Caption Saturday.

I need help with a caption for this pic.

Be nice. :)

"Let the record show."

America, you asked for this guy, and now you are in the middle of a real s*&* show. You are watching in real time how a mob boss operates. It just so happens that this one is your president.

Mr. trump lies so easily and without shame, that you have to wonder about his mental makeup.

He held a press conference today, and told lie after lie without shame and hesitation. For a minute there I actually felt bad for the guy. He looked medicated and defeated.  trumpbots, if you took a really close look, you would have noticed that your emperor was naked.

That minute of me feeling bad for this guy didn't last long, though, especially after reading the following post from John Pavlovitz. 

 "Let the record show that I did not consent to this.

Let it show that I did not vote for this man, that he did not represent me, that I did not believe he was deserving of being here, that I grieved his ascension, that I resisted his ugliness.

Let History record my objection to him, to the ways he humiliated women and vilified Muslims and threatened protestors and disregarded people of color.

Let it record my repulsion at his tremendous cruelty, his lack of compassion, his contempt for dissension, his absence of simple decency.

Let witnesses mark down my disgust at the way he boasted of infidelity, at how he ridiculed a disabled reporter, at the way he attacked female opponents for their appearance, at the way he marginalized immigrants.

Let it be remembered that I did not look the other way when women accused him of assault, when the reality of his Russian alliances came to light, when he refused to share his tax records—though large portions of the American media and its people chose to.  

Let it be remembered that I did not buy into the fear that he perpetuated of those with brown skin or hijabs or foreign birthplaces. 

Let the record show that I looked on with disbelief as he spent countless early morning and middle-of-the-night hours following the election on social media, broadcasting a steady stream of petulant, insecure, incoherent messages instead of preparing to do a job he was ill-equipped for and seemingly not all that interested in.

Let the record show that I watched him assemble a Cabinet of billionaires and bigots, of people woefully unqualified to steward our children, our safety, our healthcare, our financial stability—and that I was horrified by it all.

Let it be remembered that my faith would not allow me to fall in line behind this man while so many professed religious people did; that I saw nothing resembling Jesus in him, and that to declare him Christian would have been to toss aside everything I grew up believing faith in Christ manifested in a life.  

Let History record my grieving at the racism and bigotry and homophobia that characterized his campaign, marked his supporters, and is evident in his assembling Administration.
Let it be known that I was one of the more than 65 million people who voted for Hillary Clinton; who understood that though not perfect, she was an intelligent, experienced, passionate public servant with the temperament, commitment, and qualifications to lead and lead well. 

Let the record show that I greatly lamented the day of his inauguration, and that I promised to join together with other good people to loudly resist and oppose every unscrupulous, dangerous, unjust and dishonest act this new Administration engages in. 

History has been littered with horrible people who did terrible things with power, because too many good people remained silent. And since my fear is that we are surely entering one of those periods in our story, I wanted to make sure that I was recorded for posterity:

I do not believe this man’s actions are normal. 
I do not believe he is emotionally stable.
I do not believe he cares about the full, beautiful diversity of America.
I do not believe he respects women.
I do not believe he is pro-life other than his own.
I do not believe the sick and the poor and the hurting matter to him in the slightest.
I do not believe he is a man of faith or integrity or nobility. 
I do not believe his concern is for anything outside his reflection in the mirror.
I believe he is a danger to our children.
I believe he is a threat to our safety.
I believe he is careless with our people.
I believe he is reckless with his power.

I believe America is less secure, less diverse, less compassionate, and less decent under his leadership. And if I prove to be wrong, it will be one of the most joyful errors of my life. I will own these words and if necessary, willingly and gladly admit my misjudgment because it will mean that America is a better and stronger nation, and the world a more peaceful place.
But right now I don’t see that happening. 

Right now I am worried for my country, concerned for our planet, scared for the future of my children, and greatly saddened that 62 million Americans seem okay with all of this.

Let the record show that I was not okay with it.

Not at all." 

