One More Year of Trump

Top Ten Quotes of 2019

1. “I would like you to do us a favor, though.” — President Donald Trump, memorandum of telephone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskiy, July 25.

2. “We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. And all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!” — environmental activist Greta Thunberg, speech at United Nations Climate Action Summit, New York, Sept. 23.

3. “When we’re dancing with the angels, the question will be asked: ‘In 2019, what did we do to make sure we kept our democracy intact? Did we stand on the sidelines and say nothing?’” — U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings, closing statement at public hearing of Michael Cohen before House of Representatives Oversight Committee, Feb. 27.

4. “I would rather be dead in a ditch” than ask the European Union for a delay in Brexit — U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, remarks at police training center in Wakefield, England, Sept. 5.

5. “The Prime Minister’s advice to Her Majesty was unlawful, void and of no effect.” — Supreme Court of the United Kingdom President Brenda Hale, Baroness Hale of Richmond, judgment in case of R (Miller) v. The Prime Minister, Sept. 24.

6. “If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.” — Special Counsel Robert Mueller, remarks at the Department of Justice, May 29.

7. “I have a plan for that.” — Sen. Elizabeth Warren, remarks at “She the People” forum, Houston, April 24.

8. “Poor kids are just as bright, just as talented, as white kids.” — Presidential candidate Joe Biden, remarks to Asian and Latino Coalition, Des Moines, Iowa, Aug. 8.

9. “I’m very happy (being single). I call it being self-partnered.” — actress Emma Watson, interview in British Vogue, December 2019.

10. “It’s like a manhood thing for him. As if manhood could ever be associated with him. This wall thing." — Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, to the Democratic Caucus, January 3, 2019

Bloomberg's History of Misogyny Coming Back to Bite Him in the Ass

News of former New York mayor and current Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg’s consistent sexist comments come as no surprise to many readers, as Bloomberg has repeatedly faced allegations of sexist behavior over the course of his career. One allegation in specific made national headlines when Bloomberg was accused of telling an employee who announced she was pregnant to “kill it.” The allegation arose in a discrimination lawsuit that was settled outside of court with an undisclosed amount. 


According to court records reviewed by ABC News, at least 17 women have taken action against Bloomberg L.P., his privately held financial, software, data, and media company. ABC reports the company has developed a “frat-like” culture due to Bloomberg’s use of sexual comments including "I’d like to do that piece of meat," and "I would DO you in a second” (those quotes were taken from court documents). Three cases specifically blame Bloomberg for his role in the company’s culture. However, none of the cases made it to trial, ABC News reported.


Earlier this year, Bloomberg seemed to realize how his comments could affect his candidacy. He issued an apology through his spokesman in a piece for The New York Times, in which members of his team called his comments toward women wrong and disrespectful.

“Mike has come to see that some of what he has said is disrespectful and wrong,” Bloomberg spokesman Stu Loeser said in a statement last month. “He believes his words have not always aligned with his values and the way he has led his life.”

Trump Sticks It To Puerto Rico Yet Again

Congress was all set to do something bipartisan to help people in Puerto Rico … and then Donald Trump got wind of it and insisted it dial it back.

Republicans and Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the Senate Finance Committee had negotiated $12 billion in Medicaid funding over four years for Puerto Rico as part of the government spending package that passed last week.  Politico reports, though, that Trump wasn’t having it.  He said that was too much—for Puerto Rico, anyway, which he clearly doesn’t believe is really part of the United States—and forced Congress to cut the aid down to two years and $5.7 billion.

According to a White House spokesperson, it’s a “win for President Trump and the American people.”  Because, again, Trump doesn’t believe that Puerto Ricans count as part of the American people, despite their citizenship.  In reality, the effect is that, “With another funding cliff looming in two years under the new agreement, Puerto Rico may continue to lack the certainty it needs to commit to long-term increases of its very low payment rates to health care providers to stem their alarming exodus to the mainland, to provide coverage for such key health treatments as drugs to treat Hepatitis C, and to cover more poor, uninsured residents,” according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ Robert Greenstein.

By contrast, Trump's farm bailout (due to his trade war with China) has hit $28 billion-- more than double the 2009 auto bailout.

Somebody Else Decorates the Mantle Next Year

Trump Helps Putin by Attacking New Russian Sanctions

Trump is saying he’s getting tougher on Russia.  But the reality is that he's working to make it easier on Russia-- by destroying a new round of sanctions and keep Vladimir Putin’s international crime syndicate open for business.

