Angela Rye Hands Rick Santorum His Ass!

Rikkie don picked the wrong black woman to talk down to!

This is called opening up a 50 gallon drum of Whoop Ass!

 

Not Just Election Hacking – Russia Banned From the Olympics

Lot of dirty going on in Putin’s Russia. Looks like Putin’s home team took a huge hit.

No problem…They can compete under the Trump flag, since they own it.

Russia’s Olympic Team Barred From 2018 Winter Games For Doping

A new report confirmed “the systemic manipulation of the anti-doping rules and system in Russia.”

Russia’s Olympic team will not be allowed to compete in the 2018 Winter Games following the discovery that the country executed an elaborate program allowing athletes to use performance-enhancing drugs, including during the 2014 Sochi Olympics.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) made the decision to suspend the Russian Olympic Committee Tuesday.

An IOC report confirmed “the systemic manipulation of the anti-doping rules and system in Russia,” the organization said in a statement. The decision follows a 17-month investigation led by former president of Switzerland Samuel Schmid.

Official record books for the Olympics ― which will take place in Pyeongchang, South Korea, next year ― will permanently show that Russia did not win any medals. However, individual Russian athletes will be able to compete wearing a neutral uniform, The New York Times reports.

Russian athletes who qualify will have to meet “strict conditions,” the IOC said in a release, that include drug testing that could go beyond normal Olympic standards. But the Russian flag will not fly, and the Russian anthem won’t play at the games.

Two top Russian officials, including Deputy Prime Minister Vitaly Mutko, have been banned from Olympic involvement for life, while Russian Olympic Committee President Alexander Zhukov’s IOC membership has been suspended.

The lawyer of Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, the former head of Russia’s anti-doping laboratory who peeled back the layers of Russia’s state-run doping program in a 2016 New York Times report, said in a statement Tuesday that the IOC’s decision sent a “powerful message.” Rodchenkov’s story is further explored in the Netflix documentary “Icarus”released earlier this year.

“As the world has seen, Dr. Rodchenkov provided credible and irrefutable evidence of the Russian state-sponsored doping system, which was ultimately supervised and financed by then-Minister of Sports Vitaly Mutko and other high-level government officials,” lawyer Jim Walden said in a statement. “The decision to bar Russia’s official participation in the Winter Olympics makes abundantly clear to Russia, and all countries, that there are serious consequences for flouting the rules of the international community.”

A livestream taken by Russia Today showed Russia’s Olympic skiing team hearing the news firsthand. Video showed the athletes looking dejected…

 

Fake Rape Story By White Wing Gets Blown Up…Again

Back in the bad old days, it wasn’t uncommon for a white woman to shout rape against a black man (or men) to cover up some personal travesty.

Usually resulting in said black men getting lynched for a crime they didn’t commit.

Seems like old times…

And in response to a certain board troll…Notice how the name “Daily Caller” comes up in the story.

A woman approached The Post with dramatic — and false — tale about Roy Moore. She appears to be part of undercover sting operation.

A woman who falsely claimed to The Washington Post that Roy Moore, the Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Alabama, impregnated her as a teenager appears to work with an organization that uses deceptive tactics to secretly record conversations in an effort to embarrass its targets.

In a series of interviews over two weeks, the woman shared a dramatic story about an alleged sexual relationship with Moore in 1992 that led to an abortion when she was 15. During the interviews, she repeatedly pressed Post reporters to give their opinions on the effects that her claims could have on Moore’s candidacy if she went public.

The Post did not publish an article based on her unsubstantiated account. When Post reporters confronted her with inconsistencies in her story and an Internet posting that raised doubts about her motivations, she insisted that she was not working with any organization that targets journalists.

But on Monday morning, Post reporters saw her walking into the New York offices of Project Veritas, an organization that targets the mainstream news media and left-leaning groups. The organization sets up undercover “stings” that involve using false cover stories and covert video recordings meant to expose what the group says is media bias.

James O’Keefe, the Project Veritas founder who was convicted of a misdemeanor in 2010 for using a fake identity to enter a federal building during a previous sting, declined to answer questions about the woman outside the organization’s offices on Monday morning shortly after the woman walked inside.

“I am not doing an interview right now, so I’m not going to say a word,” O’Keefe said.

In a follow-up interview, O’Keefe declined to answer repeated questions about whether the woman was employed at Project Veritas. He also did not respond when asked if he was working with Moore, former White House adviser and Moore supporter Stephen K. Bannon, or Republican strategists.

