President Donald Trump
gregladen | October 4, 2017You will remember Clement as the whistle blower at the Department of the Interior who was harassed for showing how climate change affects communities in Alaska. He was removed from his job by Fake Interior Secretory Zinke and given a new job removing staples from paperwork or something similar. Zinke similarly reassigned several others at around the same time. The inspector general has been investigating this but nothing has come of that yet.
Clement hung on for a long time but today he left his position. According to the Washington Post:
“Keeping my voice is more important than keeping…
gregladen | October 4, 2017to lighten up your day a bit:
OK, sorry, maybe that was depressing. Sorry.
gregladen | October 3, 2017Visiting Arkansas, hanging around briefly with some people in the Real Estate business, I found a lot of hatred of Mexicans, whom they unimaginatively referred to as "spics" but making it clear they were talking about Mexicans, not some other spics. Sitting with a group of people talking about racism in an urban neighborhood in near Minneapolis, I found zero mention of dislike between whites per se and blacks per se. But Poles and Tibetans, they were very much disliked by people who were mostly but not all white. Years ago I remember being shocked by a fellow anthropologist who expressed a…
gregladen | October 3, 2017Today, Donald Trump told Puerto Rico that they dodged a bullet, that the hurricane that hit them was not a real catastrophe, that only a couple of people died, that he, Trump, is doing a great job, but would Puerto Rico please try to spend less money on fixing things up.
https://twitter.com/CNNPolitics/status/915249263520690177
Well, I'm certainly glad that problem is managed. Great work!
Oh wait ...
Is it too early to lighten the mood a bit?
gregladen | September 28, 2017Or so it seems.
Donald Trump won the 2016 election with 306 votes to Hillary Clinton's 232 votes. That is a spread of 74 votes.
Clinton was likely to win in several states in which she lost, including Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, maybe Ohio, etc. In three states that could have gone either way, Jill Stein's vote count was larger than the difference between Clinton and Trump. In Michigan, Trump won by 10,704 votes, Stein got 51,463 votes. In Pennsylvania, Trump won by 46,765 votes, Stein got 49,678 votes. In Wisconsin, Trump won by 22,177 votes, Stein got 31,006 votes.
If every Jill…
gregladen | September 26, 2017https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/911789314169823232?ref_src=t…
A pair of American B-1 Lancer bombers is flying north northeast along the border of North Korean air space. Accompanying the bombers is a squadron of F-15C Eagle fighter jets. The crews are aware of the fact that North Korea may have a policy of shoot first and ask questions later, as a response to a tweet by the Russian-installed president of the United States, in which he threatened to kill the psychopathic leader of North Korea.
(I fear for a big drop in Tom Clancy novels, as they are no longer challenging or…
gregladen | September 22, 2017To understand the Trump-Russia scandal, I believe it is necessary to step way back and take the very long view. I'm not talking about going back to early 2016, or even the year before. Much farther.
I'm not going to make a claim in this post as to what happened and who did what. Rather, I'd like to present a hypothesis, a single interpretation of events, that may or may not be correct, but that is based on this long view.
Whatever did actually happen, it did involve, or somehow exclude, Donald Trump and a number of individuals with whom he has had long term relationships, and Vladimir Putin…
gregladen | September 22, 2017The new Collins Nambia Wildlife guide is the perfect companion for travelers from the US who are trying to get away from it all. Quickly and quietly.
This handy field guide provides the usual information about the alt-Animals one finds in this remote African country, such as the Vote Suppressing Guerrilla, the Red Butted Baboon and the most common animal, the Wild Ass, and of course, the R.I.N.O.
But beyond that, this guide also provides useful information for the Indicted Tourist traveling to Nambia.
Find out where to get your laundry done, even if it is mainly small bills you want to…
gregladen | September 20, 2017From the Washington Post:
The special counsel investigating Russian election meddling has requested extensive records and email correspondence from the White House, covering everything from the president’s private discussions about firing his FBI director to his White House’s handling of a warning that President Trump’s then-national security adviser was under investigation, according to two people briefed on the requests.
White House lawyers are now working to turn over internal documents that span 13 categories investigators for the special counsel have identified as critical to their…
gregladen | September 18, 2017A lot of people will object to the title of this post. I will be told to take the post down. I will be told to modify the title or to change what I say in the post.
Nope.
Ta-Nehisi Coates is correct, and his presentation is brilliant. Watch the following interview (in two parts) and read his book We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy.
