They even lie about "Covfefe".

'No, it's still there ' #covfefepic.twitter.com/yndPf2yThG

Definition of "COVFEFE"

1. A rare type of coffee with an orange color?

2. To yearn to own something possessed by a female?

3.  To cover yourself with feelings?

4. Russian translation for I resign?

 My favorite: " When you want to say coverage but your hands are too small to hit all the letters on the keyboard."

Ok, so I guess we have all figured out by now that there is no such word. (Don't try to use it when playing Scrabble with grandma. She will call you on it.)

But there it was at the end of a tweet by the most powerful man on earth.

Weren't his peeps supposed to start controlling his tweet pulses?

I mean this is embarrassing.

Clearly this was a typo made by someone whose mind might not be right, or someone who has a hard time controlling his twitter urges to the point where he is almost tweeting in his sleep.

What we do know, is that it's not some type of inside jargon known only to a few as his press secretary seemed to imply today.

You have to wonder why the president and his team would lie about something as obvious as this. At this point they should just acknowledge the error, ride with the joke, and move on. But no, they really expect us all to believe that the president intended to tweet covfefe for all the world to see.

That's the tragedy of this story. Instead of laughing this all off as a simple typo and making light of it, this team of fabulists will still try to spin this into something favorable to them, and try to make the entire episode something that it was not.

“Do you think people should be concerned that the president posted somewhat of an incoherent tweet last night, and that it then stayed up for hours?” a reporter asked.

“Uh, no,” Spicer said.

“Why did it stay up so long? Is no one watching this?” the reporter asked.

“No, I think the president and a small group of people know exactly what he meant,” Spicer said.

I can't wait for a member of that "small group" to cue us all in.

*Pic from twitter.com

Trump wreck.

*

"John Leguizamo‏Verified account @JohnLeguizamo 21h21 hours ago                    

                

 Today, as we remember those who served and sacrificed their lives, let's also remember those who evaded service and sacrificed nothing.pic.twitter.com/ZnzedW3zEC

 

 

That tweet was from the very fine actor, John Leguizamo, yesterday.

 

I find it ironic how folks who consider themselves tough Americans choose to follow a coward who was too afraid to serve and defend his country.

 

Still, given the way things are going in trump world, we might not have to worry about a coward leading us much longer.   

"The revelation that Jared Kushner's meetings with Russians are under scrutiny brings the federal investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election to Trump's inner circle.

The 36-year-old Kushner, who is married to Ivanka Trump, has had a growing role in that circle over the past two years, from Trump family member to trusted campaign adviser to White House senior adviser.

 

Kushner is a focus in the Russia investigation over his meetings with at least two Russian officials, Moscow's ambassador to the U.S. and a banking executive, sources tell ABC News.

 

He is not a target of the FBI investigation and has not been accused of committing a crime, but sources said he is among a number of White House staffers and former Trump campaign officials who are likely to be interviewed by the FBI.

 

Here are the known meetings of Kushner with Russian officials since his father-in-law was elected.

 

Meeting the ambassador

 

Kushner's name is on the list of Trump team members who met with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the transition between Trump's election victory and his inauguration. Kushner and Michael Flynn, who would go on to become Trump's first national security adviser, met with Kislyak together in Trump Tower in December.

 

The subject matter discussed during the meeting remains unclear.

 

"They generally discussed the [U.S.-Russia] relationship, and it made sense to establish a line of communication," White House spokeswoman Hope Hicks said in a statement in March after the meeting was first publicly disclosed. "Jared has had meetings with many other foreign countries and representatives — as many as two dozen other foreign countries' leaders and representatives."

 

Other Trump associates who met with Kislyak before the inauguration include then-Sen. Jeff Sessions, now U.S. attorney general, and former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page.

Trump himself met with Kislyak and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in the Oval Office on May 10 -- a meeting that raised questions afterward when it was revealed that the president disclosed classified information about ISIS to the Russian officials. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, current National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster and Deputy National Security Adviser Dina Powell were also present in the meeting."

 

This drip drip drip is starting to feel like a downpour.

 

Is it any wonder then that....

 

"So Trump returns to the White House this week just as he left -- lonely, angry and not happy with much of anyone. The presidency, Donald Trump is discovering, is not an easy or natural fit.

"He now lives within himself, which is a dangerous place for Donald Trump to be," says someone who speaks with the President. "I see him emotionally withdrawing. He's gained weight. He doesn't have anybody whom he trusts." [Source] 

Our American nightmare continues.

*Pic from  Grant Stern in occupydemocrats.com

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

We all love our Veterans. Well..... most of us.

