Blog Catalog

Showing posts with label US News and World Report. Show all posts
Showing posts with label US News and World Report. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

On Trump's Taxes

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On Trump's taxes, folks, with that New York Times bombshell article of theirs from this weekend (see link below). This is no small thing. This Republican Party President, Donald J Trump paid almost nothing in personal income taxes for nearly two decades.

The President of the United States.

That is incredible. It's nearly unthinkable. A President? Of the United States? And he PAID NO TAXES? None? And not just one year but for NEARLY 20 YEARS?

Someone wanna' tell us what part of a patriot that is?

Can you imagine the uproar if Barack Obama, the nation's first Black President, didn't pay taxes? And then for nearly two decades, too? The Right Wing and Republicans would have been furious. And livid.



Monday, May 4, 2020

Has Donald Trump Lost HIs Mind?


The latest on this pandemic and the state of our nation and this President

US now has more coronavirus deaths than any other country





--We're over 68,000 deaths in the nation from this pandemic to date, more than any other nation
--You yourself project we'll have 100,000 deaths, at least, from it all
--Your administration has said publicly we'll likely see 3,000 deaths per day by June

With all that, today he posted this on social media:



Getting great reviews, finally, for how well we are handling the pandemic, especially our strong production of desperately needed ventilators, the building of field hospitals & beds, and soon, the great things we are doing on testing. People are really working well together!

THAT'S "great reviews"???

First, we don't want him getting "great reviews", anyway. This isn't a television show. He is, no longer, supposed to be a reality game show host.

And then he says "People are really working well together!"??

None other than a former also Republican President, George W Bush, said we need to come together as a nation, be non-partisan and work together and YOU SHOT THAT WHOLE IDEA, along with him, down.

Trump trashes George W. Bush over call for unity


I ask you, people.  I ask you, America.

Is Donald Trump, this Republican Party President, crazy?

Has he lost it?

If he ever "had it", has he lost it?


Saturday, October 5, 2019

Quotes of the Day -- On This President


Today's New York Times is chock full of good, if not, in fact, out and out great and even possibly, very likely important articles on this Republican Party President, his current situation, his tweets and statements and moods and responses, mostly to criticism. He apparently thought once one becomes President, no one evaluates, read: criticizes, that person or his or her Presidency. Whatever.

Anyway, as I said, the paper is full of great articles, this being the first I'll briefly mention today.

Image result for stupid trump


Is this Trump’s public suicide or his genius for survival?

This is the most scathing, but true, summation of this man, his Presidency and administration I've seen this week. A bit from the article:

We have hit uncharted political territory. An unstable president has lurched under the pressure of an impeachment inquiry into a form of madness that is either a very public suicide or some weird genius for survival. Trump is Robert De Niro, armed with a gun, in “Taxi Driver” gazing into the mirror repeating: “You talkin’ to me?”

We are. Nixon wanted his profanities deleted from transcripts. Trump has no such qualms. He trumpets his view of the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry on Twitter: “BULLSHIT.” He will not be a one-term president! That’s weak, like Carter, like Bush One! He cannot be WEAK like them! He cannot lose! It’s all an attempted “coup”!...

...The White House, I hear, now operates like the 26th floor of Trump Tower during the campaign. There’s no structure or plan. There’s no war room or communications cell. People wander in and wander out, except they’re all lawyered up now, no doubt. They’re not even in crisis mode. Trump just goes out and shoots his mouth, as he has from Day 1. Like a good Mafia boss, he now has everyone complicit. They’re all in this together — Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, and the rest. Since John Kelly escaped in January, Trump’s henchmen are all that’s left.

...Polls show a plurality of Americans now supporting impeachment and Trump’s approval rating sinking as low as 41 percent. He is vulnerable in several states he won in 2016, including Ohio. If he shrinks to his core unshakable support, he probably has no more than a third of the vote.

So what does he do? Double down! If there’s any guiding principle it seems to be: If Trump says often enough in broad daylight that he tried to get foreign powers to interfere in our election to his benefit, how can it be wrong? “China should start an investigation into the Bidens,” says Trump, as he leaves the White House to go to Florida.

