#Obama turns out to be the very worst President in the History of the United States.

[simply-ivanka]

Obama still had knowledged and approved of the CIA and FBI launching investigations of newly elected President Trump and many of the Trump Administration appointees based on fabricated information from the Obama Administration. Obama did not notify Trump, he only fanned the flames of Russia collusion and wrongdoing, misinformation that has cost people millions of dollars, their careers and in doing so, Obama knowingly and intentionally, maliciously, interfered with the orderly transition of power from one President to the next in violation of Federal Law.

Obama and those involved must be investigated, indicted, prosecuted, convicted, incarcerated.

[qqueenofhades]

Okay, y'all. Time to do this one more time. Let the fact that there are so many of these posts right now reinforce the point. Many of you already know this, and I see and love you, but for anyone still ~undecided about their choice, should they be an American citizen of voting age on November 3, 2020:

Time to not be. It was time a long, long while ago, but I am going to have to say it again.

Primary season is over. The endless fine-tooth combing of candidates' policies and positions is over. We are all deeply well aware that the candidates on the Democratic ticket, being human beings and establishment politicians, are flawed. "BUT WHAT ABOUT THIS POSITION FROM 19/ 20-WHENEVER AS JUSTIFICATION FOR WHY IT'S TERRIBLE TO VOTE FOR -- "

No. Stop. Just stop. Stop threatening to hold the rest of us hostage, in the middle of a pandemic, the Great Depression, and racial inequality and protests on a scale not seen from the 1960s, because you did not get Barbie Dream Candidate. That is the behavior of terrorists and toddlers. If your supposedly enlightened morally pure ideology does not involve any action to mitigate the harm that is directly in front of you, it isn't worth a shit as an ideology actually devoted to helping people. If your approach to politics is to shout about how Pure your ideas are on twitter and tear down anyone working within a system of flawed choices to do the good that they can: you're not helping, and frankly, your constant threats to withhold your suffrage as a punishment to us aren't convincing the rest of us that we really need to listen to you or that you have anyone's best interests at heart. The Online Left TM is as much a vacuous, self-reinforcing noise chamber as the Online Right TM, and can sometimes tend to be even more dangerous.

I was saying this in 2016. A lot of us were saying this in 2016. I am just about to turn 32 years old and have been voting in federal elections for almost 15 years. For what it's worth.

This is not an ordinary election. This is not a contest between two flawed candidates who respect the system and want to work to enact their policies in the ordinary way. One is a flawed 90s era Democrat who nonetheless has already been pushed CONSIDERABLY left in his policies and platforms since the end of the primaries (and his existing platform would already make him the most left president elected, even more than Obama). The other is a fascist dictator who has openly spoken about refusing to accept the election results, his desire to abolish term limits and serve for life, and complete the pillaging of any remaining fragile American public funds for him and his cult of cronies. He does not respect the system. He does not want to do anything for anyone that is not himself. 160,000 and counting needless deaths of American citizens have already happened. Will keep happening.

This is the last time Trump has to face voters. This is the last chance the country has to repudiate his entire poisonous ideology and its marching Nazi minions. IF he steps aside, which is already far from guaranteed, he can ride off into the sunset as a vindicated two term president and probably be rehabilitated like George W. Bush was within a few years of leaving office. American political memory is very short. It will happen. Again, if he even leaves.

RBG is 87 and has cancer again. She will NOT survive another four years. Stephen Breyer is 81. Their seats could both come up in the next four years. The Supreme Court could be a right wing rubber stamp for whatever time we all have left before climate change and coronavirus kill us all.

"But if people just thought for themselves and did their homework and didn't vote the party line like sheep, we could support a third party/write in -- " Stop. Just stop. Attend a ninth grade civics class and learn about how politics work in America. Yes, the two-party system sucks. Yes, the Electoral College is a hot steaming pile of absolute bullshit. Magical unicorn fairy dust fantasies WILL NOT change that.

Do not vote for Kanye (who has pretty much openly admitted he is trying to play spoiler to Biden on behalf of his buddy Trump). Do not vote for godforsaken fucking Gary Johnson or Jill Stein who appear on ballots just to give sanctimonious leftists the illusion of virtue-signaling. If you want any chance of fixing the mess that 2020 has left America and the world in, you need to vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. The end.

Biden is a flawed old man who was our last choice, sure. He is also a distinguished public servant who has already been in the White House for eight years under Obama and thus we KNOW what to expect. He is an empathetic man who connects with people's personal tragedy and picked as his running mate a younger Black/biracial woman who directly confronted and called him out on past behavior. While the pundit class was simpering and whining about how it was Disrespectful and how could he consider her, Biden did so, and that speaks well to me of the fact that he is willing to learn, to take criticism, and not just accept it from a former Black female rival, but make her his second in command and the potential first female president of the United States.

Can you EVER picture Trump doing that? Not in eight thousand million years.

As for Kamala, we are all aware of her previous checkered history as a prosecutor (and even then, she did plenty of good things as well!). Since joining the Senate, however, she has consistently become one of its most progressive members. She is the co-sponsor of an economic aid package designed to give every American $2,000/month, backdated to March (the start of the coronavirus pandemic) and continuing at least a few months after its end. A Biden-Harris White House could make that happen. Especially if they are put into office with a Democratic House and Senate (for the love of God, Kentucky, kill Mitch McConnell with fire). That is just one example.

Harris's nomination is obviously historic. And Biden didn't choose another Biden (or another Tim Kaine, the blandest white man imaginable). He chose another Obama: a younger rising star of an immigrant background, a person of color, a former lawyer and someone who represents the diversity of the country that the white supremacists and the Cheeto in Chief have tried to paint as its worst and most degenerate evil.

A vote for Biden and Harris means getting rid not just of Trump, but Mike Pence, Vladimir Putin, Jared Kushner, Betsy Devos, the Trump crony destroying the Postal Service, the rampant coronavirus misinformation and bullshit, the destruction of Social Security and Medicare, the spread of Nazi propaganda from the President's twitter account, the likely two Supreme Court picks that would be as bad as Brett Kavanaugh or worse... on and on. Biden and Harris would be elected by progressive voters and thus answerable to them in 2022 midterms and 2024 general. They can both be, and already have been, pushed further left. They are reasonable and competent adults who have demonstrated experience and compassion. I KNOW about their flaws and past actions I don't agree with. But I'm frankly done with any more counterproductive straw man bitching about This One Bad Thing They Did and how it makes it a terribad awful choice to vote for them. Open your eyes. Look at the alternative. LOOK AT WHAT HAS ALREADY HAPPENED AND THE FACT THAT THIS IS NOT EVEN AS BAD AS IT COULD STILL GET.

Check your registration or register at vote.gov.

DO NOT LOOK AT POLLS AND DECIDE "EH BIDEN IS CLEARLY GOING TO WIN, I DON'T NEED TO VOTE." THAT IS HOW WE LOST LAST TIME.

Unseating incumbents is HARD. It is even harder when the other side has openly laid out their plan to cheat in great detail, and there is nothing really stopping them from doing it. The only thing, in fact, is massive, unfalsifiable results on an undeniable scale.

So:

Vote.

Vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

Thanks a lot.

[yobaba30]

Stolen from Twitter

I owe my Trump-supporting friends an apology.  I’ve been critical of the Trump presidency these last four years, and am still exhausted from the experience. But to be fair, President Trump wasn’t that bad, other than when he incited an insurrection against the government, mismanaged a pandemic that killed nearly half a million Americans, separated children from their families, lost those children in the bureaucracy, tear-gassed peaceful protesters on Lafayette Square so he could hold a photo op holding a Bible in front of a church, tried to block all Muslims from entering the country, got impeached, got impeached again, had the worst jobs record of any president in modern history, pressured Ukraine to dig dirt on Joe Biden, fired the FBI director for investigating his ties to Russia, bragged about firing the FBI director on TV, took Vladimir Putin’s word over the US intelligence community, diverted military funding to build his wall, caused the longest government shutdown in US history, called Black Lives Matter a “symbol of hate,” lied nearly 30,000 times, banned transgender people from serving in the military, ejected reporters from the White House briefing room who asked tough questions, vetoed the defense funding bill because it renamed military bases named for Confederate soldiers, refused to release his tax returns, increased the national debt by nearly $8 trillion, had three of the highest annual trade deficits in U.S. history, called veterans and soldiers who died in combat losers and suckers, coddled the leader of Saudi Arabia after he ordered the execution and dismembering of a US-based journalist, refused to concede the 2020 election, hired his unqualified daughter and son-in-law to work in the White House, walked out of an interview with Lesley Stahl, called neo-Nazis “very fine people,” suggested that people should inject bleach into their bodies to fight COVID, abandoned our allies the Kurds to Turkey, pushed through massive tax cuts for the wealthiest but balked at helping working Americans, incited anti-lockdown protestors in several states at the height of the pandemic, withdrew the US from the Paris climate accords, withdrew the US from the Iranian nuclear deal, withdrew withdrew the US from the Trans Pacific Partnership which was designed to block China’s advances, insulted his own Cabinet members on Twitter, pushed the leader of Montenegro out of the way during a photo op, failed to reiterate US commitment to defending NATO allies, called Haiti and African nations “shithole” countries, called the city of Baltimore the “worst in the nation,” claimed that he single handedly brought back the phrase “Merry Christmas” even though it hadn’t gone anywhere, forced his Cabinet members to praise him publicly like some cult leader believed he should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, berated and belittled his hand-picked Attorney General when he recused himself from the Russia probe, suggested the US should buy Greenland, colluded with Mitch McConnell to push through federal judges and two Supreme Court justices after supporting efforts to prevent his predecessor from appointing judges, repeatedly called the media “enemies of the people,” claimed that if we tested fewer people for COVID we’d have fewer cases, violated the emoluments clause, thought that Nambia was a country, told Bob Woodward in private that the coronavirus was a big deal but then downplayed it in public, called his exceedingly faithful vice president a “p---y” for following the Constitution, nearly got us into a war with Iran after threatening them by tweet, nominated a corrupt head the EPA, nominated a corrupt head of HHS, nominated a corrupt head of the Interior Department, nominated a corrupt head of the USDA, praised dictators and authoritarians around the world while criticizing allies, refused to allow the presidential transition to begin, insulted war hero John McCain – even after his death, spent an obscene amount of time playing golf after criticizing Barack Obama for playing (far less) golf while president, falsely claimed that he won the 2016 popular vote, called the Muslim mayor of London a “stone cold loser,” falsely claimed that he won the 2016 popular vote, called the Muslim mayor of London a “stone cold loser,” falsely claimed that he turned down being Time’s Man of the Year, considered firing special counsel Robert Mueller on several occasions, mocked wearing face masks to guard against transmitting COVID, locked Congress out of its constitutional duty to confirm Cabinet officials by hiring acting ones, used a racist dog whistle by calling COVID the “China virus,” hired and associated with numerous shady figures that were eventually convicted of federal offenses including his campaign manager and national security adviser, pardoned several of his shady associates, gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to two congressman who amplified his batshit crazy conspiracy theories, got into telephone fight with the leader of Australia(!), had a Secretary of State who called him a moron, forced his press secretary to claim without merit that his was the largest inauguration crowd in history, botched the COVID vaccine rollout, tweeted so much dangerous propaganda that Twitter eventually banned him, charged the Secret Service jacked-up rates at his properties, constantly interrupted Joe Biden in their first presidential debate, claimed that COVID would “magically” disappear, called a U.S. Senator “Pocahontas,” used his Twitter account to blast Nordstrom when it stopped selling Ivanka’s merchandise, opened up millions of pristine federal lands to development and drilling, got into a losing tariff war with China that forced US taxpayers to bail out farmers, claimed that his losing tariff war was a win for the US, ignored or didn’t even take part in daily intelligence briefings, blew off honoring American war dead in France because it was raining, redesigned Air Force One to look like the Trump Shuttle, got played by Kim Jung Un and his “love letters,” threatened to go after social media companies in clear violation of the Constitution, botched the response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, threw paper towels at Puerto Ricans when he finally visited them, pressured the governor and secretary of state of Part 2 cont… Georgia to “find” him votes, thought that the Virgin islands had a President, drew on a map with a Sharpie to justify his inaccurate tweet that Alabama was threatened by a hurricane, allowed White House staff to use personal email accounts for official businesses after blasting Hillary Clinton for doing the same thing, rolled back regulations that protected the public from mercury and asbestos, pushed regulators to waste time studying snake-oil remedies for COVID, rolled back regulations that stopped coal companies from dumping waste into rivers held blatant campaign rallies at the White House, tried to take away millions of Americans’ health insurance because the law was named for a Black man, refused to attend his successors’ inauguration, nominated the worst Education Secretary in history threatened judges who didn’t do what he wanted, attacked Dr. Anthony Fauci, promised that Mexico would pay for the wall (it didn’t), allowed political hacks to overrule government scientists on major reports on climate change and other issues, struggled navigating a ramp after claiming his opponent was feeble, called an African-American Congresswoman “low IQ,” threatened to withhold federal aid from states and cities with Democratic leaders, went ahead with rallies filled with maskless supporters in the middle of a pandemic, claimed that legitimate investigations of his wrongdoing were “witch hunts,” seemed to demonstrate a belief that there were airports during the American Revolution, demanded “total loyalty” from the FBI director, praised a conspiracy theory that Democrats are Satanic pedophiles, completely gutted the Voice of America, placed a political hack in charge of the Postal Service, claimed without evidence that the Obama administration bugged Trump Tower, suggested that the US should allow more people from places like Norway into the country, suggested that COVID wasn’t that bad because he recovered with the help of top government doctors and treatments not available to the public, overturned energy conservation standards that even industry supported, reduced the number of refugees the US accepts, insulted various members of Congress and the media with infantile nicknames, gave Rush Limbaugh a Presidential medal of Freedom at the State of the Union address, named as head of federal personnel a 29-year old who’d previously been fired from the White House for allegations of financial improprieties, eliminated the White House office of pandemic respon used soldiers as campaign props, fired any advisor who made the mistake of disagreeing with him, demanded the Pentagon throw him a Soviet-style military parade, hired a shit ton of white nationalists, politicized the civil service, did absolutely nothing after Russia hacked US falsely said the Boy Scouts called him to say his bizarre Jamboree speech was the best speech ever given to the Scouts, claimed that Black people would overrun the suburbs if Biden won, insulted reporters of color, insulted women reporters, insulted women reporters of color, suggested he was fine with China’s oppression of the Uighurs, attacked the Supreme Court when it ruled against him, summoned Pennsylvania state legislative leaders to the White House to pressure them to overturn the election, spent countless hours every day watching Fox News, refused to allow his administration to comply with Congressional subpoenas, hired Rudy Giuliani as his lawyer, tried to punish Amazon because the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post wrote negative stories about him, acted as if the Attorney General of the United States was his personal attorney, attempted to get the federal government to defend him in a libel lawsuit from a women who accused him of sexual assault, held private meetings with Vladimir Putin without staff present, didn’t disclose his private meetings with Vladimir Putin so that the US had to find out via Russian media, stopped holding press briefings for months at a time, “ordered” US companies to leave China even though he has no such power, led a political party that couldn’t even be bothered to draft a policy platform, claimed preposterously that Article II of the Constitution gave him absolute powers, tried to pressure the U.K. to hold the British Open at his golf course, suggested that the government nuke hurricanes, suggested that wind turbines cause cancer, said that he had a special aptitude for science, fired the head of election cyber security after he said that the 2020 election was secure, blurted out classified information to Russian officials, tried to force the G7 to hold their meeting at his failing golf resort in Florida, fired the acting attorney general when she refused to go along with his unconstitutional Muslim travel ban, hired Stephen Miller, openly discussed national security issues in the dining room at Mar-a-Lago where everyone could hear them, interfered with plans to relocate the FBI because a new development there might compete with his hotel, abandoned Iraqi refugees who’d helped the U.S. during the war, tried to get Russia back into the G7, held a COVID super spreader event in the Rose Garden, seemed to believe that Frederick Douglass is still alive, lost 60 election fraud cases in court including before judges he had nominated, falsely claimed that factories were reopening when they weren’t, shamelessly exploited terror attacks in Europe to justify his anti-immigrant policies, still hasn’t come up with a healthcare plan, still hasn’t come up with an infrastructure plan despite repeated “Infrastructure,” forced Secret Service agents to drive him around Walter Reed while contagious with COVID, told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” fucked up the Census, withdrew the U.S. from the World Health Organization in the middle of a pandemic did so few of his duties that his press staff were forced to state on his daily schedule “President Trump will work from early in the morning until late in the evening. He will make many calls and have many meetings,” allowed his staff to repeatedly violate the Hatch Act, Part 3 continues… seemed not to know that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, stood before sacred CIA wall of heroes and bragged about his election win, constantly claimed he was treated worse than any president which presumably includes four that were assassinated and his predecessor whose legitimacy and birthplace were challenged by a racist reality TV show star named Donald Trump, claimed Andrew Jackson could’ve stopped the Civil War even though he died 16 years before it happened, said that any opinion poll showing him behind was fake, claimed that other countries laughed at us before he became president when several world leaders were literally laughing at him, claimed that the military was out of ammunition before he became President, created a commission to whitewash American history, retweeted anti-Islam videos from one of the most racist people in Britain, claimed ludicrously that the Pulse nightclub shooting wouldn’t have happened if someone there had a gun even though there was an armed security guard there, hired a senior staffer who cited the non-existent Bowling Green Massacre as a reason to ban Muslims, had a press secretary who claimed that Nazi Germany never used chemical weapons even though every sane human being knows they used gas to kill millions of Jews and others, bilked the Secret Service for higher than market rates when they had to stay at Trump properties, apparently sold pardons on his way out of the White House, stripped protective status from 59,000 Haitians, falsely claimed Biden wanted to defund the police, said that the head of the CDC didn’t know what he was talking about, tried to rescind protection from DREAMers, gave himself an A+ for his handling of the pandemic, tried to start a boycott of Goodyear tires due to an Internet hoax, said U.S. rates of COVID would be lower if you didn’t count blue states, deported U.S. veterans who served their country but were undocumented, claimed he did more for African Americans than any president since Lincoln, touted a “super-duper” secret “hydrosonic” missile which may or may not be a new “hypersonic” missile or may not exist at all, retweeted a gif calling Biden a pedophile, forced through security clearances for his family, suggested that police officers should rough up suspects, suggested that Biden was on performance-enhancing drugs, tried to stop transgender students from being able to use school bathrooms in line with their gender, suggested the US not accept COVID patients from  a cruise ship because it would make US numbers look higher, nominated a climate change sceptic to chair the committee advising the White House on environmental policy, retweeted a video doctored to look like Biden had played a song called “Fuck tha Police” at a campaign event, hugged a disturbingly large number of U.S. flags, accused Democrats of “treason” for not applauding his State of the Union address, claimed that the FBI failed to capture the Parkland school shooter because they were “spending too much time” on Russia, mocked the testimony of Dr Christine Blasey Ford when she accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, obsessed over low-flow toilets, ordered the rerelease of more COVID vaccines when there weren’t any to release, called for the construction of a bizarre garden of heroes with statutes of famous dead Americans as well as at least one Canadian (Alex Trebek), hijacked Washington’s July 4th celebrations to give a partisan speech, took advice from the MyPillow guy, claimed that migrants seeking a better life in the US were dangerous caravans of drug dealers and rapists, said nothing when Vladimir Putin poisoned a leading opposition, never seemed to heed the advice of his wife’s “Be Best” campaign, falsely claimed that mail-in voting is fraudulent, announced a precipitous withdrawal of troops from Syria which not only handed Russia and ISIS a win but also prompted his defense secretary to resign in protest, insulted the leader of Canada, insulted the leader of France, insulted the leader of Britain, insulted the leader of Germany, insulted the leader of Sweden (Sweden!!), falsely claimed credit for getting NATO members to increase their share of dues, blew off two Asia summits even though they were held virtually, continued lying about spending lots of time at Ground Zero with 9/11 responders, said that the Japanese would sit back and watch their “Sony televisions” if the US were ever attacked, left a NATO summit early in a huff, stared directly into an eclipse even though everyone over the age of 5 knows not to do that, called himself a very stable genius despite significant evidence to the contrary, refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power and kept his promise, and a whole bunch of other things I can’t remember at the moment. But other than that. . . Please share. This is how history books will read, because these are PROVABLE FACTS! Truth

