Day: September 29, 2017

Say Bye Bye To Pricey

Pricey?  Now that was a pun intended.

It is official the Rep. that bitched about people that used private flights to conduct government business in 2007 has resigned his post for the use of private flights to conduct governmental business

Sec of HHS, Price has made it official and resigned his post effective immediately….

President Trump’s health secretary has resigned after his travel on costly charter flights triggered investigations and angered his boss, the AP reports. Tom Price’s partial repayment and public regrets couldn’t save his job. The Health and Human Services secretary became the first member of the president’s Cabinet to leave office in a turbulent young administration that has seen several high-ranking White House aides ousted. Price served less than eight months.

Trump had said he was “not happy” with Price for hiring private charters on the taxpayer’s dime for official travel, when cheaper commercial flights would have worked. The flap over Price has overshadowed Trump’s agenda and prompted scrutiny of other Cabinet members’ travel. The House Oversight and Government Reform committee has launched a broad investigation of top political appointees.

This douche spent $1 million dollars on private flights and is willing to repay $51,000…..

Just another nail in the coffin of the corruption that is the Trump Administration.

Don’t fret…there is more to come……

Turn The Page!

 

Closing Thought–29Sep17

Come Fly With Me!

It appears that there is  problem in DC…..Sec of HHS, Price, has been caught with his fingers in the cookie jar.

Ever noticed that when the GOP is NOT in power they are staunch opponents of any wasteful spending….and then they take the power lead and they piss money away like there is no tomorrow.

The GOPers start looking for ways to get “free” stuff for themselves and their families….well that is what happened with Price…..seems he does not like the inconvenience of flying coach….

Price has booked a plethora of private flights to take him around to do his worse as the Sec of HHS…..to the tune of about $1 million in costs.

He has been chastised and has agreed to reimburse the government….

Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price is apologizing for taking costly charter flights on the taxpayer’s dime and says he is cooperating with investigations into his travel. Price says he’ll reimburse the government by writing a check Thursday to reimburse Treasury, and he’s pledging not to take any more charters, the AP reports. He says he wasn’t “sensitive enough” to the concerns the charters would create about the use of taxpayer dollars.

His statement comes after White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said President Donald Trump was not thrilled with Price’s flights. Trump had publicly declared his displeasure a day earlier. Trump left open the possibility that Price would be fired, but Price said Thursday he thinks he still has the president’s confidence. The brouhaha started with a Politico investigation into the flights.

He will write a check for $52,000…….he spent a million and he only owes $52,000….not bad like a plea agreement with a bank robber that stole a million but only has to pay $52,000 in restitution.

Apparently Price cannot use commercial flights for it may expose him to a lethal dose of “human cooties’….he cannot be bothered with doing the right thing….he is just echoing those thoughts of his master.

Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price is apologizing for taking costly charter flights on the taxpayer’s dime and says he is cooperating with investigations into his travel. Price says he’ll reimburse the government by writing a check Thursday to reimburse Treasury, and he’s pledging not to take any more charters, the AP reports. He says he wasn’t “sensitive enough” to the concerns the charters would create about the use of taxpayer dollars.

His statement comes after White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said President Donald Trump was not thrilled with Price’s flights. Trump had publicly declared his displeasure a day earlier. Trump left open the possibility that Price would be fired, but Price said Thursday he thinks he still has the president’s confidence. The brouhaha started with a Politico investigation into the flights.

is master…..

Why does this thief not have to pay the entire price tag?  The flights were for his benefit….he owes the entire bill!

Time to get my ass ready for the weekend…..hope everyone had a good week and that they will please get some relaxation in for the next couple of days.

Peace Out My Friends!

The Red Meat Trump Should Throw

President Trump is always throwing red meat to his supporters when things are looking dismal for his admin……the latest is the “take a knee” thing…..it is part of the “Trump Two Step:  A Political Tango”……

Instead of making up news and situation that has everyone scratching there heads why not throw the country “real” stats and figures?

