February 9, 2018: Scott Pruitt is an Idiot

 

2/9/18: Scott Pruitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, tries out a fresh new argument in regard to climate change. He’s probably tired of denying climate change is real and having the rest of the world mock his position. 

Hey, Pruitt says, maybe climate change will be good! “We know that humans have most flourished during time of warming trends,” he says in an interview. 

I think there are assumptions made that because the climate is warming, that that necessarily is a bad thing. 

 

Do we really know what the ideal surface temperature should be in the year 2100, in the year 2018? That’s fairly arrogant for us to think that we know exactly what it should be in 2100.

 (Sound of thousands of scientists smacking thousands of pates.)

 *

SPEAKING OF DUMB, the president decides to weigh in on the story of Rob Porter, who has just been booted from the White House in the wake of domestic violence accusations. “I found out about it recently and I was surprised by it,” Trump tells reporters. “We certainly wish him well. It’s obviously a very tough time for him. He did a very good job while he was in the White House. We hope that he will have a wonderful career.” 

Still, there’s hope, the president adds. “He says he’s innocent, and I think you have to remember that. He said very strongly yesterday that he’s innocent, but you’ll have to talk to him about that.” (See: 2/7/18.)

 

* 

SPEAKING OF DUMBER, the Trump administration decides to make America “safer” by deporting Amer Adi to Jordan. 

Adi is not a terrorist. He’s a Youngstown, Ohio businessman. He has a wife and four daughters, all U.S. citizens, and has lived in this country for 39 years. Rep. Tim Murphy called Adi a “pillar” of the community and noted that on Thanksgiving he passed out hundreds of turkeys to the poor. 

His problems with legal status began in the 1990s; but he had managed to remain in this country until now. 

In the age of No Mercy Trump.

BLOGGER’S NOTE (9/21/2021): Mr. Adi is allowed to re-enter the U.S. under a “humanitarian visa,” because the Biden administration has humanitarian instincts. He sees his grandchildren for the first time. 

As you would imagine, his family was thrilled.

February 18, 2018: EPA Head Scott Pruitt Leading the Good Life on Your Tax Dollar

 

2/18/19: Since our theme lately seems to be crooks and liars in the Trump administration, let’s not neglect the fiscal antics performed by E.P.A. head and Chief Climate Denier Scott Pruitt. It turns out any time Pruitt flies (and he flies more often than Mary Poppins) he goes first- or business-class. 

Last June, Pruitt flew business-class, round-trip to Italy, at a cost to taxpayers of $7,000. CBS reported that the price for his ticket was “several times the cost of what was paid for other staffers who accompanied him on the trip.” They all sat in coach. Yet Pruitt claims he must fly at the front for “security reasons.” Pruitt is the first E.P.A. head ever to set up a full-time security detail to protect him, 24/7, from tree huggers and crying babies in the backs of planes. 

Pruitt “also flew round trip between Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport and LaGuardia in New York on a shuttle flight costing $1,641.53. By contrast, the ticket for a staffer who flew with him cost $238.40.” 

(This would seem to indicate Pruitt isn’t worried about staffers being attacked or deafened by screaming children.)

 

On yet another occasion, Pruitt stuck taxpayers with a bill for $14,285.71 so he could take an 83-minute flight on a private jet, from Tulsa to Guymon, Oklahoma, in his home state. According to Google maps, the 326-mile trip would have taken just over five hours by car. 

So, let me say, as a patriotic American, that the next time Pruitt wants to travel, I volunteer to chauffer him at a cost of $500 per hour in my Honda Civic. That would mean savings of thousands for the federal government right there. 

I’ll even pay for gas and snacks if we stop. 

Pruitt could keep me busy in retirement because the man dearly loves to travel. One trip, via private jet, from Cincinnati to New York City, cost $36,069.50. A ticket on a commercial flight the same day could have been had for $350. 

One estimate puts the total cost to taxpayers for all these unnecessary private and first-class flights by Pruitt at $200,000.

 

Other members of the Trump team who find themselves under a travel cloud include Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin inquired about using a military jet to fly to Europe for his honeymoon. (At least that request was denied.) 