[bigmacdaddio]

Trump

Trump will never be forgotten because he incited an insurrection against the government, mismanaged a pandemic that killed over half a million Americans, separated children from their families, lost those children in the bureaucracy, tear-gassed peaceful protesters on Lafayette Square so he could hold a photo op holding a Bible in front of a church, tried to block all Muslims from entering the country, got impeached, got impeached again, had the worst jobs record of any president in modern history, pressured Ukraine to dig up dirt on Joe Biden, fired the FBI director for investigating his ties to Russia, bragged about firing the FBI director on TV, took Vladimir Putin’s word over the US intelligence community, diverted military funding to build his wall, caused the longest government shutdown in US history, called Black Lives Matter a “symbol of hate,” lied nearly 30,000 times, banned transgender people from serving in the military, ejected reporters from the White House briefing room who asked tough questions, vetoed the defense funding bill because it renamed military bases named for Confederate soldiers, refused to release his tax returns, increased the national debt by nearly $8 trillion, had three of the highest annual trade deficits in U.S. history, called veterans and soldiers who died in combat losers and suckers, coddled the leader of Saudi Arabia after he ordered the execution and dismembering of a US-based journalist, refused to concede the 2020 election, hired his unqualified daughter and son-in-law to work in the White House, walked out of an interview with Lesley Stahl, called neo-Nazis “very fine people,” suggested that people should inject bleach or disinfectant into their bodies to fight COVID, abandoned our allies the Kurds to Turkey, pushed through massive tax cuts for the wealthiest but balked at helping working Americans, incited anti-lockdown protestors in several states at the height of the pandemic, withdrew the US from the Paris climate accords, withdrew the US from the Iranian nuclear deal, withdrew the US from the Trans Pacific Partnership which was designed to block China’s advances, insulted his own Cabinet members on Twitter, pushed the leader of Montenegro out of the way during a photo op, failed to reiterate US commitment to defending NATO allies, called Haiti and African nations “shithole” countries, called the city of Baltimore the “worst in the nation,” claimed that he single handedly brought back the phrase “Merry Christmas” even though it hadn’t gone anywhere, forced his Cabinet members to praise him publicly like some cult leader, believed he should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, berated and belittled his hand-picked Attorney General when he recused himself from the Russia probe, suggested the US should buy Greenland, colluded with Mitch McConnell to push through federal judges and two Supreme Court justices after supporting efforts to prevent his predecessor from appointing judges, repeatedly called the media “enemies of the people,” claimed that if we tested fewer people for COVID we’d have fewer cases, violated the emoluments clause, thought that Nambia was a country, told Bob Woodward in private that the coronavirus was a big deal but then downplayed it in public, called his exceedingly faithful vice president a “p---y” for following the Constitution, nearly got us into a war with Iran after threatening them by tweet, nominated a corrupt head of the EPA, nominated a corrupt head of HHS, nominated a corrupt head of the Interior Department, nominated a corrupt head of the USDA, praised dictators and authoritarians around the world while criticizing allies, refused to allow the presidential transition to begin, insulted war hero John McCain – even after his death, spent an obscene amount of time playing golf after criticizing Barack Obama for playing (far less) golf while president, falsely claimed that he won the 2016 popular vote, called the Muslim mayor of London a “stone cold loser,” falsely claimed that he turned down being Time’s Man of the Year, considered firing special counsel Robert Mueller on several occasions, mocked wearing face masks to guard against transmitting COVID, locked Congress out of its constitutional duty to confirm Cabinet officials by hiring acting ones, used a racist dog whistle by calling COVID the “China virus,” hired and associated with numerous shady figures that were eventually convicted of federal offenses including his campaign manager and national security adviser, pardoned several of his shady associates, gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to two congressman who amplified his batshit crazy conspiracy theories, got into telephone fight with the leader of Australia(!), had a Secretary of State who called him a moron, forced his press secretary to claim without merit that his was the largest inauguration crowd in history, botched the COVID vaccine rollout, tweeted so much dangerous propaganda that Twitter eventually banned him, charged the Secret Service jacked-up rates at his properties, constantly interrupted Joe Biden in their first presidential debate, claimed that COVID would “magically” disappear, called a U.S. Senator “Pocahontas,” used his Twitter account to blast Nordstrom when it stopped selling Ivanka’s merchandise, opened up millions of pristine federal lands to development and drilling, got into a losing tariff war with China that forced US taxpayers to bail out farmers, claimed that his losing tariff war was a win for the US, ignored or didn’t even take part in daily intelligence briefings, blew off honoring American war dead in France because it was raining, redesigned Air Force One to look like the Trump Shuttle, got played by Kim Jung Un and his “love letters,” threatened to go after social media companies in clear violation of the Constitution, botched the response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, threw paper towels at Puerto Ricans when he finally visited them, pressured the governor and secretary of state of Georgia to “find” him votes, thought that the Virgin islands had a President, drew on a map with a Sharpie to justify his inaccurate tweet that Alabama was threatened by a hurricane, allowed White House staff to use personal email accounts for official businesses after blasting Hillary Clinton for doing the same thing, rolled back regulations that protected the public from mercury and asbestos, pushed regulators to waste time studying snake-oil remedies for COVID, rolled back regulations that stopped coal companies from dumping waste into rivers, held blatant campaign rallies at the White House, tried to take away millions of Americans’ health insurance because the law was named for a Black man, refused to attend his successors’ inauguration, nominated the worst Education Secretary in history, threatened judges who didn’t do what he wanted, attacked Dr. Anthony Fauci, promised that Mexico would pay for the wall (it didn’t), allowed political hacks to overrule government scientists on major reports on climate change and other issues, struggled navigating a ramp after claiming his opponent was feeble, called an African-American Congresswoman “low IQ,” threatened to withhold federal aid from states and cities with Democratic leaders, went ahead with rallies filled with maskless supporters in the middle of a pandemic, claimed that legitimate investigations of his wrongdoing were “witch hunts,” seemed to demonstrate a belief that there were airports during the American Revolution, demanded “total loyalty” from the FBI director, praised a conspiracy theory that Democrats are Satanic pedophiles, completely gutted the Voice of America, placed a political hack in charge of the Postal Service, claimed without evidence that the Obama administration bugged Trump Tower, suggested that the US should allow more people from places like Norway into the country, suggested that COVID wasn’t that bad because he recovered with the help of top government doctors and treatments not available to the public, overturned energy conservation standards that even industry supported, reduced the number of refugees the US accepts, insulted various members of Congress and the media with infantile nicknames, gave Rush Limbaugh a Presidential medal of Freedom at the State of the Union address, named as head of federal personnel a 29-year old who’d previously been fired from the White House for allegations of financial improprieties, eliminated the White House office of pandemic response, used soldiers as campaign props, fired any advisor who made the mistake of disagreeing with him, demanded the Pentagon throw him a Soviet-style military parade, hired a shit ton of white nationalists, politicized the civil service, did absolutely nothing after Russia hacked the U.S. government, falsely said the Boy Scouts called him to say his bizarre Jamboree speech was the best speech ever given to the Scouts, claimed that Black people would overrun the suburbs if Biden won, insulted reporters of color, insulted women reporters, insulted women reporters of color, suggested he was fine with China’s oppression of the Uighurs, attacked the Supreme Court when it ruled against him, summoned Pennsylvania state legislative leaders to the White House to pressure them to overturn the election, spent countless hours every day watching Fox News, refused to allow his administration to comply with Congressional subpoenas, hired Rudy Giuliani as his lawyer, tried to punish Amazon because the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post wrote negative stories about him, acted as if the Attorney General of the United States was his personal attorney, attempted to get the federal government to defend him in a libel lawsuit from a women who accused him of sexual assault, held private meetings with Vladimir Putin without staff present, didn’t disclose his private meetings with Vladimir Putin so that the US had to find out via Russian media, stopped holding press briefings for months at a time, “ordered” US companies to leave China even though he has no such power, led a political party that couldn’t even be bothered to draft a policy platform, claimed preposterously that Article II of the Constitution gave him absolute powers, tried to pressure the U.K. to hold the British Open at his golf course, suggested that the government nuke hurricanes, suggested that wind turbines cause cancer, said that he had a special aptitude for science, fired the head of election cyber security after he said that the 2020 election was secure, blurted out classified information to Russian officials, tried to force the G7 to hold their meeting at his failing golf resort in Florida, fired the acting attorney general when she refused to go along with his unconstitutional Muslim travel ban, hired Stephen Miller, openly discussed national security issues in the dining room at Mar-a-Lago where everyone could hear them, interfered with plans to relocate the FBI because a new development there might compete with his hotel, abandoned Iraqi refugees who’d helped the U.S. during the war, tried to get Russia back into the G7, held a COVID super spreader event in the Rose Garden, seemed to believe that Frederick Douglass is still alive, lost 60 election fraud cases in court including before judges he had nominated, falsely claimed that factories were reopening when they weren’t, shamelessly exploited terror attacks in Europe to justify his anti-immigrant policies, still hasn’t come up with a healthcare plan, still hasn’t come up with an infrastructure plan despite repeated “Infrastructure Weeks,” forced Secret Service agents to drive him around Walter Reed while contagious with COVID, told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” fu**ed up the Census, withdrew the U.S. from the World Health Organization in the middle of a pandemic, did so few of his duties that his press staff were forced to state on his daily schedule “President Trump will work from early in the morning until late in the evening. He will make many calls and have many meetings,” allowed his staff to repeatedly violate the Hatch Act, seemed not to know that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, stood before sacred CIA wall of heroes and bragged about his election win, constantly claimed he was treated worse than any president which presumably includes four that were assassinated and his predecessor whose legitimacy and birthplace were challenged by a racist reality TV show star named Donald Trump, claimed Andrew Jackson could’ve stopped the Civil War even though he died 16 years before it happened, said that any opinion poll showing him behind was fake, claimed that other countries laughed at us before he became president when several world leaders were literally laughing at him, claimed that the military was out of ammunition before he became President, created a commission to whitewash American history, retweeted anti-Islam videos from one of the most racist people in Britain, claimed ludicrously that the Pulse nightclub shooting wouldn’t have happened if someone there had a gun even though there was an armed security guard there, hired a senior staffer who cited the non-existent Bowling Green Massacre as a reason to ban Muslims, had a press secretary who claimed that Nazi Germany never used chemical weapons even though every sane human being knows they used gas to kill millions of Jews and others, bilked the Secret Service for higher than market rates when they had to stay at Trump properties, apparently sold pardons on his way out of the White House, stripped protective status from 59,000 Haitians, falsely claimed Biden wanted to defund the police, said that the head of the CDC didn’t know what he was talking about, tried to rescind protection from DREAMers, gave himself an A+ for his handling of the pandemic, tried to start a boycott of Goodyear tires due to an Internet hoax, said U.S. rates of COVID would be lower if you didn’t count blue states, deported U.S. veterans who served their country but were undocumented, claimed he did more for African Americans than any president since Lincoln, touted a “super-duper” secret “hydrosonic” missile which may or may not be a new “hypersonic” missile or may not exist at all, retweeted a gif calling Biden a pedophile, forced through security clearances for his family, suggested that police officers should rough up suspects, suggested that Biden was on performance-enhancing drugs, tried to stop transgender students from being able to use school bathrooms in line with their gender, suggested the US not accept COVID patients from  a cruise ship because it would make US numbers look higher, nominated a climate change sceptic to chair the committee advising the White House on environmental policy, retweeted a video doctored to look like Biden had played a song called “F**k tha Police” at a campaign event, hugged a disturbingly large number of U.S. flags, accused Democrats of “treason” for not applauding his State of the Union address, claimed that the FBI failed to capture the Parkland school shooter because they were “spending too much time” on Russia, mocked the testimony of Dr Christine Blasey Ford when she accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, obsessed over low-flow toilets, ordered the rerelease of more COVID vaccines when there weren’t any to release, called for the construction of a bizarre garden of heroes with statutes of famous dead Americans as well as at least one Canadian (Alex Trebek), hijacked Washington’s July 4th celebrations to give a partisan speech, took advice from the MyPillow guy, claimed that migrants seeking a better life in the US were dangerous caravans of drug dealers and rapists, said nothing when Vladimir Putin poisoned a leading opposition figure, never seemed to heed the advice of his wife’s “Be Best” campaign, falsely claimed that mail-in voting is fraudulent, announced a precipitous withdrawal of troops from Syria which not only handed Russia and ISIS a win but also prompted his defense secretary to resign in protest, insulted the leader of Canada, insulted the leader of France, insulted the leader of Britain, insulted the leader of Germany, insulted the leader of Sweden (Sweden!!), falsely claimed credit for getting NATO members to increase their share of dues, blew off two Asia summits even though they were held virtually, continued lying about spending lots of time at Ground Zero with 9/11 responders, said that the Japanese would sit back and watch their “Sony televisions” if the US were ever attacked, left a NATO summit early in a huff, stared directly into an eclipse even though everyone over the age of 5 knows not to do that, called himself a very stable genius despite significant evidence to the contrary, refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power and keep his promise, and a whole bunch of other things I can’t remember at the moment.

[newstfionline]

Monday, August 16, 2021

U.S. Air Force veteran comforts children plagued by gun violence (Reuters) Like many cities across the United States, Washington has seen a spike in shooting-related deaths during the pandemic. Homicides were up 19% in 2020 compared to 2019, according to the Washington Metropolitan Police Department. This month’s data shows that the city has already clocked more cases than at the same time last year. “It’s like a war zone. It’s like being in the military,” Jawanna Hardy said. Frustrated by the senseless loss of life, Hardy, an Air Force veteran and now a 34-year-old high school English teacher, launched ‘Guns Down Friday,’ an outreach program to support neighborhoods plagued by gun violence—including the one she has lived in since childhood. She has raised money for shooting victims’ gravestones, advocated for more streetlights, and trained people how to treat bullet wounds themselves. She drives her van—adorned with photos of young gun violence victims—through the streets to greet youngsters. On a recent Friday, she arrived with water balloons. “Put your guns down and pick your water balloons up!” Hardy cried through a megaphone as children outside an apartment complex in southeast Washington laughed and scrambled to drench one another. She knows her Friday night street parties will not stop gun violence but hopes they can at least provide children a brief respite from the constant fear in which many live.

Haitians scramble to rescue survivors from ruins of major quake (Reuters) Haitians labored overnight to pick through shattered buildings in search of friends and relatives trapped in the rubble after a devastating earthquake struck the Caribbean country on Saturday, killing 1,297 people and injuring at least 5,700 more. The 7.2 magnitude quake flattened hundreds of homes in the impoverished country, which is still clawing its way back from another major temblor here 11 years ago, and has been without a head of state since the assassination of its president last month. Churches, hotels, hospitals and schools were badly damaged or destroyed, while the walls of a prison were rent open by the violent shudders that convulsed Haiti. Access to the worst-hit areas was complicated by a deterioration in law and order that has left key access roads in parts of Haiti in the hands of gangs, although unconfirmed reports on social media suggested they would let aid pass.

Want to stay long term in France? First come the classes on how to be French. (Washington Post) In France, la vie en rose comes wrapped in red tape. Foreigners hoping to stay here long term must sign an “integration contract” and agree to uphold French values. The contract requires four days of civic education, yet what’s taught is more akin to a government crash course in how to be French. There are discussions about Marianne—the symbolic embodiment of the French Republic—and about classical culinary dishes, such as duck confit and escargot. France 101 covers both the cultural (how to visit museums) as well as the practical (how to navigate the national health-care system). The classes, plus language lessons for anyone whose fluency doesn’t measure up, help determine whether an applicant gets a multiyear visa. Every year, an average of 100,000 people take the courses, in cities across the country. The contemporary agreement explicitly states that receiving an extended residency visa is conditional on abiding by its terms, a key one being deference to French values. After an applicant signs the document, the language test is administered and 24 hours of classes scheduled.