We all know that lying comes as naturally to Donald Trump as breathing in air.  So no matter how often Trump tosses out claims about how “tough” he is being on Russia, it should not be surprising when The Daily Beast reported that Trump is attacking a package of sanctions against Russia.  In fact, Trump’s State Department put together a 22-page letter that pushes back against every item in the package.  In particular, the White House is arguing against regulations on Russian banks and Russian energy companies because watching them would somehow “cripple the international energy market” to place limits on companies controlled by sanctioned Russian oligarchs.  In reality, most experts believe that new regulations would make the use of Russian banks and energy companies as pipelines for the movement of stolen wealth more difficult.

And guess who is supporting Trump on both the sanctions and the impeachment?  As CNN reported, Vladimir Putin backed up Trump, saying that the impeachment in the House of Representatives was based on “made up reasons.”  Trump supports Putin. Putin supports Trump. You scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours. 

Keeping It Real on Christmas

Just Sayin'

Trump Negligence Further Cripples Defense, State Departments

While much of the nation has been focused on impeachment, Team Trump’s capacity for bungling absolutely everything else remains undiminished.  Last week, we saw five new high-level resignations inside the Department of Defense-- the latest being senior adviser for international cooperation Tina Kaidanow, who left last Monday. Other departures include top Asia policy chief Randall Schriver and Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Kari Bingen.

Under Trump, being an expert in policy, intelligence, or anything else means holding a tenuous position at best, and being in the federal government as a gaggle of possibly criminal idiots (Giuliani, e.g.) wreck much of what you've been working on over the course of your career has got to be soul-crushing from week one—let alone how bad it has to be in year three.


The net result is that, as in the State Department, the ranks of top Pentagon officials have been dwindling. Over a quarter of all Senate-confirmed defense positions are now vacant, and there seems little chance that most of those will be filled before the November 2020 election because (1) Team Trump has no need for policy experts to begin with, and (2) few sane people would agree to sign up for top positions in the last year of a maybe-survives-impeachment, maybe-doesn't administration now famous for ignoring and belittling its own top experts—when Trump isn't tweeting demands that they be thrown in jail on a whim.

So we're a wee bit screwed, for the time being. The State and Defense departments are both nonentities, from a policy standpoint, their recommendations ignored as the White House instead goes off on whatever tangent the Orangeman demands on any particular morning (buying Greenland; demanding the removal of all Americans from South Korea). And that will continue while the departments attempt to rebuild themselves after Team Trump's intentional neglect.

You could easily make the case that Trump should be impeached simply for incompetence: Time and time again, his White House team has proved itself incapable of staffing the government, of formulating any policy that lasts longer than a Fox News commercial break, or of keeping itself from breaking U.S. laws.
 

Holiday Geometry

A Single Fracking Well Generates Massive Methane Leak

A study on methane “super emitters”  has revealed something about the scope of the environmental threat represented by Donald Trump’s refusal to regulate methane release at wells. Not only are these sources making a significant and often unrecognized contribution to the climate crisis, but they can be difficult to find. Methane is invisible and, without the mercaptan added by utility companies to give gas its distinctive stink, even high levels of the gas can be odorless. Even when a satellite or plane identifies high methane in an area, pinpointing a specific well or storage facility is almost impossible without the kind of monitoring devices that the Trump Environmental Protection Agency is trying to eliminate.

Or it is almost impossible most of the time. A brand-new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows an example of a single well venting methane in a way that was not only highly visible, but almost unbelievable. As in, this single well released more methane in three weeks than most entire nations do in a year. So much methane that this single well, venting over a period of about 20 days, may have been a significant contributor to altering the climate.

This particular super-duper emitter came from a fracking well in Ohio that blew during development in 2018. The emissions from the well were so strong that they became almost immediately visible to the Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument aboard the orbiting Sentinel-5P satellite. What that instrument saw indicated that the well was producing between 100 and 160 tons of methane every hour. The satellite doesn’t have information for the full period, but if that rate continued over the 20 days before the well was capped, one Ohio blowout released more methane into the atmosphere over that period than either Germany or the U.K. released during all of 2018.

And this staggering, potentially world-altering in a very literal way event went more or less unnoticed. If it weren’t for the new instrument, and images taken both before and during the venting event, there would have been no way to quantify just how horrible a single well blowout can be, and how significant these events really are when compared to the amount of methane lost from pipelines, tanks, and in normal use.

The authors of the paper use this incident to point out the effectiveness of their space-based instrument, and it certainly is effective. But it also reinforces the need to maintain monitors on each well, and to recognize the fantastic threat generated through fracking by levying massive penalties against companies who fail to regulate emissions.

Fat Joe and Dr. Dre - Lord Above

Tis The Season!

Star Wars Christmas

Iraqi Protests Result In Tragedy

The anti-government protests that have shaken Iraq for months took a brutal turn when protesters lynched a 16-year-old boy who had fired a pistol in the air to try to shoo them away from his family’s home.  The protesters stabbed him 17 times, hung him by his ankles from a traffic light pole and cut his throat. In videos of the scene, people in police uniforms can be seen in the midst of the mob, seemingly allowing the attack to take place.

