Trump 24: Fiddling, er, Tweeting While Rome Burns

[onekidanddone]

6 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I wish his phone would fall in the toilet.

I wish he would fall in the toilet.

[JMarie]

Over three million people (Puerto Rico) are without electricity, but he's all squished up over the NFL and whether players were standing or kneeling.  First of all, those three million people are American citizens, even if he doesn't understand that (may need a geography brush-up lesson).  Second of all, football is America's pastime, and you don't screw with football.

He does this all the time.  He'll avoid working on something really important, start a stupid fight with a person/group that doesn't deserve to be picked on, and hope that the country will forget about the really important something that he's supposed to accomplish (deporting millions of illegals, building that pesky wall, repealing Obamacare).

[onekidanddone]

7 minutes ago, JMarie said:

First of all, those three million people are American citizens, even if he doesn't understand that (may need a geography brush-up lesson). 

He doesn't care. The people of Puerto Rico may be American citizens, but they serve him no purpose. He can't brag about his huge victory in PR, I'm betting none, if anybody at all on the island donated to his campaign. They are the scary brown people and going there won't earn him any ratings. 

People are suffering, but they are not white and wealthy so they don't count to him.

He will quit his blithering about the NFL when another shiny subject catches is attention. His death care bill, Clinton, the Russian hacking by his school boy crush Putin, and then it will cycle back again.

While I was on Facebook I was FB friends with a die hard Trump lover who was born and grew up in Puerto Rico. I had no idea she was a TD until she and her husband went on a rant how Obama was an arrogant (dog whistle word for uppity) Muslim. You can guess what she  had to say about Clinton.

I didn't make any drama out of it when I deleted her.  I just did it with out warning. Now though I want to know how that MAGA thing is working out for her and her family she has back in PR.  I know it is totally unhealthy for me to poke the hornets nest with her, but that does not stop me from wanting to.

[apple1]

With regard to Puerto Rico -- all five living former US presidents are working together on raising funds for Puerto Rico. (That's my good news item for today. I try to look for good news where I can).

 

As for Trump -

As of this moment, since Friday, he has tweeted or retweeted 16 criticisms of athletes in the NFL and other sports leagues who protest "The Star-Spangled Banner."

Much of that is Trump trying to distract from other things, like - oh, maybe healthcare, and North Korea, and... well, you get the drift.

[GreyhoundFan]

I love the response by Colin Kaepernick's mom:

[onekidanddone]

Ms. Kaepernick has kicked some orange ass. 

[JMarie]

1 hour ago, apple1 said:

Much of that is Trump trying to distract from other things, like - oh, maybe healthcare, and North Korea, and... well, you get the drift.

North Korea seems to think Trump's declared war on them, instead of the NFL.

[AnywhereButHere]

All these people bitching about the NFL protests. It's like they all forgot that this country was built from a freaking protest. Or do we just assume that the English wanted a shipload of goods dumped in the harbor? 

Then you get the ones who say stupid shit like "Well, what if we protested (insert liberal agenda item here)? How would you like it?"  Go for it! My only request is, if you can actually round up 5 other misguided souls, try to find at least one with a basic understanding of spelling and grammar. 

And just as my personal, petty beef with this whole thing, why do we sing the anthem before any and all sporting events. I get the Olympics and other international competitions where you are representing your country. Representing country - sing anthem. Makes sense. A domestic sporting event though, does not seem to be more or less patriotic than anything else in life. God and Country probably don't care if the Giants beat the Cowboys on any given Sunday. (Although after this past Super Bowl, god may have a thing for the Patriots - just saying!  ) Stop playing the anthem at sporting events. Hell, with soccer and hockey particularly, half the players aren't from the US anyway. Should we be fair and play all relevant anthems before every game, or does only ours count...

 

[JMarie]

How long until Trump tweets about Jerry Jones, owner of the Dallas Cowboys, who kneeled with his team?

[Destiny]

9 minutes ago, JMarie said:

How long until Trump tweets about Jerry Jones, owner of the Dallas Cowboys, who kneeled with his team?