Hat tip to you sir. I want the record and history to be clear where I stand as it relates to this man as well. 

Is it time?

   The following article was written by Quin Hillyer for the Washington Examiner. And it outlines why Mr. trump should be impeached.

I am cut and pasting this one because of all the articles calling for Mr. trump to be impeached, this one does the best job of laying out why the crime boss in chief may have crossed his final line.   

"Based simply on what President Trump has admitted to, combined with one piece of as-yet-uncontradicted reporting, Trump has committed impeachable offenses in his dealings with Ukraine.

To understand why, let’s do something that should be second-nature, especially to journalists, but which very few people practice anymore: Let’s analyze the situation while removing all names and all partisan and ideological affiliations. Let’s also stipulate that the targets of the president’s interest (in this case Hunter and Joe Biden) are guilty as sin. (They probably are not guilty of criminal wrongdoing, but let’s assume they are.)

We know, because (1) the president said so this weekend and (2) an uncontradicted Wall Street Journal report detailed the intensity with which the president did it, that the president of the United States urged a foreign leader to investigate U.S. citizens who are not under U.S. investigation and who are not fugitives from U.S. justice. Absent any explanations not yet known, this is bizarre.
There are times when the U.S. government intervenes in matters of foreign investigations to demand that U.S. citizens receive due process. In other words, U.S. interests are ensuring that American citizens have adequate defenses against foreign kangaroo courts. There also are times when U.S. citizens have been duly indicted in U.S. courts but have fled justice. In those cases, the U.S. government, even including the president, might press foreign governments to help extradite the U.S. fugitive.  

Never in my conscious memory, though, have I heard of an American president urging a foreign nation to investigate specific U.S. citizens who were not on the lam from American law. (I welcome correction here, but either way, the examples would have to be vanishingly rare.) For this to happen, in any instance, would be outlandish, especially if there is no obvious U.S. security interest in pursuing the American targets. The president is responsible for the U.S. system of justice, not for alleged (but very vague) violations, by Americans, of foreign law.

Now add the element of the specific identity of the American citizens whom the president wants targeted. These aren’t some sort of U.S.-based international mobsters. These aren’t any of a number of American businessmen trading influence and cutting corners in international commerce. Instead, these happen to be the president’s main perceived political rival, and his son.

In short, these circumstances involve a president using the prestige of his office to urge a foreign government to harass the president’s main political rival. In such a case, it doesn’t even matter if the political rival is guilty. Even if the rival is guilty of some foreign violation, that is not a reasonable excuse for the president to use such pressure. Remember, there are so far no substantive allegations — zero, zilch, nada — that either the rival or his son broke U.S. law. The president has no authority or legitimate interest in this based on his public office; his only interest here is political, meaning to hurt his rival.

That the president’s interests in this matter are personal/political rather than legitimately public is confirmed by the extraordinary efforts made by the president’s personal, private lawyer (I'm referring to Rudy Giuliani, not Michael Cohen) to pressure the foreign government in the same direction. The lawyer has acknowledged that he regularly briefed the president on these efforts, that he used the State Department to line up his interactions with Ukraine’s president for this purpose, and that the Ukrainians offered to reopen the investigation specifically in the same conversations in which they begged for a formal meeting between the two nations’ presidents. Yet the lawyer insisted he was acting in his capacity as the U.S. president’s personal lawyer, specifically (as paraphrased by the Washington Post) to “make sure” the rival “didn’t become president without having to answer” for the alleged corruption.

Remember, both the president and his lawyer have now acknowledged the essentials of this situation. The lawyer carried on these efforts for months, while reporting to the president. The president used an Oval Office phone call to emphasize his interest — eight times, reportedly — in the case. If these reports remain uncontradicted, and barring context that makes them more palatable, this is a big deal.
Already, then, even without a suggested quid pro quo involving U.S. military assistance, what we appear to have is an entirely illegitimate mingling of the president's personal political interests with his diplomatic and law enforcement powers.

