11/13/18: Trump has his undies in a wad and he’s not going to let a foreign enemy make him look bad! Is it Kim Jong-un, who won’t give up a single nuke? Vladimir, who interfered in the election?
Nope. Trump is mad because Emmanuel Macron, leader of France, a longtime U.S. ally, has said “nationalism” is bad.
Time for Trump to tweet-insult an ally again:
Emmanuel Macron suggests
building its own army to protect Europe against the U.S., China and Russia. But
it was Germany in World Wars One & Two - How did that work out for France?
They were starting to learn German in Paris before the U.S. came along
[emphasis added]. Pay for NATO or not!
Did our president just mock the French because they suffered millions of war dead between 1914 and 1918, and got overrun by the Nazi juggernaut in 1940?
Jesus. He did.
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Nazis in Paris - somehow this amuses Trump. |
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OKAY, MAYBE KIM JONG-UN still has all his nuclear weapons. And maybe crazy haters are shooting up bars and synagogues and yoga parlors. Still, we’re safe from the immigrant caravan for now.
Sadly, it turns out not even all our military leaders are convinced the troops we have guarding the border are serving a useful purpose. “Now that the political utility of troops on the southern border to face a fictitious caravan invasion threat is over [emphasis added throughout],” Admiral James G. Stavridis, a former commander of the military’s Southern Command, tells reporters, “let’s hope the president will stand down the troops so they can be with their families – especially over the holidays.”
John A. Nagl, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel who
served in Operation Desert Shield in 1990 and 1991, compares his experience
with that of troops stationed along the border. “Having spent months in the
desert with nothing to do,” Nagl says, “at least we had scorpions to have
scorpion fights with. But we had a real mission,” he adds. “These guys don’t have that.”
*
DEVELOPMENTS REGARDING the midterms rile up an already riled president. The Democrats continue to pick up seats in the House of Representatives, several governorships, and hundreds of seats in state legislatures. Martha McSally concedes defeat in Arizona and Democrats take the Senate seat once held by Trump nemesis, Sen. Jeff Flake.
McSally’s calm concession speech blows a giant hole in Trump’s claim of rampant voting fraud across Arizona.
Grant Woods, a former Republican state attorney general in
that same state, who recently registered as a Democrat, warns that Trump and
the Republican Party have simply moved too far right for Southwest voters. “The
extremism of the current Republican
Party is a losing strategy for the future,” he says. “In
the Southwest in particular, where we’re talking about a diverse population
and, increasingly, a younger population, people just aren’t going to put up
with it.”
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ALSO UNAPPEALING to younger voters, and humans generally, the noxious smell emanating from the Trump version of the EPA. That is the version where “protection” is secondary.
The latest example of malfeasance comes with the indictment of Trey Glenn, the regional director for EPA’s southeast region, on six felony counts. Before he was chosen to help run the EPA, by turning a blind eye to pollution, generally, Glenn was a lawyer, earning $250 per hour, who worked to block EPA efforts to clean up contaminated Superfund industrial sites in north Birmingham and Tarrant, Alabama. His client was Drummond Co., a coal company, which would have been responsible for the expensive cleanups.
A federal jury has already convicted a partner in Glenn’s law firm and a VP from Drummond on charges of bribing an Alabama state lawmaker – who charged $7,000 per month – in an effort to stop the EPA effort. Glenn has been charged with various ethical and criminal lapses in the same case.
As one U.S. attorney involved in the case explained, “It’s
cheaper to pay for a politician than it is to pay for an environmental
cleanup.”
BLOGGER’S NOTE: On November 21, Glenn resigned his position with the EPA, marking a major defeat for industrial polluters.
In October 2020, he managed to have
his felony charges knocked down, and pled guilty to three misdemeanors.
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IN OTHER NEWS, the F.B.I. reports that hate crimes increased for a third year in a row, up 17 percent in 2017. The leading motivators are race and ethnicity, followed by religion and sexual orientation.
The groups being attacked with increasing regularity are the same groups Donald J. Trump and extremists on the right most love to hate. These include Muslims, Jews, Sikhs (usually mistake as Muslims), dark-skinned immigrants, African Americans, gays, lesbians, and transgender individuals.
The New York Times provides detail:
A spate of seemingly racially
motivated incidents grabbed headlines last year, including a white man’s fatal
stabbing of two men who were protecting a woman wearing a hijab in
Portland, Ore.
Black people accounted for
nearly half of hate crime victims last year, according to the F.B.I. report. Of
those targeted based on religion, 58 percent were Jewish.
“For the N.A.A.C.P., we began to
see this during the presidential election in 2015,” said Derrick Johnson, the
president of the organization. “The level of tribalism that was being fueled by
presidential candidates, the acceptance of intolerance that has been condoned by President Trump and many
others across the country has simply emboldened individuals to be
more open and notorious with their racial hatred.”
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From the start, neo-Nazi types have liked Trump. |
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