And we might add: these esteemed gentlemen will have to keep jetting all over the world if they expect to break the record set by HHS Secretary Tom Price, who stuck taxpayers for nearly a million dollars in charter flight expenses before the president decided he had to be grounded. 

To add insult to injury, Price’s hand-picked choice to lead the Center for Disease Control and Prevention was recently fired after it was shown she traded heavily in drug and tobacco stocks.

Why fly cheap if taxpayers are footing the bill?

April 15, 2018: The Trump Administration Does Less than Nothing to Protect the Environment

 

4/15/18: If Trump is draining the swamp it isn’t staying drained long. E.P.A. chief and Swamp Creature Scott Pruitt is currently accused of receiving a sweetheart deal on an apartment rental in D.C. for himself, and his daughter, from the wife of a lobbyist for the natural gas industry. 

I think we can all agree that nothing says, “I care more about the environment” than getting a sweetheart deal from a lobbyist in the fossil fuel industry. 

____________________ 

We have a science moron in the White House.

____________________ 

 

We also know Pruitt has put together a 20-person security team to protect himself – perhaps from people who want to save endangered fish. Cost of that detail and all the flying Pruitt and his guards and friends are “required” to do, in just one year in office: an estimated $3,000,000.

 

What else do we know about Pruitt? He spent $43,000 for a soundproof booth for his office, so his communications would be secure, even though the E.P.A. already had a booth. All Pruitt had to do was ride the elevator down a couple of floors; but he didn’t feel like it. We know he demoted or fired several people who questioned his spending. We know he liked to have his government-paid drivers turn on sirens and flashers when he was on the way to a restaurant or a Washington Nationals ball game. We know he requested a $100,000 per month private jet club membership – and asked to be provided a bulletproof limousine. (Those last two requests were denied.) 

We know Pruitt asked if he could raise the salaries of two top aides, Sarah Greenwalt and Millan Hupp. Greenwalt would go from $107,435 to $164,200 yearly, Hupp from $86,460 to $114,590. Those requests were denied. Someone at the agency then used a little-known trick and raised their pay regardless, although Pruitt says he had no idea how this happened. Maybe poltergeists?

 

Finally, Pruitt spent $40,000 to fly to Morocco for a meeting about…well, try to guess! Clean air? Saving endangered fisheries? Discussions on climate change? Nope! Pruitt flew all that way, with Samantha Dravis (see: 4/6/18) at his side, accompanied by his phalanx of guards, because he wanted to talk to Moroccan officials about why their nation should burn more liquefied natural gas. 

In the meantime, Pruitt is planning to “protect” the environment by slashing truck and automobile tailpipe emission and mileage regulations. “This is certainly a big deal. The result,” Robert Stavins, director of the Harvard program on environmental economics, warns, “will be more gas-guzzling vehicles on the road, greater total gasoline consumption, and a significant increase in carbon dioxide emissions.” 

Because, you know what America really needs? 

More smog!

Call the blogger a cynic - he has a hunch why Pruitt took Dravis (right) to Morocco.

 

* 

LET’S STOP AND PONDER clean air and water for a moment, or a world lacking in the same. 

We now have in the Oval Office a science moron. Trump does not read. Trump watches television. Lots of television. He watches Fox News. Because the president is intellectually lazy, and because he gets his news from other science morons, he believes climate change is a hoax. 

 

Trump will never grasp essential facts. 

Because Trump is singularly unaware, it is unlikely he will ever grasp essential historical facts. Human beings are really good at ruining the environment. Head for the outskirts of any large U.S. city and what do you see? Trash Mountain. It’s the city dump, increasing annually in height and breadth. Think humanity can’t destroy its habitat? We have a field of plastic debris swirling in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. A combination of currents has trapped an estimated 80,000 metric tons in what scientists now call “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” 

It’s twice the size of Texas. 

That’s not an aberration. Did you know farm runoff (pesticides and fertilizers) enters the Mississippi River and flows into the Gulf of Mexico? Did you know this runoff creates a “dead zone” at the mouth of the river, where oxygen in the water is depleted and sea life cannot survive? That zone is the size of New Jersey – including former Governor Chris Christie. 

