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Friday, April 28, 2017: Trump's First Hundred Days
- All Targets Met
- All Systems Working
- All Constituents Satisfied
- All Staff Eager and Enthusiastic
- All Pigs Fed and Ready to fly
Friday, April 21, 2017: Like Flies to Shit
According to the New York Times in an April 20th article titled
4 Hours at the White House With Ted Nugent, Sarah Palin and Kid Rock,
the three compadres (plus families) had a fete to remember at the White House for several hours Wednesday night, April 19th, as President Trump treated his high-profile supporters to a white-china private dinner, a room-by-room tour and free-range policy chat.
Here are a few excerpts from the article.....
"'We were there for four hours, man!'" Mr. Nugent, a 68-year-old Detroit native, said in a telephone interview on Thursday, using a four-letter expletive to signal his amazement at Mr. Trump's willingness to spend so much time with his three casually dressed visitors."
"The encounter included a tour of the executive residence, a grip-and-grin session with Mr. Trump in the Oval Office and an impromptu snapshot — featuring a sneering Ms. Palin — in front of Mrs. Clinton's official portrait as the three guests and their families left through the East Wing. Mr. Nugent said one member of the group — he wouldn't say who — asked the three to extend their middle fingers beneath the portrait. 'I politely declined,' he said. 'Let the juxtaposition speak for itself.'"
""Asked why I invited Kid Rock and Ted Nugent, I joked, 'Because Jesus was booked,'" she (Palin) wrote."
"Mr. Nugent, who posed, capped in a camouflage cowboy hat, with a seated Mr. Trump in the Oval Office, was the subject of a 2012 Secret Service investigation after suggesting violence toward Mr. Obama during that year's re-election campaign."
I guess the White House is now an alternative to your local biker bar. How quaint and homey! So my question, was the beer served in glasses or did they just set a bottle or two next to the white china? And you wonder why the Trump Administration doesn't want you to see the visitor logs....
Palm Sunday, April 8, 2017: Lunch Shaming
This by far is the most disgusting thing I have read about in weeks. Apparently it is common practice for schools in this "great Christian nation" of ours to "shame" children who are short of funds to pay for their lunch.
According to a New York Times Article, "New Mexico Outlaws School 'Lunch Shaming'", April 7, 2017, "In Alabama, a child short on funds was stamped on the arm with "I Need Lunch Money." In some schools, children are forced to clean cafeteria tables in front of their peers to pay the debt. Other schools require cafeteria workers to take a child's hot food and throw it in the trash if he doesn't have the money to pay for it."
Let's compare that with school lunches in France. According to karenlebillion.com (https://karenlebillon.com/french-school-lunch-menus/), "unlike the United States, there is no national school lunch program in France. All of the lunches … are funded by local municipalities. Three-course (or even four-course) freshly-prepared, hot lunches are provided to over 6 million French children in the public school system every day. Even without national subsidies, these meals cost, on average, $3 per child (and prices for low-income families are subsidized), not significantly higher than the lunches provided through the National School Lunch Program in the US. So the French don't spend much more than we do, yet their kids seem to eat, on average, better than ours do–even in the smallest villages and poorest towns of France."
We can do better, but in fact we continue to do less and less for our children. According to Feeding America, in 2015, 13.1 million American children lived in food insecure households. One in six children in the U.S. worries about when they will have their next meal. On empty stomachs, kids don't have the energy to focus, engage, learn and grow. The one place where we could partially remedy this is in our public schools and what do we do, we throw perfectly good food in the trash rather than feed a child. What kind of debase animals are we that we can't even feed our young?
Thursday, April 6, 2017: The National Terrorist Association
According to the CATO Institute, between 1975 and 2015, terrorists born in the nations covered by Trump's travel ban have killed zero people in America. On September 11, 2001, 2,996 people died in the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil. In the fifteen years since that date, 123 murders were committed by Muslim Americans and Muslims from countries not included in the Trump ban. In that same 40 year period, guns wielded by Americans killed 1,340,000 Americans. But according to Trump, Muslims are bad and Americans with guns are good. I'm sorry, but the data does not back that up and the logic behind his thought process escapes me.