Like the news from yesterday…..

The US economy grew at an upgraded annual rate of 3.1% in the spring, the fastest pace in more than two years. But growth is expected to slow sharply this quarter in the wake of a string of devastating hurricanes, per the AP. The April-June expansion in the gross domestic product—the economy’s total output of goods and services—is up slightly from a 3% estimate made a month ago, the Commerce Department reported Thursday. It is the strongest performance since the economy grew at a 3.2% pace in the first quarter of 2015. The upward revision reflected larger farm stockpiles.

The year started with a lackluster 1.2% gain in the first quarter. Economists believe growth has slowed again to around 2% in the current quarter. The revised figure was the government’s third and final look at GDP for the April-June period, and left GDP rising at an average 2% pace over the first six months of the year. That matches the lackluster average annual growth rates seen since the recovery from the Great Recession began in mid-2009. Economists at Macroeconomic Advisers believe that growth in the current quarter could tumble by as much as 1.2 percentage points due to hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria. But analysts think the initial losses to GDP will be made up in subsequent quarters as rebuilding gets underway.

This is good news that the country would love to hear…..

This may be a short-lived story but it is good news and he could be making his case for the economy….instead all this push and shoving on Twitter.

Why make up a story when there is a good news story staring him in the face?

 

No Rehab For Vietnam

Ken Burns documentary on the Vietnam War has me posting several articles explaining various aspects of the war…..there will be both pro an con articles…to understand completely then all sides need to be discussed.

1975 and the fall of Saigon brought an end to the involvement of the US in the small Southeastern nation of Vietnam.

Since that day there has been an on-going effort to rehabilitate America’s role in the war.  An attempt to change something ugly into something noble, honorable….or at least acceptable.

There is enormous pressure and a lot of money working to rehabilitate Vietnam, to put the guilt and the shame of it behind us. But it was precisely the guilt of the people, their shame at what was being done in their name, and their courage to denounce it that made it impossible for their government to carry out the savagery any longer.

Since the day it ended, in 1975, there have been efforts to rehabilitate the Vietnam War, to make it acceptable, even honorable. After all, there were so many sides to the story, weren’t there? It was so complex, so nuancical. There was real heroism among the troops.

Of course, all of this is true, but it’s true of every war so it doesn’t redeem any war. The Vietnam War is beyond redemption and must be remembered and condemned for the calamity that it was. The Vietnam War was “one of the greatest American foreign policy disasters of the twentieth century.”

Those are not the words of a leftist pundit or a scribbling anti-American. They are the words of H.R. McMaster, the sitting National Security Advisor to the President of the United States.

Source: There Is No Rehabilitating the Vietnam War | By Robert Freeman | Common Dreams

The war cannot be rehabilitated for those that fought…..the images of the war are burnt into their minds to remain with them through life.

As a veteran of that war I have had many conversations with people wanting to know….then when they are told they dispute whatever was said….

This war cannot be rehabilitated with the truth…..only by manipulating the facts can it be made to appear otherwise.

Let’s Talk John McCain

This is a re-blog from GSFP…….Few of my thoughts about John McCain and the treatment he is getting from the Trump crowd….chuq

Gulf South Free Press

WARNING:  This post will feature some pretty raw words and thoughts….proceed with caution if you are easily offended.

It is safe to say that I do not think much of John McCain’s conservative ideas…..we agree on very little….but no matter the man deserves all the respect one can muster for he has served his country in so many ways and given up a lot for his country.

But for a couple of months now McCain has become the whipping boy of Trump….he blames so much of Trump’s failures on John McCain….especially the numerous failures the the GOP plan has had trying to repeal and replace Obamacare.

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough has ripped into Trump and his mindless supporters for all their attacks on McCain….

“Mornine Joe” host Joe Scarborough on Tuesday ripped President Donald Trump and other critics of “dying” Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican who last week announced his…

View original post 423 more words

Middle East Bets That Went Wrong

As most people will tell you the Middle East has always been a chaotic violent region and that this current situation is just an amplification of those traits.