Chris Hayes is correct to point out that the historical source of Coates title is critically important and deeply disturbing (this is something we've talked about here in the recent past). He is incorrect, as Coates points out near the end of…
gregladen | September 14, 2017The policy of the Republican Trump White House is that if a reporter or commenter says something that the White House strongly disagrees with, the reporter or commenter should be fired.
It remains to be seen how the Trump White House will enforce this newly articulated policy.
The policy was provided as a response to a question about an African American reporter identifying Trump and the White House as being aligned with white supremacy, which is a widely held and well documented truth.
Cindy Boren at the Washington Post has more here.
gregladen | September 6, 2017It is very rare that I find myself yelling at the TV when Rachel Maddow is on. She is very good at historically contextualized nuanced well informed analyses. But when I watched a segment of last night's show (on the Internet, I have no cable) I was shocked to see that she missed something really important. If, that is, it is real.
In the segment below, she makes the point that there are two "clear through lines" in the whole Trump thing. One is the love of Russia and Putin by Trump, his unwavering stance that Russia and Putin can do no wrong. The other is the consistent "vehement antipathy…
gregladen | September 2, 2017First, please take two minutes to watch and listen to this, in order to calibrate:
https://youtu.be/g25G1M4EXrQ
Now, remove all liquid containing vessels from the vicinity, put on your head-desk helmet gear, and watch this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=8&v=GUcsAFnwC7k
Then, behold the fact that Jim Bridenstine, who has demanded that President Obama apologize for believing that global warming is real and important, is being appointed to run NASA.
By the way, global warming did not stop in 2003
No surprise here, planetary warming does not care about the election. Now…
gregladen | August 26, 2017Member of the press are so cute. They evolve so slowly. They are like monotremes or something.
It is said again and again that a) government agencies and other entities, especially things like the White House, dump their news late on Fridays because this avoids the normal five-day news cycle and allows hot stories to cool off, and possibly be ignored by Monday and, b) that doesn't really work any more because of social media and cable news, but still c) we will repeat meme one endlessly anyway so that we can look very smart by then repeating memes b) which brings us to d) rinse and repeat.…
gregladen | August 24, 2017It suddenly became apparent, just a couple of days ago when President Trump was ranting and raving at a political rally, that the man does not know what clean coal is.
This is a concern because his entire energy policy stems from the assumption that we can mine lots of coal in West Virginia and use that for energy, that this is OK because it will be clean coal.
The term clean coal has been used in three ways, but really, is correctly used in only one way (number 2 of the three below), and when used that way, it is still bogus.
1) The term clean coal, or phrases very close to it, have been…
gregladen | August 24, 2017Posting this with no comment because it is expected and so obviously bone-headed Trump:
US President Donald Trump's administration has disbanded a government advisory committee that was intended to help the country prepare for a changing climate.
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration established the committee in 2015 to help businesses and state and local governments make use of the next national climate assessment. The legally mandated report, due in 2018, will lay out the latest climate-change science and describe how global warming is likely to affect the United States,…
gregladen | August 21, 2017One mean spirited decision intended to end the effort to end slavery led to one million dead and the end of slavery anyway.
I spent some time this weekend comparing prosecutors and other legal eagles, who were all hoping to get the job of Attorney General. They were Candidates General, I guess. Trump was mentioned, and somewhere along the line, Dred Scott was mentioned as well. I turned to a highly placed official sort of dude and said, "Did you know that Dred Scott lived in Minnesota?" He did not know that. So I asked a couple of other people if they knew, and they did not. Finally I…
gregladen | August 17, 2017General John F. Kelly is retired from the US Marine Corps, where he commanded the Southern Command. He replaced political operative Reince Priebus as President Trump's Chief of Staff.
The White House Chief of Staff is the highest ranking staff member in the White House, and was formalized as such in 1961. This is not a Senate confirmable position. What the Chief of Staff does varies from administration to administration but it is almost always about the same. This person can be the puppeteer, in the case of a President who is weak and in need of a guiding hand. This person is always a…
gregladen | August 16, 2017It wasn't much of a corner, he was already pretty much there, but yesterday, Donald J. Trump, pretender to the Presidency of the United States, threw in his lot with the "good people" of the fascist, white-supremacist, KKK-loving movement.
There is a lot of commentary out there about this. None of it surprises me, I and others have been pointing at this train wreck all along. But there is one new thing I'll mention now. Listen to Trump's tirade about the protestors. When he speaks of the past notables, including Jefferson and Washington, and the statues, he is plain and articulate, non-…