© C. Ford.
Oh man, it’s amazing that you can manage to forget the godsawful stench of gesso in between uses. If anything can turn you off doing art work, it’s that fuckin’ goop. Ugheeesh. (Yes, I messed with the photo, it doesn’t actually look like that, just smells like that.) What does it smell like? Rotten horseradish soaked in formaldehyde and pissed on by cats for 6 months. Ugh.
Avaaz has a global letter going, and they’d like to get 6 million signatures. I’ve signed. Please, sign yourself, and boost the signal! We can make our voices heard.
With the Muslim ban, Trump has shown that the worst fears about his Presidency are true. Add your voice to the open letter below to join the resistance — then spread it far and wide:
—-
Dear Mr. Trump,
This is not what greatness looks like.
The world rejects your fear, hate-mongering, and bigotry. We reject your support for torture, your calls for murdering civilians, and your general encouragement of violence. We reject your denigration of women, Muslims, Mexicans, and millions of others who don’t look like you, talk like you, or pray to the same god as you.
Facing your fear we choose compassion. Hearing your despair we choose hope. Seeing your ignorance we choose understanding.
As citizens of the world, we stand united against your brand of division.
Sincerely,
[Add your name!]
There are many language options at the site.
President Donald Trump, living alone inside the White House, often hungers for friendly interaction as he adjusts to the difficult work of governance. At his clubs, he finds what’s missing.
That showed last November at a cocktail and dinner reception celebrating longtime members of his Bedminster, New Jersey golf club. Deep into the process of meeting potential Cabinet nominees, the president-elect invited partygoers to stop by the next day to join the excitement.
“We’re doing a lot of interviews tomorrow — generals, dictators, we have everything,” Trump told the crowd, according to an audio tape of his closed-press remarks obtained by POLITICO from a source in the room. “You may wanna come around. It’ll be fun. We’re really working tomorrow. We have meetings every 15, 20 minutes with different people that will form our government.”
For Trump, the “Winter White House” of Mar-a-Lago offers him more than a warm and gilded setting outside of Washington, D.C. — it puts the isolated president back in the mix with his club family, where friends said he feels most like himself.
“So, this is my real group,” Trump said at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, on November 18, according to the audio tape. “These are the people that came here in the beginning, when nobody knew what this monster was gonna turn out to be, right?”
He added: “I see all of you. I recognize, like 100 percent of you, just about.”
[…]
Turning to a longtime club member that night, he said: “We were just talking about who we [are] going to pick for the FCC, who [are] we going to pick for this, who we gonna accept — boy, can you give me some recommendations?”
The supportive crowd ate it up as the relaxed Trump, in his element, gave them a close-up view of how he was setting up the government. “You are the special people,” he told the crowd of about 100 members, who mingled around a sushi station served by a waiter wearing a camouflage “Make America Great Again” cap.
Politico has the full story on this, and it should upset the hell outta people. It upsets me, and it’s fucking infuriating. The only thing that matters to Trump is being the center of attention, and that attention is best when people are paying obscene amounts of money to be one of the Tiny Tyrant’s “friends.” The special people – filthy rich lickspittles. Obviously, the rest of us don’t matter in the flaky crust of Trump’s manufactured reality.
Via Simon Moya-Smith.
Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officers assist a child from a family that claimed to be from Sudan as they walk across the U.S.-Canada border into Hemmingford, Canada, from Champlain in New York. REUTERS/Christinne Muschi.
Here’s a contrast and compare: Canadian cops who smile and assist people seeking refuge, and ugly American border cops who want to catch those seeking refuge, so they can lock them up and deport them. This one’s a no brainer, seriously. There’s a family who will now receive help, settle in, and become productive Canadian citizens. Here’s the thing – this family was living in Delaware for two years, being productive citizens in the U.S., but they weren’t legal, and given the current climate, had no hope of becoming legal. So, it’s one big fucking loss for the country with no compassion, and a net win for the country with it.