The group’s efforts illustrate the lengths to which activists have gone to try to discredit media outlets for reporting on allegations from multiple women that Moore pursued them when they were teenagers and he was in his early 30s. Moore has denied that he did anything improper.

A spokesman for Moore’s campaign did not respond to a message seeking comment.

The woman who approached Post reporters, Jaime T. Phillips, did not respond to calls to her cellphone later Monday. Her car remained in the Project Veritas parking lot for more than an hour.

The Post positioned video reporters outside the group’s office in Mamaroneck, N.Y, after determining that Phillips lives in Stamford, Conn., and realizing that the two locations were just 16 miles apart. Two reporters followed her from her home as she drove to the office.

After Phillips was observed entering the Project Veritas office, The Post made the unusual decision to report her previous off-the-record comments.

“We always honor ‘off-the-record’ agreements when they’re entered into in good faith,” said Martin Baron, The Post’s executive editor. “But this so-called off-the-record conversation was the essence of a scheme to deceive and embarrass us. The intent by Project Veritas clearly was to publicize the conversation if we fell for the trap. Because of our customary journalistic rigor, we weren’t fooled, and we can’t honor an ‘off-the-record’ agreement that was solicited in maliciously bad faith.”

Phillips’s arrival at the Project Veritas office capped a weeks-long effort that began only hours after The Post published an article on Nov. 9 that included allegations that Moore once initiated a sexual encounter with a 14-year-old named Leigh Corfman.

Post reporter Beth Reinhard, who co-wrote the article about Corfman, received a cryptic email early the next morning.

“Roy Moore in Alabama . . . I might know something but I need to keep myself safe. How do we do this?” the apparent tipster wrote under an account with the name “Lindsay James.”

The email’s subject line was “Roy Moore in AL.” The sender’s email address included “rolltide,” the rallying cry of the University of Alabama’s sports teams, which are nicknamed the Crimson Tide.

Reinhard sent an email asking if the person was willing to talk off the record.

“Not sure if I trust the phone,” came the reply. “Can we just stick to email?”

“I need to be confident that you can protect me before I will tell all,” the person wrote in a subsequent email. “I have stuff I’ve been hiding for a long time but maybe it should stay that way.”

The tipster’s email came amid counterattacks by Moore supporters aimed at The Post and its reporters.

That same day, Gateway Pundit, a conservative site, spread a false story from a Twitter account, @umpire43, that said, “A family friend in Alabama just told my wife that a WAPO reporter named Beth offer her 1000$ to accuse Roy Moore.” The Twitter account, which has a history of spreading misinformation, has since been deleted.

The Post, like many other news organizations, has a strict policy against paying people for information and did not do so in its coverage of Moore.

On Nov. 14, a pastor in Alabama said he received a voice mail from a man falsely claiming to be a Post reporter and seeking women “willing to make damaging remarks” about Moore for money. No one associated with The Post made any such call.

In the days that followed the purported tipster’s initial emails, Reinhard communicated with the woman through an encrypted text messaging service and spoke by phone with the person to set up a meeting. When the woman suggested a meeting in New York, Reinhard told her she would have to know more about her story and her background. The woman offered that her real name was Jaime Phillips.

Phillips said she lived in New York but would be in the Washington area during Thanksgiving week and suggested meeting Tuesday at a shopping mall in Tysons Corner, Va. “I’m planning to do some shopping there so I’ll find a good place to meet before you get there,” Phillips wrote in a message sent via Signal, the encrypted messaging service.

When Reinhard suggested bringing another reporter, Phillips wrote, “I’m not really comfortable with anyone else being there this time.”

Reinhard arrived to find Phillips, wearing a brown leather jacket and with long red hair, already seated in a booth in the restaurant.

The 41-year-old said she had been abused as a child, Reinhard said. Her family had moved often. She said she moved in with an aunt in the Talladega area of Alabama and started attending a church youth group when she met Moore in 1992, the year he became a county judge. She said she was 15. She said they started a “secret” sexual relationship.

“I knew it wasn’t right, but I didn’t care,” she said.

She said that she got pregnant, that Moore talked her into an abortion and that he drove her to Mississippi to get it.

In the interview, she told Reinhard that she was so upset she couldn’t finish her salad….More, including the Post hammering this woman’s boss, James O’Keefe…

 

 

Conservative Extremist Tries to Blow Up Airport – MSM Punts

Muslim drops a cigarette in front of the entrance to an airport…It’s 24 x 7 National News.

