"“Now I am going to sign this bill into law, and I don’t know if this stage will hold it, but if it doesn’t, we are not falling very far,” Trump said at the 9/11 bill signing."
Yes, he really said that. What a freaking psychopath.
Monday, July 29, 2019
Monday, July 15, 2019
The Fog of Trump
David Rothkopf:
It's being a traitor. But it's not just being a traitor. It's the obstruction of justice but its not just the obstruction of justice. It's the attacks on rule of law. But it's not just the attacks on the rule of law. It's the assault on freedom of the press.
But it's not just the assault on freedom of the press. It's the pathological lying. But it's not just the pathological lying. It's the unfitness for office. But it's not just the unfitness for office. It's the incompetence. But it's not just the incompetence.
It's the attacks on our most important allies and alliances. But it's not just the attacks on most important allies and alliances. It's the systematic destruction of our environment. But it's not just the systematic destruction of our environment.
It's the violation of international treaties and agreements. But it is not just the violation of international treaties and agreements. It's the embrace of our enemies. But it is not just the embrace of our enemies.
It's the defense of murdering dictators but it is not just the defense of murdering dictators. It is the serial undermining of our national security. But it is not just the serial undermining of our national security. It is the nepotism. But it's not just the nepotism.
It's the attacks on our federal law enforcement and intelligence communities. But it is not just the attacks on our federal law enforcement and intelligence communities. It's the fiscal recklessness. But it's not just the fiscal recklessness.
It's the degradation of the office and of public discourse in America. But it's not just the degradation of the office and of public discourse in America. It's the support of Nazis and white supremacists. But it's not just the support of Nazis and white supremacists.
It's the dead in Puerto Rico and the at the border. But it's not just the dead in Puerto Rico and at the border. It's turning the US government into a criminal conspiracy to empower and enrich the president and his supporters.
But it's not just the turning the US government into a criminal conspiracy to empower and enrich the president and his supporters. It's weaponization of politics in America to attack the weak. But it's not just the weaponization of American politics to attack the weak.
It's all these things together and the threat of worse to come. It is the damage that can not be undone. It is pathology that has overtaken our politics and our society, the revelation that 40 percent of the population and an entire political party are profoundly immoral.
It is a disease that has infected our system and is killing it. At the moment, we still have the wherewithal to fight back. But even those who recognize the dangers of this litany of crimes are proving too complacent, too inert in the face of this threat.
It is one of those moments in the history of a country when there is a choice to be made, a choice between having a future and not, between growth and decay, between democracy and oligarchy, between what we dreamt of being and what even our founders feared we might become.
The litany of crises and crimes is so long that we are becoming numb. You have heard of the fog of war. This is the fog of Trump. The volume of wrongs becomes its own defense. Is the president accused of being a rapist? Well, then remind them he is a racist and they'll forget.
This is a moment for leaders to step up. To challenge each of these abuses via every legal means available. To organize and draw attention to them. To blow the whistle if you are in government and you are being asked to violate your oath. To resist and refuse to be complicit.
If you can't do those things that make your voice heard and join a movement, support a political candidate, donate money, register voters, fight voter suppression. But whatever you do, resist becoming numb. Resist the temptation to let the recitation of old crimes and new...
...become a deadening drone. Every one matters in times like these. Every one must stand up for what is right. In their homes. In their schools. In the workplace. In their churches and synagogues and mosques.
We are approaching a great national decision about whether the American experiment will succeed or fail, whether this moment does what two world wars, a civil war and countless past misjudgments and missteps could not.
We will make it together, resist, offer a better alternative, embrace that alternative and the best leaders we can find...or succumb, let the inertia of some among us mark the end of what for two and half centuries was an idea so compelling it inspired the world.
Monday, July 1, 2019
Saturday, June 22, 2019
The Insane Criminal Infinity President
Scary weird shit, not a joke.
Trump’s new campaign ad shows him re-elected hundreds of times as president into infinity. Beside completely ignoring the constitution, he also thinks he’s immortal. This is off-the-wall bonkers idiocy and creepiness.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 21, 2019
Migrant Concentration Camps: Kids Underfed and Wallowing in Filth
GOP evil:
Children as young as 7 and 8, many of them wearing clothes caked with snot and tears, are caring for infants they’ve just met ... Toddlers without diapers are relieving themselves in their pants. Teenage mothers are wearing clothes stained with breast milk." All overseen by "guards wearing full uniforms — including weapons — as well as face masks to protect themselves from the unsanitary conditions.
The children told the lawyers they were given the same meals every day — instant oats for breakfast, instant noodles for lunch, a frozen burrito for dinner, along with a few cookies and juice packets — which many said was not enough. “Nearly every child I spoke with said that they were hungry,” Ms. Mukherjee said.
Another group of lawyers conducting inspections under the same federal court settlement said they discovered similar conditions earlier this month at six other facilities in Texas.
At the Border Patrol’s Central Processing Center in McAllen, Tex. — often known as “Ursula” — the lawyers encountered a 17-year-old mother from Guatemala who couldn’t stand because of complications from an emergency C-section, and who was caring for a sick and dirty premature baby. “When we encountered the baby and her mom, the baby was filthy. They wouldn’t give her any water to wash her. And I took a Kleenex and I washed around her neck black dirt,” said Hope Frye, who was leading the group, adding, “Not a little stuff — dirt.”