America is going full tilt manic ugly these days, and warm & fuzzies ain’t easy to come by. My thanks to Canadians for this one.
Think Progress is also covering this story, in-depth. I don’t like the descent into full court ugly here in uStates, but I am grateful people seeking refuge have a place to go where they are welcomed and taken care of by decent peoples.
Twitter.
So many Trump supporters think he’s a good businessman, and that’s why they retain a great deal of faith in him, but Trump’s no businessman, never has been. He started out with not a silver spoon, but a whole set. He’s dismissed his trust fund, and the “little” loan of a million bucks from daddy. For reasons beyond my understanding, supporters don’t seem disturbed in the slightest about any of that, or the numerous failed “businesses”, the open frauds, or the lawsuits. This myth of the “good businessman” persists. Trump sucks at business, and he’s not worth what he claims, either, one of the reasons he doesn’t want those tax returns seen by anyone. I’m sure that’s not the only reason.
Bert Spector has an excellent article up at The Conversation, explaining how Trump does not have business chops, in detail. There’s a big difference between being the CEO of a company, answerable not only to a board, but to shareholders as well. Trump has never done that. He has an LLC, which basically allows him to run a family business, which is not answerable to anyone, so there’s no need to do things in the proper manner, at least not until you get caught. When it comes to Trump, he’s been caught, numerous times, and eventually leaks money out in a settlement, then goes right back to scamming again. The article is in-depth, so just a bit here.
Throughout the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump made much of his business experience, claiming he’s been “creating jobs and rebuilding neighborhoods my entire adult life.”
The fact that he was from the business world rather than a career politician was something that appealed to many of his supporters.
It’s easy to understand the appeal of a president as CEO. The U.S. president is indisputably the chief executive of a massive, complex, global structure known as the federal government. And if the performance of our national economy is vital to the well-being of us all, why not believe that Trump’s experience running a large company equips him to effectively manage a nation?
Instead of a “fine-tuned machine,” however, the opening weeks of the Trump administration have revealed a White House that’s chaotic, disorganized and anything but efficient. Examples include rushed and poorly constructed executive orders, a dysfunctional national security team and unclear and even contradictory messages emanating from multiple administrative spokespeople, which frequently clash with the tweets of the president himself.
Senator John McCain succinctly summed up the growing sentiment even some Republicans are feeling: “Nobody knows who’s in charge.”
So why the seeming contradiction between his businessman credentials and chaotic governing style?
Well for one thing, Trump wasn’t a genuine CEO. That is, he didn’t run a major public corporation with shareholders and a board of directors that could hold him to account. Instead, he was the head of a family-owned, private web of enterprises. Regardless of the title he gave himself, the position arguably ill-equipped him for the demands of the presidency.
If, like me, your understanding of just how businesses work isn’t all that, go have a read, and learn why the whole “I’m a businessman!” rhetoric from Trump is nothing more than another lie.
Screen Grab.
Yet more constituents, frustrated by the republican response of running away in the face of questions, and people wanting actual answers, have come up with another excellent trolling effort. The target this time is Marco Rubio, who like his compatriots, is hiding in fear of having to give a straight answer.
“Missing – U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (FL-R),” the flier reads, with a picture of the Republican senator. The signs add that Rubio “refuses to take meeting with his constituents” regarding his votes in favor of Trump’s Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
“Side note, he accepted $100,000 from DeVos family, which might have swayed his vote.”
The fliers also charge Rubio with not responding “to hundred of emails, phone calls and voicemails” and claim he has not been seen in his office for weeks.
Rubio engaged Tillerson in a contentious back-and-forth during the Secretary of State’s confirmation hearing, at one point asking Tillerson if he would label Russian President Vladimir Putin a “war criminal.”
Despite originally sparring with Tillerson, Rubio confirmed the former Exxon CEO, Rubio voted for Tillerson, prompting a Greenpeace activist to protest the Florida senator by holding a spine prop behind him during a press gaggle.
