What This President Is Concerned With Today

This, of all things in the world today, just this moment, is what's concerning the person who is supposed to be the leader of our nation and the Western world. He tweeted the following this morning.

Donald J. Trump‏
Verified account
@realDonaldTrump
Following Following @realDonaldTrump

Alec Baldwin, whose dying mediocre career was saved by his terrible impersonation of me on SNL, now says playing me was agony. Alec, it was agony for those who were forced to watch. Bring back Darrell Hammond, funnier and a far greater talent!

I'm glad he's thinking and working on the big stuff.

Guns in America?  Nuclear warheads?  Nuclear war? Kim Jong Un? North Korea? Nuclear weapons?A foreign enemy hacking and influencing our elections? The economy? Health care, affordable health care? Any of that?

No. None of that.

A Saturday Night Live comedian/actor, instead.

Have you had enough, Republicans? Can we be over this soon?

The Attacks and Irresponsibility and Just Really the Insanity That Are All Donald Trump

In the very, very short time this Donald J. Trump has been President, look at all he's come out against.

He's against equal pay for women.

Trump Order Drops Pesky Regulations 

On Equal Pay

He has attacked and keeps attacking women, in fact.

Reinstating 'Global Gag Rule,' Trump Attacks Women

Trump order undoes workplace protections for women

He's against National Parks and National Monuments and so, nature. 

Trump order could undo designation of national monuments

Heck, he's against his own political party and people in it.

Trump attacks McCain and other Republicans

We've seen, this week, he's against National Football League players and they're desire for justice in our nation, a two-fer for him. 

Donald Trump Attacks NFL Players'

Behind Trump’s attack on the NFL football players

Long ago now, he's even attacked our nation's Veterans, for pity's sake.

Trump Attacks America's Veterans

Not done there, he singles out and attacks DISABLED Veterans, as well.

Trump attacks disabled Veterans

He has attacked and keeps attacking the media. 

Trump attacks media in lengthy, combative press conference

Trump threatens NBC licenses after story on nuclear buildup

Not just attacking the media, he has attacked free speech, the First Amendment. This came early this year, in February.

Trump threatens to weaken 

First Amendment protections for reporters

Trump's attack on the First Amendment

Then, he did this in the last 24 hours.

Trump Attacks First Amendment

He's certainly not for clean air nor clean water nor soil.

Trump signs bill undoing Obama coal mining rule

Donald Trump undoes the Clean Water rule

The Trump EPA Wants to Gut California’s Clean Air Rules

There are things he's for certainly. Here's one of them. He's for our local military, across the nation, having military gear. You know, so they can fight us, the American citizens.

Trump to lift military gear ban for local police

He's all for business, that's for sure.

Trump’s Policies Are Already Making Workplaces More Toxic

Another thing he's for and seemingly in a big way is a fight of some kind with North Korea and their President Kim Jong Un. 

U.S. flies bombers over Korea as Trump discusses options

Trump Flirts with Nuclear War

Keep in mind, too, this is only a partial list of what this one man has done and said so far.

So the question is now, when does this roller coaster end? How soon?

And how, exactly?

We Are, As a Nation, Normalizing the Insanity and Irresponsibility That Is Donald J Trump

Lots of us swore we would not, could not let this happen. That is, we swore we would and could not possibly let the normalization of Donald J. Trump and all his petulance and non-logic and emotionalism and rantings and ravings and tweets and self-centeredness and narcissism. We were sure we wouldn't all "go there."

But it's happening. Sure as he's called President, to this day, it's happening.

An example?

This past week.

Donald Trump's last 7 days are just 

mind-bogglingly bad

And then, today, there's this.

Trump calls negotiations with North Korea a waste of time, says U.S. will ‘do what has to be done’

He has no idea, I expect, that he's flirting with some sort of nuclear disaster, at minimum, if not out and out nuclear war.

Bravado is one thing when you're in the locker room and disrespecting women. God knows that's bad enough. But as President of the most ridiculously powerful nation on the planet to, again, flirt with nuclear warheads being rained down on some part of the planet--anywhere, really--is just outrageously stupid, even childish but certainly irresponsible.

We, the United States, can't allow, hell, exist with this, again, irresponsible dolt as leader.

The planet can't, either.

No exaggeration.

The Racist, Misogynist, Elitist World That Is Donald Trump's America

It has been quite a week.

It's been nearly stunning what all took place in the last 7 days. First there was this:

Contentious Memo Strikes Nerve

Inside Google and Out

It seems a young engineer at Google wrote not just a sexist memo but a very sexist one, declaring Google's inclusive culture, including women, if you can imagine that, was not just negative but "bad for business."  From the NYT:

His 10-page memo, titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” argued that “personality differences” between men and women — like a woman having a lower tolerance for stress — help explain why there were fewer women in engineering and leadership roles at the company. He said efforts by the company to reach equal representation of women in technology and leadership were “unfair, divisive, and bad for business.”

