I know it’s getting to be old hat by now but my attack on the stupidity of Trump voters just won’t die. This weekend I was approached by a long time casual friend who was more than a bit upset by my description of Trump voters, of which he is one, as stupid. So we had a discussion. It started with him telling me that he just couldn’t vote for Hillary because he was an ex-special forces vet and she had betrayed his comrades in arms in Benghazi. I pointed out that Hillary didn’t have command of the mercenaries protecting Ambassador Stephenson in Benghazi and that Stephenson himself had more than enough time to pull out with his detachment but t he mistakenly figured that the locals loved and wouldn’t try to kill him. I also pointed out that the detachment would have been much larger and better able to protect the ambassador if a Republican congress had voted for the bill that would have supplied money to pay them.
Having grudging conceded this argument my friend went on to attack Obamacare and praise Trump’s attempts to get rid of it. This time I was forced to point out that Trump’s bill did not provide ironclad protection for pre-existing conditions and that the main reason why the GOP was so enamored of it was that it did provide a $68 billion tax cut for the super rich. He didn’t even know about the tax cut, wouldn’t believe it was in the bill until others chimed in to assure him that it was a fact. This is actually my point. Trump voters don’t bother to find out what they are voting for. They see this big blustering macho man(actually whiny little bitch) and they go for it. Hell, the congressmen who voted for this law, for the most part, haven’t even read it so why should we expect the voters to read anything when they have Donald Trump, the thief and con man telling them it’s true.
My friend tried falling back in the Republican lie that Obamacare was failing. That it was unsustainable. Of course he had no facts, only GOP claims, that this was true. It was necessary to explain that the only reason why Obamacare is in any trouble was the Republican failure to address changes and instead, to vote only to abolish it. If changes had been made on a bi-partisan basis, especially the change to a single-payer system, the ACA would be in fine shape now. You simply take the 17 to 37% of the total cost that now goes to insurance company profits and apply it to the system and you have a healthy, paid in full program.
My friend is not a stupid man. He is a successful small business owner who is politically dumb and tragically uninformed, He has not taken even a small amount of time out of his life to check on the facts of an area of life that so strongly affects him, his family and his community. He has bought the bullshit, drunk the Kool-aid and is now at the mercy of the lying would be tyrant who currently desecrates the White House.
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If there is one really dangerous guy among all the losers working in the Trump administration it is Jeff Sessions. Yeah, the little swamp rat from Confederate Land, Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions, named after not one but two racist confederate heroes is busily taking apart all the good things in American law that relate to human rights and social justice.
Trump made a big deal about his first 100 days in office and how much he would accomplish but lets take a quick look at Trump’s “One Hundred Day Plan of Action.”
Healthcare-F
The Wall-F
Tax reform-F
Jobs-D-
Infrastructure- F
National Security- F-
If anyone is confused by that F-, just ask yourself if you feel safer today than you did the day Obama left office.
Sure, Trump has signed a lot of Presidential orders but in doing so and negating contrary orders that Obama signed, he is only proving that they are not worth the paper they’re written on. So what’s left? The only functioning member of Trumps cabinet, Jeff Sessions is attacking civil rights and social justice vigorously. Is that what we elected Trump for? Maybe it is.
Back in October Trump issued a Contract with Americ, which included all the categories we graded above. He laid out ten issues that he would solve in the first 100 days of his presidency. Of those ten, the only ones he has even attacked so far are healthcare at which he has failed miserably so far and taxes on which he issued a one page cheap sheet that no one is taking seriously. None of the others have surfaced and none look like they are close to the launch point as of this date.
What he has done is issue a number of Presidential orders, mostly rolling back business regulations that had been imposed by Barak Obama. Of course the whole thing is one big lie. Eliminating those regulations, a process that is supposed to help small businesses get a foothold, will in reality, allow big business to crush small business. What Trump doesn’t want you to see is, that those regulations were originally put in place to protect small businesses from predators like the self-same Trump who bully and take advantage of small business all the time.
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This week’s NY Times revelations about James Comey’s statements prior to the election regarding investigations into Hillary Clinton’s emails along with the lack of any mention of the investigation that the FBI was conducting into the Trump campaign’s involvement with Russia and their attempts to influence our election have raised a hell storm in the halls of Washington DC.
