Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse

[Michael Scally MD]

For a fleeting moment Tuesday, President Trump seemed to signal he would do the right thing on immigration. At a 90-minute meeting with congressional Republicans and Democrats, much of it televised, he said he’d be willing to “take the heat” for a broad immigration deal of the sort urgently needed by the country and despised by his hard-core base.

Alas, it was all a charade. The real Donald Trump was back two days later with his now notorious “shithole” remark, asking why the United States should accept people from places like Haiti or Africa instead of nice Nordic countries like Norway, and then tweeting his tiresome demands for a “Great Wall” along the Mexican border.

Never mind that Norwegians are not clamoring to leave what is rated as the happiest nation on earth, and setting aside renewed questions about Mr. Trump’s fitness, the flip-flop left the issue of immigration more confused than before.

Where to begin? How about with a simple observation: The president of the United States is a racist. And another: The United States has a long and ugly history of excluding immigrants based on race or national origin. Mr. Trump seems determined to undo efforts taken by presidents of both parties in recent decades to overcome that history.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

A lawyer for President Donald Trump arranged a $130,000 payment to a former adult-film star a month before the 2016 election as part of an agreement that precluded her from publicly discussing an alleged sexual encounter with Mr. Trump, according to people familiar with the matter.

Michael Cohen, who spent nearly a decade as a top attorney at the Trump Organization, arranged payment to the woman, Stephanie Clifford, in October 2016 after her lawyer negotiated the nondisclosure agreement with Mr. Cohen, these people said.

Ms. Clifford, whose stage name is Stormy Daniels, has privately alleged the encounter with Mr. Trump took place after they met at a July 2006 celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe, these people said. Mr. Trump married Melania Trump in 2005.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

OSLO (Reuters) - Many Norwegians rejected on Friday a suggestion by U.S. President Donald Trump that they would be more welcome to move to the United States than immigrants from “shithole countries” such as Haiti or African nations.

The Nordic country, one of the richest in the world by GDP per capita, was last year named the happiest nation on the planet and is known for a cradle-to-grave welfare state funded in part by large reserves of oil and natural gas.

...

The reference to Norway may have been prompted by Prime Minister Erna Solberg who visited the White House on Wednesday when the president praised Norway for running a trade deficit with the United States and for buying U.S. military equipment.

Christian Christensen, an American professor of journalism at Stockholm University in neighboring Sweden, tweeted:

“Of course people from #Norway would love to move to a country where people are far more likely to be shot, live in poverty, get no healthcare because they’re poor, get no paid parental leave or subsidized daycare and see fewer women in political power. #Shithole”

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Neo-Nazis and other white supremacists are celebrating President Trump's reported comments referring to Haiti, El Salvador and several African nations as "shithole countries," according to statements collected by The New York Times on Friday

White supremacist Richard Spencer, an organizer of the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Va., last year, lambasted conservatives defending the president on Fox News for pretending the remark was not racial in nature.

“It’s obviously all about race, and to their credit, liberals point out the obvious,” he told The Times.

The Daily Stormer, the largest neo-Nazi website online, welcomed Trump's reported remark, saying it was evidence he was "more or less on the same page with us."

“This is encouraging and refreshing, as it indicates Trump is more or less on the same page as us with regards to race and immigration,” the site said.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact. - Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

 

[Michael Scally MD]

WTFU ...



Thousands of webpages with climate change information have been removed or buried at agencies including U.S. EPA, the Interior and Energy departments and elsewhere across the government, according to a new report.

The https://envirodatagov.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Part-3-Changing-the-Digital-Climate.pdf (study) from the watchdog group Environmental Data & Governance Initiative tracked a year of editing of government websites and has found a drastic overhaul of public information on climate change during the Trump administration. Information that has been removed or buried includes research such as climate mitigation strategies for cities and states, a student's guide to climate change and the benefits of renewable energy.

Every administration imprints its own priorities on the government's webpages, and backers of President Trump's policies say the changes are par for the course. But critics of the new administration see a troubling pattern where information is hidden from the public.

The removal of climate information from across the federal government's web presence is evidence that the administration is not interested in engaging in an actual scientific debate about climate change, but rather stifling the truth, said Paul Edwards, a senior research scholar at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has repeatedly called for a public debate on climate science.

"It actually certifies the point that this EPA has already decided the outcome of that debate, if there is one, and moved the needle away from human causality or even in some cases from the existence of the phenomenon at all," Edwards said. "Even though they often say the climate is changing but we don't know why, the removal of this information really goes against the idea that there still is an open question there."

 

[Michael Scally MD]

MONUMENT VALLEY, Utah — Garry Holiday grew up among the abandoned mines that dot the Navajo Nation’s red landscape, remnants of a time when uranium helped cement America’s status as a nuclear superpower and fueled its nuclear energy program.

It left a toxic legacy. All but a few of the 500 abandoned mines still await cleanup. Mining tainted the local groundwater. Mr. Holiday’s father succumbed to respiratory disease after years of hacking the ore from the earth.

But now, emboldened by the Trump administration’s embrace of corporate interests, the uranium mining industry is renewing a push into the areas adjacent to Mr. Holiday’s Navajo Nation home: the Grand Canyon watershed to the west, where a new uranium mine is preparing to open, and the Bears Ears National Monument to the north.

The Trump administration is set to shrink Bears Ears by 85 percent next month, potentially opening more than a million acres to mining, drilling and other industrial activity. But even as Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke declared last month that “there is no mine within Bears Ears,” there were more than 300 uranium mining claims inside the monument, according to data from Utah’s Bureau of Land Management office that was reviewed by The New York Times.

The vast majority of those claims fall neatly outside the new boundaries of Bears Ears set by the administration. And an examination of local B.L.M. records, including those not yet entered into the agency’s https://reports.blm.gov/content/lr2000/about/ (land and mineral use authorizations database), shows that about a third of the claims are linked to Energy Fuels, a Canadian uranium producer. Energy Fuels also owns the Grand Canyon mine, where groundwater has already flooded the main shaft.

Energy Fuels, together with other mining groups, lobbied extensively for a reduction of Bears Ears, preparing maps that marked the areas it wanted removed from the monument and distributing them during a visit to the monument by Mr. Zinke in May.