Trump's Cult "Voting For Its Own Impoverishment"

Nobel Prize laureate Paul Krugman's column this morning in the New York Times explores the continuing economic decline of Trumpland: the areas of the country that strongly support con artist and demagogue Donald "Rump" Trump and are losing. His cynical campaign promises to revive the coal, steel and aluminum industries won't bring those industries or the jobs back, nor will a trade war with China. Krugman notes:

"Things have been falling apart on multiple fronts since the 1970s: Political polarization has marched side by side with economic polarization, as income inequality has soared.

And both political and economic polarization have a strong geographic dimension. On the economic side, some parts of America, mainly big coastal cities, have been getting much richer, but other parts have been left behind. On the political side, the thriving regions by and large voted for Hillary Clinton, while the lagging regions voted for Donald Trump."

Much of the problem is based on poorly educated workforces in those regions, which haven't adjusted to the new economy. The regions that have attracted industries that require highly educated workers are doing better than those that don't, and higher educated workers bring higher wages, which bring better better schools and quality of life for their communities. But these poorer regions repeatedly elect Rethuglicans that are doing them harm:

"Many of the states that have refused to expand Medicaid, even though the federal government would foot the great bulk of the bill — and would create jobs in the process — are also among America’s poorest.

Or consider how some states, like Kansas and Oklahoma — both of which were relatively affluent in the 1970s, but have now fallen far behind — have gone in for radical tax cuts, and ended up savaging their education systems. External forces have put them in a hole, but they’re digging it deeper.

And when it comes to national politics, let’s face it: Trumpland is in effect voting for its own impoverishment. New Deal programs and public investment played a significant role in the great postwar convergence; conservative efforts to downsize government will hurt people all across America, but it will disproportionately hurt the very regions that put the G.O.P. in power" (emphasis added)

That's the price of not paying attention as a citizen (or in class) and getting played over wedge issues and lies.

Friends And Enemies

In the past few days, we've seen unhinged sociopath Donald "Rump" Trump act out his inner fears and demons without the input of staff to influence his behavior. We've sorted his recent "unshackled" actions according to "friends" and "enemies."

First, friends. His obvious and fearful subservience to Russian thug and assassin Vladimir Putin was borne out in his stealthy invitation for Putin to visit the White (Supremacist) House (interestingly as first reported by Russian media). This, in the wake of the attempted assassination of a former Russian agent in England , Russia's continued participation in genocide with Assad's regime in Syria, and expulsions of Russian intelligence agents from the U.S. The signal Rump's sending to Putin is that there's no amount of calumny on the part of the Kremlin that will cause their Oval Office asset to break with them. The "DO NOT CONGRATULATE" imbroglio was typical of Rump's obstinate  loyalty to Putin and his circle of wealthy oligarchs / banks who have kept Rump's business afloat when others abandoned him. (You can almost hear him pleading with Putin, "please don't cancel your loans and line of credit to me...please!!).

Second, enemies. In addition to Rump's usual punching bags like immigrants and the media, Rump has been singling out Amazon of late for his Twitter tantrums. He would like us to believe that it's all about Amazon having an unfair advantage over Main Street businesses (a choice by consumers) and cheating the USPS, a false charge since the USPS profits from Amazon's package business (it's first class mail that's experiencing decline). As with many things Rump, Amazon is the placeholder for who he's really going after: founder and mega billionaire Jeff Bezos, who also owns Rump's nemesis the Washington Post, and whose much greater wealth Rump is envious of. Amazon's stock fell yesterday after Rump's tweeted threats, a sinister and obvious abuse of power that we hope is met by a legal rebuff by Amazon, joined by others. Or Bezos could follow former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara's suggestion:

What if Jeff Bezos bought Twitter with the change in his pocket and shut Trump's account?

