Another day, another grim historical first for America. Our Senate just confirmed Betsy DeVos as education secretary after a ‘historic tiebreaking vote’ from Vice President Mike Pence. Both DeVos and Pence are fans of widely discredited LGBT ‘conversion therapy,’ a damaging and inhumane bullshit practice we’ll probably see a lot more of now, along with guns in schools to protect kids from grizzly bears and jihadists.
Just two Senate Republicans voted against DeVos: Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, both of whom came out as opposed week. Lawmakers gave continuous speeches on the Senate floor late into the night, arguing that DeVos was unqualified because she knows nothing about public schools or basic laws of our country that protect the rights of students, among other reasons.
Senators Collins and Murkowski said their opposition was ‘influenced by the thousands of messages they had received urging them to reject the nomination,’ the New York Times reports.
President Donald Trump went full Alex Jones Infowars conspiracy theory wingnut today, saying the American news media are conspiring to cover up a vast series of Islamic terrorist attacks in which innocent God-fearin’ Americans have been killed.
Statements like this from authoritarian leaders are the sort of thing you hear when a regime is preparing to institute martial law. Perhaps that is where America is now headed. Hope not.
Today’s wackadoodle Trump camp statement was yet another nutty lie, just like Trump’s long-running racist birther campaign against President Barack Obama, whom we miss terribly, please for the love of God make this descent into national insanity stop.
Sorry. Deep breath. Okay.
Today’s freshly shocking Trump lie is probably intended to cover up something bad they’re doing that would be impeachable if our other elected officials could be bothered to get off their asses and fight this unapologetic, botchy installation of fascism in America.
In his speech today, Trump accused the ‘very very dishonest’ American free press of deliberately underplaying how scary the so-called Islamic State is, and told the assembly of “American military personnel that journalists were reluctant to report on the militant group’s attacks in Europe and ’have their reasons’ for failing to cover them.”
This new and seemingly improvised Trump fabrication follows other bold and bizarre falsehoods put forth by the President and others in his regime, including former comedian and current walking tragedy Kellyanne Conway, who referenced at least three times a ‘Bowling Green Massacre’ that never happened.
The White House followed up Trump’s conspiracy theory hallucination by papering it over with a rushed statement, all lawyerish but gibberish and full of typos. The administration published a list of purportedly under-reported terror attacks, which included incidents in San Bernardino, Brussels, and Paris, which generated nonstop wall to wall coverage for weeks, but reality doesn’t matter anymore and there is no God.
As journalist Sarah Jeong suggests, some of the language in the afternoon White House statement feels like a coded “tell” of sorts. It suggests that the document is based on prior work material of some United States government agency. Perhaps the NSA?
Who is really running the White House? Gabe explains how Steve Bannon may be the one calling the shots in the nation’s highest office — and what we can do about it.
Oh hey and you know what else is neat? Trump let Bannon write the Executive Order that put Bannon on the National Security Council, and then he signed it without reading it, or knowing that Bannon had put himself on the NSC.
When Donald Trump killed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a “trade deal” that had been negotiated by representatives of multinational corporations and government bureaucrats in utmost secrecy in order to give corporations the power to decide which labor, environmental and safety laws they’d obey, I started to hear from “progressives” who had suddenly discovered the deal, and decided that if Trump was against it, they should be for it.
There was a comedian on the Fake the Nation podcast who described it as a way to fight Chinese influence in the Pacific (this is a talking point from the banker-friendly wing of the Democratic Party), and tweets like this (“Congratulations, the TPP is dead. You helped defeat the secret plan to make the world a better place. #RIPTPP”) from people whose feeds are filled with anti-Trump messaging and causes.
TPP wasn’t a “secret plan to make the world a better place.” It wasn’t even a trade deal. Virtually every good manufactured in virtually every one of the 12 TPP members could be imported into virtually any of the other members with no tariffs at all – something CNN conveniently failed to mention.
What was TPP then? A sweetheart deal for giant corporations: it would have banned states from keeping their citizens’ data out of the NSA’s reach (a gift to the James Clapper set), allowed Hollywood to put people in jail for watching movies the wrong way (a gift to the SOPA set), allowed telcoms giants to sue to dismantle net neutrality protections (a gift to the Comcast set), jacked up the price of pharmaceuticals for the poorest people in the world (a gift to the Shkrekli set), banned governments from requiring open source code for public procurements (a gift to the Microsoft set), limited fair use (a gift to the Righthaven set), required all states to establish criminal sanctions for breaking DRM (a gift to the printer ink business-model set), and expanded copyright terms across the board (a gift to the Disney set).