Taliban sweep into Afghan capital after government collapses (AP) The Taliban swept into Afghanistan’s capital Sunday after the government collapsed and the embattled president joined an exodus of his fellow citizens and foreigners, signaling the end of a costly two-decade U.S. campaign to remake the country. Heavily armed Taliban fighters fanned out across the capital, and several entered Kabul’s abandoned presidential palace. Suhail Shaheen, a Taliban spokesman and negotiator, told The Associated Press that the militants would hold talks in the coming days aimed at forming an “open, inclusive Islamic government.” Kabul was gripped by panic. Helicopters raced overhead throughout the day to evacuate personnel from the U.S. Embassy. Smoke rose near the compound as staff destroyed important documents, and the American flag was lowered. Several other Western missions also prepared to pull their people out. Fearful that the Taliban could reimpose the kind of brutal rule that all but eliminated women’s rights, Afghans rushed to leave the country, lining up at cash machines to withdraw their life savings. The desperately poor—who had left homes in the countryside for the presumed safety of the capital—remained in parks and open spaces throughout the city. Many people watched in disbelief as helicopters landed in the U.S. Embassy compound to take diplomats to a new outpost at the airport. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken rejected comparisons to the U.S. pullout from Vietnam.

From hubris to humiliation: America’s warrior class contends with the abject failure of its Afghanistan project (Washington Post) Twenty years ago, when the twin towers and the Pentagon were still smoldering, there was a sense among America’s warrior and diplomatic class that history was starting anew for the people of Afghanistan and much of the Muslim world. “For you and us, history starts today,” then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage told his Pakistani counterparts. Earlier this month, as the Taliban raced across Afghanistan, retired Lt. Col. Jason Dempsey, a two-time veteran of the war, stumbled across Armitage’s words. To Dempsey, the sentiment was “the most American thing I’ve ever heard” and emblematic of the hubris and ignorance that he and so many others brought to the losing war. “We assumed the rest of the world saw us as we saw ourselves,” he said. “And we believed that we could shape the world in our image using our guns and our money.” Both assumptions ignored Afghan culture, politics and history. Both, he said, were tragically wrong. Michèle Flournoy, one of the architects of President Barack Obama’s troop surge in Afghanistan in 2010, said, “In retrospect, the United States and its allies got it really wrong from the very beginning. The bar was set based on our democratic ideals, not on what was sustainable or workable in an Afghan context.” Flournoy acknowledged in hindsight that the mistake was compounded across Republican and Democratic administrations, which continued with almost equal fervor to pursue goals that ran counter to decades—if not centuries—of the Afghan experience.

Afghanistan’s collapse leaves allies questioning U.S. resolve on other fronts (Washington Post) The Taliban's stunningly swift advances across Afghanistan have sparked global alarm, reviving doubts about the credibility of U.S. foreign policy promises and drawing harsh criticisms even from some of the United States' closest allies. And many around the world are wondering whether they could rely on the United States to fulfill long-standing security commitments stretching from Europe to East Asia. "Whatever happened to 'America is back'?" said Tobias Ellwood, who chairs the Defense Committee in the British Parliament. "People are bewildered that after two decades of this big, high-tech power intervening, they are withdrawing and effectively handing the country back to the people we went in to defeat," Ellwood said. "This is the irony. How can you say America is back when we're being defeated by an insurgency armed with no more than [rocket-propelled grenades], land mines and AK-47s?" As much as its military capabilities, the United States' decades-old role as a defender of democracies and freedoms is again in jeopardy, said Rory Stewart, who was Britain's minister for international development in the Conservative government of Theresa May. "The Western democracy that seemed to be the inspiration for the world, the beacon for the world, is turning its back," Stewart said. Rivals of the United States also have expressed dismay. Among them is China, which fears that the ascent of an extremist Islamist government on its western border will foster unrest in the adjoining province of Xinjiang, where Beijing has waged sweeping crackdowns on the Uyghur population that have been denounced by the West. The United States' Arab allies, which have long counted on the U.S. military to come to their aid in the event of an attack by Iran, also have faced questions over whether they will be able to rely on the United States.

Torrential rains lash wide areas of Japan, three feared dead after landslide (Reuters) Torrential rain lashed much of Japan on Sunday, flooding roads and buildings in the western part of the country, while three people were feared dead after a landslide in central Nagano prefecture. Large parts of Japan, particularly the southernmost main island of Kyushu, have seen record levels of rainfall, causing rivers to overflow and triggering landslides. While the rain had stopped in much of Kyushu as of Sunday morning, Tokyo and other parts of the country were pounded by the downpour. Japan “will continue to face conditions in which a large-scale disaster could occur at anytime, anywhere,” Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga said at a ministerial meeting on Sunday. He called on local municipalities and relevant organisations to cooperate and act with speed on rescue missions and aid.

More military personnel deployed to enforce Sydney Covid restrictions as entire state locks down (CNN) Additional Australian military personnel will be deployed to enforce tighter Covid-19 restrictions in the greater Sydney area next week, authorities announced Saturday, as the entire state of New South Wales (NSW) prepares to go under lockdown. Stay at home orders will be applied across the country’s most populous state, with people only permitted to leave home to shop for essentials, receive medical care, outdoor exercise with one other person, and work if residents cannot work from home. Schooling will also be moved back online. Sydney, the capital of NSW, has been under lockdown measures for more than seven weeks now, and they will likely be extended further; they were set to end on August 28 but the state government has indicated restrictions will remain through September.

Fuel explosion in Lebanon kills 28, wounding dozens (AP) A warehouse where fuel was illegally stored exploded in northern Lebanon early Sunday, killing at least 28 people and injuring 79 more in the latest tragedy to hit the Mediterranean country in the throes of a devastating economic and political crisis. It was not immediately clear what caused the explosion near the border with Syria. Fuel smuggling operations have been ongoing for months. The Lebanese Red Cross said a fuel tanker exploded and its teams recovered 28 bodies from the site in the border village of Tleil. In a statement, it said it evacuated 79 people who were injured or suffered burns in the blast. Hours after the blast, Lebanese Red Cross members were still searching the area for more victims as Lebanese soldiers cordoned the area.

'Once the best in the Middle East,' Beirut hospital pleads for fuel as it faces shutdown (The Week) A once-famed Beirut hospital is now pleading for international aid to avoid running out of essential resources. The American University of Beirut Medical Center in Beirut, Lebanon, is making an urgent appeal to the United Nations and its specialized agencies, the World Health Organization and the U.N. Children's Fund, to supply the hospital with fuel before it's forced to shut down by Monday. Lebanon is mired in an economic and political crisis, and the nationwide fuel shortage is currently the most dire consequence. That's perhaps most clearly reflected in the plight of AUBMC, which said 40 adults and 15 children living on respirators would die immediately and many other patients will be at great risk if the shutdown is not avoided. The medical center said it's been rationing fuel and electricity for weeks, but is running out of both. Liz Sly, The Washington Post's Beirut bureau chief, notes that the American University hospital "was once the best" in the entire Middle East region; the announcement shows that the country is "truly heading to disaster," she writes.

[empathdespoina]

Social effect of unhealthy minds hurting others...

This isn’t a post in regards to being an Empath. But it does affect Empaths, because this is happening close to their home...their families, community and towns bordering your own; besides state you live in.

I was reflecting and realized that Donald Trump (I know, I know you don’t want to hear about him, but hear me out, it has a ripple effect) grew up abused by his father and mother and child abuse is something that should seriously be address; due to the mental health issues that stem from this and it’s a cycle that gets put onto the next young innocent victim, or a victim not blood related. Seeing how Trump still refuses to acknowledge that he lost, due to his psychological mindset that he’s still trying to please his father...that’s a very unsettling mindset; especially that his father died so long ago...I honestly don’t know.

So here is a man that’s in charge of a nation, that’s mentally unstable and this is causing others who have been abused as a child and NEVER got psychological help...are ever so lovely continued the sick cycle. I say this because my mother was abused by her mother as a child - it was verbal, emotional and psychological; plus my mother’s older sister (my aunt) was abused and then her sister turned it onto my mom. This has caused my mom to follow in these foot steps. Yet my mother and aunt don’t see anything wrong with the way they treat me and sadly my brother has learned to treat me very similar; but in a worst way...due to him bringing his NYPD job home and blowing up on me for no reason, and I feel he’s not to far away to unleash his physical anger on me. I have suggested to my mother on several times to go to therapy and her response is always... I’m okay there’s nothing wrong with me. As of recently my mom wants very little to do with her sister, on the way her sister treats her. I am my mother’s and brother’s emotional punching bag of dumping their bad days on me...all because I do something small that a healthy minded person would be upset; yet for these two, flip off at me as if I did something so damn horrible as if killed a wild animal in the house and destroyed the house in the process.

Now seeing how my family is...my mom likes Trump and is very pissed that he lost; due to her being very negative towards me, anytime there’s a reference around our new leaders for the nation. And the negativity outburst is nothing more than childish, but her being an adult and the years of how she destroyed my mental health on causing me to have very high stress anxiety; that if I do something similar to what would have upset her in the past...I start freaking out, in an unsettling reaction. Reason why? Because spilling a drink on the floor isn’t a big deal for healthy minded people. Yet for my mother it was the straw that broke the camel’s back and completely lost it with me. My father tried his best to protect me when he was alive; yet reflecting on the past and understanding my mother’s past; he was most likely abused along the same line like me, due to his last famous words to my mother, as he died from cancer: “You did this to me and put me here!” Which I believe was him lashing out on the abuse she did to him and it was always a passive aggressive to then shouting and bringing up every damn past mistake and making you feel worthless and that you’re nothing more then an embarrassment to her. Since she’s always concern of how others perceive her, due to the fact she never was popular in high school and that mindset still hasn’t been let go...seeing how she was ecstatic when my brother was the popular kid back in the day, in school and she could hang out with the popular moms. -face palms herself-

Having a mentally sick man as our president who won’t admit to losing or that he’s fucked up because yeah he was abused as a child...since around that time, it was considered ACCEPTABLE. Now you’re getting all these other people who were abused as a child and mentally sick to be encourage to let all this out, let all the abuse out and to hurt others. To attack people out of nowhere to let racism fly. But for some people at home, to deal with those we know, are getting worst than they were before...all because they admire this man like a Korean Idol or a Kardashian. The most dangerous ones are who are less educated; then following under that is people (more now my mother’s age group compared to my age group...to an extent on my age group), who are getting addicted to FB - which has always used ads and fake news to convince people of what the democrats are doing and to believe everything the republicans are saying...when what they are saying, is very dangerous school of thought; for these people to become nothing more than sheep that can rage and hurt others without a care; since Trump has been doing that in the public eye and social media.

Trump doesn’t want to hear the truth and those who don’t agree with him and make it known on news channels...where he takes comfort in social media; which he can easily bend those to his thought process and believe in it. I shit you not my mother believes in this thought process; which I believe is from FB. She’s now on FB more often and her friend who is too (the one that’s got chemical brain and talks to her daily)...that the three red strips in Biden’s campaign design is related to China...because some asshole who wanted to stir things up and cause chaos; when Biden was mimicking Obama’s campaign design. I couldn’t tell my mother other wise due to her hard belief in this...and this was a woman, who years ago when my father died- she did massive research on the pesticides that cause my dad’s cancer, which lead to his death. And she would always look into things. Yet due to her being chair bound as her ankle heals...she’s been on social media more and more; which I am not addict to social media like I was to an extent 10yrs ago. She believes in the republicans on what the democrats are going to do, on making our American country into one of socialism and the socialism very that is being inferred is the one in which we have no rights. Then there was another time this reference was brought up- note by my mothers and believing that by destroying all the stores, would cause this country to quickly turn into a socialism nation. I told her we have three branches of government and it isn’t going to change, due to how the three branches of government works. She replies go ahead and believe that it will stay the same, once Biden is in office.

This is what I mean about a ripple effect of these dangerous school of thoughts and to be violent to others and keep the cycle of abuse going. My mother is a woman who could think for herself...yet these past four years under Trump it’s more of the social media fake news to scare people in buying guns...in order to “protect” themselves from an uprising of the minorities; who will come and attack our home and to protect ourselves... I am not making this up - this actually came out of my mother’s mouth when I question my mothers on why my brother had three guns and a SNIPER RIFFLE. And the other push for buying guns that Democrats would ban guns-  this causing my brother to buy so much damn ammo for his “guns” that he can be his own militia army...where these people are too stupid to realize the rights to have guns is within our 10 Amendments. It is as if no one remembers our Amendments and how our three branches of government works any more of history.

And if I have to show you dangerous school of thought to cause chaos look to the dr who lost his medical license due to things that endanger a patient, because he was putting his believes onto this woman...instead of the best care to help her. He went on social media on video saying the 5G towers were “causing the COVID” and he would go on and on about it...where he’s clearly not right in the head...but of course you have mental sick idiots who will believe someone that “appears” smarter than them. And what did they do...they went around in Europe and destroying those 5G towers.

Trump’s legacy should be of a different social experiment (which they refereed to the prohibition), on how a man could use social media to bend people to his unhealthy thought process and make others stupid to believe in everything he says. Look how some republicans are believing the election is a fraud still, due to Trump losing, and this is a man who’s always got his way and his energy aura has to be very intimating for no one to say “NO” to him. For an other average person to pull the same shit off as Trump; would be arrested in a heartbeat, yet they are afraid of this man. Which I believe, when it comes time for him to leave office and we know he won’t go peacefully; to get a trank-gun and shoot him with it; then put a straight jacket on him and haul him away to a really heavily secured mental ward. Trump has caused healthy minded people to do things, that were not seen under Obama and Bush’s time in office. I only pick them, due to the fact I was more aware of how the president worked and being able to vote. Trump is a mental disease in his own way and to see others catch this and treat those around them...like Trump treats others, as if they are beneath his feet. I don’t know how much more rage outbursts that I’m going to have to deal with, in regards to my mother as this year ends and Biden will soon be in office. Plus keep in mind, I am the only one of her two children home (due to can’t find a job) to help her out and drive her around and she treats me like this...also I wasn’t the one who left something in my mother’s path of walking for her to fall and hurt herself, it was my brother. Yet he’s not helping out as much more, due to him being happy that his back working Narcotics unit; since he was desked for awhile due to he, himself breaking his leg and ankle of the right side a year ago from mom hurting herself.

I am really concern seeing what this nation has become and seeing how my mother and brother are on board with the words coming out of Trump’s mouth; especially my mom’s friend. I guess I felt compelled to write out my fear on seeing this...awhile ago, I read two articles that psychoanalyzed Trump by some professional therapist, as they watched and observed him on tv and looked into his history, on the life he had growing up. I honestly don’t know how long it will take to make society more...I honestly can’t find the right word....less violent and more willing to hurt others in a sick twisted obsession...? Yet that still happens in this world...maybe I’m looking for is......less negative fuel to fuel the monsters that are wearing masks and are two face to people...pretending by day to be a respectable person of society and when not watched by those people...take the mask off and reveal the monster underneath willing to hurt others; as they see Trump has done, and what he’s encourage to happen in this country.

So if you have family members, friends or co-workers/bosses who have similar thought process like my family... try your best to endure it and make sure you have something you can discreetly touch to ground you... or go for more pee breaks and just say you’re body’s off...if you get questioned.

[coronavirusremediationservices]

With no end to the pandemic in sight, coronavirus fatigue grips America

Gabe Rice began sheltering in his suburban Phoenix home with his wife and three youngest children in March. They worked remotely, learned remotely and put social events on hold to hunker down alongside much of the country.

It was challenging and frustrating, but, Rice initially assumed, temporary. It seemed like a plausible plan to help the nation get the pandemic under control within a couple of months.

But Arizona’s economic reopening in May, urged by Gov. Doug Ducey (R), was soon followed by a spike in coronavirus infections in June, which became a terrible surge in hospitalizations and deaths by July.

Then came August, and the devastating realization for many Americans that the pandemic, which has killed at least 159,000 people across the country and sickened more than five million, is far from over.

“It’s difficult when you think you have a light at the other end of the tunnel to look forward to, and then all of a sudden you realize it’s a train,” said Rice, 44, a program coordinator at Arizona State University.

An exhausted, exasperated nation is suffering from the effects of a pandemic that has upended society on a scale and duration without parallel in living memory.

The Rice family and millions of other Americans are wrestling with difficult questions about how to juggle school, pay their bills and look after their mental and physical health.

Parents lie awake, their minds racing with thoughts of how to balance work with their newfound role as home-schoolers. Frontline health workers are bone tired, their nerves frayed by endless shifts and constant encounters with the virus and its victims. Senior citizens have grown weary of isolation. Unemployed workers fret over jobs lost, benefits that are running out, rent payments that are overdue. Minority communities continue to shoulder the disproportionate burden of the contagion’s impact, which in recent weeks has killed an average of about 1,000 people a day.

Buck Horton reopened his club, Wo-de’s Chill Spot, in Harvey, La., only to be forced into a second closure —  by the fire marshal’s office, which cited violations of Louisiana’s coronavirus restrictions. Buck Horton reopened his club, Wo-de’s Chill Spot, in Harvey, La., only to be forced into a second closure — by the fire marshal’s office, which cited violations of Louisiana’s coronavirus restrictions. (Emily Kask for The Washington Post) The metaphor of a marathon doesn’t capture the wearisome, confounding, terrifying and yet somehow dull and drab nature of this ordeal for many Americans, who have watched leaders fumble the pandemic response from the start. Marathons have a defined conclusion, but 2020 feels like an endless slog — uphill, in mud.

Recent opinion polls hint at the deepening despair. A Gallup survey in mid-July showed 73 percent of adults viewed the pandemic as growing worse — the highest level of pessimism recorded since Gallup began tracking that assessment in early April. Another Gallup Poll, published Aug. 4, found only 13 percent of adults are satisfied with the way things are going overall in the country, the lowest in nine years.

A July Kaiser Family Foundation poll echoed that, finding that a majority of adults think the worst is yet to come. Fifty-three percent said the crisis has harmed their mental health.

In a podcast released Thursday, former first lady Michelle Obama directly addressed the mental toll, saying she has struggled with the quarantines, the government’s response to the pandemic and the persistent reminders of systemic racism that have led to nationwide protests.