It's Memorial Day here in America, and  now might be a good time to remind everyone what the president of this country allegedly did to a veteran one day in his not too distant past.

"Scott Dworkin, the co-founder of the Democratic Coalition, recently tweeted an unsurprising reminder of court papers showing that Trump evicted a U.S. veteran because he had a therapy dog.

Specifically, the court papers described the complainant as a “United States Army combat veteran of Afghanistan and Kosovo” who had a “psychiatric disability that substantially limits one or more of his major life activities.” Furthermore, the court papers show he was advised by a psychiatrist and primary care physician to obtain a therapy dog.

Though they gave Trump Village a note from their physician explaining the need for a therapy dog, Trump attempted to evict them due to having a dog. Despite this, however, they accepted rent after the termination date of the lease and the Housing Court dismissed the eviction.

The hypocrisy of Trump’s business actions was not lost on Twitter users who responded in outrage at the deplorable act. Trump used the appearance of being a man for the military and for the vets to win the election. With a system that is undoubtedly broken when it comes to caring for its vets, it’s understandable they want to see that in Trump. However, one must take into account his previous actions. Trump allowed this to happen. Does he really care about a veteran when it comes down to his bottom dollar?" [Source]

I didn't believe it at first myself, but if you go to the link of the article you will see the actual court papers used by the author that ultimately convinces me of the veracity of the story.

That, and the fact that this president has a rather dubious history as a landlord.

So when you see President trump following his scripted lines today about sacrifice and being grateful to the men and women who served, remember that it is not coming from the heart, because president trump does not care about those men and women or anything else except himself and his inner circle.

An inner-circle, by the way, that's getting smaller and smaller. 

Pic from imemorial.com

"The Pope and the Pagan"?

It's Sunday, so the following essay penned by Andrew Sullivan is apropos.

The field Negro education series continues.

"The contrast between a grim-faced pope and the grinning president at the Vatican this past week was not lost on the press or late-night TV. But they missed the mark, it seems to me. They noted merely that the two leaders profoundly disagree on, say, the dignity of immigrants, the sanctity of heterosexual marriage, or the urgency of tackling climate change. While these disagreements exist, they are, it seems to me, merely symptoms of a deeper chasm — the vast, empty, and dark space that lies between Donald Trump and anything resembling Christianity.

 

I don’t believe that there is a Christian politics as such — there is plenty of scope for disagreement about how to translate a Christian worldview into secular politics, or whether to translate it at all. But I do believe there is a Christian set of core human virtues and values, rooted in what we Catholics still think of as the truth, and that those virtues are rooted in the Gospels. We all fail the virtue test, of course, including yours truly, perhaps more than most. But Trump is a special case — because when you think about those virtues, it is very hard to see Donald Trump as anything but a living, breathing, shameless refutation of every single one.

 

Trump is not an atheist, confident yet humble in the search for a God-free morality. He is not an agnostic, genuinely doubtful as to the meaning of existence but always open to revelation should it arrive. He is not even a wayward Christian, as he sometimes claims to be, beset by doubt and failing to live up to ideals he nonetheless holds. The ideals he holds are, in fact, the antithesis of Christianity — and his life proves it. He is neither religious nor irreligious. He is pre-religious. He is a pagan. He makes much more sense as a character in Game of Thrones, a medieval world bereft of the legacy of Jesus of Nazareth, than as a president of a modern, Western country.

He loves the exercise of domination, where Christianity practices subservience. He thrills to the use of force, while Jesus preached nonviolence, even in the face of overwhelming coercion. He is tribal, where Jesus was resolutely universal. He is a serial fantasist, whereas Jesus came to reveal the Truth. He is proud, where Jesus was humble. He lives off the attention of the crowd, whereas Jesus fled the throngs that followed him. He is unimaginably wealthy, while Jesus preached the virtue of extreme poverty. He despises the weak, whom Jesus always sided with. He lies to gain an advantage, while Jesus told the truth and was executed for it. He loathes the “other,” when Jesus’ radical embrace of the outsider lay at the heart of his teaching. He campaigns on fear, which Jesus repeatedly told us to abandon. He clings to his privileged bubble, while Jesus walked the streets, with nothing to his name. His only true loyalty is to his family, while Jesus abandoned his. He believes in torture, while Jesus endured it silently. He sees women as objects of possession and abuse, while Jesus — at odds with his time and place — saw women as fully equal, indeed as the first witnesses to the Resurrection. He is in love with power, while Jesus — possessed of greater power, his followers believe, than any other human being — chose to surrender all of it. If Trump were to issue his own set of beatitudes, they would have to be something like this:

Blessed are the winners: for theirs is the kingdom of Earth.