Try to find the Aral Sea on a world map. If you’re like Trump, you can’t. But look fast. Once the fourth largest lake in the world, decades of water diversion for cotton farming destroyed the Aral Sea. 

By 2014 most of the lake had dried up. 

 

You can go back in history and find plentiful examples of civilizations that wrecked the environment and collapsed. The Fertile Crescent of ancient times is today mostly desert. The Biblical “cedars of Lebanon” vanished. The Kushites who ruled the Upper Nile and once conquered Egypt took it on the environmental chin and watched their world collapse. The Khmer people who built Angkor Wat suffered a similar fate. The Mayan civilization in Central America rose to great heights and crashed. 

You could go back forty years to a time when the world awakened to the danger from chlorofluorocarbons in products like aerosol hairspray. Trump, for whom hair spray is as essential as cheeseburgers, has denied this was ever a problem. Yet, four decades ago, humanity came close to ruining the earth’s ozone layer. 

No one knew till it was almost too late. We were saved, again, by science, in the form of NASA satellites gathering data. 

We got lucky. 

Chlorofluorocarbons have been heavily regulated since. The damage remains. Each summer a hole in the ozone the size of North America forms over the Antarctic. Luckily, it doesn’t form over North America. The increase in ultraviolet rays reaching the surface of the earth would increase every man, woman, and child’s chances of developing skin cancer if it did. Now, only penguins and plankton pay a price. 

Did you know scientists believe one fourth of the ocean’s reefs are damaged beyond repair? And did you know why? 

Rising water temperatures. 

Climate change.

 

Did you know scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center reported last year that sea ice at both the North Pole and the South Pole had declined to the lowest levels ever recorded? An extra area equal to 790,000 square miles of ocean surface was ice free, equal in size to two Mexico’s. 

You can look all this up if you’re not lazy. The ten hottest years ever recorded, globally (according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOAA), are now, in order: 2016, 2015, 2017, 2014, 2010, 2005, 2013, 2009, 1998 and 2007. You can turn off Fox News, where climate change deniers go to spout, and go to NASA websites and study the facts. 

Or you can do what the Big Orange Buffoon does: Watch hours and hours of television daily and tweet.

 

* 

PERHAPS YOU HAVEN’T been paying attention to the people Trump wants to put in charge of guarding the environment. If you haven’t, you should. Pruitt and his business buddies are hell bent on slashing regulations that protect us all and protect the future for our children and our children’s children. 

In a recent poll, however, a majority of Americans could not say who Pruitt was. 

Consider, then, Andrew R. Wheeler, former lobbyist for Murray Energy, the largest coal-mining company in America. He has been tapped to serve as Pruitt’s deputy at the E.P.A. Wheeler previously worked for Senator “Snowball” Jim Inhofe, who once insisted, because he could pack a snowball in Washington D.C. in January, that climate change could not be real. 

And dare we forget Kathleen Hartnett White, a former Texas environmental regulator? (Texas is pretty much famous for not regulating the environment, unless forced to when something blows up.) 

Ms. White was originally Trump’s moron pick to head up the Council on Environmental Quality. 

This would be akin to asking the president to serve as your marriage counselor. 

White once called belief in global warming “a kind of paganism.” As for CO₂, White wasn’t worried about it building up in the atmosphere. CO₂, she liked to say, was “the gas of life on this planet.” 

 

Choice for Council on Environmental Quality plagiarizes answers. 

What went wrong for Ms. White in her appearance before a U.S. Senate committee? First, it turned out most of the written answers she supplied had been cut and pasted, word for word, from answers previously submitted by Swamp Creature Pruitt and another Swamp Creature nominee, during earlier hearings. 

Second, once White started talking, you could understand why she tried to cheat her way through. 

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI.) asked her to estimate how much of the excess heat from climate change was being soaked up by the oceans. It’s an important question. If the oceans are currently absorbing most of the heat, the dangers of climate change are being masked. If the oceans and atmosphere both begin to warm up fast scientists predict catastrophic results. 

White replied that she didn’t know, but said there were many opinions and “no right answer.” 

