monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Scrutiny is mounting on the world’s largest publicly traded oil and gas company. On multiple legal fronts the question is being asked: Did Exxon Mobil’s communications about climate change break the law?

That’s what some of Exxon Mobil’s current and former employees think. In February, they filed a lawsuit arguing that the company deceived them by making false and misleading statements about the financial risks of climate change, which they argue affected the value of shares they bought as part of a company-sponsored savings plan. Other Exxon Mobil shareholders are bringing similar charges against the company in a separate class-action securities fraud case.

And just last month, three California communities sued 37 oil, coal and gas companies, including Exxon Mobil, for contributing to sea level rise while engaging in a “coordinated, multifront effort to conceal and deny their own knowledge of those threats.” At the same time, the New York and Massachusetts attorneys general continue to investigate whether Exxon Mobil may have violated racketeering, consumer protection or investor protection statutes. And the federal Securities and Exchange Commission started a probe of its own last fall, asking the company about its longstanding policy of not writing down the value of its oil reserves, as other companies had done.

A British "prankster" has said editors at right-wing news website Breitbart replied to spoof emails purporting to come from Trump adviser Steve Bannon.
The prankster shared emails in which staff discussed doing "dirty work" against US President Trump's daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner.
Mr Bannon has returned to Breitbart after being fired from the White House.
"I don't much care for the Trump administration or Breitbart," the prankster told the BBC.
One of the emails purporting to be from Mr Bannon said the former White House chief strategist would be "bringing forth my wrath on Ivanka and Jared".
A reply from Breitbart editor-in-chief Alex Marlow suggested "dirty work" would follow.
He later added that the pair would be "out by end of year".
Fellow editor Joel Pollak replied: "No-one can figure out what they do."

His website, Gods2.com, proclaims on the landing page: “LATIN, BLACK AND WHITE MUST UNITE!”

Links on that site lead to another one, honestfact.com, which claims that the “Real KKK Slave Masters” are “CHEROKEE Indians (Hidden Babylonians).”

The proclamations only get more unhinged from there: “ISIS AND HILLARY RACE WAR PLOT TO KILL ALL BLACK & WHITE WOMAN OF AMERICA WITH MS-13.”

So, that puts to rest the questions we've all had about just where the hell the Babylonians have been hiding.

puts to rest the questions we've all had about just where the hell the Babylonians have been hiding.

what a high school vice principal once told me

Trump’s ‘God whisperer’ says resisting him is an affront to God

Clapper also wondered why people show up to these rallies to listen to Trump’s rhetoric. That’s quite an indictment from a man who repeatedly misled Congress and the American people about the extent of domestic surveillance taking place in the US until the theft of evidence from the NSA exposed him. Part of the reason why people chose an outsider was precisely because of the failure of the “normals” like Clapper on the inside of government to be truthful, honest, and law-abiding. That doesn’t make Trump right, of course, but CNN’s use of Clapper as an expert on fitness for office is akin to having Bill Clinton cluck his tongue about the impact of sexual harassment in the workforce or the corrosive nature of perjury and obstruction of justice.

As many of us predicted, Donald Trump followed up his tightly scripted presidential speech on Afghanistan by busting loose with a red-meat campaign address in Phoenix tonight.

But what was surprising was that Trump insisted on spending a good half-hour revisiting in painful detail his three sets of comments — all of them unsatisfactory in one fashion or the other — about the violence in Charlottesville. And he told two big lies about them, one explicit and the other implicit. The first lie was that “the media” did not report his words about Charlottesville. Unfortunately for him, “the media” covered them in excruciating detail. The subtler lie was the suggestion that only “the media” had an issue with his comments. In fact, a vast number of Republicans criticized his initial, interim, and final remarks about the white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville — especially his extended remarks a week ago blaming the “alt-left” for the violence and praising the “very fine people” among the torch-carrying defenders of Robert E. Lee.

There can be little doubt that the president was widely advised to put the whole Charlottesville issue behind him. CNN pundit Chris Cillizza summed it up well before the fact:

To re-litigate Charlottesville in any way – including using it as an example of how the “very fake” media misconstrued what he said (we didn’t) – would be a huge mistake, effectively reopening a political debate that Trump has zero chance of winning. (As evidenced by the strongly negative views of how he has handled it thus far in a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.)
But instead of moving on, Trump took a disastrous and losing talking point and repeated it over and over again when absolutely no one wanted or needed him to do that. He actually made it all worse by once again arguing that taking down Confederate monuments is the same as attacking George Washington, and expressing sympathy for Jeffrey Lord, who was fired by CNN after he used a Nazi slogan in a tweet.

What made the whole display especially bizarre is that the president wrapped this unwholesome stroll back through his reprehensible handling of Charlottesville in a “national unity” pitch, playing off his speech last night. The clear implication is that his supporters were the only true and patriotic Americans — not the “dishonest” media, or the obstructionist Democrats, or the Republican senators from Arizona that he attacked without mentioning their names.

This president is truly incorrigible, and apparently he won’t stop dragging us all back through the muck of his worst “thoughts” until he can no longer find a crowd to applaud them.

“Criticism comes with this job, and this president has the kind of broad shoulders to be able to take it.”

Clearly, Mike Pence is one of smartest and most acute observers of human behavior who has ever lived. It's amazing. Believe me. Just three days ago Pence said:

Quote:

“Criticism comes with this job, and this president has the kind of broad shoulders to be able to take it.”