President Donald Trump: The Thread

[Dick Allen]

He did it to save funding for his stupid f***ing wall

 

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/07/26/t...e-scenes-240990

Apparently he forgot his campaign promise about who was paying for this ridiculous wall.

[StrangeSox]

 

https://www.buzzfeed.com/coralewis/trump-tr...ilitary-service

[Balta1701]

One by one, we are finding the illegal gang members, drug dealers, thieves, robbers, criminals, and killers. And we are sending them the hell back home where they came from. [applause] And once they are gone, we will never let them back in, believe me. [applause]

 

The predators and criminal aliens who poison our communities with drugs and prey on innocent young people — these beautiful, beautiful, innocent young people — will find no safe haven anywhere in our country. [applause] And you’ve seen the stories about some of these animals. They don’t want to use guns, because it’s too fast and it’s not painful enough. So they’ll take a young, beautiful girl, 16, 15, and others, and they slice them and dice them with a knife, because they want them to go through excruciating pain before they die. And these are the animals that we’ve been protecting for so long. Well, they’re not being protected any longer, folks. [applause]

 

The United States elected a 1960s white supremacist minus the hood.

[StrangeSox]

Trump and Republicans treat their voters like morons

 

As Republicans struggle to figure out which spectacularly unpopular, viciously cruel and perfunctorily considered version of their health-care bill they want to become law, one former member of the House leadership has come out with an extraordinary admission about what a scam the whole project is. In an interview with Elaina Plott of Washingtonian magazine, former House majority leader Eric Cantor, who was defeated in a primary in 2014 by a tea party extremist, explains that Republicans knew they were lying to their base about their ability to repeal the Affordable Care Act, but they just couldn’t help themselves:

 

“To give the impression that if Republicans were in control of the House and Senate, that we could do that when Obama was still in office . . . .” His voice trails off and he shakes his head. “I never believed it.”

 

He says he wasn’t the only one aware of the charade: “We sort of all got what was going on, that there was this disconnect in terms of communication, because no one wanted to take the time out in the general public to even think about ‘Wait a minute—that can’t happen.’ ” But, he adds, “if you’ve got that anger working for you, you’re gonna let it be.”

 

It’s a stunning admission from a former member of the party leadership—that the linchpin of GOP electoral strategy for the better part of a decade was a fantasy, a flame continually fanned solely because, when it came to midterm elections, it worked. (Barring, of course, his own.)

 

What’s truly remarkable isn’t that a bunch of cynical politicians thought they could ride their base voters’ anger into control of Congress by lying to them about what they could actually accomplish; it’s that their voters actually believed it. And then those voters got even angrier when it turned out that the president had the ability to veto bills passed by a Congress controlled by the other party. Who knew! So instead of looking for a presidential candidate who would treat them like adults, they elected Donald Trump, a man who would pander to their gullibility even more.

 

Which brings us to where we are today. Republicans couldn’t be bothered for seven years to actually think about what repealing and replacing the ACA might involve, or whether there would be trade-offs and choices to make, or whether setting up a system that accorded with their conservative philosophy might not actually solve the problems of the health-care system. They thought it would be enough to tell their voters to get mad, and worry later about what it would take to keep the promises they made.

 

So now they find themselves with a bill that nearly everyone hates. If it passes (in whatever form), it will be a disaster for the health-care system and will be a political disaster for them as well. But they’ve convinced themselves that the only thing worse politically would be to not pass anything, because that would incur the wrath of those same base voters. In other words, their current position is, “We know how catastrophic this bill would be. But we got here by lying to these knuckle-dragging mouth-breathers for years, and if we don’t follow through, they’ll punish us.” They believe that their voters will say, “Okay, so I lost my health coverage because of you, but you’ll get my vote again because you kept your promise.”

 

That’s not to say that there isn’t plenty of outright malice in what Republicans are doing, because there is. Their contempt for people who struggle economically is boundless. They’ve wanted to destroy Medicaid for decades, and they just might be able to do it. But their strongest motivation right now is fear, fear of the voters they regard as too dim-witted to be able to make a rational judgment about the most consequential policy question one can imagine.

 

Am I being unkind? Consider what the president is up to at the moment. This morning he announced that he’ll be banning transgender people from serving in the military, serving up a bogus rationale about how they cost too much money. A White House official told Axios that this is a political masterstroke:

 

“This forces Democrats in Rust Belt states like Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin, to take complete ownership of this issue.”

