Green Eagle

A general takes over as chief of staff and immediately reacts by firing a guy who we know is Trump's alter ego, without a word of complaint from Trump. In the last couple of days we have seen Trump order the military around without authority in the LGBT matter, come within inches of starting a war with North Korea. drastically damage our standing in the world, risking further conflicts in which the military would pay the price, and license the police to effectively start a war of terror against our own people. Maybe that was a little bit too far for the military.  Did Trump really appoint Kelly to his new post, or was it forced on a man who has now been revealed as a weak, sniveling President who knows nothing except how to make threats? Probably not, and if it is true, we may never see behind the curtain, with a suddenly controlled Trump still sitting in the Oval Office, pretending to make decisions, but with everything signed off on by the military, which would just wai...

I started following not just the far right, but fringe religious and scientific beliefs too, in the late 1960's.  At first it was an amusement to follow the likes of the National States Rights Party, or Scientology or General Semantics, or lunatic Evangelical religious groups.  But around the time of the Reagan administration, I began to see that these perverted people just refused to give up their malign idiocy, and they were starting to attract funding from rich sociopaths that believed they could personally benefit from encouraging the public to detach its political views from rational thinking. At that time I began believing that what was happening, if it remained unchecked, could result in such a right wing surge in the United States that we could find ourselves facing a fascist takeover that could sweep away everything we thought was unalterable about our country.  Well, with a couple of exceptions, no one believed me.  I even had an acquaintance who is a psy...

Donald Trump, speaking to police today:  "When you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon, you just see them thrown in. Rough. I said, please don’t be too nice. Like when you guys put somebody in the car and you're protecting their head. You know, the way you put their hand over their head, like don’t hit their head and they’ve just killed somebody. I said you could take the hand away, OK.” This is one more of at least a hundred legitimate grounds for impeachment of this grotesque excuse for a human being, and not one of the lesser ones, as behavior like this, licensed by the state, is one of the surest paths to fascism that anyone could imagine. And when the country finally comes to its sense and drags this hateful man out of the White House, I only ask one thing: Do it rough.  Please don't be too nice.  It's the way he wants our country to treat criminal suspects.

I'm sure the kind of people who see my blog have already heard enough of the interview that White House "Communications Director" Anthony Scaramucci gave the other day to the New Yorker.  So I won't belabor its contents.  I just want to say that the fact that this guy was not fired within an hour of the interview's becoming public is a perfect illustration of why it is hopeless to have any relationship with Donald Trump and his administration besides kicking him the hell out of his office and trying to somehow begin to repair the devastation that he has already generated in our country.  The fact that Trump appears to be fine with people talking like this on his behalf should be enough, all by itself, to show that he has no business anywhere near the Federal government, other than as the occupant of one of its prison cells.

Two headlines from the Washington Post, about last night's Republican healthcare defeat: "The night John McCain killed the GOP’s health-care fight" "How a ham-handed phone call to Sen. Murkowski backfired" See, the guy killed it, but the phone call to Senator Murkowski, a woman, was also a failure of the guy who made the call, not the result of Murkowski's long efforts against this bill. Dames- they just can't really do anything on their own, right?

John McCain. Plenty of money that he got through dumping his first wife and marrying a rich beer heiress, so he can pay anything for his own medical care, but he does not give a God damn about the health of anyone else. The "maverick" has spent a decade now talking a good game and then voting along with the most corrupt people in the country on every issue, so we have no reason to believe that he would not get up off his sickbed for nothing but to stick a dagger in the backs of tens of millions of his fellow Americans.  And here he is again, betraying the American people, even though at this point in his life it cannot mean a damned thing to him. He is today's poster child for the utter evil that is all that the Republican party is about.  There is not a shred of decency or humanity in a single one of them, and they are now well on an almost irreversible path to destroying the United States.  And behind all their bullshit patriotic talk, they know this perfectly w...

When the President's response to an investigation is: 1. To prepare alleged grounds for dismissing or at least organizing a campaign to discredit the special prosecutor 2.  To begin an analysis of exactly under what circumstances he can pardon his family and himself we can pretty much abandon any pretense that the guy is not guilty.  These are the acts of criminals, not honest people.  Let's not have any dissembling about this any more.  The guy is guilty. The only question, and it is a big one, is where are we going to find a few honest Republicans who are willing to do the right thing and throw his ass in jail.  Sad to say, counting on that is a bad bet. My guess? If he can't get away with firing Mueller, he has two fallback positions.  The lesser one, which I expect he will try first, is to have Jeff Sessions indict Hillary Clinton on some of the bogus, lying smears the Republicans have directed against her for years.  The uproar that would ...

