Joe Scarborough was drooling all over his set this week about the fact that the Trump administration was able to announce the President’s choice for nomination to the Supreme Court without falling off the podium or insulting at least half of America and two thirds of the rest of the world. This of course, was a result of the blundering, incompetent way the Trump group has done everything else so far, especially the Muslim Ban and its horrifically incompetent roll out.
Gorsuch is a qualified candidate and certainly a conservative pick that would probably be easily confirmed under normal circumstances. These are not normal circumstances. The Mitch McConnell led stifling of Merrick Garland, Obama’s pick for this seat last March has caused a lot of righteous hostility among Democrats. The pass by Obama when he had a chance to drive Garland home during the Senate break on January 3rd, was a big mistake and makes this a nasty fight that no one needs.
So once more old prune face, Mitch McConnell, has hurt the country. Could the Democrats be the bigger humans and let this one slide because it’s a pretty good pick? Sure but that’s not how human nature works.
I say Gorsuch is a pretty good pick because he has a great record of smart decisions and he isn’t as much of a far right monster as was Scalia so he does fit pretty good. That’s neither here nor there in this mess. If McConnell really wanted to do something right for the country he would resign his seat in the Senate and Gorsuch would then probably slide through, but there is no way in hell that Schumer and the Democrats are going to let McConnell have his way without a fight.
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A great deal of discussion this week about how ineptly the Muslim Travel Ban was rolled out. Trump called it a Muslim Ban on national TV so no matter how much his toadies lie about it; as far as other American’s are concerned, a ban is what it is. The discussion had some great ideas on how the process should have been promoted and sold to the people. That includes a couple of ways it might have been very effective. The problem with all of them was that they would work for a normal, logical, rational President. That is not Trump. Trump is an egomaniacal sociopath who has to make the big splash, whether it helps him or not. His gigantic ego demands that he be able to brag that he is fulfilling his campaign promises and doing it in a loud voice no matter how it damages his other plans and his administration as a whole. There is a nasty gene running amok in Trumps brain that doesn’t just allow him to win. It demands that he win by crushing and humiliating the opposition, so there is no diplomatic, Presidential way for him to pass on any subject on which there is even the slightest chance he can gloat.
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Trump got all bent out of shape when Judge James Robart issued the ruling stopping the Muslim Ban. So Trump, in a fit of pique, referred to him as a “so-called judge.” This is a guy who has been serving this country since long before Trump was scamming potential students of Trump U. Maybe the “so-called” one is our President who, don’t forget, lost the popular election by three million votes. No matter how you count them, that’s a hell of a lot of votes.
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Watching the demonstrations, which are a reaction to Trump’s un-American moves, has been encouraging but there is a small but virulent element that must be controlled. I’m speaking, of course, about those who would turn peaceful demonstrations that have something to say, into riots of violence and destruction. I’m old enough to have been there with my wife when the anti-war, free speech and civil rights demonstrations rolled across the nation in the 60s and 70s. It was just as true then as it is now. Violence always gets the attention and all that does is blunt the point of the demonstration.
The masked kids in black at both the Washington and Berkeley demonstrations, are a detriment to any progress that can be made. They are just thugs, acting out and too stupid to realize that they are working in opposition to the real purpose of the demonstrations.
OR, are these really counter-demonstrators, sent in by Steve Bannon’s far right neo-Nazis to disrupt the demonstrations and make all the demonstrators look bad?
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George Stephanopoulos interviewed Senator Ben Sasse, ® Nebraska on his show this weekend. I was stunned. This guy is already a serious heavyweight. I’m sure that I wouldn’t agree with Sasse on much of what he promotes but unlike most politicians he had a logical reason for everything he said on the show and seems to have as balanced a view of America and the world as this blog has seen in any Republican in the last ten years. This guy is one to watch
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3 million more Americans voted for Hillary Clinton than voted for Donald Trump. Trump makes a lot of noise about making America great again but which of these groups really makes America great?
According to the Brookings Institute the 500 counties won by Clinton contribute 64% of US economic output while the 2000 counties that voted for Trump produced 36% of GDP,
conomists compared how much each state contributed to the Federal Government in Washington. The Blue states, which voted against Trump, contributed $2.4 Trillion to the government and the Red states that voted for Trump received $1.3 Trillion from the government. It’s pretty clear that the much-maligned liberal elite states are the ones that support this country and drive it economically while the conservative states that backed Trump are sucking the life out of our economy. Interestingly enough it appears that the much-touted, blue collar Red States, home of the heroin epidemic, are made up of slackers that contribute nothing, accept everything and do it while stoned to the gills.
