CBS is doing live updates of Trump’s jaunt to Puerto Rico. The most recent item is that he’s throwing paper towels to a crowd of people. Yes really: paper towels. “Here, Puerto Rico people, mop up the hurricane.”
The president — in what the White House press pooler described as a Stephen Curry impersonation — softly shot paper towels into the crowd. He also held up canned chicken breast for the crowd to see.
Reuters got a snap:
Score!… Read the rest
Trump says what happened in Las Vegas was a miracle.
“Look, we have a tragedy. What happened is, in many ways, a miracle,” Trump said as he departed the White House for a trip to Puerto Rico on Tuesday morning. “The police department, they’ve done such an incredible job. And we’ll be talking about gun laws as time goes on. But I do have to say, how quickly the police department was able to get in was really very much of a miracle. They’ve done an amazing job.”
But if you’re going to go for a miracle, it would have been a better miracle to jam all the guy’s guns, or swap the bullets for blanks. It’s not much … Read the rest
Oh goddddddd. Bozo is in Puerto Rico. Bozo is talking.
President Trump on Tuesday told Puerto Rico officials they should feel “very proud” they haven’t lost thousands of lives like in “a real catastrophe like Katrina,” while adding that the devastated island territory has thrown the nation’s budget “a little out of whack.”
Silly silly silly Puerto Rico, inviting a hurricane to visit them without checking the nation’s budget first.
… Read the restTrump’s remarks came as he touched down in San Juan amid harsh criticism of the slow federal response to the natural disaster and after he praised himself earlier in the day for the “great job” and “A-plus” performance he said his administration deserved for its response to Hurricane Maria.
We should not have to hear Donald Trump talking like this:
… Read the restHundreds of our fellow citizens are now mourning the sudden loss of a loved one, a parent, a child, a brother or sister. We cannot fathom their pain, we cannot imagine their loss. To the families of the victims, we are praying for you and we are here for you. And we ask God to help see you through this very dark period.
Scripture teaches us the Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit. We seek comfort in those words, for we know that God lives in the hearts of those who grieve. To the wounded who are now recovering in
Yet another iteration of the “now right after a mass shooting is not the time to talk about gun control” bromide – the one that makes absolutely no sense. Why isn’t right after yet another mass shooting very much the time to talk about gun control? It’s like saying “now right after a horrific multi-car crash caused by a driver texting is not the time to talk about not texting while driving.” Yes it is, it’s exactly the time to talk about it, when the dire consequences are right on the front page.
This one of course is the strikingly out of her depth Huckabee Junior.
… Read the restWhite House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Monday repeatedly deflected reporters’
Rafi Schwartz at Splinternews lists some Congressional people who offered thoughtsandprayers on the Las Vegas slaughter and have taken money from the NRA.
So who is sending their NRA-sponsored well wishes to the victims of the Las Vegas massacre today? Let’s take a look, with a little help from the campaign contribution database at opensecrets.org.
Missouri Republican Senator Roy Blunt received $11,900 from the NRA during the 2016 election cycle.
Saddened by the tragic loss of life in #LasVegas. My thoughts are with all of the families affected by this horrific attack.
— Senator Roy Blunt (@RoyBlunt) October 2, 2017
Virginia Congresswoman Barbara Comstock received $10,400 from the NRA during the 2016 election cycle.
… Read the restI am heartbroken
I saw a tweet that staggered me.
Number of Americans killed on battlefields in all wars in history:
1,396,733
Killed by firearms in the US since 1968:
1,516,863
(NYT)
— richard bacon (@richardpbacon) October 2, 2017
Seriously?
Apparently so, yes. Politifact investigated and confirmed.
… Read the restIn a column published shortly after the on-air slayings of two TV journalists in southwestern Virginia, the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof offered some “data points” about the pervasiveness of gun violence in the United States.
One of them was: “More Americans have died from guns in the United States since 1968 than on battlefields of all the wars in American history.”
That sounded familiar. Really familiar. As it turns out, the web version
A gunman on a high floor of a Las Vegas hotel rained a rapid-fire barrage on an outdoor concert festival on Sunday night, killing at least 58 people, injuring hundreds of others, and sending thousands of terrified survivors fleeing for cover, in one of the deadliest mass shootings in American history.
Online video of the attack near the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino showed the singer Jason Aldean’s performance at the Route 91 Harvest Festival, a three-day country music event, being interrupted by the sound of gunfire. The music stopped, and as victims fell bleeding, concertgoers screamed, ducked for cover, or ran.
The video clips show what a massive advantage the shooter had given himself … Read the rest
The Post on Trump’s gruesome undermining of his own Secretary of State.
“Humiliating for Tillerson, but worse, renders him useless. He’ll resign, today or after a brief face-saving interval,” predicted former Obama administration ambassador and National Security Council official Dan Shapiro, one of many foreign policy experts who tweeted about Trump’s Sunday comments, sent from his New Jersey golf club.
So I went to look at Shapiro’s Twitter and that was valuable. I decided to look at all this as an interesting learning opportunity until the moment the nukes burst overhead. Might as well, right?
Later in the day Trump expanded on his point.
… Read the rest“Being nice to Rocket Man hasn’t worked in 25 years, why would it work now? Clinton
Yesterday there was an atheoskeptic or skeptoatheist conference in Milwaukee that was the subject of a lot of ginned-up “controversy” beforehand because that’s what the organizers went for. They invited several notorious Twitter abusers, because Let All the Voices Be Heard; some people who didn’t want to share a stage with notorious Twitter abusers dropped out, and others went ahead anyway.
One who went ahead was Thomas Smith of Serious Inquiries Only, who did a conversation with one of the worst notorious Twitter abusers, Carl Benjamin who tweets as Sargon of Akkad. Friends of mine were talking about how badly that went yesterday.
