An Epidemic of Black Lung in Trump's Coal Mines

Donald Trump got elected with the promise of bringing back coal mining, an industry that has been failing for years. Trump blames renewable energy sources like solar and wind for coal's decline, but the real culprit is fracked natural gas, which is much cheaper and cleaner than coal. Natural gas is also technically far superior because natural gas turbines can spin up in seconds to satisfy shifting power demands, while coal power plants are big, slow dinosaurs.

Trump's big promise was to bring back coal mining jobs. But the problem with these jobs is that working in a coal mine is getting deadlier and deadlier. Miners are coming down with black lung disease (progressive massive fibrosis, or PMF) at an increasingly horrific rate:

"When I first implemented this clinic back in 1990, you would see ... five [to] seven ... PMF cases" a year, says Ron Carson, who directs Stone Mountain's black lung program.

The clinics now see that many cases every two weeks, he says, and have had 154 new diagnoses of PMF since the fieldwork for the NIOSH study concluded a year ago.

That a 50-fold increase. Black lung kills miners by destroying lung tissue: they literally suffocate to death. Last year NPR found that the rate of new black lung cases had increased 20 times, and it has continued to get much, much worse. The only "cure" is a lung transplant.

Why is this happening? Because we're running out of coal:

The NPR investigation also found that the likely cause of the epidemic is longer work shifts for miners and the mining of thinner coal seams. Massive mining machines must cut rock with coal and the resulting dust contains silica, which is far more toxic than coal dust.

The large (and profitable) deposits of coal have already been mined. Yes, there's a lot of coal in the ground, but it's spread very thinly now. It is much more expensive, dangerous and environmentally destructive to mine these inferior seams. Coal is already more expensive than wind and solar in most  parts of the country, and it's only going to get worse.

How has the Trump administration responded to this epidemic? The Secretary of Energy, Rick Perry, has literally embraced Robert Murray, a climate change denier and mining executive. Perry's department bent over backwards to propose regulations that would have raised electricity rates for all Americans to give special treatment to coal mining companies.

This is the same guy who has sued HBO and John Oliver for defamation of character, for simply reporting the truth about what is happening in Murray's mines. The guy is a real-life Dr. Evil, as evidenced by an ACLU amicus brief for the HBO suit.

Trump promised coal mining jobs, but what good is a job that destroys the land you live on, poisons your water and and slowly suffocates you while your family members watch helplessly?

A Message From The NRA

The Great Bald Spot

Well, one of Donald Trump's coverups has been exposed: the man is bald. Here's the evidence:

For years Trump has insisted that he's not bald. He has maintained that the thing on his head is his real hair. But, surprise, surprise: he's been lying the whole time. Hair stylists say that it's just a bad weave.

Now, generally I don't make fun of things people don't have control of, like having to wear glasses, baldness, or obesity (which is mostly genetic and societal). But Trump has a long history of making fun of people for things they have little to no control of, like that disabled reporter he mocked in a campaign rally. Then he had the gall to call women like Rosie O'Donnell "fat pigs, dogs and slobs" when Trump is such a porker himself. And in the late 90's he ranted that then-current (and gorgeous) Miss Universe Alicia Machado was fat, embarrassing her in front of a phalanx of photographers. But check out the wattle on Trump when he kisses her (he just can't stop himself!). He was already a fat slob 20 years ago.

So Trump deserves every bit of ridicule he gets for trying to cover up his baldness in such a tacky and phony way.

Trump is ridiculously vain. He thinks baldness is a sign of weakness (Washington and Churchill were such wimps!). After his presidential physical we learned that Trump takes a drug for baldness: finasteride. This has a number of side effects, including many with which Trump is afflicted: confusion, bloating of the face and redness of the skin. And impotence!

Trump even went through a painful and obviously pointless surgical procedure to reduce the size of the Great Bald Spot  (a "scalp reduction"). Afterwards he reportedly yanked out his wife Ivana's hair and raped her (an accusation she withdrew when Donald dangled millions of alimony dollars in front of her).

Trump's hair has always been completely ridiculous. It's an obvious combover, looking like a helmet of hair-sprayed yak fur. Even his daughter Ivanka ridicules it.