White wing extremist tries to blow up the airport with the same explosives used by Timothy McVeigh…And barely aa peep.

 

Whitesplaining In the Press

When color is the likely determinant of how a criminal is presented in the media.

 

Identical crimes – the white accused get pics in suits…

‘He’s a cop killer’: Twitter reams Texas paper for smiling photo of white perp but mugshots for black suspects

Which one is the Cop Killer? The guy on the left is a Cop Killer. The guy on the left is a former NFL player arrested on drug possession charges

Hollis Daniels (left) and former NFL player Johnny Jolly (right) (screen grabs from The Houston Chronicle)

‘He’s a cop killer’: Twitter reams Texas paper for smiling photo of white perp but mugshots for black suspects

A Texas newspaper came under fire this week after it published a favorable photo of suspected police shooter Hollis Daniels, who is white.

In its Tuesday story about Daniels’ alleged shooting of a police officer, the Houston Chronicle used a photo from social media that showed the suspect smiling and hugging a woman.

“I appreciate how you raised me, and all the extra love that you gave me,” a caption included with the photo said.

“Everybody needs to [know] he was a great person and amazing friend,” one person in the Chronicle‘s story was quoted as saying. “I would have never thought he would do something like that, ever.”

The paper also shared the photo on Twitter, where it did not go over well with users who pointed out that mugshots were often used for black suspects.

 

Houston – You Have a Problem

There are a series of manmade issues which have resulted in the massive damage we are seeing in the Houston region of Texas. The major contributor is the lack of Zoning Laws which would require developers to use certain standards in location and construction. Much like what happened in Florida during Hurricane Andrew some years back, there are no laws requiring builders not to build on floodplains, or to utilize special construction. As such a lot of the lessons from Andrew, and Katrina (I worked on parts of the Katrina recovery) were ignored.

The second problem is the US Government and FEMA. While FEMA is really strict on rules for coastal homes built along the ocean, and insurance rates are sky high (if you can get it at all) – they take a highly permissive approach to insuring homes and property a few miles inland – even when that property is located on a floodplain which repeatedly floods. I live in a coastal area, designated as a “flood zone”. I was required to utilize certain building methods. For instance the roof and siding are designed to survive a Category 5 hurricane – 140 MPH winds. The house is on “stilts” 13′ above the ground, which were driven 20′ or more into the earth. It has survived 4 Hurricanes, including a direct hit by a Cat 5 with no significant damage despite a 12′ Storm Surge and flooding. Indeed as I write this, my area is being pounded by a Tropical Storm moving up the East Coast, and we are expecting 60 MPH winds and 2-4 inches of rain.

FEMA has paid on properties which repeatedly flood – far in excess of the property values. Properties and localities with no storm mitigation systems.

The National Flood Insurance Program, established in 1968 was meant to protect and indemnify people without creating economic catastrophe. Instead of avoiding the floodplain, insurance allowed people to build within it, within management constraints recommended by FEMA. In theory, flood-hazard mitigation hoped to direct development away from flood-prone areas through the disincentives of risk insurance and regulatory complexity. It isn’t working – especially in areas where there was substantial construction before the law (NOLA), and in Texas where there is no Zoning.

In Houston’s case, catastrophic floods have been anticipated for some time. The combination of climate change, which produces more intense and unpredictable storms, and aggressive development made an event like this week’s almost inevitable. The Association of State Floodplain Managers has called for a national flood risk-management strategy, and the Houston Chronicle has called flood control the city’s “most pressing infrastructure need.” A lack of funding is often blamed, and relaxed FEMA regulations under the Trump Administration won’t help either.

The famously “un-zoned” city has allowed developers to pave over natural areas that provide resilience to floods, and build homes in the way of cataclysm. According to a 2016 analysis by ProPublica and the Texas Tribune, 166,000 acres of coastal prairies have been destroyed by development since 2001.“More people die here than anywhere else from floods,” Sam Brody, a Texas A&M University at Galveston researcher, told us last year. “More property per capita is lost here. And the problem’s getting worse.”

Not counting the Harvey’s devastation in Houston, in the past two years, 16,000 buildings have been flooded, and $1 billion in damage was caused by the so-called “Tax Day” and “Memorial Day” floods. In 2001, Tropical Storm Allison killed almost two dozen people and caused $5 billion in damage in Harris County, which includes Houston.