I agree that America is not safe, but today it is not because of terrorism, it is because our elected representatives are too stupid or spineless to stand up to the NRA. We can manage the risk from refugees bringing terrorism to our shores, but we are unwilling to manage our homegrown, gun toting, American terrorist problem.
As Nicholas Kristof wrote in his Sunday, February 12, 2017, New York Times article, "Husbands Are Deadlier than Terrorists", "With his travel ban, Trump is peddling an ineffective policy that is morally repugnant, even as he marches toward a looser policy on guns likely to result in more school shootings, more shattered families and more lives lost."
The real terrorist organization here is the NRA.
Tuesday, April 4, 2017: Trump Diplomacy: Support the Despots of the World
On Monday, April 3rd, Herr Trump (our nascent Führer) met with President Al-Sisi of Egypt. It was another fine example of depths that the Donald will go to in order to be adored. The following are excerpts from the White House press release covering the remarks made by both men. (BTW, reading this text, I am convinced that Trump, like Reagan, is suffering from dementia or like W his brain is screwed up from drugs.)
TRUMP: "And I will tell you, President al-Sisi has been somebody that's been very close to me from the first time I met him. I met during the campaign, and at that point there were two of us, and we both met. And hopefully you like me a lot more."
"I just want to let everybody know, in case there was any doubt, that we are very much behind President al-Sisi. He's done a fantastic job in a very difficult situation. We are very much behind Egypt and the people of Egypt. And the United States has, believe me, backing, and we have strong backing. We are very much -- and as you and I will be soon talking -- we're building up our military to a level that will be the highest -- probably the highest that we've ever had -- plane orders, ship orders, aircraft carrier orders."
"And I just want to say to you, Mr. President, that you have a great friend and ally in the United States and in me."
Al-SISI: "Your Excellency, since we met last September, I've had a deep appreciation and admiration of your unique personality,"
Herr Trump is lining up his co-conspirators and building up the U.S. military to achieve world domination. Lock and load folks because the only thing this type of alignment will do is bring terrorism to our backyard. Right now you don't want to live in a major city in the U.S. It is just a matter of time before there is another 9/11 magnitude attack.
Saturday, April 1, 2017: Jobs are the Republican's April Fool's Joke
Isn't it amazing how the justification for every cockeyed Republican policy initiative seems to be job creation, as if jobs were the only focus of the American electorate. They can destroy our environment, poison our water, pollute our atmosphere, undermine health care, ravage public education, allow unsafe working conditions, suppress the minimum wage, burden our college graduates with suffocating debt, take away the common man's ability to bargain for better wages and we are supposed to be excited because a couple of minimum wage jobs are created.
But for the moment, let's ignore all the damage that Republicans have planned for the next four years and focus only on their obsession with jobs. With the U.S. unemployment rate hovering around 5%, we are close to what economists consider to be a full employment economy. That is why the Federal Reserve and Janet Yellen are considering 2 or 3 more increases in the Prime Rate (the Federal Funds Rate) this year.
So is there an employment problem if it is not the number jobs? Indeed there is - it is skills. The highest paying jobs being created today require more skills than our high school graduates posses. For America to be "Great Again", Americans must be able to advance economically, and for Americans to advance, they must be skilled. As Janice Yellen said in a speech before the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, "While the economy overall is recovering and the job market has improved substantially since the recession, pockets of persistently high unemployment, as well as other challenges, remain… Significant job market changes in recent years, brought about by global competition and technological advances -- and the new and shifting skills that these changes demand -- make workforce development more important than ever before,"
We have a lot of problems in the U.S. and many more will be created by the Republicans over the next four years, but job creation isn't on the top of the list. Where we need to focus and invest is on the training and development of our American workforce so that they have the skills today's businesses demand. But alas, the citadel of uselessness a.k.a. our Republican Controlled Legislative and Executive branches only wants to cut those programs that would protect and advance the vast middle class workforce.
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