I won't bother to demolish Donald Trump's insane account of both Napoleon's and Hitler's invasion of Russia, from yesterday's interview; there are plenty of people handling that.  I will, as an architect, comment on his account of Napoleon's work in the city of Paris: "What he did was incredible. He designed Paris.” [garbled] The street grid, the way they work, you know, the spokes." Donald, that was done by Baron Haussmann, who was commissioned by Napoleon III, who was the nephew of the Napoleon you are talking about. One of Haussmann's boulevards in Paris Why don't you keep your damned mouth shut about things that you know nothing about?  Of course, that would pretty well stop you from talking about anything, wouldn't it?  Hey, not a bad idea, really.

I don't want to minimize the serious situation in which John McCain finds himself.  I've had people close to me die of cancer, and I know what that is like.  But I will tell you what I am thinking about this:  John McCain is a man who married a woman worth hundreds of millions of dollars (after dumping his first wife,) and who consequently has not a shred of worry about how to pay for his own care, nor does he have to make decisions about paying for his own treatment at the price of leaving his family destitute. Please, John, take a little bit of time to put yourself outside of your own privileged situation, and think about all of the people in this country who have to face what you are facing, without a huge stash of money to pay for it.  Go back to the Senate and demand that this abomination be eliminated.  We now know, from the behavior of your fellow Republicans, that there is no way to guarantee this except by a single payer system, minimally just extendi...

Trump gave an unusually lunatic interview yesterday to the New York Times .  I don't want to deal very much with the substance of his comments (there really wasn't much,) but I do want to talk about what he is up to; something which continues to go unnoticed by almost everybody. Trump's behavior, since his childhood, has revolved around bullying other people to get what he wants, which is a sense that he is not a degraded person.  The way this sick person convinces himself of his superiority is to force other, presumably inferior, people to do what he wants.  Now, he can't just beat on people any more, so he satisfies this sick need by making others go along with things he claims which they, he and everyone else know to be false.  When you understand this, you realize that the detachment of his claims from reality is not a defect but a feature.  This is because the whole point of his talk is not to seek the truth or push an ideology, but totally to humiliate t...

Lest we forget, a little news about the situation in Fukushima, from Newsweek, via Yahoo: "While much progress has been made to clean the area, the company has only just resolved the debate over what to do with the water that was used to cool the plant's damaged reactors, causing it to become tainted with tritium." What to do...what to do...  Oh wait, I have an idea: "Takashi Kawamura, chairman of Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), told foreign media that nearly 777,000 tons of water tainted with tritium, a byproduct of the nuclear process that is notoriously difficult to filter out of water, will be dumped into the Pacific Ocean" Yeah, just dump it into the ocean.  That'll take care of the problem. Nuclear energy-the power of the future.  If there is one.

You want to get Donald Trump and Mike Pence impeached?  Here is my surefire solution:  The Democrats need to mount a massively funded, furious campaign against Paul Ryan, using the Republicans' own tactics to portray him as the miserable moral monster that he is.  The minute that Ryan gets really afraid that he is going to lose his seat, the impeachment will begin immediately.

I have to admit that it is strange that so many people are willing to listen to the Don Trump-Kushner account of their meeting with the lady Russian lawyer, discover that their story that it was all about saving the orphans (the most insipid lie I have ever heard) was false, and are willing to remember that this meeting was lied about and kept secret for months, and then as a final indignity, discover that they forgot to mention that there was an "ex" Russian intelligence officer also at the meeting, and still give the entire Trump administration one second of credibility. Come on...this one episode has more wrongdoing than a thousand Benghazis.  But it's okay with a party that has adopted treason as their standard operating procedure.  I mean really, they forgot that there was a Russian spy in the meeting? Life in prison for all of them, the "President" included.