The next problem is Houston’s road system. Those giant highways are impervious surfaces which cause rapid rainfall runoff. In the case of the major superhighways in Houston, that runoff is along the road filling underpasses – making evacuation nearly impossible.

After Hurricane Sandy 36 Republican Senators refused to vote in favor of funding relief, including the two Senators from Texas. The political ramifications of that are floating around in the political miasma.

Maybe we need to take a different view of how to pay for this. The State, which is responsible for the laws leaving citizens defenseless – should bear a greater responsibility for its actions. Second – maybe we should put relocation on the table. Those buildings that have repeatedly flooded should be torn down, the owners should be provided FEMA Insurance money – but only to build elsewhere or to build with significant mitigation strategies. Ergo – the State, County, and City has to put a plan of mitigation on the table before a dime is spent for rebuilding.

 

 

Foreign Commentator…Meet the KKK

Univision journalist Ilia Calderón probably thought she was going to interview a normal human when she decided to interview a KKK Grand Dragon in his lair.

A lot of folks just don’t seem to realize what the KKK is – especially foreigners. So when the Chumph equates the KKK and antifa – this is what he is defending.

A regular “Negro Wake-up Call” for her and her viewers.

KKK leader threatens life of Afro-Latina journalist during interview

“We killed 6 million Jews the last time. Eleven million is nothing,” said the KKK’s Chris Barker

Ilia Calderón, an afro-latina reporter, feared for the safety of herself and her crew after being threatened by a KKK leader during an interview.

Calderón, an immigrant journalist for Univision of both African and Colombian descent, agreed to meet the grand wizard of Loyal White Knights faction of the KKK Chris Barker on his property in North Carolina in July.

After watching Barker conduct a ceremony with his fellow KKK members dressed in robes and yielding torches, she sat down with the leader and his wife for an interview. Things escalated quickly as Barker questioned why the journalist didn’t “go back” to the country she was born in. “We have nothing here in America; ya’ll keep flooding it,” he said. “But like God says – like Yahweh himself says – we will chase you out of here.”

Barker continued to say that he and his fellow white supremacists would “burn out” all of the immigrants in the country. After Calderón questioned exactly how that could happen, he responded saying, “We killed 6 million Jews the last time. Eleven million is nothing.”

Later on in the interview, Barker refers to the journalist as a “mongrel” and a “n*****,” then proceeded to claim he isn’t racist because he was part of a Christian group and not a hate group.

“My team told me that I would be insulted, and I knew, but I never imagined the level,” Calderón told Univision. “. . . At that time I was really felt very afraid for my safety and the safety of my team.”

“As part of the editorial meetings we were discussing the incidents of hate that had been presented, and how, from 2016 to here, these people and these groups feel entitled to raise its highest voice – perhaps backed by a President who speaks very weakly about it,” she said.

The “Christian group” had a lot to say about the riots in Charlottesville last weekend. The Loyal Knights praised James Fields — the man who drove his car into a sea of protesters that ended in the death of one women — for “running over nine communist anti-fascists.”

“When a couple of them die, it doesn’t bother us,” Barker said. “They’re always attacking and messing with our rallies.”

 

CNN Finally Works Up the Courage to Fire Their “House Honkey”

CNN has been paying their House Honkey white supremacist and neo confederate Jeffry Lord for on two years now.

Usually offered up as a punching bag :ord has suffered enough psychiatric damage ny now to be considered in a CTE study of professional football players.

Perhaps due to the ceaseless pummeling, he has retreated into white supremacist fantasy land of goose stepping nazis.

 

Electioneering in South Korea

A lot different than our hate fests…

 

The MSM Gets Punked Again on Fake Syria Bombing

The MSM got punked…Again.

The Putin-Chumph fake missile attack in Syria which succeeded in blowing up a couple of goats and a couple of antique junkyard Mig 15s, and left the target airport in such bad shape they were launching planes a few hours later to bomb the hell out of hospitals – was a publicity stunt to try and bail out a rapidly failing presidency…The Chumph’s.

Yet no one seemed to attack the absurdity of the attack, and things only became unglued when ABC News reported two hours after the attack that the Russians and Syrians had, under Putin’s orchestration – moved their aircraft, personnel, chemical weapons, and critical equipment to another airport long before the Chumph ordered the launch of the missiles.

