A little over a month ago Fat Boy and the Mini-Troll instituted a policy that was aimed at ripping children from their mother’s arms and sending them to detention centers just to gain leverage for Fat Boy in his pathetic battle for a Wall no one other than him wants. Fat Boy, in his infinite stupidity and out of control ego never figured that something so monstrous would turn his base against him. It seems he was wrong. While the program was in full crash mode, Trump made a number of speeches in which he said: the program is a law (a lie), the Democrats were the only ones who could change things because it was their law, (a bigger lie) there was no way he could do anything about it, (an even bigger lie). In all of this he was backed up by his own personal three witches; Kristien Nielson, Kelly Ann Conway and Sara Huckabee Sanders; three hardcore professional liars, each of whom possesses all the integrity of a Roy Cohen. But no matter how serious the lies, no matter how at odds with the truth Trump and his roach patrol figured he could get away with it. He kept thinking about shooting that guy in the street and his base not blaming him for it. Turned out they really didn’t much care about murder but abusing kids was a very different story. When it all broke down only 17% of his followers would follow him into child abuse. Can you imagine what scum this bunch must be?
So Trump made the big flip but in typical Trumpian manner, in which he never admitted he was changing his mind. Oh no, he was saving these kids and their mothers from the ravages of a Democratic inspired bad law. The orange plague may indeed be the most inventive liar in the history of world politics. All over the country right wing politicians are sitting back and taking a deep breath of thanks. Trump stopped the torture of children and he did it without ever admitting that he had started it in the first place. To hear him tell it, he fixed the problem. Forget that he was the problem. Forget that the real problem isn’t fixed. The problem still exists in a very real manner. There are over 2300 kids out there, stolen from their parents by the US government. 2300 kids in all kinds of weird shelters all over the country with no records, no way of tracing them and no way of reuniting them with their mothers. It seems that a government that Trump forgot to staff and one that has almost no functioning parts doesn’t know where these kids are, where their parents are or how to get them back together. Interviews with government workers attached to the Border Patrol, ICE, HHS and any number of other official agencies show floundering bureaucrats that all seem to be without rules, resources or any kind of guidance. At this point no one knows what to do and no one knows how to find out what to do. So the separations have stopped but the separation has not.
Trump and his slime are hoping that all this will fall between the cracks and just go away over time but it is now the responsibility of every intelligent, caring human being to keep that from happening. These children cannot be allowed to simply disappear into our all but non-functional Child Care System.
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The news story that Sara Huckabee Sanders was asked to leave the Red Hen restaurant in Virginia by owner Stephanie Wilkerson this weekend, brings back all the noise made about the Christian baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple. I remember that at the time I figured that the baker was an asshole just looking for publicity. But I also felt the couple were assholes too, also looking for their picture in the paper. I remember the bakers BS story that he couldn’t in good conscience honor an act that was contrary to his religion. But nobody was asking him to honor anything. He was a baker; they were asking him to bake a God Damned cake not start a national movement. Basically it was a case of the baker denying the couple their humanity because of what they were, which I believe is not only against the law but against all Christian principles as real Christians know them. Of course right now we have a hell of a lot of Christians out there who don’t know squat about Christian principles. That’s why they are willing to accept as their president a sub-human monster that extolls all the worst aspects of bigotry, racism, misogyny, criminal behavior and the inability to even know the truth let alone tell it.
That brings us to Sanders and her ejection from the Red Hen. Most right wing sources are trying to make this the flip side of the bigoted baker but it really bears no resemblance. The baker based his position on what his customers were: gay! This was a violation of the law of the land. Ms. Wilkerson based her decision on what Ms Sanders does; lie to the nation. The lies that Sanders vomits out on a daily basis are not in contention. They are right there on TV for all of us to see.. Ms. Wilkerson decided that she did not want to serve such a despicable person in her restaurant. Her action was brought about by Ms. Sander’s actions, not by anything Ms. Sanders was, like a Mormon, a Scientologist or a cannibal.