The remark is met with justified outrage. This is abuse of power. This is abuse of foreign affairs authority. These are impeachable acts. But, guess what, everyone starts reporting and writing on what Biden and his son Hunter did or did not do in China. Trump is a mass-media magician. He got McLuhan — “the medium is the message” — without reading McLuhan.

The term self-impeachment is now doing the rounds. As with a self-immolation, it can be hard to watch Trump’s blathering at its current crazed pitch. Can this be anything but the long-awaited and very public self-destruction of a man unfit for office? It may well be, but I am not entirely convinced.

As always with Trump, the rational and the Cartesian bump up against his fiendish antennae for the mass hypnosis of our age. He has his finger on the pulse of the technological character of evolution — even though he knows nothing about it. Repeat something often enough, brazenly enough and aggressively enough to people dazed enough by the cacophony around them, and they will lose their bearings enough to believe anything, even that his conversation with Zelensky was “perfect.”

There is no down range for this president. He’s too disorganized. There is only the next minute. Let’s talk Trump and golf for a minute. He likes to say, “I’m a feel player.” He’s not a believer in going to the driving range. Drop it and hit it. Fire and forget. Just hit the effing thing! Well, fire-and-forget got him to the White House, so why would he stop believing in it, even now?

Because, if Trump could manage a glimpse over the towering heights of his ego, he might see that Speaker Nancy Pelosi has him in her sights. She knows he will grow madder and madder under the pressure of the impeachment inquiry. As that happens, those working-class white women and suburban housewives who voted for Trump in large numbers in 2016 may well desert him: Derangement is not really their thing. Can the 53 Republicans of the Senate be far behind?

Then there is this.


Californians don’t vote for Trump, and he’s showing them what he can do about it.

For the last few weeks, Mr. Trump has been deep into retaliation mode, occasionally for reasons of policy, more often out of pique. His decision last month to try to revoke California’s historic right to set its own fuel efficiency and greenhouse gas standards was largely a policy matter, part and parcel of his effort to roll back President Obama’s aggressive clean car rules. That effort would be rendered incomplete as long as California maintained the right to set its own higher standards, which govern a huge chunk of the car market now and would do so going forward unless somehow Mr. Trump, in plain violation of the original Clean Air Act, got rid of it.

First Trump
  • Tries to revoke California's right to set its own fuel efficiency and greenhouse gas standards that they've historically had so they can clean their admittedly dirty air then he
  • Accuses the state of failing to meet federal air quality standards and threatens to withhold billions in federal highway funds if California did not do more to clean its air.
The guy is nuts. Vindictive and crazy.

Links:

Saturday, October 20, 2018

Republicans and Their Very Official, Un-American Work of Disenfranchising Fellow Americans


If you aren't familiar with the Republican Party's efforts and work, over many years, to disenfranchise anyone and everyone who doesn't think, and so, vote, as they wish, you need to pay attention.

The fact is, Republicans have been gerrymandering the nation and for at least decades.

The power that gerrymandering has brought to Republicans


What is gerrymandering someone might ask? Defined, it is 

"...In the process of setting electoral districts, gerrymandering is a practice that attempts to establish a political advantage for a particular party or group by manipulating district boundaries to create partisan-advantaged districts.

Image result for disenfranchising americans

The fact is, what they, Republicans, have been doing and trying to do is to get anyone and everyone who might not be aligned with their voting patterns, from being able to vote. This would include the following groups, proven, historically:

--Young
--Elderly--at least, elderly who aren't already-wealthy
--Poor and/or impoverished
--The physically-challenged
--Minorities including:
  • --Blacks and African-Americans
  • --Hispanics and Latinos
This took place 2016:

North Carolina's Deliberate Disenfranchisement of Black Voters


Not to be done there, this happened 3 days ago.

Black seniors kicked off bus taking them to vote in Georgia


This story broke only yesterday and it's happening right next door, no less, in neighboring Kansas.

Iconic Dodge City Moves Its Only Polling Place Outside Town


The entire city has 27000 residents. 60% of those residents are Hispanic. So if you're white and Right Wing and Republican, what to do??  Why, move the one polling place, as it says, outside the city limits.

It is stunning.

This, too, is going on now, in Georgia.

