Thursday Reads: The Walls Are Closing In
Posted: October 24, 2019 Filed under: Afternoon Reads, Foreign Affairs, U.S. Politics | Tags: Bill Taylor, Donald Trump, impeachment, Ukraine 20 Comments
Edvard Munch, Cabbage Field, 1915
Good Afternoon!!
Another psychiatrist’s tweets on Trump’s ailing brain caught the attention of Newsweek’s Shane Croucher: Trump’s “Mental Impairment Means He Cannot Think Strategically or in Abstract Terms,” Claims Professor of psychiatry.
“Trump has no policy on any issue because his mental impairment means he cannot think strategically or in abstract terms,” tweeted John M. Talmadge, MD, a physician and clinical professor of psychiatry at U.T. Southwestern Medical Center.
“He cannot weigh options, assess risk, or foresee consequences. Concepts like fairness, justice, honor, and integrity quite literally do not register. You can see this in every interview or press encounter. He never states an abstract thought or idea.
Man in a cabbage field, 1916, Edvard Munch
“Instead he falls back on simple adjectives: disgraceful, horrible, low-intelligence, perfect, innocent, nasty, stupid, fake, etc. He’s driven by negative emotion, often paranoid and often insulting, vulgar, vitriolic.”
Talmadge wrote that Trump expresses positivity in a “shallow tone” using “childish adjectives” and is non-specific when discussing plans or projects.
“The meaning of this is clear. Trump does not have a vision or a plan, because he can think only in concrete, elementary, childlike, one dimensional terms. He does not process an abstract idea like American forces stabilizing a multilateral conflict with geopolitical implications,” Talmadge wrote.
“This Trumpian brain failure is hard for normal people to understand because for normal people, abstract thought is natural, baked in, largely unnoticed. Normal people see the consequences, assess risk, make rational decisions most of the time.
“What is true today is that Trump is not normal, Trump is mentally impaired, Trump cannot think normally, and Trump is dangerous. When he is removed from office he literally will not understand what happened. He will have to make up a story, tell lies, and rant about Hillary’s DNC server.”
I’ve been following Talmadge for awhile. He refers to Trump’s cognitive deficit as “presidementia.”
Trump tweeted this morning that he was joking, but he clearly wasn’t and what he said wasn’t the least bit humorous.
What an embarrassment he is! He just opens his deformed mouth and spews out whatever his brain coughs up in the moment. And the idiots in the audience actually cheered his nonsense. This is our reality now.
To defend their cognitively impaired “president,” Republicans, led by drunk driver Matt Gaetz, staged a moronic “protest” of what they claimed are “secret” impeachment depositions that large numbers of GOP members are free to–and do–attend. One of those GOP attendees is Mike Pence’s brother! Buzzfeed:
As dozens of House members in charge of the impeachment investigations sit in on closed-door depositions about Ukraine, at least one person in the room has unusually close ties to President Donald Trump’s administration — Vice President Mike Pence’s older brother, Rep. Greg Pence.
Edvard Munch, Landscape with train smoke
The first-term member of Congress sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, one of three House committees leading the impeachment investigation (along with the House Intelligence and Oversight committees). He was assigned to the committee earlier this year by members of the Republican House Steering and Policy committees, long before the impeachment inquiry began.
Pence has had access to all the closed-door testimonies of officials speaking on Trump’s actions, US–Ukraine relations, and the controversial phone call between Trump and the Ukrainian president, which sparked the official impeachment investigation.
Oopsie! This morning on Fox News, Judge Andrew Napolitano explained the morning idiots how Congressional investigations work. Trump will be furious!
Republicans keep complaining about the impeachment process, but they shy away from trying to defend Trump on the content of the testimony because, as the NYT editorial board writes, what Trump did in the Ukraine scandal is impossible to defend. The most damaging testimony so far has come from Ambassador Bill Taylor, a career diplomat and public servant who refused to be sucked into Trump’s conspiracy with the three amigos, Gordon Sondland, Kurt Volker, and Rick Perry.
From Robert Makey at The Intercept: Trump Pressed Ukraine’s President to Act Out a Fake News Script, Live on CNN.
Before agreeing to release nearly $400 million in military assistance to Ukraine, President Donald Trump extorted a promise from his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, to appear on American television and act out a script prepared for him by Trump’s aides, the top American diplomat in Ukraine, Bill Taylor, told the House impeachment inquiry on Tuesday.
The Road to Borre, 1905, Edvard Munch
The scene a desperate Zelensky finally agreed to perform would have been the very definition of fake news: a dramatic announcement by the Ukrainian president, during a CNN interview, that he was opening criminal investigations on Joe Biden’s family and other Democrats.
The plot, which would have duped American voters into believing that there was some substance to a debunked conspiracy theory about Biden’s work in Ukraine as vice president, came very close to working.
Taylor testified that:
until early September, Zelensky and his aides had resisted pressure from Trump to help him smear Biden. Zelensky was supposed to do this by investigating Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company the former vice president’s son Hunter was once paid to advise, as well as claims that Ukrainian officials had revealed evidence of financial crimes by Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort in 2016 to help elect Hillary Clinton.
But once the Ukrainians became aware that the much-needed security assistance Trump had personally held up might never be delivered, Zelensky, who was an actor and comedian before entering politics this year, agreed to play his part in a ruse intended to lend credibility to baseless conspiracy theories about Biden and other Democrats.
Landscape Near Skøyen, Edvard Munch
By the first week of September, Taylor said, the “favor” Trump had alluded to in vague terms in a July phone call with Zelensky had become a very specific demand: Ukraine’s president, a former actor, would be required to deliver lines on CNN prepared for him by two American diplomats acting on orders from Trump and his shadow secretary of state, Rudy Giuliani.
Text messages released earlier this month between those two diplomats — Kurt Volker, the former U.S. special envoy to Ukraine, and Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union — show that they drafted language for Zelensky’s statement in August to send to the Ukrainian president’s close friend and personal aide, Andrey Yermak.
Head over to The Intercept to read the rest.
Abigail Tracy at Vanity Fair: “The Walls Are Closing In”: Bill Taylor’s Testimony Puts Trump’s Impeachment In Overdrive.
In this story, Ukraine is an object,” Taylor told lawmakers in his opening statement Tuesday.
Over the course of more than nine hours, he meticulously outlined Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into publicly announcing investigations into Hunter Biden, the former vice president’s son, and an unfounded conspiracy theory that Ukraine framed Russia for election meddling in 2016. And Taylor confirmed that the White House made these investigations a precondition for the release of nearly $400 million in military aid to help Ukraine counter an ongoing Russian invasion—the quid pro quo Trump and his allies have been denying since the story broke.