This is the preferred fossil fuel industry answer. What it really means, is we don’t care. So, let’s keep burning as much coal and oil as we can. 

Whitehouse set a trap. He asked if there was a “serious scientific opinion that it’s below 50 percent.” White said yes. 

“Wow,” said Whitehouse. 

Actually, NOAA has been clear about this for years: 

More than 90 percent of the warming that has happened on Earth over the past 50 years has occurred in the ocean….Though the atmosphere has been spared from the full extent of global warming for now, heat already stored in the ocean will eventually be released, committing Earth to additional warming in the future. 

 

Whitehouse wasn’t done. He trapped White again. He wondered if she agreed water expands as it warms. It’s a phenomenon that children learn about in sixth grade science. 

“I do not have any kind of expertise or even much layman’s study of the ocean dynamics,” White admitted. 

She might as well have had a note taped to her back by some prankster that read, “Kick me! I’m an idiot!” 

Senator Edward J. Markey (D-MA.) had heard all he could stand. “Your positions are so far out of the mainstream,” he informed White, “they are not just outliers, they are outrageous. You have a fringe voice that denies science, economics and reality.” 

White’s nomination was withdrawn when it became clear even GOP senators would balk at confirmation.

May 2, 2018: EPA Head Facing Multiple Investigations - Trump Wrote His Own Medical Report

 

5/2/18: Another day in Trumpistan. In what is almost surely a record for any cabinet member in history, E.P.A. Administrator Pruitt faces eleven investigations. 

Pruitt testified recently in front of Congress. He maintained he didn’t know about any of the ridiculous spending, or pretty much anything else illegal that was happening at his agency. At times you had to wonder if Pruitt realized he ran the E.P.A. or if he thought he was a male stripper or a bronco buster. 

Former E.P.A. deputy chief of staff Kevin Chmielewski was blunt. He called his boss a “bald-faced liar.” Chmielewski, a Trump appointee, assured a reporter, “100 percent,” he was forced out after questioning Pruitt’s lavish spending. He was threatened by the head of Pruitt’s abnormally large security detail, Pasquale “Nino” Perrotta. With investigative storm clouds gathering, Perrotta suddenly decided to resign his post. 

Also leaving on the spur of the moment was Albert Kelly, Pruitt’s choice to head the E.P.A. Superfund cleanup program. 

Kelly had zero experience working on environmental issues and had never dealt with matters related to toxic waste. He did have banking experience in Oklahoma, from whence he and Pruitt came. Kelly had even earned a lifetime ban from the financial industry as a result of shady dealings and once helped Pruitt get a sweet deal on the purchase of a home. The seller was a former lobbyist, who took $100,000 less for the property than he had previously paid. The “buyer” was a shell company. This obscured the fact Pruitt was going to be the person who lived in the house and the person who got a special deal from a lobbyist.

 

Meanwhile, a Moroccan news agency revealed that a second lobbyist helped arrange an expensive trip to Morocco, by Pruitt and a few of his buds – including that second lobbyist, Richard Smotkin. Why exactly did the head of the E.P.A. need to fly – first class – to Morocco? No one knows. 

According to news reports out of Morocco, Pruitt stayed at the luxurious Hotel Sofitel Marrakech while he was visiting. 

Taxpayers footed the bill for Pruitt's trips.

 

* 

Trump wrote his own medical report. 

A SECOND TRUMP DOCTOR is in the news. Harold Bornstein, Trump’s personal physician for 36 years, recently told NBC that in February 2017, after he revealed that Trump was taking a prescription medicine for hair growth, his office was raided by Trump goons. Leading the raid was Keith Schiller, longtime Trump bodyguard, and at that time Director of Oval Office Operations. That made him a paid employee of the federal government. 

Schiller was joined by a top lawyer from the Trump Organization and another “large man” Bornstein didn’t recognize.  

Not only did Schiller demand Bornstein hand over medical records, without providing documents required before such a transfer could take place, he seized the originals. By New York State law those would be property of the doctor. Bornstein says he felt, “raped, frightened and sad [emphasis added].” Schiller also demanded that a framed photo of Bornstein and Trump be removed from the wall. 

