Hot Earth

Saturday, May 13, 2017

Does our President have a screw loose?

From the L.A. Times:

He acknowledged that the Russia investigation was one of the things he considered. “In fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story. It’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.”
“If one of the reasons the president fired Mr. Comey was to subvert or influence FBI investigations of Trump campaign associates, it is hard to resist the conclusion that this was obstruction of justice,” said Ryan Goodman, a New York University law professor and the editor of the Just Security blog.

“No defense lawyer would have wanted their client to utter the incriminating words the president said on NBC to Lester Holt.”

Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe agreed. “I think President Trump inadvertently laid a solid basis for an obstruction of justice count in a bill of impeachment with his fateful Lester Holt interview. Trump seems to be his own worst enemy.”

My question is that Trump seems to be talking about "Trump" as some entity outside himself. Is he dissociating from reality? Is he clinically paranoid? The people around him need to pay attention. More than anything he may need help. We already know we do.

Sunday, March 26, 2017

Thank You Maureen Dowd

WASHINGTON — Dear Donald,

We’ve known each other a long time, so I think I can be blunt.

You know how you said at campaign rallies that you did not like being identified as a politician?

Don’t worry. No one will ever mistake you for a politician.

After this past week, they won’t even mistake you for a top-notch negotiator.

I was born here. The first image in my memory bank is the Capitol, all lit up at night. And my primary observation about Washington is this: Unless you’re careful, you end up turning into what you started out scorning.

And you, Donald, are getting a reputation as a sucker. And worse, a sucker who is a tool of the D.C. establishment.

Your whole campaign was mocking your rivals and the D.C. elite, jawing about how Americans had turned into losers, with our bad deals and open borders and the Obamacare “disaster.”

And you were going to fly in on your gilded plane and fix all that in a snap.

You mused that a good role model would be Ronald Reagan. As you saw it, Reagan was a big, good-looking guy with a famous pompadour; he had also been a Democrat and an entertainer. But Reagan had one key quality that you don’t have: He knew what he didn’t know.

You both resembled Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloons, floating above the nitty-gritty and focusing on a few big thoughts. But President Reagan was confident enough to accept that he needed experts below, deftly maneuvering the strings.

You’re just careering around on your own, crashing into buildings and losing altitude, growling at the cameras and spewing nasty conspiracy theories, instead of offering a sunny smile, bipartisanship, optimism and professionalism.

You promised to get the best people around you in the White House, the best of the best. In fact, “best” is one of your favorite words.

Instead, you dragged that motley skeleton crew into the White House and let them create a feuding, leaking, belligerent, conspiratorial, sycophantic atmosphere. Instead of a smooth, classy operator like James Baker, you have a Manichaean anarchist in Steve Bannon.

You knew the Republicans were full of hot air. They haven’t had to pass anything in a long time, and they have no aptitude for governing. To paraphrase an old Barney Frank line, asking the Republicans to govern is like asking Frank to judge the Miss America contest — “If your heart’s not in it, you don’t do a very good job.”

You knew that Paul Ryan’s vaunted reputation as a policy wonk was fake news. Republicans have been running on repealing and replacing Obamacare for years and they never even bothered to come up with a valid alternative.

And neither did you, despite all your promises to replace Obamacare with “something terrific” because you wanted everyone to be covered.

Instead, you sold the D.O.A. bill the Irish undertaker gave you as though it were a luxury condo, ignoring the fact that it was a cruel flimflam, a huge tax cut for the rich disguised as a health care bill. You were so concerned with the “win” that you forgot your “forgotten” Americans, the older, poorer people in rural areas who would be hurt by the bill.

As The Times’s chief Washington correspondent Carl Hulse put it, the G.O.P. falls into clover with a lock on the White House and both houses of Congress, and what’s the first thing it does? Slip on a banana peel. Incompetence Inc.

“They tried to sweeten the deal at the end by offering a more expensive bill with fewer health benefits, but alas, it wasn’t enough!” former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau slyly tweeted.

Despite the best efforts of Bannon to act as though the whole fiasco was a clever way to bury Ryan — a man he disdains as “the embodiment of the ‘globalist-corporatist’ Republican elite,” as Gabriel Sherman put it in New York magazine — it won’t work.

And you can jump on the phone with The Times’s Maggie Haberman and The Washington Post’s Robert Costa — ignoring that you’ve labeled them the “fake media” — and act like you’re in control. You can say that people should have waited for “Phase 2” and “Phase 3” — whatever they would have been — and that Obamacare is going to explode and that the Democrats are going to get the blame. But it doesn’t work that way. You own it now.

You’re all about flashy marketing so you didn’t notice that the bill was junk, so lame that even Republicans skittered away.

You were humiliated right out of the chute by the establishment guys who hooked you into their agenda — a massive transfer of wealth to rich people — and drew you away from your own.