The rare outburst of violence by the protesters underscored the increasing tension on the streets after the killing of more than 400 protesters by government forces and a recent spate of attacks by other groups, while the absence of a response by either the police or bystanders, many of whom recorded the killing on their cellphones, raised questions about the complicity of Iraqi society.

The Iraqi High Commission for Human Rights condemned the police behavior as well as the lack of any effort by citizens to stop the violence. “The presence of hundreds if not thousands of citizens who stood still, filming and watching is a dangerous development that confirms the society’s acceptance of violence,” said Ali al-Bayati, a commission member.

The protests have been driven by anger over political corruption, unemployment and Iranian influence in Iraqi politics. The protests forced Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi to resign last month, and the government has struggled to respond to the protesters’ demands.

The lynching victim, identified as Haitham Ali Ismael, had been berating protesters for three days for obstructing the street beside his house and making noise, but he had been largely ignored.  To get their attention, he climbed onto the roof of his house and began shooting into the air with a pistol.

The protesters, apparently under the impression that he had killed someone, stormed his house, joined by a large number of unemployed people and children who looked as if they were barely adolescents.  In video of the attack, the crowd can be heard chanting, “The blood of the martyrs will not be spilled in vain,” suggesting that they believed he had killed one or more protesters.

The crowd barged into the small house at the edge of Al Wathba Square, where Ismael lived with his mother, and began stabbing him. The protesters took him outside, pulling off his clothes and dragging him bleeding through the streets.

“I was standing there when they hung this young man by a rope and tied him to the pole,” said 25-year-old Fadhil Muhammad, a tuk-tuk driver.  “Then the rope was cut and the victim’s head fell on screws on the ground in the street and they entered into his head.”  Then they threw the boy on the bed of a police pickup truck, Muhammad said, “and in front of the police they began to slash his neck.”

“Unfortunately Haitham had been fighting with these guys for three days because of their shouting and gathering near his house, but I did not expect it to reach to the point of killing him,” Muhammad said. “He was still a young man.”

Abu Mohammad Alkinani, 45, a fruit and vegetable seller, said he knew the boy and had “never heard anything bad” about him.  “It was a painful scene, may God help his mother, and I wonder why the police did not do anything,” Alkinani said. “Maybe tomorrow this thing could happen with me and no one would help me.”

The leaders of the protest in Tahrir Square, the center of the protest movement, quickly distanced themselves from the attack and called for the perpetrators to be brought to justice.  “We went out peacefully for reforms and to stop the bloodshed and to put criminals in the hand of the judiciary,” they said in a statement released on social media. “What happened today at Al Wathba Square is a crime condemned by the demonstrators and condemned by humanity and punishable by law,” the statement said.

In videos, Iraqi police officers can be seen hurrying through the square as if they were disturbed by what was going on but perhaps afraid to interfere.  A police leader from the area, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak to the news media, expressed a sense of powerlessness.  The attackers were slashing the boy’s throat while he was in the police truck, he said, and there was little the police could do.

Keep It Real, Barack

If women ran every country in the world there would be a general improvement in living standards and outcomes, former U.S. President Barack Obama has said. 

Speaking in Singapore, he said women aren't perfect, but are "indisputably better" than men.  He said most of the problems in the world came from old people, mostly men, holding onto positions of power.

"Now women, I just want you to know; you are not perfect, but what I can say pretty indisputably is that you're better than us [men].  I'm absolutely confident that for two years if every nation on earth was run by women, you would see a significant improvement across the board on just about everything... living standards and outcomes."

When asked if he would ever consider going back into political leadership, he said he believed in leaders stepping aside when the time came.  "If you look at the world and look at the problems it's usually old people, usually old men, not getting out of the way," he said.

"It is important for political leaders to try and remind themselves that you are there to do a job, but you are not there for life, you are not there in order to prop up your own sense of self importance or your own power."

Hallmark of Bigotry

The Hallmark Channel pulled four commercials from wedding-planning site Zola that featured a lesbian wedding, but continued to run similar ads featuring heterosexual couples.  Now Zola is fighting back—saying Hallmark won’t be getting any more of its ad dollars.“ All kisses, couples and marriages are equal celebrations of love and we will no longer be advertising on Hallmark,” Zola said in a statement.  Hallmark said it pulled the same-sex spots because the debate over them “was distracting from the purpose of our network, which is to provide entertainment value.”

