Day: February 27, 2018

Closing Thought–27Feb18

Holy Crap!

The last couple of years have been awash with scandals and most of them are of a sexual type….I realize that these things are nothing new just they seem to be more prevalent than in the past….it seems that they are an almost daily occurrence….

Just last week there were a few that involved a governor and a mayor…..

A St. Louis grand jury has indicted Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens on a felony invasion of privacy charge for allegedly taking a compromising photo of a woman with whom he had an affair in 2015, the city circuit attorney’s office said Thursday. St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner launched an investigation in January after Greitens admitted to an affair with his St. Louis hairdresser that began in March 2015. He was elected governor in November 2016. Gardner declined comment beyond a brief news release, but spokeswoman Susan Ryan confirmed the indictment stemmed from a photo Greitens allegedly took of the woman, the AP reports. Greitens was taken into custody in St. Louis and released on his own recognizance, Ryan said.

The indictment states that on March 21, 2015, Greitens photographed a woman identified only by her initials “in a state of full or partial nudity” without her knowledge or consent. The indictment said Greitens “transmitted the image contained in the photograph in a manner that allowed access to that image via a computer.” The woman told her husband, who was secretly taping the conversation, that Greitens took the compromising photo of her at his home and threatened to use it as blackmail if she spoke about the affair. A news release from Gardner says it is a felony if a person transmits an image “in a manner that allows access to that image via a computer.” Greitens has repeatedly denied blackmailing the woman, but has repeatedly refused to answer questions about whether he took a photo.

Then there is the mayor………

Investigators in Tennessee say nude photos recovered from a former police officer’s phone could be evidence of two crimes—or possibly three, since Nashville Mayor Megan Barry says if the photos are of her, they were taken without her consent. In an affidavit, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation says photos from former Sgt. Rob Forrest’s phone show that an extramarital affair he had with the mayor happened while he was on duty as her bodyguard, the Tennessean reports. The photos were allegedly taken during times Forrest claimed overtime pay on two trips to Washington, DC, with Barry. The affidavit cites possible misconduct of public officials and “theft of property,” which legal experts believe refers to the overtime pay Forrest claimed. Barry, who is married, admitted the affair last month but said she wouldn’t step down.

The TBI says Forrest’s phone has also yielded evidence of 260 deleted chats between him and the mayor. Records show the TBI has seized the mayor’s phone, but she has refused to unlock it. Barry tells WSMV that she was “furious” when she learned about the photos. “If they exist, they were taken without my knowledge and without my consent. It didn’t show that I have done anything wrong or criminal and, in fact, if anything was wrongly done, it was done to me personally,” she says. The mayor says she told the TBI they could look at anything from her phone that related to the investigation, but they wanted everything between “me and my mom and my husband and my son and my attorney and that just didn’t feel right.”

This type of story is too common now for it to be news….just a couple of decades ago when the president got a BJ and you would think that the republic was doomed……now these types of stories are a yawn at best.

On that note….I am off to kick back and relax with a beer and some fried chicken….see you guys tomorrow….chuq

Obvious Explanations Are The Best

Many people both Left and Right have been wondering just what Trump has done to keep so many supporters even after he has been caught lying to them and breaking promises left and right…..

I read a story that helps to explain this phenomena……..

It’s incomprehensible to many of us that people could support a president who, in Bernie Sanders’ words, “is compulsively dishonest, who is a bully, who actively represents the interests of the billionaire class, who is anti-science, and who is trying to divide us up based on the color of our skin, our nation of origin, our religion, our gender, or our sexual orientation.”

Based on various trusted sources and a dab of cognitive science, it’s fair to conclude that there are three main reasons for this unlikely phenomenon.

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/02/three-reasons-millions-people-still-support-trump/

Personally, after knowing a few of the Trump supporters I find Number 3 the most accurate…..they cannot accept they were wrong and will spend energy making excuses for whatever it is that Trump continues to do or say….they cannot admit that they were wrong!

It is that easy!

Michael Steele Gets My Vote

Most of my life I have been a hardcore radical and according to some these days then that makes me a detested Liberal….but even in my most radical times I always had time for and would debate a conservative for there were some stands that I could understand and in a different day would have embraced their beliefs.

I find the conservs these days to actually have a good strong leg to stand on when addressing the public but they cannot fight the Twitter machine…..I find their stands conserv stands and do not confuse them with the policies of Trump they are not the same…..no matter how much Trump would like to claim the conserv mantle he falls short.

This recent CPAC, the big meeting of Trumpians made a big mistake in my opinion when one of the panel members attacked former RNC chairman, Michael Steele……

Yes, that’s the spokesman for the premier conservative confab of the year lamenting that his party once hired a black man as RNC chair. Walters apologized to Steele afterward, and Steele told MSNBC on Saturday he declined to accept it. Steele later called the comments “painfully stupid.”  Can you blame him?

CPAC Communications Director Ian Walters raised eyebrows at this year’s conference after telling an audience Friday evening that former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele only got the job because he was “black.”

“We elected Mike Steele to be the RNC chair because he’s a black guy; that was the wrong thing to do,” Walters said at the event’s exclusive Ronald Reagan dinner. Many dinner attendees greeted the comments with gasps.

Steele did more to expand the GOP during his tenure than any former chairman before him…..his legislative successes were unprecedented…so to dismiss his accomplishments by saying it was because he was a black guy is just wrong and just a bit racist.

Trump is overseeing the death of a vibrant and successful GOP….the party’s roots are drying up and rotting off….

Nukes In The Middle East?

For decades the West has been working to keep nukes out of the hands of those countries in the Middle East (with the exception of Israel) because of the chance of it would be used in ways not approved by the leaders here in the West.  Look how hard the US has fought to keep it out of the hands of Iran and Israel has used the possibility of nukes in the Middle East (with the exception of them) to get unlimited aid from the West.

Then in the last year or so there has been rumblings that Saudis have been posturing to move into the realm of nuke energy.

Saudi Arabia is moving swiftly to become the next country in the Middle East with nuclear power. The Kingdom is on the verge of striking a deal with the US for the purchase of nuclear reactors despite concerns over its refusal to accept stringent restrictions against the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Crown Prince Mohamed Bin Salman, who is the de facto ruler of the country, has ambitious plans to diversify the country’s energy source and is in the market to purchase nuclear power reactors. The potential for lucrative deals is too good to be missed and the Trump administration is thought to be mulling over loosening US law to win Saudi contracts, worth billions. The Kingdom has refused to be bound by stringent US regulations that restrict reprocessing and enriching uranium for the production of nuclear weapons.

http://theantimedia.org/saudi-arabia-nuclear-weapons/

Now I personally think it is a horrible idea if the security of the Middle East and possibly the world is of a concern.

Why?

The radical extreme fundamentalist beliefs of the Saudi brand of Islam, Wahhabism is the belief of most of the jihadists fighting in the world.  If Saudi Arabia were to get their reactors then they would produce waste which in turn could be used as a dirty bomb….something the Radicals have been fantasizing about for years….

In other words this idea would give these barbarous toads one step closer to the WMD that they dream of for so long.

The Trump administration has had some horrible ideas in its year of existence….but this one is by far one of their worst….hopefully clearer thinking will prevail.