“This was a game changer,” a senior Democratic congressional aide told me. “Ambassador Taylor looks like he’ll end up being the star witness for the prosecution in this impeachment trial of a mob boss president. He not only exposed the full scope of corruption in the White House, but he left no doubt that President Trump was deliberately extorting a foreign country to try and get them to interfere on his behalf in the 2020 election. The president has to know the walls are closing in.”
Another landscape with train smoke by Edvard Munch, 1900
Trump and his lackeys are attacking Taylor as “a radical,” but that won’t hold water.
Taylor, who was appointed ambassador to Ukraine by Republican President George W. Bush, kept meticulous, contemporaneous notes of his interactions with Sondland and other Trump officials as the Ukraine scandal came into focus. “He wrote it all down: This is what happened, this is what I was thinking at the time, and this is what happened next,” said a former high-ranking State Department official who knows Taylor well. “That is part of the whole deal; it is part of the job to have notes on every conversation.”
A highly credible witness, in other words. And hardly the “radical” bureaucrat that Trump officials are trying to claim. “He does have a reputation for being a very straight-up decent guy,” a second former high-ranking State Department official told me. “You can take his words seriously. He’s not prone to dramatics or exaggeration.”
Trump has led a war against long-term, non-political employees of the CIA, FBI, DOJ, and State Department beginning before his election, and now those anonymous federal employees are getting their revenge.
The New York Times: Trump’s War on the ‘Deep State’ Turns Against Him.
Nameless, faceless and voiceless, the C.I.A. officer who first triggered the greatest threat to President Trump’s tenure in office seemed to be practically the embodiment of the “deep state” that the president has long accused of trying to take him down.
But over the last three weeks, the deep state has emerged from the shadows in the form of real live government officials, past and present, who have defied a White House attempt to block cooperation with House impeachment investigators and provided evidence that largely backs up the still-anonymous whistle-blower.
Landscape By Travemünde, Edvard Munch
The parade of witnesses marching to Capitol Hill culminated this week with the dramatic testimony of William B. Taylor Jr., a military officer and diplomat who has served his country for 50 years. Undaunted by White House pressure, he came forward to accuse the same president who sent him to Ukraine a few months ago of abusing his power to advance his own political interests.
The House impeachment inquiry into Mr. Trump’s efforts to force Ukraine to investigate Democrats is the climax of a 33-month scorched-earth struggle between a president with no record of public service and the government he inherited but never trusted. If Mr. Trump is impeached by the House, it will be in part because of some of the same career professionals he has derided as “absolute scum” or compared to Nazis.
“With all the denigration and disparagement and diminishment, I think you are seeing some payback here, not by design but by opportunity,” said Representative Gerald E. Connolly, a Democrat from Washington’s Virginia suburbs who represents many federal employees. “It’s almost karmic justice. All of a sudden, there’s an opportunity for people who know things to speak out, speak up, testify about and against — and they’re doing so.”
Read the rest at the NYT, even though they should have at least put quotes around the term “deep state” in the story.
And soon–probably in November–the impeachment hearings will go public. The Washington Post reports:
House Democrats are preparing to move their largely private impeachment inquiry onto a more public stage as soon as mid-November and are already grappling with how best to present the complex Ukraine saga to the American people….
Moonlight, Edvard Munch
Among the witnesses Democrats hope to question in open session are the acting ambassador to Ukraine, William B. Taylor Jr., and his predecessor, former ambassador Marie Yovanovitch. Both are seasoned diplomats who, in earlier House testimony, effectively conveyed outrage over a White House plan to withhold much-needed military aid from Ukraine, a long-standing ally battling pro-Russian separatists….
Another top priority for many Democrats is John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, who made known around the White House his visceral opposition to the campaign to pressure Zelensky, a campaign directed in part by Trump’s personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani.
Testimony from Bolton could be particularly devastating for the White House, though it was unclear whether Democrats would subpoena him or when. After Bolton resigned last month, he told The Washington Post that he would “have my say in due course.”’
Democrats have long been expected to shift to public hearings, which offer the opportunity to build the case against Trump while also building support among American voters.
Click on the WaPo link to read the rest.
Who knows what horrors today will bring? What are you reading and what are you doing for self-care? I’m still mostly escaping into books, but looking at paintings helps a lot too. Yesterday I explored landscapes by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch.
Terrifying Tuesday Reads
Posted: October 22, 2019 Filed under: Foreign Affairs, morning reads, U.S. Politics 47 Comments
Vincent van Gogh, Autumn Landscape, 1885
Good Morning!!
If you thought Trump couldn’t be any more despicable than we already knew, behold his latest outrage.
CNN: Trump calls impeachment inquiry a ‘lynching’
President Donald Trump on Tuesday called House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry a “lynching,” employing a term associated with the extrajudicial killings of African-Americans while calling on Republicans to aid his political defense.
“So some day, if a Democrat becomes President and the Republicans win the House, even by a tiny margin, they can impeach the President, without due process or fairness or any legal rights. All Republicans must remember what they are witnessing here – a lynching. But we will WIN!” the President tweeted.
Trump has repeatedly railed against the probe, calling it a “witch hunt” and a “fraud,” but Tuesday marks his first use of the term “lynching,” which is associated with a period of horrific racial violence in the United States, in regard to the inquiry. Following Emancipation and the Civil War, killings, often carried out in public settings, known as lynchings, terrorized newly freed black Americans. Thousands of citizens were killed this way.
Jean-Francois Millet, Haystacks Autumn, 1873
Trump’s use of the term is also notable as he has frequently stoked racial tensions while in office, from referring to undocumented immigrants as an “infestation” to sharply criticizing African-American athletes who protest during the National Anthem.
Quoted at The Washington Post,
Rep. Karen Bass (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, responded to Trump’s comparison of the impeachment inquiry to lynching with a pair of pointed tweets.
“You are comparing a constitutional process to the PREVALENT and SYSTEMATIC brutal torture of people in THIS COUNTRY that looked like me?” she wrote.
“Every time your back is up against the wall, you throw out these racial bombs,” Bass said in a second tweet. “We’re not taking the bait. While we CONTINUE our business here in DC, why don’t you take a trip to the @MemPeaceJustice in Alabama and LEARN SOMETHING.”
Her tweet used the Twitter handle for the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which, according to its website, is “dedicated to the legacy of enslaved black people, people terrorized by lynching, African Americans humiliated by racial segregation and Jim Crow, and people of color burdened with contemporary presumptions of guilt and police violence.”