So women, who make up more than half of our nation's population, shouldn't be included in technology, according to this young man, this Einstein.

Wonderful, right?

The week got worse.

This happened Friday night.

White Nationalists March on University of Virginia

I thought we were better than this. I thought we were smarter than this. I thought we learned all these lessons, especially about race but about sexism, too, certainly.

When you pair this with the fact that a President and an entire political party just tried to pass a "health care law" in our nation's capitol that would have cut between 22 to 32 million Americans from health insurance rolls, it's easy to see that Donald Trump's America, the nightmare come true, is, in fact, a racist, sexist, misogynistic and elitist one. Great for white people and wealthy ones, at that, and corporations but God help you if you're anything else. If you're female or Black or Hispanic or poor or, heck, middle-class and/or working-class, it sucks to be you just now.

And this doesn't even touch the subject of the ugliness and stupidity and vitriol that came out of the White House and this President's mouth this last week. That may get us all, not just the nation but the world into a nuclear war and nuclear winter. I'm not even touching that.

Welcome to Donald Trump's and the Right Wing's and the Republican Party's America.

Again, God help us.

Trump Supporters

Homer and Goober discuss national and international politics.

The Most Insightful Writing On This President?

I do believe, personally, that Michael Gerson may well be writing the most lucid, insightful and intelligent, relevant, nearly important pieces about this current President.

MICHAEL GERSON: Trump's twilight zone

It is sometimes argued that the media should spend less time on President Trump’s transgressive tweets in order to devote more attention to real issues such as North Korea. In fact, it is necessary to focus on Trump’s tweets precisely because they shed light on the mind that is doing the deciding on North Korea. It is a distasteful exercise. But we cannot look away. We need to know the state of mind we’re dealing with.

Trump’s tweets reveal a leader who is compulsive, abusive and easily triggered. Trump describes all this as “modern day presidential.”

What we are witnessing is not a new age in presidential communications. It is an ongoing, public breakdown. And the question naturally arises: Is this the result of mental dysfunction?

Most psychiatrists are (understandably) uncomfortable with diagnosis from a distance. And the particular diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder requires significant impairment – which is a hard case to make of a figure at the pinnacle of American politics.

And yet. There are judgments that must be made about the fitness of the leaders. Citizens are under no ethical obligation to be silent when they see serious dysfunction. The challenge here is not merely the trashing of political norms. The main problem is the possibility that America has an unbalanced president during a period of high-stakes global testing. This is not a clinical diagnosis. It is a civic and political judgment, made necessary by the president’s own words and acts. Trump holds a job that requires, above all else, the ability to unite and steady the nation in a time of crisis. There is no reason to believe he can play that role.

Much of the prudence and courage required to confront this problem will need to come from Republicans and conservatives. Where to start? How about refusing to downplay revolting lunacy?

It is not merely an “occasional ad hominem” for a president to employ the tremendous power of his office to target individual American citizens who oppose him. It is an abuse of power.

It is not merely “uncouth” for a president to tolerate, even to hint support for, violence against political opponents (“I’d like to punch him in the face”). It creates an atmosphere of intimidation.

It is not merely “exaggeration” for a president to issue a series of eye-stretching lies, including that his predecessor spied on him and that a popular vote victory was denied to him by widespread electoral fraud. It indicates either a deep cynicism or a tenuous connection to reality.

It is not being “coarse” for a president to engage in consistent misogyny. It is a sign of a disturbing and deep-seated dehumanization of women.

Many conservatives would respond to this critique by saying, “At least he fights!” The question is: For what? Trump evinces no strong or consistent policy views. He fights for himself – for admiration and adulation – which is the only cause his extreme narcissism allows.

Many conservatives would also respond by saying, “At least he does conservative things!” But if health care is any indication, Trump lacks conviction, knowledge and the ability to persuade.

House and Senate Republicans should be prepared to aggressively challenge unbalanced or unhinged presidential language and decisions, rather than trying to dismiss them as simply a “distraction.”

No one really knows how to deal with this situation, which still feels more like an unnerving political novel than our political reality. Trump has led our country into unexplored territory. If this is “modern day presidential,” all progress moves toward the past.

--Michael Gerson served as President George W. Bush’s chief speechwriter from 2001-2006 and is a columnist for the Washington Post

No Democrat Could Get Away With All This

Imagine:

Hillary Clinton is president. 

