Sprinklers needed.

         "New York (CNN)A fire broke out at Trump Tower on Saturday, leaving one man dead and six firefighters injured, the New York City Fire Department said.

Police identified the man killed as Todd Brassner, 67, a resident of the building's 50th floor. He was taken to the hospital in critical condition but later died, said spokeswoman Angelica Conroy of the Fire Department.

Brassner was unconscious and unresponsive when firefighters pulled him out, the New York Police Department said. The medical examiner's office will determine the cause of death.

The fire was contained to the 50th floor of the tower, located on Fifth Avenue in New York. It was ruled under control around 9 p.m., two hours after it was originally reported, the FDNY tweeted.

Six firefighters suffered injuries that are not life threatening, Conroy said.

Read More

No members of the Trump family were at the tower during the fire, Fire Commissioner Daniel Nigro said.

The upper-level residential floors are not equipped with fire sprinklers, according to Nigro. When asked to comment on the President's tweet, Nigro said the building "sure stood up quite well."

His son, Eric Trump, also congratulated the firefighters before news of the death, saying "the @FDNY and @NYPD are truly some of the most incredible people anywhere!"

Brassner's apartment was valued at $2.5 million, according to bankruptcy documents from 2015. Brassner had an extensive collection of prized works of art, including a portrait of himself by Andy Warhol, as well as hundreds of guitars and ukeleles, according to the bankruptcy documents.

The fire at Trump Tower comes three months after a minor fire broke out in a cooling tower on the roof of the building, according to CNN affiliate WCBS-TV. Two people were injured in the fire, which officials said may have been caused by electrical heaters inside the cooling tower.

CNN's Gabriela Milian reported from New York and Amir Vera wrote in Atlanta. CNN's Melanie Schuman, Tony Marco, Polo Sandoval, Linh Tran and Evan Simko-Bednarski contributed to this report." {Source} 

Consider that fire at Trump Tower a forewarning of things to come for America. 

The president, typical trump fashion, tweeted about the incident, but rather that tweeting his concern for the welfare of all concerned, he bragged about how "well built" his building is.  

Of course he didn't tweet about this:

"Subsequent updates to the codes required commercial skyscrapers to install sprinklers retroactively, but owners of older residential high-rises are not required to install them unless the building undergoes major renovations.

Some fire safety advocates pushed for a requirement that older apartment buildings be retrofitted with sprinklers when the city passed a law requiring them in new residential high-rises in 1999, but officials in the administration of then-mayor Rudolph Giuliani said that would be too expensive.

Trump was among the developers who spoke out against the retrofitting as unnecessary and expensive." [Source] 

Think of that building-Trump Tower- as America, and think of poor Mr. Brassner as the American people.

*Pic from nbcphiladelphia.com

   

CAPTION SATURDAY.

• 

I need a caption for this pic.

*Pic from reddit.com

Tired of "winning".

Matt Bai is still one of the best writers in America.

This is his latest on America's leader.

The Field Negro education series continues.

"These should be President Trump’s best days in office. The tax bill that marked his first (and only) real legislative achievement has grown more popular in recent weeks. His blowhard rhetoric toward North Korea appears to have yielded a rare diplomatic opening. He’s revived a couple of his most resonant campaign themes, slapping tariffs on China and threatening to send soldiers to patrol the southern border.

And yet, Trump’s approval ratings seem barely to have budged. According to a series of polls in the last few weeks (leaving aside a single conservative-leaning outlier), four in 10 Americans, give or take, are happy with his presidency.

How can this be?

Trump loyalists will point out that his ratings are several points higher than his all-time low, and that no less revered a president than Ronald Reagan was in the same ballpark at this time in his presidency. But Reagan was battling a prolonged recession; Trump should be riding a wave of recovery.

No, a Trump Malaise descends on the country, and it can only be about one thing, as the president himself surely understands. After all, he warned us it would happen, and now his prophecy has come to pass.

We’re tired of winning already.

We laughed at the oracle when he made this prediction. But we didn’t really hear him.

When Trump first started appearing on our television screens as a candidate, sometimes for hours at a time without paying a dollar for the privilege or being interrupted by any pesky interviewers, America was beset by pessimism.

For decades, we had watched as automation and the rise of foreign manufacturers decimated our industries and hollowed out whole communities. We had seen America’s preeminent role as a superpower shaken by rivals with nuclear ambitions and by zealots living in caves.