If that isn’t sickening enough, Trump suck-up Lindsey Graham announced his agreement.
https://twitter.com/scarylawyerguy/status/1186652089780523009
Honestly, I feel sick knowing that Trump can and will get even worse.
The latest CNN poll, released this morning, found that “50% support impeaching Trump and removing him from office.”
Half of Americans say President Donald Trump should be impeached and removed from office, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS, a new high in CNN polling on the topic and the first time that support for impeachment and removal has significantly outpaced opposition….
Childe Hassam, Autumn Boulevard, Paris
Support for impeachment and removal is strongest among Democrats (87% favor it) and stands at 50% among independents. Among Republicans, just 6% say they support impeaching and removing the Republican President, lower than the 14% who said so in a September CNN poll. While a handful of other polls also have found support for impeachment in double digits among Republicans, most have found Republican support closer to the level in the new CNN poll than the September one.
Beyond partisanship, demographic dividing lines on impeachment seem to mirror those that have driven Trump’s approval rating throughout his presidency. Women (56%) are more apt than men (44%) to favor impeachment and removal. Nonwhites (68%) support it in greater numbers than whites (40%), and whites are split by education (51% with college degrees back impeachment and removal vs. 35% of those without degrees) and further by gender (26% of white men without college degrees favor impeachment and removal, but that more than doubles to 54% among white women who hold four-year degrees).
The poll finds that Americans overall are entrenched in their views on each side of the impeachment debate. Among those who say Trump should be impeached and removed, 90% say they feel that way strongly, as do 86% of those who say he should not be impeached and removed.
Trump’s response to all this has been an extended tantrum. The Daily Beast: With Impeachment Looming, Trump Is Threatening to Sue ‘Everybody Who Pisses Him Off.’
Last week, as the White House struggled to grapple with an accelerating impeachment probe and a bloodbath in Syria, President Donald Trump’s mind drifted to old, familiar territory: threatening frivolous and petty lawsuits.
With crises surrounding him, the president spent days privately grousing to those close to him about undercover video and audio, released by Project Veritas, purportedly showing a vast anti-Trump conspiracy orchestrated by CNN President Jeff Zucker. According to a source with direct knowledge of Trump’s grievance, the president repeatedly made clear that he wanted there to be consequences for CNN’s alleged malfeasance (though the released videos showed fairly mundane, if not outright boring, editorial meetings).
Egon Schiele, Four Trees, 1917, Belvedere, Vienna
Representing both the president and the 2020 Trump campaign, Gawker-killing celebrity lawyer Charles Harder sent a four-page document to Zucker and CNN General Counsel David Vigilante alleging the news channel was violating the law with its coverage. In the letter, Trump and Harder threatened to sue CNN for falsely advertising itself as a legitimate news outlet, in addition to seeking “substantial payment of damages” as part of some sort of resolution.
Reached for comment by phone on Friday, Harder simply hung up and wouldn’t answer questions about Trump’s role in crafting the letter. (The president has been known to enthusiastically suggest insults and jabs in his lawyers’ missives.) A Harder spokesman also declined to comment and said that the letter spoke for itself.
The delivery of the Trump attorney’s four-page document was a blip on the news cycle, but one that offered a glimpse into how the president has often responded over the decades when he feels besieged. In his game-show host years and real-estate days, he and his legal counsel would frequently lean on lawsuits and legal threats as an intimidation tactic—even if they knew there was no chance of it advancing in the courts. It’s a strategy that Trump hasn’t abandoned, even after he became leader of the free world. And with impeachment at the hands of House Democrats looming, one senior White House official said that the president’s impulse to sue, or say he’ll sue, “everybody who pisses him off” is only intensifying….
According to two people close to the president, Trump has also asked his lawyers and advisers about options for legal retaliation against other news outlets, including MSNBC and The Washington Post.
Trump is ridiculous, but he’s still sitting in the White House, and he’s also a danger the country and the world.
Pierre Bonnard, Autumn View, 1912
Last night The Washington Post reported that Putin and Hungary’s Orban helped sour Trump on Ukraine.
President Trump’s effort to pressure Ukraine for information he could use against political rivals came as he was being urged to adopt a hostile view of that country by its regional adversaries, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, current and former U.S. officials said.
Trump’s conversations with Putin, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and others reinforced his perception of Ukraine as a hopelessly corrupt country — one that Trump now also appears to believe sought to undermine him in the 2016 U.S. election, the officials said.
Neither of those foreign leaders specifically encouraged Trump to see Ukraine as a potential source of damaging information about Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, nor did they describe Kyiv as complicit in an unsubstantiated 2016 election conspiracy theory, officials said.
But their disparaging depictions of Ukraine reinforced Trump’s perceptions of the country and fed a dysfunctional dynamic in which White House officials struggled to persuade Trump to support the fledgling government in Kyiv instead of exploiting it for political purposes, officials said.
The role played by Putin and Orban, a hard-right leader who has often allied himself with the Kremlin’s positions, was described in closed-door testimony last week by George Kent, a deputy assistant secretary of state, before House impeachment investigators, U.S. officials said.
Kent cited the influence of those leaders as a factor that helped sour Trump on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the months leading up to their July 25 phone call — a conversation that triggered an extraordinary whistleblower complaint as well as a House impeachment inquiry.
Read the rest at the WaPo and read more details at The New York Times.
Winslow Homer, Autumn Woods, 1877
Meanwhile in the Trump-caused Syrian situation, the so-called “cease fire” ends today. The Guardian: Erdoğan threatens to ramp up assault on Kurds in Syria ‘safe zone.’
The Turkish president has threatened to press ahead with an operation against Kurdish-led forces in Syria “even more strongly” if promises made by the US regarding the withdrawal of Kurdish fighters have not been met by the time a five-day ceasefire expires.
Up to 1,300 fighters from the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) are yet to vacate Ankara’s proposed border “safe zone”, as per the terms of a ceasefire announced by the US vice-president, Mike Pence, in Ankara last week, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan told reporters before flying to Russia.
Erdoğan is meeting Vladimir Putin in Sochi on Tuesday for talks expected to focus on the size and scope of the planned buffer zone before the pause in fighting ends at 10pm local time (1900 GMT).
Turkish troops, allied Syrian rebel proxies, the SDF, and soldiers belonging to both the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, and his Russian allies are all now present in the border area after Donald Trump announced he would withdraw US troops, paving the way for Ankara to launch an attack on the SDF on 9 October.