Then today there was a big discussion of this on Morning Joe in which Scarborough and Richard Haas tried to support Sanders on the grounds of the nation maintaining some level of civility. They were quickly shot down by Nick Confasori and Elise Jordan who pointed out first that Sanders ejection was carried out civilly and that her meal and that of her seven guests was comp’d. But more important Jordan explains is that it is the Trump government and its carrion of lying backstabbing skell that is taking civility from our world and that it is important that we call them on it at every opportunity.
Some day when Trump and Sanders and their ilk are gone we will look back to stuff like this and better understand. Maybe even Hillary’s deplorables will see some kind of dubious light. But until then, the battle over the difference between truth and right and that which the Trumpians spew forth will go on. It’s all about November.
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And as if in answer to the discussion above, we find today that the child separations at the border didn’t start last month but go all the way back to the beginning of the Trump administration. An investigation by Elise Jordan has revealed that there are many more than 2300 children separated from their parents and that most of them are now located all over the country. When asked, HHS admits that they don’t know where all the children are or even where all the parents are. They have no plan to put this Humpty Dumpty back together. That of course, means that there never was a plan. That Trump started pulling children from their parents with no thought to ever getting them back together. What kind of monster puts a program like this in progress? The people who are running our country have no idea how to act like Americans and today, just to prove my point Trump announced that he wanted to move ahead on the accusations against those who are seeking asylum without due process. WITHOUT DUE PROCESS!
For those Trump supporters who don’t understand the concept of due process, it is the bedrock upon which the American judicial system is built. Everyone is innocent until proven guilty. Everyone must be given a fair shot at maintaining his or her innocence. But Trump doesn’t want to afford that right to those who have risked their lives and those of their families to make the dangerous journey from Central America to the US, hoping desperately for a better, safer life.
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Donald Trump loves to tell us all about all the things that are rigged to keep him from just doing anything he wants. The election was rigged all the way up until he won and then all of a sudden I was the fairest election in election history. Except it wasn’t. But lots of stuff is really rigged and it’s time that the general public became aware that it is and that Trump is part of the deal and that mostly it’s about the rich getting richer.
In 1952 corporate income taxes accounted for 32% of all Federal Revenue. Last year that figure had shrunk to 9% but despite this enormous reduction in taxes for corporations Donald Trump and his GOP sleaze corps felt it necessary to give their rich backers an almost 40% reduction in corporate taxes. That’s what real rigging looks like gang. Even when they didn’t need it! Last year 15 major, profitable corporations including AFLAC, Eli Lily, Met Life, Prudential and Molson Coors paid zero corporate taxes; that after posting $24.5 billion in profits and that was before Trump signed the new tax giveaway bill into law. These are corporations whose CEOs earn 347 times as much as the average worker in their companies. In case you haven’t gotten the point that’s what a rigged tax code looks like.
And what do these corporations do with all this extra money? Well, if you’re a Republican, you believe that it is allowed to trickle down to create more jobs and higher wages but you really have to be worshiping the weed to believe that one. The reality is those profits go to CEO salaries and a rise in stock dividends. There is no such thing as trickle down in the real world, only in Mitch McConnell’s wet dreams.
Now if you’re one f those people who voted for Trump and now feel that you were right and have become a true believer, part of your belief system is to keep your mouth shut, swallow the facts and pay your unfair share of taxes while the rich steal even more from you. If you’re anyone else, anyone who can still actually think; vote! Because the only way to get corporations to pay their fair share of our taxes is to change the tax law and the only way to do that is to get a progressive House and Senate with a veto proof majority and the only way to do that is to vote out of office all the lazy, stupid, know nothings who have sucked up their salaries for the last however many years and done nothing to earn them.
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Historically the American economy has driven the world’s economy since the end of WW!! If you chart a line our GDP with small glitches has been a straight line up from that time in history until now. This has been true of every administration, Democratic or Republican in that entire time frame. But when Donald Trump decided to run for office he looked around and realized that in order to get elected, America’s economic situation had to suck a lot more than it actually did. He figured that in order to get elected, we had to be getting screwed by everyone with whom we had any international economic relations. So Trump built a platform that stated America was stupid, that we didn’t know how to make good deals, that all of our previous Presidents had been taken by everyone with whom they had done business. This from an incompetent clown who had already gone bankrupt four times and been indicted for fraud at least twice.
