Tag Archives: Donald Trump

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Don’t demean your foes

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Hillary Clinton committed a potentially fatal mistake during her 2016 race for president against Donald J. Trump.

She referred to the MAGA cultists as “deplorables,” a description that energized the Trump voter base down the home stretch of a highly competitive contest.

My hone boy, Nicholas Kristoff of the New York Times, says it would be a terrible mistake to denigrate the 2024 version of the mob hangs on Trump’s every word.

Do not sell them short, Kristoff writes.

Good advice, Nick. The question always becomes, “Will the voting public buy into it? And will the Kamala Harris campaign staff treat the Trumpkins with the respect they deserve? Indeed, they deserve a lot.

Kristoff hails from the Yamhill Valley of Oregon, not far from my hometown of Portland. He writes for the New York Times these days and has earned his spurs for many years writing for the Old Gray Lady.

My fond hope is that Harris won’t commit the egregious rhetorical error that Clinton committed.

Kristoff writes: By all means denounce Trump, but don’t stereotype and belittle the nearly half of Americans who have sided with him.

Hillary Clinton learned that lesson the hard way. Kamala Harris no doubt is paying serious attention.

national news

RFK Jr. betrays his family

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Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. should be damn glad his father cannot emerge from the ground at Arlington National Cemetery and give his son the whoopin’ he has earned.

Kennedy decided to suspend his presidential campaign and then did the unthinkable: He endorsed the Republican Party’s twice-impeached, four-times-indicted, convicted felon nominee for president of the United States … Donald Trump.

Junior, the scion of the nation’s premier family of partisan Democrats, turned his back on the principles championed by his forebears, namely his father, Robert F. Kennedy, his uncles JFK and Sen. Edward Kennedy and a host of aunts, siblings and cousins.

I am scratching my noggin over this endorsement. So help me, it makes zero sense.

RFK Jr. long has fancied himself as a man of action. He developed a nice environmental law practice and has been at the forefront of environmental causes almost since his graduation from law school. Trump doesn’t give a rat’s rear end about the environment.

And yet RFK Jr. is now backing the disgraced former POTUS.

What does RFK Jr.’s endorsement mean in terms of the election outcome? Probably not enough to matter. I won’t waste any time seeking to evaluate that particular consequence.

I only can imagine what Junior’s sainted mother, Ethel, must be thinking as she watches her son spit in the face of her beloved husband and throw his support behind a moron who stands before the nation and the world as the Republicans’ only nominee ever convicted of multiple felonies.

I may never catch my breath over this one!

Donald Trump

How is this contest still close?

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I consider myself to be reasonably well-educated, with above-average intelligence, one who is still alert at my advanced age and who has a deep love of the country of my birth.

OK, now … someone will have to explain to me how a twice-impeached former POTUS who wants his old job back is still in the race to win the 2024 election.

Bear with me while I review where we stand.

He served a single disastrous term as president; he lost re-election in 2020; he had been impeached twice by the House for high crimes and misdemeanors. He then was convicted on 34 felony criminal counts, found liable in the sexual assault of a journalist. Federal and state grand juries in four jurisdictions have indicted him on a range of alleged criminal acts, including the Jan. 6 assault on the government that sought to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

All the while, he has hurled insults at veterans, Gold Star families, immigrants, gay people, women of all stripes, a physically challenged reporter for the New York Times and admitted to grabbing women by their private parts because he’s a “celebrity.”

These issues don’t even touch the myriad cluster-fu** acts that he committed as POTUS.

We fired this guy four years ago. We told him he wasn’t fit the job he had. Now he wants it back.

How in the name of all that is sacred, holy and sane does this add up?

I’m sure some High Plains Blogger critics will see fit to tell me I don’t get it. They are right.

I don’t.

national news, political news

Yep. the man is unfit

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Dawn  finally is breaking over the pundit class that is covering the third presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump.

Ever since he announced his bid for the presidency the first time in 2015, some of us have been saying that Trump’s zero experience with public service would render him unfit for the presidency. Now, others are seeing the proverbial light.

Consider what the numbskull said about those who receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and how it compares to the Medal of Honor. He put them on an equal footing, suggesting further that the Medal of Freedom is “more important” because Medal of Honor recipients “always are wounded” and some have died to earn the recognition.