“Win the future” had been one of President Obama’s hundred slogans — for about 10 minutes, anyway. The truth was we were fighting the future to a draw, at best, and everybody knew it.

And then along came Trump, like a real-life Music Man with a truckload of fetching red hats. If he became president, Trump said, America would all of a sudden start winning again. Our rural areas and small cities would bounce back. Our borders would be safe. Our government would work for everyone.

There was just one catch. We’d win so much, Trump said, that we’d eventually grow tired of winning. He knew what he was talking about. Because Trump had been winning all his life.

He was born a winner, with a dad who made a small fortune in real estate. He gambled that fortune on big-city skyscrapers and faux-classic casinos and exclusive golf courses the color of money, and he won again and again, if you don’t count a couple of nettlesome bankruptcies and a huge payout to victims of his scam university. (And, you know, the frozen steaks.)

So Trump understood how empty winning can be. How you think it’s going to soothe all your demons and wipe away all your cares, how you assume that once your team finally wins the championship you will wake up every morning with a smile on your face, but in the end it just leads to a void of disappointment and self-doubt.

And here we are.

Trump’s been pretty much the president he said he would be, even before he seized control of his own administration a few weeks ago and started replacing milquetoast policymakers with like-minded TV celebrities.

He’s told the Europeans and other allies who relied on our leadership for the last century to go figure things out for themselves.

He’s done his damnedest to discredit the entire idea of America as a nation of immigrants who share common values.

He’s responded to the Russian czar’s threat to nuke Florida by congratulating him on his hard-fought fake-election win and suggesting he visit Washington.

Thanks to Trump’s tax cuts and military buildup, we’re now rocketing toward an economic calamity in which just servicing the interest on our spiraling debt, coupled with our other obligations, will push interest rates higher and crowd out almost everything else the federal government does.

Oh, I know what you’re saying: This doesn’t sound like winning at all. But that’s only because you misunderstood what Trump was trying to say.

Trump doesn’t define winning the way you and I do. It’s not about giving back or improving people’s lives; as I’ve written before, Trump has never done that anywhere, unless you count remodeling a skating rink.

Winning, in Trump’s mind, wasn’t about us. It was about him.

It’s about ratings and primacy. Trump wants more than anything to exist outside of himself, to occupy your screens and your emotions. He always has.

Losing, to Trump, is receding from center stage. Winning is finding one way after another to keep us riveted to the show.

So Trump is absolutely delivering on his promise. He’s winning and winning and winning. Every day, it seems, he taps some new well of audacity, willing himself to become the overarching story of our time.

Even the reimagining of an old TV sitcom becomes a national conversation not because of anything that happens on the show itself, but because of what its star says about Trump, in the script and in real life. They should call it “Roseanne in Trumpland.”

Another win for the president.

And yes, we’re winning, too. Because like it or not, America has become the world’s Donald Trump. We’re shameless, unpredictable, outrageous. We’re a never-ending spectacle from which no one can look away. We’re the topic of all conversation, too.

We horrify and fascinate, and then we get up the next morning and somehow figure out how to do it again.

And we haven’t yet seen just how crazy and sordid this whole Russia investigation might become, dragging the country into yet another prolonged legal drama with unbelievable ratings, amazing, like you’ve never seen.

Of course Trump’s idea of winning feels deflating to most of us. It’s exhausting. It’s disorienting. It’s like putting your face up to an industrial fan every hour of the day.

It seeps into our dreams — all this dissembling and smallness and provocation bursting onto our TV crawls and iPhone screens — and when we wake up, we’re not an inch closer to giving our kids the America we promised them.

But you can’t really blame the president. He told us right from the start that we’d get tired of the whole noisy routine.

We were just too busy gawking to listen." [Source]

*Pic from rawstory.com

Open thread Wednesday.

 It's open thread Wednesday folks, and I need your thoughts on a few things that I have been thinking about.

Feel free to tell me what's on your mind as well.

If Martin Luther King, Jr were alive today, where would he stand on current political issues?

Is it a big deal for Bob Mueller to be questioning Russian oligarchs?

Do you think that the scandal with Sinclair Media is a big deal? 

Is it right for liberals to call for advertisers to boycott right wingnuts who say and do outrageous things?     

Do you want to hear details about Bill O' Reilly's sexual escapades?  