“I know that I am dealing with some form of low-grade depression,” she said.

Historians say that not even the 1918 flu pandemic, which killed an estimated 675,000 people in the United States, had the same kind of all-encompassing economic, social and cultural impact.

“One of the biggest differences between this virus and [the 1918] influenza is the duration,” said John Barry, author of “The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History.”

With coronavirus, he said, the incubation period is longer, patients with symptoms tend to be sick longer, and many take longer to recover. Barry said leaders did not make sufficiently clear early on the simple epidemiological truth that this would be a painfully drawn-out event.

“Part of the frustration and disappointment and depression, frankly, is because of the expectation that we’d be through this by now,” he said.

President Trump repeatedly promised a quick resolution. He conjured the image of church pews packed by Easter. The White House recommended 15 days of restrictions. That was then extended by 30 days, to the end of April. On Thursday, Trump said a vaccine could be ready by Election Day, Nov. 3 — a date well in advance of what his administration’s own experts think is likely.

But the virus has repeatedly shown that it has its own timetable. The first wave of shutdowns helped reverse the frightening trend lines of March and early April but came nowhere close to crushing the opportunistic pathogen. And now the season of the pandemic is indisputably the year of the pandemic.

“This will be a long, long haul unless virtually everybody — or a very, very high percentage of the population, including the young people — take very seriously the kind of prevention principles that we’ve been talking about,” Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in an interview.

“It is within our power and within our will to really get it down to a level that’s low enough that we can do many of the things that would get our economy going again,” he added. “There will be a long slog if everybody doesn’t pitch in.”

Not everyone is experiencing the same level of stress, and everyone’s pandemic struggles differ. Any “essential” worker exposed to high-risk conditions day after day has more urgent concerns than someone merely stuck at home and missing out on summer barbecues.

In Cadiz, Ky., Stephanie Grant has endured one of the most trying years of her life. The 42-year-old lost her job at the end of April. For more than two months, as she waited for unemployment benefits to kick in, she fell behind on her car payment, utilities, insurance and rent for the apartment she shares with her two teenage daughters.

She drained most of her savings trying to remain afloat. She applied for jobs at gas stations and dollar stores. She pursued becoming a coronavirus contract tracer, but that also didn’t come through.

“I could not get a job anywhere,” she said. “I want to get back out there and work.”

As her stress and her bills mounted, Grant turned to a Kentucky nonprofit focused on housing and homelessness. The group helped her catch up on her rent, and the arrival of her unemployment payments in late July have allowed her to catch her breath. For now.

“Right now, I’m wary. It seems like we are falling apart. The stress, the tensions, everything that’s going on. … People are scared,” she said.

And many people are bored, eager to socialize. In Harvey, La., Marlon “Buck” Horton operates a popular bar, Wo-de’s Chill Spot. But Horton’s bar permit was suspended in late July after complaints about what the state fire marshal described as “a large, non-socially distanced crowd.”

Horton, 39, denied the fire marshal’s report that he served alcohol indoors. He said people simply eager to grab a beer crowded outside, and a passerby posted a video of the gathering on Facebook, leading to the crackdown.

“We’re stuck. We don’t have assistance, and we still have landlords,” Horton said last week. At a hearing soon after, the suspension was lifted when he agreed to pay a fine and abide by the state’s coronavirus rules.

Although some states battered by the virus have made progress against it in recent weeks, it has infiltrated small towns with little previous exposure.

In Mississippi, George County is among eight counties that have been told to delay school reopenings for grades seven to 12 until Aug. 17 because of high rates of virus transmission. Superintendent of Education Wade Whitney realized how serious the pandemic had become locally when a co-worker in an adjacent office became severely ill and was hospitalized for five days.

“When that person catches it, it kind of hits you right between the eyes,” Whitney said. “Small-town George County is not immune.”

That co-worker was Matt Caldwell, the director of operations for the school district and the former head football coach at the high school. Caldwell, a big man who played offensive line for the Mississippi State Bulldogs in the early 1990s, had assumed it would be no big deal if he was infected.

“Boy, was I wrong,” he said. “I definitely underestimated it. I tell everybody I talk to it’s a real thing. Those people who think its just a hoax and all that — I know this, I wouldn’t wish what I went through on anybody.”

Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, has become an oft-quoted expert during the coronavirus pandemic. But she’s also a mother who is dismayed that her son Miles, 7, who should be entering second grade in a Maryland public school, will start the year with online-only instruction.

“I’m absolutely devastated. It’s not learning,” Nuzzo said.

The Washington Nationals host the New York Mets on Aug. 4 in an otherwise empty Nationals Park. The Washington Nationals host the New York Mets on Aug. 4 in an otherwise empty Nationals Park. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post) This is not just back-to-school season, it’s also the time when many counties and states hold their annual fairs. Those are being canceled right and left. Professional sports is now back on air, but in most cases without fans in the stadiums and arenas. Major League Baseball is trying to keep its revived season intact after several outbreaks of infection.

And there are the ordinary cancellations so many people have endured — birthdays not celebrated, weddings and funerals carried out over Zoom, trips not taken, loved ones not visited.

Joseph and Kelli Crawford of Gilbert, Ariz., had planned to travel to London in April for their 10th anniversary and for her sister’s 30th birthday. Everything was booked: Flights, lodging, tickets to concerts and plays.

They rescheduled for March 2021. But now they worry that even that might be optimistic.

“I’m crossing my fingers. But I’m also not going to be packing my bags,” said Kelli, 33.

A flight attendant, she also agreed to an 18-month voluntary separation from her work. She’ll keep her health insurance and part of her salary.

But she won’t be bored. All four of the Crawfords’ children, ages 4, 5, 10 and 13, are home. The three oldest have begun remote classes. Their 4-year-old daughter has been aching to start preschool since she saw her older brother do so last year. But there is no virtual preschool, so that plan is on hold.

“It’s one thing for the adults to be lonely,” Kelli said. “But these poor kids, I get so heartbroken about the loneliness they’re experiencing.”

There are glimmers of hope for those staggered by this dire moment: The vaccine development for the novel coronavirus appears to be moving at unprecedented speed. There are promising therapeutics that may lower the mortality rate of those who become severely ill.

The pandemic will someday come to an end, experts promise, because all pandemics have. And though SARS-CoV-2 is a slippery and unpredictable virus, it has not proved as deadly as the 1918 influenza virus that swept across much of the planet.

“In 1918, practically every city in the country ran out of coffins,” Barry said. Victims commonly died at home. “All these things led to much greater fear, which meant that people were also more willing to put up with anything that might help.”

Howard Markel, a medical historian at the University of Michigan, said that though similarities exist between today’s outbreak and the influenza pandemic a century ago, American society was different at that time.

Americans had experienced epidemics of cholera, diphtheria and other diseases in the not-so-distant past. They were accustomed to children dying of smallpox, whooping cough and other diseases.

Rep. T.S. McMillan, a Democrat from Charleston, S.C., with two flappers, dances the Charleston in Washington in the 1920s. Rep. T.S. McMillan, a Democrat from Charleston, S.C., with two flappers, dances the Charleston in Washington in the 1920s. (Library of Congress) Unlike today, most Americans also had little confidence that a magic bullet would end the suffering and exasperation. “Another expectation of our era is the expectation that science will come up with a fix quickly,” Markel said. “None of us have the patience for lengthy processes. We live in an instant society.”

Still, Markel said, despite the seemingly endless nature of the current situation, history offers reasons for optimism. When the pandemic of 1918-1919 was over, for instance, people rebounded quickly.

“They went out and started dancing the Charleston, buying raccoon coats and buying stocks and bonds,” he said. “It went from zero to 60 in no time flat.”

This crisis, too, will pass.

“No question, epidemic fatigue or pandemic fatigue is real. We are experiencing it,” Markel said. “But throughout human history, there have been terrible pandemics and contagious threats. Every civilization, every nation, has come through to the other side. And we will, too.”

[facingtherisingsun]

There were White Supremacists Shooting

The motivation for me to create this blog was so that I could speak from my heart and give my perspective about the happenings during the Minneapolis uprising after George Floyd’s murder. In a lot of ways, I still need to process what happened those nights directly following the murder. With everything in my heart I want to tell the truth, but even now, I struggle with a knowledge that I’ve been taught to dismiss as fiction. 

I grew up (majority of my adolescent and teen years) here in Minnesota. I was taught growing up that racism was regulated to that part of the country I had spent another part of my childhood, The South. I was taught that it was old white southern rednecks that upheld racism in the United States. That the progressive North, especially a place like Minnesota could never be racist. This, I think we can all attest to, is a fallacy, created by white progressives that didn’t want to entertain the very real issue of northern racism. 

Not only this, when President Obama was elected, I was 13. After his election, the fallacy of progress seeped into almost all parts of my education and life. “We are a post-racial society”, “I’m Color-blind,” “I can’t be racist, I voted for Obama!” These were all things that I heard, absorbed, and couldn’t make my mind comprehend. I couldn’t comprehend why I felt dismay when a high school teacher said, “We just need to wait until these old racists in my generation die out, then racism will end,” as if I wasn’t dealing with an onslaught of microaggressions from my peers. In so many ways, I was being indoctrinated into a ‘double think’ system that required me to not see the racial undertones that pervaded my education, or as Baldwin would put it, my ‘Mis-education’.  

So I couldn’t believe it when I started getting reports of white supremacists organizing to wreak terror on Minneapolis, those nights after the murder when the town was in flames. I couldn’t believe it when NAACP volunteers described to me how they were shot at by white men in pick up trucks. I couldn’t believe that I had to then turn around and find solutions for getting those volunteers into a safe space while also letting others know, to get off the street, “There are white supremacists shooting.” 

Still, I am working to comprehend the stories of Aryan Cowboys and the KKK in Minnesota terrorizing Black families, and how it is not on the 5 o’clock news. White Minnesotans might write this off as “outside agitators,” as I had, hearing of Alabama or Texas license plates on some cars that belonged to these white supremacists. But on further analysis, even if a few are from out-of-state,  White supremacy lives here in Minnesota. I know this because unlike Mississippi, the Minnesota State Senate has yet to pass any meaningful racial justice bills. I know this because the Aryan Cowboys that terrorized a family out in Stillwater all live in Minnesota or Wisconsin. I know that racism is alive in Minnesota because Minnesota has some of the worst racial disparities in the country when it comes to economic indicators like housing, education, income, and incarceration rates. This state was established through genocide, the mass murder of the Dakota and Ojibwa peoples that were on this land before us. This state was no stranger to Lynchings when it lynched three Black men in Duluth a hundred years ago. This state created and ignored systemic and explicit racism that led to the murders of Jamar Clark, Philando Castille, and George Floyd. 

And I see why my teachers didn’t teach me my history, why my teacher said “Wait, because racism will die out,” They were indoctrinating me into White Supremacy’s greatest perpetrators; complacency, passivity, silence. I was taught to be complacent with the status quo. I was taught to be passive in the face of microaggressions and racism. I was taught to be silent instead of speaking up for myself and for others. I hope to use this platform as a way to speak up for myself and the truth. White supremacy lives, breathes, and is shooting here in Minnesota.

News sources of white supremacist activity in Minnesota:

https://www.theroot.com/racist-minnesota-couple-attacked-black-man-held-him-to-1828222840

https://www.startribune.com/inside-minnesota-s-boogaloo-movement-armed-and-eager-for-societal-collapse/571821151/

https://theintercept.com/2020/07/15/george-floyd-protests-police-far-right-antifa/

[thesportssoundoff]

Playoff Droughts And Who Can Break Theirs

Joey

Baseball season is approaching and in the interest of breaking up the monotony of what figures to be a LONG and painful spring training, I wanted to take a peek whimsically while looking backwards. There's no more enjoyable story than when a team that's been excluded from the postseason dance for quite some time gets their invite. Sometimes it's years of hard work and team building and other years its due to ownership just throwing money around and sometimes? It's just a fluke luck circumstance not to be repeated for quite some time. For the sake of doing something of a bit of a project, I decided to take a brief look at teams that have not made the playoffs in over five years. I chose five years arbitrarily I suppose because to me five years or more without a playoff run is a genuine drought whereas four or less just feels like a lull regardless of expectations. Yankees fans may consider three years without the playoffs to be a drought whereas that's if anything a lull or a break in tradition. Teams that have been out of it for five years or more are teams that are either mired in long term BAD baseball or embracing mediocrity at best and so five years just felt right. Also I wanted to do it since the invent of the two game wild card but then it would be literally just three teams and nobody wants that.

Of the eight teams who have missed the playoffs for five years straight or longer, who are most likely to break that streak and join the dance? Well...

1- Philadelphia Phillies Last Playoff Appearance: 2011

Last year's darling picks, the Phillies have been out of the playoffs since 2011. For fun facts, 2011 was also the first year of the Chromebook, snapchat and the release of Elder Scrolls: Skryim. If you read this space for MMA? 2011 was the year Jon Jones beat Shogun for the LHW title, the Strikeforce HW Grand Prix started and Alistair Overeem's UFC debut. It's been a while and to the credit of Philadelphia, they've tried a multitude of ways from riding out the final years of aging veterans to rehauling their farm system to spending and spending big. It's not for a lack of trying they haven't made it back to the playoffs! Last year they seemed armed to roll through a perceived weak NL East with big names and big money across the board. Of course little did we know the Nationals would be better without Bryce Harper and the Phillies wouldn't even crack the top two of the division. Out goes Gabe Kapler and in comes Joe Girardi who will be tasked with VETERAN MANAGING his way through this ultra talented and underachieving roster that has added the likes of Zach Wheeler, Didi Gregorious as well as Andrew McCutchen who was lost early into 2019 with a torn ACL. The Phillies boast an insane line up as if Didi and Cutch are healthy and productive then you've got a core of Jean Segura, JT Realmuto, Didi, McCutchen, Rhys Hoskins and Bryce Harper. The rotation is pretty damn spiffy (health permitting) with Wheeler, Aaron Nola, Zach Eflin and Jake Arrieta plus flostam as a fifth if need be. The Phillies are always going to be a team that has slumps magnified and streaks glorified (such is life with Bryce Harper) but I can't see them not cracking the playoffs in some form or fashion this year. If they don't make the playoffs, we may need to try and discuss if there's some kind of a curse out there on the Phanatic.

2- Cincinnati Reds Last Playoff Appearance: 2013

Gotta admit I had no idea the Reds had a playoff cameo back in 2013. Guess that's just one of those years lost to time. Fun facts of 2013? Grand Theft Auto 5 came out that year, Yahoo purchased this hell site and the UFC brought women into the organization for the first time ever. The Reds spoke openly about wanting to spend a bit in the offseason and so they did, flexing some financial muscle with deals for Mike Moustakas, Shogo Akiyama and Nick Castellanos to help out a lineup featuring the likes of Joey Votto, Nick Senzel and Eugenio Suarez. If the Reds are going to make a serious run of things, it'll likely be on the arms of a rejuvenated Sonny Gray, mercurial Trevor Bauer and the league's best kept secret to casual fans Luis Castillo. There's obviously going to be concerns about a team that hits a lot of dingers but strikes out a bunch and a somewhat unheralded bullpen but the Reds have power, they've gotten better and they've got a cadre of arms to flex at any time. Also? The NL Central figures to be up in the air as the Cubs seem to coast with the core they have until the rebuild comes around, the Cardinals and Brewers underwent massive changes and the Pirates figure to be flat out bad. There's never been a more clear path for the Reds to make some October noise.

3- Los Angeles Angels Last Playoff Appearance: 2014

The year is 2014. In the real world,  Colorado legalizes the purchase of wacky tobacky, selfies became "a thing" in need of forever going away and the occulus rift creates a youtube grift genre. Sports wise? The MLB struggles through record rating woes, the Cowboys finally break through in the Jason Garrett tenure with a 12-4 record, the UFC is undergoing massive upheaval as stars retire or are suspended for PEDs, Bellator hosts its first PPV which in turn leads to the ousting of Bjorn Rebney for Scott Coker and LeBron James leaves Miami to go back where it all began in Cleveland. That's the last time the Angels saw a playoff game and it's been beaten to death at this point. "WHY DON'T THE ANGELS MAKE THE PLAYOFFS DURING MIKE TROUT'S PRIME?!" is tired and done to death but for those of you who feel the same way, 2020 marks the BEST chance for that to become a fad question (or perhaps just morph into "WHY CAN'T THE BEST PLAYER IN BASEBALL WIN THE WORLD SERIES ON HIS OWN?!") since the Angels are pretty damn loaded for bare. With the Astros about to endure a pretty weird season and the A's always lurking, the Angels will roll into the year with three bonafide superstars in Anthony Rendon, Shohei Otani and Mike Trout. The pieces around them aren't bad shakes either as Andrelton Simmons is a defensive whiz, David Fletcher is one of those solid under the radar types and the rotation isn't flashy but it should be competent with minor league depth to make moves if they see a big fish out there. The Angels would've been higher up had they gotten Ross Stripling and Joc Pedersen in a deal but since that fell off, I feel like 3rd behind the Reds and Phillies is a fine spot to put them in.

4- Chicago White Sox Last Playoff Appearance: 2008

2008 will probably best be known as the year of change headlined by the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States. It was the year Fidel Castro stepped down in Cuba. China got the olympics in Beijing and people were TOTALLY cool about that with nary any controversy whatsoever. Beyond that? 2008 was the year I got into MMA and that was a special time, dudes. It was also the year where the White Sox saw their last real sustained succeed with its last postseason appearance. The White Sox feel like they've been in a rebuild since pretty much the end of the Ozzie Guillen tenure and despite multiple managers, multiple attempts to figure it out, rebuilds aplenty and some damn good talent coming through the organization, it's been a rough go of it for the majority of 2010 to 2019. Put it this way, the LAST time the White Sox made the playoffs, Chris Sale was a 22 year old rookie and Paul Konerko was still an active player. They've got a chance to kick off this next decade as a bit of a sleeper team in the Central. This team can hit and one can assume that another year of development for phenom talents like Yoan Moncada and Eloy Jiminez can only help. Tim Anderson for better or worse has a style and swagger that generates attention but it is fair to remember that for at least one half a season, he was a phenomenal player worthy of the acclaim. The White Sox have tried hard to secure elite free agents (Manny Machado and Zack Wheeler) but it's been a bust so at this point it's going to be up to them to draft, develop and trade for it. It would not surprise me if the White Sox are good enough in June and July to make a big deal to try and push them over the hump and chase for the second wild card.