Trump's baldness is nothing to be ashamed of or made fun of. What he should be ashamed of is how he insults other bald men, how he lies about his own baldness, and the ridiculous lengths he goes to cover it up, and how stupid the result makes him look. And he has so little self-awareness that he's completely oblivious to all of this.

That makes the Great Bald Spot a perfect metaphor for every other disaster in the Trump administration.

Will He Answer?

Please Do So, Mr. President

Despite all advice to the contrary, President Trump thinks it's a good idea to sit down with Robert Mueller and talk about Russia. I hope that he does. Let's consider both men for a moment.

Robert Mueller is a cool, savvy investigator with decades of experience in criminal justice. As the head of the inquiry into the Trump campaign's ties to Russian intelligence, he has been the consummate professional.

Donald Trump is an arrogant dumb ass.

Who is going to win this battle?

The Memo Was A Giant Yawn

After a week of breathless hand wringing, the GOP and Donald Trump finally released the Congressional Memo that supposedly illustrates how biased the FBI is towards Donald Trump. Before it came out, I was most amused at the notion that this was some sort of smoking gun that Devin Nunes uncovered in the deep, dark bowels of the FBI on a super secret agent spy mission.

THEY WROTE THE FUCKING MEMO!!

By this same measure, I could write a memo about how Donald Trump secretly formed ISIL back in 2011. Then I could release and claim that it was so. Sheesh...

After reading through the memo, I was please to see confirmation that the investigation into Donald Trump and his ties with Russia began with George Papadopolous and his drunken night of bragging. It did not begin with the FISA warrant on Carter Page based on the Steele Dossier. Carter Page was also under scrutiny long before the Steele Dossier.

So, the whole thing was full of sound and fury signifying nothing. Honestly, it's not surprising given the fact that Republicans are madly scrambling to somehow blunt what's sure to be coming this year: an indictment of President Trump for money laundering. 

The Stock Market Just Took a Giant Hit. Will Trump Accept the Blame?

Just the other day Donald Trump bragged in the State of the Union that he was responsible for the increase in the stock market. The market had just hit its highest ever value, 26,616.

Since then -- because of Trump's speech, or the release of the stupid memo? -- the market has plummeted more than a thousand points, to 25,521.

Will Trump accept the blame for that?

To be honest, the market is overheated and a correction has long been overdue. But the real problem is that the stock market consists of scumbags trying to outguess other scumbags. The market dropped because the Friday unemployment report was good and there have been some meager wage increases.

That raises the bogeyman of inflation, a fear Republicans falsely raised throughout the Obama administration. Inflation was always around the corner, they said, and businesses used that as an excuse to keep wages down.

Now that they think inflation's really here they're ready to tank the stock market. It's just a scam to get corporations to fire a bunch of employees, lower wages, increase stock buybacks and increase dividend payouts to shareholders to make their stock more attractive.

Whenever something good happens that benefits the people who actually do all the work that makes the country run, the stock market tanks. The second it looks like companies will have to pay workers more, the greedy bastards bolt or demand a ransom payment. And since CEO bonuses depend on stock price, they always screw the employees to make themselves richer.

That's why communism happened. You can blame Marx. You can blame Lenin. But no one would have listened to Marx and Lenin without the greedy bastards who kept forcing more work out of people for less money.

And the scumbags like Trump and his cronies are trying to force us down that road again.

Best Meme Ever

Trump's CIA Chief Meets with his Russian Bosses

While everyone was oohing and ahing about how Donald Trump managed to deliver the State of the Union speech without drooling or pooping his pants, further evidence of collusion with the Russians went mostly unnoticed by the media:

Two top Russian spy chiefs traveled to Washington last week to discuss counterterrorism issues with CIA Director Mike Pompeo, but the unusual visit also raised concerns among some U.S. officials that Moscow could interpret the encounter as a sign the Trump administration is willing to move beyond the issue of election interference, current and former U.S. intelligence officials said.

Pompeo met with Sergey Naryshkin, the head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service or SVR, and Alexander Bortnikov, who runs the FSB, which is the main successor to the Soviet-era security service the KGB. The head of Russia’s military intelligence, the GRU, also came to Washington, though it’s not clear that he met with Pompeo.

Naryshkin and Bortnikov are both subject to sanctions for Russia's invasion of Crimea and supporting the ongoing guerilla war against Ukraine. They should not have even been let into the country, much less be meeting with American national security officials.