Sexual Molestation and Racial Discrimination Central, Fox News was overjoyed to have something else to talk about except serial rape by their leading talking head and others on their staff. Literally gushing about Putin’s Bitch bombing the hell out of some “A-rabs” they lead their easily dupeable slack jawed, ignorant followers in the usual orgasmic outpouring of plastic patriotism, that their “Trump had bombed some brown people. Faux News even trotted out a couple of pics of some destroyed antique Mig 15, last used in the Korean War, an which hadn’t been flown above sea level in 30 years as evidence of the “destruction”.

Took three days for much of the MSM to get their collective dicks off the table and realize they had been royally hoodwinked again.

Media masochists fall for Trump: One ineffectual missile attack, and cable news goes into White House fluff mode

One pointless display of military machismo, and the TV talking heads Trump loves to mock are swept off their feet

For nearly two years now, we’ve followed the incomprehensibly remedial political life of Donald Trump. For nearly two years, we’ve observed in shocked horror at episode after episode in which Trump is engulfed in controversy of his own making, only to be given chance after chance after chance to redeem himself, unlike nearly every other worldwide public figure, political or otherwise.

No matter how often President Trump whines and hurls tantrums on Twitter about the “dishonest media” and all the “fake news” it publishes, the television press has gifted him with unprecedented latitude — his very own set of political rules, devised by Trump and implemented by the cable news media. Actually, I hesitate to call them “rules” because the word suggests there are limits to and punishments for Trump’s behavior. Anyone following his greatest hits knows there aren’t any, at least in compared with the rules applied to previous presidents, not to mention the Democratic nominee whom Trump barely defeated last year.

This partially illiterate New York socialite turned reality-show punchline continues to be given opportunity after opportunity to behave in a reasonable, rational way by kneejerk pundits who appear desperate to artificially endow Trump with presidential qualities. His version of “presidential” lasts around 12 seconds and is barely more presidential than the behavior of a tween bully running for class president. Whether in describing his banal, off-the-rack address to Congress last month or his transparently political missile strike against a Syrian airbase, there are more than a few actors in the cable news sphere who can’t wait to normalize and legitimize Trump, only to be castrated by the president hours or days later.

In the aftermath of Trump’s ineffectual cruise missile strike against the Al Shayrat airfield in which 59 missiles constructed by Raytheon — a military contractor in which Trump owns undivested stock — caused marginal damage, allowing Bashar al-Assad to launch new airstrikes from the base the very next day, cable news was buzzing with declarations of Trump’s freshly acquired savoir-faire as a sober and decisive leader. This was Trump they were talking about — the TV huckster who once looked into a video camera and declared that “Trump Steaks,” inexplicably sold at Sharper Image stores back in the day, “are the world’s greatest steaks, and I mean that in every sense of the word.”

It’s also worth noting that President Obama dropped more than 26,000 bombs in 2016, his final year in office.

NBC News reporter Kristen Welker said she thought Trump had “turned a page” in his presidency: “This is a president who is coming off of a rocky couple of weeks. Arguably, he’s turned the page on that to some extent with these foreign leader meetings that he’s had this week and now with the focus on Syria.”

Elliott Abrams wrote in the Weekly Standard that “the Trump administration can truly be said to have started only now. The president has been chief executive since January 20, but this week he acted also as Commander in Chief. And more: He finally accepted the role of Leader of the Free World.”

Fox News Channel’s Carl Higbie: “Huge victory. All the people I have spoken to recently, active and former, have all said this was Donald Trump’s first test and he absolutely nailed it. This is right on par. This is a show of force that the world needs to see and the world now knows that we will do. And everybody in the military that I have spoken to is extremely proud to call him our president this morning.”

On Friday night’s “Real Time With Bill Maher,” CNN’s Ana Navarro qualified her praise for Trump, but endowed him with a role neither he nor any president actually possesses. Navarro said, “I still think he is a racist, misogynist, lying pig, but he’s also my commander in chief.” Apologies for nitpicking, but the president isn’t Navarro’s commander in chief, nor is he the commander of any American civilian. He’s strictly the commander in chief of the military. Nothing more. Please stop giving him ideas like this. Thank you.

CNN’s Fareed Zakaria has been widely and justifiably mocked as the worst of the batch, declaring: “I think Donald Trump became President of the United States” with this ineffectual strike.