5- San Diego Padres Last Playoff Appearance: 2006

The Padres last made the playoffs in the year of the Nintendo Wii. Floyd Mayweather hadn't even come up with his Money Mayweather gimmick yet! Lost to baseball obscurity, the Padres had at the very least an interesting team out west. The likes of Manny Machado, Fernando Tatis Jr, arguably the worst defensive outfield in the history of the universe and freakishly good young arms like Chris Paddack and Joey Luchessi at least made them fun to watch. They weren't "good" but this is a team that was still struggling to balance expensive veterans with clout (Machado, Eric Hosmer, Will Meyers) with really good young talent trying to figure things out. The Padres figure to be better with a full season of Tatis Jr, more production from guys like Hosmer and Machado plus improvements in the outfield with Tommy Pham and Trent Grisham (hold your jokes, Nats fans) figure to give this team a chance. There's a pretty good bullpen (Emilio Pagan is a sneaky nice pick up) and plenty of talent in their 26 man roster. The NL West has so much legit top talent with the D-Backs and Dodgers figuring to be really good that it's hard to make an argument for the Padres to be a playoff contender but they figure to try and trying is truly half the battle.

6- Miami Marlins Last Playoff Appearance: 2003

It's kind of a bummer that we didn't get our decennial Marlins "The fuck?" World Series win but they made up for it by giving us Jeffrey Loria and David Samson fucking things up for most of the decade leading to Derek FUCKING Jeter opting to get into the management game much to the chagrin of most folks on all sides. The Marlins are in the midst of rebuilding....again. Don't expect them to compete but they've got some good talent to at least want to see play. Brian Anderson, Caleb Smith, Jorge Alfaro and a bundle of veteran signings that will at the very least make the Marlins a fun trade partner in July will keep this team relevant. Wouldn't surprise me if the Marlins flirt with a 20 win swing from where they were last year.

7- Seattle Mariners Last Playoff Appearance: 2001

My god man. The Mariners were SO close in 2018, winning 89 games and finishing a few spots out of a Wild Card spot. As if they decided that this core couldn't do it, the Mariners went to work tearing their team apart and were rewarded with a pretty blegh squad that was once again picked apart at the deadline. To their credit they have some spiffy talent worth watching, namely the infield duo of JP Crawford and Shed Long. They’ve also got some fun young arms who might take the next step. Just don't expect them to win many games.

8- Detroit Tigers Last Playoff Appearance: 2014

The Tigers are aways away from being contenders. They're not trying to be contenders. They're in the midst of what could best be described as a multiple year rebuild after riding out the end days of the core from the start of the 2010's. They will be bad but god bless 'em for embracing it.

[bountyofbeads]

I Felt Safe in America. Until El Paso. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/10/opinion/sunday/el-paso-shooting-immigrants.html

Below are two editorial pieces written by Hispanic AMERICANS and their thoughts on America after the El Paso shooting. We CANNOT LET HATE WIN. WE MUST STAND WITH OUR BROTHERS AND SISTERS.

I Felt Safe in America. Until El Paso.

It is because of people like me and my daughter that a gunman did what he did.

By Fernanda Santos, Ms. Santos, a former national correspondent for The Times, teaches journalism at Arizona State University. | Published Aug. 10, 2019 | New York Times | Posted August 10, 2019 |

PHOENIX — A good friend who is moving to Chicago had a going-away party at a downtown brewery recently and I stopped by to say goodbye. He is an artist from Iraq who escaped to the United States in 2013 to save his life. In Iraq, Mahdi Army loyalists had chased, beaten and threatened him because he had dared to sketch nude pictures — practice for his entrance exam at Baghdad University’s College of Fine Arts. Here, he is free.

I wasn’t running from anyone when I settled in the United States 21 years ago, but I understand the idea of being free in America: For me, it has meant being free from the senseless violence of everyday life in Rio de Janeiro, from where I came. Since moving to the United States, I’ve married a white man, given birth to our daughter and moved to Arizona, where I’ve written about immigrants and the border and gotten to know both well.

I blend in seamlessly in Arizona, where about one in three residents is Latino. As a naturalized citizen, I felt safe here even when a campaign against illegal immigrants led by the infamous former sheriff, Joe Arpaio, targeted Latinos. One day after Donald Trump’s election, a man approached me while I spoke Spanish on the phone outside a coffee shop and screamed, “Speak English.” The experience rattled me, but still I felt safe. I did, however, start carrying my passport card in my wallet, just in case.

That sense of safety changed when a young white man opened fire in a Walmart in El Paso last Saturday, making targets out of brown-skinned people. I read the suspect’s manifesto  Sunday morning and, for the first time, I did not feel just like an immigrant. I felt like a target. I looked at my 10-year-old daughter eating the chocolate-chip pancakes I’d made and realized that she could be a target too. Citizenship, it turns out, is an illusory shield. In the eyes of that gunman, I am not American but an invader, an instigator. It is because of people like me that he did what he did.

Segregation was codified in this country in the days after Emancipation, when Southern states enacted laws that clamped down on African-Americans’ newly found freedom to vote, own property or attend public schools. But Jim Crow extended beyond the South: It took the Supreme Court to force Arizona to stop requiring voters to take English literacy tests, and that was years after the Voting Rights Act had already banned such tests.

But if legal segregation has largely fallen before court rulings, anti-minority and anti-immigrant attitudes have not. Last month, at a Republican event in Phoenix, State Senator Sylvia Allen, who is white, said, “We’re going to look like South American countries very quickly.” Ms. Allen, who later apologized, blamed it on the fact that white women are not reproducing fast enough and on the immigrants who are “flooding us and flooding us and flooding us and overwhelming us so we don’t have time to teach them the principles of our country.”

Last week, a fund-raising email by the Arizona Republican Party called the arrival of Central Americans at the border to assert their legal right for asylum “an invasion,” echoing language commonly employed by President Trump.

This is the language of white supremacy today: that we must stop immigration because Latinos will distort American culture and replace “real Americans.” But by “American culture” they really mean white culture, a definition that, to them, doesn’t apply to people like me. Or to black people, Muslims, Asian-Americans and many others, including mixed-race Americans like my daughter.

In his manifesto, the El Paso suspect employs this narrow definition to justify the unjustifiable. He says much more in that screed, most of it vile. Some, though, reminded me, in a good way, of the young undocumented immigrants I’ve met in Arizona. “Inaction is not a choice,” he wrote, reminding me that before elections, many young immigrants, including so-called Dreamers, knock on doors and share their stories, hoping to persuade their neighbors to do what they cannot, which is to vote. For those Dreamers, inaction is indeed not a choice.

There are Walmart stores all along the southern border. If you visit one of them on a weekend, you’ll see a parking lot full of cars with Mexican license plates. In Douglas, Ariz., a city whose mayor was born in the Dominican Republic, Mexicans who cross into the United States on foot to buy discounted clothing and housewares leave their Walmart shopping carts at the border crossing.

While I was at a Walmart in Phoenix shopping for school supplies the other day, I could see the kinds of people who make up this state. There were mothers speaking Spanish to children who spoke to one another in English, Muslim refugees from Africa in brightly colored hijabs, black families and white families too.

When school starts later this month in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, one school will be missing its principal, Elsa Mendoza Marquez. She was among the 22 people killed in the El Paso Walmart, just across the Rio Grande from Juarez. A dual Mexican-American citizen, she too was shopping and was gunned down while her husband waited for her outside, in the parking lot.

What the El Paso gunman failed to realize is that the immigrants he so hates are, like him, struggling to make sense of a changing country and claim their rightful place in it. He chose a rifle to claim his place. My Iraqi friend, who is off to pursue a master’s degree in art in Chicago, chose a brush.

The Dreamers I’ve met have chosen the power of civic engagement to fight their fight. And that, to me, makes them better citizens than plenty of the people who call themselves “real Americans” these days.

El Paso Was a Massacre Foretold

Those who are set on killing minorities are aided by the fact that they can easily obtain assault weapons in this country.

By Jorge Ramos, Mr. Ramos is a contributing Opinion writer. | Published Aug. 10, 2019 | New York Times | Posted August 10, 2019 |

Leer en español

EL PASO ­— “I don’t know why he took my boy’s life,” Dora Lizarde said. Her grandson Javier, 15, was the youngest victim of last weekend’s massacre, killed by a bullet to the head. “Fifteen years old; he still had so much time to live,” Ms. Lizarde told me in an interview this week. “I don’t know why he took him away, I don’t understand. He is young, too.”

Patrick Crusius is young, too.

Police have charged Mr. Crusius, 21, in the mass shooting that killed 22 people at a crowded Walmart here on Aug. 3. Nineteen of the victims had Spanish surnames, making this the worst attack on Latinos in modern American history. The Mexican government has labeled the killings a terrorist act, given that eight Mexican citizens were among the dead. And, yes, it is a hate crime.

The massacre of Latinos in El Paso is the latest and most brutal reaction by a young, white American against a future that might be dominated by minorities. The fact that this attack happened is unsurprising: What else can we expect when racism and hatred of others is promoted from the top down in a country where there are more guns than people?

Authorities have said that Mr. Crusius posted a 2,300-word manifesto online minutes before the attack. In it, he said the attack was in response to a “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” “It makes no sense to keep letting millions of illegal or legal immigrants flood into the United States,” Mr. Crusius supposedly wrote, “and to keep the tens of millions that are already here.” Those words startled me — not only because they were so hateful, but because they could seamlessly fit into speeches given by President Trump, by some members of his cabinet and by many right-wing politicians.

While Mr. Trump insists that he does not have “a racist bone” in his body, his history of making racist remarks says otherwise. After years of suggesting that President Barack Obama had not been born in the United States, Mr. Trump launched his presidential campaign in 2015 by likening Mexican immigrants to criminals and rapists. He recently said that four congresswomen of color should “go back” to the countries from which they came. The list goes on. When the most powerful man in the world uses such toxic rhetoric, we should not be surprised when others mimic him.

Beto O’Rourke, the former congressman from El Paso and a Democratic presidential candidate, recently told me that he is convinced Mr. Trump influenced the attack. Mr. O’Rourke — who along with Senator Elizabeth Warren, another Democratic candidate for the presidency, has said in recent days that Mr. Trump is a “white supremacist” — responded to a tweet from the president by writing: “22 people in my hometown are dead after an act of terror inspired by your racism.” Other leaders and politicians, including Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have also lost their patience with Mr. Trump. “I don’t want to hear the question ‘Is this president racist?’ anymore. He is,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said recently.

The president’s xenophobia, and that of many of his supporters and enablers, is rooted in a dread that the day is soon coming when they will be a minority in their country. While non-Hispanic whites remain a majority of the population in the United States, in less than 30 years that may no longer be the case, according to projections. This sort of demographic revolution is putting Americans’ tolerance to the test. Most of us welcome an increasingly diverse country, but many, like Mr. Trump, resist the country’s multiethnic, multicultural future. Some react by walking into a store and murdering innocent people.

The most racist Americans who are set on killing minorities are aided by the fact that they can easily obtain assault weapons in this country. I’ve lost count of all the massacres I’ve covered as a journalist. After each shooting — Columbine, Sandy Hook, Las Vegas, Parkland — I thought we might have reached the limit of Americans’ tolerance for such horror. But it wasn’t so. I fear that the killings in El Paso won’t change anything, and that I soon will be back on another flight headed to cover the next massacre. And then another. And another after that.

I have lost hope that the United States will ever pass laws that limit access to firearms. Like many parents around the country, I’ve had difficult conversations with my children in case they find themselves in a situation where someone is shooting at them. “Try to escape, hide or fight,” I tell them. “But don’t stay still. Gunmen have a lot of bullets, but not patience.”

Still, even if we could somehow solve our gun problem in America, our racism problem would be far more difficult to eradicate. Hate-group activity is on the rise, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. And anti-immigrant rhetoric has already appeared in slogans shouted during the 2020 presidential campaign.

I crossed the border from El Paso to Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, one morning this week. For many years, Juárez was considered one of the most dangerous cities in Mexico because of the presence of drug cartels. Yet on this visit some people I spoke with told me that they didn’t dare cross into El Paso with their families. When I asked why, some said that they feared being hunted for being Mexican, and all said that racism was a factor.

Nobody should live in fear because they are Mexican nationals in the United States or members of the Latino community. But that’s where we are now in this United States of Trump. The abundance of weapons of war on the streets and Mr. Trump’s unending racist rhetoric are indisputably connected to the massacre in El Paso. What happened in this city was a massacre foretold. Words matter. When they are filled with hate, they cause great damage.

Mr. Ramos is an anchor for the Univision network and the author of “Stranger: The Challenge of a Latino Immigrant in the Trump Era.”

[alexsmitposts]

Of Lesser Men Imagine yourself in school. You are 8 years old and it is recess time. You look for your friends, for the boys it is baseball or football, and the natural leaders set up teams and it begins. This is humanity, from its roots as hunter-gatherers so many hundreds of thousands of years ago, this is the natural order of things. Then, some would not survive. Guile and weakness was seldom rewarded. With the onset of “civilization” that changed. Where, at one time, the natural leaders became royalty or nobility, the need to pass on power though lineage went awry and these bloodlines through inbreeding and degeneration became the Deep State, physical weaklings, moral reprobates, tasked with selecting more of the same and moving them into positions of authority. The goal has been division, entropy, suffering, and managing the expectations of those of promise, pushing them into piracy, banditry or killing them in wars. Thus, when we find ourselves, even the strongest of us, the best of the best as it were, subject to rule by our lessers, “under the thumb” of those who, as children, we shunned as cowardly or vile, why do we recoil in surprise? What was left runs Washington, London and Paris, other capitols as well, the “lesser men,” damaged, confused, inferior, pushed up the ladder, the chosen people, a class of “Untermensch.” America’s ruling elite, when examined, for the most part resemble a form of reverse Darwinism. We are going to be calling the comic tragedy of the Muller investigation what it really is, “MuellerGate.” Any possibility that there was ever an investigation of anything intended is gone but the real reasons might well startle all but the most paranoid or well-informed watchers. What began as RussiaGate is playing out as not just fakery, but a complex and well-crafted intelligence operation intended to destabilize both the United State and Russia with full complicity of the press, those who control the press from the inside. It was always not only a wrong assumption by insane as well to assume that somehow, the controlled corporate media, would declare war on a presidency that has been so friendly to the oil industry, Wall Street, big polluters and the big pharma “poisoners.” The only other force handling this much cash is the CIA/Deep State worldwide heroin ring run out of Afghanistan and Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, with the help of well known and powerful American families, names very much like Romney, Bush and Walton, according to an FBI whistleblower who came forward in 2012. When Mueller investigators interrogated me in 2018, I brought the debriefing recordings with me and offered to play them. It nearly cleared the room. Here is what is playing out as of mid-April, 2019: Democrats who control congress are planning to subpoena the entire Mueller Report and to question both Mueller and Barr. Legal experts are saying that only a preliminary impeachment process provides needed statutory authority for this effort. The public, perhaps a majority approaching 60%, is hanging on this drama, waiting to “get Donald Trump” as though he were a masked villain in a fake professional wrestling match, which of course he is. What has been purposefully forgotten is that both Mueller and Barr are “lesser men.” Both, according to sources, were CIA recruits early in life. During Vietnam, the CIA began profiling a new generation to carry them past their roots. The CIA’s roots are Nazi Germany’s Abwehr. Their profile included intellectual ability combined with a bevy of negative traits including social psychopathy, feelings of inferiority and intense guilt, and a powerful need for approval and affirmation from authority figures. Two of my good friends, one a senior Army intelligence officer and the other a high-ranking FBI official, both “the best of the best” tried to get into the CIA and were turned away. They weren’t crazy enough. According to sources, both Barr and Mueller were “crazy enough” and for 4 decades or more, have been close personal friends while operating in and out of the corridors of power on behalf of what is now termed the Deep State. Similarly, Mueller and Comey as FBI directors were close friends. Remember, it was Comey that only days before the 2016 election put out highly derogatory and utterly unnecessary statements about the Clinton email case. That case, of course, was a fabrication of a GOP congress that spent endless millions concerned about “classified emails” that, thus far, were utterly without substance. Moreover, anything from the State Department that a Secretary of State wants to make pubic or declassify, has the full authority to do as the President does the same for the White House. Trump does this continually. Before that it was the phony Benghazi investigation and before that, Hillary Clinton was accused of personally murdering Vince Foster. Let us not forget the Clinton impeachment and the role of Kenneth Starr as prosecutor. Starr was a longtime acolyte of Richard Mellon Scaife, a typical James Bond bad guy, scion of one of the biggest Deep State banking families who simply bought Starr and spent millions hiring thugs of various kinds to smear the Clintons. Starr had been promised a seat on the US Supreme Court if he got Clinton. He failed but his “man,” Brett Kavanaugh, now holds a seat on the high court as a surrogate, we are told, for failed and disgraced Ken Starr. A key to understanding the dynamic is knowing that everything the public sees or is allowed to see is scripted. Comey went after Clinton not to damage or influence the election but to create the appearance of doing so while, as had happened in 2000 and 2004, Deep State operatives working with local election officials, literally thousands of them, simply hacked the election count. This has been investigated, studied and written of so many times and is forgotten and shelved. Everyone is complicit. Past that, every candidate is always from the same pool, either hopelessly insane like Trump or Bush 43 or deeply flawed or crippled like Bill Clinton or Barak Obama. When someone different sneaks in like Jimmie Carter, the answer is simple. The Federal Reserve cuts off the money supply, collapsing the economy and the CIA stages a coup in Iran in order to move Reagan in. Part of America’s suppressed history is the truth about Reagan, BCCI, Iran Contra and the collapse of America’s industrial economy, all done while America’s middle class disappeared. This was no accident. MuellerGate is a critical component of a “lesser man” ploy. Mueller and Barr, we assume, are in continual contact as they are constant companions, lifelong companions, who have planned and executed Deep State operations over and over during their careers. Barr exists to fabricate childishly absurd legal opinions. Read one of them. His early letter on the RussiaGate investigation, castigating his best friend Robert Mueller as dangerously incompetent, is classic deception and cover. Then, lo and behold, Mueller finishes an investigation that takes forever. The nation focuses on little else while everything that can be broken or stolen in the nation is broken and stolen. There are 3 White Houses, one in New York at Trump Tower, now a Secret Service protected home for the headquarters of the Kosher Nostra while at Mar-a-Lago, Chinese billionaires are buying America on the cheap. The White House in Washington is now “Tel Aviv on the Potomac.” Making it all work is the three-act play staged by the worst actors in the world, villain Donald Trump, Nancy Pelosi of the fake left, and a cast of thousands. It was evident what was going to happen from the get go with the public sucked in the Mueller drama, taking it all seriously, while the GOP’s control of the Senate and the generalized agreement that a sitting president cannot be indicted. In fact, there is no such provision in the constitution whatsoever. The legal concept is the creation of now sitting Federal District Judge Raymond Moss, written in 2000 at the behest of then Attorney General Janet Reno. Was Reno expecting Bill Clinton to start murdering White House visitors on live television? That is, perhaps, the only rationale for a legal opinion that has entrained itself as a keystone of Deep State security. This is from Lawrence Tribe, perhaps the nation’s leading authority on the constitution: “In a recent opinion piece, I argued that the text and structure of the Constitution, a serious commitment to the rule of law, and plain good sense combine to preclude a rigid policy of “delaying any indictment of a president for crimes committed in winning the presidency.” My op-ed argued against the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memos opining that the Constitution prevents the indictment of a sitting president. Nearly everyone concedes that any such policy would have to permit exceptions. The familiar hypothetical of a president who shoots and kills someone in plain view clinches the point. Surely, there must be an exception for that kind of case: Having to wait until the House of Representatives impeaches the alleged murderer and the Senate removes him from office before prosecuting and sentencing him would be crazy. Nobody seriously advocates applying the OLC mantra of “no indictment of a sitting president” to that kind of case. The same is true for any number of other cases that come readily to mind. Among those, in my view, must be the not-so-hypothetical case of a president who turns out to have committed serious crimes as a private citizen in order to win the presidency. Whether the president committed such crimes in collusion with a shady group of private collaborators or did so in conspiracy with one or more foreign adversaries, it should not be necessary for the House to decide that such pre-inaugural felonies were impeachable offenses and for the Senate to convict and remove the officeholder before putting him in the dock as an alleged felon and meting out justice.” Conclusion Are people like May or Macron or Trump little more than circus clowns? Is everything scripted, where the chance of peace breaking out, of justice and righteousness infecting the absurd global processes inoculated against? Are the current moves around the world to criminalize expression of these very thoughts an indication of how blatant and egregious the lesser men have become?