It recalls the meeting that Trump had with Sergei Kislyak last year, when he bragged that he had gotten rid of the Russia investigation by firing James Comey, making Trump sound like some junior employee trying to impress the big boss.

This is unprecedented (or should I say, unpresidented, as Trump seems to think it's spelled). These three Russians are the sworn enemies of the United States, and Trump's national security apparatus is colluding with them.

The evidence that Russia interfered with our election and is continuing to attack American institutions is undeniable, yet the Trump administration totally blew off a law Congress passed to enact further sanctions on Russia.

Trump's Treasury department was supposed to draw up a list of bad Russian actors and sanction them, but all they did was copy and paste a list of Russian billionaires from Forbes' website, fifteen minutes before the deadline.

These people are not professionals -- they're middle schoolers cribbing their homework from the Internet.

Trump is selling this country out to the Russians, and Republicans in Congress are sitting idly by as the worst treason in American history unfolds before their eyes.

White Evangelicals, This is Why People Are Through With You

John Pavlovitz has knocked it out of the park. Here is the open letter, reprinted in its entirety and dedicated, with fondness, to Ed "what the heck" Heckman who trolled this blog for so many years as A. Noni Mouse and still obsessively reads it every day, unable to comment. Ed, your kind has reached the end of their time. Buh-bye...

Dear White Evangelicals, 

I need to tell you something: People have had it with you. They’re done. They want nothing to do with you any longer, and here’s why: They see your hypocrisy, your inconsistency, your incredibly selective mercy, and your thinly veiled supremacy. 

For eight years they watched you relentlessly demonize a black President; a man faithfully married for 26 years; a doting father and husband without a hint of moral scandal or the slightest whiff of infidelity. They watched you deny his personal faith convictions, argue his birthplace, and assail his character—all without cause or evidence. They saw you brandish Scriptures to malign him and use the laziest of racial stereotypes in criticizing him.

And through it all, White Evangelicals—you never once suggested that God placed him where he was, you never publicly offered prayers for him and his family, you never welcomed him to your Christian Universities, you never gave him the benefit of the doubt in any instance, you never spoke of offering him forgiveness or mercy, your evangelists never publicly thanked God for his leadership, your pastors never took to the pulpit to offer solidarity with him, you never made any effort to affirm his humanity or show the love of Jesus to him in any quantifiable measure. 

You violently opposed him at every single turn—without offering a single ounce of the grace you claim as the heart of your faith tradition. You jettisoned Jesus as you dispensed damnation on him. And yet today, you openly give a “mulligan” to a white Republican man so riddled with depravity, so littered with extramarital affairs, so unapologetically vile, with such a vast resume of moral filth—that the mind boggles. And the change in you is unmistakable. It has been an astonishing conversion to behold: a being born again. 

With him, you suddenly find religion. With him, you’re now willing to offer full absolution. With him, all is forgiven without repentance or admission. With him you’re suddenly able to see some invisible, deeply buried heart. With him, sin has become unimportant, compassion no longer a requirement. With him, you see only Providence. And White Evangelicals, all those people who have had it with you—they see it all clearly. They recognize the toxic source of your duality. They see that pigmentation and party are your sole deities. They see that you aren’t interested in perpetuating the love of God or emulating the heart of Jesus. They see that you aren’t burdened to love the least, or to be agents of compassion, or to care for your Muslim, gay, African, female, or poor neighbors as yourself. They see that all you’re really interested in doing, is making a God in your own ivory image and demanding that the world bow down to it. They recognize this all about white, Republican Jesus—not dark-skinned Jesus of Nazareth. 

And I know you don’t realize it, but you’re digging your own grave in these days; the grave of your very faith tradition. Your willingness to align yourself with cruelty is a costly marriage. Yes, you’ve gained a Supreme Court seat, a few months with the Presidency as a mouthpiece, and the cheap high of temporary power—but you’ve lost a whole lot more. You’ve lost an audience with millions of wise, decent, good-hearted, faithful people with eyes to see this ugliness. You’ve lost any moral high ground or spiritual authority with a generation. You’ve lost any semblance of Christlikeness. You’ve lost the plot. And most of all you’ve lost your soul. I know it’s likely you’ll dismiss these words. The fact that you’ve even made your bed with such malevolence, shows how far gone you are and how insulated you are from the reality in front of you. 