— Preet Bharara (@PreetBharara) April 3, 2018

Today's Cartoon Threefer

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(Steve Sack, Minneapolis Star Tribune)


(Jeff Darcy, Cleveland Plain Dealer)


(Jim Morin, Miami Herald)

Trump's Easter Ranting And Cabinet Turmoil

Seth Meyers took "A Closer Look" at the not- so- tippy- top shape of malignant dumbass Donald "Rump" Trump's assministration:

Cover Of The Week - What A Greedy Pig

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Here's the article by Jonathan Chait, positing that corruption, not Russia, is Trump's greatest liability.  It's the self- dealing, stupid!

Chait concludes by telling Democrats they just need to tell a simple story for November 2018--

 ...Trump represented himself as a rich man feared by the business elite. He had spent much of his life buying off politicians and exploiting the system, so he knew how the system worked and could exploit that knowledge on behalf of the people. In fact, his experiences with bribery opened his eyes to what further extortion might be possible. Trump was never looking to blow up the system. He was simply casing the joint.

And 62 million suckers bought it.

At Least He Didn't Talk About His Hands

Today was the traditional Easter festivities and egg roll at the White (Supremacist) House, presided over by degenerate adulterer and demagogue Donald "Rump" Trump and his sorry spouse. As he is wont to do, Rump made it all about himself to the bewildered children who were there for the colored eggs and candy, speaking to them from the South Portico balcony and channeling Mussolini:

"Our military is now at a level, will soon be at a level it has never been before. So many military people are with us today. So just think of $700 billion, because that's all going into our military this year.”

Here's the pic of military genius Cadet Bone Spurs yapping incoherently to the unimpressed kids about how much he's spending on the military:

screen cap, CBS News

Thought balloons:

Mrs. Rump: (What if he falls off the balcony after a quick nudge? #%@$#@ unprotected sex with Stormy and Karen.....grrrrrrrr, goodbye pre-nup!) 
Easter Bunny: (Just because I'm his second son Eric doesn't mean I should play the bunny.... I wonder if these glasses make me look smart? Uh oh, I think I just made a doody...)

Is Scott Pruitt's Toxic EPA Tenure About To End?

No less an expert in scandals than former New Jersey Gov. Chris "Krispycreme" Christie opined on the fate of EPA Administrator mortician Scott "Swamp Thang" Pruitt after only his most recent ethical/ legal fail:

CHRISTIE: Listen, I don't know how you survive this one. And if he has to go, it's because he never should have been there in the first place.

"[T]his one" refers to Swamp Thang's sweetheart Capitol Hill townhouse rental from the wife of a lobbyist for the only liquefied natural gas plant in the U.S.  Liquefied natural gas is odorless, so what's that smell, you ask:

[T]he first sign of trouble came when Pruitt took a first-class trip to Morocco late last year – it cost $40,000 and you paid for it – in order to have the EPA chief pitch “the potential benefit of liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports on Morocco’s economy.” 

Why the head of the EPA would make economic energy recommendations to foreign countries was unclear. The answer, however, soon after seemed to come into focus.

The only LNG export plant in the country hired a lobbyist, and Scott Pruitt lived in a Capitol Hill condo – for $50 a night, far below market value – in the Capitol Hill home owned by the lobbyist’s wife. (our emphasis)

Someone posing as an "ethics" official at EPA has said this was all above board because, yes, if you pro rated the $50 across a 30- day month, it would have been $1,500 -- "fair market rate!" * That may seem like a princely sum to most, but on Capitol Hill, that wouldn't be fair market rate for a doghouse (fleas negotiable).  Here's a pic of the place that could be had for $50 a day, if you're an EPA Administrator willing to shill for your landlady's husband's business:


(via ABC News)

Swamp Thang is nothing if not a serial abuser. Media Matters has a helpful timeline of Pruitt's scandals prior to to rentgate.  Here are a few lowlights:

