Monthly Archives: November 2018

national news

Hypocrisy is flourishing in the White House!

Let’s just call him the Hypocrite in Chief.

Donald J. Trump has been caught in yet another example of bald-faced, categorical and unqualified hypocrisy.

His daughter Ivanka has been caught using her personal e-mail account to transmit messages pertaining to government business. Was any of it classified? Was she able to send messages that compromised our national security? Oh, probably not.

But the point is this: Daddy Trump spent two whole years telling the world that in his view Hillary Clinton committed “several felonies” while using her personal e-mail while she was secretary of state. He led chants of “Lock her up!” at campaign rallies.

Now his older daughter is caught doing essentially the same thing. His response? Pfftt! Not parallel, he says.

Moreover, he called Clinton “stupid” for not knowing the rules. Was all of that lost on Ivanka, who now says she didn’t know the rules about e-mail use when she took her post as a senior adviser to her father?

Remember, too, how he criticized President Obama for playing too much golf? How he — Trump — wouldn’t have time to play golf, that he’ll be too busy “making America great again”?

He’s turned Obama into a weekend duffer. This president, the guy who ridiculed his predecessor unjustly, has lapped the field — and then some! — with his golf outings.

I do not begrudge the golf per se. I’ve said all along that presidents are never off the clock; they remain in constant contact with their key aides, advisers and national security team.

I do begrudge the golf only because of Trump’s hypocrisy on that matter — and on so many others.

Simply astonishing.

business news, environmental news

Energy prices up, then down, then up . . .

Donald Trump is cheering the drop in oil prices. So am I. I don’t like paying more for gasoline than I can afford. So, I am enjoying watching the price of crude take a tumble.

But wait a second! Didn’t the president come into office declaring his intention to shore up the fossil fuel industry? He tossed some of the environmental regulations approved during the Obama administration, claiming they hurt drillers’ ability to explore for oil.

The other thing that hurt drillers was, um, the price of oil. Back when it was around $100 per barrel, pump jacks all over Texas and the rest of the Oil Patch that had gone silent when the prices fell were restarted. They began pumping the “Texas Tea” out of the ground.

Why, then, does the president say this in a Twitter message:

Oil prices getting lower. Great! Like a big Tax Cut for America and the World. Enjoy! $54, was just $82. Thank you Saudi Arabia, but let’s go lower!

His Pennsylvania Avenue cheering section seems to suggest now that he wants the price to keep falling. A lot of West Texas wildcatters are unhappy with the trend. They don’t want to see it continue. They want it to go the other way.

I happen to hope it doesn’t, just like the president.

But why didn’t the president say anything in that tweet about developing alternative energy sources? President Obama made quite a push to do so during his two terms in office. The result was that we became effectively “energy independent.” The U.S. of A. became the world’s leading oil producer. Meanwhile, we invested in wind, solar and hydropower to take the burden off those wildcatters and Big Oil to keep producing.

Which is it now? Are we going to cheer the plunging oil prices or wish them to increase?

Donald Trump, per usual, is sending a mixed — or perhaps confused — message to the world.

***

And of course, the bouquet the president tossed to Saudi Arabia — in light of his hideous acceptance of the Saudis’ denial in the murder of a U.S.-based journalist — sends another chilling message altogether. More on that one to come.

media news

Trump wears me out … and I’m the retired guy!

My life as a retired individual has placed me in front of a TV watching news a good portion of most days.

I will be terribly candid here. I spend too much time watching TV news. It wears me out. Why? Because so much of it deals with drama presented by Donald J. Trump, the nation’s president.

It makes me wonder: If the news of each day wears me out, how in the world does the president continue to “function,” such as he does, under the pressure of all the missteps, mistakes, miscues and misjudgments he makes?

Jeb Bush called him the “chaos candidate” for president and said his presidency would be filled with chaos as well. Boy, howdy! The former GOP governor of Florida had that one right!

I just don’t understand where Trump stores that cache of whatever it is that keeps him going. Nor do I understand how he interprets his tenure as president as an A+ endeavor, how he defines “winning” and how in the world anything gets done within the executive branch of the U.S. government.

The president calls the cadence. That is more true with this president than many — if not all — of his predecessors.

It’s a cadence of fits and starts. It’s not a “fine-tuned machine.” It’s a clunker of a vehicle that keeps looking as if it’s falling apart piece by piece.

Yep. I am worn out by all this chaos and confusion. But … I’ll keep watching it unfold.

International news

Looking back at bin Laden raid

The nation has been talking in recent days about the commando raid that took out Osama bin Laden.

I thought I’d share with you a video of President Obama announcing “to the nation and the world” the death of the terrorist leader. Here it is:

Perhaps the most relevant point I want to emphasize here is the president’s explanation of the tireless work done by anti-terrorism experts working for two presidential administrations. President Bush’s team began the hunt for bin Laden shortly after 9/11, then handed it off to President Obama’s team.