But I had to at least try to reach you. It’s what Jesus would do.

Kickback Nation

The real goal of Trump and his enablers has now become clear: get rich off their government connections and government programs.

Trump, of course, holds all his events at Trump properties, making money off the government in the process by charging federal agencies for using facilities at his golf courses, Trump Tower and Mar a Lago required to provide protection for Trump and his family. Which is basically half the time.

Foreigners freely admit they do business with Trump's hotel in Washington to curry favor with the administration.

Michael Flynn cashed in on his position by selling access and influence to Turkey and Russia.

Jared Kushner and his family cashed in numerous ways, from selling green cards to Chinese nationals, to getting money from Russian banks, to using his phony Middle East "peace" initiative as a cover for soliciting cash from Israeli investors.

Montana business associates of interior secretary Ryan Zinke used his position to get an outrageously overpriced contract with Puerto Rico to repair the power transmission infrastructure, until the deal was exposed and canceled.

The border wall is just a giant scam to funnel Homeland Security cash into the pockets of corrupt companies.

Betsy DeVos is dismantling regulations that prevent for-profit colleges and charter schools from ripping off students, as well as screwing over students with gigantic debts to private lenders incurred obtaining worthless degrees from for-profit institutions.

When a photographer leaked a photograph of energy secretary Rick Perry hugging former coal execute and convicted felon Robert Murray, the photographer was fired. Murray was convicted of ignoring mine safety regulations, which resulted in the deaths of nine miners in 2012. Perry tried and failed to give coal mining companies a handout which would have cost ratepayers $12 billion.

The Trump administration is cutting staff at federal prison facilities, sending inmates to private prisons, which are more poorly staffed and have a long history of inmate abuse.

And, of course, the entire tax bill was a huge quid pro quo for Republican campaign donors, a fact which numerous Republican congressmen admitted. Republican Chris Collins of New York said, "My donors are basically saying, 'Get it done or don't ever call me again.'"

Congress passed a law that requires the Trump administration to impose restrictions on Putin and the Russian oligarchs who enable him for Russian interference in elections in the United States and countries like Germany, France and the Czech Republic, but the Trump administration isn't going to enforce them.

You'd think this last action would be sufficient to prove that Trump is directly colluding with the Russians. But Republicans in Congress are instead attacking the FBI with a phony memo.
This kind of backroom dealing and influence peddling is exactly the kind of thing that Trump voters said they hated when they talked about draining the swamp in Washington. But Trump is dialing up the corruption to 11.

The Force of a Gun!

I've been thinking a lot recently about the argument we hear all the time from the gun humpers about how their hard earned money is taken by the force of a gun. For the rest of us adults this is known as paying your taxes.

This argument has always irritated me because it's very two dimensional. The core of what they are saying is true. Not paying your taxes will result in your arrest. The problem is that there really aren't scores of IRS agents raiding the homes of taxpayers across the country. The gun humpers fail to note that years and years will go by with penalty after penalty being assessed until finally, perhaps, someone might come to your door and arrest you...if they get around to it. People who dodge their taxes are lower on the priority list than, say, a murderer or a drug dealer.

The "force of a gun" argument also sets up a cartoon villain in the form of the federal government that they can have an adolescent outburst against. For some reason, the gun humpers need villains in their lives so they can caterwaul about how unfair life is.

What I can't figure out is why they don't just fucking leave. Taxes are going to be around forever. We need them to help keep our country in decent shape. In fact, we need a lot more of them if we want to compete against countries like China. Like the teenager who complains about the rules of the house over his head, the gun humpers should be more grateful that we have such a blessed life in this country and taxes support this life in a very necessary fashion. Further, the gun humpers constantly wine about others who should leave if they don't like our laws.

Perhaps they should heed their own advice.

About the Anti-Christ...

When Barack Obama was president evangelicals were constantly calling him the Anti-Christ. Every time there was a natural disaster they said it was God's wrath for his and our moral failings.

But Donald Trump is a much better candidate for the Anti-Christ: he literally embodies all the Seven Deadly Sins, which I cataloged in a previous post.