The move to pull the ads comes following complaints by One Million Moms, a division of the conservative American Family Association, which has been designated an anti-LGBT hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

A open message to Hallmark posted on the American Family Association's website said, "Such content “goes against Christian and conservative values.  You will lose viewers if you cave to the LBGT agenda.”  The site later posted an update that the CEO of Crown Media Family Networks, (which owns the Hallmark Channel) confirmed in a phone call that the Hallmark Channel will “continue to be a safe and family friendly network. Praise the Lord,” the statement added.

Response on Twitter was harsh, and many users urged a boycott of the Hallmark Channel:

Holiday Ho Ho Ho

Lizzo - Good As Hell

Trump To Put A Beatdown on Homeless People

Ever since the Trump administration forced Matthew Doherty, Obama's director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH), to resign, they have been looking for someone to lead a crackdown on homelessness.  Well, it now seems that Robert Marbut, a former community college civics professor and San Antonio City Council member, is the best candidate for that job.

Marbut has touted the belief that homelessness is caused by behavior and that providing services on the street such as food and supplies encourages vagrancy; he has done so in his role as a policy consultant for cities including Key West and St. Petersburg in Florida; Fresno, California; and San Antonio, Texas. Marbut calls providing food and supplies to people outside of shelters "street feeding" and says that most panhandlers are not actually homeless but instead are grifters who rely "on the good nature of citizens to get tax-free dollars." Marbut recommends shelters that are open all day but that harshly punish rule-breaking.

A shelter in St. Petersburg using his plan had a success rate of 7% of residents obtaining permanent housing within two years. More than 80% of residents either just left the shelter or were kicked out for breaking rules, including things like poor hygiene. A former resident of that Florida shelter, Marcus Franklin, told HuffPost that residents were forced to sleep outside when beds were full, even during storms. "That whole area’s flooded and you still got to sleep out there," he said. He described metal tents erected for "housing" residents, saying, "Those things have no sides on 'em. The water's still hitting you. You're soaking wet."

"His approach is literally to have people sleeping on mats in a shelter courtyard and to call that ending homelessness," Diane Yentel, president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, told Mother Jones. "It's absurd." She says that Marbut talks about homelessness "like it's a personal flaw. [...] He dismisses the clear structural challenges of a lack of affordable housing that exacerbate homelessness."

"Top Cop" William Barr Going Off the Deep End

What has become clear in recent weeks is that Attorney General Barr has become another of Donald Trump’s personal lawyers, serving the president first and the country second, if at all. 

Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz had barely issued his report clearing the FBI of bias in its investigation of Russian interference in the Trump campaign/election before Barr was out and about, contradicting it, just like he did pre-damage control on Robert Mueller’s report.   According to Barr, the Horowitz report  "now makes clear that the FBI launched an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken.”

The 476-page report made no such thing clear.   Quite the opposite. Horowitz squashed a thousand conspiracy theories about the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane that have been idiotically cultivated by the president and his defenders.  The OIG’s main finding was that the inquiry started “in compliance with Department and FBI policies with no political bias,” and had “an authorized investigative purpose.”  It did not rely on materials from the infamous Christopher Steele dossier until AFTER the investigation had already been opened.  There were procedural issues with the application for a FISA warrant, which the FBI will correct.  But no information derived from the warrant was actually used.  A low-level agent who didn’t follow procedures is gone. And there was no spying on the Trump campaign.  But that doesn't stop Barr from his alternative-reality bullshit. 

Before Barr's mis-characterization of the OIG report, there was his Notre Dame speech in October, where Barr denounced liberalism and secularism and warned that “militant secularists” were out to destroy America’s “moral order” with rhetoric that would have fit right in at Nuremberg.

Then, last week, came that shocking (and not much shocks anymore, but this one really did) speech about how the police just might stop protecting communities that didn’t show them the proper respect. The American people, he said, “have to start showing, more than they do, the respect and support that law enforcement deserves. And if communities don’t give that support and respect, they might find themselves without the police protection they need.”  

To hear the nation's top law enforcement official say that certain people in the country won't get full protection of the law is scary-- something right out of the fascist playbook.

FBI OIG Shoots Down Trump's Bullshit

The Justice Department’s inspector general has released his report on the FBI’s investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign, and the result is what we expected:  The FBI launched its investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia NOT for partisan reasons but because it had reason to investigate.

The inspector general’s report is harshly critical of the FBI’s handling of applications for a FISA wiretap on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, however.   But to be clear:  There was no bias against Trump. It wasn’t a coup. There weren’t scummy “dirty cops.”  The FBI didn't put undercover agents in the Trump campaign.  There were no informants or spies.   Trump wasn’t illegally “wire tapped” by President Obama. 