That is somewhat accurate but the big problems showed up around the time of the Arab Spring…factions within factions within countries made some bad calculations that has lead to a horrific war/civil war……plus the disastrous humanitarian crisis that has engulfed the region.

As uncertainty engulfs a bleeding Near East, besieged by regional and global powers each pursuing its own agenda, dormant ambitions and sensitivities are waking up and finding the current situation suitable to express themselves.

To begin, such dormant ambitions and suppressed sensitivities would have never emerged had it not been for the huge regional disorder and radical change of international balance of power.

It is true that domestic consensus towards ‘national’ identities and boundaries is not guaranteed these days, even in western democracies that values human rights – as the Scots and Catalan nationalists seek to secede from the UK and Spain, respectively, through the ballot box – yet internal instability remains a sure prerequisite to animosities and partition as we witness in Iraq and Syria.

Source: The Near East’s costly wrong bets – Al Arabiya English

There are a wealth of reasons why this region exploded into the violence that has been unmatched in many years.  The problem is that a problem is identified and before a solution can be formulated another problem fires up…..for the time being all that the world can do is try to manage the situation as best they can without things getting worse.

Two of the world’s most powerful and influential countries, Russia and the US, are doing all they can to re-shape the Middle East…..but what will that look like?

On Tuesday, September 12, Russian defense minister Sergei Shoigu sat with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad in Damascus. According to Russian embassy social-media posts they discussed joint cooperation against Islamic State. This comes on the heels of the Syrian army reaching the city of Deir ez-Zor on the Euphrates River in eastern Syria and breaking a two-and-a-half-year siege. Russia has played a key role in the Syrian army’s successes, which increasingly means that Russian-backed Syrian forces are coming into contact with the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). On September 16th the US-led coalition said a Russian airstrike east of the Euphrates river wounded several members of the SDF. As ISIS declines, its vacuum is filled with groups whose agendas are not the same and, in the case of Washington, whose policy remains unclear in eastern Syria. That is leading to greater Iranian influence across Iraq and Syria, and it leaves U.S. allies in the Gulf, Israel and on the ground in Syria wondering what comes next.

Source: Will America and Russia Change the Political Dynamics in the Middle East? | RealClearWorld

Both countries are pouring resources into the region…..and how will this shake out in the end?  The problem is the amount of factions and players in the region.

Why No Progress Over The Years?

With all the mash up between NK and the US and Trump saying that after many many years of trying and nothing getting done on the nuke front….it is time to face reality.

Listening to Trump got me to thinking about the negotiations between NK and the US and I had to see just what has actually been done over all these years of debate…..

After much research I found a great chronology of the North Korean-US negotiations…..

For years, the United States and the international community have tried to negotiate an end to North Korea’s nuclear and missile development and its export of ballistic missile technology. Those efforts have been replete with periods of crisis, stalemate, and tentative progress towards denuclearization, and North Korea has long been a key challenge for the global nuclear nonproliferation regime.

The United States has pursued a variety of policy responses to the proliferation challenges posed by North Korea, including military cooperation with U.S. allies in the region, wide-ranging sanctions, and non-proliferation mechanisms such as export controls. The United States also engaged in two major diplomatic initiatives to have North Korea abandon its nuclear weapons efforts in return for aid.

In 1994, faced with North Korea’s announced intent to withdraw from the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), which requires non-nuclear weapon states to forswear the development and acquisition of nuclear weapons, the United States and North Korea signed the Agreed Framework. Under this agreement, Pyongyang committed to freezing its illicit plutonium weapons program in exchange for aid.

Source: Chronology of U.S.-North Korean Nuclear and Missile Diplomacy | Arms Control Association

Looks like they have tried to cover all aspects of diplomacy to get NK back in line with the rest of the world…..if so then ….is a military solution all that is left?