In Trump's first term we have had more than 15 natural disasters that cost a billion or more dollars:

• Hurricanes Harvey and Maria
• Floods in California, Arkansas and Missouri
• Wildfires in California and much of the West
• Mudslides in California
• Record heat and cold across the country
• Drought in the Dakotas and Montana
• Dozens of tornadoes in the Midwest
• Severe weather in Colorado, Texas, Oklahoma, etc.

Hate crimes against Jews and other minorities are way up.

Americans are killing each other in mass shootings at schools, churches and concerts with increasing frequency and bloodiness. Conservatives choose not to call these acts of terrorism, but bouts of insanity. Trump's ethos of "hit them back ten times harder" has inspired and validated outbreaks of vindictive rage among his followers.

Because of Trump's incendiary and foolish behavior toward North Korea there are serious concerns that we are on the brink of nuclear war: the Doomsday Clock has been moved to two minutes to midnight. Residents of Hawaii thought the world was going to end when they recently received warning of an incoming nuclear missile.

Trump says he we will move the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, which many take as a sign of impending Armageddon, when the Jews return to Jerusalem.

Then, of course, there's the non-stop lying and boasting that Trump engages in. The Anti-Christ, above all, is known as the deceiver.

Then there are the biblical allusions to the Anti-Christ. I'm no biblical scholar, so I'll leave that to the experts. Here's a post from "God Reports," a Christian website, entitled, "Could Christians be fooled by the antichist?"

In his second letter to the Thessalonians, Paul teaches that before the Day of the Lord the antichrist will be revealed. This coming world ruler will attract followers from all over the world with his magnetic personality.

He will be a financial and political genius.

In Daniel 7 he is referred to as the “man of sin, the “little horn.” Daniel wrote, “This horn possessed eyes like the eyes of a man and a mouth uttering great boasts.”

He will be boastful and egotistical, a megalomaniac in his quest for world power. He will come preaching peace. But Daniel says, “through peace he will destroy many.” (Daniel 8:25)

His authority will be overpowering, his hatreds intense, his political techniques first rate. The news media will not be able to resist covering his every move and pronouncement – however outrageous.

Sound familiar? The above was published two years ago, when Trump was still battling the 17 dwarves for the Republican nomination.

It's completely wrong in its characterization of Trump as a financial and political genius -- he's an blundering idiot on all counts -- but somehow he manages to keep all these evangelicals in his thrall through some of demonic power despite the ugliness of his person, his personality, his sins and his words. . . .

The Two Opioid Crises

The United States is going through two opioid crises. The first is the proliferation of opioid drugs to treat every minor ache and pain. The second is the crisis of faith — or rather, the lack of a crisis of faith — in American evangelical circles.

Karl Marx famously referred to religion as the “opium of the people.” The full quote is:

“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”

Marx believed that, like opium, religion relieved their pain, but, like opium, it sapped their will, making them complacent. Religion reinforced the status quo, giving power to the elites (the nobility and capitalists) and prevented the people from fighting against real social problems.

In Soviet Russia the government took Marx’s dictum as a warning against a harmful addiction. The Soviets repressed religion, though Stalin’s 1936 constitution guaranteed freedom of religion and freedom from religion.

The Soviets never stamped out religion: they didn't tear down churches or ban literature with religious overtones, like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Instead, the Orthodox Church was co-opted by the Soviets and made subservient to the government, but kept at arm's length. Religious minorities who refused to toe the line -- notably Jews and Pentecostals -- were routinely persecuted, imprisoned and murdered, with the blessing of the Orthodox Church.

When he came to power, Vladimir Putin recognized the Soviets' error: instead of suppressing religion, Putin has taken complete control of the Orthodox Church. He has in fact turned everything completely around: now his government goes after atheists and people who break a law that makes it a crime to "insult the feelings of religious believers." Putin has harnessed the homophobia and misogyny of the Church and turned it into official state policy.

The Pussy Riot arrests were just a taste of the theocratic dictatorship that Putin is constructing.

This did not go unnoticed by Donald Trump. Trump has never been a religious man. Every time he mentions religion ("Two Corinthians," "I don't bring God into that picture") it is clear he neither knows about nor cares anything for religion.

Yet he has promised American evangelicals the moon: more restrictions on abortion, the ability to discriminate against homosexuals, denying women access to birth control and any medical treatment they just don't happen to like. He's feeding them the opium they demand.