Trump’s personal attorney/attorney general, William Barr, continues to insist that the FBI investigation was illegitimate, and claims that the IG’s report saying it was not politically motivated “makes clear” that Barr’s insistence on the opposite is correct.

Oh-- and one more time.   The Ukranians did not hack the DNC emails-- the Russians did.  The FBI did not give the servers to the Ukranians, since there were no servers.   And what's the deal with flushing toilets???  Nobody flushes toilets fifteen times, for chrissakes!

Hindu Nationalist Government in India Continues to Instituionalize Religious Discrimination

India's government has introduced a controversial bill which offers amnesty to non-Muslim illegal immigrants from three neighboring countries.  The controversial bill seeks to provide citizenship to religious minorities in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan.

The government, led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), says this will give sanctuary to people fleeing religious persecution.  Critics say the bill is part of a BJP agenda to marginalize Muslims.

The Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB) has already prompted widespread protests in the northeast region of the country which borders Bangladesh, as people there feel that they will be "overrun" by immigrants from across the border.

The CAB amends the 64-year-old Indian Citizenship law, which currently prohibits illegal migrants from becoming Indian citizens.  Under the amended version of the law, there will be an exception for members of six religious minority communities - Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi and Christian - if they can prove that they are from Pakistan, Afghanistan or Bangladesh. They will only have to live or work in India for six years to be eligible for citizenship by naturalization, the process by which a non-citizen acquires the citizenship or nationality of that country.

Opponents of the bill say it is exclusionary and violates the secular principles enshrined in the constitution. They say faith cannot be made a condition of citizenship.  The constitution prohibits religious discrimination against its citizens, and guarantees all persons equality before the law and equal protection of the law.

Delhi-based lawyer Gautam Bhatia says that by dividing alleged migrants into Muslims and non-Muslims, the bill "explicitly and blatantly, seeks to enshrine religious discrimination into law, contrary to our long-standing, secular constitutional ethos".

Historian Mukul Kesavan says the bill is "couched in the language of refuge and seemingly directed at foreigners, but its main purpose is the delegitimization of Muslims citizenship".

Critics say that if it is genuinely aimed at protecting minorities, the bill should have have included Muslim religious minorities who have faced persecution in their own countries - Ahmadis in Pakistan and Rohingyas in Myanmar, for example. (The government has gone to the Supreme Court seeking deportation of Rohingya refugees from India.)

India Rape Victim Set on Fire on Her Way to Court

A 23-year-old alleged rape victim is fighting for her life after she was set on fire while going to court in northern India.  The woman was on her way to a hearing in the case she filed against two men in March, in Uttar Pradesh.

She is in critical condition in hospital, where she is being treated for severe burns.  Five men including two of her alleged rapists have been arrested on suspicion of setting her on fire, police say.

The woman was on her way to a train station when a group of men assaulted her and dragged her to a nearby field, where they set her on fire, according to reports in local media.

The incident occurred in Unnao district, which was recently in the news over another rape case.  Police opened a murder investigation against a ruling party lawmaker in July after a woman who accused him of rape was seriously injured in a car crash.  Two of her aunts were killed and her lawyer was injured.

This latest incident has sparked widespread outrage in India, which is still reeling under a shocking murder and rape case that grabbed headlines just under a week ago.  In that case,  A 27-year-old vet in the southern city of Hyderabad was raped and set on fire. Protests were held across the country after the victim's charred remains were found following her disappearance last week.

Rape and sexual violence against women have been in focus in India since the December 2012 gang-rape and murder of a young woman on a bus in the capital, Delhi. But there has been no sign that crimes against women are abating.  According to the latest government crime figures, police registered 33,658 cases of rape in India in 2017 - that's an average of 92 rapes every day.

Iowa's Joni Ernts Secretly Plans to Gut Social Security

An activist group called Social Security Work parked the billboard above  in front of Senator Joni Ernst's office this week and plans to have it travel around the state the entire month. "When Joni Ernst says she wants to address Social Security behind closed doors, she is speaking in code to Wall Street donors," said Linda Benesch, Social Security Works communications director, in an email. "The only reason to act in secret is to overthrow the will of the American people by cutting earned benefits. Our mobile billboard exposes Ernst's real plans."

The reference is to comments Ernst made back in September at a town meeting. Ernst said that lawmakers need to "fix" Social Security "behind closed doors," where they can "just have an open and honest conversation about what are some of the ideas that we have for maintaining Social Security in the future."

Open and honest-- but with the American people shut out of the conversation. Which is how all Republicans want to destroy the program—behind closed doors, with no one person’s fingerprints on the weapon.

Rod Wave - Cuban Links

Trump Embarrassed Yet Again in Front of World Leaders

Trump was made to look foolish yet again on the world stage in front of world leaders at the London NATO summit.  Footage began circulating that showed Trudeau, UK PM Boris Johnson and French leader Emmanuel Macron mocking Trump over his impromptu press conference which resulted in him being late to a meeting with the French president.

