4/17/17: The lawyer for white supremacist
Matthew Heimbach, charged with assaulting an
African American woman at a Trump rally in March 2016, offers up a noteworthy
new kind of defense.
He blames the president.
____________________
My client, “acted pursuant to the
directives and requests of Donald J. Trump and Donald J. Trump for President.”
Attorney
for Matthew Heimbach
____________________
Really, no joke! His lawyer insists
Heimbach can’t be faulted. His client “acted pursuant to the directives and
requests of Donald J. Trump and Donald J. Trump for President.” If found liable
for damages, he says, “any liability must be shifted to one or both of them.” (See: 8/8/19.)
*
TRUMP ADVISERS spend the day arguing over
whether or not to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord. New E.P.A. head and
noted climate-change denier Scott Pruitt and Steve Bannon insist the president
keep his campaign promise and exit. Secretary of State Tillerson and
co-directors of the Bureau of Nepotism, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner,
warn that withdrawal will erode faith in the U.S., particularly where
American allies in Europe are concerned.
POSTSCRIPT: A 2014 poll
found the United States had more climate
deniers than any other advanced nation. This may prove that money invested in
pseudo-scientific work by Big Oil and Big Coal pays Big Dividends.
Of course, you could read all about climate change in that
font of “fake news,” Scientific American magazine. You could
go to NASA’s website. You could do your research. But act quickly before the
Trump administration slashes funding for climate change research and scrubs the
NASA site. The future looks grim unless you have your head so far
up your posterior you can’t catch a glimpse of anything past your small
intestine. You can also check out a letter signed by 375
scientists, including 35 Nobel Prize winners, stating emphatically that human
activity is driving climate change.
Meanwhile, Trump supporters can simply
stick their heads in their freezers and pretend 2016 wasn’t
the hottest year on record, beating out 2015 for the
old record, which beat out 2014 for the
record before that.
___
4/18/17: The powerful armada Trump claims he
sent steaming toward North Korea (see:
4/12/17) turns out to be steaming through the Sunda Strait, going the other way. We do have a
great military, but it’s not going to be easy hitting
North Korea from 3,000 miles away.
(This is not the last time the president
will prove he’s a complete numbskull, regarding the U.S. military.)
BLOGGER’S NOTE (7/4/19): One of Trump’s greatest moments – his claim
that in 1781, George Washington captured the airports at Yorktown.
Almost impossibly ignorant.
Okay, not even close!
___
4/19/17: The Hillreports: “A Moscow-based think tank linked to Russian
President Vladimir Putin created a plan to swing the 2016 presidential election
in favor of Donald Trump.”
Damn
reporters! Always digging for facts and writing stories based thereon.
___
4/20/17: Attorney General Jeff
Sessions tells a conservative commentator he’s
“amazed that
a judge sitting on an island in the Pacific” could block Trump’s second travel
ban.
Sessions apparently forgets all federal judges have such
power and that Hawaii is part of the United States.
___
4/21/17: Six hundred icebergs have
already been seen in waters near Newfoundland. Most years the number at this
point is 60. This is more evidence that the Greenland ice sheet is breaking up.
We need more snowballs! (See:
3/14/17.)
___
4/22/17: Thousands of scientists,
supporters, and environmentalists demonstrate across the nation. Organizers are motivated
by Mr. Trump’s attacks on funding for NASA, his decision to turn the E.P.A.
over to a man who could not, in confirmation hearings, name a single E.P.A.
regulation he supported, and in the face of the president’s claims that global
warming is a hoax and vaccines might be killing children.
Dr. Naomi Oreskes, a professor at Harvard, who participates
in the march, explains: “I can’t think of a time where scientists felt the
enterprise of science was being threatened [emphasis added] in the way
scientists feel now.”
The president’s grasp of scientific truths has often proved tenuous. See, for
example, his idiotic comments on hairspray.
BLOGGER’S NOTE:On the eve of the
summit with North Korea, fourteen months later, The New York Times will report that the White House “has never added a
science adviser or senior counselor trained in nuclear physics.” The State
Department will still not have a chief scientist. Nor will the Department of
Agriculture, although Trump did nominate Sam Clovis for that post, despite the
inconvenient fact that Clovis had zero background in…science. The Interior
Department and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will both have
disbanded climate change panels. Joel Clement, an expert in climate change at
Interior, will be reassigned to a new job. That new job: overseeing fees from
fossil fuel drilling.)
