In response to a Trump tweet attacking New York Senator Gillibrand, USA Today published the most scathing editorial about Trump that I have ever seen, in any venue.
“With his latest tweet, clearly implying that a United States senator would trade sexual favors for campaign cash, President Trump has shown he is not fit for office. Rock bottom is no impediment for a president who can always find room for a new low…
“White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Tuesday dismissed the president’s smear as a misunderstanding because he used similar language about men. Of course, words used about men and women are different. When candidate Trump said a journalist was bleeding from her “wherever,” he didn’t mean her nose.
“And as is the case with all of Trump’s digital provocations, the president’s words were deliberate. He pours the gasoline of sexist language and lights the match gleefully knowing how it will burst into flame in a country reeling from the #MeToo moment.
“A president who would all but call Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand a whore is not fit to clean the toilets in the Barack Obama Presidential Library or to shine the shoes of George W. Bush.
“This isn’t about the policy differences we have with all presidents or our disappointment in some of their decisions. Obama and Bush both failed in many ways. They broke promises and told untruths, but the basic decency of each man was never in doubt.
“Donald Trump, the man, on the other hand, is uniquely awful. His sickening behavior is corrosive to the enterprise of a shared governance based on common values and the consent of the governed.”
Well said.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Wow! An unequivocal moment for a change. Kudos to USA Today’s editorial board.
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Rude and Crude
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It is about time.
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” As of last week, Trump had failed to nominate anyone for 60% of 1,200 key positions he can fill to keep the government running smoothly.”
How can our ‘beloved leader’ appoint people when he has to golf most weekends? He also has to use his great intuitiveness to pick people. I think his ‘great genes’ and ‘great intuitiveness’ are both a pile of hooey. My hope is that more and more in this country get tired of his constant lies and total lack of any morality or compassion.
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He and Tillerson are decimating the State Department, driving out experienced career officials. The damage is long lasting.
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And looming is the fact that he will shut down the Federal Government right before Christmas if he doesn’t get his way and the crazy GOP agenda pushed through. Trump is awful, but Pence is a very scary person. I’ll take Crude, Rude and Dumb over Pence any day of the week!
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Thank you, Lisa M.
Pence is the Booby Prize for Democrats who engage in the magical thinking that Mueller and impeachment will save us.
Trump is beyond the beyonds disgusting, a literal self-caricature, but obsessing on his crudeness is politically misguided. Trump’s inappropriateness for office was essentially the basis of Hillary Clinton’s campaign in the 2016 presidential election (along with the arrogant and erroneous assumption that it was “her turn”), and we all know how that turned out (and please spare us the hysteria about Putin).
The way out of the political darkness we find ourselves in is simple (though incredibly difficult): concrete, material benefits for everyone, such as universal health care (not just insurance with unaffordable premiums and deductibles, as with Obamacare, but guaranteed care), free college tuition, expanded Social Security benefits and a job guarantee at a living wage. That’s how you revive the Democratic Party, and drive a stake through the heart of Trumpism.
The Democratic Party’s abandonment of huge, needy constituencies and regions of the country, in service of its faux-meritocratic, Sheryl Steinberg/Corey Booker/”Creative Class” identity politics, created a political void that Trump and Bannon filled. Taking up the banner of material benefits for everyone (which, incidentally, would overwhelmingly benefit women, Blacks, Latinos and other excluded groups, since they are overwhelmingly comprised of working people), would take away the oxygen from Trump and Bannon (who cleverly appropriates Left rhetoric), and just leave them with the dregs of their xenophobic/Christian Taliban/racist base.
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“Obama and Bush both failed in many ways. They broke promises and told untruths, but the basic decency of each man was never in doubt.”
I know, I know….. But their basic decency is very much in doubt. Both of them are war criminals. Bush launched an illegal war in Iraq that killed 4,000+ American soldiers, not to mention a million or so Iraqis. He tortured people in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. He illegally spied on U.S. citizens. He did away with habeus corpus. He set the precedent for the national security state.