The only excuse I can think of for this brand of unearned fluffing, other than submissiveness and/or masochism, is that certain members of the press continue to genuflect before the “both sides” attitude. These are transparently weak attempts to generate some sense of cosmetic balance around the coverage of a president who, no matter what he says or does now, is still under numerous federal investigations for colluding with Russia to hijack the 2016 election cycle. It was a trespass against American sovereignty and the integrity of our electoral process, and if the current president was involved in any way, it was an unprecedented and massively treasonous act. And the Russia headlines make up only part of the roster of manifest reasons why Trump shouldn’t have been allowed to tour the White House, much less run the nation from the Oval Office.

A monkey can order a missile strike, and Trump kind of screwed this one up. He hit a few inconsequential items on the checklist — managing to avoid upwards of 100 Russian personnel who were on hand at the base for some still-unexplained reason — but he failed to take out any chemical weapons, which I thought was the point of sticking our noses into a civil war that hasn’t involved any attacks against the United States. And let’s say this again: Syrian fighter jets were taking off from Al Shayrat the next day. Oh, and Trump’s attack reportedly managed to kill seven civilians, including four children.

You had one job, Mr. President.

All in all, my biggest objection to Trump’s intervention in Syria — he’s also secretly put boots on the ground there, by the way — is the fact that it’s being carried out by this tabloid weirdo with cartoon hair named Donald Trump. It’s like finding out your bypass surgery is being performed by Gary Busey and the pilot for your cross-country flight will be Meat Loaf. Trump is in no way equipped with any of the qualities of a strong leader. He’s a petulant, obnoxious, intellectually incurious doofus who needed four tries to correctly spell the word “hereby.” He and his worthless, somnambulant secretary of state don’t have a Syria policy, beyond lamenting Assad’s murdering of babies on one hand while blocking other Syrian babies from seeking refuge from Assad inside the United States on the other.

Everything Donald Trump touches turns to crap sooner or later. As American warships steam toward the Korean peninsula, we, and especially the cable news media, must not forget who this president really is. We must not forget the myriad disasters and irreparable destabilization for which he’s responsible. And the worst is yet to come.

 

LA Times – The Trump Highway to Hell

This is the first of a three part series of editorials by the LA Times. It eviscerates the man, his inability to lead, and lack of intelligence and ethics.

Republicans are equally at fault for not getting rid of this POS by impeachment, and defending him against evidence of treason.

Our Dishonest President

It was no secret during the campaign that Donald Trump was a narcissist and a demagogue who used fear and dishonesty to appeal to the worst in American voters. The Times called him unprepared and unsuited for the job he was seeking, and said his election would be a “catastrophe.”

Still, nothing prepared us for the magnitude of this train wreck. Like millions of other Americans, we clung to a slim hope that the new president would turn out to be all noise and bluster, or that the people around him in the White House would act as a check on his worst instincts, or that he would be sobered and transformed by the awesome responsibilities of office.

Instead, seventy-some days in — and with about 1,400 to go before his term is completed — it is increasingly clear that those hopes were misplaced.

In a matter of weeks, President Trump has taken dozens of real-life steps that, if they are not reversed, will rip families apart, foul rivers and pollute the air, intensify the calamitous effects of climate change and profoundly weaken the system of American public education for all.

His attempt to de-insure millions of people who had finally received healthcare coverage and, along the way, enact a massive transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich has been put on hold for the moment. But he is proceeding with his efforts to defang the government’s regulatory agencies and bloat the Pentagon’s budget even as he supposedly retreats from the global stage.

It is impossible to know where his presidency will lead or how much damage he will do to our nation.

These are immensely dangerous developments which threaten to weaken this country’s moral standing in the world, imperil the planet and reverse years of slow but steady gains by marginalized or impoverished Americans. But, chilling as they are, these radically wrongheaded policy choices are not, in fact, the most frightening aspect of the Trump presidency.

What is most worrisome about Trump is Trump himself. He is a man so unpredictable, so reckless, so petulant, so full of blind self-regard, so untethered to reality that it is impossible to know where his presidency will lead or how much damage he will do to our nation. His obsession with his own fame, wealth and success, his determination to vanquish enemies real and imagined, his craving for adulation — these traits were, of course, at the very heart of his scorched-earth outsider campaign; indeed, some of them helped get him elected. But in a real presidency in which he wields unimaginable power, they are nothing short of disastrous.