June 1, 2017: The
president, who can’t tell the difference between
weather and climate, and has the same
grasp of basic science one might expect from a hamster, withdraws the U.S.
from the Paris Climate Accord. In so doing, he aligns the United States with
two other “leading” nations: Syria and Nicaragua. The other 194 signatories
still believe climate change is a serious threat.
BLOGGER’S
NOTE: April 2018 more than a thousand members of the National Academy of
Sciences will sign a letter criticizing
the decision to withdraw
from the accord. “The dismissal of scientific evidence in policy formation has
affected wide areas of social, biological, environmental and physical
sciences,” they will warn.
___
6/2/2017: Reporters
ask aides if the president still believes global warming is a hoax. It’s an
easy question. You might as well ask if Trump believes in Santa Claus. Press
Secretary Sean Spicer replies, “I have not had an opportunity to have that
discussion.” (See: 8/27/17; 12/28/17; 1/6/18.)
Kellyanne Conway gives a flippant answer,
fluffs her hair, and prances away. “You should ask him,” she says.
____________________
“Make Our
Planet Great Again.”
President
Emmanuel Macron
____________________
In “Fake News,” German Chancellor Angela
Merkel, invoking her training as a scientist, tells reporters Trump’s actions:
…will not
deter all of us who feel obliged to protect this earth [emphasis added]…We
will gather all our strength – in Germany, in Europe, and in the world – to meet
the great challenges of humanity, like climate change, and to successfully
master these challenges. For all whom the future of this planet is important, I
say: Let us continue along this path together, so that we are successful for
our Mother Earth.
Koichi Yamamoto, Japan’s environment
minister, says the president has “turned
his back on the wisdom of human beings.”
French President Emmanuel Macron is blunt, mocking
Trump’s stance. He addresses an audience on TV:
Tonight, I
wish to tell the United States, France believes in you – the world believes in
you.
I know that
you are a great nation. I know your history – our common history.
To all
scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, responsible citizens who were
disappointed by the decision of the president of the United States, I want to
say that they will find in France a second homeland.
I call on
them: come and work here with us.
To work together on concrete solutions for our climate, our environment. I can
assure you, France will not give up the fight.
I call on you
to remain confident. We will succeed, because we are fully committed, because
wherever we live, whoever we are, we all share the same responsibility: Make Our Planet Great Again.
France and Britain pledge to ban the sale
of gas- and diesel-powered automobiles by 2040. (See: 7/6/17.)
___
6/3/17: The average American worker’s
wage grows 0.2
percent in May. This brings the year-over-year gain to 2.5 percent. That surpasses inflation
by 0.5 percent, meaning the average worker, earning $45,000 annually, has $225
more to stick in the bank or hide in his or her sock drawer.
By comparison, the top 25 hedge fund
managers earna combined $11
billion in 2016.
James Simons leads the way at $1.6 billion. Simon’s pay for one year equals the
wage gains piled up by 7,111,111 average workers.
In a baffling, stream-of-consciousness press conference
yesterday, the president gave voice for more than an hour to whatever
random fragments of thought percolated to the surface of his consciousness and
spilled from his lips.
If you missed it, or plowed through and read a transcript,
you had to feel sorry for reporters stuck listening in the Rose Garden, tasked
with deciphering the message. It was a sticky day in
Washington and Trump started by apologizing. He said there might be time for
questions, “maybe at the end,” if ‘it’s not too hot.’”
You might imagine the U.S. is facing a health crisis. Not so,
said Trump. “So,
we’ve had a big day in the stock market,” he noted.
“Things
are coming back, and they’re coming back very rapidly,” he added, “a lot sooner
than people thought. People are feeling good about our country. People are
feeling good about therapeutics and possible vaccines.” If you’ve never
noticed, Trump often substitutes the words “thing” or “things” for facts when
he speaks. But Americans were “feeling good” he claimed.
He cared about
protesters in faraway cities.