 

Yes, the 2018 elections will hinge on transgender people serving in the military. That’s mind-numbingly stupid, but to believe it you’d have to think that voters are complete idiots. And as The Post reports, Trump addressed a big crowd of his voters yesterday in Youngstown, Ohio:

 

Here in the heart of the industrial Midwest, Trump promised to refill lost manufacturing jobs in factories or to “rip ’em down and build brand-new ones.”

 

“That’s what’s going to happen,” Trump said at a campaign rally in a packed hockey arena that holds 7,000 people … Trump said: “They’re all coming back. They’re all coming back. They’re coming back. Don’t move. Don’t sell your house.”

In fairness, many people in the area, even Republicans, understand that’s a complete crock. Those jobs aren’t coming back, and the region’s future won’t be built on factories that employ huge numbers of people who can move into high-wage, high-benefit jobs with little preparation. Yet they still show up at his rallies and cheer while he lies right in their faces.

 

If there’s a note of hope to be found in all this, it’s that this health-care effort has been such a farce — in large part because the public has finally begun to clue in to what the Republican proposals might actually mean. That idea terrifies Republicans in Congress, which is why they are pushing through one of the most sweeping and consequential pieces of legislation in American history without a single hearing and with only a few hours of floor debate. Since one version of the bill was voted down yesterday, the current strategy seems to be to pass “skinny repeal,” which would do nothing except eliminate the individual and employer mandates and a tax on medical devices.

 

If that were to become law, it would immediately destroy the individual insurance market, since you’d be able to wait until you got sick before buying insurance and insurers would still have to cover you. Republicans in Congress don’t know a lot about health-care policy, but they know enough to understand that. They’re hoping, however, that the public is too dumb to realize just how destructive the idea would be.

 

There’s one other path open to them, which is to pass skinny repeal, then go to a conference committee with the House, in which an entirely new bill would be written incorporating the other things Republicans want to do. That bill could then be presented to both houses as a last chance to repeal the hated Obamacare, in the hopes that members would vote for it despite its inevitable unpopularity and cataclysmic consequences for Americans’ health care.

 

If and when that happens, Republicans will make that same calculation again: This thing is terrible and most everyone hates it, but we have to pass something because we fooled members of our base into thinking this would all be simple and we could give them everything they want. Or as Trump said during the campaign, “You’re going to have such great health care at a tiny fraction of the cost, and it is going to be so easy.”

 

That was just one of the many lies they were told, and they ate it up. Now we’ll all have to pay the price.

 

 

[Big Hurtin]

Trump and Republicans treat their voters like morons

 

Well....

 

How does that thing about ducks go again?

 

[Steve9347]

I'm beyond over all of this.

[Balta1701]

The U.S. DOJ tonight announced it was changing sides on a court case arguing that Title 7 should cover discrimination against gays - that's the part of the US code that forbids discrimination based on gender. The US was previously supporting a case saying that it should prevent discrimination against homosexuals, the U.S. DOJ is now arguing that discrimination against homosexuals should be legal.

[greg775]

Trump is obviously a rich, elitist jerk basically. But it's 'funny' cause I like to read the CNN headlines on my phone at lunch every day and click on the stories and it's so funny to read how the reporters refer to Trump.

I'd say 90 percent of the articles on Trump are negative and/or out to get him impeached yet you can sense the frustration/desperation in the reporters who have yet to make a mark so to speak.

Today I was reading an article about Trump's inappropriate speech to the Boy Scouts (I didn't listen to it but I believe everybody who said it was a horrific inappopriate speech cause hey, that does define Trump) and the writer in the third paragraph referred to him as "Trump, the former Celebrity Apprentice host." I mean, what? What's that second reference to the prez all about?

 

At any rate, Trump has had his fun. It's either time to get serious and get him on something bad and get the impeachment going or just figure out a way to get the man to resign. He can't be having much fun. He's a dope, a dolt and despised by most folks in the USA. I mean, Donald you have jumped the shark. Move on, count your money, play some serious golf and let your VEEP do his thing. Or to the media, it's not enough just to act like you hate Donald in your articles, get him on something that will, uh, actually get him impeached and gonzo from DC.

Edited July 27, 2017 by greg775

[RockRaines]

The U.S. DOJ tonight announced it was changing sides on a court case arguing that Title 7 should cover discrimination against gays - that's the part of the US code that forbids discrimination based on gender. The US was previously supporting a case saying that it should prevent discrimination against homosexuals, the U.S. DOJ is now arguing that discrimination against homosexuals should be legal.

Awesome. #MAGA am I right?