[teafortwo29]

Once Reluctant to Speak Out, an Energized Obama Now Calls Out His Successor

Former President Barack Obama has leveled many attacks on President Trump heading into the 2018 midterm elections. These sharp rebukes, though, are a departure from how past leaders used their post-presidential campaign stops. Published on Nov. 1, 2018, Credit Scott McIntyre for The New York Times

By Peter Baker Nov. 2, 2018

MIAMI — Former President Barack Obama’s voice has a way of lifting into a high-pitched tone of astonishment when he talks about his successor, almost as if he still cannot believe that the Executive Mansion he occupied for eight years is now the home of President Trump.

For most of the last two years, he stewed about it in private, only occasionally speaking out. But as he hit the campaign trail this fall, Mr. Obama has vented his exasperation loud and often, assailing his successor in a sharper, more systematic way arguably than any former president has done in three-quarters of a century.

Although some admirers believe he remains too restrained in an era of Trumpian bombast, Mr. Obama has excoriated the incumbent for “lying” and “fear-mongering” and pulling “a political stunt” by sending troops to the border. As he opened a final weekend of campaigning before Tuesday’s midterm elections, Mr. Obama has re-emerged as the Democrats’ most prominent face, pitting president versus president over the future of the country.

In a fiery speech in Miami on Friday afternoon before heading to Georgia for another rally, Mr. Obama said that even conservatives should be disturbed by Mr. Trump’s disregard for the Constitution and basic decency. “I know there are sincere conservatives who are compassionate and must think there is nothing compassionate about ripping immigrant children from the arms of their mothers at the border,” he said.

“I am assuming that they recognize that a president doesn’t get to decide on his own who’s an American citizen and who’s not,” he continued, referring to Mr. Trump’s vow to sign an executive order canceling birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants. “That’s not how the Constitution of the United States works. That’s not how the Bill of Rights works. That’s not how our democracy works.”

“I’m assuming people must get upset,” he went on, “when they see folks who spend all their time vilifying others, questioning their patriotism, calling them enemies of the people and then suddenly pretending they’re concerned about civility.”

The current president fired back later in the afternoon. Mr. Trump, who has made more than 6,400 false or misleading statements since taking office, according to a count by The Washington Post, said his predecessor had lied by telling Americans they could keep their doctor under his health care plan, which ultimately turned out not to be the case.

“Twenty-eight times he said you can keep your doctor if you like your doctor,” he told a small crowd at a West Virginia airport hangar. “They were all lies. Used it to pass a terrible health care plan we are decimating strike by strike.”

He also criticized Mr. Obama’s trade policies and treatment of the news media. “Lie after lie,” Mr. Trump said. “Broken promise after broken promise. Unlike President Obama, we live under a different mantra. It’s called promises made, promises kept.”

Since leaving office, Mr. Obama has risen in the esteem of many Americans, as former presidents often do. A poll by CNN this year found that 66 percent had a favorable view of him, far more than those who approve of Mr. Trump’s performance in office.

When he left the White House in January 2017, Mr. Obama said he intended to follow the tradition of his predecessors by staying out of the spotlight unless he perceived what he considered broader threats to American values. Advisers said Mr. Trump’s performance in office has qualified, justifying his decision to abandon restraint this fall.

“He cares very deeply,” said Valerie Jarrett, his longtime friend, and adviser. “His language has been very direct and he’s made an appeal to citizens across our country that now’s the time to stand up for our core ideals.”

He has issued 350 endorsements that candidates then trumpeted on social media and he has helped raise millions of dollars for Democrats. A video op-ed he taped generated 17 million views and a voter registration video drove nearly 700,000 viewers to Vote.org, according to his team. He is taping dozens of recorded telephone messages that will be sent out this weekend.

Mr. Obama’s red-meat speech on Friday delighted the crowd at the Ice Palace Film Studios in Miami. But if he has become the Democrats’ “forever president,” as Andrew Gillum, the party’s candidate for governor of Florida, called him, there are trade-offs for an opposition party trying to groom a new generation of leaders as the start of the 2020 presidential election approaches.

“President Obama wants to make room for the next generation of Democratic leaders to step up, which is why he’s largely stayed out of the day-to-day fray over the past two years,” said Eric Schultz, a senior adviser to the former president. “But too much is at stake in these midterms and this moment is too consequential to sit out.”

To Republicans, Mr. Obama’s decision to directly take on his successor smacks of violating norms just as he accuses Mr. Trump of doing.

“I was taken aback by the amount of space in President Obama’s speeches that are devoted to a full frontal assault on Donald J. Trump and his administration,” said Karl Rove, the political strategist for former President George W. Bush. “He spends a considerable amount of his time to get up there and trash Trump.”

Ron Kaufman, who was White House political director for the first President George Bush, said Mr. Obama’s language had been strikingly harsh from one president about another. “If you go back and dig up some of the pretty nasty things President Obama has said, I think you would be a bit surprised,” he said. “He gets away with it because of his style.”

Not since Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover has a president hit the campaign trail after leaving office to actively take on his successor in quite the way Mr. Obama has. Roosevelt actually mounted a comeback against his handpicked replacement, William Howard Taft, while Hoover castigated Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal program as “despotism” at the Republican convention in 1936.

Other former presidents have been critical of their successors, too. Jimmy Carter became a vocal opponent of George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, calling his administration the “worst in history.” But with Mr. Carter and others, these were one-off comments in interviews or other public settings, not a systematic indictment on the campaign trail.

Until this cycle, Bill Clinton has been a regular campaigner for fellow Democrats, not least his wife, but even as he assailed Republican ideas, he generally refrained from directly attacking his successors. As in previous years, the younger Mr. Bush has been out on the trail this fall but has largely kept his post-White House campaigning to closed-door fund-raisers and studiously avoided criticizing either Mr. Obama or Mr. Trump.

Mr. Obama’s criticism of Mr. Trump reflects a deep antipathy he feels for his successor, whom he called a “con man” and a “know nothing” during the 2016 campaign. Mr. Trump was the leading promoter of the lie that Mr. Obama was not born in the United States, a conspiracy theory that irritated the 44th president.

Mr. Obama has never been effective at translating his own popularity to other Democrats — the party lost all three elections while he was president when his name was not on the ballot — but he seems liberated as he finally unloads on Mr. Trump. “He wants to be in the game and he’s really energized doing it,” said Bill Burton, a former aide who caught up with Mr. Obama at a campaign stop in California.

Now 57, Mr. Obama has turned even grayer on top but has otherwise not changed much. For rallies, he still doffs coat and tie for his trademark white collared shirt with rolled up sleeves. He has dispensed with the professorial history lessons that slowed his stump speech down at the beginning of the fall and sharpened his argument into an animated, finger-pointing, crowd-riling indictment of his successor.

While he did not use Mr. Trump’s name in Miami on Friday, Mr. Obama left no doubt who he was talking about. He pointed to Mr. Trump’s use of a cellphone that advisers have told him is being monitored by foreign powers, contrasting that with the Republican criticism of Hillary Clinton’s use of an unsecure email server.

“You know they don’t care about that because if they did, they’d be worrying about the current president talking on his cell phone while the Chinese are listening in,” Mr. Obama said. “They didn’t care about it. They said it to get folks angry and ginned up.”

“Now in 2018, they’re telling you the vestigial threat to America is a bunch of poor refugees a thousand miles away,” he added, referring to a migrant caravan in Mexico. “They’re even taking our brave troops away from their families for a political stunt at the border. And the men and women of our military deserve better than that.”

In just a few days, he will find out whether voters see it his way or Mr. Trump’s.

Michael D. Shear contributed reporting from Huntington, W.Va., and Alan Blinder from Atlanta.

Follow Peter Baker on Twitter: @peterbakernyt.

[patriotsnet]

Why Do Republicans Want To Get Rid Of The Epa

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/why-do-republicans-want-to-get-rid-of-the-epa/

Why Do Republicans Want To Get Rid Of The Epa

It Is Time To Take Back Our Legislative Power From The Epa And Abolish It Permanently This Legislation Abolishes The Epa Effective December 31 2018 Gaetz Wrote In An E

Gaetz’s legislation has the potential to cause serious harm to the Pensacola area that he represents. The area’s economy relies on tourism. Such tourism would erode as quickly as the Pensacola beaches, if he triumphantly destroys the EPA.

A brief history of the EPA, shows how it rescued that very area. Before the EPA was created, a private wood treatment factory released cancer-causing dioxins into Pensacola Bay without consequence. The EPA cleaned the area up, and saved the tourism industry in the Panhandle. IrregularTimes

As a result of the potential economic harm Gaetz’ legislation will cause to his district, Democratic Women’s Club is protesting his events. For protection against the female protesters, Gaetz has organized militia-men and biker groups. This is the same group of bikers that provided Trump muscle against the Women’s March on Washington.

Come on, Mark! Do you really need biker protection against the Democratic Women’s Club?

If you don’t care about making the world more filthy for tomorrow’s generation, here are some consequences that abolishing the EPA would cause, that you might care about.

Even a Trumpkin could figure out that if we abolish one department, the responsibilities of that department would have to be conducted by someone else.

Getting rid of the EPA would be handing a lot more work to firemen and police officers. Which, in turn, would force them to focus less on their main jobs of preventing fires and crime.

Prior To Going To War In Iraq Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld Optimistically Predicted The Iraq War Might Last Six Days Six Weeks I Doubt Six Months

What’s more, Vice-President Dick Cheney said we would be greeted as liberators by the Iraqi people after we overthrow Saddam.

They were both horribly wrong. Instead of six weeks or six months, the Iraq war lasted eight long and bloody years costing thousands of American lives. It led to an Iraqi civil war between the Sunnis and the Shiites that took hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives. Many Iraqi militia groups were formed to fight against the U.S. forces that occupied Iraq. What’s more, Al Qaeda, which did not exist in Iraq before the war, used the turmoil in Iraq to establish a new foothold in that country.

The Iraq war was arguably the most tragic foreign policy blunder in US history.

In 2012 Republicans Predicted That Failure To Approve The Keystone Pipeline Would Send The Price Of Gasoline Sky High And Kill Large Numbers Of Jobs

Despite the fact that the Keystone Pipeline was not approved, the price of gasoline continued to drop below $1.80 per gallon, millions of new jobs were created and unemployment dropped from 8% to 4.9% by early 2016. The most optimistic predictions say that the Keystone Pipeline would only create a few dozen long-term jobs and would do nothing to lower the price of gasoline.

In 1993 When Bill Clinton Raised Taxes On The Wealthiest 15% Republicans Predicted A Recession Increased Unemployment And A Growing Budget Deficit

They weren’t just wrong: The exact opposite of everything they predicted happened. The country experienced the seven best years of economic growth in history.

Twenty-two million new jobs were added.

Unemployment dropped below 4%.

The poverty rate dropped for seven straight years.

The budget deficit was eliminated.

There was a growing budget surplus that economists projected could pay off our national debt in 20 years.

Republicans Predicted That We Would Find Iraqs Weapons Of Mass Destruction Even Though Un Weapons Inspectors Said That Those Weapons Didn’t Exist

The Bush administration continued to insist that WMDs would be found, even when the CIA said some of the evidence was questionable. As we all know, the WMDs predicted by the Bush administration did not exist, and Saddam Hussein had not resumed his nuclear weapons program as they claimed. Ultimately, both President Bush and Vice President Cheney had to admit that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Republicans Predicted That President Obamas Tax Increase For The Top 1% In 2013 Would Kill Jobs Increase The Deficit And Cause Another Recession

You guessed it; just the opposite happened. In the four years following January 1, 2013, when that tax increase went into effect, through January 2017, unemployment dropped from 7.9% to 4.8%, an average of more than 200,000 new jobs were created per month, Wall Street set new record highs, and the budget deficit was cut in half.

Over 5.7 million new jobs were created in the first two years after that tax increase. That’s more jobs created in two years than were created during the combined 12 years of both Bush presidencies.

In 2001 When George W Bush Cut Taxes For The Wealthy Republicans Predicted Record Job Growth Increased Budget Surplus And Nationwide Prosperity

Once again, the exact opposite occurred. After the Bush tax cuts were enacted:

The budget surplus immediately disappeared.

The budget deficit eventually grew to $1.4 trillion by the time Bush left office.

Less than 3 million net jobs were added during Bush’s eight years.

The poverty rate began climbing again.

We experienced two recessions along with the greatest collapse of our financial system since the Great Depression.

In 1993, President Clinton signed the Brady Law mandating nationwide background checks and a waiting period to buy a gun.

Mitch Mcconnell Have Ing A Meeting Days After President Obama Become President To Talk About How They Will Make Him A One Term President

For some reason it was ok to oppose everything Obama did, Even though more people voted for him than any other president in history. Our mandate meant nothing to them. The republicans denounced trump before he was president but support him more and more even though his actions have only gotten worse. The day you make a republican sprint past a microphone and not take the moment to lie about whatever they are doing, Is a cold day. Also tells you how they feel.

Republicans Said Waterboarding And Other Forms Of Enhanced Interrogation Are Not Torture And Are Necessary In Fighting Islamic Extremism

In reality, waterboarding and other forms of enhanced interrogation that inflict pain, suffering, or fear of death are outlawed by US law, the US Constitution, and international treaties. Japanese soldiers after World War II were prosecuted by the United States for war crimes because of their use of waterboarding on American POWs.

Professional interrogators have known for decades that torture is the most ineffective and unreliable method of getting accurate information. People being tortured say anything to get the torture to end but will not likely tell the truth.

An FBI interrogator named Ali Soufan was able to get al Qaeda terrorist Abu Zubaydah to reveal crucial information without the use of torture. When CIA interrogators started using waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation methods, Zubaydah stopped cooperating and gave his interrogators false information.

Far from being necessary in the fight against terrorism, torture is completely unreliable and counter-productive in obtaining useful information.

In 2008 Republicans Said That If We Elect A Democratic President We Would Be Hit By Al Qaeda Again Perhaps Worse Than The Attack On 9/11

Former Vice-President Dick Cheney stated that electing a Democrat as president would all but guarantee that there would be another major attack on America by Al Qaeda. Cheney and other Republicans were, thankfully, completely wrong. During Obama’s presidency, we had zero deaths on U.S. soil from Al Qaeda attacks and we succeeded in killing Bin Laden along with dozens of other high ranking Al Qaeda leaders.

Republicans Said We Must Deregulate Businesses So They Can Be More Profitable And We Will All Enjoy The Wealth Created By Deregulation

This theory failed back in the 1980s when the Reagan administration deregulated the Savings and Loan industry. All the S&Ls collapsed, and it cost taxpayers billions of dollars to bail them out.

They were proven wrong again in 2008 when years of deregulation of the financial industry resulted in the worst financial collapse and recession since the Great Depression. Taxpayers had to spend nearly a trillion dollars to bail out these large corporations. Instead of spreading the wealth around, deregulation cost millions of jobs and created economic turmoil that took the country years to recover from.

Senator Mitch McConnell claimed Obamacare would cost the economy two million jobs.

Republicans Routinely Accuse Democrats Of Wanting To Cut Defense Spending To The Bone And Leave Us Defenseless Against Our Enemies

History has repeatedly proven them wrong. Under Democratic presidents and Congresses, the United States still spends more on defense than the next ten countries combined. Republicans frequently insist on spending hundreds of billions of dollars on weapons systems that the Pentagon doesn’t even want in order to benefit the multi-billion dollar defense contractors. Democrats who criticize this unnecessary spending are accused of trying to cut defense spending to the bone.

