39th Weak of the Trumpanzy!

The snapshots come from American volunteers on the devastated island who are working with the American Federation of Teachers. The union has sent 40 nurses to Puerto Rico, where the natural disaster of Hurricane Maria and neglect from the Trump administration has created a perfect storm of death, disease and decay across an island of 3.4 million citizens.

"This disaster is caused by neglect by the federal government," union president Randi Weingarten told Newsweek. "That's why this is such a tragedy. For President Trump to say they're safe is cruel and an abstention of responsibility."

Puerto Ricans are fighting to live with that failure. The elderly woman is in her 70s and caring for her grandchildren while also trying to relieve her wheelchair-bound husband’s pain. There are wounds covering his body and an infection that's festering on his foot. The couple lives in Yabucoa, on the southeast edge of Puerto Rico, and hopes to join family on the U.S. mainland soon.

“He’s got pressure ulcers on his back and feet, and she can barely lift him,” Maureen Upton, a 12-year nurse practitioner, told Newsweek. “She was just in tears. She didn’t know what she was going to do.”
'There is no help' for Puerto Rico

Misty Richards, a registered nurse from Oregon who volunteered with the teachers union, worries there will be a slow increase in deaths, as people in rural communities lack medicine and nutrition.

Those with the money and resources to leave are able to head to the U.S. mainland, but not everyone is so fortunate. As well-off citizens leave the destruction behind, that leaves fewer people in the community to aid those who have nothing, creating a resource drain, Richards said.

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RelentlessOnanism said:

What's amazing to me is that his 'base' (although perhaps fraying a tiny bit at the edges) seems, on the whole, to be totally immune to his deficiencies and are stubbornly sticking with him, come what may. He is clearly a grade A fucking buffoon, totally and utterly out of his depth and a national embarrassment to the American people; yet 35-40% of the electorate seem to just ignore his obvious incompetence and stupidity. It's bizarre.

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JackLuis said:

10 examples of Trump unraveling before the current unraveling began

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Yet this morning, the president said in so many words that Puerto Rico was a disaster before the hurricanes hit, and that the federal government can’t stay to provide aid forever. Puerto Rico, Trump implied, will have to take care of itself.

Like I said, I’m not going to talk about the white supremacy of his tweetstorm. My point is the president is saying the natural rights of people born free and equal are like a buffet. The government can pick and choose whose rights to protect, and throw away the rest.

And my point is he’s saying this out loud, an important nuance. Trump is not the first or last president to chafe at the idea of serving Americans who despise him personally and politically. This is not to say presidents should not give special attention to their supporters and allies. But no president in my lifetime has actually said this in public. That matters, because what Trump says in public influences what he’s willing to accept in terms of policy outcomes.

Puerto Rico isn’t alone. The AP reported Wednesday some 3,500 homes and buildings have been consumed by wildfire in the Napa Valley. The conflagration comes after long summer months, during which fires raged in California. Yet the president has said nothing.

This is a big deal and it can’t be overstated. Most people are going to focus on the president’s moral obligation to help. But considering the damage in Puerto Rico and California, the need for recovery goes beyond morals. Trump is not the president of only red states. He has a constitutional obligation to “preserve, protect and defend.”

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Speaking with host Joy Reid, retired U.S. Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson said the saber-rattling at North Korea combined with President Donald Trump’s desire to back out of a nuclear deal with Iran is setting the stage for “17 more years of war.”

“The German minister said what Trump has done is make the Iran agreement into a domestic policy thing, meaning domestic politics,” host Reid suggested. “By doing that he’s assured that the new agreement will fail ultimately, and then what you have is one choice: war. The end game is to provoke Iran enough so we can go to war.”

“I think we are doing the same thing as we did in 2003, and I was very intimate with that process in Iraq,” Wilkerson replied referencing his tenure at the State Department when the U.S. attacked Iraq. “We are marching down the road to war. If you think Iraq was a bad war wait until you see Iran.”

“[Trump] said yesterday in his remarks, he said Iran is spreading global destruction and chaos,” Wilkerson continued. “Saudi Arabia is the one doing that. The bloody war in Yemen, which sad to say we are involved in, it’s the bloodiest war on the face of the Earth right now, the greatest humanitarian disaster since World War II. We are a part of that. The Saudis are far worse than Iran and we are getting ready to make that situation even worse, more profoundly destabilizing, by taking on Iran militarily.”

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“I will tell every GI out there: You have had 17 straight years of war, get ready for 17 more,” he concluded, causing Reid to moan, “Oh, my God.”

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JackLuis said:

Ex-Bush official warns Trump is itching for war: ‘If you think Iraq was a bad war wait until you see Iran’



Yes but the Saudis let the Trumpanzy touch their glowing orb, the Iranians never let him touch their balls.

Resist, Impeach, Remove!​

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phrodeau said:

Yeah, but maybe Israel will step up this time.

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President Donald Trump’s campaign for re-election in 2020 spent $1.1 million on legal bills over the last three months, said The Hill on Sunday.

The information came from third-quarter Federal Elections Commission (FEC) filings by the campaign, the first presidential re-election campaign in U.S. history to begin virtually the moment the candidate took office.

