Trump 42: Racist In Chief

[GreyhoundFan]

 

Continued under spoiler

Spoiler

 

 

[thoughtful]

3 hours ago, fraurosena said:

You scared, Donnie? You sound scared.

 

Donald, you complain about what they are doing, then call them the do nothing party.

I'm sure this is the very first time in your whole life that you have contradicted yourself and made no sense, Donny, but you might want to watch out for such things in the future. People may stop trusting you.

[fraurosena]

Remember how Trump (falsely) attacked the Squad for calling America garbage? 

 

[fraurosena]

Plus, he’s a racist.

 

[fraurosena]

And again, he accuses others of his own fallacies.

[Article from February this year]

Warning before you read: gag inducing.

Trump's NYC eateries written up for 'live mice,' other 'critical' health code violations in recent months

Quote

Their namesake is a Mr. Clean freak, but some Trump eateries are just plain dirty.

Mice in the kitchen, filthy food prep areas and broken sewage systems are on the list of recent stomach-turning health code violations at a number of Trump-branded restaurants in the city, the Daily News has learned.

Health inspections at Trump properties from Midtown Manhattan to the Bronx’s Ferry Point reveal the President’s eponymous company still struggles to keep its day-to-day operations clean — though similar infractions have been reported for years.

Violations at the President’s crown jewel and Manhattan residence — Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue — are perhaps the most gag-inducing.

City Department of Health inspectors visited the tower’s cafe and grill on July 11, 2018 and found “evidence of mice or live mice” in and around the kitchen, according to records that haven’t previously been reported. The inspectors categorized the violation as “critical.”

The inspectors also deemed the restaurant “not vermin proof” and said its “conditions” are “conducive to attracting vermin” and “allowing vermin to exist.”

Moreover, the eatery’s “food contact surfaces” had not been properly maintained and “unacceptable” material had been used to build some “non-food contact” stations, making them practically impossible to clean.

The Trump Tower eatery has been written up for various health code violations every year since 2014, including sightings of “live roaches” in 2016 and “filth flies” in 2017. But inspectors have not — until now — found mice tracks at the posh establishment.

President Trump — who’s technically still the chief executive of the restaurant since he never completely divested from his namesake company when he moved into the Oval Office — has a tendency to not clean up after himself, according to a former business associate.

“He has always been far more focused on creating an image for his properties than in spending what it takes to make them excellent,” the ex-associate told The News, speaking on condition of anonymity in order to be candid.

A spokesperson for the Trump Organization wouldn’t comment directly on the rodent reports but said any “minor infractions” were dealt with immediately. The rep also noted the Midtown eatery has an “A” rating despite the violations.

But a Health Department spokeswoman noted the Trump restaurant is still an outlier, as only about 22% of food establishments in the five boroughs have “mice-related violations.”

Inspectors returned to Trump Tower on Aug. 22 to check out the mezzanine bar — and found another “critical” health violation.

An unidentified “food worker” at the gold-plated bar — where “The Billionaire Martini” costs $20 — was not using “proper utensils to eliminate bare hand contact” with raw foods, according to records. Additionally, the inspectors found a “single service” food item was reused and improperly stored.

A bartender at the skyscraper shrugged off cleanliness concerns and said his work station at least doesn’t have rodents scampering around.

“I haven’t seen any mice here,” the barkeep told The News on a recent evening. “I don’t know about the restaurant, but no mice here.”

The health officials came back again Jan. 31 and found Trump cafe and grill workers weren’t keeping certain foods protected from “potential sources of contamination.”

About 12 miles north, at the Trump Golf Links in the Bronx, inspectors detected more “critical” health violations last Nov. 7.

Food contact surfaces at the club’s eatery were not “properly washed, rinsed and sanitized after each use” or after “activity when contamination may have occurred,” the inspectors reported.

Secondly, the golf restaurant’s plumbing and sewage systems were crap, according to the inspectors.

Records reveal mandatory “anti-siphonage” and “backflow prevention” devices hadn’t been installed as part of the plumbing networks, resulting in floors not being “properly drained.”

The “sewage disposal system,” meanwhile, was simply “in disrepair” and “not functioning properly,” the inspectors said.

Despite the sketchy health inspection records, the President has a long history of bragging about his hotels and restaurants, invariably calling them “beautiful” and “the best,” while knocking other people’s eateries.