It took time, patience and perseverance for our intelligence community to find bin Laden in that compound in Pakistan.

Yet there came the unfounded and idiotic criticism from Donald J. Trump that the team that took out bin Laden should have done it “much sooner.” He laid the criticism at the feet of retired Admiral William McRaven, the man who coordinated the effort that resulted in bin Laden’s death in May 2011.

Trump doesn’t know what transpired between 9/11 and the raid that eliminated bin Laden. So his criticism of McRaven is tasteless, ignorant and despicable.

I thought you might want to hear from Trump’s immediate predecessor, Barack Obama, how this huge event came to pass.

national news

How low can POTUS go?

It is fair to wonder about the depths of Donald J. Trump’s progression as a politician. To the point: Just how low is too low and how do we know if he has hit rock bottom?

I do not believe, based on the record of low points he has acquired to date, that we have found the bottom of the abyss.

My goodness, this individual has scored so many low points it’s hard to keep score. Some highlights/lowlights:

  • He said the late U.S. Sen. John McCain was a “war hero only because he was captured” during the Vietnam War.
  • Trump denigrated a Gold Star family because of their Arab ethnicity; their son, an Army officer, died in battle in Iraq. The parents had the temerity to criticize Trump during the Democratic National Convention in 2016.
  • Trump mocked a New York Times reporter, mimicking his actions caused by a severe neuromuscular disease.
  • The candidate admitted to a TV host that he grabbed women by their genitals because of his “celebrity” status.
  • Trump has lied repeatedly, gratuitously and without any sense of shame.
  • The president just recently criticized the Special Operations Command chief — retired Admiral William McRaven, a battle-tested SEAL — for failing to kill Osama bin Laden “much sooner” than commandos did.

I know I have missed some examples, but you get the idea.

One might surmise, probably correctly, that any one or two of those incidents would doom someone’s political aspirations. Donald Trump, though, not only has survived, he has managed to fire up his political base. The roughly 38 percent of Americans who stand by their man do so because he “tells it like it is,” or he sticks it in the establishment’s eye, or speaks their language.

What’s more, this guy doesn’t care that the rest of the country finds his statements, behavior and demeanor repugnant to the high office he occupies.

How low can this guy go? I think he’s got some more space to fall before he finds the bottom of the pit.

He once said he could “shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes.” I believe he is correct. Surely he knows better than to test that theory. Doesn’t he?

International news, military news

Trump ‘afraid’ to visit troops at war? Aw, c’mon!

Donald J. Trump has offered varying reasons for why he has yet to visit troops deployed in war zones.

He has too much to do at home. He’s too busy. He’s dealing with the so-called “witch hunt.” Then he said he doesn’t want the troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan in the first place.

Now comes a Washington Post item that suggests the president has a fear of harm that might come to him were he to venture into a war zone. As the Post reports: Trump has spoken privately about his fears over risks to his own life, according to a former senior White House official, who has discussed the issue with the president and spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly about Trump’s concerns.

“He’s never been interested in going,” the official said of Trump visiting troops in a combat zone, citing conversations with the president. “He’s afraid of those situations. He’s afraid people want to kill him.”

Come on, will ya? Didn’t the president say he would be willing to rush into a school where a shooter was gunning down innocent victims? He said that after the Parkland, Fla., massacre.

Hey, the president is fearless. That’s what he has told us!

national news

Trump wanted DOJ to prosecute Hillary and Comey? Wow!

Donald J. Trump won’t ever acknowledge it, but he well might owe a huge debt to a guy he managed to get pushed out of the White House, former White House counsel Don McGahn.

The New York Times is reporting that Trump wanted the Justice Department to prosecute Hillary Clinton and former FBI director James Comey, two Trump political foes.

McGahn, who left the counsel’s office this past month, reportedly said “no.” He then told the president he lacked the authority to initiate such a request. Moreover, he told Trump any such action might prove to be impeachable, if not illegal.

And so … the story gets weirder by the day.

What we have here, according to the NY Times, is a case of supreme abuse of power by the president of the United States against two people he detests. Hillary Clinton is on the president’s sh** list because she opposed him for president in 2016; Comey is there because he was investigating whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russians who attacked our electoral system and who declined to agree to a loyalty pledge to the president.

Do you think special counsel Robert Mueller — who took over the “Russia thing” probe after Comey was canned — is interested in this bombshell? I would bet yes. He is. Very interested.

As for McGahn, he might be emerging as a hero in this ongoing drama. He well might have saved Trump’s backside by refusing to knuckle under to his demand to seek a DOJ prosecution of Clinton and Comey. He also might emerge as a hero to those of us who believe he might have a serious story to tell Mueller about how the White House, how it ignores the rule of law, and how the president is driven by impulses he cannot control.