Probably not long. I noticed that he remembered PR exists this afternoon, and then he was a dick about their debt and everything else (and that debt is at least partially congress' fault), and telling us all how awesomely he was doing. What a god damned asshole.

[nvmbr02]

18 minutes ago, Destiny said:

Probably not long. I noticed that he remembered PR exists this afternoon, and then he was a dick about their debt and everything else (and that debt is at least partially congress' fault), and telling us all how awesomely he was doing. What a god damned asshole.

Seriously! WTF does "doing good with food and water" (may not be a direct quote, but you get the idea) mean when PR gov. is saying that 60% of people on the island don't have potable water. That's almost 2 million AMERICANS that do not have safe drinking water because of this storm. And that is "doing good".

[Destiny]

19 minutes ago, nvmbr02 said:

Seriously! WTF does "doing good with food and water" (may not be a direct quote, but you get the idea) mean when PR gov. is saying that 60% of people on the island don't have potable water. That's almost 2 million AMERICANS that do not have safe drinking water because of this storm. And that is "doing good".

I talked to BFF today. He drove all the way to San Juan ( a 1.5h drive at the best of times ) to get a cellphone signal out. After we got done with the OMG I MISS YOU, it was down to the business of OMG hon, did the flashlights I ordered before the storm on Amazon ever make it out of the mainland and on my side, honey, what can I send you when mail is up again. It cut off, so, they may or may not have god damned fucking WATER, let alone electricity. I have no idea when I might be able to talk to him again, because there isn't enough gas available to go back to San Juan for cell coverage, because of damage, but fucking Orange god damned Menace is stroking his own dick because he helped the brown people who, implication says, might not even deserve help because debt.

[louisa05]

@AnywhereButHere Just saw it summed up pretty well elsewhere on the web: This isn't about the NFL, it's about the First Amendment. 

And I refuse to see it as people being distracted from whatever issue we're told we're being distracted from this time. A sitting president (someone who took an oath to protect and defend the Constitution!) is demanding that U.S. citizens be punished for exercising their Constitutional rights. Being angered by that and questioning that is not at all falling for a distraction. Every single person in the country should be angry about that. Plus, I still think that the majority of politically aware adults have the capacity to be concerned about more than one thing at a time. 

The anthem started being played at sporting events during WW1, before it was officially the anthem. Like the pledge, it was born of that period in world history when nationalism was in full bloom around the globe. The stuff of nationalism--anthems, pledges, public holidays and expressions of patriotism-- all of it was born of that era. Never mind that most hardcore conservatives I know seem to think that Washington was pledging to the flag and Lincoln was crying at the anthem and the 4th of July was a holiday already in 1776. 

Also...nearly 1/3 of Major League Baseball players are foreign born. Perhaps you are on to something, we should play all of the anthems at every game. That would slow things down considerably. 

 

[Destiny]

By the way, this is only one of four. I still have three more friends that I have no idea if they are ok and if they need anything, but thank god Cheeto is worried about their debt. Gods forbid that not be the first part of the conversation. 

[nvmbr02]

@Destiny I am thinking of you and your loved ones. I hope you they are safe and that you hear from them soon. I can only imagine what you are feeling right now. A good friend of mine is active duty military and had to go an an extended deployment 2 days ago. She is from PR and her dad, along with most of his side of the family, still live there. She hasn't heard from anyone yet. I know she is worried sick. She left her phone with her BF so that if they try to contact her she wont miss the call and they should be able to get ahold of someone since she doesn't know how much access she will have to cell service when she is gone. 

The issue hits close to home for me since I am currently a resident of another U.S. territory. I told my husband that I don't want to be doomsday prepper or anything but we need to make sure our emergency kit and emergency water supply stays stocked. I have zero faith in the government coming to our rescue in case or earthquake, typhoon or nuclear disaster. It is just sad that the American citizens that live in the various territories have zero voice in congress and can not vote for their president. 

[GreyhoundFan]

Here's a WaPo article about the TT's "response" to Puerto Rico: "Trump declares Puerto Rico is in ‘deep trouble’ as questions mount about his commitment"

Spoiler

President Trump, facing mounting questions about his commitment to Puerto Rico’s recovery, took to Twitter Monday night, saying the U.S. territory is “in deep trouble,” in part because of problems that predated Hurricane Maria.