“The Red Hen Restaurant should focus more on cleaning its filthy canopies, doors and windows rather than refusing to serve a fine person like Sarah Huckabee Sanders,” Trump tweeted in June after his press secretary was refused service at the Lexington, Va., establishment because of her role in his administration.

He added, “I always had a rule, if a restaurant is dirty on the outside, it is dirty on the inside!”

 

[fraurosena]

Stop calling me racist all the time! I'm a misogynist too, you know! And scared shitless of the House Dems looking into impeachment...

 

[fraurosena]

Owned.

 

[fraurosena]

Didn't he claim he was a germaphobe?

Rust, mold, parasites: Trump’s Mar-a-Lago cited for 78 health violations in the last three years

[Article from April 2017]

Quote

Unsafe seafood. Insufficiently refrigerated meats. Rusty shelving. Cooks without hairnets.

Reports show Florida health inspectors cited President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort with 15 violations in late January, days before the U.S. leader hosted Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for a diplomatic visit.

Still, the state inspectors allowed the luxury resort’s main restaurant and beach club grill to remain open as staff scrambled to make several immediate corrections.

Among the “high priority” problems described as “potentially hazardous” were faulty fridges with meats stored well above the required 41 degrees Fahrenheit. For example, in the restaurant’s walk-in cooler, the duck and beef were measured at 50 degrees, while a ham was at 57 degrees.

Other issues included smoked salmon being served without undergoing “proper parasite destruction” and a hand washing sink for employees with water that was not hot enough.

Stephen Lawson, spokesman for the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation, said the violations were the result of a routine inspection and not prompted by any consumer complaints or food-borne illnesses.

“The infractions were corrected on site, and the establishment was immediately brought into compliance,” Lawson said on Thursday.

The January inspections were not the first time authorities have found problems at Mar-a-Lago. Over the last three years, records show the club has been cited 78 times for violations that included chefs handling food without washing their hands, dirty cutting boards, a slicer “soiled with old food debris” and an “accumulation of “black/green mold-like substance” in the ice machine.

Lawson said inspectors will return to Mar-a-Lago for another unannounced visit before the end of the year.

The Trump Organization, which operates the family’s business empire, did not immediately respond to an email requesting comment. The violations were first made public weeks ago, but received broader attention this week following a report in the Miami Herald.

Trump is a frequent visitor to his private club in Palm Beach. The president often refers to the property as the Winter White House. He hosted a summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping there last weekend, where Trump said the men shared a “beautiful” chocolate cake while discussing the U.S. cruise missile strike on Syria.

I'd like to know how the inspections went in 2018 and 2019.

Edited July 28, 2019 by fraurosena

[fraurosena]

I felt like a great fighter pilot.

[fraurosena]

'Racist Elijah Cummings'

I can't even. 

 

[thoughtful]

The fact that Melted Velveeta Boy asked "do other presidents do it?" before deciding to shake hands with graduates was just as telling as the fact that he lied about it. Either he wasn't going to be bothered unless others had (can't be one-upped!), or he'd been briefed beforehand, and hadn't bothered to listen when someone told him "and then you shake hands with the graduates."

Possibly both.

[GreyhoundFan]

"The ‘I alone can fix it’ president wants black areas to fix themselves"

Spoiler

It doesn’t take much evidence for President Trump to decide he’s right. Dead people still on voter rolls? Then he clearly lost the popular vote in 2016 because of voter fraud. A warrant was obtained against a former campaign staffer a few weeks before the election? Then the entire investigation into Russia’s role in the election was obviously invalid.

The most recent example came Saturday, when Trump began his day by watching a Fox News segment looking at run-down areas in Baltimore. The report featured video filmed by a Republican activist from the city and was used to draw a specific contrast: This is what Rep. Elijah E. Cummings’s district looks like. Yet, the Maryland Democrat has the gall to criticize Trump?

Never mind that what was shown were individual units in one part of Cummings’s district. Never mind that his district also reportedly includes rental units owned by Trump’s son-in-law and White House adviser Jared Kushner. Those discrete bits of televised evidence, those several rowhouses — on Fox News, no less! — were more than enough for Trump to offer a sweeping assessment of Cummings’s tenure.