Georgia’s ‘exact match’ law could disenfranchise 909,540


And it's how they got a man with a horrible reputation even in his own political party and with zero government experience elected to the White House, the highest office in the land even though he got at least 3 million less popular votes than his political opponent. Sure, you get out-voted but hey, load the voting districts your way and voila! The Electoral College makes you President anyway!

And sure, Democrats are legally capable of gerrymandering also but the fact is, Republicans have used it and been using it to load their--our--voting districts for years now, as I've said and shown here.


Not done there, not done with just gerrymandering, this political party took it further, much further, too. Not only do they use these voter ID laws to help them in elections, disenfranchising fellow citizens in the process, but they've publicly admitted it, as well.




This, to me, is the worst aspect of these voter ID laws and their requirements, this next point.


It's been also proved there is nearly zero true voter fraud, on anyone's part, too.


There is a great "meme" out there on social networks I've seen recently. It asks, how bad is your political party if your way of "success" is to keep Americans from voting?

And the answer is, bad. Really, really bad. And not in a Michael Jackson way, by any stretch.

So what all this means, what we need to do, as a nation, as a people is, first, get the Republicans out of power, out of office, and then, once and for all, make gerrymandering and voter ID laws, both, illegal. We need to truly, truly take back the vote. 

We can do this. 

We must.

Vote November 6!

And VOTE BLUE!!  Vote Democratic!  Then let's work and fight for change.

Links:




Saturday, August 18, 2018

Whither Boomers?



Personally, I see a lot of postings online, advertisements, promoting living abroad for retirement. (Yeah, I know. It's coming up, for better and worse). Just a few examples:






And check this out. Even AARP is pointing the way.


And the thing is, I get the feeling a bunch of us Boomers are going to go be expats in other nations like Mexico, Belize and yes, as shown in the picture above, Portugal. Check out the reasons:

--The dollar goes further 
--Health care isn't as absurdly, obscenely expensive 
--There isn't as much wealth inequality in other nations and finally, a big factor is that 
--No other nation has as many guns and shootings and killings as we do in the US

One more thing. Better, older, saved architecture. 

Oh. Another. The food. Frequently in these places, great food.

Yeah.

I see a LOT of us leaving.


Thursday, March 15, 2018

What Tying Health Care to Profit(s) Gets You


Yes sir/ma'am, this, this, among many other things, is just what, exactly, tying health care to profit and profits gets a nation---us.

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U.S. Health Care Ranked Worst 

in the Developed World


Note two things about the article--First, it is from Time magazine, not some wild, irresponsible rag and two, it was published June 17, 2014.  As prices and costs for health care in our nation get ever-higher, this only becomes more true and only gets worse.

This study is from just last year.



Here are some of the other things tying health and health care to profits gains you.



So congratulations, America. The rest of the world knows better than this. We pay more, far more, than any other nation for health care and we have the worst medical outcomes.

Aren't we brilliant?  Seems "exceptional" to me, right?

Will you EVER learn?


Saturday, March 3, 2018

This Actually, Literally Frightening Republican President Donald J Trump and His Administration


Image result for crazy donald trump

There is so much wrong with and from this President Trump, it's honestly difficult to assess. That's  partly because he says and does so many contradicting things and then partly because there are so many ramifications, here and across the world, from, again, what he says and does. Here are some examples from this past week alone.




He's not even for supporting our laws, due process and the legal system.


One more example of him saying one thing...


And then, days later, if not sooner, changing his mind and position, entirely.

There is not only what he says and then contradicts, entirely, there is also the gross, gross incompetence for what he isn't doing and what he doesn't do.

And then there's the corruption. You can't forget the corruption. Some of it is from within the White House.

Regulator Seeks Kushner Loan Details From Deutsche Bank

Some of it is outside the White House.


Not done there, there's this.

According to Fact Checker and the Washington Post, so far in his Presidency, in 406 days, Trump made 2,436 false or misleading statements.

President Trump has made 2,436 false 

or misleading claims so far 


Additionally, in 408 days, as of today,  he has spent 100 of those days on a Trump golf course.


If you aren't at least concerned, folks, you aren't paying attention.




Sunday, June 4, 2017

We Think of Ourselves as Peace-Loving People


I think that, if you asked most Americans, they would say and agree we are, in fact, a "peace-loving" people. Definitely.

