In continuing the discussion about Donald Trump being too stupid to be president; unemployment went up 4.5% this week, a message that the White House lackeys were trying very hard to sell to voters. And when they need the moron in the Oval Office to just follow the script on jobs, he Tweets, as he did on Monday, an attack on NASCAR for backing Bubba Wallace instead of identifying the racists that hate a black man competing in what, to now, has been a white sport. So a report that could have benefited him ends up getting lost because of his racist stupidity. Trump keeps trying to cut his own throat but his knife, like his intellect, is too dull to do the job.
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Trump wants to pull us out of the World Health Organization, using that body as a scapegoat for the spread of the Coronavirus, which we all know was due to the fact that he, didn’t see any personal gain in dealing with it in the beginning and therefore left the whole country open to its ravages.
Now he’s faced with a new opportunity to screw-up. Decisions have to be made all around the country as to whether or not to open schools. Trump wants them to open because he thinks it will make people feel better about the economy and maybe vote for him, but he has no plan for how to manage a safe opening. He has already stated more than once that he takes no responsibility for anything, so
as if it wasn’t bad enough that he was meddling in something for which he didn’t want to take responsibility, Trump announced that he would withhold funding for schools unless they do what he wants. That means the schools that don’t open fast enough won’t have the money to protect their students and faculty.
This rush to send all kids back to school without establishing the barriers that will keep them safe is an exact mirror of Trump’s policy to open everything else, even in locations that have not met the CDC guidelines. We can see how well that is working as the numbers skyrocket in states like Florida, Arizona, Texas, California and Georgia. They are all beginning to look like New York a few months back.
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As evidenced by Trump’s insane behavior there is an election coming and even Fox polls tell him he ain’t winning. But one of the big hopes Trump still has, mainly because he exists in a self-congratulatory ego generated bubble, are the debates. Both sides have spoken of three debates and that would be fine but as Tom Friedman wrote in The Times this week Biden should never approach a debate with the Liar in Chief without two conditions being in place. First Trump must release his taxes, the ones that every other presidential aspirant has revealed and two there must be an on the spot fact checking operation in place.
By now it is obvious to everyone, even those who don’t care, that Trump is constitutionally incapable of telling the truth no matter what the subject. That will mean that Biden would have to spend all his time allotment correcting Trump’s lies instead of expounding on his own ideas.
Even James Carville agrees that a running fact check is necessary, though he doesn’t think the debates will happen if Trump has to reveal his taxes.
Trump’s taxes long ago ceased to be a privacy matter. With the publication of the book by his niece Mary and the earlier evidence admitted by Michael Cohen, John Bolton and others, it is now clear that the release of any information on his or his family’s tax scams will jeopardize Trump’s freedom the second he steps out of the White House.
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In a broad rollback of Obamacare, the Supreme Court ruled this week that employers were not obligated to provide birth control for women if it violated the employer’s religious principles. The decision allows the Trump administration to allow any employer to claim a religious exemption to paying for birth control in the employer supplied health insurance program. The decision effects between 70,000 and 126,000 women who currently benefit from free birth control through their employer supplied health care plan.
Marjorie Dannenfelser president of the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List declared it a major victory for Trump.
Dannenfelser stated, “We commend President Trump for standing strong for the Little Sisters of the Poor,”
All very compelling but the Little Sisters of the Poor don’t usually depend on insurance for their birth control. If they do the Catholic Church has definitely entered a new moral universe. Still Mother Lorraine Marie Maguire of the Little Sisters of the Poor, which runs homes for elderly, low-income people, allowed that her organization was “overjoyed.” “We are so grateful that the contraceptive mandate will no longer steal our attention from our calling,” she said. That’s really what was taking up all her time was it? I guess the Little Sisters are a lot hotter than they appear.
So it looks like it will be getting harder to have your insurance pay for birth control if your employer is paying for it and he decides he has enough religious scruples to save on the premiums.
Don’t get me wrong. I fully support the concept of religious freedom, as long as it doesn’t impose itself on anyone else’s religious or human rights freedom. I very much appreciate my freedom to not follow any religion but I understand that my freedom to not worship doesn’t give me the right to interfere with those who do. That’s what happening here. Most people should have enough intelligence to understand that.
But what’s kind of ironic is that all the work being done by the religious right to keep people from using birth control is setting itself up to backfire.