According to NBC News: “Bornstein said the original and only copy of Trump’s charts, including lab reports under Trump’s name as well as under the pseudonyms his office used for Trump, were taken.” 

Well, be honest now. Are you the least surprised Trump used pseudonyms at his doctor’s office?

 

Bornstein told a reporter that a letter he supposedly wrote in December 2015, certifying Trump’s health and fitness to be president, was in fact written by…Donald J. Trump. “He wrote it himself,” Dr. Bornstein said. 

At the time, news reports quoted Bornstein as saying, “If elected, Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.”  Not just healthy! He’d be the healthiest ever! 

Trump had been mocking “low energy” Jeb Bush, and warning that Crooked Hillary lacked the “stamina” to do the job. 

So “Bornstein” gushed: 

Over the past 39 years, I am pleased to report that Mr Trump has had no significant medical problems. Mr Trump has had a recent complete medical examination that showed only positive results. Actually, his blood pressure, 110/65, and laboratory test results were astonishingly excellent.

 

Trump didn’t drink. Trump didn’t smoke. He’d never had cancer or required a knee or hip replacement. He had lost “at least fifteen pounds” in the last year. In other words, Trump was a stud. “His physical strength and stamina are extraordinary,” the letter writer added for emphasis.

 

* 

YOU MAY remember that Dr. Ronny Jackson also discussed Trump’s health in a televised meeting in January. Like Bornstein, Jackson laid it on with a trowel. Trump was in “excellent” health, both mentally and physically. “It is called genetics...” Jackson smiled broadly for reporters. “Some people have just great genes. I told the president that if he had a healthier diet over the last 20 years, he might live to be 200 years old.” Trump wasn’t just a stud currently. Jackson insisted he’d be a stud for a second term. 

Or a second century. 

Even the fact the president was sleeping only four or five hours a night didn’t trouble Dr. Jackson. Trump had “a very unique ability to just get up in the morning and reset” or “push the reset button,” which “has helped him with his stress level.” 

(I wondered at the time if Jackson had ever read any of the president’s early-morning rage-tweets.) 

Jackson noted that the president was 6' 3", which meant he was still growing at age 71. As Politico noted, Trump’s New York driver’s license lists his height at 6' 2," and at that height, and what Jackson said was Trump’s weight (239 pounds), the president would be officially obese.

 

* 

“The Department of Justice is not going to be extorted.”

 RUMOR HAS LEAKED that the House Freedom Caucus, a group of hard-right Republicans, is working on impeachment articles to get rid of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. 

Then Robert Mueller can be fired.  

Rosenstein was not dainty in response. “I can tell you there have been people who have been making threats privately and publicly against me for quite some time,” he told reporters. “And I think they should understand by now the Department of Justice is not going to be extorted.” 

Let that sink in. 

Trump’s bootlickers in the House of Representatives would love to shut an investigation down – not because it’s taking too long – but before it’s too late to protect all the assorted crooks.

June 4, 2018: Trump Agrees He Can Pardon Himself - and EPA Head Scott Pruitt Might Need a Pardon, Too

 

6/4/18: The Justice Department decides to spend good taxpayer money to appeal a court decision that says President Trump cannot ban people who disagree with him from his Twitter feed. (See: 5/24/18.) 

A judge has ruled that in endlessly tweeting about public policy, Trump’s account has become a public forum. 

Therefore, First Amendment rights apply. 

The president is not a fan of First Amendment rights (see: 6/5/18). So, he will use taxpayer dollars to keep taxpayers who disagree with how he spends taxpayer dollars from having a say.

 

* 

TRUMP WEIGHS IN on Rudy’s bizarre claim from the day before. Naturally, the president concurs: 

As has been stated by numerous legal scholars I have the absolute right to PARDON myself, but why would I do that when I have done nothing wrong? In the meantime, the never ending Witch Hunt, led by 13 very Angry and Conflicted Democrats (& others) continues into the mid-terms!

 

One wonders who these “numerous legal scholars are.” We’ve got Rudy…and Rudy’s imaginary friend. 

