April 17-22, 2017: Trump Gets Climate Science Wrong - but White Supremacists Love Him

 

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 Hill reports: “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.

Bring back measles and smallpox! (See: 4/29/19.) 

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.)

April 6, 2018: How Russians Launder Money - and How the Trump EPA Doesn't Protect the Environment

 

4/6/18: The stock market begins the day by plunging 700 points on growing fear of a trade war with China. 

It ends the day down 572. 

____________________ 

Russians looking to do some laundry.

____________________ 

 

Shortly after the market closes, the Treasury Department announces sanctions on 17 Russian officials, 12 companies, 7 Russian oligarchs and 6 Lords-a-Leaping. Among the sanctioned: Oleg Deripaska and eight of his companies. 

Can we find any connection to anyone in the Trump 2016 campaign? Yes, we can! But not, “Yes, we can,” in the Obama sense. 

Deripaska and campaign manager Paul Manafort were in business together for years, prior to Trump’s run for the money…uh…presidency. Alexander Torshin, also among the sanctioned, worked through the N.R.A. to set up a meeting with Don Jr. during the campaign. A third gentleman on the list is Suleiman Kerimov, accused of smuggling cash into France in suitcases, $20 million at a time. Then he laundered it all by buying fancy villas. 

Why might that ring alarm bells in Trumpistan? NPR explains: 

The Treasury Department’s singling out of Kerimov for allegedly smuggling cash out of Russia followed a report this week by CNN that said Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller’s office has been interdicting wealthy Russians as they fly into the United States [emphasis added, unless otherwise noted] in order to interview them about potentially transporting cash.

 

If Russia funneled money to American political campaigns or organizations as part of its attack on the 2016 election, one way it might have done so is by simply smuggling paper dollars in order to avoid electronic transfer records.

 

Foreign contributions are barred in U.S. elections…

 

One way in which illicit money allegedly moves out of Russia is via real estate. A rich person buys property in the West (in London, New York or South Florida) without living in it. Instead, hot real estate markets in those places make it simple to resell a condo or a mansion and free up legitimate cash. In Kerimov’s case, he was allegedly using this scheme in the south of France when he was arrested in Nice last year.

 

In 2008, Donald Trump sold an estate he had purchased for around $42 million in Palm Beach, Fla., to Russian tycoon Dmitry Rybolovlev for $95 million.

 

Who else was on a January 2018 Treasury Department list for possible sanction? Yes, Rybolovlev! Aras Agalarov, who helped broker the secret meeting with Don Jr. in Trump Tower, was another. Sergei Gorkov, a Russian banker who met with Jared Kushner during the transition period, before Trump took office, was a third. Gazprom, a Russian oil company and Rosneft Oil, tied to Carter Page, the Trump aide who became a target of the FISA court, would make four and five. 

There are so many potentially corrupt links and conflicts of interest in this story it takes Politico seven charts to include them all.

 

* 

AT 9:44 P.M., I SETTLE in front of the TV for a little channel surfing. I catch Sean Hannity bitching about how the left hates Trump and never gives him a fair shake. 

It makes Hannity sick, he tells three guests, knowing “this president” has created “3,000,000 jobs.” 

Once again, being a fact-based liberal, I check the Bureau of Labor Statistics Monthly Jobs Report. Trump is enjoying a solid start to 2018. I may look at news with a left-of-center slant. But the math is the math is the math. 

Gertrude Stein said that. She was a real math afficionado. 

The March jobs report is relatively weak: 103,000 jobs added to the economy. The first official report for a month is “preliminary” and can change, up or down, but usually not by much. 

Let’s see how Trump has done so far, starting January 20, 2017, when he took office. We’ll give him 11/31^st’s of that month’s job gains. Then we’ll total up jobs added from February 2017 through March 2018. Not bad, President Buffoon. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics in just under fourteen-and-a-half months Trump has added 2,625,903 jobs. 

Not quite Hannity’s “3,000,000.” 

Still, not bad.