The brief video posted on Twitter by Canada's public broadcaster, CBC, showed Trudeau gossiping with a group of leaders, including Johnson, Macron, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, and Queen Elizabeth's daughter Princess Anne at Buckingham Palace.

At the start of the footage, Johnson asked Macron: "Is that why you were late?"  Trudeau then interjects: "He was late because he takes a 40-minute press conference off the top."  An amused Trudeau later jokes, "Oh yeah, yeah . . . you just watched his team's jaw drop to the floor."

Trump had already been embarrassed by Macron the previous day when the French president called Trump out on his bullshit in front of a group of reporters.  Trump had tried to claim yet again that ISIS prisoners being held in Syria were "mostly from Europe." (an assertion has been repeatedly contradicted by Trump's own officials.)   Macron corrected Trump on that point, as well as confronted him over his ridiculous assertion that ISIS has been vanquished, telling his American counterpart to “be serious”.

When the video clip of Trudeau joking about Trump with Macron and Boris Johnson began making news, Trump responded by whining that Trudeau was "two-faced' and canceling his last news conference before he furiously stormed back to the U.S.

Oh Snap!

Kamala Harris dropped out of the presidential race, and Trump couldn't wait to troll her:

Kamala didn't lose a step:

Trump Tax Changes Result in Reduction in Charitable Giving

A report published in June by the Giving Institute, a nonprofit that studies philanthropy, finds that charitable giving has dropped in the wake of tax code changes implemented under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. The nonprofit Marketplace reports that the near-doubling of the standard tax deduction for most Americans under the act has made itemizing deductions—formerly an incentive to donating to nonprofits—less attractive.

Marketplace notes, “Many charities have reported declines in giving since the law went into effect. In the first half of this year, fundraising revenue was down 7.3% compared to the same period last year for more than 4,000 organizations tracked by the Fundraising Effectiveness Project. And in 2018, total charitable contributions from individual Americans was down 3.4%, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy.”

According to The Washington Post, while charitable giving as a whole has been essentially flat since the changes to the tax code were introduced, that fact masks the uneven distribution of donors and recipients. Wealthier people and charitable foundations, the paper reports, tend to give to larger, wealthier institutions, while smaller local organizations rely on donations from less-wealthy individuals—those who are no longer encouraged by the prospect of itemized deductions to make donations.

Katy Perry-Cozy Little Christmas

Growing Outrage Over Violence Against Women in India

Outrage has continued to grow in India over the gang-rape and murder of a 27-year-old woman, with protesters taking to the streets and politicians calling for the offenders to be “lynched”.

Demonstrations spread to cities including Delhi, Bengaluru and Kolkata and MPs spoke out in parliament following the discovery last week of the woman’s burned body in Hyderabad.

Four men now in police custody are alleged to have deflated the victim's scooter tires in order to leave her stranded then approached her appearing to offer to help. It is alleged she was dragged to an abandoned area by the roadside where she was gang-raped, asphyxiated to death and her body set alight and dumped.

“This act has brought shame to the entire country, it has hurt everyone,” said the defense minister, Rajnath Singh, speaking out against what he called a “heinous crime”.

Last week multiple rapes and murders were reported, including the gang-rape and murder of a lawyer in Jharkhand and the rape and murder of a six-year-old child in Rajasthan.

Violent crimes against women have been in the spotlight in India since 2012, when the fatal gang rape of a young woman aboard a moving bus in Delhi prompted hundreds of thousands to take to the streets to demand stricter rape laws.

Outrage over the 2012 Delhi rape prompted thousands of women to take to the streets and spurred quick action on legislation, doubling prison terms for rapists to 20 years and criminalizing voyeurism, stalking and the trafficking of women. Indian MP's also voted to lower to 16 from 18 the age at which a person can be tried as an adult for heinous crimes.

Sexual violence against women remains rife in India and it is the most dangerous place in the world to be a woman, according to a 2018 survey by the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Police in the country registered 33,658 cases of rape in 2017, according to the most recent available official records – an average of 92 a day - but the real figure is believed to be far higher as many women in India do not go to the police out of fear.

Tens of thousands of cases also remain stuck in courts, often hindering victims and their families as they navigate the slow and cumbersome legal system. Figures for 2017 reveal that courts opened 18,300 cases related to rape but more than 127,800 more remained pending at the end of the year.

Ohio GOP Reduced to Insanity in War on Women

Ohio lawmakers have introduced legislation that would jail doctors for “abortion murder” unless they reimplant ectopic pregnancies in the uterus. Unfortunately, there no such procedure in medical science. Ectopic pregnancies, where the embryo is implanted in the fallopian tube, can be fatal for mothers. Legislators have been told in the past that this fantasy operation cannot be done.