As a result of the Turkish offensive, Syria’s Kurdish officials struck a deal with Assad, their former enemy, for military reinforcements in the border area.
Trump’s withdrawal of the remaining 1,000 US special forces from Kurdish-held Syria means Moscow and Ankara have emerged as the two main foreign players in Syria’s long war.
Claude Monet, Autumn on the Seine at Argenteuil, 1873
Finally, from this morning’s New York Times: ISIS Reaps Gains of U.S. Pullout From Syria.
When President Trump announced this month that he would pull American troops out of northern Syria and make way for a Turkish attack on the Kurds, Washington’s onetime allies, many warned that he was removing the spearhead of the campaign to defeat the Islamic State, also known as ISIS.
Now, analysts say that Mr. Trump’s pullout has handed the Islamic State its biggest win in more than four years and greatly improved its prospects. With American forces rushing for the exits, in fact, American officials said last week that they were already losing their ability to collect critical intelligence about the group’s operations on the ground.
“There is no question that ISIS is one of the big winners in what is happening in Syria,” said Lina Khatib, director of the Middle East and North Africa Program at Chatham House, a research center in London.
Cutting support for the Syrian Democratic Forces has crippled the ability of the United States and its former partners to hunt down the group’s remnants.
News of the American withdrawal set off jubilation among Islamic State supporters on social media and encrypted chat networks. It has lifted the morale of fighters in affiliates as far away as Libya and Nigeria.
That’s it for me. What stories are you following today?
Monday Mash Up: WTF were They Thinking Edition
Posted: October 21, 2019 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: Donald Trump must be impeached, hard rock hotel New Orleans Crane implosion, Lying Mike Pompeo, Pierre Delecto, quid pro quo, Ukraine 26 Comments
Portrait of Dr Gachet. Vincent Van Gogh,1890
Good Morning Sky Dancers!
Ever have one of those days where you’re so lost in your head that even the most menial daily tasks wind up all wrong? Well, today, I managed to start the coffee pot without putting the coffee pot in the machine, went out to walk Temple, and came back to a steaming pile of wet grounds all over the kitchen cabinet and floor. I’m just exhausted. That’s my excuse. I’ve spent several weeks watching a building that shouldn’t have been built to begin with tumble down towards beautiful historic buildings and people on the street and then spent a 3 day vigil hoping US engineers could accomplish a demolition feat which it appears they mostly did. Three people died for some one’s profit maximization exercise.
I also have a houseful of guests that should be gone by now and work and bills keep piling up. I’m overwhelmed.
I know I’m distracted but this and watching genocide in Syria on TV knowing full well we had a hand in it although We the People don’t like it. And, that we’re being grifted by a bunch of Thugs passing themselves off as a Political party while the economy is falling apart and we’re picking up the bills for stuff we really shouldn’t be.
Oh, and did I mention all roads from the White House lead to a very happy Vladimir Putin?
What’s an American Girl to do?
So, what the Fuck was Mitt Romney thinking when he did this?
Thinking of him, Roy Lichtenstein, 1963
Yes, Mitt Romney has a sock puppet that evidently represents his conscience or his manhood or something … This is by
Mitt Romney, the senator from Utah, former Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts governor, is also, apparently, the man behind a Twitter account that uses the moniker “Pierre Delecto.”
Mr. Romney on Sunday admitted to McKay Coppins, a writer at The Atlantic, that he was responsible for the social media account, which he uses to covertly monitor political discourse and occasionally defend himself. It’s unclear what, if anything, Pierre Delecto is a reference to.
Several events preceded the admission.
First, The Atlantic published on Sunday a profile of Mr. Romney, one of the few prominent Republican lawmakers to criticize President Trump over his efforts to press Ukraine to investigate his Democratic rivals. Those efforts form the basis of an impeachment investigation by the House.
Mr. Trump lashed out in response this month, calling the senator on Twitter a “pompous ‘ass’ who has been fighting me from the beginning.” In one tweet, the president used the hashtag “#IMPEACHMITTROMNEY.”
I wonder if Pierre Delecto chats up Carlos Danger. Oh, and why do these names sound like sleazy characters from bad pulp fiction? This is from Ashley Feinberg writing for Slate ” This Sure Looks Like Mitt Romney’s Secret Twitter Account (Update: It Is) Meet “Pierre Delecto.” So there’s a difference between a sleazy sock puppet sending Dick picks trying to prop up Weiner’s manhood and a sleazy sock puppet trying to prop up Mitt Romney’s, right?
Earlier today, the Atlantic’s McKay Coppins published a lengthy profile on Mitt Romney, apparently part of Romney’s effort to set himself up as the noble Republican foil to an out-of-control president. These sorts of pieces, which are more about narrative setting than anything else, typically don’t contain a lot of new information, but this had one notable exception. About midway through, the usually guarded senator revealed that, just like fellow lone-voice-of reason-haver James Comey, he was the owner of a secret Twitter account.
At one point, as Coppins asked him about the #IMPEACHMITTROMNEY hashtag Trump tweeted into being earlier this month, Romney said this:
“That’s kind of what he does,” Romney said with a shrug, and then got up to retrieve an iPad from his desk. He explained that he uses a secret Twitter account—“What do they call me, a lurker?”—to keep tabs on the political conversation. “I won’t give you the name of it,” he said, but “I’m following 668 people.” Swiping at his tablet, he recited some of the accounts he follows, including journalists, late-night comedians (“What’s his name, the big redhead from Boston?”), and athletes. Trump was not among them. “He tweets so much,” Romney said, comparing the president to one of his nieces who overshares on Instagram. “I love her, but it’s like, Ah, it’s too much.”
In other words, a wealth of information that would be highly useful to anyone hoping to track down the senator’s supposedly secret Twitter hideout— or more specifically, to me. The chances seemed high that Romney, a known family man, would want to keep close tabs on his offspring. And as luck would have it, Romney has plenty of offspring .
Not all of his five sons have public Twitter accounts, and some of them, like the dreaded Tagg, have too many followers to possibly dig through. Romney’s oldest grandchild, Allie Romney Critchlow, however, has just 481 followers, making digging through them an annoying-but-not-impossible feat. As I scrolled, while focusing on the ones that appeared to make an effort to conceal their real identities, one in particular caught my eye.
Reader, meet Twitter user @qaws9876, otherwise known as Pierre Delecto.
Seated Harlequin, 1901, Pablo Picasso
Yeah, you can go see what he’s been up to as his super hero alter ego that he undoubtedly costumes in superhero jammies while tweeting away.