Obama droned bombed thousands of civilians, including wedding parties, funerals, rescuers and hospitals. He declared the unilateral right to kill anyone anywhere, including U.S. citizens. He invaded and decimated one of the most functional countries in Africa (Libya) and reduced it to rubble, resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths. He supported a right wing coup in Honduras that was responsible for thousands more deaths. He cut heating subsidies in the middle of one of the coldest winters on record. He put Social Security cuts on the table.
I could go on, but you get the idea. These are not the actions of men whose “basic decency was never in doubt”. Just because you’d like to have a beer (er, coffee) with them does not make them decent men. Just because they were evil with more panache doesn’t make their evil any less evil.
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Incidentally, the commonly accepted word for “untruth” is lie.
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In this day and age….. Politician = LIAR. They like to keep the donor class happy at all costs.
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Trump was supposed to be the unique president who owed nothing to donors and was free to drain the swamp and do the right thing. Now we know he is owned by his evangelical base and they didn’t pay him anything. He filled the swamp with alligators and no one paid him to do it.
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It might be worth looking into the Mercer family. From what I’ve heard, the Mercer family earned their billions in the hedge fund industry. They may have been responsible for travesties like the selection of Mike Pence as Trump’s running mate and the appointment of Betsy DeVos. They may also face billions in tax liability that could be modified by a new tax law. Not coincidentally, they’ve been associated with the growing influence of evangelicals on government policy and the rise of people like Steve Bannon. They’re also said to be big Trump donors, so it looks like someone did pay him. I’ll see if I can find a link to an article that covers these topics.
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He has figured out how to pay himself! Can anyone doubt that he plans to leave the presidency a much wealthier man? It depends on how long he thinks he can keep the gravy train going. He obviously is not at all concerned with the well being of the country or the vast majority of people.
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Trump’s only skill is branding. He ran for Prez to enrich himself and his family. He’s like the dog that caught the car. He is still uninterested in policy and gets his news from FOX, Breitbart and Alex Jones. Also the National Enquirer, published by one of his friends.
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Here’s an Atlantic article about the Mercers from last January…
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/514529/
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Here’s another revealing article about Rebekah Mercer, who has an important role on the Trump transition team…
http://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/news/a9204/rebekah-mercer-donald-trump-transition/
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… “had”
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Trump knows exactly what he’s doing and how ignorant his base is because he planned this a long time ago:
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I can’t say that Trump is now smart enough to know exactly what he is doing but back when his brain was working that was what he had to say on the subject of running for president. He is a very dangerous person who is working to make money for himself and destroy all aspects of government. He’d love to be dictator. [Is Bannon running the show?] Now tRump loves anything on Fox.
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This is a fake quote. Never happened, and very easy to spot.
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I also believed this quote and sent it to a friend who posted it on FaceBook. I just checked on Snopes and this is what I found:
Donald Trump said in 1998 that he would one day run as a Republican because they are the “dumbest group of voters.”
RATING
FALSE
ORIGIN
The above-reproduced image and quote attributed to Donald Trump began appearing in our inbox in mid-October 2015. The format is easily recognizable as one wherein questionable or offensive words are attributed to the individual pictured, and in this case image claims that Donald Trump made the following statement in a 1998 interview with People magazine: [Photo and quote]
Despite People‘s comprehensive online content archive, we found no interview or profile on Donald Trump in 1998 (or any other time) that quoted his saying anything that even vaguely resembled the words in this meme. Trump appeared somewhat regularly in the magazine’s pages before he came to star on The Apprentice, but the bulk of the magazine’s celebrity-driven coverage of him back then centered on his marriages to, and divorces from, Ivana Trump and Marla Maples.
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As a general rule, anytime I see a sensational quote circulating on the internet — especially when it’s packaged in the form of a “meme” along with an image — I assume it’s made up and then see if I can disprove that assumption using google.
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Can you disprove this one, Flerp, or are we to believe Trump really thinks his base is smart –and he lies for other reasons?