When do you think white folks will learn that black face in all forms is wrong?

"Kindezi Old Fourth Ward sincerely apologizes and accepts responsibility for the hurt, anger, frustration and disappointment caused by the poor judgment we made in having students use masks that mimic blackface," the school posted to its Facebook page on Friday."

Mr. trump is sending  the National Guard to the Mexican border, is that a waste of our money? 

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/news/nation-world/article207665039.html#storylink=cpy

If it walks like a bigot.....

The following essay was written by William Saletan.

The Field Negro education series continues:

"I don’t like to accuse people of racism. That word is used far too often, unjustly, to smear good men and women. It has been thrown at House Speaker Paul Ryan, Sen. John McCain, former Gov. Mitt Romney, and other decent conservatives. It has been attributed to anyone who defends law enforcement or opposes a government program. When everyone on the right is a white nationalist or white supremacist, these terms lose their meaning.

But Donald Trump is a racist. He meets what Ryan himself once called the “textbook definition” of racism. Trump singles out particular ethnic, racial, and religious groups for suspicion. He holds all members of these groups responsible for the misdeeds of other members. He casts aspersions on individuals based on creed and background. And he explicitly advocates discrimination. If these behaviors don’t define bigotry, nothing does.

Let’s give Trump the benefit of the doubt in every case where his conduct could be explained, even implausibly, by something other than prejudice. Housing discrimination by his father’s company? Young Donald wasn’t directly involved. The Central Park Five? He thought they were guilty. Questioning Barack Obama’s birthplace? Trump just wanted to be thorough. His failure to denounce David Duke? Trump couldn’t hear the question. Calling the removal of Confederate statues an attack on “our culture”? He meant we should own our history. Calling Sen. Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas”? He’s being ironic. Hounding NFL players who kneel? He feels strongly about the national anthem. Set aside all of that, and you’re still left with four patterns that can’t be explained away.

The first is Trump’s habit of associating certain ethnic or religious groups with violence. In 2013, he targeted blacks, writing on Twitter that “the overwhelming amount of violent crime in our major cities is committed by blacks and hispanics.” He also retweeted fake black-on-white crime data. In 2015, he kicked off his presidential campaign with a tirade against Mexican immigrants: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” Later that year, Trump claimed to have seen thousands of people cheering the 9/11 attacks in northern New Jersey, “where you have large Arab populations.” In each case, Trump imagined or misrepresented the threat. He never does this to whites.

Within these groups, Trump blames the innocent for failing to control the guilty. He has held Barack Obama responsible for black crime, explicitly because Obama is black. “President Obama has absolutely no control (or respect) over the African American community” Trump wrote in 2014 during the riots in Ferguson, Missouri. A year later, Trump jeered, “Our great African American President hasn’t exactly had a positive impact on the thugs who are so happily and openly destroying Baltimore!” In 2016, after the Orlando massacre, Trump falsely charged that “the Muslim community does not report” its extremists. He concluded that Muslims should be punished collectively for such incidents: “The Muslims are the ones that have to report them. And if they don’t report them, then there have to be consequences to them.” Trump refuses to apply this policy of collective responsibility to whites. After Charlottesville, he argued just the opposite: that “very fine people” shouldn’t be faulted for rallying with Nazis. 

 Trump has persistently cast aspersions on particular poeple based on race, ethnicity, or religion. He suggested to evangelicals that they couldn’t trust Ted Cruz because Cruz’s family came from Cuba. He suggested to Protestants that they couldn’t trust Ben Carson because Carson is a Seventh-day Adventist. He retweeted an allegation that Jeb Bush “has to like the Mexican illegals because of his wife,” who is Mexican American. At rallies and in TV interviews, Trump charged that Gonzalo Curiel, the Indiana-born federal judge presiding over the Trump University fraud case, was incorrigibly biased against him because “we’re building a wall. He’s a Mexican.”

The clearest standard of bigotry is advocating differential treatment based on race, sex, ethnicity, or religion. Trump has done that repeatedly. In 2013, he dismissed the military’s integration of women as a stupid mistake, arguing that it had led to sexual assaults. In 2015, he demanded a “complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” In 2016, he warned that Muslim migrants were too dangerous because once they were allowed into the United States, they might proselytize for Islam, and there was “no way” to “prevent the second generation from radicalizing.” In his attacks on Curiel, Trump reasoned that no judge “of Mexican heritage” could fairly preside over his fraud case, because such ancestry entailed “an inherent conflict of interest.”