This alone would be impeachable, and far worse than anything Trump was suspected of in connection with the whole Russia-collusion business. It would represent an attempt on Trump's part to leverage the presidential office to get a personal favor from the leader of a foreign country desperately needing U.S. support against Russia. And Trump was supposedly asking this foreign leader for the personal favor of investigating American citizens not accused of violating U.S. law. Naturally, it came without any guarantee or request for due process for the American citizens involved.

Now add in the element of military assistance. The president and his lawyer say there was no direct quid pro quo. We’ll see. The president was ambivalent about assisting Ukraine and was in fact slow-walking the assistance, even though the American public, through its representatives, had specifically authorized it. Ukraine needed the assistance desperately enough that an inappropriate presidential request might have seemed like a lot more than a friendly ask.

This would be a manipulation and misuse of American aid, taxpayer-financed, for a purely political interest of the president’s. Remember, in this case the president did not release the aid again until after press reports began suggesting that the aid delay was somehow tied to the president’s political interests. He made no other substantive explanation for why the aid was now justified when a month earlier he had felt necessary to delay its delivery.

Even if the president’s rival and his son were guilty of violating Ukrainian law, all of the above-mentioned presidential behavior would be impeachable. There was no national-security interest involved in prosecuting the rivals, no readily apparent American system-of-justice interest, and no other known “reason of state” why these particular American citizens should be particularly targeted.
Finally, if the quid pro quo were explicit or directly hinted at, the case for removal would be such a slam-dunk that it should be accomplished within mere months. Either way, unless Trump convincingly walks back his own and Giuliani's remarks in the last few days confirming the broad gist of these reports, the pressure alone merits removal from office." [Source]

*Pic from politico.com

Caption Saturday.

I need a caption for this pic. 

Example: Who needs a wallet? 

Who is on the line?

So this happened in America. The president was on the phone with a foreign leader and what he was saying so "alarmed" a member of the intelligence community and the individual went to his superior as a whistle- blower and told them that what the president was saying to this other world leader (cough cough, Putin) was a threat do national security. The communication was coded, URGENT.

All of this, of course, will not matter to the cult of trump. They will make excuses for the president's actions and declare that whatever he was doing he was doing it to make America great again. Just more "fake news". 

To be fair, the president of the United States can say pretty much whatever he wants to a foreign leader. As someone said earlier, he can promise to sell Alaska to the Russians and that shouldn't prompt an intelligence official sounding a national security alarm. So clearly what was said had to be bad enough to get this senior intelligence person's attention.   

What the president might (or might not) have said to a foreign leader (cough, cough, Putin) might have been devastating, but what we know happened next is just as troubling. The justice department, as they have been known to do, has been stonewalling congress and covering for their president.

"The complaint was deemed "credible and urgent" by Mr. Atkinson and so he brought it to the House Intelligence Committee's attention, as required by law. Trump's "acting" Director of Intelligence, Joseph Maguire, stepped in and blocked disclosure to the Committee, in defiance of the law that says it "shall be" given to Congress. This is yet another coverup by the most corrupt administration in history. But, this is critical intelligence that cannot be delayed for 6 months while it winds through the courts, and indeed, should not go to court at all."

I have to give trump credit, though, he hit the jackpot with Bill Barr. Here is a man who has been acting more like trump's personal lawyer than someone who is supposed to be the chief law enforcement official for the people of the United States. Barr will do everything in his power to make sure that whatever Mr. trump said to that world leader will not see the light of day.

Sadly, as I have written countless times when writing about the behavior of the grifter in charge, this too shall pass. The American people have trump shenanigans overload, and nothing seems to change what has already been baked into the cake. He will just keep lying, stealing, and bluffing his way though this presidency. And we will keep shaking our heads and wondering how in the hell people can in good conscience continue to support him. 

*Pic from theroot.com 

Scared yet?

The rapper Common must have been reading my mind. I say this because of his recent comments about Mr. trump's mental health.

"He may be the most powerful person on Earth, but Donald Trump needs help, in the opinion of the famously enlightened American rapper Common.

