I thought of writing about the infamous memo that Trump's clown-puppet, Nunes, has crafted both with and for his master, but I don't want us to forget something else that hasn't gotten as much press ... Trump's affair, while married, with the porn star ...
This is important, though I'm sure Republicans would like us to feel it's unseemly to bring it up ... it goes to the character of the president, and it goes to the character of the holier-than-thou conservative Christians who have supported him despite every bad thing he's done.
There’s a level at which — when you consider that the president of the United States has cozied up to a foreign power that tampered with an American election, has repeatedly assaulted the country’s courts and its law enforcement and intelligence agencies, has defended neo-Nazis, has cried “fake news” while provably lying, and has been revealed so credibly to have paid off a porn star that it made news when his own wife chose to attend his biggest speech of the year — it’s hard to believe that the state of the union is strong.
[....]
Despite promising a $1 trillion infrastructure plan a year ago, a phantom plan whose price tag he raised to $1.5 trillion on Tuesday, he has yet to do anything to fix rusting bridges and faltering rail lines. His tax plan will undermine local efforts to make improvements around the country. He has yet to take serious action to end the opioid crisis. (“We have to do something about it,” he said Tuesday night, rather pathetically.) He has rubbed raw the nation’s wounds of bigotry and sexism. Without study or discernment, he has stripped away regulations meant to restrain climate change and to protect consumers. He seems utterly indifferent to improving an education system that is the foundation of the global competitiveness he insists he cares so much about. He’s deepened America’s commitment to Afghanistan with no exit strategy, and he’s raised tensions in the Middle East to no clear end. By gratuitously alienating allies and upending trade deals, he has eased the way for China’s hegemony ...
The editorial board of The New York Times goes on to say that the state of our union *is* strong, not because of Trump but in spite of him.
I agree ... Trump's lies have taught us the worth of truth, his attacks on immigrants have reminded us of our own immigrant roots, his misogyny has brought forth the #Me Too movement, his trashing of the environment has spurred on the green revolution, his racial bigotry has made us see what commonalities we all share, and his faux Christianity has made the US Catholic bishops feel shame at having supported him (a miracle!). The one thing Trump can say is that the economy is doing well, but there's one truth he has never learned - there are things more important than money.
Mr. Speaker, and Mr. President, and my distinguished colleagues and our guests: I would like to add a personal word with regard to an issue that has been of great concern to all Americans over the past year. I refer, of course, to the investigations of the so-called Watergate affair. As you know, I have provided to the Special Prosecutor voluntarily a great deal of material. I believe that I have provided all the material that he needs to conclude his investigations and to proceed to prosecute the guilty and to clear the innocent. I believe the time has come to bring that investigation and the other investigations of this matter to an end. One year of Watergate is enough.
Seven months later he was forced to resign in the face of impeachment and his removal as president.
I first heard of the deputy director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe, just after then FBI director James Comey had been fired by Trump. McCabe was called before congress for comment on, among other things, whether the rank and file of the FBI had become disenchanted with Comey, as the White House had asserted ...
McCabe has been the victim of attacks by Trump from the moment Comey had been fired ...
The day after he fired James Comey as director of the FBI, a furious President Donald Trump called the bureau's acting director, Andrew McCabe, demanding to know why Comey had been allowed to fly on an FBI plane from Los Angeles back to Washington after he was dismissed, according to multiple people familiar with the phone call.
McCabe told the president he hadn’t been asked to authorize Comey’s flight, but if anyone had asked, he would have approved it, three people familiar with the call recounted to NBC News. The president was silent for a moment and then turned on McCabe, suggesting he ask his wife how it feels to be a loser — an apparent reference to a failed campaign for state office in Virginia that McCabe’s wife made in 2015. McCabe replied, “OK, sir.” Trump then hung up the phone.
Trump continued his attacks on McCabe via Twitter. Trump even demanded McCabe tell him who he had voted for in the 2016 election. Trump also told Sessions to get Christopher Wray, Trump's replacement for Comey, to fire McCabe, and it appears now that Wray has indeed pressured McCabe to leave ...