Trump said Puerto Rico was already suffering from “broken infrastructure,” including an old electrical grid, which he said was “devastated” by Hurricane Maria, as well as “massive debt.”

“Food, water and medical are top priorities — and doing well,” Trump said in his series of tweets, which credited the Federal Emergency Management Agency. He noted that, by contrast, Texas and Florida, hit by earlier hurricanes, “are doing great.”

... < tweets from the twit >

Monday night’s tweets were the first from Trump about Puerto Rico since Wednesday, when the hurricane made landfall and Trump declared “we are with you.”

Power remains out on much of the island, and officials say they are facing numerous logistical challenges, including damage to airports and ports. But FEMA says its response has been robust, including the deployment of 10,000 federal workers.

Criticism of Trump has come from Democratic politicians, celebrities and others, focusing in part on the heavy attention he has put in recent days on his opposition to football players who kneel during the national anthem.

“At the same time that he was doing all of that, we had American citizens in Puerto Rico who are in a desperate condition,” Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee Trump defeated last year, said in a radio interview on Monday. “He has not said one word about them, about other American citizens in the U.S. Virgin Islands. I’m not sure he knows that Puerto Ricans are American citizens.”

Marc Anthony, the Latin pop singer, was more blunt, urging Trump on Twitter to “shut the [expletive] up about NFL.”

“Do something about our people in need in #PuertoRico,” Anthony wrote. “We are American citizens too.”

Actor Kal Penn, who worked in the White House during President Barack Obama’s tenure, said on Twitter that was “outrageous & unsurprising that our President won’t race to help fellow Americans.”

...

And some Republicans chimed in as well.

“There are millions of our fellow Americans on Puerto Rico facing great danger and suffering,” GOP strategist Steve Schmidt, a frequent Trump critic, said on Twitter on Monday. “Trump silence and inaction is appalling.”

Trump’s lack of public attention to Puerto Rico has been striking in part because of the major focus he put on helping Texas and Florida recover from earlier hurricanes, a factor many analysts have cited in explaining Trump’s recent uptick in his job approval numbers.

During a briefing Monday, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was peppered with questions about Trump’s priorities, including his focus on Puerto Rico.

She noted that Trump had dispatched Brock Long, the FEMA administrator, and Tom Bossert, Trump’s homeland security adviser, to assess the damage in Puerto Rico.

“The federal response has been anything but slow,” Sanders said. “In fact, there’s been an unprecedented push through of billions of dollars in federal assistance that the administration has fought for. … And once we have a greater insight into the full assessment of damage, then we’ll be able to determine what additional funds are needed.”

For those who thought SHS would be an improvement over Spicey, I'm sorry, she's just as bad.

[JMarie]

11 hours ago, louisa05 said:

Also...nearly 1/3 of Major League Baseball players are foreign born. Perhaps you are on to something, we should play all of the anthems at every game. That would slow things down considerably. 

What about the NHL?  Some of them are from ... Russia {clutching pearls in trepidation}

[Ali]

Did he ever have a failed business venture in Puerto Rico or does he just not care about them because they are brown Spanish speaking people?

[apple1]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Here's a WaPo article about the TT's "response" to Puerto Rico: "Trump declares Puerto Rico is in ‘deep trouble’ as questions mount about his commitment"

  Hide contents

 

For those who thought SHS would be an improvement over Spicey, I'm sorry, she's just as bad.

I think she is worse (yes, that's possible).

[JMarie]

29 minutes ago, Ali said:

Did he ever have a failed business venture in Puerto Rico or does he just not care about them because they are brown Spanish speaking people?

Funny you should ask about another failed business venture

https://www.forbes.com/sites/chloesorvino/2017/03/20/puerto-rico-trump-bankruptcy-golf-course/#1d95b9d34bfe

Quote

When the Trump International Golf Club in Rio Grande, Puerto Rico, filed for bankruptcy in July 2015 — just a month after Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign — Trump's family did everything they could to distance themselves from the failed project. "This has absolutely nothing to do with Trump. This is a separate owner. We purely manage the golf course," Eric Trump told Bloomberg at the time.