Ohio obstetrician and gynecologist Dr David Hackney wrote on Twitter: “I don’t believe I’m typing this again but, that’s impossible. We’ll all be going to jail.” The bill proposes punishing women and girls as young as 13 with “abortion murder” if they have an abortion, and creates a new law called “aggravated abortion murder” which would be enforced with the death penalty.

Ohio passed a six-week abortion ban last summer. The “heartbeat bill”, as supporters called it, banned abortion before most women know they are pregnant. Reproductive rights groups immediately sued, and the bill never went into effect. 

Putin Envy or Penis Envy?

 

Shock News: Another Trump Banker Commits Suiciide

It has just come to light that a former Deutsche Bank executive who signed off on some of the institution’s questionable loans to Donald Trump recently killed himself in his Malibu home.  Thomas Bowers, the onetime head of Deutsche Bank’s American wealth-management division, committed suicide by hanging, according to Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner’s office. Bowers was 55.

Bowers isn’t the first Trump-connected Deutsche exec to unexpectedly commit suicide.  In 2014, Deutsche derivatives analyst William Broeksmit, who had links to Trump and Russia, hung himself from a dog leash at his home in London.  Broeksmit reportedly left notes expressing anxiety over investigations of the area of banking where he worked.  It was later revealed that Broeksmit became ensnared in numerous investigations pertaining to potential criminal activity with respect to LIBOR fixing and illegal trading.  The whereabouts of work-related financial documents found at the scene of Broeksmit's suicide remain unclear. 

Trump’s relationship with Deutsche Bank—which lent him around $2 billion after most other institutions had abandoned him after his long string of defaults and bankruptcies—has come under investigation by two Congressional committees and the New York Attorney General, who are hoping the bank can shed light on Trump’s elusive finances, according to the New York Times. At one point, Bowers had a close connection to those finances.

Rosemary T. Vrablic, who was Trump’s private banker after 2010, reported directly to Bowers.  Bowers approved loans including more than $100 million to buy his Doral resort in Miami—even after Trump and Deutsche had to settle litigation over a Chicago loan that went bad.

Bowers hasn’t been employed by Deutsche since at least 2015, when he joined Starwood Capitol Group as COO, and was then appointed to the Board of Directors of Opus Bank in 2016.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Wild Pigs Fatally Maul Texas Healthcare Worker

A 59-year-old Texan woman has died after being assaulted by feral hogs, in what the county sheriff described as “one of the worst cases I’ve ever seen”.

Christine Marie Rollins, a healthcare worker in Anahuac (near Houston), arrived to look after an 84-year-old patient who she had been caring for almost two years when she was attacked in the early hours of the morning. 

Sheriff Brian Hawthorne said he would not go into the details of the incident but said he was disturbed by the attack. In a statement, he said: “This is an unbelievably tragic, a very rare incident. In my 35 years I will tell you it’s one of the worst things I’ve ever seen.”

An autopsy determined she had died from exsanguination – bleeding to death – due to feral hog assault.  Hawthorne said that bites and bruises of varying sizes made it clear that multiple animals were involved in the attack.  He said the pigs had taken over some of the pasture and woods of the family land.

The issue of feral hogs in the U.S. has been bubbling under the surface for some time.  In August, self-proclaimed libertarian William McNabb became a viral sensation when he waded into the debate on gun reform by posing the question: “How do I kill the 30-50 feral hogs that run into my yard within 3-5 minutes of my kids while they play?”  Multiple news outlets – including the Guardian – raced to see how much of an issue wild hogs really are in the US.

According to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), there are about 5 million feral hogs in the U.S., half of which are in Texas. They cause billions in damage every year, destroying local wildlife and native habitats, and threatening locals. However, the USDA does not recommend shooting as a method to control groups of the pigs, which can weigh between 100 and 400 pounds.

Sheriff Hawthorne said there have been six deaths by feral hogs reported in U.S. history.  A University of Nebraska paper from 2013 put the total number of wild hog killings in U.S. history at four.

Federal Contractor Cancels Event at Trump Golf Club

A for-profit company collecting hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal government for locking up migrant children apparently decided it wasn’t such a great idea after all to hold its holiday bash at Trump's Virginia golf course, according to reports.

Caliburn International — operator of the Homestead facility for children in Florida — had already sent out invitations to its December 6 gala at the Trump National Golf Club in Potomac Falls, Virginia.  Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly, who was instrumental in the president’s immigration policy,  joined the company's board of directors after leaving the White House.