Blessed are the healthy: for they will pay lower premiums.

Blessed are the rich: for they will inherit what’s left of the earth, tax-free.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for oil and coal: for they will be filled.

Blessed are the merciless: for they are so, so strong.

Blessed are the liars: for they will get away with it.

Blessed are the war-makers: for they will be called very, very smart.

 

Blessed are those who support you regardless: for theirs is the Electoral College.

Blessed are you when others revile you and investigate you and utter all kinds of fake news about you. Rejoice and be glad, for the failing press is dying.

 

The week Trump visited the Vatican, a transcript of his April 29 phone call with the president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, leaked. In it, Trump tells Duterte that his extrajudicial murders of hundreds suspected of being in the drug trade was “an amazing job.” Trump’s proposed budget, released this week, would eviscerate basic support for the poor in order to reward the already stupendously superrich, and would lay waste to the natural world so that our collective wealth, already greater than any country’s in human history, could be goosed some more. His party’s health-care plan would throw 23 million people off their insurance, even as he pretends it will cover everyone. Every pillar of Trump’s essential character is a cardinal sin for Christians: lust, gluttony, greed, envy, anger, and pride. We are all guilty of these, of course, but there is in Trump a centrality to them, a shame-free celebration of them, that is close to unique in the history of the American presidency. I will never understand how more than half of white Catholics could vote for such a man, or how the leadership of the church could be so terribly silent when such a monster stalks the earth.

Then there was his choice to visit Saudi Arabia as his first foreign trip. Of all the countries! Most presidents have begun their foreign excursions with Mexico and Canada, democratic neighbors and trading partners. Not Trump. He picked a gruesome, militarized, misogynist dictatorship, that makes Margaret Atwood’s Gilead look like a feminist playground. It is a country that imports millions of foreign workers in what amounts to near-slavery conditions and that refuses to cooperate in efforts to restrain human trafficking. In a week when extreme Sunni terrorism claimed yet more lives in Manchester, Trump visited the country that was central to spreading Wahhabist ideology and Salafist theology throughout the world in the first place, that funded the precursor to ISIS, that denies minimal freedom of religion, and that gave us the perpetrators of 9/11. While Obama prudently leveraged the Shia-Sunni conflict by engaging Iran as well as the Sunni states, Trump has returned to the pro-Sunni and pro-Israeli playbook.

 

This was particularly weird on the same weekend that Iran — the focus of Trump’s ire — actually held an election, in which both men and women voted. Yes, of course, the choices were constrained by Tehran’s theocracy —but the reelection victory of Rouhani, the architect of the nuclear deal, was striking. Seventy percent of the country turned out, and Rouhani won by a near-20-point margin against his hard-line opponent. He has a mandate for more liberalization, and picked up momentum in the final weeks of the race by emphasizing more liberal themes. This is, of course, Obama’s long game vindicated. The former president gambled that by engaging Iran and getting a nuclear deal, he could buttress the resistance movement that fueled the Green Revolution, and slowly pull Iran back into a more moderate path. While the mullahs’ grip holds, it’s remarkable how successful Obama’s strategy has turned out to be:

 

Despite controlling most unelected councils, the conservative clerics and Revolutionary Guard commanders have suffered a string of political defeats, starting with Mr. Rouhani’s election in 2013. That led to direct talks with their archenemy, the United States, and ultimately to the nuclear deal, which they opposed. Then moderate and reformist candidates made strong gains in last year’s parliamentary elections.

Among the more profound shifts in Iran under Rouhani has been the opening up of superfast internet access, giving ordinary Iranians instant exposure to the West. Can you imagine an election in Saudi Arabia — much less one in which women were allowed to vote and the internet operated as a key pillar of an open media? And the potential for further change only opens up further as the 78-year-old Supreme Leader faces mortality.

 

Of course, the U.S. relationship with the Saudis is worth keeping; and the arms sales are lucrative. I’m a realist. But to throw the American lot entirely in with the Sunnis in the regional Sunni-Shiite war, to embrace the Saudis so openly in Trump’s first trip abroad, to effectively deepen the U.S. involvement in the brutal assault on Yemen that the Saudis have launched, and to punish Iran for its internal liberalization and adherence to the nuclear deal makes absolutely no sense to me. Yes, it serves Israel’s interests, which is why Netanyahu is happy. It enables him to isolate Israel’s key rival in the region, while he further entrenches Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. But it is not at all clear it serves America’s." [Source]

 

Enjoy your  Memorial Day tomorrow, and please remember why we celebrate it in the first place.