This is not a “secret plan to make the world a better place.” It’s also not a way to beat back Chinese hegemony in the Pacific Rim. It was a way to let corporations take over democratically elected governments and write their own laws. The fact that Donald Trump hates the TPP (for his own stupid reasons, e.g., “A bunch of people I don’t like, such as establishment Republicans and Democrats, want TPP, so I can look good to my base by killing it) does not make TPP good for America, bad for China, or anything but unmitigated awful.
TPP’s advocates were neoliberals, people who believe that market solve all our problems and that corporations should operate without regulation or democratic accountability. Trump doesn’t like neoliberalism, he likes nationalist capitalism, the Russian model where only domestic oligarchs are allowed to loot powerful nations, and then they grow their fortunes by looting less-powerful nations. This is the opposite of neoliberalism, which lets any oligarch loot any country, even powerful ones (this is why Putin hates the EU – it allows the investor class of all member-states financialize and gut the industries of all the other states, without regard to the donor-state’s power. That’s how the UK came to sell off so much of its essential state apparatus, at fire-sale prices, to multinational firms that originated in EU member-states).
Sometimes, Trump’s hatred of neoliberalism and his love of nationalist capitalism will create a Venn intersection that contains some genuinely good policies, like killing TPP (also: attacking the outsourcing of industrial jobs to countries with weaker environmental, labor and safety laws). The fact that Trump hates outsourcing and TPP doesn’t make them good, it makes Trump a stopped clock who is right twice a day.
Establishment Democrats condemned Bernie Sanders and his supporters for sharing some of Trump’s agenda, but they were missing the important part: pay attention to why, instead of what, and you can easily discern Trump policies from Sanders policies. For example, Trump attacked big finance (“These guys are getting away with murder”) and then immediately appointed a bunch of ex-Goldman Sachs bankers to run the nation’s financial regulation (this, by the way, is exactly what Obama did, and also what Clinton was poised to do).
Sanders’ response to Trump was to point out that Trump was a fraud, that he was continuing the corruption he’d promised to dismantle, appointing a cabinet of billionaires after promising the abolition of “a government that works for Wall Street and for special interests but not for the people.”
The problem with Wall Street isn’t who likes Wall Street, it’s what Wall Street does.
Not every thing Trump does will be wrong, and we can laud the policies that do good things without letting Trump off the hook or praising trumpism. Trump killed TPP because he wanted to undermine Obama’s legacy. He should have killed TPP because it’s a sweetheart deal for giant corporations at public expense. It may be harder to make Trump look stupid by expressing this nuance, but if you become a TPP cheerleader because Trump hates it, you are part of the problem. Big league.
Trump hates CNN because they don’t give him a pass when he lies. You can cheer CNN on for its callouts without letting it off the hook for being a corporate cheerleader.
The way to defeat trumpism is to develop an alternative program, a coherent one that puts people ahead of profits, that acknowledges that the system is rigged, that demands better and never settles. Yes, the Affordable Care Act is how me and my family get our healthcare, and it’s better than nothing, but it is much worse than the single payer system that all the civilized countries of the world use – a system that is consistently cheaper and better than ACA or the chaos that preceded it. We can condemn Trump for dismantling ACA because he’s not replacing it with single-payer, rather than insisting that a system that’s raising premiums by 25%, removing lifesaving medicines and procedures from its coverage, and fattening the corrupt insurance industry is anything more than a better-than-nothing bandaid that should be replaced with something better as quickly as possible.
You could be forgiven for thinking that the otherworldly rock formations in these pictures come from another planet, or from a sci-fi movie perhaps. But they’re actually called sand tufas and they come from right here on earth.
A tufa is a peculiar form of calcium carbonate, and they’re created when calcium-bearing freshwater springs well up through alkaline lake water (which is rich in carbonates). The carbonate and calcium combine and, over centuries, these elements form unusual spires, towering columns, and strange cauliflower-shaped mounds which can reach heights of up to nine metres (30ft). Tufas can only form underwater, and they’re only exposed when lakes are drained or dry out over many years. Check out this collection of pictures compiled by Bored Panda to see these curious formations for yourself.
All eyes were on Lady Gaga heading into the 2017 Super Bowl. Following yet another week of protest and unrest in Donald Trump’s America, the world was waiting to see how divisive, how political, how “satanic” she would dare to be with everyone watching — and it wasn’t even close to Beyoncé’s Black Panthers nod at Super Bowl 50 or Meryl Streep’s Golden Globes speech.
She did exactly what she said she would: deliver a masterful performance while continuing to offer the same message of hope, compassion and inclusion she’s been making since day one. Read more