 

We now look to see how Obama fared when it came to adding jobs. For simplicity’s sake we’ll work backward from January 2017. We’ll give Obama 19/31^st’s of that month’s job gains, the same as Trump. (I’m not splitting January 20, since Trump took over at noon. We’ll just ignore that day and call it a tie.) Next, we can work backward, fourteen months: December 2016 to November 2015. 

We pull out the calculator and the total is – 2,933,903 jobs created in the last fourteen and 19/31^st’s months, under Trump’s predecessor. 

Now, let’s Google: “Sean Hannity credits President Obama with creating jobs” and see what we find. 

Okay: Nothing. 

I did find this, however, which I definitely found amusing:

 

* 

ONE GUY we can say is definitely adding jobs, is E.P.A. head and Swamp Creature Scott Pruitt. Pruitt who protects our air and water, at least in theory, has had to hire a twenty-person security team to protect him from…what, air pollution? That’s twenty jobs right off the bat; and a twenty-first goes to Samantha Dravis, who serves as associate administrator at the agency. 

Sadly, that job ends Wednesday when Dravis resigns under a cloud. But what fun while it lasted! Dravis got to fly first class, all over God’s creation, at taxpayer expense, just like her boss. 

 

Flexible hours at taxpayer expense. 

Dravis was always safely by Pruitt’s side, what with twenty security personnel keeping angry taxpayers at a distance. Also, the hours were flexible, to say the least. One Democratic congressman recently sent a letter to the Inspector General of the E.P.A, alleging that Dravis had not come to the office “for much if not all of the months of November 2017-January 2018.”  

 

POSTSCRIPT: Did you know Pruitt also wanted to design a special “challenge coin” or souvenir coin representing the E.P.A.? 

Did you even know the government was wasting tax dollars designing and handing out “challenge coins?” 

I admit I did not, until I noticed a story some months back about the coin Trump designed for himself. Naturally, it was bigger than any of the coins of his presidential predecessors. And it had the word “Trump” slapped on one side and his fat mug appeared on the other. 

Now we know Pruitt wanted a coin he could call his own. First, he would make his bigger than all the E.P.A. coins that came before. Second, he would remove the E.P.A. logo. Who needed that! Other possibilities included adding a buffalo, indicative of Pruitt’s Oklahoma roots (and maybe, since the buffalo almost ended up extinct, indicative of Pruitt’s less than aggressive efforts to protect the environment), a Bible verse to reflect his own religious tastes, and, naturally, his name in big bold letters. Finally, there was some thought of adding an oil company lobbyist to the inverse… 

Ha, ha, I made that one up. If you knew anything about Pruitt, and most of you don’t, you might believe it was no joke.

Under Pruitt, oil spills are no big deal.

April 8, 2018: EPA Protects the Koch Brothers, Trump Wants to Pull Out of Syria

 

4/8/18: On CNN (Donald J. Trump’s least favorite cable news channel), Republican Senator Susan Collins offers a vote of “no confidence” for embattled Swamp Creature Scott Pruitt. 

“On policy grounds alone, I think Scott Pruitt is the wrong person to head the EPA,” Collins tells Jake Tapper (Trump’s least favorite cable news host). 

Of course, you know who loves what Pruitt is doing? Charles and David Koch! And, what do the Koch brothers like to do – besides donate hundreds of millions to Republican politicians? 

They like to run a company that refines petroleum and manufactures all kinds of wonderful chemicals. 

As Pruitt and the Trump administration see it, you could give a bucket of any chemical the Koch brothers manufacture to children to drink. And it wouldn’t harm them a bit, other than the fact they might start to glow in the dark. And that’s why we now have an E.P.A. To help the Koch brothers.

 

* 

Fourteen months later: Still Obama’s fault. 

THE CRY-BABY-IN-CHIEF takes a second hit from a Republican senator Sunday morning, this time from John McCain. 

According to the senator, the president’s recent talk of withdrawing U.S. troops from Syria has “emboldened” Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and led him to order a chemical weapons attack Saturday. 

Here’s how McCain put it: 

President Trump last week signaled to the world that the United States would prematurely withdraw from Syria. Bashar Assad and his Russian and Iranian backers have heard him, and emboldened by American inaction, Assad has reportedly launched another chemical attack against innocent men, women and children, this time in Douma.