Although his policies are, for the most part, variations on classic Republican positions (many of which would have been undertaken by a President Ted Cruz or a President Marco Rubio), they become far more dangerous in the hands of this imprudent and erratic man. Many Republicans, for instance, support tighter border security and a tougher response to illegal immigration, but Trump’s cockamamie border wall, his impracticable campaign promise to deport all 11 million people living in the country illegally and his blithe disregard for the effect of such proposals on the U.S. relationship with Mexico turn a very bad policy into an appalling one.

In the days ahead, The Times editorial board will look more closely at the new president, with a special attention to three troubling traits:

1. Trump’s shocking lack of respect for those fundamental rules and institutions on which our government is based. Since Jan. 20, he has repeatedly disparaged and challenged those entities that have threatened his agenda, stoking public distrust of essential institutions in a way that undermines faith in American democracy. He has questioned the qualifications of judges and the integrity of their decisions, rather than acknowledging that even the president must submit to the rule of law. He has clashed with his own intelligence agencies, demeaned government workers and questioned the credibility of the electoral system and the Federal Reserve. He has lashed out at journalists, declaring them “enemies of the people,” rather than defending the importance of a critical, independent free press. His contempt for the rule of law and the norms of government are palpable.
2. His utter lack of regard for truth. Whether it is the easily disprovable boasts about the size of his inauguration crowd or his unsubstantiated assertion that Barack Obama bugged Trump Tower, the new president regularly muddies the waters of fact and fiction. It’s difficult to know whether he actually can’t distinguish the real from the unreal — or whether he intentionally conflates the two to befuddle voters, deflect criticism and undermine the very idea of objective truth. Whatever the explanation, he is encouraging Americans to reject facts, to disrespect science, documents, nonpartisanship and the mainstream media — and instead to simply take positions on the basis of ideology and preconceived notions. This is a recipe for a divided country in which differences grow deeper and rational compromise becomes impossible.
3. His scary willingness to repeat alt-right conspiracy theories, racist memes and crackpot, out-of-the-mainstream ideas. Again, it is not clear whether he believes them or merely uses them. But to cling to disproven “alternative” facts; to retweet racists; to make unverifiable or false statements about rigged elections and fraudulent voters; to buy into discredited conspiracy theories first floated on fringe websites and in supermarket tabloids — these are all of a piece with the Barack Obama birther claptrap that Trump was peddling years ago and which brought him to political prominence. It is deeply alarming that a president would lend the credibility of his office to ideas that have been rightly rejected by politicians from both major political parties.

Where will this end? Will Trump moderate his crazier campaign positions as time passes? Or will he provoke confrontation with Iran, North Korea or China, or disobey a judge’s order or order a soldier to violate the Constitution? Or, alternately, will the system itself — the Constitution, the courts, the permanent bureaucracy, the Congress, the Democrats, the marchers in the streets — protect us from him as he alienates more and more allies at home and abroad, steps on his own message and creates chaos at the expense of his ability to accomplish his goals? Already, Trump’s job approval rating has been hovering in the mid-30s, according to Gallup, a shockingly low level of support for a new president. And that was before his former national security advisor, Michael Flynn, offered to cooperate last week with congressional investigators looking into the connection between the Russian government and the Trump campaign.

Those who oppose the new president’s reckless and heartless agenda must make their voices heard.

On Inauguration Day, we wrote on this page that it was not yet time to declare a state of “wholesale panic” or to call for blanket “non-cooperation” with the Trump administration. Despite plenty of dispiriting signals, that is still our view. The role of the rational opposition is to stand up for the rule of law, the electoral process, the peaceful transfer of power and the role of institutions; we should not underestimate the resiliency of a system in which laws are greater than individuals and voters are as powerful as presidents. This nation survived Andrew Jackson and Richard Nixon. It survived slavery. It survived devastating wars. Most likely, it will survive again.

But if it is to do so, those who oppose the new president’s reckless and heartless agenda must make their voices heard. Protesters must raise their banners. Voters must turn out for elections. Members of Congress — including and especially Republicans — must find the political courage to stand up to Trump. Courts must safeguard the Constitution. State legislators must pass laws to protect their citizens and their policies from federal meddling. All of us who are in the business of holding leaders accountable must redouble our efforts to defend the truth from his cynical assaults.

The United States is not a perfect country, and it has a great distance to go before it fully achieves its goals of liberty and equality. But preserving what works and defending the rules and values on which democracy depends are a shared responsibility. Everybody has a role to play in this drama.

This is the first in a series.