• It's learned that she has deep ties to Putin and the Russian spy agency. 
• Additionally, Russia's President Vladimir Putin helped get her elected.
• She puts utterly unqualified billionaires in cabinet posts. 
• She pursues public policies that benefit her and her billionaire friends. 
• She puts her daughter Chelsea in a position of influence in the West Wing, giving her her own office and allows her to use that position to forward her own business interests. 
• Chelsea's husband is her chief advisor. 
• The private business trips taken by Chelsea and her husband are paid for by the taxpayers.
• She refuses to release any tax returns. 
• She blocks access to the visitor logs in the White House.
• Husband Bill refuses to live in the White House so our tax dollars are spent keeping him safe in New York City.
• Hillary spends almost every weekend lounging in her own, privately-held resort. 
• Hillary raises the prices of staying at this/her private resort because after all, she is now President.
• Her private resort gets reimbursed for any and all "official" government functions (including security) because she chooses to conduct all her "business" and personal functions there. 
• She and her family live in three White Houses at the same time.
• In an interview, she names the wrong country she bombed while bragging about the chocolate cake she was eating while she ordered said bombing.
• Hillary starts churning up concerns of war, possibly nuclear, with Kim Jong Un and North Korea.

The Republicans would be eating her alive.

Which all begs the question....

Why are we putting up with this?

Adapted, largely, from a post on FB by one Carmen Norwood

What We've Come To

Where we are now, thanks to this Presidency.

And thanks fo the Republicans and those who voted for and supported this candidate. 

This petulant, unthinking, irrational, emotional, greedy dolt of a man-child.

Links:

Welcome to the "It's All About Me" Presidency

Republicans, The Next Four Years Are All On You

The Solution to the Middle East

I figured it out.

I figured out a way to end the violence and fighting between the Israelis and Arabs and all others in the Middle East.

We--the world community--give each side one nuclear warhead with the requirement that we--that same world community---shoot off those 2 warheads at precisely the same time, at the other side.

Problem solved.

Peace in the Middle East, at long last.

This Could Rattle Your Day. Or Week. Or Month.

I just saw this article:

The Center for National Security and Arms Control at Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, N.M.

Nuclear weapons labs hit with sizable fines for new security violations

Just a couple details:

A classified material was missing for years before anyone noticed, and a lab official's public slides included bomb design data

You're in charge of the nations nuclear weapons and you can't keep track of the inventory?

And check this out from that same article:

In 2004, the laboratory’s director suspended the lab’s operations to fix problems that included the loss of classified computer disks, and in 2006, police responding to a domestic violence call at an employee’s home discovered thumb drives from the lab that contained classified information, along with illicit drugs.

That's enough to make you feel all warm and fuzzy, there, isn't it?

Try to have a great weekend, campers.

America, Our Nuclear Warheads and What We Need to Know and Do

More people need to know more of these details.

And then contact our Congressional representatives about them.

Quote of the day

"The nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five." --Carl Sagan

On this day...

On this date in 1945, the first atomic bomb was successfully tested near Alamogordo, New Mexico.

North Korea going nuclear?

I wrote about this earlier this week and there's a bit more information so I want to follow up. It turns out that evidence is beginning to show that North Korea may well not have sunk the South Korean warship that we--the US--has been raising heck about internationally, with the North Koreans. South Koreans themselves are coming up with "dossiers of their own scientific studies" at least showing why it's doubtful the North Koreans sank this ship. Check this out: The critics, mostly but not all from the opposition, say it is unlikely that the impoverished North Korean regime could have pulled off a perfectly executed hit against a superior military power, sneaking a submarine into the area and slipping away without detection. They also wonder whether the evidence of a torpedo attack was misinterpreted, or even fabricated. "I couldn't find the slightest sign of an explosion," said Shin Sang-chul, a former shipbuilding executive-turned-investigative journalist. "The sailors drowned to death. Their bodies were clean. We didn't even find dead fish in the sea." Shin, who was appointed to the joint investigative panel by the opposition Democratic Party, inspected the damaged ship with other experts April 30. He was removed from the panel shortly afterward, he says, because he had voiced a contrary opinion: that the Cheonan hit ground in the shallow water off the Korean peninsula and then damaged its hull trying to get off a reef. It seems there is a politician, of all people, running for office in South Korea, who started this idea. Imagine that--a politician inciting the public with possibly untrue ideas and thoughts, in order to get elected. And this wouldn't matter a fig but for the US running with it and now preparing to have a huge naval exercise off the coast of North Korea which, in turn, is getting that same North Korea to propose that, if said exercise goes forward, as planned, that they may well "go nuclear" on somebody. In the meantime, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton keeps rattling her saber, so to speak, since we're so "in the right" on this whole thing. Could calmer heads please prevail? Link to original post: http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jul/23/world/la-fg-korea-torpedo-20100724