Mont Blanc. At 15,774 feet, the mountain straddling the borders of France, Italy, and Switzerland, is the highest in western Europe. Scientists manage to compare glaciers on the mountain in 1919 with those a century later. The loss of ice is sobering, and for Fox News viewers, probably stunning. Normally, climate change denial is part of the company brand. 

Fox reports: 

“The scale of the ice loss was immediately evident as we reached altitude but it was only by comparing the images side-by-side that the last 100 years of change were made visible. It was both a breathtaking and heartbreaking experience, particularly knowing that the melt has accelerated massively in the last few decades,” said Kieran Baxter, of the University of Dundee, in a statement.

 

“Unless we drastically reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, there will be little ice left to photograph in another hundred years,” Baxter warned.

 

Somebody should probably alert President Trump to the growing realities and the challenges they represent.

 

Speaking of Trump, his lips move again, and a series of baffling whoppers come spilling out. For some unknown reason, he insists that when he took office the U.S. military was hurting. 

We couldn’t even buy ammunition! 

This was a surprising claim for several reasons. First, defense spending in Fiscal Year 2017, set before he took office, was $605.8 billion. That would be $1.66 billion per day. Second, U.S. defense spending far surpassed (and still surpasses) the spending of any other nation. Our spending, even before Trump took over, matched the next seven or eight highest-spending countries combined. 

Finally, the president claimed “a top general, maybe the top of them all” told him about this sad state of ammo-less affairs before he took charge. Yet, no top general came forward to support his claim. Retired Gen. Mark Hertling, former commander of U.S. Army Europe, did respond. “For those interested,” Hertling tweeted, “this isn’t true. Actually, it’s ludicrous.”