“Rep, Elijah Cummings has been a brutal bully, shouting and screaming at the great men & women of Border Patrol about conditions at the Southern Border,” Trump tweeted, “when actually his Baltimore district is FAR WORSE and more dangerous. His district is considered the Worst in the USA. As proven last week during a Congressional tour, the Border is clean, efficient & well run, just very crowded. Cumming District is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess. If he spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could help clean up this very dangerous & filthy place.”

It takes an enormous amount of chutzpah for Trump to level this charge. This was, after all, the president who pledged at his party convention three years ago this month that he alone could fix the government’s problems. Since he’s been president, Trump has traveled to Maryland several times in an official capacity, but never to Baltimore.

His invocations of the city since he has been president include a mention of East Baltimore as he established “opportunity zones” in several regions — designations that could end up benefiting Kushner.

Most of the times he has mentioned Baltimore, though, have been to lump it together with other heavily black places such as Detroit and Chicago as a stand-in for “dangerous, run-down areas.” We’re spending money on wars overseas, he said, while “neglecting the fate of American children in cities like Baltimore and Chicago and Detroit.” Speaking to police officers, he lamented that we had “seen the unbearable horror of the shortcomings in Baltimore and Chicago that have cut short so many lives and so many beautiful, beautiful dreams.”

He uses “Baltimore” as an invocation of something bad. It is something from which people must be lifted up or against, something from which the rest of the country should be compared. It overlaps with how he uses “infest,” a term that been used by Trump on Twitter to describe only places that are mostly nonwhite or heavily Democratic.

To contrast himself with Cummings, Trump insisted on Sunday that he has done more for black Americans than have Democrats simply because the black unemployment rate has fallen.

When Trump took office, 57.5 percent of the country’s working-age black population was employed; now, 58.2 percent are. Over the prior three years, the percentage had climbed 4.2 points. The unemployment rate in the Baltimore area has dropped under Trump, from 4.5 percent to 3.8 percent. Three years before his inauguration, it was at 6.3 percent. Employment growth there has trailed the rest of the country.

On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly conflated the concerns of black Americans with problems in the “inner city,” as though what was happening in places such as West Baltimore defined the black experience.

Trump’s main pitch to black voters in 2016 was: “What do you have to lose?” To be fair, that pitch included no promise of black voters actually gaining much in voting for him.

Trump’s disparagement of Baltimore and his insistence that its problems are Cummings’s problems and not his own reflects where Trump thinks government resources should be expended. Just as he championed a $16 billion bailout for farmers at the same time his administration was mulling a $15 billion cut to food stamps, Trump sees some parts of America as deserving of concern and others as hopelessly broken.

Struggling places such as West Virginia are victims from outside forces that must be combated, like environmentalists and drug-smuggling immigrants. Baltimore? Baltimore’s problems aren’t a function of decades of structural racism or neglect but, instead, the fault of the people who live there and represent it.

There’s a paradox that’s worth reiterating: If it’s an indictment of Cummings that Baltimore has problems, it is necessarily also an indictment of Trump. Both are in positions of political authority over it, but at least Cummings has spent time in the district.

To compare Baltimore to the border, as Trump did, exposes what the president is actually doing. Trump has direct control over facilities at the border housing migrants, facilities that have been repeatedly criticized as dirty, under-resourced and unhealthy for those interned in them. Baltimore, while part of the United States, is at enough of a remove that he can pass the buck wherever he wants. He doesn’t even need to pretend that it’s his responsibility — and his defenders quickly stepped up to bolster that belief.

A few rowhouses prove that Cummings is a hypocrite. A few news stories raising alarms about conditions at the border? Fake news.

Early last year, I was in Baltimore to see how residents felt about the president one year into his term. I spoke with a man named Oliver Spriggs, 78, who lived in Cummings’s district. He was walking with his 8-year-old grandson, Keishawn.

I asked how he thought Trump was doing.

“You really don’t want to know,” Spriggs replied.

Keishawn chimed in: “Horrible!"

"Lousy!” Spriggs said. He said that he felt Trump was a liar.

“And as far as I’m concerned,” Spriggs added, “he’s a racist in his words and his actions.”

His grandson, surprised, looked at his grandfather.

“He’s a racist?” Keishawn asked.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"The vermin in the White House"

Spoiler

Of course the White House is infested.