And we’re still watching Trumpists wiggle worm their way out of the idea of a Quid Quo Pro that’s been verified and something speculative. You would think a Secretary of State with that much education would have something better to do on a Sunday that make a fool of himself. But then, he’s a Trumpist and a Fundie and a fool
This is from Peter Wade writing for Rolling Stone: “Stunned Into Silence, State Department Chief Recalls Manafort at His Guiltiest. Sec. Mike Pompeo’s attempts to deflect questions about the president’s Ukraine quid pro quo scandal died a horrible death on Sunday.”
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s attempts to deflect and avoid giving honest and straight answers about President Donald Trump’s Ukraine quid pro quo scandal died a horrible death on Sunday during his appearance on ABC News’ The Week.
Host George Stephanopoulos asked the secretary if it was appropriate to withhold military aid to Ukraine until they pursued an investigation into the president’s political rivals. Stephanopoulos was referring to acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney admitting to the quid pro quo earlier this week. Pompeo said, “I’m not going to get into hypotheticals and secondary things based on what someone else has said.”
Stephanopoulos responded, “Except it’s not a hypothetical.”
um,,, cue the video
https://twitter.com/AdamWeinstein/status/1185947146891288576
That was a poignant pause worthy of Captain James T Kirk of the USS Enterprise!
That is the moment when you could almost see Pompeo start to sweat and one could imagine the memes starting to multiply that would include the intro of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sound of Silence” playing in the background as Pompeo went quiet for a prolonged period of time. Then the secretary eventually awoke from his coma and, with a gravelly voice, righted himself and continued to insist that the question was a hypothetical.
As national security editor for the New Republic Adam Weinstein pointed out, the scene was reminiscent of Trump’s former campaign manager and now-jailed felon Paul Manafort’s infamous 2016 viral moment when he was stumped and stuttered through his answer when asked about Trump’s relationships with Russian oligarchs.
Woman in a Purple Coat, 1937 by Henri Matisse
So, we also have this from the Philadephia Inquirer: by Julia Terruso: “No one shows up to Joe Biden debate-watch parties in Philly. Does that matter? ” Personally, I’ve been invited to both Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris down here in New Orleans and both were held in very crowded bars, well attended, and not the only watch parties in town.
David Bradford set up a bowl of chips, salsa, and some grapes in the common room of his Center City apartment building.
He was hosting a presidential debate-watching party for Joe Biden supporters just blocks from the former vice president’s national campaign headquarters. He didn’t expect a big crowd, but in the end only one other person showed up.
The two men watched in silence and both left before the three-hour debate ended. A reporter turned off the TV on her way out. Bradford’s was one of three watch parties within a 20-mile radius of Center City registered with the campaign. None drew more than seven people.
Elsewhere in Philadelphia, fans of Sen. Elizabeth Warren pinned on buttons and wore “Philly for Warren” T-shirts. They gathered in six different locations from South Philadelphia to Wynnefield cheering at Warren’s responses and jeering when her opponents took shots. Local supporters of Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders have also had well-attended watch parties here.
It makes for quite a contrast. But does it matter?
Biden draws from an older, less progressive, often less-educated crowd. That’s not the demographic that often gathers for watch parties. Polling shows his support is more pragmatic than passionate. His campaign has pushed back on the idea he has an “enthusiasm gap” before, arguing it’s something political operatives and journalists obsess over that means little to most Democratic voters.
“The Twitter Democrats are a very small subset of the Democratic Party,” said U.S. Rep. Brendan Boyle (D.,Pa.), who supports Biden. “They are a much younger, more educated, wealthier, whiter subset — they’re important but let’s not make the mistake of extrapolating that they are the party.”
On the other hand, the kind of grassroots momentum that begins in bars and homes can turn into organization: Volunteers canvassing can have a tangible impact. And if some of Biden’s support is less enthusiastic, which polls suggest, there’s the risk it fractures.
Excuses! Excuses! Sounds like something Pierre Delecto would say! And then, here’s when the President got corrected by a Science GRRLLL up there in Space like a real Super Hero!
Seems like a lot of things are just not going as planned … and I’ll provide you with something that only slightly went awry when the entire project was a clusterfuck from the get go. The Great Hard Rock Hotel New Orleans Crane Implosion. We know have a huge crane body stationed like a metal christmas tree impaling Rampart Street. Fortunately, it only took out a sewer and not the main gas and electric lines into the French Quarter. So that was a win because of that and only a few historic buldings like the Saenger Theatre and the Old Roosevelt Hotel where my parents honeymooned in the late 40s lost a few windows.
From TV station WDSU “City: Demolition at Hard Rock went ‘as good as it could have’; next phase is search and extraction”. Also, the next phase is just wait until we learn more about how a crooked developer got this pass the city council and mayor a few years back and managed a go round the planning commission and the master plan and undoubtedly got it through a crook in the city permits office.
Well, it’s a long post already and I’ve only covered a few things in the domestic news. Don’t ask me to look abroad today. Please don’t!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Lazy Caturday Reads
Posted: October 19, 2019 Filed under: Afternoon Reads, Foreign Affairs, U.S. Politics 14 Comments
Boris Kustodiev (Russian artist, 1878–1927) The Merchant’s Wife, 1918
Good Morning!!
Every day I wake up asking myself, “Can this really be happening?” We’ve been living this nightmare for years now, and it still feels so unreal. The good news is that more and more people in positions of power–government and media–are beginning to wake up to Trump’s insanity.
Peter Baker at The New York Times: On Day 1,001, Trump Made It Clear: Being ‘Presidential’ Is Boring.
DALLAS — At one point during one of his most unpresidential of days, President Trump insisted that he knew how to be presidential.
“It’s much easier being presidential, it’s easy,” he told a stadium full of more than 20,000 boisterous supporters in MAGA hats and T-shirts cheering his every word on Thursday night. “All you have to do is act like a stiff.”
By Charles Spencelayh
He buttoned his suit coat, pursed his lips, squared his shoulders and dropped his arms rigidly at his sides. “Ladies and gentlemen of Texas,” he then droned in a sleep-inducing staccato monotone the way he imagined most of the other 44 presidents had done. “It is a great honor to be with you this evening.”
The crowd loved it, roaring with laughter. Transforming back into the unpresidential president America has come to know, Mr. Trump added, “And everybody would be out of here so fast! You wouldn’t come in in the first place!” Being presidential, he was saying, is so boring. Who wants that?
Most Americans want exactly that. We are sick of being shocked and ashamed every day by this deranged freak. We don’t want to live in his reality TV show.
