monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

In a rapid-fire series of decisions, an appeals court on Wednesday rejected Walker’s request that it block the lower court order. Walker had argued that the issue was moot since the legislature planned to change the law.

But shortly after, lawmakers announced it was dropping the plan to hold an extraordinary session to change the law.

Fox News host Laura Ingraham apologized to Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg on Thursday “for any upset or hurt” after she mocked the student’s GPA and his rejection from several colleges.

“On reflection, in the spirit of Holy Week, I apologize for any upset or hurt my tweet caused him or any of the brave victims of Parkland,” Ingraham tweeted.

On Wednesday, Ingraham tweeted a Daily Wire story about Hogg being rejected from four colleges he applied to, saying, “David Hogg Rejected By Four Colleges To Which He Applied and whines about it. (Dinged by UCLA with a 4.1 GPA…totally predictable given acceptance rates.)”

Where Ingraham got 4.1 was unclear. As the article she linked to states, Hogg’s GPA is 4.2.

Hogg responded by asking Ingraham who her biggest advertisers were.

“Asking for a friend. #BoycottingIngramAdverts” he tweeted. He later posted a list of companies for his followers to contact.

...Several advertisers subsequently announced they were pulling their ads from the Fox host’s show.

Trump crony Michael Savage compares March For Our Lives protesters to Hitler Youth, Khmer Rouge
"You stupid brats, you. You know nothing about history. Nothing. Zero. Because you've been brainwashed"

Like Hitler Youth wore arm bands, these clowns wore arm bands, these stupid, useful idiots.

Except as BuzzFeed explained, “The images tweeted by the president were not of his long-promised wall, but a months-long project to replace existing portions of a wall along Calexico, California.”

Quote:

The project, which started in 2009, will replace a 2.25-mile section in the California-Mexico border wall, according to a statement last month from US Customs and Border Protection.

The original wall in that section, built in the 1990s, had been built from recycled metal scraps and old landing mat materials, the agency said.

So when Trump wrote yesterday about “the start” of construction on a border wall, what he ended up pointing to were pictures of an Obama-era project.

Nikki Haley Slashes the U.N. Budget Again, Cuts the Corrupt Peacekeepers

It’s a good start, but that isn’t enough of a cap for a department constantly accused of hiring child abusers, rapists, and murderers. The U.N. has failed to cut down on the crimes and their budget keeps going up.

Who controls the past controls the future: Who controls the present controls the past.


From 1984

“Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and human memories.”

____________________________________________________
The gun manufacturers in America have been controlling the past. The biggest myth of the 21st century is that mass murders are done by the mentally ill when in fact mass murders are committed by psychopaths. If you believe that the mentally ill are responsible for the mass murder in Las Vegas that killed 59 people and injured 841 then you just throw your hands up and say oh well nothing can be done. But if you know the truth and realize the Las Vegas shooter was a psychopath and that there are at least 13 million more just like him living in America today than the problem is the weapons of war. Psychopaths are not mentally ill they are intelligent functioning human beings that not only lack empathy but seem to take enjoyment in the suffering of other human beings and animals.
If someone is mentally ill stabs someone to death because they think they are a shape shifter we throw our hands up because it is like someone being struck by lightening there is nothing we could have done to prevent it. But mass murders are intelligent and plotting. The case the site of their mass murders like a bank robber. Recently on the news they showed the Pulse Night Club shooter casing Disney World his initial plan was to commit his mass murder at Disney World. He decided he could tell he could not kill enough people at Disney World.

By changing this one item in history the gun manufacturers have been able to keep flooding America with weapons of war. Mass murders in America were perceived as equivalent of lightening strikes there was no point in trying to anything about them. You have a small chance of being struck by lightening or being killed in a mass murder but something can be done about mass murder.

The gun control movement is going to have to take control of the past from the gun manufacturers because their version of the past benefits them.

Ousted Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin said Thursday night that he did get a call from President Donald Trump on the day of his firing but that the President didn’t mention he would be fired.

“We spoke about the progress that I was making, what I needed to do from a policy perspective,” Shulkin told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes about his Wednesday phone call with Trump. “He was very inquisitive about the things that we were working on, making sure that we were focused on the job at hand.”

“He made no mention of the fact that he was about to terminate you?” Hayes then asked.

“That’s correct,” Shulkin replied.

Outlandish former Texas congressman Steve Stockman resurfaced last spring when he was arrested by federal agents while trying to board an international flight and subsequently slapped with a 28-count felony fraud indictment, which he said was the work of the “deep state.”

Stockman’s trial is currently in its second week in a federal court in Houston. And it’s a doozy.

The far-right Republican firebrand is accused of using hundreds of thousands in charitable donations from two conservative mega-donors for personal expenses in what prosecutors call a “white-collar crime spree.” They say he’s used the money to spy on political rivals with Mr. Gadget-style tools, to pay off his credit card debt, to go on dolphin boat rides, and to buy up copies of pop-up Advent books published by his brother.

Stockman, who served in the U.S. House from 1995 to 1997 and again from 2013 to 2015, earned a reputation as a tea party favorite eager to buck his party’s establishment. He invited Ted Nugent to President Obama’s State of The Union speech,

“He made no mention of the fact that he was about to terminate you?” Hayes then asked.

A growing number of companies will heed calls from a survivor of the Florida high school shooting to drop their advertisements on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News program after the host mocked the student on Twitter.

At least six said they would cease buying ads on the show.

Fox News host Ingraham’s rapid apology shows the power of Parkland survivors

The Trump administration is expected to launch an effort in coming days to weaken greenhouse gas emissions and fuel economy standards for automobiles, handing a victory to car manufacturers and giving them ammunition to potentially roll back industry standards worldwide.

A Houston megachurch pastor and longtime spiritual adviser to President George W. Bush was indicted in federal court Thursday on claims that he sold more than $1 million in worthless Chinese bonds to vulnerable and elderly investors, some of whom lost their life savings to the alleged scheme.

A federal grand jury in Shreveport, La., returned a 13-count indictment accusing the Rev. Kirbyjon H. Caldwell and financial planner Gregory Alan Smith of wire fraud, money laundering and conspiracy, prosecutors said in a news release.

...His financial background has long played a role in his ministry. His 1999 book, “The Gospel of Good Success: A Road Map to Spiritual, Emotional and Financial Wholeness,” discusses how he transformed his megachurch into a “Kingdom-building machine” and advises readers on how to “create wealth God’s way,” among other things.

Surprise: Trump’s newest Cabinet nominee has no relevant experience

It is immoral because it perpetuates a lie: that the white working class that finds itself attracted to Trump has been victimized by outside forces. It hasn’t. The white middle class may like the idea of Trump as a giant pulsing humanoid middle finger held up in the face of the Cathedral, they may sing hymns to Trump the destroyer and whisper darkly about “globalists” and — odious, stupid term — “the Establishment,” but nobody did this to them. They failed themselves.

If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy — which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog — you will come to an awful realization. It wasn’t Beijing. It wasn’t even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn’t immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn’t any of that.

Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence — and the incomprehensible malice — of poor white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain’t what it used to be. There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down.

The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.

If you want to live, get out of Garbutt.

''I don't know what that means, a community college,'' Trump said at one point. ''Call it vocational and technical. People know what that means. They don't know what a community college means.''