Mice, rats, cockroaches, ants. Raccoons, even. This has been going on for 200 years.

Traps galore, according to the reporters who are there every day and familiar with the yelp of a colleague whose toes were nearly tickled by a scampering rodent.

This is nothing new in an old house.

And it’s a little glass-housey of President Trump — veteran of numerous health code violations in his properties across the country — to talk about vermin in Baltimore.

This is the guy who comes from a city that lionized a rat who scavenged a slice of pizza in a subway station. And this cheap shot about rodents in Baltimore is how he took a racist swipe at Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.) over the weekend when he called the congressman’s district a “rat and rodent infested mess.”

You wanna talk pestilence? The nation’s capital is in the middle of a huge, public infestation.

And let’s take a look at the history of Trump’s current (when he’s not at Mar-a-Lago, with its 78 health code violations) residence — the White House.

This place has been rat-infested for much of its history.

“The rats have nearly taken the building so it has become necessary to get a man with ferrets,” is how first lady Caroline Harrison reported it on Oct. 9, 1889, according to “America’s First Ladies: A Historical Encyclopedia and Primary Document” by Nancy Hendricks.

Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt’s housekeeper, Henrietta Nesbitt, was horrified by the mice, rats, squirrels, cockroaches and black ant infestations she found when they moved in, according to her 1948 book, White House Diary.

“I tried to get one of the entomologists to figure out how many generations of cockroaches had grown up there since President Adams,” Nesbitt wrote.

That administration modernized the kitchen. But that did little for the rest of the White House.

The National Security Council, during the Ford administration, had to evacuate the secure Situation Room in the basement of the White House thanks to a rat. Classified journal notes obtained by The Washington Post in the 1990s logged a rat incident on Nov. 25, 1975:

“Meeting was held in the Roosevelt Room rather than the Situation Room because one of the ladies saw a large rat in the Situation Room immediately before the meeting,” a staffer wrote. “I looked, but couldn’t find anything to club. The rat probably escaped into the wall space where the sliding map boards fit.”

Or that time President Jimmy Carter was the meanest he’s probably ever been, fuming when the Oval Office reeked from dead rodents rotting in the walls .

And maybe Trump forgot about the swimming rat?

“It did not look like a Walt Disney rat, I’ll tell you that,” first lady Barbara Bush told the Houston Post in 1990, after a rat swam with her while she did her daily laps in the White House pool. “I was out of that pool so much faster than I thought I could.”

“I swim with a mask, and it just went right by in front of me,” she told the Houston Post. “Fortunately, George Bush was there and drowned the beast. It was horrible.”

The current administration has placed numerous work orders to capture rats, mice, cockroaches and stink bugs, according to an investigation by the NBC 4 investigative team. Trump famously called the place “a dump” when he was moving in.

Trump should be comfortable with infestations by now. Just check out the stacks of health code violations at his properties.

The New York Department of Health and Mental Hygiene found in last July that his Fifth Avenue Trump Café and Grill had “Evidence of mice or live mice present in facility’s food and/or non-food areas.”

The year before, health inspectors battled “filth flies.”

From the inspector’s report: “Filth flies or food/refuse/sewage-associated (FRSA) flies present in facility’s food and/or non-food areas.” And the “Facility not vermin proof. Harborage or conditions conducive to attracting vermin to the premises and/or allowing vermin to exist.”

Funny that there’s pestilence always close to Trump.

And that may be why the current infestation in the White House is the worst of all.

The Baltimore Sun brilliantly punched back at Trump, calling him the biggest rat of all.

And given his impact on the country, that may be true.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica explains why rats get such a bad rap from humans: “Brown and house rats exploit human food resources, eating and contaminating stored grains and killing poultry. They have been responsible for the depletion or extinction of native species of small mammals, birds, and reptiles, especially on oceanic islands. Both the brown and house rat have been implicated in the spread of 40 diseases among humans, including bubonic plague, food poisoning, schistosomiasis, murine typhus, tularemia, and leptospirosis.”

Trump, the way his family and company enrich themselves with their corrupt deals, questionable negotiations and persistent conflict of interest are eating into the stored savings of this nation’s working class.

His tax policies that help the rich and his largesse to corporate pals is hastening the depletion of America’s middle class and a liveble, sustainable environment.