Andrew G. McCabe abruptly stepped down on Monday as the F.B.I.’s deputy director after months of withering criticism from President Trump, telling friends he felt pressure from the head of the bureau to leave, according to two people close to Mr. McCabe.
Though Mr. McCabe’s retirement had been widely expected soon, his departure was nevertheless sudden. It added to what has already been a chaotic upheaval at the F.B.I. under Mr. Trump, who has responded to an investigation into his campaign with broadside attacks against both the bureau and the Justice Department.
As recently as last week, Mr. McCabe had told people he hoped to stay until he was eligible to retire in several weeks. Instead, he will immediately go on leave and retire on March 18.
In a recent conversation, Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, raised concerns about a forthcoming inspector general report. In that discussion, according to one former law enforcement official close to Mr. McCabe, Mr. Wray suggested moving Mr. McCabe into another job, which would have been a demotion. Instead, the former official said, Mr. McCabe chose to leave. In an email to F.B.I. employees, he said he was leaving with “sadness.” ...
I think it is shameful the way Andy McCabe has been treated by Trump and his minions. But there's more to this as well. McCabe was but one of three men at the FBI that James Comey confided in about his meetings with Trump and who might be witnesses against Trump for an obstruction of justice charge. What has become of them? ...
The FBI officials Trump has targeted are Andrew McCabe, the current deputy FBI director and who was briefly acting FBI director after Comey’s firing; Jim Rybicki, Comey’s chief of staff and senior counselor; and James Baker, formerly the FBI’s general counsel. Those same three officials were first identified as possible corroborating witnesses for Comey in a June 7 article in Vox. Comey confirmed in congressional testimony the following day that he confided in the three men ...
The latest book I've been reading from the public library is Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff. As everyone knows by now, the nonfiction book details what has been going on behind the scenes in Trump's White House.
It's almost Saturday and I'm reading about the music of 1983. Here's David Bowie again. This clip is from 2002 but the song he sings, Let's Dance, came out in '83 ...
Still researching music of the past by the year and now I'm in at 1982. This was when I was married. I can remember sitting in a Mexican restaurant with the ex after seeing the movie Cat People, David Bowie writing and singing the title song for it ...
A few days ago I had a post about Pope Francis' visit to Chile, where he defended a bishop accused of covering up sex abuse. Tonight there was a segment on the PBS NewsHour on this which I thought was pretty good ...
Ursula K. Le Guin, a prolific novelist best known for the Earthsea series and The Left Hand of Darkness, died Monday at the age of 88 in Portland, Ore. Across more than 20 novels and scores of short stories, Le Guin crafted fantastic worlds to grapple with profoundly difficult questions here on Earth, from class divisions to feminist theory .... Le Guin stood as a towering figure in science fiction and fantasy. Indeed, she completed a triple crown of the genres' biggest prizes, earning the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards several times over ...
I read her book The Left Hand of Darkness when I was a teen and it made a big impression on me. She was one of the early feminist science fiction writers and this book, which won both the Hugo and Nebula awards, envisioned a world in which people were of a neutral gender except for when they reproduced, at which time they could end up being either female of male. What would our lives and our culture be like if our gender wasn't fixed, if we all had a common experience of being both male and female?
When I was a girl growing up in Oklahoma, women got abortions. But because those procedures were illegal, many of them ended up with back alley butchers. And we all heard the stories: women who bled to death or died from an infection.
One of my older brothers and I can argue left-right politics all day and all night, but when it comes to reproductive rights, we see it the same way: A woman should make this very personal decision — and the government should stay out of it.
We’re in step with most of America. Nearly 70% of all Americans agree that a woman’s reproductive decisions should stay between her and her doctor.
On the 45th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, I think about what has changed since abortions became legal. Our health care system has pretty much dealt with the safety issue: thanks to Roe v. Wade, abortion is now safer than getting your tonsils out. A lot of women are alive today because of Roe.
But Roe has had another enormous impact. Access to safe abortion services has changed the economic futures of millions of women ...
