Sunday, January 29, 2017

Trump "Stupid," and "Counterproductive":

Another massive trump snafu.
Another stark reminder of why most Americans voted against trump.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans are once again taking to the streets as a result of trump's ham-fisted idiocy.
If trump had even the least bit of common sense he would have had experts vet this idea, plan for it, and implement it in a way that at the very least would have minimized the chaotic nature of this Muslim Ban.
MFBSR

Despite a decade of working to help America in Iraq, Hameed Khalid Darweesh was welcomed to the United States with handcuffs. Darweesh had received a special immigrant visa on January 20 for his work as a contractor, engineer, and interpreter for the Army's 101st Airborne Division in Baghdad and Mosul. But when he arrived at New York City's John F. Kennedy International Airport on Friday night, he was among the refugees detained upon arrival in the wake of President Donald Trump's latest executive order.

On Friday afternoon, Trump banned refugees from Syria indefinitely, suspended all refugee resettlement to the United States for 120 days, denied entry to citizens of seven predominantly Muslim nations (Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Syria, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen), and reduced the number of refugees to be resettled this year by more than half. After nearly 19 hours of detention and a lawsuit filed on his behalf, Darweesh was released on Saturday. Countless others remain stuck in limbo.

While Trump's executive order claims to be in the interest of "protecting the nation," experts in national security and counterterrorism who spoke with Mother Jones argue that it poses potentially disastrous immediate and long-term security threats to the nation and US personnel overseas.





"At the exact moment we need them most, we're telling these people, 'Get screwed.'"
"Not only is it immoral and stupid, it's also counterproductive," says Patrick Skinner, a former CIA counterterrorism case officer who now works at the Soufan Group, a security consulting firm. "We've got military, intelligence, and diplomatic personnel on the ground right now in Syria, Libya, and Iraq who are working side by side with the people, embedded in combat, and training and advising. At no time in the US's history have we depended more on local—and I mean local—partnerships for counterterrorism. We need people in Al Bab, Syria; we depend on people in a certain part of eastern Mosul, Iraq; in Cert, Libya. At the exact moment we need them most, we're telling these people, 'Get screwed.'"

Kirk W. Johnson, who spent a year on the reconstruction in Fallujah in Iraq with the US Agency for International Development (USAID), echoes Skinner's fears: "This will have immediate national security implications, in that we are not going to be able to recruit people to help us right now, and people are not going to step forward to help us in any future wars if this is our stance."

The US-led war on ISIS is but one front in a constellation of fights against extremist groups that could be hampered by Trump's decision. "The US is officially banning people in these countries at the same time we're trying to build up local support to fight ISIS," Skinner says. "It takes a long time to build trust with these people. This is like the Abu Ghraib thing. You have to start over, say, 'Okay, starting now, trust me.' How many times can you get away with that?" It also sends a message that groups like the so-called Islamic State can exploit. Elizabeth Goitein, the codirector of the Brennan Center's Liberty & National Security Program, says, "The message this projects is that America sees Muslims as a threat—not specific actors who are intent on committing terrorist acts. The message that America really is at war with Islam will be ISIS's best friend."

BuzzFeed reporters Mike Giglio and Munzer Al-Awad spoke with five current or former ISIS fighters who cited Trump's divisiveness as a factor that will weaken America. They added that his rhetoric against Muslims will help them reinforce their narrative that America and the West are fighting not just terrorism, but Islam itself. "Trump will shorten the time it takes for us to achieve our goals," said one.

Meanwhile, the very allies who have operated alongside US personnel in war zones for years—contractors and translators like Darweesh—are once again being abandoned. For the past decade, Johnson has been leading an effort to resettle Iraqi allies, many of whom, he says, face torture, kidnapping, and death after collaborating with American soldiers. It all started in 2006 when he heard from an Iraqi USAID colleague who'd been identified by a militia. The militia left a severed pig's head on his door step, along with a message saying that it would be his head next. Despite his years of helping the United States, the US government offered no help, and he had to flee the country with his wife.