February 24, 2017, KOKH: Pruitt lied to senators about his use of a private email account. An investigation by Oklahoma City Fox affiliate KOKH revealed that Pruitt lied during his Senate confirmation hearing when he said he did not use a private email account to conduct official business while he was attorney general of Oklahoma, a finding later confirmed by the office of the attorney general. The Oklahoma Bar Association subsequently opened an investigation into the matter, which could lead to Pruitt being disbarred in the state of Oklahoma. [snip] 

August 28, 2017, E&E News: Pruitt gave a Superfund job to a failed banker whose bank had given loans to Pruitt. In May, Pruitt appointed Albert “Kell” Kelly to head a task force on the EPA’s Superfund program, even though Kelly had been fined $125,000 by federal banking regulators and banned for life from banking activity because of misdeeds committed when he was CEO of Oklahoma-based SpiritBank. Kelly had no previous experience working on environmental issues and, as ThinkProgress reported in February 2018, he had a financial stake in Phillips 66, an oil company that the EPA had deemed responsible for contaminating areas in Louisiana and Oregon. In previous years, Kelly’s bank had given a loan to Pruitt to purchase a share in a minor league baseball team and provided acquisition financing when the team was sold. The bank had also provided three mortgage loans to Pruitt and his wife, as The Intercept reported in December. [snip] 

September 26, 2017, Wash. Post: Pruitt spent almost $25,000 on a private soundproof booth. The EPA spent nearly $25,000 to construct a secure, soundproof communications booth in Pruitt’s office, even though there was another such booth on a different floor at EPA headquarters. No previous EPA administrators had such a setup, the Post reported. UPDATE: On March 14, the Post reported that the EPA spent more than $18,000 on the prep work required to install Pruitt’s booth, which put the booth’s total cost “closer to $43,000.” [snip] 

February 11, 2018, Wash. Post: Pruitt spent $90,000 on first-class flights and other travel in a single week. During a stretch in early June, Pruitt racked up at least $90,000 in taxpayer-funded travel costs, including first-class, business-class, and military flights. The figure did not include the cost of Pruitt’s round-the-clock security detail accompanying him on those trips. One first-class flight was for an overnight trip to New York, where Pruitt made two media appearances to praise Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris agreement. According to the Post, “[EPA] records show that wherever Pruitt’s schedule takes him, he often flies first or business class, citing unspecified security concerns.” The chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Trey Gowdy (R-SC), demanded documentation and explanation for Pruitt’s first- and business-class work travel, but Pruitt missed the chairman’s March 6 deadline to turn over documents. 

February 13, 2018, CBS News: Pruitt flew luxury business class on a foreign airline. Pruitt broke with government rules requiring employees to fly on U.S. carriers. He got a waiver to return home from Milan, Italy, in June on Emirates Airline in what CBS described as “one of the world’s most luxurious business class cabins.”

And that's only a small sample of what Swamp Thang has been up to, mis- using taxpayer dollars, gutting environmental laws and regulations, all the while selling himself (and us) to the highest bidder.  He'd have been "locked up" long ago in a "normal" administration. But, in President Spanky's, he's par for the course.

(* As friend P.E.C. clarifies in the comments, Swamp Thang only paid the $50 on nights he spent in the townhouse - such a deal!)

(Photo:  EPA's Howdy Doody Swamp Thang)

Monday Reading

As always, please go to the links below for the full articles.

You asked for a trade war, you got it!

China is moving forward with its plan to counter President Donald Trump's new tariffs on steel and aluminum, levying duties that will take effect Monday on more than $3 billion in U.S. exports to the country. 

In a statement Sunday, the Chinese government said it would impose the retaliatory tariffs on 128 products, according to an informal translation. 

China will impose a 15 percent tariff increase on goods including American fruit and nuts and add a 25 percent tariff on pork, recycled aluminum and other goods, the government said.

Supporters of nitwit bull(shitter)- in- a- China- shop Donald "Rump" Trump (a.k.a. President Spanky) in central valley California (fruit and nuts) and Iowa (pork) will soon be learning a hard lesson, one on which we're hard pressed to sympathize.