After 1,000 days in office, Mr. Trump has redefined what it means to be presidential. On the 1,001st day of his tenure, which was Thursday, all pretense of normalcy went out the window. It was a day when he boasted of saving “millions of lives” by temporarily stopping a Middle East war that he effectively allowed to start in the first place, then compared the combatants to children who had to be allowed to slug each other to get it out of their system.
It was a day when he announced without any evident embarrassment that officials of the federal government that answers to him had scoured the country for a site for next year’s Group of 7 summit meeting and determined that the perfect location, the very best site in all the United States, just happened to be a property he owned in Florida.
It was a day when he sent out his top aide, an adviser who has served as “acting” White House chief of staff for nearly 10 months without ever being granted the respect of earning the title outright, to try to quell the whole impeachment furor, only to have him essentially admit the quid pro quo that the president had so adamantly denied.
It was a day that ended with a rally where one of the warm-up acts, the Texas lieutenant governor, declared that liberals “are not our opponents, they are our enemy,” and the president called the speaker of the House “crazy,” a rival candidate “very dumb,” a House committee chairman a “fraud” and the governor of another state a “crackpot.”
By Mary Cassatt (1944-1926)
This one is from Thursday. Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg: Does Trump Realize the Trouble He’s In?
Wednesday, the 1,000th day of Donald Trump’s presidency, went badly. That’s no surprise; most of the first 999 days went badly too. I have no idea if he’s going to wind up getting ousted from office, either as a result of the impeachment House Democrats are readying or the 2020 election. But things are getting worse for Trump — whether he realizes it or not.
Every once in a while, some event offers a clarifying reminder of the president’s poor judgment. On Wednesday, it was the release of a letter Trump wrote to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The letter itself was an embarrassment, in which Trump, soon after telling Erdogan on the phone that U.S. forces would move out of his way to enable Turkey’s invasion of Syria, tried to walk things back. Sort of. As Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman put it at the Monkey Cage, the president opted for “threatening rhetoric reminiscent of a Mafia boss” to “make loud threats that he may not be able to deliver on.” As soon as the letter was published, professional diplomats and historians said they had never seen something so amateurish from a U.S. president.
But what really underlined Trump’s problem for me wasn’t that he wrote an incompetent letter to follow up on what seems to have been an incompetent phone call. Or that his Syria policy, as my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Eli Lake notes, has resulted in chaos and death. Or that, on a crass political level, he’s managed to alienate his congressional allies just as he needs them most, with House Republicans voting overwhelmingly on Wednesday to condemn his decision.
No, what really got to me was that Trump distributed copies of this letter to congressional leaders when they showed up at the White House for a briefing. Think of it. Even if the letter had been perfectly normal, what Trump was handing them was an Oct. 9 request to Erdogan to halt his invasion — a request that Erdogan has, as we’ve seen, totally ignored. Trump was bragging about what he considered to be a sign of his own brilliance without realizing that it was instead evidence of abject failure.
Jeune-Fille-au-Chat, by Suzanne Valedon, 1919
Is it possible that Trump doesn’t understand that he’s an international laughing stock? Yes. It appears that he is that delusional. It was shortly after the meeting in which he distributed the insane letter that he tweeted the now iconic photo of Nancy Pelosi standing up and pointing at him–because he thought the photo made him look good!
Erdogan spoke about the letter to NPR. Bloomberg: Erdogan Says He Won’t Forget Trump’s ‘Devil’ Letter.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he won’t forget a letter from U.S. President Donald Trump that warned him not to be a “fool,” a “tough guy” or a “devil,” and vowed a response to what he said was a missive out of line with diplomatic courtesies.
Trump penned the warnings in a letter to Erdogan dated Oct. 9 in an effort to persuade the Turkish leader not to start a military offensive in Syria. Turkey sent troops across the border to push back American-backed Kurdish fighters on the same day, and the operation was its response to Trump’s letter, Erdogan aide Gulnur Aybet told NPR in an interview….
“We don’t see this issue as our priority today,” he told press in Istanbul. But, “it should be known that when the time comes, necessary action will be taken regarding this issue.”
Trump has been dictating a lot of letters lately, like the one he had his White House Counsel send to Congressional committees claiming their impeachment inquiry is illegitimate. The latest was a missive threatening to sue CNN for their news coverage.
Jonathan Chait: Trump Writes Unhinged ‘Legal’ Letter Demanding That CNN Pay Him Money.
This week, right-wing hoaxster James O’Keefe launched the latest of his series of secretly recorded videos, which purport to prove various conservative conspiracy theories but fail. The new version involves a CNN contractor recording employees grumbling about various complaints about the network, none of which establish the plot O’Keefe set out to prove, and some of which suggest the opposite (an employee complains that CNN covers Trump rallies but not Biden ones, which are too boring).
Mimi and her cat, by Paul Gauguin
Even some of the conservative movement’s dimmest stars came away unimpressed. The project nonetheless seems to have left an impression on Donald Trump, a devoted follower and purveyor of nearly all the right’s conspiracy theories, a fanatical devotee of cable news, and, incidentally, the president of the United States. Trump has directed his lawyer to threaten a lawsuit against CNN on the basis of O’Keefe’s flimsy video.
The letter claims that O’Keefe has personally disproven CNN’s claim to be a news network dedicated to reporting facts. “In the Footage, your employees
appear to state that CNN attempts to make its reporting appear neutral and unbiased, when in fact its reporting is far from neutral and highly biased against the President.” The letter then moves on to its true complaint, stating (without any evidence whatsoever), “Never in the history of this country has a President been the subject of such a sustained barrage of unfair, unfounded, unethical and unlawful attacks by so-called ‘mainstream’ news, as the current situation.”Continuing from this extremely shaky factual foundation, Trump’s letter proceeds to a ludicrous legal argument: CNN has violated the Lanham Act, which controls truth in advertising. Therefore, by claiming to be a real news network while subjecting Trump to hours of critical coverage, it has misrepresented itself.
Read the rest at New York Magazine.
Two more reads on Trump’s increasingly erratic behavior.
Politico: Trump veterans see a presidency veering off the rails.
Former Trump White House officials and other Republicans close to the White House are increasingly worried about President Trump’s erratic behavior and say there are no longer enough safeguards around him to prevent self-inflicted disasters large and small.
Henri Toulouse Lautrec, Lechaton Minette
Just in the last two weeks, Trump precipitously withdrew U.S. troops from northern Syria and attacked America’s Kurdish allies as “no angels,” sparking outrage among GOP lawmakers; released a letter to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan whose undiplomatic language was widely mocked; called his former defense secretary “the world’s most overrated general”; and blew up at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi during a meeting his own White House had called….