Trump’s
rambling discourse started off almost normal. He said he would be punishing
China for “its oppressive actions against the people of Hong Kong.” He said the
Chinese government was “extinguishing Hong Kong’s freedom.”
“We’ve all watched what happened,” Trump continued. “Not
a good situation. Their freedom has been taken away. Their rights
have been taken away.” He wanted the world to know he cared about protesters in
faraway cities. He just wasn’t a fan of protesters in front of the White
House.
After that, it was off to the races, except that Trump had no
idea which way he was running or why. He bragged about how he was making China
pay “massive tariffs” and how he was using billions of dollars raised by
tariffs to help America’s farmers. “I’ve given quite a bit to thefarmers and ranchers of our
country because they were targeted,” by retaliatory Chinese tariffs.
The
president still didn’t understand how tariffs work, or how importers pass costs
on to consumers. He said he’d given the farmers and ranchers $12 billion. Then
he gave them $16 billion more.
Trump didn’t
give them a dime. Consumers footed the bill.
Had he
mentioned Joe Biden? He thought he should. “Joe Biden’s entire career,” Trump
explained, “has been a gift to the Chinese Communist Party and to the calamity
of –
of errors
that they’ve made.”
Did he
mean “comedy” of errors? There’s no way of knowing when this president speaks.
He might have meant “cornflakes.”
Why was
he elected? Trump said, it had to do with “a lot of bad things; things related
to trade.” No telling what things he meant. He didn’t like the World Trade
Organization. That was for sure. And China had been ripping us off for years.
Whose
fault was that?
Biden!
He’s coming for your
windows and your eyeballs.
Trump wanted us to know. Biden was bad. He was in favor of
the Paris Climate Accord. “No good,” Trump grimaced. Okay. Sure. Two hundred other
countries signed the Accord. Trump said he saved us. He got us out of a bad
deal. A terrible deal. “I’ve been given a lot of credit for what I did there,”
Trump insisted. “It took a certain amount of courage, I guess, because it
sounds so nice – the Paris Climate Accord – but it wasn’t good for us at all.”
(See: 7/16/20.)
If Joe Biden got elected, we’d all be screwed. That would be
it for the windows we used to love.
Also. Our eyeballs! Our eyeballs would be wrecked. Trump
explained. Biden and the Democrats wanted to:
….mandate net-zero carbon
emissions for homes, offices, and all new buildings by 2030. That
basically means no windows, no nothing. It’s very hard to do. I tell
people when they want to go into some of these buildings, “How are your eyes?” Because
they won’t be good in five years. And I hope you don’t mind cold office
space in the winter and warm office space in the summer, because your air
conditioning is not the same as the good old days.
Trump’s aides must have told him he was polling poorly with
white suburban women. Trump wanted them to know that Joe Biden had a dastardly plan.
He wanted suburbs to allow low income housing to be built outside of cities.
Trump hates American cities. Too many Democrats!
He explained the threat:
Abolish – in the suburbs, you’re
going to abolish the suburbs with this [emphasis added]. Enforce
Obama-Biden’s radical AFFH – that’s the AFFH regulation that threatens to strip
localities of federal affordable housing funds unless they change their zoning
laws to fit the federal government’s demands. So what you have – I mean,
I’ve been watching this for years in Westchester, coming from New
York. They want low-income housing built in a neighborhood.
Biden! Biden wanted poor families to have better lives. He
wanted their kids to go to school with yours.
He wanted to abolish the suburbs.
Well, I’m ending that
rule. I’m taking it out, so – I spoke with Ben Carson the other
day. We’re going to be taking it out. I’ve watched that whole thing
go, and now they want to make it twice as bad in the suburbs – in the suburbs.
Mothers aren’t happy about that. Fathers aren’t happy about
that. They worked hard to buy a house, and now they’re going to watch the
housing values drop like a rock, and that has happened. It dropped like a
rock. So we’re not going to do that; we’re going to do the exact opposite.
According to Trump, Biden wanted “to defund our military.”
Not Trump. He wanted to spend more money. Because China is “building a massive
military.”
Trump did not call China’s president Xi Jinping his friend, as he so often has before. That’s not working out
so well, lately.