"You can see his actions and behaviour are that of somebody who don't really love themselves," said the singer, who revealed how therapy turned his life around earlier this year in his bestselling memoir, "Let Love Have the Last Word".

The US president is a victim of his own out-of-control ego, the Chicago-born performer of hits like "The Light" commented to AFP before a show in Paris at the weekend.

Trump has "got some issues going on. And those issues need to be resolved," Common said.

"Narcissism is something that can be dealt with. Therapy can help that. And I would subscribe every leader (to it), even if you were a good leader," he told AFP.

"So somebody would really help the country and the world if they would" take the US president aside and tell him, "'Hey, this needs to be part of your programme, some therapy'."

Common speaks from experience with therapy. In his memoir and the accompanying album, "Let Love", the rapper opens up about his time on the couch that helped him put his childhood abuse behind him and grow as a man.

- 'Be quiet and listen' -" [Source] 

This of course is all true, but it's sad because we know that the last thing that Donald trump will do is "be quiet and listen." It's just not in him. A seventy plus year old man with an out of control ego and showing early signs (or late depending on who you ask) of dementia is not going to go quietly into the night. 

Of course none of this would matter to us if the guy was still some cartoonish reality talk show host telling washed up B list actors and celebrities that they are fired on his show. Sadly, the stuff he does has serious implications and could mean life or death to thousands and thousands of people. This just isn't  funny anymore. 

The Middle East is on the verge of war and our own Private Bone Spurs is tweeting threats to the Iranians on twitter. Mind you we don't even know if they Iranians are to blame for bombing the Saudis precious oil plants. They say they are not, and trump says that they are. Isn't it sad when you believe the Iranians more than you do your own president? Private Bone Spurs declared that we are "locked and loaded" and he put the Iranians on notice that we are ready to proceed. He also tweeted that what we do depends on who the Saudis believe bombed their facilities. And here I thought the will of the American people came first. Silly me. 

Peter Wehner, writing for The Atlantic, had the following to say about trump's fitness for office: 

" Donald Trump’s disordered personality—his unhealthy patterns of thinking, functioning, and behaving—has become the defining characteristic of his presidency. It manifests itself in multiple ways: his extreme narcissism; his addiction to lying about things large and small, including his finances and bullying and silencing those who could expose them; his detachment from reality, including denying things he said even when there is video evidence to the contrary; his affinity for conspiracy theories; his demand for total loyalty from others while showing none to others; and his self-aggrandizement and petty cheating."[ Source]

This is all true. And it  makes Mr. trump scary as hell. 

 *pic from reddit.com.

Caption Saturday.

I need a caption for this pic.

Racism and the right.

The following is an article written for the New York Times opinion page by Ross Douthat.

I disagree with some of  what he says, but it's still a must read for those want to educate themselves about what is going on with American politics in the age of trump. 

"Last week I wrote a column that simultaneously argued that conservatism has a problem with white-nationalist infiltration and that liberalism, influenced by the revival of racial chauvinism in the Trump era, is increasingly tempted to smear mainstream conservatives as racist.

The response was varied, but a common critique from the left was that any defense of individual conservatives from the charge of racism is basically irrelevant to the underlying structural reality that the Trump era has exposed — which is that the American right’s coalition is founded on racism, endures because of racism and has no future as a morally decent force unless it is essentially refounded, its racist roots torn out.

One of the more temperate versions of this argument was offered by New York magazine’s Zak Cheney-Rice, taking on my own essay and a column by Tim Carney of The Washington Examiner calling for conservative institutions to make themselves inhospitable to white identity politics. Such calls are well and good, wrote Cheney-Rice, but they wildly understate the challenge:

… racism has been fundamental to American conservatism, and the G.O.P. in particular, since the mid-20th century realignment of the parties — even as its purportedly defining tenets have proven to be negotiable, from small government to antagonism toward autocrats to reduced deficit spending. None of this precludes the existence of nonracist conservatives, to be sure. It just makes them some of the least influential people in their movement, and renders their claims to broader relevance akin to shouting into a void.

