Sean's bad day.

        I like to joke that "I have never had a bad day in my life". I mean just waking up every day means that you have already had a good day, right? 

But even I have to admit that some of my days have been worse than others.

There was the time (while still a teenager) that I took a date to a fancy restaurant thinking that I had enough to pay for the meal, only to realize, after we were seated at the table and looking at our menus, that I couldn't even afford one of the appetizers.

Other days come to mind. Like that Sunday in 2005 when I watched #5 puke over himself in the fourth quarter costing my Birds their first ever Super Bowl.

Still, those days are nothing like the day that Sean Spicer had today.

"The White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, set off an intense backlash on Tuesday when he suggested that President Bashar al-Assad of Syria was guilty of acts worse than Hitler and asserted that Hitler had not used chemical weapons, ignoring the use of gas chambers at concentration camps during the Holocaust. Mr. Spicer later apologized.

During his daily briefing for reporters, Mr. Spicer was defending President Trump’s decision to order a missile strike on Syria by trying to lend gravity to the actions of Mr. Assad. American officials accuse the Syrian president of using sarin gas, a lethal chemical weapon, in an attack on a rebel-held area of Idlib Province last week that killed dozens, many of them children.

 

But in misconstruing the facts of the Holocaust — Nazi Germany’s brutally efficient, carefully orchestrated extermination of six million Jews and others — Mr. Spicer instead drew a torrent of criticism and added to the perception that the Trump White House lacks sensitivity and has a tenuous grasp of history.

 

“We didn’t use chemical weapons in World War II,” Mr. Spicer said. “You know, you had someone as despicable as Hitler who didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons.”

 

He continued, “So you have to, if you are Russia, ask yourself: Is this a country and a regime that you want to align yourself with?”' [Source]

 

Huh???

 

Dude it's Passover! Stop it!

 

Four corrections and an apology later did not make Spicer's comments any less outrageous  and controversial.

 

But this is part of a bigger pattern with this administration and those on the right. This normalization of all things Nazi . It's actually kind of scary if you think about it, and this might actually explain Spicer's outrageous statement. It just didn't seem that out of the main stream to him to make such a declaration about Hitler.   

 

If I were to take a poll and ask who had a worse week between Pepsi, United, or Sean Spicer, who would you choose?  Personally, I would have to go with Sean. United and Pepsi are corporations and they will bounce back. Folks who like to drink Pepsi products will keep drinking them, and United is one of the airlines with a monopoly in this country. They will take a PR hit, but they will ride it out. Folks won't stop flying.  

 

Sean, on the other hand, is a terrible spokesperson working for a terrible president, who-- you heard it here first-- will soon be out of a job. 

 

"I was obviously trying to make a point about the heinous acts that Assad had made against his own people last week, using chemical weapons and gas. Frankly, I mistakenly made an inappropriate and insensitive reference to the Holocaust, for which there is no comparison," Spicer said. "And for that I apologize. It was a mistake to do that."

 

Shake it off, Sean. Tomorrow is another day. For your sake I just hope that our president isn't tweeting tonight. 

 

*Pic from cnn.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Days of dysfunction, chaos, and law breaking.

I hate to keep beating a dead orange horse, but team trump, you really have to get your s**t together.

Let's forget, for a minute, all the seriously wrong,  ill-prepared, and unqualified people the president has appointed to cabinet positions. That is bad, but it's not as bad as his minions breaking the law.

We will start with Kellyanne Polls, who clearly broke the law by promoting the sale of Ivanka trump's products on FOX VIEWS from the White House.

 “I hate shopping, but I’m going to get some myself today,” Conway, a special counselor to the president, said from the White House briefing room. “I’m going to give it a free commercial here, go buy it today.”

Whoops!

Even more egregious than one Conway did, though, is what transpired between the Russian Ambassador to the United States and trump's national security adviser, Michael Flynn. (I hope that he at least knows what the START Treaty is.)

"Michael Flynn, President-elect Donald Trump's choice for national security adviser, held five phone calls with Russia's ambassador to Washington on the day the United States retaliated for Moscow's interference in the U.S. presidential election, three sources familiar with the matter said.

The calls occurred between the time the Russian embassy was told about U.S. sanctions and the announcement by Russian President Vladimir Putin that he had decided against reprisals, said the sources. They spoke on condition of anonymity, citing internal U.S. government deliberations about the issue.