As for
the coronavirus, Trump bragged that he took care of it himself, with the China
travel ban. “And I was a crowd of one, because even experts didn’t want to do
it. They thought it was a mistake.” It came at us, the disease. It wasn’t
his fault it spread. “But we did what we had to do, and now we’ll put out the
flames as it – as it happens. We have to get the schools open. We
have to get everything open. A lot of people don’t want to do that for
political reasons, not for other reasons.”
That is
why, in one recent poll, nearly 70% of parents said they worried about
sending kids back to school.
“He’s really bizarre.”
For
most of an hour Trump babbled on about Joe Biden, and what a terrible person he
was. Biden,
he insisted, “He’s really bizarre.”
The president riffed about face masks. He didn’t like them. “I
see people now, friends of mine – they walk up, they want to say hello, and
they have to keep their distance, and they’re all covered up, like you’re all
covered up, with facemasks,” he said, motioning at reporters, cooking in the
sun.
Trump eventually
pulled out a list his aides had prepared, and ticked off all the mortal sins of
the former vice president. Biden is all for letting MS-13 gang members come to
the U.S., commit heinous crimes, and avoid deportation. “So, in other words,
we’ll take all of these people – many of whom are in prison for rape, murder, lots
of other things.” It wasn’t clear how, but Trump insisted Biden wanted to
“incentivize illegal-alien child smuggling.” By comparison, he claimed he had built
“259 miles…of great, powerful wall.” Not counting the part that fell down
earlier in the week. (See: 7/11-12/20.)
Trump said
that we had great asylum agreements with other nations in the Western
Hemisphere. Trump named three: Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Rather
than people coming here as refugees, he said those incredibly poor countries had
shouldered the load.
Who
wants refugees, anyway? I think that’s what Trump meant. At that point you had
to listen carefully to get what the president was trying to say, and even then,
you probably couldn’t.
In
fact, we might as well let the comedian Sarah Cooper take over for this quote:
Trump
wanted everyone to know, he had a “great meeting last week with the President
of Mexico. Great guy. Friend of mine – become a friend of mine.” The
two had never met before. This claim reminded me, when I read through the
speech, of other friends Trump has said he has.
Kim
Jong-un.
Xi Jinping.
Jeffrey
Epstein. (Okay, that one is kind of a joke.)
The
wall with Mexico. It was genius, Trump said, “because it stopped people coming
in from heavily infected areas of Mexico.”
What
about that infection? That COVID-19? “But it’s still – we’ve done a
great job; get no credit for it,” Trump complained. “And I don’t want the
credit.”
(You know he did.)
He said
he had kept people out of this country “that are going to come in and blow up
our cities, do things.” Maybe the “liberal Democrats running the cities”
wouldn’t mind if people came in and blew them up. “But I would mind,”
Trump said, “and the people of this country mind.”
That’s
how Trump’s press conference went. He didn’t think the people in the cities
would mind if they got blown up.
But he
would mind – even though he hated Democrats in the cities.
Joe Biden hates statues.
Also, Joe Biden hates statues. Trump? He loves statues.
Really, he loves Confederate statues almost as much as grabbing women’s….
Where were we? Yeah. Terrible people wanted to destroy our
best statues. Terrible people. Like African Americans.
And liberals.
But this has been going on, and
I found an act that we’ve used. And we have many, many people in jail
right now – many, many people in jail, all over the country – because they
tried to destroy or, in some cases, got – got it down, a federal statue or
monument.
I signed an executive order a
couple of weeks ago, and it says very simply, “Ten years in jail.” You do
it, 10 years in jail. The amazing part is we’re able to catch everybody
because, thanks to all of you on television – we appreciate it – but we have
their pictures. We have the man standing on Andrew Jackson’s
horse.
Roger
Stone? Seven-time convicted felon? No. No jail time for him.
Eventually, the president took a few questions. Was he down
in the polls, a reporter asked? “Do you see yourself as an underdog in this
race?”
Trump
said no. “I think we have a really good poll numbers.” His good poll numbers
were not fake. How could he be so sure? “You look at the Intracostal in
Florida. You look at the lakes. You see thousands of boats with Trump
signs, American signs. You’ve got the Trump-Pence sign all over,” he explained. “You
look at what’s going on. You look at bikers, for miles and miles, riding
up highways proudly with their signs.”
