Hopefully this will be the last thing I ever write about Brett Kavanaugh and his abortive reach for the Supreme Court. As I’ve stated before it was a job interview, not a trial and when he stood before the Senate and delivered his self-written address it was certainly a good thing for him that it was just a job interview. If it had been a trial he would have destroyed his chances of acquittal with his raging rant. What he did revealed to the world that he had nowhere near the temperament to be a Supreme Court judge.
Instead of presenting a calm dignified appearance, the kind of bearing we expect from our judges, he raved and ranted, indulged in political attacks and tried to smear everyone he thought might have a grudge against him all the way back to the Clintons. It was a performance worthy of Donald Trump.
But he still had a chance to redeem himself. When the crude clown in the White House attacked and mocked Dr. Ford. At that point the man who we want on the Supreme Court would have defended his accuser. The man who did that would be a shoe-in for the Court, but Kavanaugh is just a scrambling drunk with only some of the qualities needed to do the job for which he is applying.
In attacking politics he became politics and joined the likes of Senators McConnell, Grassley and Cornyn and judges Alito and Thomas who have abandoned any thought of doing the right thing for political expediency.
By the time you read this, all I am writing about will be old news and Kavanaugh will be on the Court That’s how fast the world is moving; but because of that speed we must have only the finest in the Senate, the House and on our Supreme Court. From where I’m sitting it looks very much like Kavanaugh will join the Court when it reconvenes so it will be extra important that on Nov. 6thwe the voters make sure that we eliminate those from congress that represent themselves before they represent the people.
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Progress happens in this country when the voices of the powerless meld with the powerful. We are approaching an occasion when the powerless can create the powerful or at the very least endow them with the power necessary to produce the ends that the powerless want and need. I’m speaking about November 6thwhen hopefully, enough of us go to the polls to throw the Republicans out of the House and the Senate in order to give the Democrats a majority in both Houses. We are choking on Brett Kavanaugh and the only way to put a stop to that kind of abomination is to vote when the opportunity presents itself. VOTE!
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The Department of Energy (DOE) is probably the most important non-legal or military agency in the US government. Like all other government agencies, it has been ignored by the Trump administration or even worse; some Trumpets have noticed it and stuck their ignorant noses into its workings, thereby using their ignorance to severely interrupt the functions of this most important agency.
Of course the worst offender is the idiot in the White House. The first and possibly most stupid thing he did was appoint Rick Perry a former Governor of Texas who at one point in his fetid career tried to name three agencies that he would eliminate if he were elected president but couldn’t remember the third, which was the DOE. Naturally the first thing Trump did when elected was to name this moron who wanted to get rid of the agency but couldn’t remember its name as its head.
Despite all the noise that Perry had made about getting rid of the DOE he had no idea what that agency actually did; no concept that it was the agency that had control of our nuclear program and was also tasked with monitoring all nuclear action all over the world. So now we had a moron running an agency that before he as appointed its leader, had no idea what it did.
Michael Lewis in his terrific book The Fifth Riskillustrates the complete incompetence of the Trump administration as they took office.
Trump, in his almost universal ignorance of the parameters of the job he was trying to get elected to, knew nothing about a transition team and when he was told he had to have one, he didn’t want to be bothered. It wasn’t until Chris Christie informed him that by law he had to have one that he even considered putting one together. Even then he fought against spending any money on it. He had berated Chris Christie who was in charge of his transition team about raising money that otherwise could go directly to him and the day he won the election he cancelled the whole transition effort and fired Christie. And just to prove his ignorance he told Christie that they could meet for two hours at the inauguration ball and find out everything they needed to know about running a government that employed over two million people. This is a moron who went bankrupt running a company that only employed a dozen people.
The Trump administration had done none of the prep work necessary to fill the thousands of jobs that were now opening up for the new administration. The various agencies under Obama had planned ahead, preparing to instruct the new Trump appointees on all the problems, processes and secrets of each agency. The only problem was there were no appointees. The first day all the agencies sat ready to instruct the influx of new workers that would be needed to run the government but nobody showed up. Nobody had been appointed. Trump and his lackeys hadn’t done their homework and thought it was too much of a bother to interview and hire the people they would need to make a government that could run the most powerful nation on the planet. Two years later that is still the case. Thousands of jobs are still vacant and the government stumbles along ignoring the work that we are paying millions of tax dollars to accomplish.