What an absolute crock of bull dookie!

The Medal of Freedom is the nation’s highest civilian honor; it goes to those who contribute greatly to our cultural life, through athletics, art, music, drama. The Medal of Honor is our nation’s top military honor; it is awarded to those who perform heroically on the battlefield.

Both medals are big deals.

However, for the former POTUS to put down Medal of Honor recipients because they are “wounded or killed” betrays a profound lack of understanding or appreciation of those don the nation’s uniform in service to their country.

It also reveals what I have noted many times on this blog, which is that Trump never has committed a single moment of his existence on this Earth to public service.

I am running out of ways to say this … but this moron is unfit for public office at any level, let alone as commander in chief.

national news, political news

GOP has no governing platform

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Anyone who believes today’s Republican Party has a governing platform that is worth a damn needs to pay careful attention to what is being reported all around the world.

It is that the GOP is — and has been — the exclusive property of a one-time real estate developer and a former TV “reality show” host who in 2016 stumbled into the U.S. presidency.

Put another way, Donald J. Trump has no policy, no guiding principles, no moral compass to guide him. He makes policy up as he goes along and that “policy,” and I use the term with an abundance of caution, somehow becomes the policy of the MAGA cult that is running the once-great political party.

Democratic nominee Kamala Harris is on the verge of unveiling her economic policy. She will present it perhaps before Democrats meet next week in Chicago to send her into the fight with Trump as their party’s nominee.

I met someone today who expressed support for the “Republican Party platform.” I answered that the party “doesn’t have one.” This individual wouldn’t buy that idea. We changed the subject.

This is the kind of stubborn notion that is so damn hard to expunge from Republicans’ noggins.

Of course, this all ignores the deep moral failings that Trump has exhibited his entire adult life.

I have been impressed by the rant offered by Democratic VP nominee Tim Walz, who reminds us that “public service” is a foreign concept to Trump. I have been saying since the day his political career began that Trump has spent his entire professional life focused on one thing: enriching himself. He purports to be a populist but doesn’t give a damn about the millions of disenfranchised Americans who need a real champion, not one who portrays himself as a populist on the campaign stump.

So, when Republicans tout their party platform, they should add a caveat that reminds us that it’s all a creation of Donald Trump’s demented mind.

national news

Who’s lost his mind?

All that idiocy about whether President Biden’s butter has slipped off his noodle seemingly ignored a more critical issue facing voters in this presidential election year.

It is whether the guy nominated by the Republican Party has flipped his wig, gone ’round the bend, booked a one-way ticket to la-la land.

Biden resolved the issue about whether he was a drag on the Democratic ticket by stepping away from his re-election bid. He handed the frontrunner mantle to Vice President Kamala Harris, whose rollout was flawless; she has picked an outstanding running mate in Tim Walz and the two of them have been wowing the faithful ever since.

Then comes this nugget of nonsense from Donald Trump: He accuses Harris and Walz of faking the huge crowd sizes at all those rallies through the use of artificial intelligence. Yep, those thousands of cheering partisans were AI creations. They weren’t real, according to the Madman in Chief.

I don’t know what part of that moronic declaration is most astonishing.

  • That Trump would say it out loud.
  • That he would believe anyone would take it seriously.
  • That millions of Americans would swallow that bait.

I’ll go with all three.

The Republican Party nominee for POTUS has lost his mind.

economic news

Harris, Trump agree? Wow!

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Who’da thunk this could happen, that Vice President Kamala Harris and Donald J. Trump would agree on a significant public policy issue?

Both candidates for POTUS agree that service workers who rely on tips shouldn’t have to be taxed on that portion of their income.

Trump tossed the idea out there first. Harris has followed suit. Trump, though, is contending that Harris “stole” the idea from him and is trying to win favor with voters by casting this notion as her own.

Holy taxman!

I happen to agree that tip income need not be taxed. If you’re working as a server in a restaurant, you’re already earning something below the national minimum wage. Tips are meant to supplement the meager wage these folks are earning.

Harris wants to take the issue a step further. She wants to increase the minimum wage to $15 per hour, something that Trump opposes. Spoiler alert: I support Harris’s idea.