So, today's little piece of the Trump-Putin puzzle: "A GOP donor and opposition researcher who said he tried to work with Russian hackers to retrieve deleted emails from a private server used by Hillary Clinton, has died in a suicide, according to public records cited in a Chicago Tribune report." Suicide.  Of course it was.  Because any other explanation would be more the sort of thing that, say, Vladimir Putin goes in for, than something Trump would get up to. Yet, already.  Or maybe not.  We report, you decide.

I understand that Donald Trump was the guest of honor at a Bastille day celebration while he was in France.  I was so disappointed to discover that he wasn't this kind of guest of honor: I mean, come on, French guys, you had your chance.

If you are a Republican. Here's an excerpt from a Washington Pos t article from last December, in case you have forgotten about this: "The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter...The Democratic leaders in the room unanimously agreed on the need to take the threat seriously. Republicans, however, were divided, with at least two GOP lawmakers reluctant to accede to the White House requests. According to several officials, McConnell raised doubts about the underlying intelligence and made clear to the administration that he would consider any effort by the White House to challenge the Russians publicly an act of partisan politics." You see, it's okay for a Republican to collaborate with our foreign enemies, as long as it's okay with other Republicans too;...

Whoo, back already.  They seem to need to be really shouting out their idiocies today.  I wonder why they're so active? Ben Shapiro, Town Hall:  "What If There's No Trump-Putin Conspiracy? " Yeah, and while we are on the subject, what if the moon doesn't exist?  What if Smurfs are real?  What if monkeys really can play the electric guitar?  Ben explains himself: "Trump issued a series of tweets implying that he created a relationship of trust with Russian President Vladimir Putin... this looks rather suspicious, unless it turns out that pretty much every Trumpian scandal can be explained through a combination of Trump's ego and the incompetence of those around him." See, even if he does go out on fifth avenue and start shooting people, he isn't guilty because he's just an incompetent egomaniac.  That explains everything, and makes it okay.  See, Trump could open our borders to an invading Russian horde and it would all be fine, becau...

So you can predict what the Republicans are going to try to do to dodge having to deal with the monster they backed, but let's just see how many whiny excuses they have gotten up to in the last 24 hours, starting at the top: Senator and Republican Elder Statesman Orrin Hatch:  "...all this stuff about Trump's sons and daughter -- it's a bunch of bunk..I don't think this is relevant to the Trump administration." Bunk.  Bunk, I tell you. But how about going to an even higher authority?  And I'm not talking Hebrew National hot dogs here: Katie Pavlich, Town Hall:  "President Trump Defends Don Jr. Amid Email Scandal: My Son is a High Quality Person" Maybe compared to yourself, Donald. After that, we really don't need to hear from the run of the mill right wing assholes, but Green Eagle is going to plow on anyway: Cortney O'Brien, Town Hall:  "Dems Insist Congress Must Investigate Trump Jr." Only Dems, apparently.  On...

Fresh on the heels of Trump administration claims that they didn't have hotel rooms booked for the G20 summit because it was Barack Obama's job to make those reservations, way back when he was President, comes this even more unbelievable refusal to take responsibility for their own actions, regarding Donald Trump Junior's recently revealed attempt to collude with the Russians to attack Hillary: "White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus has accused Democratic operatives of arranging a meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Kremlin-linked lawyer last summer, two weeks after Donald Trump won the Republican nomination for president." Yes, Democrats arranged a meeting to supply Republicans with dirt on their own candidate.  That's the story, right. There is absolutely no depth of craven shamelessness that the Trump administration is unwilling to sink to, in its increasingly desperate attempts to shield the nation from the fact that Trump is a traitor. Man,...

It's getting hard to continue with this, seeing as how we can get things just as lunatic and hateful from the White House these days.  Well, let's just get going with this contribution to our understanding of national affairs: Leah Barkoukis, Town Hall:  "CNNBlackmail: Jeff Zucker Issued a Thinly Veiled Threat at Trump Before Inauguration" See, it wasn't Trump threatening to blackmail journalists, it was the other way around!  And how did that work? "(Jeff Zucker:) It doesn’t worry me that Donald Trump hasn’t done an interview with CNN in eight months. I think our credibility is higher than ever, and our viewership is higher than ever, and our reporting is as strong as ever. One of the things I think this administration hasn’t figured out yet is that there’s only one television network that is seen in Beijing, Moscow, Seoul, Tokyo, Pyongyang, Baghdad, Tehran, and Damascus — and that’s CNN. The perception of Donald Trump in capitals around the world is ...

