Tuesday Reads: The Daily Drumpfistan Detritus

Good Morning Sky Dancers!

I’m trying not to count the days and ways our country has been held hostage by a Russian and NAZI installed madman.  I really think we’re beginning to witness an implosion of the Republican party.  They have so many niche interest groups that there are nothing but internecine battles between them. The only way they hold it all together is by a group gestalt of hating what they perceive as “other”.

Most of us fall into the group of other one way or another.  People of color, people not practicing the right form of Christianity or not Christian at all,  the GLBT community, the creative class, intellectuals and professors, recent immigrants from certain countries, any one not fixated on the second amendment to the exclusion of all others, or people not deemed symbolically patriotic enough all make the enemies’ list one way or another.   It’s the season for attacking the wonderful work of Planned Parenthood too.  Nothing like lies and strawmen to whip up the country’s basket of deplorables.

Here’s today’s news in Republican acts we despise.  Let’s start with her ickinesss Marcia Blackburn. Blackburn specializes in being a gender traitor.

Twitter is barring a top Republican Senate candidate from advertising her campaign launch video on the service because a line about her efforts to investigate Planned Parenthood was deemed “inflammatory.”

GOP Rep. Marsha Blackburn, who is running to replace retiring Sen. Bob Corker, launched her campaign last week with a video proclaiming herself “a hard core, card-carrying Tennessee conservative.” In her announcement video, she boasts: “I fought Planned Parenthood and we stopped the sale of baby body parts. Thank God.”

Twitter decided the line violated its ad policies, according to an email obtained by POLITICO. A Twitter spokeswoman didn’t immediately return a request for comment. The video is still on Twitter, but the campaign is barred from paying to promote it.

The line refers to her work leading a House select committee investigating Planned Parenthood following a 2015 controversy in which videos shot by undercover conservative journalists appeared to show the group profiting from the sale of fetal body tissue. Democrats have argued the panel’s inquiry was a waste of taxpayer funds, intended to concoct a reason to shut down the group.

Planned Parenthood consistently denied wrongdoing and never faced criminal charges.

Then, there’s this white supremacist in the White House who continues to push the Bannon agenda.  Stephen Miller represents the worst of the modern Republican party.

Miller, a staunch immigration hawk, was conspicuously left out of the bipartisan dinner meeting where that DACA framework had been formed. By the morning after the dinner, Miller, sources say, was already in discussions with Capitol Hill offices about how to ensure conservative policy gains ended up in the final deal his boss might cut.

A hard-lined anti-immigration advocate, Miller strategized with Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) about a more specific, more conservative, set of extractions the White House would demand in the deal. Cotton was the natural choice—he is one of the Senate’s most conservative members on the immigration issue, and the co-author of legislation, dubbed the RAISE Act, to significantly limit the number of legal immigrants to the U.S.

Miller is a jerk for all jerks.  He’s one of those folks that believe in their superior genes while the rest of us look at him and wonder if he ever got laid by anything he didn’t pay for. 

Whenever Donald Trump gives a speech and you find yourself thinking, “I can’t believe anyone could be this hateful,” there’s a good chance that the man behind that speech was Stephen Miller, the prematurely balding 32-year-old who must have made a deal with the devil at some point wherein he traded his youth and morals for power. Well, The New York Times has a new profile of Miller that gives us a glimpse of his youth in liberal haven Santa Monica, California. And it turns out that he’s always been just the absolute worst. Some of the anecdotes in the piece have circulated before. A young Stephen Miller running for student government and getting booed for complaining about having to pick up his own trash when they have janitors to do that for them? Absolutely gross, but we’ve heard it. Miller calling a classmate and telling him that they could no longer be friends because of, among other things, said classmate’s Latino heritage? Awful, but already part of the Miller narrative. But the stories in this profile we haven’t heard before? Oh god, they’re…something.

Like the story of his weird “striptease” for the school newspaper editor?

Mr. Miller set off on a patriotic semi-striptease before the editor of the student newspaper, according to the editor, Ari Rosmarin, theatrically removing a button-down to reveal an American flag T-shirt in protest of an article he found inconsistent with the national interest. (The White House denied any symbolic unbuttoning, though officials confirmed Mr. Miller’s fondness for the T-shirt.)

Who does that? What an odd and bizarre thing to do, especially over an article in a school newspaper. Really? You found an article in your high school paper “inconsistent with the national interest”? It’s high school! Didn’t Miller have high school things to do? Like go on dates or work for minimum wage at a video store? But in fairness to Stephen Miller (I know, I know, he doesn’t deserve it, but hear me out), this particular story is more weird than infuriating. But make no mistake, Miller has plenty of infuriating stories. And perhaps none more so than this next anecdote from the piece.

He jumped, uninvited, into the final stretch of a girls’ track meet, apparently intent on proving his athletic supremacy over the opposite sex.

