Trump
gregladen | October 3, 2017Visiting Arkansas, hanging around briefly with some people in the Real Estate business, I found a lot of hatred of Mexicans, whom they unimaginatively referred to as "spics" but making it clear they were talking about Mexicans, not some other spics. Sitting with a group of people talking about racism in an urban neighborhood in near Minneapolis, I found zero mention of dislike between whites per se and blacks per se. But Poles and Tibetans, they were very much disliked by people who were mostly but not all white. Years ago I remember being shocked by a fellow anthropologist who expressed a…
gregladen | October 3, 2017Today, Donald Trump told Puerto Rico that they dodged a bullet, that the hurricane that hit them was not a real catastrophe, that only a couple of people died, that he, Trump, is doing a great job, but would Puerto Rico please try to spend less money on fixing things up.
https://twitter.com/CNNPolitics/status/915249263520690177
Well, I'm certainly glad that problem is managed. Great work!
Oh wait ...
Is it too early to lighten the mood a bit?
gregladen | September 29, 2017The White House calls the disaster in Puerto Rico a "good news story," implying that the federal government is doing a great job there.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump put out a tweet today that seems to imply that the US needs to consider whether or not it wants to help Puerto Rico, which, by the way, is actually part of the United States.
Here is the mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico, responding to some of this:
Hat tip: Media Matters for America
gregladen | September 28, 2017Or so it seems.
Donald Trump won the 2016 election with 306 votes to Hillary Clinton's 232 votes. That is a spread of 74 votes.
Clinton was likely to win in several states in which she lost, including Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, maybe Ohio, etc. In three states that could have gone either way, Jill Stein's vote count was larger than the difference between Clinton and Trump. In Michigan, Trump won by 10,704 votes, Stein got 51,463 votes. In Pennsylvania, Trump won by 46,765 votes, Stein got 49,678 votes. In Wisconsin, Trump won by 22,177 votes, Stein got 31,006 votes.
If every Jill…
gregladen | September 22, 2017To understand the Trump-Russia scandal, I believe it is necessary to step way back and take the very long view. I'm not talking about going back to early 2016, or even the year before. Much farther.
I'm not going to make a claim in this post as to what happened and who did what. Rather, I'd like to present a hypothesis, a single interpretation of events, that may or may not be correct, but that is based on this long view.
Whatever did actually happen, it did involve, or somehow exclude, Donald Trump and a number of individuals with whom he has had long term relationships, and Vladimir Putin…
gregladen | September 20, 2017From the Washington Post:
The special counsel investigating Russian election meddling has requested extensive records and email correspondence from the White House, covering everything from the president’s private discussions about firing his FBI director to his White House’s handling of a warning that President Trump’s then-national security adviser was under investigation, according to two people briefed on the requests.
White House lawyers are now working to turn over internal documents that span 13 categories investigators for the special counsel have identified as critical to their…
gregladen | September 18, 2017A lot of people will object to the title of this post. I will be told to take the post down. I will be told to modify the title or to change what I say in the post.
Nope.
Ta-Nehisi Coates is correct, and his presentation is brilliant. Watch the following interview (in two parts) and read his book We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy.
Chris Hayes is correct to point out that the historical source of Coates title is critically important and deeply disturbing (this is something we've talked about here in the recent past). He is incorrect, as Coates points out near the end of…
gregladen | September 14, 2017The policy of the Republican Trump White House is that if a reporter or commenter says something that the White House strongly disagrees with, the reporter or commenter should be fired.
It remains to be seen how the Trump White House will enforce this newly articulated policy.
The policy was provided as a response to a question about an African American reporter identifying Trump and the White House as being aligned with white supremacy, which is a widely held and well documented truth.
Cindy Boren at the Washington Post has more here.
gregladen | September 6, 2017It is very rare that I find myself yelling at the TV when Rachel Maddow is on. She is very good at historically contextualized nuanced well informed analyses. But when I watched a segment of last night's show (on the Internet, I have no cable) I was shocked to see that she missed something really important. If, that is, it is real.
In the segment below, she makes the point that there are two "clear through lines" in the whole Trump thing. One is the love of Russia and Putin by Trump, his unwavering stance that Russia and Putin can do no wrong. The other is the consistent "vehement antipathy…
gregladen | September 2, 2017First, please take two minutes to watch and listen to this, in order to calibrate:
https://youtu.be/g25G1M4EXrQ
Now, remove all liquid containing vessels from the vicinity, put on your head-desk helmet gear, and watch this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=8&v=GUcsAFnwC7k
Then, behold the fact that Jim Bridenstine, who has demanded that President Obama apologize for believing that global warming is real and important, is being appointed to run NASA.