You sold yourself as the businessman who could shake things up and make Washington work again. Instead, you got worked over by the Republican leadership and the business community, who set you up to do their bidding.

That’s why they’re putting up with all your craziness about Russia and wiretapping and unending lies and rattling our allies.

They’re counting on you being a delusional dupe who didn’t even know what was in the bill because you’re sitting around in a bathrobe getting your information from wackadoodles on Fox News and then, as The Post reported, peppering aides with the query, “Is this really a good bill?”

You got played.

It took W. years to smash everything. You’re way ahead of schedule.

And I can say you’re doing badly, because I’m a columnist, and you’re not. Say hello to everybody, O.K.?

Sincerely, Maureen

Wednesday, March 22, 2017

Documenting Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

In days gone by when I lived in Hawaii I blogged heavily. I had a site, The Green Flash News, and I used it as an advocacy platform for Hawaiian issues. I was known for my writing in the Hawaii Island Journal and as a necessity was morphing into an activist. Eventually I had to stop writing for the paper and the Green Flash became my medium. I monitored state and county government wrote articles and opinion pieces about the issues and sent out "Action Alerts" asking subscribers to take action on an issue. I provided language for letters and call scripts along with every ask. I had a great list developed from several successful campaigns and people in Hawaii were rabid about environmental and cultural issues so we had some good success. It was a lot of work but well worth it. When I moved back to America all that fell away and I've thought of several ideas for a new site and I've never quite got going again. I do Twitter a little but am not convinced that engaging in 140 character political discourse is a worthwhile pursuit nor an outlet for my writing. Or blogging either for that matter. It's such a morass out there in internet world. What's the purpose? Hard for me ot act without a purpose. Ah, but I found an answer!

I have a nice website for my photography http://jkpnaturallandscapes.com, , so why not create a repository of my writing, as well as publish snippets of work I have that has been lying around collecting dust since being diminished by the great and powerful in New York City by serializing the books online. I'll write new stuff too and blog about whatever I'm feeling.

It's important to act as a witness to what's going on in our world. It's important not only to speak out in the present but leave a history of your own perspective. One that might be read by a grandchild or great grandchild. Hey, in two generations they won't remember shit about what is going on today. I see that everyday. There hasn't been a level of social discord as high as today since the 60's. Few of today's generation know anything about living under the Draft, about the scourge of Vietnam, Selma, Alabama, Richard Nixon, blood in the streets. Mankind is doomed to repeat history for the young know for certain they are smarter than their predecessors and therefore in no need of history. And they are right for evolution makes it so.

So, I think it’s a worthwhile endeavor and a testimony to the fact I wasn’t just lying around thoughtlessly for 68+ years. Ten or twenty years from now my journal of fact and fiction will be looked upon as an artifact frozen in time. Maybe I’ll still be around to see that and be one of the last survivors to remember the Beatles.

Saturday, February 18, 2017

Nobody can or wants to work for Trump

http://axios.com

Wednesday, February 15, 2017

You Can't Hide Your Lyin eyes

Trump has created a situation where you can't trust anything coming out of the White House. Continued, purposeful, lying by Trump and his team has muddied the water so instead of the press coming out looking like the liars, it is his own team that is suffering. The purposeful lying is part of the Bannon game of shadow and deceit and I believe Trump and his team worked directly with the Russians to create the document leak/fake news paradigm that stole the election. The continued non stop lying is meant to discredit the truth. Very Orwellian, very Bannon. Let's see how it plays out.

Wednesday, January 25, 2017

Trump's Shock and Awe; We are witnessing the end of America's Greatness

After a Tuesday when he threw a sucker punch on Mother Earth and indigenous people everywhere when he signed executive orders bringing to life the Dakota Access Pipeline Standing Rock Sioux ‏@StandingRockST and Keystone Pipeline which threatens the heartland, on Wednesday illegitimate president Donald Trump opened fire on several fronts as he had promised in his run to the White House which as we know is now sooo white. He blocked Syrian refugees from entering the country as well as anyone, tourist or immigrant from a list of Muslim dominated countries. He also ordered the building of a 65 ft high concrete wall along the Mexican American border. Mexican's president took it as an affront to his country. Many of us agree with you President Pena Nieto. Trump's actions are rude and crude and belittle's the office of President and U.S. standing worldwide. Sadly desperate people do desperate things like voting in a despot intent on bullying his way forward. This week kind of reminds me of George Bush's "shock an awe" and declaration the war in Iraq had been won. I can even hear Donald in the distance or is that the toilet flushing?

https://nyti.ms/2kuf7EG

Sunday, June 15, 2014

To Frack or not to Frack?

Anti- frackers say it's a problem, oil execs say its not but neither side has put up any actual Facts to support their claims. The oil companies, since they are the actors, should pony up some cash to do some hard science investigation to see if there are problems and work to minimize them for the good of the public and the business community. Let's not hide our heads in the sand on this one.

-impacts