The calls raised fresh questions among some U.S. officials about contacts between Trump's advisers and Russian officials at a time when U.S. intelligence agencies contend that Moscow waged a multifaceted campaign of hacking and other actions to boost Republican Trump's election chances against Democrat Hillary Clinton." [Source]

Of course, the trump administration lied about these calls ever taking place, but now, thanks to good reporting, we are learning that they did.

The craziest part of this story is trump saying that he was not aware of what Flynn did. (If you believe that I have a wonderful antique bell here in Philly with a slight crack on the side to sell you.) Trump, who is always watching the news and wants to know everything going on with all of his people, did not know that General Flynn had conversations with the Russians? I need a break.

Finally, remember that  salacious dossier that contained some rather racy things (ahem ahem, golden showers) about our president that he called "fake news"? Well, as it turns out, it might not be so fake after all.

 "As noted by correspondent Jim Sciutto earlier today, multiple current and former law enforcement and intelligence officials have stated that an intelligence intercept has confirmed some of the conversations described in the dossier.

Sciutto did state that this doesn’t confirm the more extreme allegations made in the dossier but intelligence and law enforcement agencies now have greater confidence in the document’s credibility.

Sciutto also pointed out that when they tried to get a comment from White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer on the story, Spicer told them “we continue to be disgusted by CNN’s fake news reporting.”' [Source]

Sorry Sean, given your administration's track record of late, we are riding with CNN on this one.

Voter fraud from the right. And is Virginia for racists??

"Beware of the hand
When it's comin' from the left
I ain't trippin' just watch ya step
Can't truss it" ~Public Enemy~

Down in Florida the GOP has a problem:

"Republicans on Thursday fired a vendor suspected of submitting 108 questionable new voter registrations in Florida's Palm Beach County, ground zero for disputed ballots in 2000's presidential race.

The Republican Party of Florida used Virginia-based Strategic Allied Consulting to help register and turnout voters in Florida, one of a shrinking handful of states President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney are contesting. The Florida state party had paid the firm more than $1.3 million so far, and the Republican National Committee used the group for almost $3 million of work in Nevada, North Carolina, Colorado and Virginia.

"We have zero tolerance for any threat to the integrity of elections. When we were informed of an alleged incident we immediately cut all ties to the company," RNC Communications Director Sean Spicer said." [Source]

OK, it would be bad but not the end of the world if this was an isolated incident but.....

"What first appeared to be an isolated problem in one Florida county has now spread statewide, with election officials in at least seven counties informing prosecutors or state election officials about questionable voter registration forms filled out on behalf of the Republican Party of Florida.

Lux said there have been forms that listed dead people and were either incomplete or illegible. He met with local prosecutors on Friday, but added that his staff was still going through hundreds of forms dropped off by Strategic employees.
Lux, who is a Republican, said he warned local party officials earlier this month when he first learned the company was paying people to register voters." [Source]

How is this for irony? The GOP is enacting tougher voter ID laws all over the country so that they can suppress minority votes and win the elections stamp out voting fraud, and it seems that they are guilty of fraudulent voting practices themselves. Nice.

Finally, Virginia is not only for lovers, it seems that it also the place of racist republican party leaders as well.

 "The Mecklenburg County Republican Committee has come under fire for posting racist photos of the president on its Facebook page. One image depicts Obama as a caveman; another portrays him as a thug.

The Virginia Republican Party has ordered Mecklenburg County to take the photos off its page. Pat Mullins, chairman of the Republican Party of Virginia, said:

“These kinds of images have no place in political discourse — period. They are offensive, tasteless and should never have been posted anywhere, let alone a local unit’s Facebook page. The Republican Party of Virginia condemns this sort of imagery in the strongest possible terms.”

The photos had been on the page for several months, but it wasn’t until a luncheon event with Republican Senate candidate George Allen on Monday that they started receiving criticism. Allen was campaigning in the state at a luncheon the Mecklenburg County Republican Committee promoted and ProgressVA, which supports Allen’s opponent Timothy M. Kaine, found the photos on the committee’s page. Allen said he had prior knowledge of the photos and has condemned them." [Source] 

So Mr. Macaca Man had "had prior knowledge of the photos"? Oh lawd, I think we have been down this road before.

Anyway, as is to be expected with folks of this ilk, they do not see a problem.

R. Wallace “Wally” Hudson, chairman of the committee, was surprised to hear from a reporter that anyone had taken offense.

“If that group is that sensitive, I’m sorry, they’re just not human,” he said, chuckling. “It’s not American. If they’ve got a problem with it, we’re not going to change what we do.”

I hear you Wally, because being the right kind of "human" is so American.