In 2009 Republicans Predicted That The Economic Stimulus Package Would Only Make The Recession Worse And Cause More Unemployment

The results show they couldn’t have been more wrong. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 ended the recession after only a few months. Although 750,000 people were losing their jobs each month when Obama took office, after the Recovery Act was passed the rate of job loss immediately decreased each month and within a year the economy showed positive job growth.

Considering the severity of the 2008 economic collapse and the total opposition by Republicans to do anything at all to stimulate the economy, it is remarkable that the US economy recovered as quickly as it did.

Looking at the rate of job loss and job creation, its easy to see that the stimulus of 2009 was highly successful in stopping the job losses and turning the economy around.

In 1993 When The Brady Law And The Assault Weapons Ban Were Passed Republicans Predicted Increasing Rates Of Crime And Murder

Thankfully, just the opposite happened. While the rate of violent crime had increased steadily from the 1970s into the 1990s, it suddenly began to drop after 1993 and continued to decline for more than ten years. What could have happened in 1993 to precipitate such a sudden and prolonged drop in crime? That’s the year Congress passed the Assault Weapons Ban and the Brady Law, which mandated background checks and a waiting period to buy a gun.

Despite Republican predictions to the contrary, the Brady Law and the Assault Weapons Ban were followed by the most dramatic reduction in violent crime since the FBI started keeping statistics. The graphs below, based on the actual numbers from the FBI Uniform Crime Reports website, show how the rates of murder and violent crime in the US dropped suddenly after the 1993 Brady Law and Assault Weapons Ban were passed.

These charts show the rate of murder and violent crime over 35 years based on numbers from the FBI Uniform Crime reports.

Most Republicans Said That President Obama Should Be Impeached Because Of The 2012 Attack On The Us Consulate In Benghazi

Their own investigations, however, proved them wrong. Every Congressional inquiry, including those by the Republican-led House Intelligence Committee, concluded that the Obama administration did nothing wrong regarding Benghazi, that there was no “stand down” order given, and that neither the President nor anyone in his administration lied about it. Each and every Republican investigation has reached this same conclusion, but Republicans continue to exploit this tragedy for political gain.

Republicans Said That If President Obama Was Reelected The Price Of Gasoline Would Rise To $545 A Gallon By January 2015

In fact, Senator Mike Lee of Utah said if Obama was reelected, the price of gas would reach $6.60 a gallon. Newt Gingrich, who was running for president in 2012, said Obama’s energy policies, EPA regulations, and failure to approve the XL pipeline would result in $10.00 a gallon gasoline.

Of course, these predictions were laughably wrong. Instead of $5.45 per gallon or $10.00 per gallon, the price of gas in January 2015, was $1.89, less than half of the all-time high of $4.15 a gallon under President Bush.

Republicans Insist That Their Policies Create More Jobs Than Democrats And Claim Democratic Policies Are Job Killers

History, however, has proven them wrong. According to numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, under the last three Republican presidents, there were a total of 21 million new jobs created during their combined 20 years in office .

However, under the last three Democratic presidents, there were a total of 40 million new jobs created during their combined 19 years in office .

So the last three Democratic presidents have seen the creation of nearly twice as many jobs in 19 years as the last three Republican presidents did in 20.

Grist Is The Only Nonprofit Newsroom Focused On Exploring Solutions At The Intersection Of Climate And Justice

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Republican Senator Matt Gaetz From Conservative Florida Panhandle Has A Lot Of Secrets In His Closet Part 1

Feb 17, 2017

My two articles today will both be about the Republican freshman senator Rep. Matt Gaetz, from Florida.

My editor told me to write an article about how republicans want to destroy the EPA. As terrifying as that statement is, my research led me to the door step of Matt Gaetz, a republican senator that few Americans know. The only thing awesome about this guy is how he typifies every single Republican. His district is one of the most conservative in the county. Still, if I had a nickle for every sin he is rumored to have committed, I’d have enough for a phone call.

According to a Fox News report, he is introducing a bill to finally abolish the EPA. I use the word ‘finally’ because the EPA has been bugging republicans for a long time. According to republicans, all that the EPA does is implement regulations that cost the elite lots of cash.

The bill is not even a page long. It looks like it took someone two minutes to write up. However preposterous the bill is, the creep who wrote it, is even more of a joke. With seven arrests, murder suspicions, and even an alleged gay lifestyle, Matt Gaetz is the epitome of the republican politician. From the corner, he preaches, ‘Do as I say, not as I do.’

Today The American People Are Drowning In Rules And Regulations Promulgated By Unelected Bureaucrats

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A bill to “completely abolish” the Environmental Protection Agency has been drafted that would close the main arm of the US Government responsible for fighting climate change by the end of next year.

Matt Gaetz, a Republican member of the House of Representatives, has written to other politicians who might support his bill, according to an email obtained by The Huffington Post.

He claimed the “American people are drowning in rules and regulations” imposed by “unelected bureaucrats”.

And the EPA, he added, was “an extraordinary offender”.

The Environmental Protection Agency In The Early Trump Administration: Prelude To Regulatory Capture

Article notesCopyright and License informationDisclaimerhttp://www.ajph.orgCONTRIBUTORS

L. Dillon conducted and coordinated the research and writing of this article. L. Dillon, C. Sellers, M. Sullivan, J. Harrison, and S. Johns conducted interviews. C. Sellers coordinates EDGI’s larger interview project, conducted research and writing, and is the lead author of “EPA Under Siege.” V. Underhill, N. Shapiro, J. Liss Ohayon, P. Brown, M. Sullivan, and S. Wylie contributed to research and writing. J. Harrison contributed to research design. All authors, including authors in the writing group, contributed to the research and writing of “EPA Under Siege.”

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Exclusive: Indiana Republican Sen Mike Braun Will Support Biden’s Epa Pick But Not His Agenda

Indiana Republican Sen. Mike Braun told IndyStar he plans to vote to confirm President Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency — a departure from many of his GOP colleagues.

For Braun, he said it’s an easy choice.

“The EPA often is at the center of partisan fights,” said the U.S. senator from Jasper. But Biden’s pick, Michael Regan, “seems like somebody who will listen, and he seems like somebody that’s going to talk to the people impacted, like the farmers.”

Regan has been North Carolina’s top environmental regulator since 2017. He was questioned in his confirmation hearing Wednesday before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, of which Braun is a member.

Regan said if confirmed, he would “follow the science and the law,” and focus on issues of climate change, environmental justice and drinking water.

The lines of questioning exposed political divisions among members about how to tackle the climate crisis and environmental regulations, particularly as it relates to jobs and the economy.

Some Republican members expressed concerns that “green jobs” will not be sufficient to replace those being lost from the fossil fuel industry. Many also were concerned about Biden’s plans to revisit controversial rules that were undone by President Donald Trump both at the EPA and in courts, including President Barack Obama’s power plan and clean water rule.

Braun told IndyStar he shares some of those concerns.

Progress ‘out the window’

Careers

In The 1960s Republicans Claimed That The Passage Of Medicare Would Be The End Of Capitalism

California Governor Ronald Reagan even proclaimed Medicare would lead to the death of freedom in America. Of course, they were laughably wrong. Since the passage of Medicare, capitalism has thrived and millions of elderly Americans have had longer, healthier lives and greater personal freedom. Medicare remains the most popular form of health insurance in the United States.

When Bill Clinton raised taxes on the wealthiest 1.5%, Republicans predicted a recession, increased unemployment, and a growing budget deficit. They were wrong.

There Is More Pollution When Congress And State Governorships Are Under Republican Control

Republican politicians have been portrayed traditionally as having less concern for the environment, but what does the evidence say about the GOP and pollution? In new research, Luke Fowler and Jaclyn Kettler examined 20 years’ of data on state-level toxic waste releases. They found that there was likely to be more pollution when the US Congress and state Governorships were held by Republicans, and that pollution was lower when these institutions were held by Democrats.

In contemporary American politics, Republicans have largely been cast as the villains when it comes to environmental issues, especially as President Trump dismantles the Environmental Protection Agency , Republican members of Congress vote against environmental legislation, and climate change denial still factors into party rhetoric. However, the complicated nature of the federal system and environmental policy may limit the influence of Republican partisan control on environmental outcomes. While others have thoroughly examined Republican rhetoric and record on the environment, we ask: does Republican leadership translate into more pollution?

The Trump Administration Rolled Back More Than 100 Environmental Rules Heres The Full List

Over four years, the Trump administration dismantled major climate policies and rolled back many more rules governing clean air, water, wildlife and toxic chemicals.

In all, a New York Times analysis, based on research from Harvard Law School, Columbia Law School and other sources, counts nearly 100 environmental rules officially reversed, revoked or otherwise rolled back under Mr. Trump. More than a dozen other potential rollbacks remained in progress by the end but were not finalized by the end of the administration’s term.

“This is a very aggressive attempt to rewrite our laws and reinterpret the meaning of environmental protections,” said Hana V. Vizcarra, a staff attorney at Harvard’s Environmental and Energy Law Program who has tracked the policy changes since 2018. “This administration is leaving a truly unprecedented legacy.”

Rule reversals

The bulk of the rollbacks identified by the Times were carried out by the Environmental Protection Agency, which weakened Obama-era limits on planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and from cars and trucks; removed protections from more than half the nation’s wetlands; and withdrew the legal justification for restricting mercury emissions from power plants.

In justifying many of the rollbacks, the agencies said that previous administrations had overstepped their legal authority, imposing unnecessary and burdensome regulations that hurt business.

climateteam@nytimes.com or tweet @nytclimate.

Republicans Claim That Raising The Minimum Wage Would Kill Jobs And Hurt The Economy

There is far more evidence to the contrary. Cities and states that have higher minimum wages tend to have better rates of job creation and economic growth.

Detailed analyses show that job losses due to increases in the minimum wage are almost negligible compared to the economic benefits of higher wages. Previous increases in the minimum wage have never resulted in the dire consequences that Republicans have predicted.

Republicans have accused President Obama of “cutting defense spending to the bone”. This chart of 2014 discretionary spending firmly disproves that argument.

The Reagan Administration Takes A Swing At Environmental Agencies And Regulation

Riding these political tides to the White House, the early Reagan administration undertook a frontal assault on environmental agencies and regulation much like what we are now seeing. Gorsuch stepped into the EPA’s helm, hatching plans to cut its budget and personnel by half. Her Colorado colleague over at the Interior Department, James Watt, sought a similar devolution of control over federal lands; OSHA and FDA were also targeted.

But for these Republican anti-environmentalists, the power of the Presidency was not enough. A Democratic Congress, still bolstered by the party’s Southern bloc, stood in the way. Democratic committee chairs geared up for Congressional hearings that spotlighted the ensuing consequences and corruption at agencies under fire. The hue and cry then raised, and courtroom battles the Administration then lost, turned out to be much more than it had bargained for. Within two years, Gorsuch and Watt had resigned and restoration of federal environmental agencies was underway. A seminal Supreme Court decision in 1984, Chevron, Inc. vs NRDC, required judicial deference to environmental and other agencies’ interpretation of statutes, confirming their authority to regulate.

Republicans Have So Corrupted Epa Americans Can Only Save It In The Voting Booth

The Republican Party values polluter wealth over public health

Last modified on Mon 30 Apr 2018 11.01 BST

Like Donald Trump and the rest of his administration, Scott Pruitt has been caught up in so many scandals that it becomes impossible to focus on any single act of corruption. It’s difficult to focus on the damage Pruitt is doing to the environment and public health when seemingly every day there’s a new scandal related to his illegal $43,000 phone booth, or use of Safe Water Drinking Act funds to give two staffers a total of $85,000 in raises , or his sweetheart deal on a condo rental from a lobbyist’s wife , or wasting taxpayer funds on first class air travel and military jets, and a nearly $3m per year security detail, and bulletproof car seat covers, and a bulletproof desk, and so on.

Number of federal investigations into Scott Pruitt has now risen to 11. Reps. Beyer & Lieu say EPA inspector general will take up an inquiry into the $50-a-night condo rental from the wife of an energy lobbyist.

— Lisa Friedman April 27, 2018

But while Pruitt’s unprecedented corruption is staggering and would have resulted in his firing long ago in any other presidential administration, the damage Pruitt is doing to public and environmental health is a far greater scandal yet. As George W. Bush’s former EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman wrote in for why TIME included Pruitt as one of its 100 most influential people this year,

Epa Scientists’ Work May Face ‘case By Case’ Review By Trump Team Official Says

“Pollution today is far more subtle,” Ruckelshaus says. It’s invisible greenhouse gases that cause global warming, or non-point pollution sources like the agricultural runoff from a farmer’s land that makes its way to a river. Those are no less threatening than issues like a burning river, Ruckelshaus says. And in some cases — specifically, in terms of climate change — they can be even worse.

“As people are subjected to sea level rise and ever-increasing severity of storms, of floods, of droughts, they know something’s going on,” Whitman says. “They’re often ahead of Washington in that.”

And she believes that as those effects of climate change become more widely felt, the environment will become a top issue for voters again.

That is, she says, unless changes at the EPA and in the country’s environmental regulations by the Trump administration don’t do it first.

How A More Diverse And More Urban Environmental Movement Helped Republicans

Racial and geographic realignments over the 1980s and ‘90s favored the anti-environmental Republicanism Gingrich now sought. Better-off black Americans moved to suburbs of their own, as civil rights groups spearheaded a new movement for “environmental justice.” White environmental groups gained bases in well-off older suburbs as well far-flung newer ones, but energy concerns inclined them to identify with a gentrifying downtown and the “walkability” espoused by a New Urbanism. At the same time, black majority districts were also being created to bring racial equity to Georgia’s Congressional delegations, starting with the 5th district, which was won in 1986 by John Lewis. Black representatives became the state’s foremost supporters of environmental causes in Congress.

This shift in Georgia environmentalism, fortified by redistricting, served Gingrich and the Georgia Republican Party extraordinarily well. With environmental causes coded in these ways, down-playing or opposing them shored up electoral support among rural as well as many suburban whites, especially the working class. Through gerrymandering Republicans worked to pack more blacks into fewer of Georgia’s Congressional districts, making most other districts whiter.

California Eyes Climate Leadership Role But Trump’s Epa Holds A Key On Cars

There is a disconnect though. Why, if the majority of Americans feel that the environment should be given priority, even at the risk of curbing economic growth, do environmental issues rarely come up in political debates. As ClimateWire pointed out, in the 2016 presidential campaign, there were “3 debates over 4 ½ hours, and zero climate questions.”

People don’t vote the issue. National security, health care, guns and trade policy, among others, were all viewed as more important to voters in the 2016 election.

Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment looked at that disconnect in 2005, while Reilly was an adviser.

“And the answer that came back was that the public essentially has concluded that there is no crisis,” Reilly says. “That the kind of issues that were emergency issues that prompted the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency have been very well addressed by the Environmental Protection Agency.”

Other former EPA administrators and officials agree.

“People can’t touch, smell and feel pollution the way they did back in the 1960s, the 1970s,” Ruckelshaus says. “I think the EPA and state agencies have become a victim of their own success.”

Changing tides

As administrator of the EPA, Pruitt has said that he would rely more on the states for environmental protections and look to reign in the federal government’s role.

Former Epa Heads Democrats And Republicans Rebuke Trump Environment Record

3 Min Read

– Four former heads of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Democrats and Republicans, on Monday issued a sharp rebuke of the Trump administration’s record on the environment after the current administrator said the agency is focused on “work that has been neglected for years.”

Former EPA administrators for Democratic presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton and Republicans George H.W. Bush and his son George W. Bush criticized the administration of President Donald Trump for rolling back regulations on methane, vehicle emissions and power plants.

“If you need any more proof of how strongly this is felt by people you have it today in four former administrators… we’ve all come to the same conclusion,” Carol Browner, who ran the EPA under Clinton, told reporters in a call organized by Joe Biden’s presidential campaign.

Two Republican former administrators, William Reilly and Christine Todd Whitman, endorsed Biden on the call, saying the Trump administration’s actions on the environment had been an “aberration.”

“There has been nothing like an administration, on the environment, in the last 50 years to compare with the dereliction that characterizes this administration,” Reilly, who served under George H.W. Bush, said on the call.

In the coming weeks Wheeler said EPA will propose rules to limit lead in drinking water.

Whitman, who served under George W. Bush, was asked to react to Wheeler’s claim that the environment had improved under Trump.

Republicans Predicted That Obamacare Would Hurt The Economy And Kill Jobs

As you may have guessed, they were wrong. 2014 was the first full year that Obamacare was in effect. During that year the United States saw the fastest rate of job creation in 14 years and the best rate of economic growth in over ten years. More jobs were created in 2014 than in any year of the Bush presidency. Not only did Obamacare not harm the economy, it coincided with the best economic expansion in a dozen years.

[cloudwomensquarterly]

Cloud Women’s Quarterly Journal - Summer 2018

Welcome ~ Ximopanōltih

I don’t know if it is just me but Spring seems to have flown by and all those seeds and seedlings we planted then, are sprouting and coming up, and are well on their way to coming to fruition. As always we give thanks to those who believe in life and future, who care about more than just themselves and theirs. We give a special thanks for all the community gardens, gardeners, and for the abundance of beauty still growing on this land. 

Summer is definitely here. There are many gatherings happening - weeklong writing workshops, beach outings, bbq's in the park, camping, hiking, boating and all kinds of other fun and beautiful outings planned - especially for this season which we know as summer.  As children, we counted down the days for summer vacation to arrive and were very sad as September approached and those long sultry summer days came to a close.  

In recent days we as a country have been worrying and disputing over the fate of children. These children, however, are not counting down the days until or of summer. These are children who are terrified because they have been separated from their parent or parents at the border. The majority of these families came here fleeing violence and death in their own countries. They came here as refugees seeking solace and asylum and were not trying to enter undocumented. They actually turned themselves in at the border and asked for asylum. And just because this country, and I mean on both sides of the aisle in Congress, cannot come to an agreement on a fair and just immigration reform that does not mean that we must torment and torture people who come here under the impression that we are a country who cares. One that at a minimum,  adheres to its own laws and policies. How hard can it be? That’s a rhetorical question because if you know history, you know our government has a bad one - of not keeping its word. It has consistently not honored its treaties and has gone back on countless agreements.