Let's just get this damned clear right now.  If Trump were not guilty of collusion with the Russians to take over the Presidency, i.e. the worst act of treason in the history of the United States, he would want nothing more than to have the truth revealed.  His collusion with Putin this weekend to try to shut down the interest in a revelation of the facts, after all the other information we've had the last half year or so, is clearly evidence that he knows he is guilty.  This is evidence beyond any sort of reasonable doubt by any reasonable person. He is guilty.  He is a traitor.  He is the worst criminal in the history of the government. Anyone who doesn't believe that at this point is a fool.

So in the end, the real interest of the world was not, surprisingly enough, on whether John Podesta refused to give some e-mails to the government which were not in his possession*, but exactly how Donald Trump, as President, would stand up to the man who all of our intelligence agencies say was responsible for massively interfering with the integrity of our election process, putting a corrupt, stupid tool (that would be Trump himself) in the White House instead of the massively experienced, honest, serious public servant who should be there. I guess we should have gotten a sign of how that was going to go, the day before the much-heralded meeting between Trump and Putin, when Trump pretty much preempted taking a strong stand about this near act of war, by declaring against the determination of all of the American experts, that there was no reason to believe Russia was behind the treachery in his favor in the recent election. Well, they met. I saw a little of this (very little,...

Our Secretary of Energy, former governor of Texas and Republican Presidential front-runner, Rick Perry: “Here's a little economics lesson: supply and demand,” he said. “You put the supply out there, and demand will follow.” The demand for terminal stupidity is about to take a huge jump.

Read this, from Daily Kos. Just one tiny little example.

Okay, it is apparently time once again for me to point out the truth about North Korea's belligerent posturing that should be obvious to people with even the most shallow knowledge of the way things work. North Korea is a military dictatorship, and what's more, a very poor one that devotes an obscene portion of its revenue to its military.  Now, anyone who knows a thing about military dictatorships knows that most of that money ends up in the pockets of the generals, who are the actual rulers of their country, not some bumbling thirty year old nitwit. Do you think these generals would really leave the security of their racket in the hands of this buffoon? No, it is completely obvious that Kim Jong Un has one role and one role only to play in his country's rule, and that is to keep the populace so frightened of foreign attack that they tolerate being reduced to poverty so the generals can have all the money.  These generals, however, enjoy being able to grow rich fro...

From the very first time I heard of Twitter I thought it was an abominable thing, because its 140 character limit is suitable for nothing but sound bites, and it essentially eliminates the possibility of any sort of real analysis of anything; in other words, it plays right into the Republican party's strength.  I have, consequently, refused to have anything to do with it, and believed that every decent person should have spoken out against its use as a tool of political propaganda. Well, with Trump's tweets of the last few days, including the new one showing Trump beating a man who seems to have a CNN logo for a head, I think my position, in which I have been almost alone, has been pretty well demonstrated to be true.  Twitter is responsible in very significant part for the deterioration of our political discourse from its formerly miserable state into the ugly screamfest it has now become, and the chief beneficiary is the single person who cares the least about what damage ...

A recent picture of Trump.  What do you think you are looking at here, given that he is about 6'-2" tall?  325? 350?  The guy is as physically out of control as he is mentally out of control.  Oh well, the more pounds he packs on, the more likely it is that he will destroy himself.  His mental problems will only destroy others.  Sort of makes you sad to see the end of this, huh? Well, like I say, we can always hope for a heart attack or a stroke.

I guess it is worthwhile to keep our eyes on what is going to happen to our country when the effects of the corrupt Republican refusal to acknowledge the damage caused by climate change really takes place.  Here's a county by county map of the degradation to gdp that will happen by 2080 or so: I'm not sure there is much satisfaction to be taken by this fact, but the damage is going to be overwhelmingly concentrated, as you can see, in the red States that support Republicans. Unfortunately, as informed people already know, the Republican States only exist by sucking the earnings out of the blue States.  So, in fifty years or so, the belligerent, stupid, greedy right wingers that fill these States will have even more motive to engage in violence to take away what the rest of us have earned. Just one more reason why I believe that this century is going to see the end of the United States as a single entity, brought down not by terrorists or illegal immigrants, but by peop...