And his hateful, divisive and racist rhetoric in tweets, speeches and outbursts is spreading a disease of partisanship, division and hatred this nation hasn’t seen since the 1960s.

Yes, the biggest rat is in the White House.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Don’t get complacent. Things really are that bad under Trump."

Spoiler

The economy is humming. We’re not at war (much). So he can’t be that bad, right?

Steadfast NeverTrumpers may find it hard to believe, but I’m hearing that argument more and more lately, as people try to come to terms with the possibility of a second Trump term. It’s the “normalization” we’ve been warned about since Donald Trump’s ascension, but in a different form than we might have expected.

After all, many of the people telling themselves that things aren’t “that bad” insist they are as offended as ever by the racist tweets and sexist taunts. They’d prefer someone more civil in the Oval Office, of course.

But . . . the government, and the world, carry on. He insults our allies, but they remain on our side. He imposes tariffs, but unemployment stays low. He threatens defaults, but the debt ceiling is raised. Maybe, people think, a second term wouldn’t be the end of the world.

I’d argue such complacency is not justified. First, because a second term could be a lot more dangerous than the first. There would be more Trump judges on the courts to validate his lawlessness, no Jim Mattis or (God help us) Jeff Sessions in the Cabinet to curb his authoritarian whims, no worries of voter anger to restrain his bellicosity. A second mandate surely would embolden him; at worst, we could find that his jokes about a third term were no joke.

But complacency is misplaced also because — and here’s where the normalization comes in — things are that bad, even now. If people discount the damage, it’s due to a combination of fatigue and relief: fatigue, because it’s almost impossible to maintain outrage when the outrages are so incessant; and relief, because we are constantly aware that things could be worse.

Take North Korea’s missile launches last week, for example. Congress and the media would be scorching any other president right now for allowing North Korea to continue its nuclear and military buildup unimpeded. But we are so grateful that Trump has not blustered and stumbled into a war — into “fire and fury” — that we bite our tongues.

It’s the same around the world: Our ankle-high expectations for the man keep us from noticing how completely he is meeting those expectations. Our two key allies in East Asia, Japan and South Korea, are at loggerheads; a marginally competent president would be helping to mend fences.

Our most important allies in Europe are spinning apart as Britain plunges toward a disastrous Brexit; a normal president would be helping our friends salvage something workable for the future.

When Ebola emerged in West Africa, the Obama administration mobilized; now Ebola is spinning out of control in Congo, and the United States is absent. A Darfur-scale tragedy has unfolded among the Rohingya in Myanmar, also known as Burma; Trump doesn’t know who they are. A human rights violation of epic scale has taken shape in western China — the cultural genocide of an entire people, with as many as 3 million people in concentration camps — and Trump takes no notice. Journalists are murdered and imprisoned, and Trump sides with their murderers and jailers.

To the world, it is not just Trump taking these positions. It is America. The damage will be long-lasting.

And his ignorance and cynicism reverberate through some of the biggest stories of our time: the confidence of authoritarian strongmen in China, Russia and beyond; their distortion of technology from a liberating force into a malevolent tool of surveillance and suppression; the destructive warming of the climate, which the United States ignores and abets. None of these is easily reversible.

The story is similar, if more familiar, at home. The constant, willful lying; the attacks on the press and on the very idea of truth — these are not harmless. They draw from but also foster a lack of trust that will persist long after his presidency.

So does the racism. So do the ugly attacks on immigrants. So do the contempt for science and the refusal to stand up to foreign attacks on our elections. So do the disparaging of public servants and the casual threats to wield the vast powers of the federal government against perceived political enemies. These things used to be not okay. Now they are okay. There will be no easy return.

Yes, we’ve avoided recession, the nation is (mostly) at peace, the government will not default. Naturally, we are thankful.

But when we need to be thankful for avoiding disaster, we don’t really have so much to be thankful for. Things are that bad. We have a right to expect better.

 

[fraurosena]

Sweet Rufus. Now he's equating himself with the 9/11 first responders. There is no depth too low for him to go.

What a sad, miserable little man you must be if you have to make believe constantly in order to feel good about yourself.

ETA: Sad, miserable, lacking empathy, and completely and utterly tone-deaf.