Owned by the late construction magnate Arturo Diaz Jr. and his family, the property featured two 18-hole golf courses and a giant 46,000-square-foot clubhouse. It had also been struggling for years.

Diaz brought in Trump to turn around the golf course in 2008. The Trump Organization claimed it had a plan "to attract customers and control operating expenses." But over the next five years, club membership barely budged, inching up to just 63 paying members. Only 4 of them owned Trump-branded real estate adjacent to the courses.

All the while, the course's expenses increased 22%, including Trump's management fees, which were about 4.5% of annual revenues, or more than $600,000 by the end of 2012. Ultimately, with about $78 million in debt and only $9 million in assets, the golf club sold for $2 million.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"If Trump’s not a white supremacist, he does a good impression"

Spoiler

President Trump’s race-baiting attack on African American athletes is nothing new. During the civil rights movement, blacks in the South who dared to stand up for justice were often punished by being fired from their jobs. Trump is demanding that National Football League team owners act like the white segregationists of old.

It was gratifying to see the overwhelming rejection of Trump’s hideous rabble-rousing by NFL players, owners and fans. But let’s be clear: There is no reason, at this point, to give Trump the benefit of any doubt. We should assume Trump’s words and actions reflect what he truly believes.

His opening salvo, delivered Friday at a campaign rally in Alabama, could not have been clearer, or cruder: “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a b---- off the field right now. Out! He’s fired. He’s fired!’ ”

Trump was referring, of course, to players who take a knee during the singing of the national anthem. The practice was started by quarterback Colin Kaepernick — and adopted by a smattering of players around the league, almost all of them black — as a way of protesting police shootings of unarmed African Americans.

Trump claimed in a Monday tweet that “the issue of kneeling has nothing to do with race,” but that is a lie. Kaepernick’s method of protest had everything to do with race, as its intent was to focus attention on racial injustice.

Trump was speaking to a virtually all-white audience in the Deep South. About 70 percent of players in the NFL are African American. Some political analysts put two and two together and concluded that Trump was playing to the racial anxieties and animosities of his base. If this is true, however, he seems to have miscalculated.

Hundreds of players, black and white, protested during the anthem on Sunday by kneeling, linking arms or, in some cases, declining to take the field until the music was over. Many coaches and owners joined in. Almost all team owners released statements defending the players’ right to protest, including New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, a friend of Trump’s who contributed $1 million to his inauguration committee and gave him a Super Bowl ring. Kraft said he was “deeply disappointed” by Trump’s remarks.

Perhaps stung by the near-unanimity of the NFL’s reaction, Trump sought refuge by appealing to an audience he might have expected to be friendlier. “So proud of NASCAR and its supporters and fans. They won’t put up with disrespecting our Country or our Flag,” he tweeted Monday.

But a half-hour later, NASCAR’s most popular driver, Dale Earnhardt Jr., responded by tweeting, “All Americans R granted rights 2 peaceful protests.” Maybe next Trump will try his luck with the professional rodeo circuit.

Trump’s intent, I assume, was to create a wedge issue, with patriots on one side — his side — and non-patriots on the other. He did not realize that so many people who might dispute Kaepernick’s position on police violence would nevertheless defend the players’ right to take a stand, or a knee. We have a president who does not understand our fundamental freedoms.

We also have a president who, if he’s not a white supremacist, does a convincing impression of one.

On Saturday, he publicly disinvited the Golden State Warriors’ Steph Curry — one of pro basketball’s transcendent stars — from the White House. Curry had expressed reluctance to visit, and instead of reaching out, Trump slammed the door. I suppose you could argue that rich and famous athletes can take care of themselves.

But recall that Trump and his father were sued by President Richard Nixon’s Justice Department for illegally refusing to rent apartments to black prospective tenants. Recall that Trump continued to insist that the “Central Park Five” — four black men and one Latino — were guilty of a brutal rape even after DNA evidence had conclusively proved their innocence. Recall that Trump led the “birther” movement, ridiculously claiming that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. Recall Trump’s campaign appeal to black voters: “You’re living in poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58 percent of your youth is unemployed — what the hell do you have to lose?”