I decide to do a little checking. There are scholars who think the pardon power might include self-pardons. Most who subscribe to that theory add that it would be suicidal for Trump to so act, almost the same as self-impeaching himself. 

They argue that the American people would be outraged and their representatives in Congress would act. 

(Those scholars have not accounted for the epic cowardice Senate Leader McConnell brings to the table.)

 

* 

E.P.A. ADMINISTRATOR SCOTT PRUITT is a busy man, what with talking to lobbyists from the coal industry about how we can burn all the coal they can mine. It turns out Pruitt is so busy he needs an aide to run his errands. Millan Hupp, that aide, is told to hunt for a good apartment for Pruitt and book his travel. Hupp makes headlines when it is revealed she contacted the Trump International Hotel in D.C. and asked about getting Pruitt an “old” mattress for his new Washington digs – once Hupp helped him locate those digs. Hupp, 26, was more than happy to do errands and provide services because Pruitt made sure she got a good cost-of-living increase in her pay. She started off a year ago making $48,000 and ended up at $114,590. 

Alas, all the scandals now cost Pruitt his job…. 

I’m kidding. Hupp is forced to resign. 

Also out on her ear is a second aide, Sarah Greenwalt. Like Hupp, she got a good raise for her work in 2017, “earning” a bump of $66,000, to finish her abbreviated E.P.A. career at $164,200. 

When a reporter calls to ask about the resignations, a spokesperson for the E.P.A. responds, “You have a nice day. You’re a piece of trash.”

Ms. Hupp was paid by taxpayers to find Scott Pruitt a mattress.

June 7, 2018: EPA Administrator Hunts Down Scented Hand Moisturizer

 

6/7/18: Trump has not given a formal press conference in 476 days. If he does, reporters will ask pointed questions and he will have to explain his positions in more words than fill a simplistic tweet. 

 

The search for scented hand moisturizer. 

What kind of questions might the president want to dodge, besides the obvious ones about all the cheating he used to do while married to the current First Lady? 

Well, there’s the Russia investigation – and his brand-new claims that he can indeed pardon himself. 

And there’s always Scott Pruitt! 

A new report in the Washington Post says Pruitt had his security detail drive him around D.C., from one Ritz Carlton Hotel to another, so he could score some of his favorite scented hand moisturizer. 

He also thought it might be a good idea to send members of the detail out to pick up his dry cleaning.

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE: Whenever I find errors in what I wrote, I correct them. For example, in several earlier posts I referred to “Director Pruitt” of the E.P.A. His official title was “Administrator Pruitt.” Corrections have been made.

Amazon would have delivered this lovely array.

June 8, 2018: Rick Gates Knows Where the Coven Meets

 

6/8/18: This is how the Russia investigation goes. Rudy Giuliani makes stupid comments on television: “The president has the power to pardon himself! He can pardon a head of lettuce!” 

Next, the president posts a stupid tweet, something like: “I can pardon anyone I want. Even witches! I am totally innocent. But even if Special Counsel Mueller has pictures of me in bed with five Russian hookers, a pair of mallard ducks, and Vladimir Putin, I have the power to pardon myself!!!” 

 

Gates knows where the coven meets. 

Special Counsel Mueller and his investigators just keep on digging. They keep building cases (we don’t know how many there will be) and keep their mouths clamped shut. 

On this fine day Mueller and his team issue two fresh indictments. Paul Manafort gets hit with another, this time for witness tampering. 

If you’re having trouble keeping track, don’t feel bad. Manafort has been charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States, money laundering, tax evasion, bank fraud and being, generally, a scumbag. 

Also indicted for the first time is Konstantin Kilimnik, Manafort’s business partner and man with ties (of course) to Russian intelligence. Manafort once referred to him as “my Russian brain.” 

Rick Gates, Manafort’s right-hand man, and a cooperating witness in the investigation, has admitted that he knew Kilimnik was linked with Russian intelligence agents. Manafort left the campaign under a cloud in August 2016; but Gates remained a member of Team Trump through Inauguration Day and beyond. 

That means if there are real witches in the White House Gates knows where the coven meets.

Rick Gates is cooperating with Mueller.