 

[fraurosena]

That uneasy and seemingly involuntary twitching is remarkable. 

 

[fraurosena]

George Takei has the right of it.

 

[fraurosena]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"A brief history of Trump making 9/11 about himself"

Spoiler

President Trump again pushed the envelope Monday during a signing ceremony to extend the 9/11 victims compensation fund.

“Many of those affected were firefighters, police officers and other first responders,” Trump said. “And I was down there also, but I’m not considering myself a first responder. But I was down there. I spent a lot of time down there with you.”

It is not the first time Trump has touted himself while discussing the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in comments ranging from tone-deafness to provocative to outright false or misleading, examples of which you can watch in the video above.

On 9/11, Trump called in to a local TV station and falsely said he would have the tallest building in downtown Manhattan after the World Trade Center towers fell.

In 2005, he campaigned against what would become One World Trade Center, saying the “terrorists win” if New York built it as it was designed.

In 2011, he said he predicted the 9/11 attacks (he did not).

In 2013, he remembered 9/11 by sending his “best wishes” to the “haters and losers.”

During the 2016 campaign, Trump falsely claimed (then doubled down on the claim while mocking a disabled reporter) that “thousands” of New Jersey Muslims celebrated the 9/11 attacks. He also said his Muslim ban would have stopped 9/11.

He has repeatedly used 9/11 to attack his political opponents, including blaming President George W. Bush for the terrorist attacks.

After the attacks, Trump was criticized for taking a $150,000 grant for his 40 Wall Street building near Ground Zero, even though he previously said the building was undamaged.

Other Trump claims about the 9/11 attacks are equally dubious.

In 2015, Trump said he saw “many people” jump from the World Trade Center towers, even though he did not live near the towers in 2001. He later reportedly said he saw it from a telescope.

And New York City’s comptroller found no evidence that Trump gave $10,000 to 9/11 victims, despite Trump’s claims otherwise.

Before signing the 9/11 victims compensation fund extension Monday, Trump told the gathered first responders to come up on stage, while casting doubts on the stage’s stability.

“I don’t know if this stage will hold it, but if it doesn’t we’re not falling very far.”

While touting the bill, Trump didn’t mention that his 2019 budget, if passed, would have reduced health funding for 9/11 victims.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"#LostTrumpHistory: Trump’s 9/11 claims become a George Conway-pushed meme"

Spoiler

Noted historian President Trump, who earlier this month taught Americans about the airports taken over in the Revolutionary War, had a new contribution Monday at the signing of the Sept. 11 victims compensation fund extension.

“Many of those affected were firefighters, police officers and other first responders. And I was down there also, but I’m not considering myself a first responder. But I was down there. I spent a lot of time down there with you,” he said to a Rose Garden crowd that included 9/11 first responders.

There is no evidence that Trump went to Ground Zero after the 2001 terrorist attack, but the president does have a long history of inserting himself into it, as The Fix’s JM Rieger details here.

Monday’s comments quickly drew condemnation from the president’s critics, including from Twitter’s unofficial Martha Mitchell, George Conway, the wayward husband of Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway.

Soon after, Twitter user @JoJoFromJerz joked: “Did you know that Donald Trump was the first aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean? It’s true. Believe me. I wonder what other, little known facts there are about Donald Trump’s accomplishments or roles in history. Please share if you know one. #LostTrumpHistoy.”

Within hours, some of the same Twitter denizens who drove the #RevolutionaryWarAirportStories hashtag a few weeks ago were trending with a new one.

Conway spent much of the afternoon retweeting them.

That would be Sir Edmund Hillary.

This one pokes fun at Kellyanne Conway’s erroneous 2017 claims about the “Bowling Green Massacre,” which doesn’t exist.

 

I love most of them, but I think the moon walk is probably my favorite.

[fraurosena]

Oh my gosh, that Miracle on Ice one brought back fond memories of my mom and I watching that in the middle of the night and eating almost all of a baby Edammer in all the excitement. 

FYI a baby Edammer weighs 900 grams, which is about 2 pounds...

[GreyhoundFan]

3 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Oh my gosh, that Miracle on Ice one brought back fond memories of my mom and I watching that in the middle of the night and eating almost all of a baby Edammer in all the excitement. 

FYI a baby Edammer weighs 900 grams, which is about 2 pounds...