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The problem with the Trump administration is that it really doesn’t recognize the constitution. It doesn’t really understand that we have a three-part government in which all three parts are equal. Trump, Bannon and Miller think just because Trump was elected President, he now rules with a singular authority. If this were a banana republic Trump would have been able to just throw Judge James Robart out of office and probably jail him. If this were a banana republic he might have been able to arrest the military officers who pushed back against his backing for torture. But it isn’t. It’s the United States and our institutions have the power of the constitution to back them up and the backing of a people who understand that the law as created by congress and interpreted by the courts is more powerful than the one man who sits in the White House. This is something that Trump will have to learn or he faces the same future as Richard Nixon, another President who didn’t accept this reality.
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For those of you with super short memories let me remind you of the never-ending stream of bullshit put out by the Republicans over the four deaths we incurred at Benghazi. In line with that, let me also remind you that it had been the Republicans who had conveniently refused to vote more security funds for our embassies just before that incident. None of that kept the slimy GOP punks from harassing Clinton for months about her almost nil involvement in the whole mess.
So of course, now that Hillary is no longer in the picture Republican Senators Heller, Cruz and Rubio have introduced legislation to cut even more money from the protection of our embassies. Does anyone see anything even a little hypocritical about this? And they wonder why we think of them as the scum of the earth.
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Welcome to Soviet Russia during the cold war, welcome to Nazi Germany, to North Korea, to Saddam’s Iraq or the Congo under any number of dictators. Last night behaving not unlike these examples of human debris acted during their lowest ebb, Mitch McConnell and his Senate majority stopped Senator Elizabeth Warren from voicing her comments, after reading a letter by Coretta King during her opposition to racist Attorney General nominee Jeff Sessions.
We already knew, as that old reprobate Orrin Hatch stated later that Sessions had the votes to get approved but it’s to this Senate’s eternal damnation that the GOP members weren’t even able to give the other side a fair hearing. McConnell’s incursion into Warren’s right to address the Senate was successful but like most of what McConnell does, stupid and lacking in any concept of democracy
Then Marco Rubio also spoke against Warren. It seems Rubio has decided that since he got killed in his Presidential bid, he is going to run for his cushy job in the Senate again. It therefore behooves him to show up once in a while, unlike his previous tenure. We all know Rubio to be a cynic and a hypocrite but his speech about Warren violating the sanctity of the Senate was a real side splitter even for the most naïve. All of a sudden, all these thieving Republicans who legislate with an eye to their personal profit are all about decorum.
So let’s look at what actually happened. Warren read statements from Ted Kennedy and Coretta King that referred to Sessions earlier shot at a Federal Judgeship. That’s when McConnell jumped in and erroneously charged her with denigrating a member of the Senate. Yes, Sessions is currently a Senator, more shame to that body, but Warren’s attack was not in reference to his Senate seat but to the job he was applying for; Attorney General.
This fascist majority body then voted to keep Warren from further comment. This was a stupid move by the GOP when one considers that no one objected to Ted Cruz calling McConnell himself a liar on the floor of the Senate. Of course they are both Republicans so it might have been difficult to get a majority out of the GOP Senators for that unless they had a way to wring a profit out of it.
This was just another of McConnell’s dumb moves mainly because it made a martyr out of Warren. Right after her censure she went to another room and read the rest of her statement including Coretta King’s letter to reporters and it was all over the news.
The Trump White House and the rest of the Republican Party have to understand that if they are to prosper, being the bully in the room, having the power, brings with it certain responsibilities and ignoring those responsibilities can only be done under the threat of looking like the Nazi in the room, which will invite retaliation at the polls.
Trump is learning this right now because of the blundering manner in which the Muslim Ban was rolled out. It became apparent yesterday when Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly was sent out by the White House to take the hit for the incompetent way the Ban was rolled out. He did his job saying “it’s on me,” but everyone knows by now that it was Steve Bannon and Steve Miller who pushed the Ban out the door before it was ready for human consumption; doing so before the other branches had a chance to vet it. Kelly, after doing his job should go back to the White House and punch both these clowns in the nose. It has already been established that neither Homeland Security nor Customs had sufficient notice to make this blunder work right and, when HS saw no reason to withhold passage from those who held legitimate Green Cards and visas Bannon stopped them, a move that was later corrected.
This like McConnell’s blunder on the Senate floor over Warren cannot continue to happen. Trump ran on the idea that he knew how to get things done; that he would correct all the bad moves of the previous administration. So far, after only a couple of weeks the Tumpanzies have illustrated nothing but blundering incompetence and stupidity. Of course it’s mainly because they took office with such an elevated sense of hubris that they figured they were infallible. Trump’s ego kept him from recognizing that an Electoral College win didn’t give him a mandate in a country where he lost the popular vote by three million. The same ego that keeps Trump from recognizing that he can in fact do something wrong will eventually kill him because it won’t let him correct the mistakes that are inevitable in any Presidency and especially in one where no one has any experience at what they are doing and their leader doesn’t bother to investigate anything that didn’t interest him when he was still pouring cement for his father.