After one of the invitations was leaked to the press, Caliburn issued a mass email to workers changing the venue.  “Our team leaders have made the decision to change the venue so that our employee holiday event is focused on the spirit of compassion and thankfulness to our employees who work every day supporting missions of humanitarian service, national security, and medical care around the world,” the company said in a statement.

A federal contractor paying for a party at a property owned by a current U.S. president is unprecedented, as American presidents typically divest from their businesses before taking office to avoid conflicts of interest.  However, this wouldn't be the first time that private interest attempted to curry favor with Trump by steering business to one of his properties.  “It’s hard to overstate how problematic it is for a company with billions in government contracts to be paying the president directly,” said Noah Bookbinder, executive director of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. 


Virginia Canter, chief ethics counsel for CREW, said: “Obviously for a contractor that has hundreds of millions of dollars in business before the federal government, I don’t think it’s any small coincidence that they’re patronizing a Trump business.  These facilities are ways for people to influence the administration.”

Debatable Moment

Sumatran Rhino Now Believed To Be Extinct

The Sumatran rhinoceros has become extinct in Malaysia, zoologists have announced.

The last of the species in the country succumbed to cancer in the state of Sabah on the island of Borneo, it was revealed.

The rhino, named Iman, had suffered from uterine tumors since her capture in March 2014. “Iman’s death came rather sooner than we had expected, but we knew that she was starting to suffer significant pain,” said Augustine Tuuga, the director of the Sabah wildlife department.

“Despite us knowing that this would happen sooner rather than later, we are so very saddened by this news,” added Christina Liew, Sabah environment minister.

Iman escaped death several times over the past few years due to sudden massive blood loss – but on each occasion wildlife officials managed to nurse her back to health. They also obtained her egg cells for a possible collaboration with other scientists to reproduce the critically endangered species through artificial insemination programs.

Malaysia’s last male Sumatran rhino died in May and another female rhino also died in captivity in 2017. Efforts to breed them have so far proved futile.

Rhinoceros are killed for their horns which are sold on the black market because of their supposed medical attributes. The horns are ground up and swallowed as treatments for fevers or convulsions even though they are made primarily of keratin, the same material that makes up hair and fingernails.

Increasing Calls for White Nationalist Stephen Miller to Resign

Calls from elected officials for white supremacist Stephen Miller to leave the White House aren’t coming just from the House. Two dozen senators so far—all Democrats—told HuffPost that they also believe he should resign or be fired over his anti-immigrant policies and radical views, which have been further exposed in hundreds of recently leaked emails.

“Stephen Miller has championed this administration’s cruelest initiatives,” said Nevada Sen. Jacky Rosen. “From family separation to terminating TPS and DACA, he's used his role to impose his extreme views on policy.” Hawaii Sen. Mazie Hirono said, “Stephen Miller’s emails reinforce what we’ve known all along: that white nationalism permeates Donald Trump’s administration. He should resign.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said, “On the long list of people that work in the Trump administration who we believe should not be there, Stephen Miller is at the top of that list.”

In their letter calling for Miller’s resignation, Jewish groups said, “Stephen Miller’s penchant for white nationalism has been public knowledge for some time, but on November 12, we finally saw the paper trail confirming what we all suspected: Stephen Miller is a white nationalist.” Among the revelations in Hatewatch’s investigation is Miller’s close ties to the anti-immigrant hate group Center for Immigration Studies, a group with a “decades-long history of circulating racist writers, while also associating with white nationalists”—like Miller.

DOJ Fails Yet Again To Criminalize Humanitarian Aid

The Trump Justice Department’s years-long, taxpayer-funded mission to prosecute a volunteer for providing humanitarian aid to two people who had recently crossed the southern border has once again failed.  A jury acquitted humanitarian worker Scott Daniel Warren on felony charges of harboring undocumented immigrants. “The not guilty verdict came after just 2.5 hours of deliberation,” the Arizona Daily Star reports, “and it was greeted with cheering, laughter and tears from Warren’s supporters and fellow aid workers, including a contingent of clergy members from across the country.”

This is the second time the Trump administration had tried to imprison Warren for his work with the humanitarian group No More Deaths, which leaves water, food, and other life-saving supplies for migrants in the searing border desert. Warren’s first trial ended in a hung jury this past June, where he faced up to 20 years on two counts of felony harboring and one count of felony conspiracy for giving food, water, and clean clothes to two men in Arizona.  Not satisfied with failing to criminalize basic humanity, federal prosecutors announced they would once again try him.

”In closing arguments this week, defense lawyer Gregory Kuykendall said Warren only provided humanitarian aid,” the Arizona Daily Star continued. “’Being a good Samaritan is not against the law. Practicing the golden rule is not a felony,’ Kuykendall told the jury.” The jury agreed.