Let me get this straight: The stock market tanks and Donald Trump blames former President Biden for it.
The market then rallies big time … and Trump is silent.
No love for Biden. Why is that? Does the former president deserve to be showered with praise? No. Not really.
The point, though, is that Trump’s hair-trigger is far too quick to dish out criticism while his so-called kinder side just cannot be motivated to hand out a word of praise.
He’s a weirdo, man.
Right-wingers’ vendetta against public radio and television would be laughable … if the consequences of this battle weren’t so frightening.
They want to defund National Public Radio, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Public Broadcasting Service. Why? Because they contend erroneously that it’s all “fake,” that it’s biased against conservatives and that the right-wing cabal just won’t tolerate it any longer.
Good fu**ing grief!
In in the interest of full disclosure, I will say I have some experience working for both public media. I freelanced for Panhandle PBS and for High Plains Public Radio for a time after leaving print journalism in 2012. And I worked for a time for KETR-FM public radio in Commerce, Texas, for a while after my wife and I moved to the Metroplex.
I have seen their work up close and I can attest to the absolute professionalism I witnessed while working for them.
I long have held the view that bias rests in the hearts and minds of news consumers, not necessarily in those who deliver it.
I recall a conversation I had with an NPR news director once who explained to me the rules that the broadcast network places on those who deliver the news over the air. They must avoid terms, he said, that connote a point of view. One of those words, he explained, is “reform.”
When discussing legislation aimed at changing current public policy, NPR journalists were told to use the term “overhaul” policy, not “reform” it, as reformation means it would be an improvement.
My friend was quite adamant in telling me that public radio takes its responsibility to be fair, neutral and unbiased quite seriously.
What’s more, I have to point out that the founders protected a “free press” from government interference. They set those protections for the only industry functioning then — and now — in the Constitution.
The right-wing cabal needs to get a grip and perhaps look inward to determine the source of the bias it seeks to eliminate.
National security adviser Mike Waltz has been shown the door by Donald J. Trump for his role in the leak of sensitive material via a social media platform.
Hey, I’m good with it. Trump needed to get him the hell out of there.
But … wait a second. What about the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, the clown Trump appointed to run the Pentagon and who also, by the way, is involved up to his armpits in the same matter that befell Waltz?
Trump has surrounded himself with ignorant boobs, buffoons and misfits. Chief among must be Hegseth, the former Fox talk show host who got elevated to run the world’s most lethal military operation. Watch him today, and you get the impression he still is pandering to a right-wing TV audience while discussing military policy matters … of which he knows not a damn thing.
Waltz got caught sending material out via a social media platform. It was highly classified material. The same kind of material that Hegseth blabbed about to his wife and other family members.
Trump once boasted in 2016 while forming the executive branch of government that he would hire “the best people.” It didn’t happen then and it hasn’t happened this time around. He hired an education secretery, Linda McMahon, who recently confused AI, shorthand for artificial intelligence, with “A-1,” a brand of steak sauce.
Robert Kennedy Jr., a premier conspiracy theorist and vaccine denier, now runs the Health and Human Services Department, and is threatening to endanger the lives of children and teenagers throughout the world.
Now, Trump has declared he “runs the government and the world.” Huh? Yeah. He said that. Except that he runs only one third of the federal government, the one lined out in the Constitution as the excutive branch.
I’m glad Mike Waltz is no longer providing national security advice to the Numbskull in Chief. He’s only one of many who need to go.
My late parents departed this Earth long before Donald J. Trump burst onto the nation’s political scene.
Dad was gone in 1980; Mom died four years later. Neither of them had the displeasure of suffering from the whims and machinations of this truly bizarre individual. Still, I think about them every day even without having to attach their names to what they might be thinking about what the current president is doing to our economy and to our standing in the world.
I’ll be candid on assessing their analytical skills. Dad wasn’t much of a critical thinker. He relied on his gut. A side of me actually thinks he might have been impressed by Trump’s phony bravado. Dad was a proud World War II veteran, though, and my hope is that he would be repulsed by Trump’s blatant disrespect for those of us who did don the uniform of our country.
Mom, however, was a much deeper thinker than Dad. I will presume that she would be aghast at Trump’s homophobia, his racism, lack of empathy and compassion, his boasting of business skills when he’s run every endeavor he’s ever touched into the ground.
Therefore, on these matters, I am much more my mother’s son than I am a part of Dad.
They’re no longer around and I shudder to think how they would respond to what is unfolding during this second Donald Trump turn as POTUS.
I shudder, indeed, at how Dad might be cheering the charlatan on as he lies through his teeth. More importantly, though, I shudder at how Mom would respond to this individual’s overall unfitness for the nation’s highest and most honored public office.