 

A black Samurai in Japan? The Hidden Story of Yasuke

A black Samurai in Japan in the 16th Century? Truth is stranger than fiction as the story of Yasuke is planned to hit the Big Screen.

 

Forgotten Tale Of Japan’s First Black Samurai Bound For The Big Screen

The Japanese revered the African former slave in the 16th century.

There is very little recorded history on Yasuke, the young African man believed to be Japan’s first black samurai, but his story may soon be told on the silver screen.

Lionsgate has asked screenwriter Gregory Wilden, the creator of the 1986 film “Highlander,” to write a script for an action drama based on Yasuke’s centuries-old story, according to the Hollywood Reporter and Deadline.

The Lionsgate film “is based on the true story of an African whose journey to Japan comes with conflicting background stories,” Widen told Deadline last week. “The one I’ve chosen is that he was a slave soldier after the fall of Abysinnian Bengal, a black kingdom run by Ethiopians.”

In that story, Yasuke was sold into slavery and “found himself in the care of Alessandro Valignano, an Italian missionary,” Widen explained.  “They formed a bond, and when there were complications in Rome, he was sent to Japan and took Yasuke with him,” he added.

Yasuke was an African slave in his early 20s when Valignano brought him on a missionary trip to Japan in 1579, according to historical accounts that Oxy reviewed. He stood out there because of his tall stature and dark skin and he soon became a local celebrity. His real name is unknown, but locals called him Yasuke in Japan ― likely a Japanese version of his birth name.

When Japanese warlord Oda Nobunaga learned of Yasuke and his impressive strength, he hired the young African as a feudal bodyguard. Under Nobunaga, Yasuke quickly rose in the ranks to become a well-respected samurai warrior who spoke fluent Japanese.

“They presented him with a blade, and he went to work,” Widen told Deadline.

Parts of Yasuke’s story lived on in a 1916 Japanese children’s book called Kuro-suke, about a young, black samurai who often dreams of his parents in Africa.

 

Well Wishes for Tower of Power’s Garibaldi and Van Wageningen

Two members of the Tower of Power band were hit by a train this morning, and are hospitalized. Prayers and well wishes for a recovery.

Two members of famed R&B group Tower of Power hit by train

Two members of Tower of Power, a group that has been an R&B institution for nearly 50 years, were hit by a train as they walked across tracks before a performance in their hometown of Oakland, but both survived, their publicist said.

Calling it an “unfortunate accident,” publicist Jeremy Westby said in a statement that drummer David Garibaldi and bass player Marc van Wageningen are “responsive and being treated at a local hospital.”

Garibaldi has been with the group since 1970. Van Wageningen is substituting as bass player.

“We are monitoring their situation directly with the hospital,” band manager Tom Consolo said. “We will update everyone tomorrow but for tonight we ask that you send your prayers.”

Without identifying them, the Oakland Fire Department said that two pedestrians were hit by a passenger train at Jack London Square about 7:30 p.m. Thursday and taken to a hospital.

The accident was near Yoshi’s, a jazz and R&B club where the group had been scheduled to play two shows Thursday night. Both were canceled.

Yoshi’s General Manager Hal Campos told CBS San Francisco Bay Area he called 911 and stayed with the two injured men until help came. They were both unconscious and appeared to have broken bones, Campos said.

“We don’t know if they didn’t hear the train. We don’t know how this tragedy happened but we’re very, very sad about this. The band is emotionally destroyed … all of us worked with them for days now and many years, it’s really sad,” Campos said.

It wasn’t clear why the men were on the tracks, but pedestrians often need to cross them in the area with trains running across and in between streets, including right outside Yoshi’s.

Tower of Power, a band of about a dozen members, most of them horns, has been beloved members of the R&B and pop communities since forming in Oakland in 1968. The group and its rotating cast of musicians have recorded behind many far more famous names including Elton John, Otis Redding, Aerosmith and Santana.

They were also a national TV fixture in the 1980s with frequent appearances on “Late Night With David Letterman.”

Tributes and well wishes were quickly emerging on Twitter, including one from pop star and drummer Sheila E., who tweeted “Pleez pray for my frenz.”

From back in the day….

And live in 2012 –

 

Miami Herald Goes All In

The world’s shortest editorial…

 

Not a Happy Customer

A customer in France marched into an Apple Store and began to smash the merchandise…

Apparently he was upset about a refund.

The man was arrested outside the store, and charged,

Ouch! Hope this guy won the French Lottery…He’s going to need it to pay for all that!