All of the legal fees disbursed by the campaign pertain to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. The campaign paid $237,924 to the law firm of Alan Futerfas, which is representing the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump, Jr. while an additional $30,000 went to the firm Williams and Jensen to pay attorney Karina Lynch, who is also representing Trump, Jr.

The campaign paid $802,185 to the Jones Day law firm and $25,885 to the Trump Corporation for “legal consulting.”

According to the report, the campaign raised $10.1 in the third quarter. Total spending amounted to around $4 million, including legal fees.

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President Donald Trump’s chaotic, sparsely-staffed administration is being roiled by White House Chief of Staff John Kelly’s drive to fill the remaining positions left unfilled by the president.

According to Politico, the beleaguered White House’s decision to leave key federal positions unstaffed — including top-tier jobs at Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s State Department and the Department of Homeland Security — has left the administration hobbled and beset by problems of its own making.

Kelly has granted Cabinet secretaries more autonomy to hire employees, reversing former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus’ orders that all appointments must be routed through the West Wing for the president’s approval.

This has been a priority of Kelly’s, said two sources to Politico’s Nancy Cook, since he was the head of Homeland Security and was frequently at odds with the White House over his choices of personnel.

Trump’s tangled snarl of grudges, grievances, past insults and petty political differences with other Republicans slowed hiring for the Trump administration to a crawl. Now, Kelly is reportedly trying to loosen that bottleneck, but not everyone is pleased.

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art-time Donald Trump critic and actor Robert De Niro went off on the president again on Thursday during a speech at a charity function, the New York Daily News reported.

De Niro, who has, in the past, said Trump has turned the U.S. into a “tragic dumbass comedy” and gone on record to say he wanted to punch the president in the face, dropped a couple of f-bombs during a speech at the Annual Hudson River Park Gala in New York.

The actor got political while thanking people for dedicating a park bench to him. He said that Donald Trump “doesn’t deserve a view of the park” or a seat on “my bench.”

“One of my pleasures will be keeping people off my bench who don’t deserve a view of the park — like Donald Trump,” he said.

After that, things, apparently, got vulgar.

“F— you, Donald Trump. It’s a horror with this motherf—er,” the Daily News quoted him as saying.

De Niro also called Trump a “low life.”

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In office less than 10 months, President Donald Trump already has his eyes on the 2020 general election — and he wants to run against: the woman he already defeated.

"I was recently asked if Crooked Hillary Clinton is going to run in 2020? My answer was, 'I hope so!'" the president tweeted early Monday. amid many other pressing matters.

It is not clear what prompted the tweet. Clinton has told reporters numerous times she didn't plan on running again, telling CBS News, "I am done with being a candidate."

She has said she isn't done in politics but doesn't plan to run for an office again.

Other politicians are also eyeing the 2020 general election.

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In a blistering editorial in the Washington Post, conservative commentator Jennifer Rubin blasted the so-called Christians who turned out at the Value Voters Summit in Washington D.C. over the weekend to listen to a “faithless” Donald Trump among other conservative speakers.

According to Rubin, Christian attendees have sold their souls to support a “thrice-married, frequently accused misogynist who evidences not a single Christian virtue (e.g. humility, honesty, empathy, kindness, generosity).”

Rubin conceded that Trump has delivered some red meat for social conservatives, “… in the form of a Supreme Court justice appointment of their liking, a broad order to ban transgender people from the military and sweeping permission for employers to deny birth control as part of the health-care coverage they provide.”

She then noted the widely shared report that Trump mocks Vice President Mike Pence’s Christian background, asking visitors who met with the VP if Pence “makes them pray.”

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n Monday, President Donald Trump held a Rose Garden press conference whose purpose appeared to be convincing the assembled crowd and media that he and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) are great friends in spite of reports to the contrary.

“We’ve been friends for a long time,” Trump said of McConnell in the joint speech. “We are probably now…closer than ever before and the relationship is very good.”

“Watching Mitch McConnell endure the humiliation of being forced to subjugate himself to Trump on live TV is quite enjoyable,” yet another CNN reporter, Dan Pfeiffer, tweeted.

“Do the police know about a deranged old man holding Mitch McConnell hostage in the Rose Garden?” another mused.

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President Donald Trump on Tuesday fired back at Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who on Monday delivered a speech slamming Trump’s brand of “half-baked nationalism.”

Appearing on talk radio station WMAL in Washington DC, Trump was asked about the criticism McCain leveled at him this week, in which he lashed out at “half baked, spurious nationalism” that’s being “cooked up by people who had rather find scapegoats than solve problems.”

“People have to be careful because at some point I fight back,” Trump told WMAL radio host Chris Plante. “You know, I’m being very nice. I’m being very, very nice. But at some point I fight back and it won’t be pretty.”

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President Donald Trump reportedly lost $600 million last year, causing him to drop 92 spots on the Forbes list of richest people.

CNN reported on Tuesday that Trump dropped to the number 248 spot on the list of the richest 400 Americans after becoming president.

Forbes cited a tough real estate market and the cost of Trump’s presidential race for the decline in his net worth.

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