[Steve9347]

The U.S. DOJ tonight announced it was changing sides on a court case arguing that Title 7 should cover discrimination against gays - that's the part of the US code that forbids discrimination based on gender. The US was previously supporting a case saying that it should prevent discrimination against homosexuals, the U.S. DOJ is now arguing that discrimination against homosexuals should be legal.

I, too, reacted to that headline with despair, but what's really being said is the word "sex" is in definition to the reproductive organs of the individual, not their sexual preference. Basically, they're saying new legislation needs to be passed to protect people based on sexual preference.

 

While I hate everything about this, perhaps we can get some real legislation on the books.

[Balta1701]

I, too, reacted to that headline with despair, but what's really being said is the word "sex" is in definition to the reproductive organs of the individual, not their sexual preference. Basically, they're saying new legislation needs to be passed to protect people based on sexual preference.

 

While I hate everything about this, perhaps we can get some real legislation on the books.

 

"Maybe if we discriminate even harder it'll force someone to write a better law."

[pettie4sox]

 

"Maybe if we discriminate even harder it'll force someone to write a better law."

 

Man just think 60 some years ago, blacks were 2nd class citizens. Today, people just pretend they aren't.

[StrangeSox]

Interpreting statutes that narrowly would lead to gutting all sorts of civil rights protections in this country. They'd use that same sort of interpretation to overturn Obergefell for sure.

[StrangeSox]

Remember when we used to be able laugh at NK propaganda about Dear Leader's miraculous achievements?

 

https://twitter.com/MattNegrin/status/890584702612119552

 

Donald Trump sinks 3 30 ft putts and throws tight spirals through tires!

[StrangeSox]

Department of Energy, aka our nuclear arsenal, is being gutted by the Trump administration and Perry is essentially a useless and clueless figurehead doing nothing with the department.

 

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/07/dep...s-michael-lewis

 

This article is super long and I'm only excerpting from the first third, but this is extremely alarming.

 

On the morning after the election, November 9, 2016, the people who ran the U.S. Department of Energy turned up in their offices and waited. They had cleared 30 desks and freed up 30 parking spaces. They didn’t know exactly how many people they’d host that day, but whoever won the election would surely be sending a small army into the Department of Energy, and every other federal agency. The morning after he was elected president, eight years earlier, Obama had sent between 30 and 40 people into the Department of Energy. The Department of Energy staff planned to deliver the same talks from the same five-inch-thick three-ring binders, with the Department of Energy seal on them, to the Trump people as they would have given to the Clinton people. “Nothing had to be changed,” said one former Department of Energy staffer. “They’d be done always with the intention that, either party wins, nothing changes.”

 

By afternoon the silence was deafening. “Day 1, we’re ready to go,” says a former senior White House official. “Day 2 it was ‘Maybe they’ll call us?’ ”

 

“Teams were going around, ‘Have you heard from them?’ ” recalls another staffer who had prepared for the transition. “ ‘Have you gotten anything? I haven’t got anything.’ ”

 

“The election happened,” remembers Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, then deputy secretary of the D.O.E. “And he won. And then there was radio silence. We were prepared for the next day. And nothing happened.” Across the federal government the Trump people weren’t anywhere to be found. Allegedly, between the election and the inauguration not a single Trump representative set foot inside the Department of Agriculture, for example. The Department of Agriculture has employees or contractors in every county in the United States, and the Trump people seemed simply to be ignoring the place. Where they did turn up inside the federal government, they appeared confused and unprepared. A small group attended a briefing at the State Department, for instance, only to learn that the briefings they needed to hear were classified. None of the Trump people had security clearance—or, for that matter, any experience in foreign policy—and so they weren’t allowed to receive an education. On his visits to the White House soon after the election, Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, expressed surprise that so much of its staff seemed to be leaving. “It was like he thought it was a corporate acquisition or something,” says an Obama White House staffer. “He thought everyone just stayed.”

 

Two weeks after the election the Obama people inside the D.O.E. read in the newspapers that Trump had created a small “Landing Team.” According to several D.O.E. employees, this was led by, and mostly consisted of, a man named Thomas Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance, which, upon inspection, proved to be a Washington, D.C., propaganda machine funded with millions of dollars from ExxonMobil and Koch Industries. Pyle himself had served as a Koch Industries lobbyist and ran a side business writing editorials attacking the D.O.E.’s attempts to reduce the dependence of the American economy on carbon. Pyle says that his role on the Landing Team was “voluntary,” adding that he could not disclose who appointed him, due to a confidentiality agreement. The people running the D.O.E. were by then seriously alarmed. “We first learned of Pyle’s appointment on the Monday of Thanksgiving week,” recalls D.O.E. chief of staff Kevin Knobloch. “We sent word to him that the secretary and his deputy would meet with him as soon as possible. He said he would like that but could not do it until after Thanksgiving.”