Cheney-Rice goes on to catalog various conservative policies, from border detention camps to voter-ID laws, that reflect the deeper-than-Donald-Trump influence of racism on the right. He argues that the various conservative factions have consistently made their peace with racism and racist policies since Richard Nixon, not just since 2016. And he suggests that since “the Republican Party would collapse without support from racists,” there is probably no path to a nonracist G.O.P. that doesn’t involve the total defeat and total reconstruction of the party. 

Cheney-Rice is right that there is considerably more racism on the right than Republican Party elites wanted to believe pre-Trump and that the elite has conspicuously failed to confront its more overt and toxic forms — which is part of how we ended up with a birther as the president of the United States. In the longer view, he’s also right that white identity politics has been important to the conservative coalition since the 1960s, when the strategic and policy choices that the Nixon-era Republican Party made — in effect, rallying voters who opposed the Great Society’s vision of racial redress — ensured that a lot of racially conservative and racist white voters would migrate into the G.O.P. 

But I disagree with Cheney-Rice that these underlying realities make change, indeed dramatic change, in how conservative politics approaches race all but unimaginable. 

Some of that difference reflects philosophical differences about what constitutes racist public policy: I think conservatism can be nonracist, or at least substantially less racialized, without embracing the current progressive definition (from reparations to substantialimmigration increases to single-payer health care) of what anti-racism requires. But some of it reflects a different interpretation of the complexities of conservative policy history, and how our politics has reduced racial polarization in the past. 

Those complexities first: If it’s true that conservative politicians, in the age of Trump and earlier, have supported policies that disadvantage minorities, it’s also true that the record of every post-Nixon Republican administrations has mixed other policies as well. Nixon himself accepted elements of the Great Society even as he undermined others. As Noah Smith pointed out recently, the modern multiracial America was forged as much by eight years of Ronald Reagan’s pro-immigration conservatism as by the original liberalizing 1965 reforms. George W. Bush’s administration sharply increased education spending in the hopes of closing racial gaps, pushed a homeownership agenda with a similar purpose, and started an AIDS-in-Africa initiative that saved millions of nonwhite lives. And for all his race-baiting, even Trump has pursued policies that don’t fit the white-identitarian frame — most notably a criminal-justice reform that built on state-by-state efforts that were championed by religious conservatives and libertarians as often as by Democrats.

So it’s been possible, in various ways and at various moments, for the post-Nixon Republican Party to be something other than just a coalition defending white supremacy. (There has also been somewhat more racism lurking below the surface of progressive politics over the same period — as genteel eugenics, as elite NIMBYism, as left-wing or Sharptonian anti-Semitism — than most polemics against the right acknowledge, but that’s a subject for another time.)

And the racialized element in conservative politics has also ebbed and flowed depending on the political situation. When I came to political awareness in the early 1990s, American politics was dominated by racially polarizing controversies over crime, welfare and affirmative action. But by the time I graduated from college, a decade later, those issues had receded, the major cultural controversies had changed and conservatism’s agenda under the younger Bush was consciously designed to win over at least some minority voters and leave the Lee Atwater era behind.

That change didn’t happen because the Republican Party was destroyed and refounded in 1999. It happened because the racialized issues dividing the country circa 1992 were somewhat successfully addressed by politicians of both parties, or else partly resolved themselves. The Clinton-Gingrich years brought compromises on welfare reform and affirmative action, successful policing strategies that helped bring down the crime rate, and an economic boom that made every policy debate seem somewhat less zero-sum. The subsequent turn to “compassionate conservatism” happened because these shifts happened first; the Republican voter base didn’t suddenly become perfectly racially enlightened, but the salience of race changed dramatically as crime rates fell and welfare was reformed.And this shift was not just a case of white America making deals at black America’s expense and congratulating itself. Blacks as well as whites had a relatively optimistic view of race relations around the turn of the millennium, and that sentiment persisted until Barack Obama’s second term. Racial polarization hardly disappeared, especially in the voting booth, but it was more muted in the George W. Bush era than before or since. And it might have remained muted if the Bush administration had not fallen into a very different error than racism — the error of unbounded moralistic optimism, which after the Iraq disaster and the financial crisis made darker, more culturally pessimistic varieties of conservatism seem like wisdom to many voters on the right.