This behavior has continued in office. During an Oval Office meeting last summer, according to the New York Times, Trump complained that Haitians coming to the United States “all have AIDS.” He also warned that people from Nigeria, if they were allowed into our country, would never “go back to their huts.” Six weeks ago, Trump retweeted messages from a hate group, which by their plain language (“Muslim destroys a statue of Virgin Mary!” “Muslim migrant beats up Dutch boy on crutches!”) sought to incite anger against all Muslims.

The White House denied the Times report about Haitians and Nigerians. But now there’s confirmation, from a Democratic senator, a Republican senator, and others who attended or were briefed, that Trump made similar remarks in an Oval Office meeting with lawmakers on Thursday. During a back-and-forth about migrants from Haiti, El Salvador, and Africa, Trump fumed: “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” He specifically asked, “Why do we need more Haitians?” He demanded that Congress “take them out” of a list of immigrant populations temporarily allowed to stay in the United States. Instead, he said the United States should accept more people from countries such as Norway.

Trump disputes his exact language in the meeting. But on Friday morning, in a series of tweets, he affirmed his reasoning. “USA would be forced to take large numbers of people from high crime countries which are doing badly,” he wrote. “I want a merit based system of immigration and people who will help take our country to the next level.”

What Trump is proposing, as sketched in his own tweets, is not a merit-based system. A merit-based system would accept or reject applicants based their own merits. Trump is saying that applicants should be accepted or rejected based on country of origin. He’s saying that the individual should be judged by the group. If you’re Haitian, you’re out.

That’s bigotry. It’s not some left-wing activist’s definition of bigotry. It’s the textbook definition. And while quotas by nationality are common in immigration policy, it’s hard to explain why Trump thinks and talks this way on so many other issues, not just about foreigners but about Americans. He has been doing it for years to every group with whom he doesn’t identify: blacks, Latinos, Muslims, Seventh-day Adventists, Cuban Americans, Mexican Americans, Arab Americans, Korean Americans, and women.

A president who keeps saying bigoted things and pushing bigoted ideas, despite repeated warnings, is a bigot. A party that continues to excuse him is a bigoted party. And a country that accepts him is a bigoted country. Don’t be that party. Don’t be that country." [Source]

Fooling the faithful.

"As an atheist, I'm finding Easter on April Fool's Day to be a fucking hoot...

-Doug in Oakland" 

I couldn't resist that comment which accompanied my last post from a regular in the fields. 

Anyway, today is the holiest of days for white evangelical Christians in America, and on this day, their leader, rather than tweet an inspirational message of peace, or of God's grace, chose to tweet a hateful and divisive screed about illegal immigration.

He even went to church with his wife. You know, the one he cheated on--- soon after she gave birth to his youngest child-- with a playboy bunny and a porn star.

Polls show that most white American evangelicals support this president. The fact that he is a bigot, a thief, an alleged rapist, and a conman, means nothing. Throw in the fact that he makes fun of the disabled and of poor people in Third World countries, and you have to wonder if these people who support him understand irony, or if they even consider doing a little self-reflection every now and then. 
 
White American evangelicals claim that they support this current president because they felt that their religion was under siege under former president Obama. Now, with trump, they believe that they have a friend in Washington,  and that he will protect their religion and American way of life by stacking the courts with like minded people, and pushing for laws that will do harm to those other people; not them. So even if they know that he raped someone, as Jerry Falwell, Jr. recently suggested,  they are still not sure  if they would pull their support for him.

 Michael Gerson nailed the dilemma facing white evangelical trump supporters in his excellent essay for the Atlantic magazine:

"Trump supporters tend to dismiss moral scruples about his behavior as squeamishness over the president’s “style.” But the problem is the distinctly non-Christian substance of his values. Trump’s unapologetic materialism—his equation of financial and social success with human achievement and worth—is a negation of Christian teaching. His tribalism and hatred for “the other” stand in direct opposition to Jesus’s radical ethic of neighbor love. Trump’s strength-worship and contempt for “losers” smack more of Nietzsche than of Christ." 

Today is the day Christians believe that Jesus rose from the dead. I dare say that if he were to wake up today he would wonder why he even bothered.