My mom and I were so excited while watching the Miracle on Ice that we ate our way through a couple of bags of Doritos. Good times.

[GreyhoundFan]

"‘He should investigate himself’: Trump echoes Fox News again to lash out at Elijah Cummings"

Spoiler

Two days after starting yet another bruising national clash over race with a barrage of furious tweets aimed at Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.) and his majority-black Baltimore district, President Trump took to Twitter on Monday night to lash out at both yet again.

After misleadingly calling Baltimore’s statistics “the worst in the United States on Crime and the Economy,” Trump suggested that the city had wasted aid.

“Billions of dollars have been pumped in over the years, but to no avail,” Trump tweeted. “The money was stolen or wasted. Ask Elijah Cummings where it went. He should investigate himself with his Oversight Committee!”

As with Trump’s first attack on Cummings, the president’s Monday-night insults weren’t fired off in a vacuum. Rather, they came amid hours of programming on Fox News blasting Cummings and Democrats, and backing Trump’s complaints about Baltimore.

Kimberly Klacik, a Baltimore Republican whose Saturday morning appearance on Fox inspired Trump’s initial attacks, was back Monday night on “The Ingraham Angle,” and the president tuned in to watch. After quoting from Klacik’s interview on Twitter, Trump echoed a controversial 2016 campaign slogan aimed at black voters, writing: “What the h.... do you have to lose?”

Trump’s latest online missives made clear that days of withering criticism from Democrats and some Republicans have done little to temper his drive for stoking racial tensions as an electoral strategy. They also starkly highlighted how Fox News and its array of Trump-backing hosts continue to drive the president’s daily agenda.

As The Washington Post’s Ashley Parker, Josh Dawsey and Robert Costa reported, when Trump tuned in to Fox on Saturday, he was already enraged at Cummings over the Democrat’s role investigating his businesses and relatives as chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, and for his criticisms of Trump’s border strategy.

That anger was ignited by Klacik’s segment on “Fox & Friends Weekend,” featuring footage of dilapidated buildings and garbage in Cummings’s district. (The piece didn’t note that the district includes above-average median incomes, famed institutions such as the Johns Hopkins Hospital and even rental units owned by Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner.)

Within an hour of the piece airing, Trump opined on Twitter that “no human being would want to live” in “disgusting, rat and rodent infested” Baltimore and called Cummings “a brutal bully.”

Thus began a familiar cycle, exemplified earlier this month when Trump sent a racist tweet aimed at four minority Democratic congresswomen and demanding that they “go back” to the “crime infested places from which they came,” despite the fact that all four are U.S. citizens. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) likewise deemed Trump’s broadside against Cummings a “racist attack,” echoing many other prominent Democrats.

Two days of brutal verbal sparring followed. Trump first insisted that “Democrats always play the Race Card,” before then accusing Cummings — who is African American and whose district is nearly 53 percent black — of himself being “racist.” When the Rev. Al Sharpton joined the fray and slammed Trump for criticizing Cummings in “the most bigoted and racist way,” Trump claimed in a tweet that the former Democratic presidential candidate “Hates Whites & Cops."

At the White House this week, The Post reported, some advisers worried that Trump’s attacks on Cummings would distract from larger issues and declined to defend his more personal insults lobbed at the congressman. A Monday afternoon White House meeting with black pastors, many of whom supported Trump, hinted at a potential easing of hostilities.

But by Monday night, a trio of Fox News hosts went on air to enthusiastically back the president. As CNN’s Brian Stelter reported, Tucker Carlson’s show touted how “DEMS HAVE FAILED BALTIMORE,” while Sean Hannity cued up a segment on the “CRISIS IN BALTIMORE.” Laura Ingraham, meanwhile, invited Klacik back on the show under the chyron, “DEMOCRATS WRECK CITIES, BLAME TRUMP.”

Amid that cable news support, Trump returned to Twitter and his familiar grievances against Cummings and Baltimore. Trump has taken particular umbrage at Cummings for criticizing his Department of Homeland Security chief during a congressional hearing earlier this month over reports of unsanitary conditions for children at border facilities.

“None of us would have our children in that position,” Cummings said during the hearing. “They are human beings.”

On Monday night, Trump again hit out at the congressman over that critique.

 

 

[fraurosena]