 

A month after the election Pyle arrived for a meeting with Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, Deputy Secretary Sherwood-Randall, and Knobloch. Moniz is a nuclear physicist, then on leave from M.I.T., who had served as deputy secretary during the Clinton administration and is widely viewed, even by many Republicans, as understanding and loving the D.O.E. better than any person on earth. Pyle appeared to have no interest in anything he had to say. “He did not seem motivated to spend a lot of time understanding the place,” says Sherwood-Randall. “He didn’t bring a pencil or a piece of paper. He didn’t ask questions. He spent an hour. That was it. He never asked to meet with us again.” Afterward, Knobloch says, he suggested that Pyle visit one day each week until the inauguration, and that Pyle agreed to do it—but then he never showed up, instead attending a half-dozen meetings or so with others. “It’s a head-scratcher,” says Knobloch. “It’s a $30-billion-a-year organization with about 110,000 employees. Industrial sites across the country. Very serious stuff. If you’re going to run it, why wouldn’t you want to know something about it?”

 

After Pyle’s list of questions wound up on Bloomberg News, the Trump administration disavowed them, but a signal had been sent: We don’t want you to help us understand; we want to find out who you are and punish you. Pyle vanished from the scene. According to a former Obama official, he was replaced by a handful of young ideologues who called themselves “the Beachhead Team.” “They mainly ran around the building insulting people,” says a former Obama official. “There was a mentality that everything that government does is stupid and bad and the people are stupid and bad,” says another. They allegedly demanded to know the names and salaries of the 20 highest-paid people in the national-science labs overseen by the D.O.E. They’d eventually, according to former D.O.E. staffers, delete the contact list with the e-mail addresses of all D.O.E.-funded scientists—apparently to make it more difficult for them to communicate with one another. “These people were insane,” says the former D.O.E. staffer. “They weren’t prepared. They didn’t know what they were doing.”

 

“We had tried desperately to prepare them,” said Tarak Shah, chief of staff for the D.O.E.’s $6 billion basic-science program. “But that required them to show up. And bring qualified people. But they didn’t. They didn’t ask for even an introductory briefing. Like ‘What do you do?’ ” The Obama people did what they could to preserve the institution’s understanding of itself. “We were prepared for them to start wiping out documents,” said Shah. “So we prepared a public Web site to transfer the stuff onto it—if needed.”

 

 

But there was actually a long history of even the appointees of one administration hanging around to help the new appointees of the next. The man who had served as chief financial officer of the department during the Bush administration, for instance, stayed a year and a half into the Obama administration—simply because he had a detailed understanding of the money end of things that was hard to replicate quickly. The C.F.O. of the department at the end of the Obama administration was a mild-mannered civil-servant type named Joe Hezir. He had no particular political identity and was widely thought to have done a good job—and so he half-expected a call from the Trump people asking him to stay on, just to keep the money side of things running smoothly. The call never came. No one even let him know his services were no longer required. Not knowing what else to do, but without anyone to replace him, the C.F.O. of a $30 billion operation just up and left.

 

This was a loss. A lunch or two with the chief financial officer might have alerted the new administration to some of the terrifying risks they were leaving essentially unmanaged. Roughly half of the D.O.E.’s annual budget is spent on maintaining and guarding our nuclear arsenal, for instance. Two billion of that goes to hunting down weapons-grade plutonium and uranium at loose in the world so that it doesn’t fall into the hands of terrorists. In just the past eight years the D.O.E.’s National Nuclear Security Administration has collected enough material to make 160 nuclear bombs. The department trains every international atomic-energy inspector; if nuclear power plants around the world are not producing weapons-grade material on the sly by reprocessing spent fuel rods and recovering plutonium, it’s because of these people. The D.O.E. also supplies radiation-detection equipment to enable other countries to detect bomb material making its way across national borders. To maintain the nuclear arsenal, it conducts endless, wildly expensive experiments on tiny amounts of nuclear material to try to understand what is actually happening to plutonium when it fissions, which, amazingly, no one really does. To study the process, it is funding what promises to be the next generation of supercomputers, which will in turn lead God knows where.