Trump knew what he was saying wasn’t true but little details like that have never bothered Trump. Interested websites like Politico and others have now established that Trump has publically stated over 3000 lies just since he took office. That is 6 or 7 lies per day for that period but in the last week the whole thing has exploded. The pressures of getting jammed by his own stupidity in the child separation mess, added news about progress on the Mueller front and the backfiring of his expectations of the tariff scene have forced the great liar into a frenzy of untruth that adds up o 15 publicly stated lies per day. Even for a Trump that’s significant.
So Trump’s current strategy on the economic front, bolstered by his constant lying has somehow gotten intermingled with his racism and bigotry to produce a wall of untruth about anyone who is not white. The muddled Supreme Court decision the other day to support not the constitutionality of Trump’s Muslim ban, but his current power to implement such a thing, only adds to the confusion. But the real problem is that Trump’s uninformed economic policies are going to lead to real disasters. By ignoring America’s real economic strength and lying himself into a corner he has forced himself to progress along a path that will ultimately lead to the destruction of markets all over the world.
Trump’s decision to attack our trade treaties was based not on informed intelligence about what was in those treaties but on his desire to create a scapegoat that he could attack. His subsequent lies about his targets allowed him, in his mind, to move ahead in his attempts to destroy them. His trashing of the TPP did not save us from the Chinese taking advantage of us in Asian trade but rather turned the entire Asian market over to them, leaving us helpless to do anything to stop their massive advance.
His brain dead decision to implement tariffs against some of our closest trade partners like Mexico, Canada and Germany are already backfiring. Trump seems completely ignorant of the process of tariffs or the inevitability of them backfiring. It’s easy to understand that Trump is too ignorant, too uninformed, to realize the consequences of his idiotic tariff policies. What’s not easy to understand is that there seems to be no one in his entire government with the balls to stand up on his hind legs and tell Trump the damage he is doing. His tariffs on steel and aluminum have led to retaliation from the Europeans markets and those retaliations have directly affected the profitability of Harley Davidson, the giant American motorcycle firm. Faced with a hundred million dollar loss of profits Davidson has announced that they will close some of their facilities here and move the manufacturing of the product they will sell in Europe, to Europe. This is what any intelligent business would do. Trump’s retaliation is to attack the company and threaten to tax them ou of business. Meanwhile thousand of American employees will lose their jobs to Europeans and tens of thousands more might lose their jobs too if Trump is able to pull off his threats. The fact is that most of the jobs threatened belong to Trump supporters, white lower middle class blue-collar workers. Will they be dumb enough to continue their mindless support of the fat liar or will they finally smarten up.
And while this is happening, Trump continues to attack German auto companies that have settled in the US and employ hundreds of thousand of Americans in Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia and South Carolina among others. Trump attacks companies like Mercedes, Toyota, VW and BMW who are really boosting America’s economy and he is endangering the American workers who earn their living from these foreign sources. The biggest problem is that there seems to be no viable reason for these attacks except that Trump is mad as a hatter.
Where do these policies come from? Is there any logical basis for what Trump is doing except that he made these attacks on the campaign trail and now thinks they are some kind of solution to a problem that has never existed. Every intelligent thoughtful economic thinker has spoken out against Trump’s policies. It isn’t like 95%. It’s everybody. But still the lying moron in the White House forges ahead, trying desperately; it seems to crush our economy.
His tax plan, which up until now was the only piece of legislation to which Trump could point as having any kind of success is now slowly being revealed as a disaster which will bankrupt the country at the cost of putting extra money in the pockets of the already too rich. Trump is leading us to a twenty one trillion dollar debt, the interest on which will break the bank unless the whole bill is junked and the super rich made to actually pay the kind of taxes they should.
Does Trump think that if things get too tough he can just lead the country into bankruptcy like he did four of his sleazy businesses? It appears so, because he is doing nothing to head it off and his tariff policies are just going to make matters worse.
And of course, in the middle of this economic disaster in which he is stirring the pot, Trump has decided that we need to spend another twenty billion or so on a Wall to keep snakes and prairie dogs out of the country. To that end, in order to power up his position, he decided to rip infants from the arms of their mothers and to make matters worse, he implemented the plan without an alternative of solution as to what to do about getting them back together. When major scumbags are organized, Donald Trump will lead them.