Bikers
with signs had nothing to do with actual polls, but you figure reporters were
nicely browned after an hour in the sun, and only hoped to get away before Trump
bragged about himself for another hour.
*
TRUMP ALSO FOUND TIME in his schedule the same day to pose
with an array of Goya food products, while sitting at the Resolute Desk in the
Oval Office. The company owner had praised Trump’s bold leadership. Latinos,
who love Goya foods more than they love Trump, called for a boycott.
5/3/21: The Biden administration continues to make clear: For the next four
years the U.S. will join the battle against climate change. The first step was to reenter the Paris Climate Accord. The second was the
president’s decision to hold a virtual summit regarding the crisis, involving forty world
leaders. The third was to reinstitute rules to control methane admissions – controls put in place
under Mr. Obama. Those rules were swept aside by Mr. Trump, who, in his
profound ignorance, did more harm with his climate policies and idiot rhetoric
than any human in the history of the world.
This week, as noted by The New York Times, the EPA
announced an important fourth step. New proposals to regulate
hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, “a class of man-made chemicals that are thousands
of times more potent than carbon dioxide at warming the planet,” were
announced.
The move is also the first time
the federal government has set national limits on HFCs, which were used to
replace ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons in the 1980s but have
turned out to be a significant driver of global warming. More than a dozen
states have either banned HFCs or are formulating some restrictions.
Meanwhile,
the forces of ignorance – that is, Republican leaders and their right-wing
media allies – remain strong. Struggling to find ways to damage President Biden,
they have tried fake rage.
We’ve
seen this before. Don’t have a healthcare plan? Attack Obamacare and insist
there will be “death panels” for granny. Other scare tactics in recent years have
included, the “War on Christmas,” which involved liberals beating up people who
dared go caroling, the “War on Wedding Cake,” with gays ruining marriage by
getting married, the “War on Coal,” which was going to reduce us all to
lighting homes with tallow candles, the “War on Potties,” involving transgender
folks standing around watching us pee, and now, the “War on Hamburgers.”
Since two-thirds of Americans believe government
should do more to address climate change – because they are not ill-informed dimwits
like Rejected-President Trump – and since Republicans have no plan – it was time
again for Scary Stories: Chapter XX. On one recent show
Fox News claimed that Biden’s climate requirements
would “cut 90% of red meat” from the American diet,” to a “max four pounds per
year,” or “one burger per month.”
“To meet the Biden
Green New Deal targets,” Larry Kudlow, of Fox Business said, “America has to –
get this – America has to stop eating meat. No burger on July 4. No steaks on
the barbecue.”
You could almost hear his viewers loading their
guns at the news – and not even noticing that the Democrats had never actually
come for those guns, or anything else, including poor granny.
Politico gave these kinds of claims the worst possible “Pants on Fire”
rating.
As for this blogger, he cannot resist noting that
when Kudlow was working as a White House advisor in the last administration, he
insisted in February 2020 that Team Trump had the coronavirus almost totally under control.
____________________
“We have it contained…I won’t say airtight, but
it’s pretty close to airtight.”
Larry Kudlow
____________________
Nice
call, Larry, you dolt.
*
IN
OTHER goofy, right-wing news, Tucker Carlson goes on another one of his nightly rants, yowling that if anyone
sees children wearing masks outdoors, they should call the police.
Carlson’s
point has something to do with the fact that outdoors, most of us are
relatively safe from COVID-19 or even the flu. But for some reason we should be
furious if parents try to be extra careful, regarding their kids. Forcing
children to wear masks outside, he grumbles, “should be illegal.” He adds that
if you see these youngsters, “Your response when you see children wearing masks
as they play should be no different than your response if you see someone
beat a kid in Walmart.” You should call the police. Or you should call
child protective services.
He went
on to say, of people in masks,
They’re
the aggressors. It’s our job to brush them back and restore the society we were
born in. So the next time you see someone in a mask on the sidewalk or on the
bike path, do not hesitate. Ask politely but firmly, “Would you please take off
your mask? Science shows there is no reason for you to be wearing it. Your mask
is making me uncomfortable.”
And on
this day, May 3, another 467 Americans die from COVID-19. Tucker doesn’t care about that.