So without arguing that racism is going to disappear outright from conservative politics after this presidency, the recent historicalrecord at least suggests that another muting could happen, another substantial diminishment of racial polarization, at some point in the post-Trump future. Especially since there is little evidence that Trump himself is making Americans or Republicans more racist, or that his most racially polarizing strategies are actually politically effective: Instead, his main achievement has been to activate latent bigotries rather than expand their influence, and what can be activated can presumably be suppressed.

If you draw lessons from the 1990s and 2000s, that suppression would require more than just the quarantine of overt white supremacists (though it does require that). First, following the pattern of the crime and welfare debates, it would probably require a sense among populist voters that today’s equivalent to those controversies, the debate over the pace of immigration and the security of the southern border, had been addressed in a way that wasn’t just a capitulation to the left or to big business.

Second, it would require a recovery of influence and moral ambition by the Republican Party’s religious conservatives — a group whose elites shaped the Bush presidency’s racially inclusive efforts and whose rank-and-file are still less inclined to white-identity politics than other conservative constituencies, despite their Faustian bargain with Trump.

Third, it would require some clear successes by Democrats in states like Texas and Georgia, where the G.O.P. is currently hanging on to power with thinning white majorities, to prove to Republican politicians that a strategy of voter-ID laws and base turnout really is as foredoomed as optimistic liberals hope.

Finally, it would require imaginative statesmanship by the next generation of Republican leaders, who would be wise to recognize that the Democratic Party’s leftward shift — and particularly the way that white liberals have lately overleapt minorities in their racial pessimism — is an opportunity and not just a threat, because it leaves a potential pan-ethnic center available for a less bunkered and bigoted populist conservatism to claim.

This list of requirements is not small, and there are plenty of reasons to doubt they will be met. The media ecology has changed since the late 1990s in ways that make suppression and quarantine more difficult. Trump himself had the opportunity and the credibility to make a base-satisfying deal on immigration, but that opportunity has passed. Religious conservatism’s compromise with Trumpism may ultimately prove fatal to its influence. The Democrats’ leftward move should inspire entrepreneurship and outreach from Republicans, but it could help sustain the G.O.P.’s own base strategy instead. Many G.O.P. donors prefer a party of white-identity politics and tax cuts to the more economically populist and ethnically diverse alternative. And Trump’s toxic Twitter influence will endure, no doubt, even once his presidency has ended.

But meeting the requirements doesn’t seem obviously less plausible than the world imagined by some fervent Trumpists, where the G.O.P. somehow holds onto power just by winning an ever larger share of the white vote — or for that matter the world imagined by certain hopeful liberals, where the G.O.P. remains a white-identitarian party and simply gets steamrollered into irrelevance as in California.

My scenario also has one piece of grim plausibility going for it: It wouldn’t end the hysterical polarization that defines our times so much as redirect it. A religious-populist conservatism with more appeal to blacks and Hispanics could easily inspire as much fear and anxiety among liberal mandarins as the current Trumpist version. And instead of defending conservatives against charges of racism, I could get back to my true vocation: defending conservatives against charges of theocracy.

Someday, God willing. Someday." [Source]

*Pic from defenseone.com

The death of outrage.

Let's play a little game. Imagine, if you will, former president Barack Obama playing fast and loose with American intelligence, and causing a high level American asset to be called out of the field. Imagine him publishing secret missile sites to millions of people. Imagine him planning a meeting with the Taliban at Camp David  the very same week that Americans remember the September 11th attacks on this country. Imagine him saying nasty things every day to ordinary American citizens, while praising murderers and dictators. Imagine him spending over thirty percent of his time in office playing golf or being on a property that caters to those who play golf. Imagine a president Obama lying about the track of a Hurricane and commanding the leader of the agency charged with telling us about hurricanes to lie to us. 