Under the strain of a metastasizing impeachment probe on Capitol Hill and helming an administration run by a diminishing number of heavyweight officials of independent stature, the president is displaying the kind of capricious behavior that once might have been contained or at least mitigated, former officials say.
“The wheels are not off the car. The situation is way worse than that. The car has been impounded and we are now waiting to figure out what the fine is and to see whether or not we’re going to get the car back,” said former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci.
Peter Nicholas at The Atlantic: The Unraveling of Donald Trump.
The country is entering a new and precarious phase, in which the central question about President Donald Trump is not whether he is coming unstrung, but rather just how unstrung he is going to get.
Giovanni Boldini (Italian artist, 1842-1931) A Lady with a Cat
The boiling mind of Trump has spawned a cottage industry for cognitive experts who have questioned whether he is, well, all there. But as the impeachment inquiry barrels ahead on Capitol Hill, several associates of the president, including former White House aides, worry that his behavior is likely to get worse. Angered by the proceedings, unencumbered by aides willing to question his judgment, and more and more isolated in the West Wing, Trump is apt to lash out more at enemies imagined and real, these people told me. Conduct that has long been unsettling figures to deteriorate as Trump comes under mounting stress. What unfolded Wednesday inside the West Wing’s walls might be only a foretaste of what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi described that day, after a meeting with Trump, as a presidential “meltdown.”
“He’s grown more comfortable in the job and less willing to assimilate new information and trust new advisers,” a former White House official told me. “He’s decided to throw caution to the wind and go it alone, especially when he’s stressed and feels under attack and threatened in various ways. Then his worst impulses and vices shine through.” [….]
At least one associate has confronted Trump recently about his judgment, specifically his decision to repeatedly attack the Biden family. Isn’t it unseemly for a president to target Joe Biden’s son Hunter? Wouldn’t it be smarter, at least, to outsource this sort of attack to someone else?
According to a person close to the president, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss private conversations, Trump’s explanation was that he acts as any normal person might, and that he won’t be moved by what he calls “political correctness.” “You don’t get it,” Trump said.
The only ones who “get it” are the wackos at his Hitler rallies. Even Republicans are beginning to wake up from their long sleep.
I haven’t even scratched the surface of what’s happening in the news. What stories are you following today?
Fraud Filled Friday Reads: Pity the US Taxpayer and pray for the Kurds
Posted: October 18, 2019 Filed under: morning reads 31 Comments
The Beginnings of Chaos, Zhong Baio, 2009
Good Morning!
I figured things that went crazy yesterday would be further elucidated today. I was right. Yesterday’s Trumpist regime actions still look appalling even with a bit more information and explanation. We have Mike Pence getting outfoxed by the Turks which unfortunately means death for the Kursish people in Syria. His negotiations were basically a recipe for capitulation and genocide. I’m also wondering how much money from the US Treasury will be piled into refitting the Doral for a grand old case of emoluments violations? Plus there was Mulvaney’s mea culpa on a Trumpist quid pro quo that cannot be unwound once put on national TV. Is there a stronger description of what’s going on in the White House other than utter chaos? Labeling it all chaos seems like such an understatement!
Let me start with USA Today’s opinion page and the heading from Paul Brandus: “Trump’s unmatched sleaze: Grifters, women, trampling Constitution and now G-7 at Doral”.
We’ve had presidents who were used by members of their own family for personal gain, like Ulysses S. Grant.
We’ve had presidents who stocked their Cabinet with greedy, self-serving mediocrities who took advantage of the public trust, like Warren G. Harding.
We’ve had presidents who swore to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution, only to then abuse it, like Richard Nixon.
And we’ve had presidents who, thanks to a presumptive sense of entitlement, lived slimy private lives, using countless women before tossing them aside — Harding again, plus John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton.
President Donald Trump falls into every single sleazy category, squarely and shamelessly. Just Thursday, we learned that he’ll hold next year’s Group of Seven meeting (with leaders of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom) at his own Doral golf resort in Miami.
It’s the latest example of how Trump, who never divested from his businesses, continues to make millions from them. It’s also the latest reminder that he constantly violates the Constitution’s emoluments clause, which is supposed to ban presidents from accepting money from foreign governments. This while the House is in the middle of an impeachment inquiry and there are two lawsuits pending over the emoluments clause.
“This is unbelievable,” said Noah Bookbinder, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which filed one of those suits, speaking for much of America.
“Flower of Death—The Bursting of a Heavy Shell— Not as It Looks, but as It Feels and Sounds and Smells” (1919) by Claggett Wilson Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC
And then there’s this tell-all book by Ex VA chief Shulkin as reviewed in WAPO by Lisa Rein. Here’s the headline: “Ex-VA chief Shulkin’s new book decries ‘toxic, subversive’ culture in Trump’s Washington”.
His security detail leaked his schedule, putting him at risk. A senior adviser on his team circulated a three-page memo outlining his ouster — with a succession plan. His inner circle held meetings without him and scurried to secret huddles at the White House.
And a trio of rich men who are fixtures at President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Fla. — but had no experience in the federal government — were his keepers.
These are some of the scenes from David Shulkin’s new book, “It Shouldn’t Be This Hard to Serve Your Country,” an account of his tumultuous 15 months as Trump’s first Veterans Affairs secretary.
The book portrays a toxic, backstabbing culture in Trump’s Washington that, as its title suggests, should give pause to anyone considering public service, Shulkin writes. From his rib-tickling interview with the president-elect to his dismissal by tweet in March 2018, Shulkin says he was blindsided at almost every turn by a multitude of institutions, from his inspector general to the media. And he says veterans are paying the cost.
“The VA was once thought to be the only part of the federal government that was above politics,” Shulkin, 60, writes. But “the environment in Washington had grown so toxic, chaotic and subversive that it became impossible for me to accomplish the important work that our veterans need and deserve.”
Ultimately his own staff did him in, Shulkin writes, turning ethics questions about a trip he took to Europe that mixed business with pleasure to their advantage. The Ivy League-trained physician who had excelled at turning around ailing hospitals was unprepared for the onslaught.
The score-settling book, to be published Tuesday by a division of Hachette Book Group, is Shulkin’s comeback to the forces that derailed him. He describes a deep state of subordinates within his own inner circle — not of career bureaucrats but political appointees — who assumed outsize power with a singular goal: to privatize veterans’ health care.
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René Magritte. The Double Secret, 1927.