Charone Frankel posted a clip of the worst moment on Facebook.
Editing to add: Here is … Read the rest
Tillerson is trying to talk to North Korea, which admittedly is not a project full of promise but when the alternative is nuclear war you kind of have to try, mk? But Trump doesn’t think so, and Trump also doesn’t think it’s a bad idea for a president to undercut his own Secretary of State on Twitter. Yes I said on Twitter. The history books of the future, if there is any future, will be full of lines like “war broke out on Snapchat in the autumn of that year…”
… Read the restI told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man…
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 1,
Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight tells the media to quit rationalizing the monster.
… Read the restI’m happy to acknowledge that Trump’s responses to the news are sometimes thought-out and deliberate. His criticisms of the media often seem to fall into this category, for example, since they’re sure to get widespread coverage and Republican voters have overwhelmingly lost faith in the media.
But at many other times, journalists come up with overly convoluted explanations for Trump’s behavior (“this seemingly self-destructive emotional outburst is actually a clever political strategy!”) when simpler ones will suffice (“this is a self-destructive emotional outburst.”). In doing so, they violate both Ockham’s razor and Hanlon’s razor — the latter of which can be stated as “never attribute
Speaking of people who want everything done for them…
"They want everything to be done for them." pic.twitter.com/SsrVvH6l9s
— Jess Dweck (@TheDweck) September 30, 2017
Meanwhile the mayor of San Juan has been working around the clock.
The goal is one: saving lives. This is the time to show our "true colors". We cannot be distracted by anything else. pic.twitter.com/7PAINk19xM
— Carmen Yulín Cruz (@CarmenYulinCruz) September 30, 2017
He's literally at a country club golfing & is calling brown people who are on the verge of dying a bunch of lazy whiners.
— Clint Smith (@ClintSmithIII) September 30, 2017
Six hours later the monster returns.
Despite the Fake News Media in conjunction with the Dems, an amazing job is being done in Puerto Rico. Great people!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 30, 2017
“Never mind about the lives of three million people in Puerto Rico, rant about “Fake News” and Democrats instead.”
The Governor of Puerto Rico, Ricardo Rossello, is a great guy and leader who is really working hard. Thank you Ricky!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 30, 2017
“I like him but I don’t like her, she can’t come to my party.”
… Read the restJust spoke to Governor Kenneth Mapp of the U.S. Virgin Islands who stated that #FEMA and Military are doing a GREAT job! Thank
James Fallows is scathing – and James Fallows is not a guy who scathes easily.
… Read the rest[Trump’s] Twitter outburst this morning — as he has left Washington on another trip to one of his golf courses, as millions of U.S. citizens are without water or electricity after the historic devastation of Hurricane Maria, as by chance it is also Yom Kippur — deserves note. It is a significant step downward for him, and perhaps the first thing he has done in office that, in its coarseness, has actually surprised me. (I explained the difference, for me, between shock and surprise when it comes to Trump, in this item last week.) Temperamentally, intellectually, and in terms of civic and moral imagination,
Some reactions to President Monster.
@realDonaldTrump. 16 dead Americans on your watch and rising. You're golfing again this weekend. While families die and wait for water. https://t.co/YCEZUlMkrv
— Lin-Manuel Miranda (@Lin_Manuel) September 30, 2017
Don’t forget this moment of national disgrace. pic.twitter.com/6DDuC84QH9
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) September 30, 2017
https://twitter.com/JessicaValenti/status/914125778941554688… Read the rest
He didn’t. He didn’t. Even he can’t be that stupid and petty and egomaniacal. Can he?
Tss. Of course he can. There is no limit to how stupid and petty and egomaniacal he can be. He could run over a bunch of children and complain about the mess on his tires.
Trump responded Saturday morning to harsh critiques from San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz by targeting her personally. The president accused the mayor of playing politics and succumbing to pressure from fellow Democrats to attack his administration. He also, remarkably, directly attacked her and other Puerto Rican officials’ leadership.
… Read the restThe Mayor of San Juan, who was very complimentary only a few days ago, has now been told
An organization called the American Life League was passing this around in 2014.
Suffering is a grace-filled opportunity to participate in the passion of Jesus Christ. Euthanasia selfishly steals that opportunity.
But no. The point of laws allowing help in dying is to help people who ask for it. You can’t call suffering any kind of “opportunity” when it’s imposed on people against their will. That’s like saying we’re giving the people of Puerto Rico an “opportunity” to die of dehydration or disease by failing to respond to the hurricane damage promptly. People who want to avail themselves of the grace-filled opportunity to participate in the passion of Jesus Christ by suffering will still be able to do that … Read the rest
A bit more on Hefner, by Liz Posner at AlterNet:
… Read the restHefner claimed to have been a leader in the sexual revolution, liberating Americans from their puritanical views of sex. At least, that was his moral justification for objectifying women, as he told Vanity Fair:
A new documentary entitled Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel makes a persuasive case for Hefner the liberal who not only agitated for sexual tolerance but, among many good, brave causes, also was an early protagonist for racial equality and gay rights. “But feminists still oppose you for treating women as objects,” I reminded him.
“They are objects!” he insisted. “Playboy fought for what became women’s issues, including birth control. We were the amicus
Tom “Air Miles” Price is out. If only he’d had the sense to hop on Amtrak he could have stuck around.
But don’t let them tell you this is Trump keeping his promise to drain that swamp.
… Read the restMr. Price’s job was on the line since the first of a string of reports by Politico on Sept. 19 about his extensive use of charter aircraft. Mr. Trump has fumed privately and publicly about Mr. Price’s actions, fearing that they undercut his promise to rid Washington of the sort of abuses that have soured the public on its political class. The president made clear on Friday that he also saw it as undermining his promise to save the government money, citing