Trump's entire life history is a catalog of deadly sins that evangelicals used to rail against: lust (the divorces, the womanizing, bragging about sexual harassment), gluttony (he even lies about his obesity), greed (huge tax cuts for himself, the casino gambling, "My whole life I've been greedy, greedy with money"), sloth (exercise uses up finite energy), wrath ("Get even with people"), the envy (the constant obsession with his wealth compared to others), and of course, pride: he can't go five minutes without bragging about himself in the most expansive terms possible, and demands everyone around him constantly shower him with empty praises.

Yet some American evangelicals claim that Trump was ordained by God to be president. When it came to light that he paid a porn star $130,000 to keep quiet about having sex with him just after Melania gave birth to their son, Tony Perkins of the conservative Family Research Council said, "Yes, evangelicals, conservatives, they gave him a mulligan. They let him have a do-over. They said we'll start afresh with you and we'll give you a second chance."

But it's not a second chance. It's the hundredth or thousandth chance: almost every day there's another story of Trump's egregious moral failings, from outright lies, to constant vulgarity, to sexual predation, to banging porn stars, to casual racism, to normalizing Nazis, to giving himself gigantic tax cuts to the elites that Trump promised to take down.

Are evangelicals so doped up on opiods and religion that they can't see they've made a bargain with the devil?

Instead of Left Vs. Right, how about Fact Checkers Versus Non Fact Checkers?

A recent question on Quora raised an interesting point. Why not get rid of the whole left-right, liberal-conservative paradigm and merely divide people into those who deal in facts and those who do not?

Obviously, it will end up that the more fact based folks will be left of center but there still are plenty of people on my side of the aisle that get emotional about politics and ignore reality. This is particularly true of progressives who think that both parties are "just the same."

Honestly, I think this is a great idea in the era of "alternative facts." If someone can't accept reality and has solutions to problems that don't exist, they shouldn't be in charge of anything.

Will Trump Abandon Our Kurdish Allies?

Donald Trump is about to abandon the one group in Iraq that has consistently been on the United States' side for the last 17 years of conflict in Iraq and Syria. Turkey has begun a ground assault against Kurdish forces who helped defeat ISIS.

Turkish troops crossed the Syrian border into the Kurdish enclave of Afrin on Sunday morning, beginning a ground assault against American-allied militias there, as the first accounts of casualties emerged amid rising international criticism of Turkey’s military action.

Turkish fighter jets were again in the skies Sunday bombing Kurdish militia targets in the border region. Ten people were reported killed in the bombing raids, according to Kurdish militants, and three people died on the Turkish side of the border in retaliatory shelling, local people said.

Turkey is ostensibly our ally, but Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has become increasingly authoritarian in the past few years (with Trump cheering him on), turning Turkey from a secular democracy into a radical Islamic dictatorship. Erdoğan doesn't limit his thuggish behavior to Turkey: he has had his security forces beat American citizens on American soil, more than once.

Turkey also co-opted Michael Flynn, paying him tons of cash to push pro-Turkish positions before and after the election. Yes, Trump's security advisor was on the payroll as a foreign agent for the Turkish government!

Turkey is now allying itself with Iran, Russia and Syria against the Kurds, who were gassed by Saddam Hussein in the 1980s. The Kurds are not Arabs and have long been discriminated against in the Middle East and Turkey, often being forbidden to speak their own language, which is an Indo-European language.

When borders in the Middle East were reorganized after WWI and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire the Kurds did not get their own country. Their lands were split up among Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. Turkey has attacked non-Turkish minorities within their border relentlessly, killing or deporting millions of Kurds and Armenians who had lived there for centuries.

Some Kurds have engaged in terrorist activities in Turkey and other countries. They consider themselves freedom fighters, rebelling against governments that have consistently denied their basic human rights. When the Iraq War started the Kurds thought they could finally get help from the United States, with its history of democracy and freedom.

But the United States under Donald Trump has utterly no moral authority. He can't tell Turkey to ease up on the Kurds -- they'll just point to what he's doing in this country: throwing Muslim and Hispanic men, women and children into prison to await deportation to countries where they will likely be killed. Many of these people were raised as Americans, think like Americans, talk like Americans and speak no language other than English.

At the UN in September Trump boldly declared that every country should have their own version of America First: “As president of the United States, I will always put America first. Just like you, as the leaders of your countries, will always and should always put your countries first.”