If you’d care to harken back to the Democratic debates you might remember that one of the biggest debates was over the type of healthcare delivery the party would support. There was a big movement toward single payer universal healthcare. The thought behind it was that it would be the most efficient and that it would work best financially; both of which are pretty much true. The opposition wanted to retain their employer and union supplied healthcare, currently provided through insurance companies, which they were dumb enough to think was free like single payer. Let us keep our insurance company policies they demanded and they won. Does the term; “hollow victory” have any significance here?
With single payer this suit would have been abandoned before it ever got to the court because there would not have been any employer involved in any way.
Trump and his bizarre coterie of followers can celebrate this victory all they want but they will have a different look on their faces when they realize that it has become the single element that changed the Democratic outlook to fully back single payer and crush all those insurance companies that have been filling the Republican campaign chests.
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And then there’s Ghislaine Maxwell, the bimbo who is accused of pimping little girls for Jeffrey Epstein and his buddies. Poor Ghislaine has just been arrested and now the authorities are faced with the problem of where to keep her. Sure jail always seems like a safe place until it isn’t. Old Jeffrey found that out when someone decided that it was time for him to commit suicide. Let’s face it, this pair; Jeff & Ghis had and have enough serious names in their heads to terrify any life insurance company in the world. I remember during the Second World War there was a saying that Second Lieutenants lasted about one minute in combat. Ghis will be lucky to last half that in a cell. And of course a big threat will come from Trump World. It’s one thing to brag about grabbing pussy but when it comes to a twelve year old it’s quite different ballgame.
But it isn’t just those people. The Royal Family has a lot to protect as well and they have a significant history of dealing with problems that they had locked up in the Tower of London. An American jail shouldn’t prove much of a problem. And how many others? Crime lords, truculent billionaires, all kinds of bad people with no morals have secrets to keep that are currently held by Ms Maxwell, who filled their beds with underage flesh. I sure in hell wouldn’t want to be the one in charge of keeping her alive long enough to testify. This lady is in deep shit.
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There is very little on this earth that is more beautiful than a mother polar bear frolicking with her cubs on the artic ice and nothing more adorable than those cubs, but right now they are all being endangered by the useless greed of the barons of the fossil fuel industry as they desperately try to force air into huge fortunes tottering on the brink of destruction.
The polar bear range is under attack by the pollutants thrown up into our atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels.
The Southern Beaufort Sea population of polar bears has decreased 40% between 2000 and 2010, Cub survival was even worse. Between 2004 and 2007 of 80 cubs observed only 2 survived. This problem is mostly due to loss of habitat caused by melting ice on which they normally live. This melting is caused by rising temperatures brought about by carbon thrust into the atmosphere during the burning of fossil fuels. But that’s not enough for the lords of oil. They aren’t satisfied to just kill off the polar bears, they want to stomp the guts out of those pathetic bodies.
It’s no secret that the fossil fuel industry is a huge supporter of the Trump administration; filling its coffers and manning every job he can force them into. The biggest insult was when Trump, in what was quite possibly the most ludicrous appointment in political history, made oil lobbyist Scott Pruitt the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency It was the real life equivalent of hiring the fox to protect the hen house. By 2018 Pruitt was the target of 14 different investigations based on malfeasance. Or how about Rex Tillerson former CEO of Exxon who Trump made his first Secretary of State? So with this kind of crap stinking up the White House it’s no wonder that the oil companies are taking this last shot at acquiring drilling rights in the coastal plain of the Artic National Wildlife range.
But the big question is; why are these rich swine battling so hard to acquire rights that will probably never yield one drop of oil? I mean why drill it if you can’t sell it. There is no future for fossil fuels. Russia and Saudi Arabia are already finding this out and it’s driving them almost as nuts as Trump.
Renewables have already taken over the market and will continue to surge into the foreseeable future. Remove the support of government subsidies and the oil and gas business will be beaten to death by sun and wind and this is just the beginning. New technologies will make the drubbing even more devastating. VW will roll its last combustion engine car off the line this week. From now on they’ll all be electric. So why are the barons of the fossil fuel industry so set on killing baby bears? Are they just awful people who have finally after a century been beaten and now want to just do as much damage as they can or is there some subtle undercurrent of evil that pervades their culture?
They can’t all be sociopaths like Trump but they must all be stopped before they can do any more damage. Oil and coal are dead. Lets accept that and move on to a better world.