Rump to Putin:  Come see what you've bought!

President Trump told Russian President Vladimir Putin that the two leaders could meet in the White House, a Kremlin aide told Russian media Monday, Russian news agencies said.

But, he heard sumpin' sumpin' on "Fox & Friends," so it must be true!

With a trio of temperamental tweets on Easter Sunday and three follow-ups this morning, Trump announced there will be no deal to save the 700,000 “dreamers” whose futures he put in peril by ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. He also called on Republicans to change the rules of the Senate to pass anti-immigration legislation with a simple majority and threatened to kill the North American Free Trade Agreement if Mexico does not step up border security. 

The president then falsely claimed that there are “big flows of people” who are sneaking into the United States “because they want to take advantage of DACA.” 

In truth, to be eligible for the program created by Barack Obama, immigrants must have lived in the United States since 2007, have arrived in the country before they turned 16 and have been younger than 31 on June 15, 2012. Anyone who came after does not qualify. 

It was Rump's way of saying "Happy Easter!"

From mindless to "a beautiful mind."

The life of renowned physicist and author Stephen Hawking was celebrated Saturday in English city of Cambridge, with hundreds of well-wishers lining the streets for a glimpse of the hearse carrying his remains to a private funeral.

Hawking will be interred in Westminster Abbey, near the remains of Sir Isaac Newton.

Last but never least, check out Infidel's link round-up, where you can get links to rabbits in the movies, the on- going failings of "Christians," innovative transport (hilarious), and how creative people see the world (among many, many interesting links).

Sinclair Broadcasting's Orwellian Move

You'll be seeing a lot of this video, courtesy of Deadspin, in the next hours and days. It's a mashup of news anchors from dozens of TV stations owned by the right-wing Sinclair Broadcasting Group, reading an identical script that could have been written by demagogue and would-be autocrat Donald "Rump" Trump with the references to "media bias" and fake news. Sinclair has become a favorite of the White (Supremacist) House for their unabashed support of Rump's agenda, and they're looking to add another 40 stations to their empire of nearly 200 TV stations, courtesy of a partisan, Rumpian Federal Communications Commission. The stations could have had a printed version shown onscreen, with a voice over, but they chose to involve their anchors reading the canned statement, to the "journalists'" lasting embarassment.



BONUS: One local "journalist" reading the script (1:07 mark) is Autria Godfrey of ABC7 in Washington who was arrested last year for public intoxication and trespassing at a Northern Virginia nightspot. Highest standards, indeed.

BONUS II:  Charles Pierce has some thoughts worth reading about this latest right- wing degradation of the free press. Now, that's extremely dangerous to our democracy!

Today's Tomorrow Cartoon: Unbelievable

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In the White (Supremacist) House with Dear Leader.

Hey, maybe Laura "The Shrieker" Ingraham can be the new janitor there.....

(cartoon: Tom Tomorrow)

Across The Universe, Cont. -- The Galaxy With No Dark Matter

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From NASA/ ESA, March 28, 2018:  NGC 1052-DF2 resides about 65 million light-years away in the NGC 1052 Group, which is dominated by a massive elliptical galaxy called NGC 1052.

This large, fuzzy-looking galaxy is so diffuse that astronomers can clearly see distant galaxies behind it. This ghostly galaxy is not well-formed. It does not look like a typical spiral galaxy, but it does not look like an elliptical galaxy either. Based on the colours of its globular clusters, the galaxy is about 10 billion years old. However, even the globular clusters are strange: they are twice as large as typical groups of stars.

All of these oddities pale in comparison to the weirdest aspect of this galaxy: NGC 1052-DF2 is missing most, if not all, of its dark matter. The galaxy contains only a tiny fraction of dark matter that astronomers would expect for a galaxy this size. But how it formed is a complete mystery.