And recall his reaction to Charlottesville, where he discerned some “very fine people” among the torch-wielding parade of Ku Klux Klan members and neo-Nazis.

I don’t believe this can all be political calculation. I believe Trump is telling us what he really thinks — and who he really is.

I can't imagine anyone not understanding that he's a white supremacist.

[GreyhoundFan]

Isn't this the truth? "Trump is feeling like a loser today, so here come the rage tweets"

Spoiler

It is probably not an accident that President Trump unleashed ugly tweetstorms that attacked kneeling football players and implied that Puerto Rico is to blame for its own disastrous fate — even as he faces the possibility of major, humiliating personal losses of his own on two fronts.

Trump desperately wanted to sign something — anything at all, regardless of its consequences for millions — that would allow him to boast at rallies that he had obliterated his predecessor’s signature domestic accomplishment. Yet today, we are likely to find out that the Cassidy-Graham repeal bill is finally dead. Meanwhile, Trump has gone all in for GOP establishment pick Luther Strange in today’s Alabama Senate primary runoff. Yet it’s plausible that his runoff opponent, religious-right extremist Roy Moore, will prevail.

Trump today went after the kneeling football players yet again, tweeting this:

Ratings for NFL football are way down except before game starts, when people tune in to see whether or not our country will be disrespected! The booing at the NFL football game last night, when the entire Dallas team dropped to its knees, was loudest I have ever heard. Great anger

There is probably no one who grasps the nature of Trump’s bond with his voters as well as former chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon does, and a new Bannon quote is quite illuminating about Trump’s ongoing assault on football players exercising their right to peaceful protest. Bannon said this on Fox News:

“If the National Football League players want to take a knee, they should take a knee at night, every night, and thank God in heaven Donald J. Trump is president of the United States. He has saved this country so much grief. He’s done such a tremendous job, with virtually no help. And that’s what I meant when I said that.”

The first part of this (we should genuflect with gratitude before the Trump presidency) is generating online traffic, but the second part (the Trump presidency is a tremendous success) is more interesting. Bannon surely knows (though he won’t say so) that Trump is failing ignominiously on many fronts. Bannon is heavily promoting the notion that the GOP establishment has allegedly abandoned the True Trumpist Agenda, and he is pushing primary challengers that will take on GOP Senate incumbents. If Moore wins, Bannon has said, it will lead to more such challenges (the fact that Trump endorsed Strange can be safely ignored as an anomaly).

But in reality, there is no distinct Trumpist agenda, as Bannon has defined it. Trump has thrown in with the GOP establishment on most major policy matters, and all the Bannonite economic populism has quietly vanished. The real problem (as the health-care debate showed) is that Republicans have failed to deliver Trump a win on their agenda, not that they are betraying some imaginary agenda that he wants. Bannon’s quote on Fox illustrates his answer to this. His new role (with the exception of the nativist and xenophobic side of his “populist nationalism”) is not really to promote that agenda. It’s to play the chief propagandist hammering home to Trump voters that he is winning everywhere, that his presidency is a spectacular success, and whatever signs of occasional tiny setbacks they might be sensing here and there are solely the fault of the GOP establishment.

That Bannon, the keeper of Trump’s political id, is aggressively defending his assaults on black athletes kneeling during the national anthem — while painting his presidency as a triumph — is telling. This is obviously only the latest exercise in Trump/Bannon racial demagoguery, in which Trump shows total indifference toward the systemic and oppressive racism these athletes are highlighting as a fact of American life, while seeking to rally his voters (as David Frum puts it) against them with “conservative cultural grievances,” thus retaining our history and heritage (recall Trump’s argument in favor of Confederate memorials) as the property of Trump’s America.

But the other crude calculus here (which Sarah Kendzior has identified) is that Trump goes on these rampages when he feels as though he’s losing bigly on other major fronts. Trump isn’t merely rallying his voters against high-profile black protesters. He’s also rallying them behind himself against whatever foe he decides to pick a fight with on any given day. And naturally, whether he’s winning or losing, he’s winning.

...