I can tell you what would happen. That Negro would be out of office so face he wouldn't know what hit him. He would be impeached and tried for treason. His wife would also be arrested and his youngest daughter would become a ward of the state. Remember what happened when he wore a tan suit? Republicans lost their minds.

I am not sure why there is no outrage over all the things the things that this president has done. I suspect that there are folks in this country who will support him no matter what he does, because he has something in common with them that trumps (pun intended) everything that he does. His whiteness. It's why he can get away all that he has been doing, and Barack Obama would have been run out of DC on the impeachment bus.

Some of us are outraged, and some of us will continue to shout from the mountain tops about what is going on in this country. Unfortunately some is not enough, There are a lot of people in this country who are fine with what Mr. trump is doing, and enough of them will vote to make the next election close.

Sharpie Saturday.

 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

I want to thank the very creative folks on twitter for these pics.  

Oh, and seven days later trump is still lying about the Hurricane forecast and Alabama.  

Sharpie-gate, and the lie that keeps getting bigger.

Someone please tell Mr. trump that this sharpie fiasco has gone on long enough. What should have been a one day news story that just pretty much confirms that he is a liar who will lie about the smallest of things, has turned into what is now being called sharpiegate.

Mr. trump has doubled and tripled down on his ridiculous and dangerous lie that the people of Alabama were in harms way when Hurricane Dorian was heading towards the United States. It is a lie that was proven wrong, and that the authorities in Alabama had to quickly correct before their citizens went into a full blown panic. And yet this petty man who some of you chose to elect as your president insists on perpetrating a fraudulent story.

The kicker was when he held a press briefing and used a sharpie to include Alabama in the hurricane's track. (A little stunt that was illegal to boot.) That would have been the low point in any normal presidency, but we are talking about Donald trump here, so that probably registers somewhere in the middle on the outrage meter.

And  still he won't let it go.

The following is from the Washington Post:

"He posted nine tweets and five maps about Alabama and the big storm.

He defended a doctored hurricane map that had been altered with a black Sharpie to include the state.

And he had his White House release a 225-word statement defending his erroneous warnings that Alabama was “going to get a piece” of the storm.

As Hurricane Dorian battered the Carolinas with torrential rain and wind Thursday, President Trump remained fixated on sunny Alabama — a state he falsely claimed was in the storm’s crosshairs long after it was in the clear.

For a fourth straight day, Trump’s White House sought to clean up the president’s mistaken warnings to Alabama from Sunday, seeking to defend Trump’s tweets by releasing statements, disseminating alternative hurricane maps and attacking the media.

Trump also took to Twitter again to defend his use of a doctored and outdated hurricane map that looped in Alabama using black marker — the latest iteration in a days-long, administration-wide campaign on the topic....

Tim O’Brien, a Trump biographer and executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion, said the Alabama claims underscore the president’s belief that admitting error is a sign of weakness.

“He’s doubling down on the worst sides of his troubled personality — to never admit an error and to continue obsessing about it, and emphasizing it, when it doesn’t serve him well to do so,” he said. “He doesn’t move along because he is incapable of moving along.”

Trump, who canceled a trip to Poland to monitor the storm, was especially sensitive to the criticism he has received for misrepresenting the hurricane’s path, according to current and former officials.

“Always good to be prepared! But the Fake News is only interested in demeaning and belittling,” Trump tweeted Monday, complaining about an ABC News report that highlighted the discrepancy between Trump’s warnings to Alabama and the government’s assurance that the state was not under threat." [Source]

We are all under a threat. The threat of Donald trump. 

Finally, there is a story breaking tonight from Mother Jones about Mr. trump's finances, and a mysterious $50 million loan that he says that he owes to one of his own companies. If you care anything about what is happening with the conman in Washington you will give it a quick read. [Read here.]

 .