By the way, global warming did not stop in 2003
No surprise here, planetary warming does not care about the election. Now…
gregladen | August 26, 2017Member of the press are so cute. They evolve so slowly. They are like monotremes or something.
It is said again and again that a) government agencies and other entities, especially things like the White House, dump their news late on Fridays because this avoids the normal five-day news cycle and allows hot stories to cool off, and possibly be ignored by Monday and, b) that doesn't really work any more because of social media and cable news, but still c) we will repeat meme one endlessly anyway so that we can look very smart by then repeating memes b) which brings us to d) rinse and repeat.…
gregladen | August 24, 2017Posting this with no comment because it is expected and so obviously bone-headed Trump:
US President Donald Trump's administration has disbanded a government advisory committee that was intended to help the country prepare for a changing climate.
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration established the committee in 2015 to help businesses and state and local governments make use of the next national climate assessment. The legally mandated report, due in 2018, will lay out the latest climate-change science and describe how global warming is likely to affect the United States,…
gregladen | August 17, 2017General John F. Kelly is retired from the US Marine Corps, where he commanded the Southern Command. He replaced political operative Reince Priebus as President Trump's Chief of Staff.
The White House Chief of Staff is the highest ranking staff member in the White House, and was formalized as such in 1961. This is not a Senate confirmable position. What the Chief of Staff does varies from administration to administration but it is almost always about the same. This person can be the puppeteer, in the case of a President who is weak and in need of a guiding hand. This person is always a…
gregladen | August 15, 2017In a series of strange events, President Donald Trump once again invoked violence against a CNN reporter and, apparently, embraced the idea that he is a fascist.
Following the homicidal terrorist attack on anti-White Supremacist demonstrators, trump saw fit to post the following tweet, memorialized here in a retweet by Kyle Griffin, an MSNBC producer.
Similar to an earlier contrived production in which Trump himself is shown in a video beating a CNN reporter, this shows a train labeled TRUMP running over a CNN reporter in cartoon form.
That tweet was deleted soon after being posted. I…
gregladen | August 11, 2017Here is the tweet:
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/895970429734711298
Locked and load means ready to pull the trigger. Making that conditional on Kim Jong-un becoming a pacifist means Trump is going to pull the trigger. Based on this statement of policy by President Trump (when President speaks/tweets, policy comes out his mouth or other orifice), bombs should be dropping, missiles flying, ancillary terrorist attacks initiated, naval forces engaged, and possibly action across the DMZ started, by the end of the day, or at least, by the end of the weekend. Tens of thousands will be…
gregladen | July 26, 2017Donald Trump has consulted with his generals and military experts ...
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/890193981585444864
and declared that Transgender individuals will not be allowed to serve in the US Military in any capacity because the Military has other things to do
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/890196164313833472
which apparently includes world domination will will be disrupted by the burden of transgenderness.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/890197095151546369
We'll see.
gregladen | July 7, 2017Part of the active effort to defend Trump and his administration and campaign against accusations that they directly engaged with the Russians to alter the outcome of the 2016 presidential election appears to be the faking of explosive documents, sent to news agencies. When these fake documents are then used, and subsequently discredited, the news agency, the reporters, the specific story at hand, and the entire investigation against Trump and his people all lose credibility.
Here, Rachel Maddow reports on a document sent to "Send it to Rachel."
Who is behind this attack? I assume someone…
gregladen | July 3, 2017I speak, of course, of America.
America became very ill early last year when one of the two main political parties seriously embraced a fake candidate for the most important job in the land.
America was given a very poor prognosis in August when that party endorsed this clown for president. Then, in November, the fatal blow happened, but as is the case with many fatal things -- being sentenced to death, being told you have incurable cancer, etc. -- it took a while before the death throes.
From some point in time, around January, though the late winter and spring, we gained the full…
gregladen | July 1, 2017I've made the point several times now. We live in a constitutional democracy, but many of the first line (and last line) protections are not enforceable laws, but rather, agreements made among people who all want to live in and respect a constitutional democracy.
But if a large enough cadre of members of Congress, a gaggle of highly placed judges, or a President decide to act in a way that conflicts with those conventions, they can actually get away with quite a bit.
The US Congress is run by such a cadre, pretending to engage in a democracy but willing to break the non-enforceable laws…
gregladen | June 29, 2017Trump is reportedly pressuring public news media and other outlets to not distribute information about Obamacare, as they normally would, in an effort to sabotage the n-Law. This is what dictators do.
Trump's people in the "press" room have bullied the press to the point that they are finally starting to lash out. This is what dictators do.
https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/879783260137504768?ref_src=twsr…
Trump has attacked another female journalist, this time Mika Brzezinski, with another enigmatic blood coming out of her body parts comment.
This is what dictators do.
https://…