If we say we are a safe haven for families who are fleeing violence in their own countries and then stop them at the border and separate the adults from their children, handcuff them, cage them all, take the babies to undisclosed and not well-documented locations, at the tenderest ages of their lives, with no guarantee they will ever get each other back. What message are we sending? And when the president of these United States says that domestic violence is private violence and therefore does not qualify as violence under the statutes of what constitutes fleeing violence in order to be eligible for asylum - what then? If that same president calls immigrants rapists, animals, undesirables, from sh*thole countries, and describes their coming here as an infestation. What then?   Should said president take all the credit for the problem? No. But should he mix his racist worldview into an already difficult and almost impossible to solve immigration problem? NO!  That is the worst. This so-called president lies. He says things like the Democrats want open borders, to which those of us who are acutely aware of the millions who were deported under the eight years of the Obama administration knows this is a bald-faced one - a big fat lie. Democrats didn’t create the immigration problem any more than he did. But as usual, he is trying to point the finger elsewhere instead of actually trying to make a positive change. Find a real solution. There seems to be nothing positive about him or his reign. All he does is bob and weave, lie, and distort facts and truths - a real corporate mouthpiece.

But back to the children. Separating children from their families is nothing new, they did it to the First peoples of this land when they stole their children and forcibly put them into boarding schools, and they also did it when they sold away children born into their deplorable system of slavery separating them forever from their birth families. It is nothing new. It’s a sure way to demean and destroy the very foundation of what it means to be a healthy and complete human being which starts with the family, the mother, the people who have your back - or should. It’s nothing new - but it’s unacceptable.

We commend all those who’ve signed petitions, taken to the streets in protest, have called their congresspeople, tweeted, posted on other social media sites etc., against this deplorable policy of separating immigrant children from their parents. It has resulted in the standing president having to do something to stop it. But all he’s done is more smoke and mirrors. People will still be separated from their families, charged with a criminal offense instead of a minor charge for even coming to the border and trying to cross.

Neither political party has ever seemed truly willing to take the time to do what’s necessary to fix our broken immigration system, nevertheless, those of us who do care must continue to call for fair and just immigration reform. We must say no to the separation of families, and no to hatred of people just because of the color of their skin, their religion, sexual orientation, their class, or where they were born. 

In these days of summer, we wish you all lighter and happier times in the company of your children, if you have them, and your loved ones - be they family and/or friends. Also, please enjoy our humble offerings for this solstice. We appreciate your feedback, write to us.

Ma Xipactinemi, (Be Well)

The Editor

p.s. The deadline for submissions to the Fall Equinox issue of CWQJ is September 15, 2018. Thanks to Redearth Productions & Cultural Work for sponsoring our submissions process. Please go there and submit work. Our issues are loosely themed on the four seasons. We accept articles, interviews, essays, poetry, short fiction and creative non-fiction, original artwork, herbal and natural remedy recipes, food recipes, and yes, political commentary on what’s happening in our world. 

[tremendouspeachduck]

Dumb pipeline conversation

We’re Energy Independent - Yeah!  It’s now time to get out of the U.N.

If Canada wants oil to get to Mexico, then USA can benefit. 

Canada will do it with or without our putting people back to work

Yes, there will be spills to clean up

Don't you just love logic? 

Let's praise Pres. Trump for turning it around for us 

 Is energy independence important to you?  It means low gas prices at the pump.

To be truly energy independent, the United States would need to produce enough energy to sustain the entirety of its population and industry. Such independence seemed like a far off goal not too long ago. However, innovations in sustainable energy and the recent shale gas boom have made the idea of an energy independent future seem more attainable.

As it seems more and more possible for the United States to achieve energy independence in the not-so-distant future, it’s important to remember that this process is complicated. Though it can be achieved in different ways to different effects, energy independence will require the US to radically re-envision the way it supplies and uses energy.

Energy independence also boasts possible geopolitical benefits. The United States imports most of its energy from countries where political tensions run high. Saudi Arabia, Iraq, China and Russia are all huge exporters of energy, and this has put the United States in more than one awkward position over the years.

In addition to the amount of defense money spent protecting US oil interests abroad, relying on foreign oil has prevented the US and other countries from intervening in conflicts around the world. Europe’s lack of intervention when Russia annexed Crimea is just one example of energy stability influencing foreign policy decisions for the worse.

Energy independence could free the United States from fear of trade retaliation when making foreign policy decisions. This would make it easier for the US and other energy independent countries to boycott or otherwise intervene in unjust systems and governments.  It would also give other oil producers more claim over their own energy.

as of 2018, October - the USA has become energy independent - Hurrray!  Thank you Pres. Trump

What  comes next?  Before this resource is depleted, we must retire the notion of fossil fuels and move toward wind, solar, or hydro.  I prefer hydro; it has the least bad side effects.

DEMS would eliminate nearly all fossil fuels from the electric grid and force everyone in the country to buy from power companies selling only renewable energy.

Without government subsidies, renewable energy costs significantly more than many forms of traditional energy generation. 

Electricity prices are, on average, increasing by 50 percent faster in those states that have created renewable power mandates compared to those that have rejected these economically destructive policies. This is especially troubling news for working-class and lower-income Americans, who spend much larger shares of their income on energy than wealthier families.

Not only are DEMs proposing to eliminate the hundreds of thousands of jobs in the fossil fuel industry in the United States, even though America recently became a net-energy exporter, they are demanding this transition occur in just 10 years, from 2020 to 2030. This mandate would be virtually impossible to achieve because wind and solar energy sources still rely on back-up generation from fossil-fuel-powered energy when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining.

DEMs also propose “eliminating greenhouse gas emissions from the manufacturing, agricultural and other industries, including by investing in local-scale agriculture in communities across the country,” as well as “eliminating greenhouse gas emissions from, repairing and improving transportation and other infrastructure, and upgrading water infrastructure to ensure universal access to clean water.” It’s not clear whether this would eventually mean the elimination of all gasoline-powered cars, but even if we assume private ownership of these vehicles would be permitted, the removal of affordable fossil fuels, including natural gas, from all industry would increase the cost of developing, manufacturing, and delivering all goods and services in the country. It would force companies to spend, at the very least, hundreds of billions of additional dollars more than they do now — expenses that would inevitably be passed along to consumers by raising taxes, printing money, and creating new publicly owned banks.

Please send an email to your Senator and to your House rep ASAP!  You can cut/paste the VOTE NO message into your email.   You may also phone the United States Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121 - plz be nice to the volunteer.  Also send this message to Pres. Trump.

VOTE NO on Green Deal.  The biggest reason I can think of - WE ALREADY have the Climate Change Law.   Thanks to Pres. Trump

and YES on getting out of the UN.  

 Congressional Republicans want to defund the U.N., a 193-nation boondoggle for which the United States alone pays well over a quarter of the freight — about 22 percent of the regular operating budget, and close to 30 percent of the much larger peacekeeping budget (for which we get more scandal than peace).

At best, denying our annual $3 billion payment would accomplish nothing. Defunding measures are called for periodically, whenever the U.N. induces a congressional tantrum over one or another of its obscenities. Even as one lawmaker fumes about shutting off the spigot, another is already saying, “Well, we don’t need to defund everything — after all, the U.N. does a lot of good.”

“A lot of good,” by the way, is an exaggeration. Sure, some U.N. officials are just as well-meaning as any other preening progressive. But the institution stinks, even in its humanitarian aid work. As Heritage’s Brett D. Schaefer notes, citing a 2012 academic study on best and worst practices among aid agencies, U.N. agencies consistently rank “among the worst and least effective performers.”

More important, if $3 billion seems like chump change to you in an age of unfathomable $20 trillion national debt, that’s the way Turtle Bay’s grubby globalists see it, too. They continue to plot international tax schemes (on carbon emissions, financial transactions, etc.), as well as the lucrative skim from redistributionist rackets like the “Green Climate Fund” and the new “Sustainable Development Goals.” The real goal, naturally, is a sustainable fund for the U.N., relieving it of reliance on finicky donors.

The GOP Congress’s focus on the U.S. contribution is understandable. The American taxpayer’s U.N. tab far exceeds the combined $2.5 billion ponied up by the other four permanent Security Council members (China, Russia, Britain, and France). In fact, it exceeds the contributions of 185 countries combined (about three dozen of which pay under $30K in dues – far less than what their diplomats rack up in unpaid Manhattan parking tickets).

Yet the money is not the real problem, and cutting it off for a time won’t pack much political punch.

The Left loves the U.N. It will never seriously address the institution’s thoroughgoing anti-Americanism, anti-Westernism, anti-Semitism, anti-nationalism, anti-capitalism, and anti-rectitude. Instead the media-Democrat complex – with a big assist, starting in two weeks, from the most publicly active former president in American history – would portray an aspirational U.N. valiantly fighting to save the planet from war, poverty and CO2. Duly abominated for slashing funds, the GOP would take a political hit but achieve nothing: The U.N. would find other ways to raise the dough, and Republicans – after watering the defund effort down to feckless foot-stomping – would be goaded into paying any withheld dues, with interest, probably during the next lame-duck session.

The better move is: Just leave. Withdrawal from the U.N. would make transnational progressives go ballistic, but it would hearten millions – the kind of patriotic, self-determining citizens whose fury at statism’s transition into globalism catalyzed Trump’s candidacy (and, in Britain, spurred Brexit).

Put the politics aside, though. Leaving would be the right thing to do.

The U.N. is Ground Zero of the totalitarian Islamist-Leftist quest to eviscerate Western principles and individual liberty – and, while they’re at it, the Jewish state.

You think I’m exaggerating? The U.N. is the Islamist-Leftist vehicle for nullifying American constitutionalism – its guaranteed freedoms and the very premise that the People are sovereign. In just the last few years of Obama’s eager collaborations, the U.N. has produced resolutions that erode First Amendment liberties, calling on member states to outlaw negative criticism of Islam. It has overridden the Constitution’s protections against treaties that harm American interests, endorsing the Iran nuclear deal to give it the imprimatur of international law even though it is unsigned, unratified, and would not have had a prayer of attaining the required two-thirds supermajority Senate approval.

The U.N. is the Islamist-Leftist vehicle for nullifying American constitutionalism – its guaranteed freedoms and the very premise that the People are sovereign.

And more is on the way. The Obama administration signed a U.N. arms-trade treaty that would undermine Second Amendment rights — again, under the vaporous guise of “international law.” On Obama’s watch, the U.S. has also signed the U.N.’s onerous Paris climate agreement, which international bureaucrats tell us has “entered into force” despite — again — the lack of Senate approval required for ratification under our law.

Think no ratification means no problem? You’re not getting how the U.N.’s international-law game works.

Once American presidents sign agreements, globalists insist that we’re bound by them. How can that be, since a presidential signature is insufficient under the Constitution? Because in 1970, President Nixon signed another beauty, the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. Its Article 18 states that once a nation signs a treaty — or merely does something that could be interpreted as “express[ing] its consent to be bound by the treaty” — that nation is “obliged to refrain from acts which would defeat the object and purpose of the treaty.” You’ll be shocked, I’m sure, to hear that the Senate has never approved this treaty on treaties, either. No matter: The State Department (who else?) advises us that, notwithstanding the lack of ratification under our Constitution, “many” of the treaty’s provisions are binding as — you guessed it — “customary international law.”

American government participation in the U.N.’s shenanigans is stripping away our rights and our capacity to govern ourselves. Just as bad, it is sullying us.

Logically, it has to be that way. When not bowing before foreign despots, Obama practically genuflects at mentions of the “international community.” But the international community is awful. It consists of a few good countries swimming in a shark-infested sea. When good seeks consensus with evil, the result cannot be good — just as when you insist, as our government does, on being an impartial “honest broker” between Israel, our democratic ally, and the Palestinian terror state-in-waiting, that is a boon for the jihadists, not the democrats. When you pretend that all states are equal, that there is no difference between the good guys and the bad guys, that is always a coup for the bad guys.

And that’s what the U.N. is: a coup for the bad guys.

Think about it: We are voluntarily entered into an arrangement in which actions affecting American national security and prosperity are subject to the Security Council veto power of Vladimir Putin and the Communist Party of China – the principal patrons of the “Death to America” regime in Iran, the world’s leading sponsor of anti-American terrorism.

We are voluntarily underwriting an institution that — with Obama having formally boarded the anti-Israel train — is joining the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. The General Assembly, which is steered by the sharia-supremacist Organization of Islamic Cooperation, has just created a BDS database to target companies that do business with Israeli settlements in what the U.N. has declared is “Palestinian territory.”

WE NEED TO GET OUT of UN .   .   .  NOW!

Please send an email to your Senator and to your House rep ASAP!  You can cut/paste the VOTE NO message into your email.   You may also phone the United States Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121 - plz be nice to the volunteer.  Also send this message to Pres. Trump.

It would depend on the terms under which the U.S. left  .If we completely withdrew all at once, our resources, our capital, our troops, and the UN’s right to even meet in the U.S., then either China or Russia would most likely maneuver to have the entity relocated for the publicity and influence.They would not be one iota as generous as the U.S. with resources or manpower.  Within five years the U.N. would crumble much as the League of Nations did.Without the U.S. bankrolling the operation and actually doing the things it wants done, the U.N. would be even less than a paper tiger. It would be couple of paragraphs in a high school history book.

Any vengeance toward Israel or elsewhere could easily be handled with various independent coalitions.

Also, as a result from our recent election fiasco .  .  .

In each state, we must come together and demand clean elections.

[go-redgirl]

Robert Mueller and his Team: Riding the Clown Car DB Daily Update ^ | David Blackmon Today’s Campaign Update (Because The Campaign Never Ends)The death of the final paltry remnants of customer service is upon us. – A federal judge has ruled against the Jeff Sessions Justice Department, approving the merger of Time Warner and AT&T, in what will be the largest merger of media/entertainment giants in American history. 

It will also be the merger of two of the three worst customer service organizations – in addition to Comcast – ever conceived by evil human brains.Fair warning: 

If you are already sick of the horrible, demented, disgraceful lack of service you receive as a customer of one of these two behemoths, just wait until you see how you feel once this merger is completed, your bill has doubled, and the very predicable layoffs and other “streamlining” and “right-sizing” measures have been implemented in the newly-merged “customer service” department. Waterboarding will have nothing on what these people have planned for you.

Why hasn’t this guy been indicted yet? 

In all seriousness, how is he still walking around a free man?

 – Despicable former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe pulled a stunt designed to attract fake news media sympathy on Tuesday, filing suit in federal court against the DOJ and the FBI for “violating procedures” in firing him back in March. 

McCabe’s skunky lawyers complained to in their court filings that DOJ is “withholding documents” from the defense in the case, to which House Intel Committee Chairman Devin Nunes and Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley no doubt responded, 

“Welcome to the party, pal.”Before anyone gets to feeling too sorry for this imperious jackass, let’s all remember that the causes for his firing are incredibly well-documented in a 40-page report issued by DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz a few days prior to his being escorted from the premises. That report meticulously lays out a case in which McCabe is revealed to be a serial liar who perjured himself multiple times during the course of 2016 and 2017, as he worked feverishly to protect the Pantsuit Princess and damage a duly-elected President of the United States.

It is important to note that Horowitz also issued a criminal referral to Jeff Sessions related to McCabe’s actions, and that that referral is yet to be acted upon. While we can hope – and may be even likely – that this is just a case of the wheels of justice turning slowly, it is fair to note that McCabe – whose despicable behavior on the job began to come to light early in 2017 – has already been walking around a free and unindicted man far longer than any ordinary American accused of similar crimes would have been.

So if you’re looking for sympathy, Andy, you’ll have to go to CNN and the New York Times, where serial liars get to host hour-long shows in prime time and reporters are sanctioned to sleep around with government officials so they can leak national secrets to their depraved, brainwashed audiences. 

You won’t be getting any from any of us hicks out here in flyover country.Speaking of DOJ lawyers hiding the ball… – Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his team of aspiring circus clowns took their efforts to save face in their fake indictments of several Russian nationals to new heights on Tuesday. They filed a motion asking the judge in their fake case against Concord Management and Consulting to allow them to hide the evidence they have supposedly collected against the Russian company until trial.

This of course is a breathtaking departure from normal rules of disclosure, in which the prosecution is required to timely provide the defendants the evidence upon which they built their case. In case you’re wondering why Mueller would take this extraordinary step, the answer is obvious: 

The charges against Concorde and the other Russian national defendants are extremely flimsy – perhaps completely unsupportable – and Mueller and his evil minions never expected any of them to actually show up for trial, given that the U.S. and Russia do not have a reciprocal extradition treaty in place.

Mueller’s motion hilariously claims that the documents in question are highly sensitive, even resorting to the standard DOJ dodge that some of them identify “sources, methods and techniques used to identify the foreign actors behind these interference operations.”Let’s all remember what these Russian defendants are accused of: 

They are accused of spending a paltry sum of money that didn’t amount to a pinprick in the context of 2016’s $2 billion presidential contest to create a bunch of fake accounts on Twitter and Facebook and spread propaganda designed to create confusion and discord among the U.S. electorate. 

They are also accused of organizing a handful of protest rallies, alternately opposing both Donald Trump and the Fainting Felon.Any 20-something year-old kid living in his grandmother’s basement could have figured all this out in about 2 days, but Mueller would have us and the judge believe that doing so required the Justice Department and FBI to engage in all manner of top secret skullduggery that would make a great John LeCarre’ novel.

This motion comes a month after Mueller’s request to indefinitely delay the trial was summarily rejected by the judge, so now he and his team of dishonest Clinton- and Obama-donors are scrambling around trying to figure out what in the hell they’re going to do. 

After all, you can’t go to trial with a case that doesn’t exist.Won’t it be fun when Mueller has to drop this case? President Trump just needs to leave this guy alone, because he’s a clown.Just another day of Robert Mueller is a clown America.That is all.

Follow me on Twitter at @GDBlackmon