[...] While it often feels like abortion rights is one of the most divisive issues in our nation, polling from Pew Research Center reports that seven in 10 Americans oppose overturning Roe v. Wade. That's more people than agree on almost anything these days. To mark the anniversary and call attention to that statistic, NARAL (National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws) is asking people on Twitter to share why they are one of the #7in10forRoe ...
The Women’s March is back. A year after millions of women took to the streets en masse to protest President Trump’s inauguration, marchers will be gathering again this weekend in hundreds of cities across the country and the world, as they try to build on a movement that has only grown in its ambition.
A deluge of revelations about powerful men abusing women, leading to the #MeToo moment, has galvanized activists to demand deeper social and political change. And in the United States, progressive women are eager to translate their enthusiasm into electoral victories in this year’s midterm elections ...
It's especially important for women to stick together and win elections as Trump erodes pro-choice rights ...
[...] The Trump administration on Friday took two new steps in its ongoing fight against abortion.
The first was a new regulation that further underscored protections for health-care workers who refuse to perform abortions and other medical procedures because of religious and moral objections.
The second rescinded a formal warning issued by the Obama administration in 2016 to all state Medicaid directors reminding them that they could not cut funding to Planned Parenthood just because that group offers abortion services.
However, the rescission of that warning does not affect the existing federal law barring Medicaid directors from taking such actions.
The moves came a day after the Health and Human Services Department announced it was creating a new "Conscience and Religious Freedom Division" within its Office of Civil Rights.
And it came on the same day that President Donald Trump was due to become the first sitting president to address the annual March for Life anti-abortion demonstration in Washington ...
Remembering my cat Data who died today in January 2005. He was 15 years old and I had him (and his siblings) from when we found them in the garage as babies. He was very sick at the end with bladder cancer. My sister and I were giving him subcutaneous fluids every day plus a bunch of different medications, and he was so ill he didn't want to eat so I had to give him moist food with a syringe. He suffered a lot :(
One of the things that helped me get along then was that I had checked a two CD set of the Bee Gees' greatest hits from the public library and listened to it almost all the time as a distraction. Here is one of the songs I especially liked ...
If I had more time I'd answer both Andrew Sullivan and Catherine Deneuve, explaining in detail why they are wrong, but I'll just have yo make it short ..... Andrew, just because you're Catholic doesn't mean you have to believe in complementarianism or natural law - both science and reason are against you. And Catherine, come one, how can I take anyone seriously on sexual harassment who has this kind of Pepé Le Pew cultural baggage? ...
Here's more: Samantha Bee on the #Me Too backlash ...
Back in 2015, Pope Francis installed Juan de la Cruz Barros as bishop of Osorno, Chile, over the vehement protests of local Catholics ... Barros had been credibly accused of covering up sexual abuse by his mentor, pedophile priest Fernando Karadima.
The protests in 2015 when the bishop was installed ...
The Pope has just visited Chile, and he managed to make the situation even worse ...
Pope Francis accused victims of Chile’s most notorious pedophile of slander Thursday, an astonishing end to a visit meant to help heal the wounds of a sex abuse scandal that has cost the Catholic Church its credibility in the country. Francis said that until he sees proof that Bishop Juan Barros was complicit in covering up the sex crimes of the Rev. Fernando Karadima, such accusations against Barros are “all calumny.”
The pope’s remarks drew shock from Chileans and immediate rebuke from victims and their advocates. They noted the accusers were deemed credible enough by the Vatican that it sentenced Karadima to a lifetime of “penance and prayer” for his crimes in 2011. A Chilean judge also found the victims to be credible, saying that while she had to drop criminal charges against Karadima because too much time had passed, proof of his crimes wasn’t lacking.
[snip]
Anne Barrett Doyle, of the online database BishopAccountability.org, said it was “sad and wrong” for the pope to discredit the victims since “the burden of proof here rests with the church, not the victims — and especially not with victims whose veracity has already been affirmed.” “He has just turned back the clock to the darkest days of this crisis,” she said in a statement. “Who knows how many victims now will decide to stay hidden, for fear they will not be believed?” ....