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Trump was out in Kansas last night celebrating the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh. Why? Why wasn’t he in Washington trying to fix a dysfunctional government? A government that still has thousands of offices unfilled because Trump, who couldn’t be bothered to fill them just isn’t doing his job! His job is not to be out in the hinterlands campaigning for he next election, his job is to run the government he got elected to run. Now we know he is incapable of running any government mainly because anyone who, by actual count, lies to the people of America 6.7 times a day isn’t capable of running anything. If Trump spent his time in the White House leaning about what’s going on in our government and its agencies instead of standing in front of hundreds of screaming idiots, maybe he’s know what the various agencies do and maybe he’d have some idea of how his pre-election promises are poisoning the nation.
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So it’s time to put away all the bullshit from the so-called GOP moderates like Susan Collins, Jeff Flake, Bob Corker and the rest. Only Lisa Murkowski stands unbesmerched. The rest can talk the talk all they want but they just can’t walk the walk. Even Manchin, the so-called Democrat from West Virginia showed us that he didn’t have the balls to stand up for what he talked about. He finally punked out with… “I’m just a West Virginian.” That just means he’s dumb as a post.
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For most of my lifetime, and I’m an old man, nowhere near enough credence has been given to victims of sexual abuse. Now, finally, maybe some standard of belief is changing. Now maybe women and even men who have suffered from this crime against humanity seem to have more support in their claims. But just when these victims are ready and sometimes able to come out of their closet we have a President who mocks and demeans them in front of an audience of simpering retards. This liar, this conman, this criminal, is the pile of crap that the far Right base is so proud of that they can stand in front of him and applaud as he makes fun of a woman who has suffered at the hands of a punk that we just put on the Supreme Court. That was bad enough but then to have this would-be dictator step up and make fun of her is more than a normal human being should be asked to accommodate. Trump has made one or two good moves in his almost two years in office but there is no way they can make up for the degradation that this criminal has heaped on the image of the White House, our country or Americans. He needs to go!
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Let’s talk about the Heritage Society, that semi functional conservative think-tank where the absence of real thought is rewarded by promotion and accolade. This is the outfit that has just given us Brett Kavanaugh because their original list of potential Supreme Court candidates was not fascist enough for Donald Trump.
This is a bunch of old white farts who have no concept of what it means to be good citizens but only follow the dictates of a small coterie of rich white guys who just want to be richer and f**k the rest of the country.
Case in point. Ever hear of an outfit named ARPA-E? Probably not! It’s a part of the DOE, a small section with a miniscule budget of about 300 million. It was run when it opened by Arun Majundar, an Indian immigrant who became a citizen and ended up teaching at Stanford. ARPA-E’s job is give out grants for the pursuit of outlandish scientific concepts that might turn out to be the new GPS or Internet, both of which actually came out of ARPA-E. The reason this section exists at DOE is that very little in the way of scientific innovation or exploration actually comes out of the industrial and scientific sector. Big companies are loath to spend big bucks on R & D when it may actually limit the sales of their current products. That means its left to the government to fund all the outrageous ideas that turn into genius inventions.
So of course, that means that the DOE, which has been ignored by the Trump administration when it comes to filling open jobs that are desperately needed, will be attacked by the Heritage Society which is run by corporate interests and has no accountability to the public but only to rich corporate interests.
It was the Heritage Society who recommended that Trump appoint Sonny Perdue as Secretary of Agriculture, which meant that he would head up the DOE. What equipped Perdue to have this job? Well, in 2008 a governor of Georgia he passed a law that stated no government employee could accept more than $25 in gifts. That same year he received over $25,000 in gifts. Then he passed a law that exempted certain real estate deals from capital gains taxes if the profits are used to buy land outside of Georgia. A few months later he claimed just such a deduction on his taxes saving himself over $100,000. This kind of maneuvering makes him a perfect fit for a Trump Cabinet.
So just as the DOE was trying to clean up the child nutrition issue, Perdue was sworn into office. The first thing he did was stage a public event at a school in Leesburg, VA where he announced that the USDA would no longer require schools to meet the nutritional requirements set up by the Obama administration, thereby degrading the food product for every child the program was feeding. This is the administration that the far- right wants. F**k our kids as long as we stop immigration, build a wall, help the coal industry not provide jobs, make the rich richer and send all non-whites back where they came from. If that’s the America you yearn for stay home on November 6th.
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Kavanaugh is a fact of life. We can’t change that but we sure in hell can stop it from happening again. VOTE!