I believe we are witnessing this saga taking a seriously dangerous turn. It likely won’t be pretty.

International news

Stunt is coming to an end on the border

Thousands of active-duty American troops deployed to our southern border. They strung some razor wire, walked around with rifles on their shoulders. They waited for the “caravan” to arrive.

The migrants fleeing repression in Latin America are still en route, supposedly. But the troops are getting ready now to go back to where they are based.

What was the point of sending them to the border? It’s clear to a lot of us that the troops were part of “stunt” orchestrated by the commander in chief, Donald J. Trump.

The size of the “border security force” outnumbered the forces deployed each in Afghanistan and Iraq.

So they’re now getting ready to leave. The “caravan” might get here. It might not arrive. The “horde” comprises families: mothers, fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers and children. These are the folks who pose the existential threat to our national security? Please!

It’s also been an expensive stunt, costing billions of dollars we cannot afford to spend. Meanwhile, the fires are burning out of control in California and Donald Trump is yammering about “forest management practices” being the culprit for the tragedy that has ravaged the state.

I am astonished.

national news

Happy 93rd birthday, RFK

Robert F. Kennedy would have turned 93 today.

The late U.S. attorney general and U.S. senator from New York died 50 years ago at the hands of an assassin who shot him in a Los Angeles hotel kitchen after Bobby Kennedy had just won the California Democratic Party presidential primary.

He was 42 years of age when he died.

I have grieved ever since over that loss.

RFK was my first political hero, although I don’t like using the h-word when talking about politicians. They aren’t heroic figures any more than athletes are heroes.

I did admire him greatly.

But to think on this day that a young, ambitious politician died at an age that is younger than the younger of my two sons fills me with an odd sense of my own mortality.

We need a politician like RFK among us today. We are a nation divided by race, by social status, by partisan politics. Bobby Kennedy sought to elevate us above the divisions that ravaged the nation when he sought the presidency in 1968, that most turbulent of years.

It was Bobby who climbed aboard that flatbed truck in Indianapolis on April 4, 1968 and informed the crowd of mostly black supporters that “Martin Luther King was shot and killed.” The crowd gasped in horror. RFK then went on to call for “love” and “compassion for one another.”

As other major U.S. cities erupted in violence that night, Indianapolis remained calm.

I don’t know whether Robert Francis Kennedy would have attained the highest office in America had death not taken him that night. My heart tells me there was a path to the Democratic nomination and to election. But … that must remain for others’ speculation.

The nation lost a champion for humanity five decades ago.

Today, though, I want to salute the fellow who entered this world 93 years ago today and embarked on a too-brief journey in a quest to heal the wounds that harmed us.

Happy birthday, Bobby. Many millions of us still miss you.

Uncategorized

Trump once again undercuts our intelligence experts

Donald John Trump has a limitless array of weapons that he uses — against our own nation’s intelligence experts!

He deployed some of them again today by undercutting the CIA’s assessment that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman ordered the ghastly murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey.

Trump said in a highly unusual statement that he won’t take any action against the government of Saudi Arabia, despite what the CIA analysis has concluded. That’s right. He sides with another authoritarian leader, taking his word over the learned view expressed by some of the finest intelligence experts in the world.

I suppose the president had that $110 billion order for jet fighters that Saudi Arabia has placed with the Defense Department on his mind, too.

To be sure, the president called Khashoggi’s murder “terrible” and said it is an action that our country “does not condone.” He stopped short of joining the CIA assessment of the crown prince’s involvement.

Now, a word about the CIA and its current leadership.

Gina Haspel, a career spook and a former deep-cover agent, is Trump’s appointed CIA director. She is a highly trained professional who has spent her entire professional life working to protect this country against its enemies. Yes, she had some issues for which she had to answer when she was confirmed by the U.S. Senate, but I do not doubt her skill or her management ability in running the agency.

For the commander in chief to say, in effect, that the CIA is mistaken does the agency a disservice. Moreover, it disserves the search for the truth behind the slaughter of a U.S. resident who worked as a columnist for the Washington Post. Khashoggi’s final column, in fact, called on Saudi Arabia to exercise tolerance for those who disagree with government policy.

It is reasonable to presume that Khashoggi’s insistence on reforming Saudi government policies led to his hideous and ghastly murder.

The CIA concluded that the Saudi crown prince ordered Khashoggi’s assassination. The CIA is full of experts who know what they’re doing. The president, meanwhile, is full of delusions about his own instincts. He has chosen to give the Saudi government a pass on what the nation’s intelligence experts say it did to a journalist.

If only the president of the United States would take dead aim at the bad guys and quit undermining the good guys’ work on our behalf.