May 1, 2017: This is Loyalty Day. Trump proclaimed it all by himself! He wants all Americans – well, maybe not the Muslim ones – to “recognize and reaffirm our allegiance to the principles” upon which our nation was built. “The United States stands as the world’s leader in upholding the ideals of freedom, equality, and justice,” the proclamation for the day reads.
Oddly enough, Trump also invites Rodrigo Duterte, cutthroat president of the Philippines, to visit the White House.
__________
“A son of a
whore.”
__________
You know they’ll have chemistry. Duterte
is anti-free press and once called Obama a “son of a
whore.”
Sure, people who deal in “fake news” will criticize. They will tell you Duterte is a cold-blooded killer. Time says that as part of Duterte’s aggressive anti-drug campaign, in 97% of drug busts, police kill all suspects, not to mention innocent bystanders who might have criticized Duterte.
Amnesty International labels such tactics “extrajudicial murder.”
Reuters reports that Duterte said in his Inaugural Address that his country was infested with 3.7 million drug addicts. Later, he told a reporter, “I have to slaughter these idiots for destroying my country.”
Anyway, it’s Loyalty Day, when we
celebrate America’s core values and Duterte has been invited to the White House
for a sleepover. He’s the guy who said he was going to “forget the laws
on human rights [emphasis added]” once he took office.
 |
Duterte says "corrupt" reporters deserved to die. |
___
5/2/17: Trump tries on his tin-pot dictator hat. He’s frustrated (after three months) with the slow pace of reforming the country. Hey, why not change Senate rules to give the GOP total control?
He tweets out a call for the Senate to ditch its 60-vote rule, required to pass many kinds of legislation. The votes aren’t there. “We....either elect more Republican Senators in 2018 or change the rules now to 51%.”
If that doesn’t work, how about this idea: “Our country needs a good ‘shutdown’ in September to fix mess!”
You
read that right. The president wants to shut down the government if he can’t
have his way.
*
TIMOTHY NOLAN, 70, and the former chair of Trump’s 2016 campaign in Campbell County, Kentucky is due in court. Charges lodged against him include “forcing a minor to engage in commercial sex” in or around August last year.
Nolan denies all charges.
BLOGGER’S
NOTE: When I set to work, editing my blog in April 2021, I learn that Nolan is by
that time a convicted sex offender.
And
there’s a similar story
about Trump’s 2016 campaign chair in Oklahoma, former State Sen. Ralph Shortey.
Described by some as “pious,” in November 2017, he agreed to plead guilty to
child sex-trafficking, by GOP standards of the very worst kind. His
victim was a 17-year-old male!
As
the New Republic explained, when police
questioned Mr. Shortey at a motel where he had arranged to meet his victim,
Shortey was wearing
a T-shirt referencing a Bible verse, which was visible in their bodycam video,
as The
Oklahoman detailed – Ephesians
5:22: “Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord.”
“Underneath
‘Ephesians 5:22’ is a cartoonish drawing of a sandwich,” according to The Oklahoman. “Underneath
the drawing is the phrase, ‘Now go make me a sandwich.’”
Ironically,
Shortey had previously voted against a transgender bathroom bill and had voted
to allow business owners in Oklahoma to discriminate against LGBTQ individuals. See: 7/19/19
and 1/14/20
for Trump adviser George Nader’s conviction.)
___
5/3/17: We learn that former Assistant Attorney General Sally Yates is preparing to testify before Congress. She will indicate “that she gave a forceful warning to the White House regarding then-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn nearly three weeks before he was fired, contradicting the administration’s version of events, sources familiar with her account tell CNN.”
Yates will tell Congress she informed White House lawyers that, “Flynn was lying when he denied in public and private that he had discussed U.S. sanctions on Russia in conversations with Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergei Kislyak.” The general’s “misleading comments,” she warned, meant that General Flynn was “potentially vulnerable to being compromised by Russia.”
BLOGGER’S NOTE: Yates was soon fired for
her pains. Trump & Co. then blamed the fact Flynn was working in the White
House on President Obama, because Flynn won a security clearance while Obama
was in office.
All Trump did was hire the man to serve
in his campaign and make him his National Security Adviser. (See: 12/1-2/17.)
.jpg)