Rubio also voted to confirm DeVos, despite a massive public campaign to sway the senator’s vote.
Naturally, there was an outraged denial from Rubio’s spokesperson:
“Anyone who claims they can’t get in touch with Senator Rubio’s office is being dishonest,” the spokesperson said. “Our Tampa office only has two employees and serves multiple counties, yet they have met with dozens of these liberal activists.”
“This is nothing more than a strategy outlined in an online activist manual to carry out ‘mass office calling,’” the spokesperson continued. “In the manual, activists are instructed that ‘you and your group should all agree to call in on one specific issue that day.’ They are further instructed that ‘the next day or week, pick another issue, and call again on that.’ Their goal is to flood offices with calls and emails and then go to the press and claim they aren’t getting a response.”
Right. That’s why rethugs are canceling town halls left and right. This is a way to apply pressure, and rightfully so, because people want answers. Full story here.
Aaaaaw. From Kengi, click for full size.
© Kengi, all rights reserved.
Sigh.
© C. Ford.
Blue Jay, click for full size.
© C. Ford.
Demonstrators block an escalator at the international terminal as protests against President Donald Trump’s executive order banning travel from seven Muslim-majority countries continue at San Francisco International Airport, Sunday, Jan. 29, 2017. (AP Photo/Olga Rodriguez).
In a column for the Guardian on Monday, American writer Francine Prose called for a “nonviolent national general strike” to demonstrate “how many of us there are, how strong and committed we are, how much we can accomplish.”
She wrote: “Let’s designate a day on which no one (that is, anyone who can do so without being fired) goes to work, a day when no one shops or spends money, a day on which we truly make our economic and political power felt.”
Calls to do just that have been circulating online recently, with activists setting Feb. 17 — the Friday before President’s Day — as the day for a #nationalstrike against the presidency of Donald Trump.
No one working, no one buying anything, for one day. I realize not everyone will be able to blithely ignore their job for one day, but if you can get away with it, please, please, do. Affinity will be closed for the strike on Friday, February 17th, and I will post a reminder prior to the day. Pretty sure most people can manage to forgo shopping for one day. Be ungovernable.
The full, in-depth story is at News.Mic.
Photograph: Isopix/REX.
George Soros has an interesting article up at The Guardian, about Russia and the EU. There are some very good points made, and it’s difficult to pay attention to everything happening on the world stage right now, which is a gift to unscrupulous leaders.
…Putin is a gifted tactician, but not a strategic thinker. There is no reason to believe he intervened in Syria in order to aggravate the European refugee crisis. Indeed, his intervention was a strategic blunder because it embroiled him in a conflict with Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, which has hurt the interests of both.
But once Putin saw the opportunity to hasten the EU’s disintegration, he seized it. He has obfuscated his actions by talking of cooperating against a common enemy, Isis. He has followed a similar approach in Ukraine, signing the Minsk agreement but failing to carry out its provisions.
It is hard to understand why US and EU leaders take Putin at his word rather than judging him by his behaviour. The only explanation I can find is that democratic politicians seek to reassure their publics by painting a more favourable picture than reality justifies. The fact is that Putin’s Russia and the EU are engaged in a race against time: the question is which one will collapse first.
The Putin regime faces bankruptcy in 2017, when a large part of its foreign debt matures, and political turmoil may erupt sooner than that. The president’s popularity, which remains high, rests on a social compact requiring the government to deliver financial stability and a slowly but steadily rising standard of living. Western sanctions, coupled with the sharp decline in the price of oil, will force the regime to fail on both counts.
Unless something happens to prevent it, the current regime in the U.S. will help Russia out financially, by most likely lifting sanctions and going through with that 500 billion dollar oil deal in the Antarctic. If that does take place, it won’t be good, certainly no better than where things stand right now.
The full article is at The Guardian.