As the government gets closer to a shutdown, Trump, surrounded by his generals, blames the Democrats and says that the most important reason for not allowing a shutdown is that we must support the military. He apparently doesn't know this, but sucking up to the military doesn't make him sound manly and it doesn't compensate for him having been a draft dodger, it just makes him sound like a wannabe banana republic dictator.
Remember this little person from last spring? ....
Now Goldy looks like this ....
And his thoughts are turning to love. I suspect so are the thoughts of the other four former kittens, his siblings, and his mom, Marie, as well. Somehow I have to catch them all and take them to the SPCA or the County to get spayed/neutered before any more kittens arrive! The new cats aren't very tame and I can't pick them up so to help with catching them I bought a trap, one that seems like the safest version I've seen ... Tru Catch Trap ... and I found a video that explains how to use it, so here's hoping it all works out.
- President Obama at the Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial
In this nightmare era of Trump, it's hard to remember that there was once a time when leaders tried to bring people together instead of pitting them against each other ...
Trump's merit-based immigration policy is *not* what America is supposed to be about. Our actions haven't always matched out ideals, but we do have ideals ...
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
From the poem The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus, which was used to raise money for the pedestal on which the Statue of Liberty rests. The whole poem is engraved on a bronze plaque inside the pedestal.
Are any of you guys fans of The X-Files? If so, maybe you'll remember a past episode in which Mulder and Scully encounter a Tulpa, a thought-form, a monster created from the beliefs of others. I want us to keep this creature in mind as we discuss Trump's latest horrible utterance about 'shithole' countries ...
Trump's animus towards the people from 'shithole' countries can come as no surprise. It's awful, yes, but anyone who has watched his campaign rallies before the election or who has been paying attention since then to his many racist remarks - who can forget his defense of the neo-nazis of Charlottesville - already knows Trump is a racist.
As disturbing as this is ... and I find it obscene the way Republicans have danced around this fact ... there is something else that is just as disturbing. That thing is that Trump is only president because he was voted for by people who like his racism, people who share it.
Trump is a kind of creation, an assemblage of the beliefs of Republican voters, an avatar to go forth into the world for them and make their beliefs manifest. And let's not pretend that those beliefs sprout from the righteous financial worries of the 'forgotten man'. Those beliefs are grown in contempt for the other people and the very world around us - they result in the desire to punish the poor, to keep women in their place, to use the environment as just a consumable product, to exclude racial/ethnic minorities, etc.
We can and should try to hold Trump accountable for what he says and does, try to get rid of him. But we have to own up to the fact that he is not some lone malefactor that we can eventually banish to make everything better. We have to face the fact that perhaps a third of our voters - Trump's base - have brought the Trump monster to life with their own deep beliefs, and they will not be as easy to make disappear.
“Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” Trump said, according to these people, referring to African countries and Haiti. He then suggested that the United States should instead bring more people from countries like Norway, whose prime minister he met yesterday. - Esquire
The Republicans' "stable genius" is an open racist ... they must be so proud.
a 2017 American biographical spy thriller film directed and written by Peter Landesman, based on the 2006 autobiography of FBI agent Mark Felt .... The film depicts how Felt became an anonymous source ("Deep Throat") for reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, and helped them in the investigation which led them to the Watergate scandal. The film stars Liam Neeson, Diane Lane, Tony Goldwyn, and Maika Monroe.
Here's a trailer ...
The movie is pretty interesting because it gives the other side of the story of the investigation into Watergate than the film All the President's Men. What's eerie is the way it seems to foreshadow what's happening right now ... a president eyeball deep in a corruption conspiracy and warping the DOJ and the FBI in order to cover that up. Here's the beginning of a review from The New Yorker ...