 

The Trump people didn’t seem to grasp, according to a former D.O.E. employee, how much more than just energy the Department of Energy was about. They weren’t totally oblivious to the nuclear arsenal, but even the nuclear arsenal didn’t provoke in them much curiosity. “They were just looking for dirt, basically,” said one of the people who briefed the Beachhead Team on national-security issues. “ ‘What is the Obama administration not letting you do to keep the country safe?’ ”

 

By the time I arrived the first eighth of Trump’s first term was nearly complete, and his administration was still, largely, missing. He hadn’t nominated anyone to serve as head of the Patent Office, for instance, or to run FEMA. There was no Trump candidate to head the T.S.A., or anyone to run the Centers for Disease Control. The 2020 national census will be a massive undertaking for which there is not a moment to lose and yet there’s no Trump appointee in place to run it. “The actual government has not really taken over,” says Max Stier. “It’s kindergarten soccer. Everyone is on the ball. No one is at their positions. But I doubt Trump sees the reality. Everywhere he goes everything is going to be hunky-dory and nice. No one gives him the bad news.”

 

The question on the minds of the people who currently work at the department: Does he know what it does now? D.O.E. press secretary Shaylyn Hynes assures us that “Secretary Perry is dedicated to the missions of the Department of Energy.” And in his hearings, Perry made a show of having educated himself. He said how useful it was to be briefed by former secretary Ernest Moniz. But when I asked someone familiar with those briefings how many hours Perry had spent with Moniz, he laughed and said, “That’s the wrong unit of account.” With the nuclear physicist who understood the D.O.E. perhaps better than anyone else on earth, according to one person familiar with the meeting, Perry had spent minutes, not hours. “He has no personal interest in understanding what we do and effecting change,” a D.O.E. staffer told me in June. “He’s never been briefed on a program—not a single one, which to me is shocking.”

 

Meanwhile, inside the D.O.E. building, people claiming to be from the Trump administration appear willy-nilly, unannounced, and unintroduced to the career people. “There’s a mysterious kind of chain from the Trump loyalists who have shown up inside D.O.E. to the White House,” says a career civil servant. “That’s how decisions, like the budget, seem to get made. Not by Perry.” The woman who ran the Obama department’s energy-policy analysis unit recently received a call from D.O.E. staff telling her that her office was now occupied by Eric Trump’s brother-in-law. Why? No one knew. “Yes, you can notice the difference,” says one young career civil servant, in response to the obvious question. “There’s a lack of professionalism. They’re not very polite. Maybe they’ve never worked in an office or government setting. It’s not hostility so much as a real sense of concern with sharing information with career employees. Because of that lack of communication, nothing is being done. All policy questions remain unanswered.”

Edited July 27, 2017 by StrangeSox

[StrangeSox]

The entire government, especially State, is being "run" in a similar manner. It's going to take a long, long time to recover from the damage this administration does to the country.

[pettie4sox]

But atleast Killary is not president guys... /g

[Steve9347]

 

"Maybe if we discriminate even harder it'll force someone to write a better law."

Ugh. I know. I know.

[StrangeSox]

But atleast Killary is not president guys... /g

 

The amount of programs they're dismantling or letting rot through neglect related to foreign and domestic nuclear weapons and threats is extremely alarming.

 

Crippling our national research and development of energy technologies is less of an immediate that compared to that, but that's also going to do lasting damage to our economy as we get left behind out of malice and stupidity.

Edited July 27, 2017 by StrangeSox

[pettie4sox]

The amount of programs they're dismantling or letting rot through neglect related to foreign and domestic nuclear weapons and threats is extremely alarming.

 

Crippling our national research and development of energy technologies is less of an immediate that compared to that, but that's also going to do lasting damage to our economy as we get left behind out of malice and stupidity.

 

What can we really do about though, besides wish for the unthinkable?

 

Trump is too dumb to resign and too egotistical to think he's not damaging America.

[illinilaw08]

Department of Energy, aka our nuclear arsenal, is being gutted by the Trump administration and Perry is essentially a useless and clueless figurehead doing nothing with the department.

 

This article is super long and I'm only excerpting from the first third, but this is extremely alarming.

 

Since the election, I have waffled between whether I prefer Trump or Pence as POTUS. I consider Pence to be extremely dangerous in basically any area of social policy, but with the governing experience to actually get stuff done. But then I read articles like this - and I have to imagine that a Pence led administration wouldn't have let the Department of Energy get to where that article depicts it.

 

This stuff shouldn't be partisan. The Department of Energy's role internationally in training inspectors, and finding loose plutonium and uranium, shouldn't be controversial. This is pretty terrifying...