 

To all the Vets out there, thank you for your service and sacrifice.

 

To the coward who was too afraid to serve, but now calls himself a leader; may your hypocrisy be exposed for all the world to see.

CAPTION SATURDAY.

I need a caption for this pic.

*Pic from rollingstone.com

"With white liberals like these who needs the right wing?"

I read a great article in Salon.com that I want to share.

The field Negro education series continues.

"Obsessed with their own masochism and insecurity, white leftists keep beating themselves up for Trump's victory

Is there any problem in America not the fault of liberal progressives? Has anyone actually ever met a liberal? What do these people do for fun? Sneer about cultural appropriation, burn American flags, and mock old women wearing crosses?

The idea that every political, social and financial crisis in the United States has a liberal origin is not only the propaganda of right-wing tantrums, but increasingly since the surreal election of Donald Trump, an obsession of liberals themselves. Myopically fixated on their own masochism and pathetic insecurity, they have wasted precious airtime, intellectual energy and freelance budgets of popular publications in attempts to explain how exactly they are to blame for 62 million Americans driving or walking to the polls to vote for a historically illiterate fool whose character actually appears in worse shape than his acumen.

Bernie Sanders, a leftist rather than a liberal, was one of the first to incoherently assign the presidential loss to the failure of “identity politics,” failing to recognize that Donald Trump is the most powerful practitioner of identity politics in the world. Mark Lilla, a Columbia University professor, acted as eloquent parrot to Sanders when he wrote that the Democrats’ fixation on diversity cost them the election. Recently, Bill Maher, whose derangement seems to advance with every television appearance, told Jack Tapper that the Democratic Party failed in 2016 because its leaders “made white people feel like a minority.”

Caitlin Flanagan, an excellent writer regardless of the inanity of her topic, blames Bill Maher for Trump’s victory, or more broadly, “late night comedy.” “When Republicans see these harsh jokes,” Flanagan explained about the humor of Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah and Samantha Bee, “they see exactly what Donald Trump has taught them: that the entire media landscape loathes them, their values, their family, and their religion.” [More here]

Read the rest of that article and tell me your thoughts.

If you want to learn a little bit more about race and politics you will be glad that you did.

The "ugly Americans".

Watching Donald trump push aside that other world leader to get to the front of the line today made me feel embarrassed for him, his family, and our country. Talk about  the"ugly American." He was boorish, ill-mannered, and uncouth. In other words, it was classic trump.

I am not sure what he was trying to prove throughout this NATO visit, but you could tell by watching the other world leaders no one was impressed. He came across like that drunk uncle that everyone tries to avoid at the family barbecue.

And yet, there he was, the leader of the free world, looking and acting like the crude demagogue who griffted his way into the oval office. 

"The incident happened  in Brussels on Thursday

Commenting on the hilarious moment, one twitter user said: “He's like a child trying to be king of the playground, but all the other kids are actually adults.”

Another wrote: “It's obvious they were deliberately ignoring him and he felt uncomfortable.”'

What's scary is that this type of behavior will only get him more love from  some of the people in his base.  "See, this is what we needed, a tough guy to stand up to dem dare Europeans. They don't have that girly man Obama t kick around anymore."

The tough guy persona seems to be working for a certain segment of the GOP base, and, as a result, the tough guy wannabes are the ones being hailed by trump and his minions as the only true Americans.

Even republican politicians running for congress seemed to have gotten into act.

One of them body slammed a reporter for asking him a policy question for crying out loud.

"The bizarre events that unfolded on election eve layered a new level of uncertainty over the congressional contest, which had been seen up until then as Republican Gianforte’s to lose.

The wealthy tech entrepreneur was cited for misdemeanor assault Wednesday night after accusations that he body-slammed Ben Jacobs, a journalist for the Guardian newspaper who was asking the candidate about the House GOP’s healthcare legislation.

*Democrats put up a last-minute radio spot featuring audio of the altercation and suggesting voters ask themselves, “If Greg Gianforte could be sentenced to jail, should he really be elected to Congress?”

Three of Montana’s largest newspapers, the Missoulian, Helena Independent Record and Billings Gazette immediatelyrescinded their endorsement of Gianforte, who has had a reputation in the state for prickliness — especially when dealing with reporters." [Source] 

If he wins he will fit right in with the gang in Washington. Let's be honest, trump created this environment and dangerous situation for reporters by creating a people vs. press atmosphere in America. Remember all those rallies where he encouraged his supporters to attack the reporters who were present? I do.

trump created this atmosphere, and we will all have to live with the consequences.

*Pic from nbcwashington,com