Bannon's statement (from Faux News) made me want to vomit. The idea that ANYONE should genuflect before the TT is ludicrous. And, by the way, I wouldn't have genuflected in front of Obama or any other president.

[47of74]

Yeah, the pendejo in chief just comes up with bullshit excuses.

Quote

President Trump on Tuesday said providing supplies and other relief to Puerto Rico is more difficult than similar disaster efforts in Florida and Texas because the U.S. territory is a more isolated island in the Atlantic Ocean.

"We right now have our top people from FEMA, and they have been there," he said at a White House press conference with Spain's prime minister. "We are unloading on an hourly basis, massive loads of water and food and supplies for Puerto Rico.

"And this isn’t like Florida where we can go right up the spine or like Texas where we go right down the middle and we distribute," Trump said. "This is a thing called the Atlantic Ocean, this is tough stuff.”

Trump's response to the disaster in Puerto Rico from Hurricane Maria, which has left the island without power, has come under criticism from Democrats who say the president's focus has been on protests in the NFL and not disaster relief.

Meanwhile a real President would have moved heaven and Earth to help people, even if they weren't US citizens. 

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Isn't this the truth? "Trump is feeling like a loser today, so here come the rage tweets"

  Reveal hidden contents

It is probably not an accident that President Trump unleashed ugly tweetstorms that attacked kneeling football players and implied that Puerto Rico is to blame for its own disastrous fate — even as he faces the possibility of major, humiliating personal losses of his own on two fronts.

Trump desperately wanted to sign something — anything at all, regardless of its consequences for millions — that would allow him to boast at rallies that he had obliterated his predecessor’s signature domestic accomplishment. Yet today, we are likely to find out that the Cassidy-Graham repeal bill is finally dead. Meanwhile, Trump has gone all in for GOP establishment pick Luther Strange in today’s Alabama Senate primary runoff. Yet it’s plausible that his runoff opponent, religious-right extremist Roy Moore, will prevail.

Trump today went after the kneeling football players yet again, tweeting this:

Ratings for NFL football are way down except before game starts, when people tune in to see whether or not our country will be disrespected! The booing at the NFL football game last night, when the entire Dallas team dropped to its knees, was loudest I have ever heard. Great anger

There is probably no one who grasps the nature of Trump’s bond with his voters as well as former chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon does, and a new Bannon quote is quite illuminating about Trump’s ongoing assault on football players exercising their right to peaceful protest. Bannon said this on Fox News:

“If the National Football League players want to take a knee, they should take a knee at night, every night, and thank God in heaven Donald J. Trump is president of the United States. He has saved this country so much grief. He’s done such a tremendous job, with virtually no help. And that’s what I meant when I said that.”

The first part of this (we should genuflect with gratitude before the Trump presidency) is generating online traffic, but the second part (the Trump presidency is a tremendous success) is more interesting. Bannon surely knows (though he won’t say so) that Trump is failing ignominiously on many fronts. Bannon is heavily promoting the notion that the GOP establishment has allegedly abandoned the True Trumpist Agenda, and he is pushing primary challengers that will take on GOP Senate incumbents. If Moore wins, Bannon has said, it will lead to more such challenges (the fact that Trump endorsed Strange can be safely ignored as an anomaly).

But in reality, there is no distinct Trumpist agenda, as Bannon has defined it. Trump has thrown in with the GOP establishment on most major policy matters, and all the Bannonite economic populism has quietly vanished. The real problem (as the health-care debate showed) is that Republicans have failed to deliver Trump a win on their agenda, not that they are betraying some imaginary agenda that he wants. Bannon’s quote on Fox illustrates his answer to this. His new role (with the exception of the nativist and xenophobic side of his “populist nationalism”) is not really to promote that agenda. It’s to play the chief propagandist hammering home to Trump voters that he is winning everywhere, that his presidency is a spectacular success, and whatever signs of occasional tiny setbacks they might be sensing here and there are solely the fault of the GOP establishment.