[StrangeSox]

Since the election, I have waffled between whether I prefer Trump or Pence as POTUS. I consider Pence to be extremely dangerous in basically any area of social policy, but with the governing experience to actually get stuff done. But then I read articles like this - and I have to imagine that a Pence led administration wouldn't have let the Department of Energy get to where that article depicts it.

 

This stuff shouldn't be partisan. The Department of Energy's role internationally in training inspectors, and finding loose plutonium and uranium, shouldn't be controversial. This is pretty terrifying...

 

Possibly, but consider that this is all happening under the watch of a longtime GOP politician, former Governor and one-time Presidential candidate Rick Perry. It's a problem with a political party that ideologically does not believe in the importance of what the government does and does not care to understand it. Things weren't quite as chaotic under W, but there was still plenty of institutional rot. Trump's budget that substantially defunds DoE (among many other departments) was written by Mulvaney and other regular GOP politicians, staffers and operatives. Reagan's administration had numerous deeply incompetent and unqualified people heading agencies and was rife with scandals and crimes.

 

It shouldn't be partisan in a sane country, but one of the two major parties in the US fundamentally does not believe that the government can, should or needs to do important work.

 

for example, from the article:

 

Right away he faced the hostility of right-wing think tanks. The Heritage Foundation even created its own budget plan back in 2011 that eliminated ARPA-E. American politics was alien to the Indian immigrant; he couldn’t fathom the tribal warfare. “Democrat, Republican—what is this?,” as he put it. “Also, why don’t people vote? In India people stand in line in 40 degrees Celsius to vote.” He phoned up the guys who had written the Heritage budget and invited them over to see what they’d be destroying. They invited him to lunch. “They were very gracious,” said Majumdar, “but they didn’t know anything. They were not scientists in any sense. They were ideologues. Their point was: the market should take care of everything. I said, ‘I can tell you that the market does not go into the lab and work on something that might or might not work.’ ”

 

s I drove out of Hanford the Trump administration unveiled its budget for the Department of Energy. ARPA-E had since won the praise of business leaders from Bill Gates to Lee Scott, the former C.E.O. of Walmart, to Fred Smith, the Republican founder of FedEx, who has said that “pound for pound, dollar for dollar, activity for activity, it’s hard to find a more effective thing government has done than ARPA-E.” Trump’s budget eliminates ARPA-E altogether. It also eliminates the spectacularly successful $70 billion loan program. It cuts funding to the national labs in a way that implies the laying off of 6,000 of their people. It eliminates all research on climate change. It halves the funding for work to secure the electrical grid from attack or natural disaster. “All the risks are science-based,” said John MacWilliams when he saw the budget. “You can’t gut the science. If you do, you are hurting the country. If you gut the core competency of the D.O.E., you gut the country.”

 

But you can. Indeed, if you are seeking to preserve a certain worldview, it actually helps to gut science. Trump’s budget, like the social forces behind it, is powered by a perverse desire—to remain ignorant. Trump didn’t invent this desire. He is just its ultimate expression.

 

There exists an entire industry on the right wing that churns out this sort of ideology, and by and large that's all the modern GOP listens to.

Edited July 27, 2017 by StrangeSox

[StrangeSox]

There's some parts of the article that directly touch on what I do for a living that make me pretty worried about the security of our critical infrastructure under this administration. Now I'm curious to see how badly they're messing things up at the NRC. At least they're fee-funded, so they can't gut their budget directly.

 

e: as if on cue, the DoE official account tweeted out this story: In the fight between Rick Perry and climate scientists — He’s winning

Edited July 27, 2017 by StrangeSox

[RockRaines]

Since the election, I have waffled between whether I prefer Trump or Pence as POTUS. I consider Pence to be extremely dangerous in basically any area of social policy, but with the governing experience to actually get stuff done. But then I read articles like this - and I have to imagine that a Pence led administration wouldn't have let the Department of Energy get to where that article depicts it.

 

This stuff shouldn't be partisan. The Department of Energy's role internationally in training inspectors, and finding loose plutonium and uranium, shouldn't be controversial. This is pretty terrifying...

Trump is a moron, and Pence is mostly just a religious zealot that dabbles in bigotry. I think Pence is a slightly better choice, if only because of his experience in politics.

[bmags]

I would choose pence 100x over this, for one reason, he would have an easier time getting qualified people into the white house again. I have no doubt the stuff happening in the Senate would be 100% the same, but the administrative things like the gutting of state would not be happening.