“Jared Kushner ‘admitted Donald Trump lies to his base because he thinks they’re stupid'”
http://www.independent.co.uk/News/world/americas/jared-kushner-donald-trump-lied-base-stupid-voters-supporters-president-son-in-law-white-house-a7764791.html
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Trump has spoken several times about his superior intelligence and superior genes. He believes that the only people who are smart are millionaires and billionaires which is why he has appointed so many in his administration. Of course, there is the added benefit of his being the ‘boss’ over so many wealthy people. They have to respect him and adhere to his beliefs. That he likes the power that it gives him.
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Papers should not write headlines like that — Trump always takes it as a challenge.
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“How low can he go?”
How low can one man go?
The radius below
The level of the sea
Is lowest man can be
In more concrete terms, the earth’s radius is greatest on the equator: approximately 20925649 feet
So, the answer is “20925649 feet below sea level”
Theoretically speaking, of course. Practical matters (temperature and pressure) come into play long before that lower limit is reached.
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Of course, that assumes he stays on Earth.
If he went to Jupiter, he could go lower.
But I think we should not take this too far lest it become absurd.
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Luckily (for him), he could still tweet from Jupiter, although it would take some 40 minutes for the tweet to reach earth.
Which raises an important point. The further away from earth, the longer the tweet transit time (referred to as TTT in the technical literature).
If he were tweeting from Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the sun, his tweets would take over 4 years to reach earth, so even if he were already there, by the time we got his first tweet, his term would be up!
And of course, it would take much longer than 4 years to get there in the first place. Probably on the order of at least 100 years, even with nuclear powered rocket propulsion (eg, Orion spaceship designed by Freeman Dyson). So the whole discussion would be moot at that point
Hope that helps.
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Dear DAM Poet: Sounds like a good plan. I wonder where NASA stands in sending the Orange IDIOT to Proxima Centauri? If it is the nearest star to the sun, keep telling the IDIOT how much better his complexion would look. Maybe he’ll fall for it. Also, tell him there are lots of hamburgers, french fries, ice cream and chocolate cakes just sitting around waiting to be eaten. You could add that Fox is the only TV station that has reception that far from earth.
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In U.$.$.A. Swamp Drain You
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The problem is that stress is getting to Trump because he can’t take criticism. What will Trump do when he gets totally frustrated? He has way too much power and is unstable.
………….
There are Thousands of Mental Health Professionals Warn of Trump’s Increasing Instability…Democracy Now
…“In the 19 years since Propecia was approved to treat hair loss from male pattern baldness, side effects have been so concerning that the term post-finasteride syndrome (PFS) has been coined and hundreds of lawsuits have been brought. In addition to its sexual side effects, the drug’s effects on cognition, mood and mental states have been documented in the scientific literature.
“A 2013 study in Journal of Sexual Medicine noted ‘changes related to the urogenital system in terms of semen quality and decreased ejaculate volume, reduction in penis size, penile curvature or reduced sensation, fewer spontaneous erections, decreased testicular size, testicular pain, and prostatitis.’ [unquote] Many subjects also noted a ‘disconnection between the mental and physical aspects of sexual function,’ and changes in mental abilities, sleeping patterns, and/or depressive symptoms.”
Do you think this is relevant?
DR. BANDY LEE: Most definitely. Mental function is not separate from physical function, and many medications have profound effects on the mind’s capacity. And so, this is one of the reasons why an evaluation would be so critical, because mental impairment can be just as debilitating as physical impairment, and the both are connected…
https://www.democracynow.org/2017/12/8/there_are_thousands_of_us_mental
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I was impressed, too, until I saw on the very same page as this article that USA Today is running a piece, posted at the top of the list of additional articles, calling for an end to Net Neutrality.
If Net Neutrality ends tomorrow, as planned, we can say hello to the monetization of just about every aspect of the Internet and the ability of big business to control virtually all that we do here.
DEFEND #NetNeutrality
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