That Bannon, the keeper of Trump’s political id, is aggressively defending his assaults on black athletes kneeling during the national anthem — while painting his presidency as a triumph — is telling. This is obviously only the latest exercise in Trump/Bannon racial demagoguery, in which Trump shows total indifference toward the systemic and oppressive racism these athletes are highlighting as a fact of American life, while seeking to rally his voters (as David Frum puts it) against them with “conservative cultural grievances,” thus retaining our history and heritage (recall Trump’s argument in favor of Confederate memorials) as the property of Trump’s America.

But the other crude calculus here (which Sarah Kendzior has identified) is that Trump goes on these rampages when he feels as though he’s losing bigly on other major fronts. Trump isn’t merely rallying his voters against high-profile black protesters. He’s also rallying them behind himself against whatever foe he decides to pick a fight with on any given day. And naturally, whether he’s winning or losing, he’s winning.

...

Bannon's statement (from Faux News) made me want to vomit. The idea that ANYONE should genuflect before the TT is ludicrous. And, by the way, I wouldn't have genuflected in front of Obama or any other president.

Just the sight of fornicate face or his minions makes me wanna hurl... 

[GreyhoundFan]

Thank you, @47of74, I truly needed that meme today!

Here's info on one of fornicateface's judicial nominees. What a piece of work: "A Trump judicial pick said transgender children are proof that ‘Satan’s plan is working’"

Spoiler

Before Jeff Mateer became President Trump’s nominee for federal judgeship in Texas, he fought a local ordinance extending equal protections to members of the LGBT community and said the separation of church and state does not exist in the Constitution.

But likely his most controversial statements were made in two 2015 speeches, in which he said transgender children are proof that “Satan’s plan is working” and same-sex marriage is a harbinger for “disgusting” practices such as polygamy and bestiality. He also appeared to advocate gay conversion therapy, a discredited practice banned by a handful of states and condemned by human rights and medical groups.

Those comments, which did not appear in media reports until CNN unearthed them last week, have outraged LGBT rights groups and drawn scrutiny to Mateer’s legal career as awaits a Senate confirmation hearing. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the top Democrat on the Senate committee that confirms judicial nominees, said Mateer’s “reprehensible” views about the LGBT community cast doubt on his ability to be fair and impartial.

Mateer has not responded to a request for comment.

In one of the speeches, titled “The Church and Homosexuality,” Mateer talked about a transgender first-grade girl who in 2013 sued a Colorado school for keeping her from using the bathroom for her gender.

“Now I submit to you, a parent of three children who are now young adults: A first-grader really knows what their sexual identity [is]?” Mateer said in the May 2015 speech, according to CNN. “I mean, it just really shows you how Satan’s plan is working and the destruction that’s going on.”

Mateer also said that allowing same-sex couples to marry could lead to other practices that bring the country “back to that time where debauchery rules.”

“I submit to you that there’ll be no line there. … Why couldn’t four people want to get married? Why not one man and three women? Or three women and one man?” he said, adding later, “There are people who marry themselves. Somebody wanted to marry a tree. People marrying their pets. It’s just like, you know, you read the New Testament and you read about all the things and you think, ‘Oh, that’s not going on in our community.’ Oh, yes, it is.”

Months later, in November 2015, Mateer gave another speech at a conference hosted by Kevin Swanson, a controversial pastor who suggested the death penalty as a punishment for homosexuality and recently said the country would be spared from God’s wrath in the form of Hurricane Irma if the Supreme Court banned abortion and same-sex marriage.

Mateer said, according to CNN: “Biblical counselors and therapists, we’ve seen cases in New Jersey and in California where folks have gotten in trouble because they gave biblical counseling and, you know, the issue is always, it’s same-sex. And if you’re giving conversion therapy, that’s been outlawed in at least two states and in some local areas. So they’re invading that area.”

Conversion therapy for minors has been banned in at least nine states and the District of Columbia. The practice has also been discredited by several medical organizations, including the American Psychiatric Foundation, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association.

Mateer’s nomination comes amid recent actions by the Trump administration that advocates say undermined the fight for equal rights for the LGBT community. Trump has reinstated the ban on transgender people in the military. His administration also has rolled back federal guidelines allowing transgender students to use public school restrooms that match their gender identity.

The recent revelations on Mateer, Texas’s first assistant attorney general, have also raised questions about whether he disclosed his controversial comments to a vetting committee, as required by state law.