But there is this--

The U.S. Is Still No.1 at 

Selling Arms to the World


And this--


And this--


And that's all external to the nation. This is how we are internally--


Which brings us today to this latest study.

gpi2016.jpg


The title seems clumsy since it's ranking "most peaceful" yet we are, nationally, down to the number 114 spot. 

A brief summary of the study:

"The U.S. declined the most in an annual study of global peace that cites political turbulence, deteriorating press freedom, a public perception of increasing crime and corruption, and less acceptance of minorities... The U.S. dropped 11 places to the 114th most peaceful country out of 161 in the index published by The Institute of Economics and Peace."

So note:  we're at the 114th spot OUT OF 161 NATIONS. We're in the bottom half. And WE DROPPED 11 PLACES from the previous study.

More:

Armenia and Rwanda are just in front of America on the list, El Salvador and China follow.

And who are the "most peaceful" nations?

“Iceland remains the most peaceful country in the world, a position it has held since 2008. It is joined at the top of the index by New Zealand, Portugal, Austria, and Denmark.

Huh. All Socialist Democracies. Imagine that. Them and all their greater wealth equality. Looks clearly like it does make a difference after all.

And that's not all.

Most U.S. allies are in the top-20 of the index, including Canada, Japan, Australia, Ireland and Germany.

Again. All Socialist.

Go figure.

Oh, and let's not forget. All hail, the NRA.

Links:






Thursday, March 9, 2017

Way to go, America



Check out the latest ranking of all the nations of the world and who does--and who doesn't--come in at the top. This is precisely what Republican and Right Wing policies and legislators and government and governments get us.


Socialist. 

 All Socialist. 

This is what working together gets them. 

A little from the article.

A new ranking of the world's “best countries” is out — and the results don’t look good for America.

Switzerland takes top nation honors, according to the second annual “Best Countries” ranking from U.S. News & World Report, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and global brand consultants BAV Consulting. Just behind the Swiss are Canada and Britain, second and third, respectively.

The United States ends up in the seventh spot, just edging out Australia but also lagging Germany, Japan and Sweden.

Get that. Our neighbors to the North, the Canadians, are number two in the world. I expect most Americans would no way expect that.

Not only are we ranked in the 7th spot but we dropped 3 spots from the previous list. We are only seen as the “most powerful.” Given the absolutely foolish and fiscally irresponsible amount we spend on military and what we call defense, we ought to be most powerful.

Bet better, America. You're falling behind. And it's not because you're not spending boodles of money. It's just that you're foolishly spending far too much of it on what we consider "defense" and health care.

Link:

Thursday, February 23, 2017

America, Who You Are, In Three Statistics


Inline image 1

America, I don't think you know who you are.

Oh, sure, you kind of know but I don't think you're really looking at yourself and seeing who and what you are.

So with that in mind, America, Americans, I give you three--just three--statistics, just three facts that really show who you are, what you support and what you're about. Forsooth:

Number one.  Health care.




Our health care and health care system is, far and away, the most expensive health care system in the world, bar none.

For all we pay, we have lousy health and even extremely poor health outcomes.

Of the top 17 industrialized nations, we have the worst mortality rates. Translation: We die sooner than the 16 nations before us on that list.

Second, number two of our statistics, on top of all that spending and costs, we are ranked number 31, in 31st place in life expectancy, internationally. Check it out.


Of the 30 nations ahead of us on this list of life expectancy, all have universal health care. Imagine that. Oh, yeah, and most are---GASP--SOCIALIST nations. Heaven forbid, right?

Third and finally, there is this statistic and fact, America. Again, this is who you are.





These, my fellow Americans, are your--our--priorities.

Sure, we bemoan our students and schools failing and sure, we lament our health care is outrageously high--so high we can't afford it and that it's also the number one cause of bankruptcy in the nation. And yes, we don't have enough money, we think and say, for our roads and bridges and highways and sewers and airports and infrastructure or anything else, really, but BY GOD, WE HAVE BILLIONS AND TRILLIONS FOR "DEFENSE"! Nobody has more money for bombs and jets and warships or blows things up better than us.

So there you go, America. In three quick little "nutshells", so to speak, this is who and what you are.

Apparently, you think this is all not just a good idea but that it's also somehow sustainable.

Links: