Month: August 2017

IST Asshat “Assie” Award–Aug 2017

The last Sunday of the month and time for IST to award its “Assie”….

The winner for the month of August 2017 is the preacher Pat Robertson…..

IN SANER TOUGHT

ASSHAT “ASSIE” AWARD FOR THE MONTH OF August 2017

WINNER!

Mr. Robertson has won this award under another incarnation the “Anal-ocity Award”….. but this will be his first award as the “Asshat” Award….

 

Fox News host Eric Bolling has been suspended from his job for allegedly sending photos of his genitals to multiple female coworkers, but televangelist Pat Robertson believes that it is all part of a big conspiracy to bring down the right-wing cable news station.

Via Mediaite, Robertson this week went to bat for Bolling, whom he described as a “straight arrow” who could never be guilty of the actions he’s been accused of committing.

“He was on this program, he’s a dedicated Catholic, goes to mass every day, very nice man,” Robertson said of Bolling. “They’ve pulled him off the air because someone sent some pictures ostensibly over his name.”

Seriously?  He was framed?

MY thought is…yeah there have been NO Catholics that have been known to do stuff like this….Catholics are not capable of such degenerative acts.

A copy of this post will be sent to his offices with a congratulatory note….

By winning this month he will be in the running for the annual Asshat Award to be given in December 0f 2017.

Harvey Arrives!

Saturday begins and the word is the Hurricane Harvey has roared ashore with 120+ mph winds and rain upon rain.

Hurricane Harvey settled over southeast Texas early Saturday, lashing the state’s Gulf Coast with damaging winds and dumping torrents of rain over hundreds of miles of coastline that braced for what forecasters predicted would be life-threatening storm surges—basically walls of water moving inland. The fiercest hurricane to hit the US in more than a decade made landfall the previous night about 30 miles northeast of Corpus Christi as a Category 4 storm with 130 mph winds. It gradually weakened over the next several hours and the National Hurricane Center said that by 3am Harvey was back to a Category 2—still sustaining winds of 110 mph, per the AP. No deaths were immediately confirmed in the hours after Harvey’s arrival, but officials noted emergency crews couldn’t get out in many places due to high winds.

Melissa Munguia, deputy emergency management coordinator in Nueces County, which includes Corpus Christi, said early Saturday that it could be hours before crews could fully assess the damage in coastal communities. Early reports did begin to emerge from Rockport, a coastal city of about 10,000 people that was directly in Harvey’s path when it came ashore. Officials confirmed that the roof of Rockport’s high school had partially caved in and that the community’s historic downtown saw extensive damage. Harvey’s approach sent tens of thousands of residents fleeing inland, hoping to escape the wrath of a menacing storm that threatens not only the coast but a wide swath of Texas that is home to oil refineries, chemical plants, and dangerously flood-prone Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city.

Now that it has arrived you can be sure that there will be story upon story of people abusing the FEMA aid and such…..most of it will be on the bullshit sites like Infowars, Breitbart, etc.

These are the same sites that “reported” these abuses after Katrina….I lived through Katrina and most of these bullshit stories are lies…..one story was that a man got some FEMA cash and went out a bought a diamond ring for himself…that one was not verified and there will be many such stories.

Plus there will be more reports of looting, rapes, etc….anything to make people look like savages

The story that the nation should fixate on is the needs that the people of this storm….the lodging, food, water, clothing, etc.

Please do not let these naysayers prevent you from helping in any manner that you can….these people are now in dire need.

Mr. Trump, Your Timing Sucks!

As promised Pres. Trump has pardoned that racist sheriff from Arizona, Arpaio…..

President Trump wasn’t bluffing: Trump has pardoned former sheriff Joe Arpaio following Arpaio’s conviction for intentionally disobeying a judge’s order in an immigration case. The White House announced the move Friday night, saying the 85-year-old ex-sheriff of Arizona’s Maricopa County was a “worthy candidate” for a presidential pardon.

He picked today to do the dirty deed because of the storm heading to Texas, Harvey…..the news was released too early for the storm is still over the Gulf and not yet inland.

A news dump after midnight would have put this story on the back burner until the storm stories subsided and then it would be not as highlighted.

Goes to show where the loyalties of this president remains….strongly on the side of the racists.

No doubt now…if there was ever any doubt…

His timing sucks big time…..illustrates the amateurish nature of this man and his administration.

Closing Thought–25Aug17

May I Please Have Your Permission!

There is always lots of tension in and around the “Holy Land”….3 religions, 2 people, one land…..makes for lots of news and opinion.

It seems that Israel is trying some sort of “land swap” with the Palestinians and he is asking the US for permission…..

The idea of a vague “land swap” has often been discussed within Israel as a way not only to keep the settlements built in occupied territory, but as a way to get rid of some of their pesky ethnic and religious minorities. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is now floating a specific proposal to do just that.

Under the proposal, which Netanyahu is said to have forwarded to the White House, seeking a US imprimatur, the Israeli government would formally annex the Gush Etzion bloc of settlements in the West Bank, and “in return” would give the Palestinians a series of villages in Wadi Ara.

While this is being couched as an even-up trade, what’s actually being proposed here is for Israel to formally expel ethnic Arab villages in Wadi Ara, which are part of Israel’s pre-1967 borders, and whose residents, while Arabs, are Israeli citizens.

(antiwar.com)

Seriously?

Israel has been destroying homes and crops and stealing land for over 50 years and now they are asking the US if it is okay….really?

And what part of this deal involves the US?

Why would the US have any say in the situation?

This smells like a set-up…..a ploy to get the US to sign off on something that can be used on many occasions….don’t trust them they LIE!

Time for me to close down the operation for the day…..back tomorrow with more stuff.  chuq

More Thoughts On The New Afghan Plan

I see the generals have gotten to yet another president….generals always want more troops and usually the get what they want….and Afghanistan is NO different……

The American people don’t like long wars with uncertain outcomes—and never have. That was true in 1953, when the U.S. accepted a stalemate and armistice with the Chinese-backed North Koreans, and it was true again in 1975, when the U.S. suffered an ignominious defeat and 58,000 dead at the hands of pajama-clad guerrillas and the North Vietnamese army. “Never fight a land war in Asia,” General Douglas MacArthur famously said, and for good reason: in both Korea and Vietnam, the enemy could be endlessly supplied and reinforced.

The solution, in both cases, was to either widen the war or leave. In Korea, MacArthur proposed expanding the war by taking on Chinese military sanctuaries in China (which got him fired), while in Vietnam, Richard Nixon ordered the invasion of Cambodia and mined North Vietnam’s harbors, an expansion of the war that sparked a genocide and merely postponed the inevitable. America’s adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan have been as unsatisfying. A troop surge retrieved America’s position in Iraq, though most military officers now view Baghdad as “a suburb of Tehran” (as a currently serving Army officer phrased it), while the U.S. has spent over $800 billion on a Kabul government whose writ extends to sixty percent of the country—or less.

Source: How the Brass Talked Another President Into a Losing Strategy | The American Conservative

Even the conservatives can see the fruitless attempt at some form of nation building…..even Red State (a site I seldom visit has seen just how dumb this war has become…..even these guys are seeing Afghanistan turning into yet another Vietnam…..a worthless waste of time and treasure……

In 1999, two years before America’s longest war would begin in Afghanistan, Lewis Sorley published a seminal work titled A Better War about America’s last longest war that raged in the 1960s and 70s. The subtitle of this great work serves as the thesis of the book and says it all: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam. Effectively beginning when the 88th Congress enacted the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in August, 1964, which authorized Lyndon Johnson to use military force in Southeast Asia, and continuing to the end of direct military involvement in 1973 with the fall of Saigon, the Vietnam War cost over 55,000 American lives over the course of roughly 9 years.

The ultimate loss of the Vietnam War after the expense of so much blood and treasure serves as a cautionary tale for what we are now witnessing in Afghanistan.

Source: America Cannot Afford to Have Afghanistan Become the New Vietnam

But to familiarize yourself more with this situation if you have not been paying attention…..always view a situation from both sides anything else is disingenuous….

Source: Trump Lays Out a Winning Strategy for Afghanistan

Source: Trump’s Bold New Afghanistan Strategy Isn’t Bold. Or New.

Yakety Yak…Don’t Talk Back

Hurricane Harvey is headed inland…..not in my region but it will effect us nonetheless….if worse comes to worse I will get knocked off the internet…..but buck up I will return as soon as possible.

Our fearless leader is not making friends and influencing people during his first 7 months as the center of power.

He has picked fights with just about everyone from his AG to the FBI to Dems and now he is on the case of the Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell….

President Trump and Mitch McConnell have taken potshots at each other in public of late, but that’s nothing compared to what’s going on in private, reports the New York Times. A lengthy story describes their relations as of the “Cold War” variety, and it says the two men haven’t spoken since a phone call on Aug. 9 that devolved into a shouting match. CNN confirms the volatile nature of that call, with one of its sources saying that the president swore at the Senate majority leader. Both stories say Trump is not only peeved at the Senate’s inability to repeal ObamaCare, but at McConnell’s refusal to help shield the president from the Russia investigation. McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, is Trump’s transportation secretary, and earlier this month she navigated the rift as best she could publicly: “I stand by my man—both of them.”

The Times story runs through in great detail the sources of friction, including that McConnell “expressed horror” to aides about the president’s reaction to the Charlottesville violence. Maybe the most damning line of all: “McConnell has privately expressed uncertainty that Mr. Trump will be able to salvage his administration after a series of summer crises.” A White House official, however, downplays the feud to CNN and says it won’t interfere with looming action on tax reform and government funding. But Ed Kilgore at New York isn’t so sure. “If nothing else, the ‘cold war’ between Trump and McConnell could lead both men to a decision to go it alone at times when cooperation is essential to GOP goals.”

This is NOT how the conservative agenda gets pushed through Congress.

If Trump has an agenda (I am not sure that he does) he will need the Majority leader to help him accomplish something positive….so far he is on a course of being the only lame duck president in his first year in office.

The Molly Maguires

We are having our fair share of protests these days but if you look back in history we have always had our share of protests….both non-violent and violent alike.

One of those anarchic type groups that seldom gets any mention when history is mentioned is the Molly Maguires.

Louis Adamic’s history of the Molly Maguires: a secret society of Irish-born mine workers in the US who terrorised the exploitative mine bosses of the time.

In the US in the mid-19th century trade-unionism was tame and timorous. Most of the strikes ended disastrously for the labor organizations concerned. There were labor unions whose membership pledged itself to “avoid exciting topics.” Labor leaders, so called, were for the most part men who neither labored nor led: aspiring third-rate politicians and windy orators who had little capacity for understanding the new industrial forces as they affected the worker; or reformers and lopsided idealists, full of lovely vagaries and longings, who had drawn their original inspiration and their terminology from the writings of the utopian Socialists and the Brook-Farmers. They met in labor conventions to pronounce solemnly upon the nobility of toil and recite verses about the golden sweatdrops upon the laborer’s honest brow, which “shine brighter than diamonds in a coronet.”

Source: The Molly Maguires, 1850-1875 – Louis Adamic

Just another trip down memory lane in the Professor’s Classroom…..there is so much about the struggle of the American worker that seldom gets any attention….it should even if you do not agree with their tactics….it is still part of our national heritage.

From Kabul to Baghdad

WE have been fighting and dying in the Middle East for almost 17 years….I try to keep my readers up to date on these wars but it is difficult at times….mainly most Americans do not care how long we have been fighting and dying.

This is a personal trip for the writer of this op-ed…it is a good read and informative if that is what you are looking for information….but if you prefer slogans then this will mean little to the reader.

 

 

 

Closing Thought–24Aug17

Another Brick In The Wall!

Soon we will be having the usual debate on the extension of the government so there will be NO shutdown, which most know is NOT a good thing, it is however a great slogan and political theater….

Pres. Trump’s pet issue is the building of the Great Wall of Mexico…..and NOTHING has changed….he still is using it to gin up his base…….

President Trump was speaking in Reno Wednesday even as the assessment continued over his Tuesday night rally in Phoenix. In Arizona, he didn’t just vent about the media, he also made headlines on multiple policy fronts. Among other things, he renewed his push for a border wall in a big way. “If we have to close down that government, we are going to build that wall,” he told cheering supporters. The issue is expected to come to a head during budget negotiations in September, with Politico reporting that Trump has been telling advisers he won’t accept any deal unless it contains “real money” to start construction. “He is animated about the wall,” one source tells the website. “He cares about that more than many other things. He knows his base cares and chants about it.”

Is he truly willing to shutdown the government unless he gets the funds for his “Big Beautiful Wall?”

But I thought Mexico was going to pay for it….is our check in the mail?

What kinda of mindless droid would destroy the government on something as worthless as his “Big Beautiful Wall”?

Thursday is at an end….time to slink back into the crypt and prepare for tomorrow’s stuff……be well, be safe…..chuq