This is obviously insanely disrespectful, and just such a gross “look at me” stunt, but it’s also just super dumb. If I wait at the last stretch of a marathon and, being well-rested, “beat” the people who have run the previous 26 miles, that obviously doesn’t make me athletically superior to them. Anyone who thinks that it does would have to be a complete moron

We all know that Trump’s on a daily search for his manhood and gets away with most of it because of his money and sheer audacity. Trump hates the narrative that makes him look like anything less than the superior master race.  He’s such a nitwit he offered to prove the “moran” narrative wrong by taking an IQ test. Do we really believe he’d achieve a score above room temperature?

President Donald Trump, scorned by reports that Rex Tillerson called him a “moron” earlier this year, told Forbes in an interview released Tuesday that he has a higher IQ than his secretary of state.

The comment underscores the volatility between the two men after multiple reports that their relationship has frayed over the secretary of state’s comment. Trump and Tillerson, along with Secretary of Defense James Mattis, will have lunch together at the White House on Tuesday afternoon.

“I think it’s fake news, but if he did that, I guess we’ll have to compare IQ tests,” Trump said. “And I can tell you who is going to win.”

I really haven’t wanted to delve very deeply into this swamp but here’s a bit on sexual predator Harvey Weinstein. The Drumpf history of predation has been tough enough to read.  This man is a nightmare waiting to happen.  Most of the time women warn each other about the pussygrabbers.  I was warned early in the 1980s to never get in the Senator’s elevator with Strom Thurmond.  He was a notorious ass grabber.  Hollywood is full of these kinds of stories. I really hope we can eventually rid ourselves of this but since we got the Pussy Grabber elected knowing what we know about him, I’ve given up all hope of any one treating any one with respect and kindness from the Republican Klan.

And now  …  “RNC chairwoman calls on Clinton to speak out about Weinstein”.  Weren’t they just telling her to shut up and go away?

Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel suggested on Saturday former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton should speak out about the sexual assault allegations against former campaign donor and film mogul Harvey Weinstein.

“Whose side is Hillary Clinton on: Harvey Weinstein’s or his victims?” McDaniel said in a tweet.

So, we just continue to learn that some people were just not raised right.   Here’s yet another example and go read the byline from WAPO as well as the rest of the article.

Frustrated by his Cabinet and angry that he has not received enough credit for his handling of three successive hurricanes, President Trump is now lashing out, rupturing alliances and imperiling his legislative agenda, numerous White House officials and outside advisers said Monday.

In a matter of days, Trump has torched bridges all around him, nearly imploded an informal deal with Democrats to protect young undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children, and plunged himself into the culture wars on issues ranging from birth control to the national anthem.

In doing so, Trump is laboring to solidify his standing with his populist base and return to the comforts of his campaign — especially after the embarrassing defeat of Sen. Luther Strange in last month’s Alabama GOP special election, despite the president’s trip there to campaign with the senator.

Sen. Bob Corker’s brutal assessment of Trump’s fitness for office — warning that the president’s reckless behavior could launch the nation “on the path to World War III” — also hit like a thunderclap inside the White House, where aides feared possible ripple effects among other Republicans on Capitol Hill.

After a caustic volley of Twitter insults between Trump and Corker, a Tennessee Republican who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, few GOP leaders came to the president’s defense Monday — though few sided openly with Corker, either. The most vocal Trump defender was the one under the president’s direction, Vice President Pence.

Trump in recent days has shown flashes of fury and left his aides, including White House chief of staff John F. Kelly, scrambling to manage his outbursts. He has been frustrated in particular with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who was reported last week to have earlier called the president a “moron.” Trump’s Sunday morning Twitter tirade against Corker caught staffers by surprise, although the president had been brooding over the senator’s comment a few days earlier about Trump’s “chaos” endangering the nation.

One Trump confidant likened the president to a whistling teapot, saying that when he does not blow off steam, he can turn into a pressure cooker and explode. “I think we are in pressure cooker territory,” said this person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly.

Meanwhile, Puerto Ricans are dying and California is burning and people are missing and dying.  Maybe Kremlin Caligula should take a lesson from Nero. Ah, I forget!  He doesn’t read.

Powerful wildfires fanned by strong winds ravaged parts of Northern California’s wine country on Monday, killing at least 11 people and destroying some 1,500 structures.

More than a dozen blazes continued to burn across eight counties since the weekend, while over 20,000 people in the paths of the fast-moving infernos fled their homes, fire officials said.

With increased resources headed to the region to battle the wildfires, “hopefully we’ll start seeing some turnaround throughout the course of today and into tomorrow,” Scott McLean, deputy chief of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire, said Tuesday on “TODAY.”

It’s autumn which is the time to reap what you sow.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?