I can only imagine that every privatized VA hospital would also carry the Trump logo across its entrance paid for with a hefty bill by the US Taxpayer while Vets languish in lines waiting for services they’ll never receive in the name of personal profit for Trump and his family crime syndicate.
And meanwhile, what is supposed to be a ceasefire in Syria, appears to be a free for all including chemical weapons. This headline is from Foreign Policy and is written by Lara Seligman: “Turkish Proxies Appear to Be Using White Phosphorus in Syria. Photos of children show horrific burns caused by what looks like white phosphorus.” This is a NATO all. WTF?
Turkish-backed forces appear to be using munitions loaded with white phosphorus—a chemical that can maim and kill when it comes in contact with human flesh—in their violent campaign against Kurdish fighters in northern Syria, Foreign Policy has learned.
Meanwhile, reports emerged overnight that Turkey has continued to attack Kurdish fighters and civilian settlements in the border town of Ras al-Ain, despite a cease-fire agreement announced by U.S. Vice President Mike Pence. Turkish-backed forces targeted a Kurdish medical convoy and an American aid organization trying to get into the town to evacuate wounded civilians, according to a Syrian conflict monitor.
Photos provided to Foreign Policy by a Kurdish source and confirmed by a senior U.S. administration official show children in Ras al-Ain with chemical burns on their chests and faces consistent with wounds from white phosphorus. ()
An official with an aid organization, who declined to be named for security reasons, confirmed that several people had been admitted into the National Hospital in Hasakah city coming from Ras al-Ain with “severe burns” that appeared to have been caused by white phosphorus or napalm.
In a letter supplied to Foreign Policy by Bassam Saker, the representative of the Syrian Democratic Council (SDC) to the United States, the co-secretaries of the SDC’s health department, Rapareen Hasn and Manal Mhemed, urgently called on the international community to evacuate the wounded civilians.
“Turkey uses all kind of weapons including the internationally prohibited ones, and our medical teams are unable to evacuate the civilians,” according to the letter, which was also confirmed by the senior U.S. administration official. Saker confirmed that the prohibited weapons referred to in the letter are suspected to be “unusual bombs” loaded with white phosphorus.
Separately, a former combat medic who deployed to Syria in 2017-2018 confirmed to Foreign Policy that the photos appeared to show chemical burns.
The She Wolf, 1943 – Jackson Pollock
This is what the Orange Snot Blob in the Oval office laughs off as “not our problem”.
And the letter sent to Erdogen by the Toddler in Chief was seen as an insult to Turkey so there’s this reporting from the UK Independent. “Erdogan says Turkey will take necessary steps against Trump’s ‘disrespectful’ letter. Letter ‘was not in line with diplomatic and political courtesy. We will not forget this lack of respect'”.
The letter “was not in line with diplomatic and political courtesy. We will not forget this lack of respect. This is not a priority for us. But when the time comes we would like it to be known that we will take the necessary steps.”
The extraordinary missive warned the Turkish leader not to be a “fool” over Turkish plans to start a military campaign in northern Syria.
It emerged on Thursday that Mr Erdogan reacted angrily to the letter, throwing it in the bin and commencing the military offensive, which has left dozens of civilians dead and displaced hundreds of thousands.
Well, so much for impressing folks with his stable genius and art of the deal. From Raw Story Today: “Turkey’s foreign minister bursts out laughing as he mocks Trump’s erratic tweets.”
Speaking to the BBC’s HARDtalk this Friday, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu scoffed at the Trump administration’s threat of sanctions over his country’s military operation in northeast Syria, saying that the threat is the result of erratic confused messaging that’s not doing anything to help the situation.
Cavusoglu laughed and mocked Trump for his constant tweeting about various issues, including Turkey.
“Different voices, different positions are coming from the United States, because of the differences between the administration, the State Department, Pentagon, and this and that,” he said.
Meanwhile, here’s what’s partying at Mar A Lago these days. Yeah, it’s still grifting bigots pushing conspiracy theories and stupid rich people if you want to know. This is from the Palm Beach Post: “Another anti-Muslim group to host event at Mar-a-Lago”.
Another anti-Muslim group has scheduled a fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago, prompting the nation’s largest Muslim advocacy group to again ask the Trump Organization to cancel an event sponsored by such a group.
The Center for Security Policy, a Washington, DC think-tank whose founder, Frank Gaffney once suggested President Barack Obama was a Muslim and that Sharia law threatens American society, intends to host its annual Flame Dinner at Mar-a-Lago on Nov. 23. Tickets for the event start at $650, according to the Center’s website.
Fred Fleitz, the Center’s president and CEO, said the group was not deterred by the Trump Organization’s abrupt decision on Oct. 6 to cancel an event hosted by another anti-Muslim group, ACT for America, after news of that group’s dinner plans grabbed national headlines and drew widespread criticism.
“We are honored to have this event at Mar-a-Lago,” said Fleitz, adding that he has dined at the club many times.
And then there was another HaterPalooza in Texas with the typical Trumpist Rage and Rant. It was even more amped up than usual.
Plus, there was the usual misogyny and lies and insanity. Where do these Trumpers spring from? Who likes this sort’ve thing? Trump’s hateful catharsis in front of aggrieved white bigots is something you could not pay me to do. Not any amount. No HOW.
The Fall of the Rebel Angels, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1592
Beto O’Rouke had a counter rally in what the Dallas Observer called a packed venue.
Standing on a platform surrounded by a crowd of screaming fans and waving signs, Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke told a packed theater at his Rally Against Fear about his plans and dreams for the country.
Throughout the night, he and other speakers focused on the need for gun control, immigration and healthcare reform and denounced the imprisonment of immigrant children and last week’s shooting of Atatiana Jefferson, a 28-year-old woman who was killed in her home by a Fort Worth police officer.
Many issues make it easy to be afraid right now, he said, but it’s important to come together and work to overcome terror, racism, sexism and discrimination.
“We cannot stand for that fear because we must stand for those who have been the victims of that fear,” he said.
Rather than speak from the stage behind him, he opted to stand among the people who came to support him at Thursday night’s event in Grand Prairie. The theater seats 6,000 people and was packed to the gills.
Quite a contrast to the usual attacks on Hillary, “crazy” Nancy Pelosi and any one that dares name the orange devil for what he is.
So let me end with a few things that show we can make progress despite him. Notice this is another moment from a Democratic Candidate President celebrating the strides women have made in Space.
And, there are other things that go on despite the chaos … like Bulldog Mattis roasting Trump which you know always makes the Orange Snot Blob testy.
So, let me end with a classic song that also sums up the times today:
Have a good weekend! What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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