"We are not going to be able to recruit people to help us right now. And people are not going to step forward to help us in any future wars if this is our stance."
Johnson discovered that there was no mechanism in place to help US allies like his colleague, and he began a personal crusade to change that. Since then, through legislation and a special immigrant visa platform, Johnson's efforts have helped thousands reach the United States, but the process is cumbersome, long, and often too late for the people who need it most. Johnson speaks of interpreters "who were having legs shot off, cut off, their wives raped, their children abducted." Some of his colleagues were even killed. And though Johnson has been critical of the process for years, now he's in the "awkward position" of defending it, because it was at least better than shutting those allies out as a matter of policy.

Skinner, Johnson, and Goitein all point out that the executive order reads as if whoever wrote it had no understanding of, or done any work with, US refugee admissions programs. Indeed, a senior Department of Homeland Security official reportedly told NBC News that career State Department and DHS officials had no input in the order, saying, "Nobody has any idea what is going on." Johnson says, "It reads as though 9/11 happened yesterday, and that 9/11 was carried out by refugees, which it wasn't, and it creates a series of policy prescriptions to solve a problem that doesn't exist, as if the stringent measures that have been put in place over the past 15 years to screen refugees don't exist."

Johnson, exasperated at the thought of US allies being turned away by the very country they spent years helping, adds, "These people who are directly and immediately impacted by this have done more to help our country than just about every breathing American has—especially the president. Shame is not a strong enough word for today. This is a disgraceful moment."

Susan Walsh/AP


Saturday, January 21, 2017

Putin Watching anti-trump Demonstrations "Mission Accomplished!"


Reports from the Kremlin are that Vlad Putin is overjoyed at trump's narrow electoral college win.
"I shocked the world!" Putin crowed "I am the reason that so many uneducated Americans voted for this idiot."
A reporter asked Putin why he would want such an obvious moron to run the American Presidency.
Putin chuckled. "He will end capitalism. His lack of understanding, and his dislike of the American people, his failure to realize that he will unite the intelligent people of America against him, will cause that nation to fall into disorder. He will expose the character of his cohorts, a stupid, selfish group of morons who have nothing to boast about other than how much money they inherited. I am the man who coached trump to say  'I can grab women by the P##sy because I am rich. Mexicans are rapists. Megyn Kelly is on her period!
I knew Clinton had the intelligent vote, so I counted on the Americans with low IQ's and poor education, and it worked."
One of the Kremlin ministers let out a low whistle, "You are a brilliant man,"
Putin smiled, "That's what he said."



Monday, January 16, 2017

Insulting the world's most easily insulted fascist buffoon is going to become the next planking


The only thing saving him from a stroke is that he's too stupid to understand 3/4ths of the insults hurled at him.


President-elect and gigantic rubbery manchild Donald Trump was all over Twitter last weekend. His newest grievance is that Saturday Night Live made fun of him last night. This, the soon-to-be leader of the United States of America declares, will not stand.

 Follow
 Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump
I watched parts of @nbcsnl Saturday Night Live last night. It is a totally one-sided, biased show - nothing funny at all. Equal time for us?
6:26 AM - 20 Nov 2016
  16,195 16,195 Retweets   69,664 69,664 likes
You don't get equal time, you pompous suit balloon. The American president has zero protections against comedians mocking him in television or in print—he doesn't appear on the network afterwards saying I'm da president of the United States, and I strongly disapprove of that last sketch in which I was portrayed as a luxuriously coiffed show rabbit duct-taped to the top of a steel coatrack. You self-absorbed git. You citrus-faced two-bit monorail salesman. You great gilded walking Viagra advertisement. You woman-grabbing, child-groping, teen-ogling professional fraudster and con.