But really, there’s no “theft” involved in one candidate endorsing an idea pitched by an opponent. Then again, I tend to believe Donald Trump is going to take a lot more credit that he doesn’t deserve on issues that Harris endorses along the way.

national news

Trump challenges Harris’s ethnicity? What the … ?

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Who in this world of ours does Donald J. Trump think he’s bamboozling?

The Republican presidential nominee today sat before the National Association of Black Journalists and said — and you can’t make this stuff up — that Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris only recently identified herself as Black. It was his crass and boorish manner in which he actually questioned whether the vice president of the United States is who she has contended she is for as long as anyone can remember.

What the hell is the matter with this idiot?

Harris is the product of a Black father and an Indian mother. That means she is the first VP of Black and South Asian descent.

Trump’s cowardly attack, of course, drew the expected response from Harris, who in a few days will accept the Democratic nomination for president. She told a rally crowd in Atlanta, “If you’re going to say something about me, say it to my face!”

That was Harris’s way of challenging Trump’s waffling on his pledge to debate the Democratic candidate on Sept. 10. He and his campaign agreed to do so. Now he’s chickening out.

Just as Trump sought to foment the lie in 2008 about Barack Obama’s birthplace, questioning whether the future president was eligible to run for the office, he has launched yet another chickensh** effort to cast aspersions on another rival’s ethnicity.

This individual’s cowardice simply takes my breath away.

Joe Biden, national news, political news

Does Joe stay … or go?

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My mind has been flip-flopping like a fish out of water on the issue of President Biden’s viability as a presidential candidate in 2024.

I believe I have reached a conclusion on this matter, so I will share it with you right now.

The president needs to step aside. He needs to hand the top spot on the Democratic ticket to Vice President Kamala Harris, who needs then to find a suitable running mate to carry the fight forward against Donald Trump and J.D. Vance.

I will offer only one caveat. If the president stays in, I’ll be with him until hell freezes over. Which ain’t gonna happen.

The foremost issue must be to keep Donald Trump from darkening the Oval Office’s door ever again.

I have been watching many of VP Harris’s speeches over the past few days and to my aging but still perceptive ears, she has found her voice. One hears no quiver in her voice. She is certain on where she stands and she delivers her views with vigor and conviction. The vice president relies heavily on her years as a prosecutor, telling cheering audiences, “Let’s look at the facts.”

When I watch the vice president recite chapter and verse how Trump and Vance are wrong, on, say, women’s reproductive rights, I see a stand-up champion. When she talks about how the GOP talks out of both sides of its mouth on seeking “unity,” I see a fierce fighter.

Sadly, the Joe Biden I grew to admire from his first days in the US Senate — the ferocious and occasionally garrulous advocate he became — no longer exists. Make no mistake, though, on this key point: Joe Biden has been one of the better presidents of the past century and he accomplished plenty during his time in office. He will leave office, whether this coming January or in January 2029, with his head held high.

However … the Democratic Party leadership is bailing on him. The source of the money the party will need to defeat Trump has dried up. President Biden should step aside.

Joe Biden chose well when he picked Kamala Harris to run with him in 2020. It’s her turn now.

Donald Trump

What has happened to us?

You want any graphic example of just how topsy-turvy the US political system has become? Look at what is happening in Milwaukee this very evening.

Republican convention delegates have nominated a former POTUS who was impeached twice during his term in office, who is accused of instigating an attack on our government and of trying to overturn a free and fair election, who has been convicted of 34 felony counts, is indicted on four additional felonies, been deemed liable for the rape of a woman and has admitted to being a sexual assailant.

What’s more, GOP delegates are standing tall, firm and foursquare behind Donald Trump. They are united behind this man’s candidacy.

Meanwhile, Democratic political leaders are turning on the incumbent president, Joe Biden, because of a poor debate performance, many of them calling on him to forgo his re-election campaign. They are splintered and Biden is in actual danger of losing the election to the guy he defeated four years ago.

Many of us who have been around long enough remember earlier times when we wondered whether our system could survive tempest and tumult.

But …. nothing like this!

I am at a total loss to understand what has happened to my beloved United States of America.