Author: Jobrny

We need a political revolution that will restore government to We The People.

Trump’s EPA chief spent taxpayer dollars on family trip to Disneyland

Maybe he has his own idea of how to drain the swamp:

EPA administrator Scott Pruitt is in trouble yet again for misusing taxpayer resources — this time to take personal trips, including a family trip to Disneyland, a visit to the Rose Bowl and a stop in Lexington for a University of Kentucky basketball game.

According to a letter sent by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) to the EPA Office of the Inspector General, Pruitt kept his multimillion-dollar government security detail with him on personal vacations. No previous EPA administrator has ever demanded 24-hour security detail even while not on official business.

Wait a minute, this classic Washington corruption. The opposite of DTS:

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt paid just $50 a night to rent a room in a condo in Capitol Hill which is co-owned by the wife of a prominent lobbyist, according to reporting from Bloomberg and ABC News. The unusual deal, which allowed Pruitt to pay only for the nights he actually spent in the room — mere blocks from his office — appears to be well below what he would have paid in comparable or worse locations. Other apartments in the same building rented for $5,000 a month, according to ABC News.

Scott isn’t the only one failing to DTS:

Trump’s White House and various federal agencies could be violating President Donald Trump’s own executive order designed to “drain the swamp,” a government watchdog has alleged in 30 complaints filed in recent days.

The group, Public Citizen, announced Monday that it filed the ethics complaints accusing the Trump administration of violating the president’s own order that bars ex-lobbyists from being appointed without a waiver to government jobs dealing with the issues they lobbied for in the past couple of years.

In fact, we now know it was all a campaign promise for electoral purposes. Don the con got what he wanted. Never intending to fulfill:

President Trump and his appointees have stocked federal agencies with ex-lobbyists and corporate lawyers who now help regulate the very industries from which they previously collected paychecks, despite promising as a candidate to drain the swamp in Washington.

A week after his January 2017 inauguration, Trump signed an executive order that bars former lobbyists, lawyers and others from participating in any matter they lobbied or otherwise worked on for private clients within two years before going to work for the government. But records reviewed by The Associated Press show Trump’s top lawyer, White House counsel Don McGahn, has issued at least 24 ethics waivers to key administration officials at the White House and executive branch agencies.

A Woman Who Went Viral For Being Assaulted During A Protest Is Now Facing Arrest

“It was pure madness,” Thakur, 24, recounted later, of the events of March 23 when a group of more than 2,000 people had gathered to protest against sexual harassment. “There was a policeman in the crowd who was in such a frenzy beating up kids that he had taken his own shirt off. … His eyes were blazing red. I couldn’t smell any alcohol on him but I think he was just high off the fear and anger in the crowd.” Pictures and the videos of the protest were soon doing the rounds on social media and on TV news.

Five days after she was assaulted by members of the Delhi police, Thakur and her friends — all students at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University — stood waiting outside a lawyer’s office in the Supreme Court. In a bizarre turn of events, Thakur was not there to follow up on a complaint against the police. The police had filed a complaint against her, for assault, “outraging the modesty of a woman,” and “rioting while armed with a deadly weapon.”

Source: A Woman Who Went Viral For Being Assaulted During A Protest Is Now Facing Arrest

Thanks to Trump the US needs to borrow almost $300 billion this Week

Only a matter of time before we have to pay the piper. Any downturn in the economy could break the camel’s back:

The United States plans to sell about $294 billion of debt, according to the Treasury Department. That’s the highest for a week since the record set during the 2008 financial crisis.

Federal revenue is declining because of President Trump’s tax cuts, so the government needs to borrow more to make ends meet. At the same time, Washington’s borrowing costs have climbed rapidly in recent months.

“The amount of debt coming on the market this week is extremely large,” said Rick Rieder, global chief investment officer of fixed income at BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager.

NRA is Stepping up their Attacks on Teen Anti-Gun Violence Activists

The NRA feels threatened by the incredible success of Teen Parkland school shooting survivors. Now they’ve stepped up their attacks. And they playing dirty. The NRA, and their surrogates, do not have logic on their side. So they turn to smearing and name calling. The American people have to step up their support for these teens. They are our children. The “March for our lives” was part of how we send a message. But we need more. In order to defeat evil we must fight on many different levels. That’s what the civil rights movement did. They are the blueprint for what we must do to defeat the gun lobby’s hold on Washington.

One of those NRA thugs is Rick Santorum. He had some fatuous comments to make after MFOL Saturday:

“How about kids instead of looking to someone else to solve their problem, do something about maybe taking CPR classes or trying to deal with situations that when there is a violent shooter that you can actually respond to that,” Santorum said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

It turns out that Santorum, while he was in the Senate was the 3rd highest on the list of “top 5 politicians in the pocket of the NRA.” That tells you everything you need know.

And now FOX News is stepping up the attacks. That was predictable. Here’s what a patronizing Tucker Carlson had to say:

This is the problem with letting children write news stories. The articles tend to be dumb, and intentionally or not, they tend to be inaccurate and dishonest. Worst of all, they tend to reinforce the fantasy that complex problems have simple solutions, because that’s what most children believe. In real life, nothing is simple.

…The self-righteous kids screaming at you on television over the weekend aren’t helping at all.

The Parkland students have become enemy number one:

And as of this weekend, this group of idealistic young people have officially become the right’s leading hate figures.