 

Trump wasn’t about to stand for such criticism and promptly turned to Twitter. Whose fault was this attack? 

Once again, the buck stopped not on his desk but conveniently, more than fourteen months in the past. “If President Obama had crossed his stated Red Line In The Sand,” Trump whined, “the Syrian disaster would have ended long ago! Animal Assad would have been history!”  

Trump has now had fourteen months to get rid of Animal Assad. 

He can’t do it either.

In Trumpistan, if it goes bad, Obama did it.

February 17, 2022: Not All Politicians Are Alike

2/17/22: No, dummkopfs! Not all politicians are alike. Voting makes a difference, whether or not you get everything you want from the people you help elect. For example, the Biden administration is:

 

ü Allocating $5 billion to help states build more electric charging stations for cars and trucks.

 

ü Reversing a Trump administration policy which stripped the power of  California and other states to set stricter tailpipe emission standards.

 

ü Taking climate change seriously, with Biden not being an ignoramus, like Trump, who called it a “hoax.”

Was there anyone in Trump's cabinet who wasn't a crook
or didn't quit and call the president a moron?

 

ü Pushing a bill to cap the monthly costs for insulin (needed by 1.6 million type-1 diabetics in this country if they want to live) at $35 per month –because drug companies have been gouging patients for years.

 

ü Forgiving student loans for 1,800 individuals, for a total of $71.7 million – those students having been bilked by rapacious agents of the for-profit DeVry University.

 

ü Which reminds me of Trump University, which got socked for a $25 million penalty for screwing students.

 

ü Not choosing a former executive of DeVry University to help run the Department of Education, as did Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, of the ill-fated Trump administration.

 

ü Not having cabinet members get ousted for ethics violations, as opposed to Team Trump, which featured E.P.A. administrator Scott Pruitt paying top aides who didn’t show up for work.

 

ü Not getting “F” marks from 170 major environmental groups for failing to protect the environment – thanks, Scott Pruitt, et. al.

 

ü Not having Biden labeled “the worst president for the environment in history,” as the Sierra Club labeled Trump.

 

ü And not having Tom Price, Trump’s first head of Health and Human Services, stick taxpayers for the cost of more than a million dollars in unauthorized flights.

 

ü And not having Alex Acosta, who became Trump’s Secretary of Labor, being the guy who gave Jeffrey Epstein a sweet deal which kept him from spending significant time in jail, allowing him another decade during which he was able to prey upon young girls.

 

ü And, as we just found out just this week, Trump’s Secretary of Interior, Ryan Zinke, who was negotiating a deal with land developers in Montana, by which he hoped to profit, while also “serving” as the man in charge of all federally-owned lands. Which caused Zinke to lie to the Inspector General with responsibility for upholding ethics in the Department of Interior.

 

ü And, as a bonus, Zinke asked members of his staff – paid for by “We the People” through taxes, to help him make the deal happen. Sort of the double-whammy of bad ethics.

 

ü But at least his staffers were showing up, unlike staffers for Pruitt, so you could call that a plus.

 

ü Not just vowing, as did Republicans, if they take control of Congress in 2022, to “secure our border, finish building the wall, and name it after President Donald Trump.” (And getting Mexico to pay for it?)

 

ü Not making life harder for transgender individuals, by announcing as Republican just did, this principle: “Men are men, women are women, and unborn babies are babies. We believe in science.” 

 

ü And not being hypocritical about believing science. Republicans don’t believe in climate change and don’t believe in vaccines.

 

ü They do believe in QAnon’s hocus pocus. 

 

FUN FACT: Normally, this would be embarrassing for everyone involved, but Donald J. Trump has endorsed Rep. Mark Finchem to be the next Arizona Secretary of State. It turns out, Finchem is kind of nuts. He has called the vaccines – which Trump loves to brag about getting developed at warp speed – a “crime against humanity.” Finchem has also made it clear he didn’t get vaccinated because he was worried about “potentially deadly gene therapy.” 

Doesn’t that mean, Rep. Finchem should be warning that Loser Donald is trying to kill people?