“Follow the money.” These are the words most closely associated with Deep Throat, Bob Woodward’s famous Watergate source, as memorably portrayed by Hal Holbrook in the movie version of “All the President’s Men.” As it happens, the phrase never appears in the book of that title, in which Woodward and Carl Bernstein chronicled their Washington Post investigations, and it is not spoken in a new movie, “Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House,” about the real-life person who was Deep Throat, which opens this Friday. But Felt’s sentiment, if not his exact words—about the central role that money often plays in political scandals—strikes a resonant chord at a time when the nation is confronting another crisis of political legitimacy.
Felt, who was the deputy associate director of the F.B.I., died, at the age of ninety-five, in 2008, three years after confirming his identity as Deep Throat, a secret that Woodward and Bernstein had kept for more than three decades. In the new movie, Liam Neeson plays Felt with a kind of lugubrious sincerity. He’s an unhappy man, beset by professional and personal woes, and he makes his secret alliance with Woodward for reasons that are both admirable and vengeful. (Felt is appalled by Watergate, but he’s also bitter that he was passed over for the directorship of the F.B.I., following the death of his boss, J. Edgar Hoover, in 1972.) The follow-the-money sentiment refers to Felt’s instruction to Woodward to examine how the Watergate burglary was financed. Who paid the five men who broke into the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate complex on June 17, 1972? Who paid for their lawyers after they were caught? Woodward learned that the money came from Nixon campaign contributors and people associated with the Committee for the Reëlection of the President (the notorious CREEP) ....
The movie didn't do well on the Tomatometer but if you're interested in Watergate stuff or simply like Liam Neeson :) you may find it worth a watch, as I did.
I've found that Wikipedia has pages for every year of music, with all the albums/songs released in that year. I've been going back and forth, finding stuff here and there - it helps distract me from all my worries, at least for a while :) Here's what I found today: Carry On Wayward Son by Kansas ...
Carry on my wayward son
For there'll be peace when you are done
Lay your weary head to rest
Don't you cry no more
Once I rose above the noise and confusion
Just to get a glimpse beyond the illusion
I was soaring ever higher, but I flew too high
Though my eyes could see I still was a blind man
Though my mind could think I still was a mad man
I hear the voices when I'm dreaming, I can hear them say
Carry on my wayward son
For there'll be peace when you are done
Lay your weary head to rest
Don't you cry no more
Masquerading as a man with a reason
My charade is the event of the season
And if I claim to be a wise man, it surely means that I don't know
On a stormy sea of moving emotion
Tossed about I'm like a ship on the ocean
I set a course for winds of fortune, but I hear the voices say
Carry on my wayward son
For there'll be peace when you are done
Lay your weary head to rest
Don't you cry no more
Carry on, you will always remember
Carry on, nothing equals the splendor
Now your life's no longer empty
Surely heaven waits for you
Carry on my wayward son
For there'll be peace when you are done
Lay your weary head to rest
Don't you cry no more
Steve Bannon apologises for what he said in the book about Trump, because his wealthy donor, the conservative Mercer family, is cutting him off in revenge. PS, the White House is portraying Bannon's words in the book as vindictive, but the information in the book was gathered long before Bannon was ever fired, while he was in good standing at the WH.
Oh, and the Senate and the House committees investigating Russian involvement in our elections, run by Republicans, want to criminally investigate the British agent who alerted the FBI to possible problems in the first place - yep, Grassley and Graham have been quite busy kissing their master's ass.
This is what it's like to live in a dictatorship, where a wealthy leader, surrounded by his generals, tries to delegitimize the free press, muzzle dissent, and have his political opponents jailed, while stacking the courts and subverting the justice system. It only took a year.
Much in the news today about the upcoming book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by journalist Michael Wolff. The Wikipedia page linked to give the basic info on it, and here's a first excerpt from the book in New York magazine: Donald Trump Didn’t Want to Be President. Especially interesting about the book - Steve Bannon believes Trump colluded. Here's something from Rachel Maddow on the book ...
On the PBS NewsHour tonight there was a segment about how a study from Sweden shows that dogs (and I think all pets) can help people live longer, especially people like me who are alone ...
My numerous cats come with a lot of baggage, but I am so much less lonely now that they are here.