Hubble took this image on 16 November 2017 using its Advanced Camera for Surveys.  (our emphasis)

Credit: NASA, ESA, and P. van Dokkum (Yale University)

BONUS:  Scientific American has more --

A galaxy without dark matter—or without some bizarre effect of gravity that would mimic dark-matter behavior—would be a very weird thing indeed. Finding such a thing would be like finding smoke but no fire, effect without cause. Yet that is what Yale University astronomer Pieter van Dokkum and his colleagues have just found, they report in a study published Wednesday in Nature. 

The galaxy, called NGC 1052-DF2, is about 65 million light years away. It is almost as big as the Milky Way but is “ultra-diffuse,” meaning it contains just a vanishing fraction of the stars found in our galaxy—only 1 percent, in this case. That stellar sparseness means it does not look much like a typical spiral galaxy, but rather a loosely connected, ghostly blob of star-pocked gas and dust. If it contained an amount of dark matter typical for a galaxy of its size, the dark matter’s gravity would hasten the motions of several star clusters that surround it. Instead, van Dokkum’s team found those star clusters moving languidly around NGC 1052-DF2, a sign that there may well be very little or no dark matter within that galaxy at all. That suggests dark matter can be decoupled not only from regular, visible matter, but from entire galaxies—a phenomenon astronomers have never seen until now.

Please read the full article to see why this has shaken up assumptions and theories about gravity and dark matter in the universe.

The Idolators And Their Idol On Easter

Degenerate sociopath and sexual abuser Donald "Rump" Trump and his lame wife made a show of going to Easter services earlier today near his tacky residence, Mar-A-Lago. He used the opportunity outside the church not to deliver a message of tolerance and joy. Instead, Rump, who personifies everything that Christians are supposed to reject, slammed immigrants and Dreamers in particular. Earlier, the Twitter twit had a tirade about "no more DACA", killing NAFTA to punish Mexico, and pushing his illusory, 17th century technology wall.

In addition to a sermon on Rump's continual commission of the seven deadly sins, the church's minister should have treated Rump to something from Matthew 25: 35-40:

35 For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, 36 I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ 37 Then the righteous will answer him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? 38 And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? 39 And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’ 40 And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’

The hypocritical farce of sanctimonious white "evangelical" right-wingers twisting themselves into pretzels and enthusiastically embracing this lying, corrupt fraud may account for their dwindling credibility. Their leadership has long been  comprised of partisan Rethuglican hacks (e.g., Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed, Franklin Graham, etc.) who clothe themselves in religious trappings, selective texts and the gospel that greed is good. They resemble their idol Rump in more ways than one, and seem to spend more time at political events and on Fox than in church.

So for those of you who are religious, observe this betrayal of your faith on Easter Sunday, and reject it publicly and often.

Forecast: Expect Clear Skies, Falling Object (UPDATED)

Sometime later tonight to early Monday morning, an 8.5 ton piece of Chinese space junk will reenter the atmosphere and crash to earth. The Tiangong 1 space station is expected to crash in a band 43 degrees north to 43 degrees south, meaning most of the U.S., China, Africa, South America and Australia are in the wide path. Scientists say that the reentry burn-up will destroy about 90% of the spacecraft, which would still leave 1,700 pounds of bad news coming down for a surprise landing.

Heads up!

UPDATE:  Most of the surviving space junk landed in the Pacific, so you can resume your normal activities!

It's Easter, It's A Parade!

What's Easter without a trip down memory lane with Irving Berlin's "Easter Parade," MGM's 1948 classic with Judy Garland and Fred Astaire? Here's the closing scene.

Easter Sunday Reflection

Easter has become the Evangelical winter solstice.

It’s that date on which professions of faith and the actual practice of that faith are the farthest apart.

— The Hoarse Whisperer (@HoarseWisperer) March 29, 2018

BONUS:  Today's accompanying text.