According to the same story it seems that the FBI made a decision that Hillary was going to win the election and they didn’t have the stones to face GOP complaints once Hillary won and it was discovered that they were holding further further investigations and had not made them public.
Of course Hillary didn’t win. Trump won and now Comey’s decision not to publicize the investigation into Trump’s people and their involvement with the Russians has put the FBI in exactly the place Comey had been trying to avoid in publicizing the investigation into Clinton. Of course the big question is; was this done to help Trump’s campaign or was it just a massive screw up by Comey?
There can be no doubt that the ensuing announcement of the Clinton investigation and the holding back of any announcement about a Trump investigation had some effect on the election and considering its closeness, the assumption can easily be made that Comey’s pair of blunders caused us to have Trump inflicted on us. If this is true, what Comey did, or didn’t do must be considered the most significant blunder in the history of US politics. It has allowed a lying, sociopathic egomaniac to infect the White House. It has caused a man with absolutely no political experience to assume the most important, most complicated office in the world and it has placed the finger of a man with severely limited stability directly on the button that could end the world. James Comey has a hell of a lot to answer for.
*****
Donald Trump has demanded the most invasive and comprehensive vetting for refugee women and children who already face a two year process to get out of refugee camps and into someplace where they can live reasonable lives. He bellows that this is absolutely necessary for the safety of the American people and the protection of our borders and cities.
But when they were vetting Mike Flynn, a guy who was going to have the highest security clearance, who was going to be advising the President on the most sensitive of national security issues, they didn’t even bother to ask him if he was working for another government at half a million bucks a throw, nor did they ask about a speech he gave at a meeting of our enemies in Russia at a discount price. Is there something wrong with this picture? Trump, the big time vetter in chief can’t be bothered to ask his closest advisor, until he got fired, if he was working for a foreign government. This is ridiculous. This is the epitome of amateur time in Dixie. This fat orange clown who is busy trying to make the lives of starving people more miserable can’t be bothered to find out if his chief advisor is a spy. This can only add to the stack of indictments that will eventually make up the Trump impeachment files.
*****
Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions the diminutive confederate racist who occupies the Attorney General’s office is one of the few functioning appointments of the Trump cabinet. As such he is doing everything he can to eliminate the American right to vote. It’s a right, by the way, not an entitlement and as such everything that Sessions does to limit it is a violation of the Constitution. Two of the truly egregious acts of the GOP have been in the areas of gerrymandering and voter suppression. This is an attack on our most basic right and it is the mark of a loser to attack it. At a time when we should be attacking anyone and everyone who gets between an individual and his right to vote we are wasting our energy on unimportant bullshit. Even as this is being written, legislators in Alabama are voting to protect Confederate monuments in their state. That’s something that’s really important, especially if you are a racist, a bigot or brain dead.
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Donald Trump Jr., the idiot son, spent Earth day killing prairie dogs. Yes, the great hunter was at it again except this time he wasn’t killing endangered species, he was killing cute harmless little animals that wouldn’t hurt a flea. The mighty hunter was accompanied on his trophy trip by Greg Gianforte, a dumb as a post Republican candidate from Montana, where the slimy pair went to kill these harmless animals.
Like many Americans I learned to hunt before I was twelve. My uncle Joe, an army colonel from WWII taught the boys in our family on his 17 acres of NY state forest. The one hard and fast rule was, you don’t shoot what you can’t eat. Hunting was not about sport it was about survival. We shot rabbits and deer. That was it. I stopped hunting when I was about 18. I drew down on a young buck and he turned and looked at me. He had a quizzical look on his face. I ejected the round, we were only allowed to carry one round at a time. My uncle always said if you couldn’t kill your dinner with one shot you had no business hunting or eating.
You don’t eat prairie dogs and only the Trumpet would consider one trophy worthy, but the genuine asshole that took him hunting these cute little animals was quoted as speaking to how much fun it was to kill them. It is now the job of every citizen of Minnesota to make sure Greg Gianforte doesn’t get elected – to anything.
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The new job numbers show that 211,000 jobs were added in April. The jobs came from every category. Trump will now claim that the job growth is due to something that he has done, but that will be a lie. The economy that Obama bred has more to do with the figure than anything Trump has done and even what Obama did has little to do with what is happening now. The fact is that Obama pulled us out of the Bush disaster and now, after eight long years, the economy itself is what is creating job growth. Trump hasn’t done squat.