The first and most repugnant strategy was to directly attack high-profile campaigners, especially students David Hogg and Emma Gonzalez.

Running short of reasoned arguments, many attempted to push conservative buttons with high impact visuals. Alt-right social media company Gab was one of many that disseminated a doctored animation of Gonzalez in which she falsely appeared to be tearing up the US constitution. Cartoonist and Trump sycophant Ben Garrison depicted Hogg as an assault rifle, wielded by CNN, and loaded with Marxism. Breitbart re-published a round of tweets accusing Hogg of throwing a Nazi salute.

The right has even turned to hoaxes in a pathetic attempt to try and discredit the Parkland students:

Far-right trolls created a fake image and GIF of survivor Emma González tearing up the Constitution. Along with appearing on Squawker, the fake image and GIF subsequently spread on Twitter, where those pushing the bogus graphics included Gab, a social media platform for white nationalists, and actor Adam Baldwin. 4chan /pol/ (4chan’s “politically incorrect” message board) users subsequently celebrated the news that the fake image had been shared on Twitter. The hoax was based on a video from Teen Vogue of Gonzalez tearing up a target.

 

Study: wind and solar can power most of the United States

The authors analyzed 36 years of hourly weather data (1980–2015) in the US. They calculated the available wind and solar power over this time period and also included the electrical demand in the US and its variation throughout the year.

With this information, the researchers considered two scenarios. In scenario 1, they imagined wind and solar installations that would be sufficient to supply 100% of the US electrical needs. In the second scenario, the installations would be over-designed; capable of providing 150% of the total U.S. electrical need. But the authors recognize that just because a solar panel or a wind turbine can provide all our energy, it doesn’t mean that will happen in reality. It goes back to the prior discussion that sometimes the wind just doesn’t blow, and sometimes the sun isn’t shining.

Source: Study: wind and solar can power most of the United States | John Abraham | Environment | The Guardian

Video shows unarmed Black man Before he is Shot dead by Texas Deputy

The beat goes on. And no one in government is raising the alarm. Black people are being regularly executed without posing a threat to the police. In fact, cops are lying quite often the person they’ve shot:

Cellphone video of a sheriff’s deputy fatally shooting an unarmed black man shows the man wandering in a Houston street with his trousers around his ankles and continuing to approach the deputy as the officer tells him to stop.

The video, obtained by the Houston Chronicle from a civilian witness, does not show the actual shooting because a car passes in front of the cellphone camera as the Harris county deputy fires a single shot.

A spokesman for the sheriff’s office says the man had an object in his hand, but no weapon was recovered at the scene.

Family members identified the man as 34-year-old Danny Ray Thomas, and said he had been devastated after two of his children were killed in 2016. The children’s mother is accused of drowning them in a bathtub.

Officers were responding to reports that a man was walking in the intersection with his pants down hitting cars as he mumbled to himself.

This CNBC article Reads like it was written by the White House

kudlow Google SearchCNBC has always been a conservative outlet. The new Trump chief economic advisor has been a long time host on than station. And long before there was FOX we had CNBC giving the capitalist orthodoxy for years. No room for socialists there.

This article wants to downplay the big drops in the stock market the last 2 days by arguing that the DOW is up by a substantial since Trump became president. Never mind the drop could continue next week. And it’s stands the market is the lowest since the end of November. Four months have been lost. And all because of Trump’s belligerent trade talk:

President Donald Trump has touted the strong stock market performance since he took office.

Detractors may point to the Dow Jones industrial average’s recent stumbles, but the benchmark index has much further to fall before Trump’s post-inauguration gains are gone.

“I think the stock market is gonna be great. The stock market is way up. When I came into office the stock market was from a different planet. It’s way up,” Trump said at a news conference Friday. “China is gonna end up treating us fairly.”

Then as if the point were made. The author repeat Trump’s spin:

Trump still has a big cushion. The Dow closed at 19,827.25 on Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, 2017, which means it has about 3,700 points to go before the Trump rally gains disappear.

Donald Trump Wants to Become President for Life Just Like Xi Jinping


Donald Trump doesn’t hide his admiration for dictators. In fact, his ‘leadership’ system is authoritarian. His lavish lifestyle is like an old European monarch. His problem is that we have a constitution that keeps getting in his way. But Trump is still a threat as long as he is power. All that it could take is a ‘terrorist attack’ or some new manufactured war. That would distract us from his endless criminality. He has already tried it repeatedly with talk of war with North Korea. There is also the threat of a Mueller firing:

The ruling Communist party in China announced that leader Xi Jinping was eliminating the two-term limit for presidency, meaning he could rule indefinitely.

The move has been criticised by liberals and pro-democracy activists who have condemned the Chinese leader for cementing his grip on control in the former dictator state.

But, according to an audio recording aired by CNN, President Trump said the concept was “great” and said to cheering supporters: “Maybe we will give that a shot.”

Puerto Ricans face yet another crisis—with water rationing a possibility as soon as next week

I don’t know which is worse for Puerto Rico: Hurricanes or the government:

For some Puerto Ricans, five months into the disaster caused by Hurricane Maria,  things seem to be getting worse each day. Many of the island’s residents remain without power and have absolutely no idea when it will be restored. On Thursday, San Juan area residents suffered yet another major blackout after two power plants shut down. And now, it looks like water supplies have become an issue on parts of the island with officials possibly planning to ration water starting next week.