President Trump Goes Back in Time to Save Jobs!

We continue our quest to document daily life in Trumpistan. If you’d like you can go back in time and read about Days 1-100, 101-200, 201-300 and 301-350.

It depends on your tolerance for chaos and incompetence.

January 5 (Day 351): IT’S OFFICIAL. The Greatest-Job-Creator-Ever, Donald J. Trump, watched in awe (of himself) as he turned the U.S. economy around in 2017, with absolutely no assistance from anyone. 

Not even Melania helped.

He inherited a mess the day he took office—and now, because he is clearly the greatest president ever, he has added jobs for 87 months in a row, starting all the way back in October 2010.

Yes. He did it all by himself. Trump went back in time and started adding jobs at a furious pace. He saved the country and his hair looked fabulous meanwhile. Just see all the jobs he added to the U.S. economy, just by tweeting:

2011   2,092,000

2012   2,142,000

2013   2,302,000

2014   2,998,000

2015   2,713,000

2016   2,240,000

2017   2,093,000

Sharp-eyed economists might wonder: Is the Wizard of Washington, D.C. losing his touch? As the Bureau of Labor Statistics notes, fewer jobs were added this year than in any year since 2011. But you figure if Trump keeps firing White House aides who call him an “idiot” or “moron” or “f---ing moron,” he can definitely recapture his mojo in 2018.

STILL, DONALD J. TRUMP WASN’T SATISFIED! He had more miracles to pull off. 

He also made sure 2017 was the safest year in commercial airline history. Earlier this week he went to Twitter to save lives. “Since taking office,” he tap-tapped, “I have been very strict on Commercial Aviation. Good news - it was just reported that there were Zero deaths in 2017, the best and safest year on record!”

Not a single commercial airline passenger died anywhere in the world last year, he said, an aviation first. (Just slightly untrue.) Trump did that. Trump made sure no planes crashed in England or Ireland. Trump kept planes from plummeting to earth in Bulgaria, Botswana and Bangladesh. If you were on a plane, flying to Moscow (not that anyone working for his campaign ever did that), Trump kept you aloft.

I think we can even say Trump flew planes himself. He would take breaks from golfing, don a disguise and get to work. On Fox News, Sean Hannity and the three stooges who host Fox and Friends agreed. Trump was the greatest pilot ever. He was half Wilbur Wright, half Orville, half Charles Lindbergh and 10 percent Eddie Rickenbacker.

Fox News listeners heard the news from Laura Ingraham too. They did some quick calculating and immediately realized those fractions added up perfectly, and so, this proved how great Trump is.

Trump even kept Americans safe in the past. He made sure no commercial airliner crashed—and no passenger died on U.S. soil in 2014. He did it again in 2015. Wow. Then he pulled off a similar feat in 2016, even with that Kenyan guy in the White House working hard to make sure every plane went smash.

True love. But not the gay kind! No sir, none of that.

LAST BUT NOT LEAST, under Trump, the E.P.A. cleaned up way more Superfund toxic waste sites. In 2016 only two sites were cleaned up and “delisted.” But this year? Seven! Seven were cleaned up.

Again, Fox News fans were treated to this fabulous news—real news, not fake news—and did some right-wing math. The truth hit them. It hit hard.

Trump had cleaned up fifteen more sites than Obama the year before.

Sadly, the “fake news” folks at Time magazine tried to throw shade on this achievement. Those rotten reporters claimed the cleanup work at those sites was finished before Donald J. Trump took office. They fakely pointed out that Scott Pruitt, Trump’s pick to head the E.P.A., was simply the one who officially delisted those sites. Then the hacks at Time lost their minds. Like Steve Bannon! 

That sloppy bastard!

They failed to credit President Past-Present-and-Future with all the excellent work he had done during the years Obama sat in the Oval Office, writing letters back home to Mombasa. Yes, ten Superfund sites were delisted every year, on average, during Obama’s two (illegal) terms in the White House.

Fox News viewers know the truth. They know Trump cleaned up those sites all by himself. He scooped up the toxic chemicals with his bare hands.

He went back in time. He did it all.

What a man!