A bipartisan group of attorneys called the Federal Judicial Evaluation Committee interviewed applicants and recommended candidates to the two U.S. senators from Texas, Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz. The two Republican senators then recommended possible nominees to Trump, who announced earlier this month that he is nominating Mateer and four others.

It’s unclear whether the vetting committee or Cornyn and Cruz knew of Mateer’s previous statements when they recommended him for the role.

David Prichard, a San Antonio attorney and chair of the committee, said confidentiality rules prevent him from saying whether Mateer disclosed his 2015 speeches, according to the San Antonio Express-News. But he added that Mateer’s past remarks will be a “fair topic” for the Senate to tackle. In her statement, Feinstein assured that Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee will discuss Mateer’s history during his confirmation hearing, which has not been scheduled.

“This is going to be sorted out at the appropriate place,” Prichard told the Express-News. “That’s why you have Senate hearings. That’s why you have a confirmation vote. … Let the chips fall where they may.”

Prichard has not responded to a call and email from The Washington Post. Cornyn, Cruz and the White House’s press staff also have not responded to requests for comment.

Groups such as the National Center for Transgender Equality, Human Rights Campaign and the Southern Poverty Law Center have all called for the Trump administration to withdraw Mateer’s nomination, saying that someone with clear and extreme bias should not be a federal judge.

“How dare he? How dare he talk about children this way?” Mara Keisling, the National Center for Transgender Equality’s executive director, said of Mateer’s comments about the transgender girl from Colorado.

Mateer, who received his law degree from Southern Methodist University, spent six years as the general counsel for the First Liberty Institute, a Plano, Tex.-based religious liberty advocacy group. He fought legal battles to let a Christian baker refuse to accommodate gay patrons, to allow Christian prayers at local government meetings, to display a portrait of Jesus in a public school, and to keep “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, among other things.

He also has spoken openly about his view that the separation of church and state does not exist in the Constitution, quoting late Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist, who called the wall separating the two institutions a “misleading metaphor.”

“I’ll hold up my $100 bill and say, ‘For the first student who can cite me the provision of the Constitution that guarantees the separation of church and state verbatim, I’ll give this $100 bill. It’s not there,” Mateer said in a 2013 speech. “The protections of the First Amendment protect us from government, not to cause government to persecute us because of our religious beliefs.”

Mateer became the second man in charge at Texas’s attorney general’s office in 2016. His appointment, while lauded by conservatives, drew ire from civil liberty groups.

The League of United Latin American Citizens in San Antonio said in an open letter to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that tapping Mateer is an indication that the state “is moving the church into public office” and is undermining civil rights gains of the LGBT community.

“It’s a shame that Texas has elevated an attorney who has no respect for the rights of non-Christians to such a high office,” a group called Americans United for Separation of Church and State said of Mateer’s appointment to the state post. “We can only hope that in the course of litigating on behalf of the Lone Star State a judge or two will set him straight on the facts of church-state separation.”

Mateer is not the only Trump judicial nominee to draw scrutiny.

Two nominees are conservative bloggers who have written opinionated posts about politics.

John Bush, a Kentucky lawyer who blogged under a pseudonym and called Cruz a “sore loser,” was nominated to a federal appeals court seat.

Damien Schiff, a federal claims court nominee, called Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy a “judicial prostitute” in a blog post. In defending his post, Schiff said it “was not to attack any person but rather to attack a certain style of judging.”

Stephen Schwartz, another federal claims court nominee, was criticized by civil rights groups for what they say was his “niche” legal practice of defending anti-transgender policies.

The Senate confirmed Bush in July. Schiff and Schwartz have not been confirmed.

 

[JMarie]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

But likely his most controversial statements were made in two 2015 speeches, in which he said transgender children are proof that “Satan’s plan is working” and same-sex marriage is a harbinger for “disgusting” practices such as polygamy and bestiality. He also appeared to advocate gay conversion therapy, a discredited practice banned by a handful of states and condemned by human rights and medical groups.

I'm not quite clear on how same-sex marriage is a harbinger for polygamy.  Don't most (if not all) polygamous relationships include both genders?