Trump showed what he meant by that when he endorsed  Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte's campaign of mass murder without due process. Trump has no respect for the rule of law; he only respects power and the show of brutal force.

Under Trump most of the rest of the world has lost faith in the United States. Except, of course, in dictatorships like Russia, Kazakhstan, and Belarus, and theocracies like Israel where Arab Christians and Muslims are second-class citizens.

There is a real danger of the Turkish-Kurdish conflict becoming an all-out war, with Turkey going for a "Final Solution" for the Kurdish problem, aided by Syria, Iran and Russia.

Will Trump stand by and let Turkey commit genocide on the only people who've stood by the United States in Iraq? Based on how Trump treats his own allies in Congress, it looks like the Kurds are on their own.

Quote of The Day

“Most important, he is the first president to fail to defend the nation from an attack on our democracy by a hostile foreign power — and to resist the investigation of that attack. He is the first to enrich his private interests, and those of his family, directly and openly.

He is the first president to denounce the press not simply as unfair but as “the enemy of the American people.” He is the first to threaten his defeated political opponent with imprisonment. He is the first to have denigrated friendly countries and allies as well as a whole continent with racist vulgarities.”

--Sean Wilentz, The New York Times. 

Literally a F!cking Moron

Details of Donald Trump's affair with porn star Stormy Daniels were reported last week in an interview that was conducted in 2011, before the hush money was paid.

Trump's lawyer and Daniels say that the affair never happened, but the NDA requires both parties to deny everything, so this is expected. But there's little doubt that it happened, a fact pretty much everyone on both sides of the aisle acknowledge.

Daniels is cashing in on the publicity with a burlesque tour in red states, where Trump supporters line up to pose with her topless. (She's a Republican and ran for senate in Louisiana.)

In addition to revealing that Trump asked Daniels to spank him with a copy of Forbes magazine with him on the cover:

Among the more bizarre details, Daniels said Trump watched the Discovery Channel’s “Shark Week” documentaries during one of their trysts. She also said he complimented her on her nose, likening it to “a beet.” She said he did not wear a condom during their trysts.

Yes, Donald Trump had sex with a porn star and did not wear a condom. This is sheer stupidity, giving the high rate of STDs in the porn industry.

Trump is literally a fucking moron.

This man is a germophobe who fought his own "personal Vietnam" by banging hundreds of women in Sixties and Seventies.

And it gets even crazier. At the exact same time that the story of him banging a porn star bareback is flooding the airwaves, Trump is catering the the anti-abortion crowd.

These are the same people who insist that the only sex education kids get is abstinence. When they mention birth control it's only to tell kids that it has a spectacular failure rate and gives you breast cancer.

With Trump's history of unprotected sex and paying hush money, it makes you wonder how many women he impregnated and then paid to have abortions and keep quiet about them. I expect we'll have at least two stories about this in the next year.

He wouldn't be the first "pro-life" Republican politician to demand a mistress have an abortion. Republican Tim Murphy resigned after it came to light he insisted his mistress get an abortion. And Tennessee Republican Scott DesJarlais won an election after admitting he tried to make his mistress get an abortion.

Meanwhile, the career of Democrat John Edwards was destroyed when it came out that he'd had an affair with Rielle Hunter, who actually had the child.

The entire anti-abortion/anti-gay/abstinence movement is a bunch of liars, frauds and hypocrites. From the priests who molest choir boys, to the pastors who bang parishioners, to the ministers who do drugs and have gay sex, to the politicians who knock up their mistresses and demand they get abortions, to the church-goers and voters who know exactly what these men are doing and let them get away with.

It's all about the patriarchy and keeping women in their place. They don't give a damn about the unborn, or chastity, or morality. It's about punishing women for the sex that men force them into having.

Distinction Deniers

The NRA is Fucked

Well, well, well...it looks like the NRA is in a wee bit of trouble. The FBI is investigating whether money from Russia was funneled through the NRA to help Donald Trump win the presidency. It is illegal to use foreign money to influence federal elections.

I would laugh my fucking ass off and never stop rolling on the floor if this is what brought down the NRA. Some patriotic organization...taking money from a totalitarian state and a foreign one at that. Aren't those guys always bitching about oppressive governments?

Well, I suppose if they help the NRA out, then they are OK...