But wait! He also just cannot stop being obsessed over Mike Pence (doomed for the next for years to play Ronald Reagan to Donald's Bonzo, and if you think that is a compliment to Mike Pence you are unfamiliar with your Ronald Reagan movies) being talked-at by the cast of Hamilton. Donald will freely tell you which minority groups in America are the most full of rapists and is willing to torture and kill the families of suspected bad-doers for the sake of fulfilling his turgid campaign vows, but talking back has him in flop sweat for an entire weekend, remember this?:

 Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump
Our wonderful future V.P. Mike Pence was harassed last night at the theater by the cast of Hamilton, cameras blazing.This should not happen!
6:48 AM - 19 Nov 2016
  34,306 34,306 Retweets   123,749 123,749 likes
 Follow
 Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump
The Theater must always be a safe and special place.The cast of Hamilton was very rude last night to a very good man, Mike Pence. Apologize!
6:56 AM - 19 Nov 2016
  44,284 44,284 Retweets   151,525 151,525 likes
 Follow
 Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump
The cast and producers of Hamilton, which I hear is highly overrated, should immediately apologize to Mike Pence for their terrible behavior
4:22 AM - 20 Nov 2016
  25,834 25,834 Retweets   105,565 105,565 likes
 He deleted yet another one, one which criticized the Hamilton cast for reading their appeal to Pence from a note rather than memorizing it backstage first. Because Donald is, yes, nothing but an enormous poop.

This man is going to melt down before he ever reaches his own inaugural. He's completely unprepared for not just the duties of the office, not just the pressure of the office, but with being criticized on television. He's still sorting out how to arrange things so that he only conducts important meetings with other family members present so that they can explain the big words to him after everyone else has left.

How does this toupee-wearing ball of spite and uncooked bread dough survive an office that so visibly withers even the most prepared and level-headed? Trump's weekly address will simply be Donald Trump reading off a list of Americans who said bad things about him during the previous week, each followed with a grade-school rejoinder along the lines of I know you are but what am I and, presumably, a back-channel instruction to the IRS as to who should be receiving new audits this week. The man is not merely incompetent and unqualified, he is not even a fully developed adult. He is a spoiled child. He can barely register the presence of other persons in his field of view, so absorbed he is in his own self-estimations.

Donald, you stubby-fingered coatfart, we are going to make your life hell. Americans are going to invent insults for you never before seen in English or any other language. There's going to be a Manhattan Project of insult development, every researcher looking to craft the three or four biting words that will reliably make you wet your pants onstage. Insulting the world's most easily insulted fascist buffoon is going to become the next planking.

There is no way this man makes it through a four-year term in the most pressure-laden office in the nation. And he's going to be absolutely floored when he finds out he can't just retire to one of his gauche and overpriced resorts and appoint Ivanka the new president in his stead.

Jackass.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/11/20/1602236/-Not-even-president-yet-and-Donald-Trump-is-losing-his-mind


Friday, January 13, 2017

John Lewis Agrees With Most Americans, Trump is not a Legitimate Ptresident

John Lewis is considered to be one of the most honest members of the Congress, and one of the most knowledgeable. Today he commented on the Russian supported billionaire trump. As he put it, and most Americans agree, he became President because of dirty tricks on the part of trump and Putin.
mfbsr

Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) said he does not believe Donald Trump is a "legitimate president," citing Russian interference in last year's election.

Asked whether he would try to forge a relationship with the president-elect, Lewis said that he believes in forgiveness, but added, "it's going to be very difficult. I don't see this president-elect as a legitimate president."

When pressed to explain why, he cited allegations of Russian hacks during the campaign that led to the release of internal documents from the Democratic National Committee, and Hillary Clinton's campaign co-chairman, John Podesta.

"I think the Russians participated in helping this man get elected. And they helped destroy the candidacy of Hillary Clinton," Lewis told NBC News' Chuck Todd.

Trump appeared to acknowledge this week that Russia did engage in hacking during the campaign, but he has vigorously argued that any foreign interference had no impact on the election's outcome.

The long-serving Georgia Congressman and civil rights leader also said that he would not attend President-elect Trump's swearing-in. "I don't plan to attend the inauguration. It will be the first one that I miss since I've been in Congress. You cannot be at home with something that you feel that is wrong, is not right."

http://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/john-lewis-trump-won-t-be-legitimate-president-n706676


The Chomsky Hoax

The Chomsky Hoax
Exposing the Dishonesty of Noam Chomsky