Monday, June 17, 2019
Donald Trump-- the Mobster President
How did Donald Trump, a self-serving promoter who lost billions of dollars for his investors, convince the world that he is a financial genius? It wasn’t just by fabricating tales of his success. It was also by bullying and silencing people who could have stopped those deceits — particularly reporters and Wall Street analysts — forcing all but a very few into a conspiracy of silence.
These tactics, which form a core element of his politics, were something I saw him hone firsthand in the 1980s and 1990s as Trump’s company was imploding.
I was the lead real estate wealth estimator for the Forbes 400 list in its early years. Trump called me twice in 1984, posing as his fictional “VP of finance” John Barron and professing the kind of riches that ought to land him on the list, despite failing to document them. So when a New York Times exposé last month showed that Trump had lost $1.1 billion between 1985 and 1994, I looked back at my archives and began calling old colleagues to compare these figures with what Trump was telling journalists three decades ago.
First, I turned up three never-before-published letters from Trump to Forbes from 1989, in which he claimed to be worth $3.7 billion. We now know that he reported losses of about $100 million that year and that he was treading near insolvency. Then I started to contact other people who had collided with Trump in those years. Journalists told me how he’d tried to block their reporting on his empire — by making up ethical scandals about them, furnishing fake documents and, in one case, threatening to expose the private life of a closeted media executive. Wall Street analysts witnessed a campaign of intimidation that began when Trump got one of them fired for (correctly) doubting his casinos’ ability to pay off their debts.
Even while he was suffering tremendous financial setbacks — and precisely because he was suffering those setbacks — these efforts show Trump in the desperate act of spinning a mythology about himself (rich) that would sweep aside the facts (broke). And he did it by imperiling the livelihood of his doubters, silencing them and inducing a chilling effect both in the press and among the very people who are supposed to protect investors from terrible gambles like Trump’s businesses. If this self-promotion scheme had failed, Trump would never have become a reality-TV-starring symbol of business acumen. He would have skulked off into anonymity or ignominy, just another failed real estate developer and speculator.
Instead, he fooled the world. Although he’d struggle for the rest of his career to get most legitimate banks to extend credit, the gambit basically worked: It turned him, rather than his empire, into the product, enabling decades of tabloid coverage, countless eponymous goods from casinos to steaks to airlines, dozens of film and TV cameos, and ultimately his image-defining show, “The Apprentice.” It made a man with limited business savvy and less money than he claimed into someone famous for having a surfeit of both. These early (and shockingly impudent) fabrications built one of the greatest brands in American history — one that made Trump a household name and, eventually, president.(snip)
Trump had waged a relentless, vindictive campaign to build his own myth by suppressing the facts: Between the collapse of his empire in 1991 and the issuance of more than $1 billion in Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts stock and junk bonds by 1996, he’d compromised the truth-telling capacity of Forbes magazine, the Wall Street Journal, TV broadcasters, Arthur Andersen and casino analysts on Wall Street. By the time Trump resigned in 2009 as chairman of the public company he founded, he had paid himself an estimated $82 million in personal compensation, while the company’s stocks and bonds had become nearly worthless.
His brand survived all that, and even thrived, because he wasn’t just concocting tales of his greatness; he was also forcing others to repeat them, or at least not to contradict them. It was a strategy that more recently has paid off handsomely against onetime opponents like Sen. Lindsey Graham. Nobody can succeed on this scale simply by lying. Trump’s greatest and most cynical skill, honed during the 1980s and 1990s, was learning how to win by silencing truth-tellers and suppressing the truth when it matters most.
So bizarre and fucked up that this guy can bully people into submission.
McConnell Is a Massive Evil Asshole
U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell went full-fledged off-the-wall red-baiting in a Fox News interview on Friday’s “Ingraham Angle.”
The Republican from Kentucky told host Laura Ingraham that allowing Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. to become states – which would mean full representation in the U.S. House and Senate along with voting rights, would be “full bore socialism.” Democrats “plan to make the District of Columbia a state and give them two Democratic Senators,” Leader McConnell said, adding they would also make Puerto Rico a state which “would give them two more Democratic Senators. They plan to expand the Supreme Court. So this is full bore socialism on the march in the House, and, yeah, as long as I am Majority Leader in the Senate none of that stuff is going anywhere.”
McConnell, who proudly posted the video clip (below) to his Twitter account, was not asked to defend his remarks, nor to explain how basic values of American democracy that 50 states currently enjoy and have since the founding of the Republic, are socialism.
He also admitted he wants to be called the “Grim Reaper” when it comes to bills passed by the House.
McConnell is currently sitting at least 100 bills passed by the House of Representatives. He has zero plans to allow any of them to come to the floor for debate or a vote.
U.S. citizens living in Washington, D.C. have no representation in the Senate, and their House Representative cannot vote on actual legislation. They are allowed to vote for president but are allotted only the same number of Electoral College votes as the least-populous state.
Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory, but U.S. citizens who reside there have no representation in the House or Senate, and are not allowed to vote in presidential elections.
Democracy is not socialism. McConnell is a freaking fascist.
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