Morning News Round-Up

I had a big dilemma.  There were so many pathetic news stories over the weekend about our so-called president that I didn't know which one to write about.  If I selected one, then all the others would go unmentioned.  And there were so many that if I spread them out through the week, they not only would be old news by the time I got to Thursday, but that would be not writing about all the news pathetic news stories that cropped up in the meantime.

Instead, I've decided to write about them all here, but as shorter pieces, rather than in depth.  Then again, they're each so egregious that none of them really need much insight to grasp how dismal each is.  I mean, after all, if you saw a story that read, "Home Repairman Charges 90-year-old Grandmother on Welfare $3,000 to Change Her Lightbulb," you really wouldn't need much in-depth explanation for what was so gut-wrenchingly wrong about this...

​Let's dive in.  Make sure you have your protective gear on --


On Friday, Donald Trump actually tweeted -- "The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!"

Two things:

1) He clearly needs at least ONE honest person near by to explain how delusional this sounds. And that he comes across like a would-be despot. And like a so-called president.  More would be better, a whole staff would be ideal.  But just ONE honest person to explain reality to him would be a starting point.

2) "Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter." -- Thomas Jefferson

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It was a big weekend for head-crushing quote from Trump.  On Saturday night, at his "campaign rally" (he does know he's president, right??), he was speaking about terrorist threats around the world and told the crowd -- "You look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden. Who would believe this?"

The answer to his question is easy:  It's The 20% of ignorant American suckers who believe anything Trump says and thinks he doesn't make all this tripe up.

For the record, there was NO terrorist attack "last night" in Sweden. The worst that happened in Sweden that night was that someone over-ate at a smorgasbord, that and a radio station spent all evening  playing ABBA records.

​So, let's see, that makes Bowling Green, Atlanta, and now Sweden as places that have suffered the tragedy of non-existent terrorist massacres.  Our thought and prayers go out to them all.

​The next day, Trump tried to obfuscate and sent out another tweet (sigh...), supposedly explaining that he had been referring to a "Fox News" report about immigrant crime in Sweden.  The problem with that fake explanation (which some in the news media bought) is that his quote very clearly and specifically refers to some unnamed event that happened in Sweden "LAST NIGHT."  He wasn't talking about crime statistics, he was making up terrorism to scare people.

Oh, and Carl Bidt, the former Prime Minister of Sweden, upon hearing of Trump's comments, sent out his own tweet.  It read, "Sweden?  Terror attack?  What has he been smoking?  Questions abound."

And the former Prime Minister isn't alone in Sweden.  According to a Pew poll, 92% of actual Swedes who really live in Sweden and, in fact, know their country say that they have little to no confidence in Trump to “do right thing regarding world affairs.” 92%!! I don't think you can get 92% of people to agree on anything, including a love of pizza, a good night's sleep, and puppies. No wonder Trump lies about them.

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Nor is Sweden alone among European nations who have a bizarrely low-opinion of Trump.  A petition has been circulating in England, our closest world-power ally, with whom we famously have a "Special Relationship" which has been signed by 1.8 million citizens to keep the American president out of the U.K.,  As a result of that, this matter is now being debated in Parliament. (For the record, to be debated in Parliament, the issue only needed 100,000 signatures.) 

It's not bad enough that Trump has done this -- gotten to the point that England (England!!!!) is debating whether to block the President of the United States from entering the country -- but utterly stunning that he accomplished such concern and hatred in ONE MONTH.

And what's almost worse is that almost zero Republicans in Congress seem to care.
​

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For weeks, whenever anyone in the Trump administration has been asked about ties to Russia, they have been angry and blistering in their denials.  Now that reports have surfaced about the former and now-fired National Security Director Michael Flynn negotiating with Russia before the Trump administration took office, that hard line has changed.  On ​Meet the Press ​this past Sunday, what Chief of State Reince Priebus said (now) was, “We don’t know of any contacts with Russian agents.”  Hardly the blustered denials from before.

But Priebus did himself even more proud when he tried to regain the bullying upper-hand by slamming the press for not always naming its sources (something most reasonable people understand as a cornerstone for investigative journalism) . What made this stand out, though, is that Preibus himself in the same interview quoted people he said were in the intelligence community and supported a point he was making...but didn't name his own sources.  Just the anonymous "intelligence community."  To be clear, if naming his sources would have compromised them (though it well-may not have), I understand him not naming them.  Just exactly the same as he should understand journalists not naming their sources.  But he probably does understand it.  He just wanted to try to tear down the press.

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Finally, the Gallup Poll says that Trump's "approval" rating during his one-month Honeymoon Period is now at a paltry 38%.

​We are not surprised.