 

* 

AT THE G-7 MEETING in Canada, President Trump, who all the other leaders there can’t stand, suggests Russia should be allowed to rejoin the group. That way he’d have at least one friend. 

Trump also appears to be confused. At one point, he suggests Canada was responsible for burning the White House in 1814. As for Russia invading the Crimea in 2014, that doesn’t bother him one bit.

Trump does ♥Putin.

 

Ohio Governor John Kasich, a Republican, issues this statement: 

Russia was kicked out of the G-8 because of its invasion and annexation of Crimea. Since that time, Moscow has encouraged and directed a separatist insurgency in Eastern Ukraine, intervened in support Syria’s murderous dictator and the war crimes that he has perpetrated, interfered in the U.S. presidential election, waged an information war to undermine Western democracies, attempted to assassinate opponents on the sovereign territory of our allies, and made common cause with China to undermine the post-WWII international security system and the democratic values embedded in it.

 

…President Trump’s idea of renewing Russian membership in the G-7/G-8 does not protect or defend the national security interests [emphasis added] of the United States or our allies.

 

Ohio Sen. Rob Portman, also a Republican, says in a statement of his own, “Russia shouldn’t be let back into the G-8 until it changes the behavior that caused it to be expelled in the first place.”

 

* 

BACK IN WASHINGTON D.C., Sierra Club leaders file a Freedom of Information Act request. Then they start digging through E.P.A. records. It doesn’t take long to learn that E.P.A. Administrator Pruitt allowed a Dallas businessman to select the head of the E.P.A.’s influential Science Advisory Board. 

That businessman, Doug Deason, and his dad, Darwin Deason, donated $900,000 to GOP candidates and Trump’s 2016 election. Now the head of the Science Advisory Board will review regulations that can impact Deason’s business. 

Pruitt has also removed pesky scientists, with their ridiculous focus on clean air and water, from several advisory boards. To fill their seats, he allowed coal and gas industry executives to suggest replacements. Now the people who bring you giant oil spills, blow up towns like West, Texas and cause hundreds of fracking-related earthquakes in Oklahoma, will be advising the E.P.A. on clean water and clean air and how to make sure dangerous chemicals don’t end up… 

Oh, forget it. This is Scott Pruitt. 

He doesn’t care any more about clean air and water than Trump cares about eating healthy and regular exercise.

July 3, 2018: Coal Miners Love Trump - and the Head of EPA Is A Crook

 

7/3/18: E.P.A. Administrator Scott Pruitt continues to lead in the race to be declared the worst cabinet member since Albert B. Fall, Secretary of the Interior and brains behind the Teapot Dome Scandal. 

See 1923 for details. 

Leaked information from congressional investigations shows Pruitt routinely used aides paid for by “We, the People,” to schedule personal travel and run errands. He continued to spend lavishly on travel even after E.P.A. officials warned him. He asked an aide to violate federal law and call around to political groups that might like knowing they had a friend at the E.P.A. And, hey, could they find a job for his lovely wife, Marilyn? He thought a starting salary of $200,000 sounded about right. 

For some odd reason, Pruitt routinely asked aides to put charges for his hotel rooms on their credit cards when they traveled.

 

* 

IN ALABAMA, Randy Johnson takes heart, knowing Donald Trump will fight and win the “War on Coal.” Having retired from the coal mining business in 2014, Mr. Johnson, 71, decides coal is back! 

He spends $2.7 million on a 220-ton excavator, buys up an available tract of land, and starts fresh, mining once again. His 22 employees paint “Trump” in white block letters on the side of the new machine and Trump (the machine, not the golfing fool in the White House) goes to work. 

In a recent letter to the White House, Johnson wrote the president appreciatively, “We know you ‘get it’ and you love America and coal miners. Keep fighting for us and we will stand with you.” 

This blogger realizes that good people can have good reasons to vote for Trump. For example, you believe he’ll save the industry that employs you. Coal mining, obviously. 

This does not mean climate change is a hoax; and anyone who says it is – such as our president – is a nitwit.

 

(By year’s end, 2018 will rank as the fourth hottest year, globally, ever. The top three, in order: 2016, 2015, 2017.)