Wednesday Open Thread | Was Trump’s warning to North Korea plagiarized from Truman’s speech?

Hat tip JeffreyGuterman

#Truman: The like of which has never been seen on this earth. 8/6/1945

#Trump: The likes of which this world has never seen before. 8/8/2017

About SouthernGirl2

A Native Texan who adores baby kittens, loves horses, rodeos, pomegranates, & collect Eagles. Enjoys politics, games shows, & dancing to all types of music. Loves discussing and learning about different cultures. A Phi Theta Kappa lifetime member with a passion for Social & Civil Justice.
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55 Responses to Wednesday Open Thread | Was Trump’s warning to North Korea plagiarized from Truman’s speech?

  1. rikyrah says:

    If a Black Man wielding a machete said that he liked Mahalia Jackson….would they have put THAT in a tweet to describe him?

    Uh huh

    https://twitter.com/DailyMirror/status/894597948557938689

  2. rikyrah says:

    The Perils of a Paper Tiger Presidency
    by John Stoehr
    August 9, 2017

    I have talked in months past about President Donald Trump’s fundamental weakness. My intent is to demonstrate how the opposition can politically wound the president, and actively erode—if not break—the link between him and his core supporters. His base of power comes almost exclusively from projection of toughness. Yes, he’s a populist of sorts, but policy is entirely beside the point. Actually, policy isn’t even beside the point, because the only point to the Trump presidency is displays of strength. If you crack that, you crack his base. In the right conditions, only one stray strand is needed for the whole thing to unravel.

    I made the case over at US News & World Report Tuesday that we may be seeing that unraveling now. The president has been unpopular from the beginning, but his support had been remarkably steady, around 40 percent, give or take. Some said this was his floor, and that Trump could limp along for years, while others (including myself) thought this level of support was more proof that America’s unreconstructed racists will be with the president no matter what he did.

    We may be wrong. New polling suggests that support is softening. I argued Tuesday that this comes from three things: one, Hillary Clinton can’t be blamed anymore; two, he’s not delivering on promises to provide material gains for white working class voters; and three, his base is starting to figure out that he’s weak after witnessing his repeated failures to repeal Obamacare.

    But the public isn’t alone. Our adversaries also sense weakness. And this is my point here. A paper tiger president is bad in all kinds of ways. After the Russians effort to influence the election and poison the public sphere, the North Koreans now see an opportunity. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the first seven months of Trump’s presidency unfolded at the same time that Pyongyang figured out how to put a nuclear warhead on rocket capable of hitting the US.

    A strong president would, first of all, be very careful about public statements reacting to news from North Korea. But specifically, he would not issue any threats unless he intended to follow through with that threat. Without follow-through, threats are empty, and empty threats mean that our enemies can do whatever they want without fear of American power.

  3. rikyrah says:

    When Ministers Suggest That God Has Ordained Killing
    by Nancy LeTourneau
    August 9, 2017

    After Trump said that North Korea would be “met with fire and fury like the world has never seen,” one of his biggest supporters on the religious right, Rev. Robert Jeffress of the First Baptist Church in Dallas, said that God has given Trump the authority to take out Kim Jong Un.

    “When it comes to how we should deal with evil doers, the Bible, in the book of Romans, is very clear: God has endowed rulers full power to use whatever means necessary — including war — to stop evil,” Jeffress said. “In the case of North Korea, God has given Trump authority to take out Kim Jong Un.”…

    The biblical passage Romans 13 gives the government authority to deal with evildoers, Jeffress said. “That gives the government to the authority to do whatever, whether it’s assassination, capital punishment or evil punishment to quell the actions of evildoers like Kim Jong Un,” he said.

    In other words, Jeffress goes beyond Kim Jong Un and suggests that the government (i.e., Trump) has the authority to assassinate and impose the death penalty based on what the Apostle Paul wrote in Romans 13. Let’s take a look at that portion of the Bible, shall we?

  4. rikyrah says:

    This Muthaphucka HERE!!

    Republican makes provocative comments about McCain’s brain cancer
    08/09/17 02:18 PM—UPDATED 08/09/17 02:30 PM
    By Steve Benen
    It’s no secret that Republicans were disappointed when Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) joined Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), and 48 Senate Democrats in derailing the GOP’s far-right health care plan two weeks ago. But just how far are some on the right prepared to go to express their dissatisfaction?

    Politico notes one Senate Republican who broached a highly provocative subject.

    Sen. Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican who voted in favor of the GOP plan to repeal parts of Obamacare last month, suggested Tuesday that Sen. John McCain’s deciding vote against the proposal may have been related to his brain cancer.

    “I’m not going to speak for John McCain, you know, he has a brain tumor right now, that vote occurred at 1:30 in the morning, some of that might have factored in,” Johnson said on the radio program “Chicago’s Morning Answer.”

  5. Liza says:

    From the carnival barker in the Oval Office…

    Donald J. Trump‏Verified account @realDonaldTrump 8s8 seconds ago

    Senator Mitch McConnell said I had “excessive expectations,” but I don’t think so. After 7 years of hearing Repeal & Replace, why not done?

    Donald J. Trump‏Verified account @realDonaldTrump 6h6 hours ago

    …Hopefully we will never have to use this power, but there will never be a time that we are not the most powerful nation in the world!

    Donald J. Trump‏Verified account @realDonaldTrump 6h6 hours ago

    My first order as President was to renovate and modernize our nuclear arsenal. It is now far stronger and more powerful than ever before….

    • He’s a fucking fool. No one can reason with him and that’s a terrible thing. He needs to be gone immediately.

      • Liza says:

        We are in so much danger.

      • Ametia says:

        This is #45′ way to DISTRACT from RUSSIA. Mueller’s getting hotter than July on his trail, so what does the orange POS do? Tweet useless tweets, threatening NK. and the media pulls out old footage from 8 years ago to help justify the fuckery. I.CAN.NOT

        FEAR- This is always the go-to-tool for politician, especially, ignorant, spiteful, hateful, dumb, cowardly white males with SMALL hands and TINY Peens.

  6. rikyrah says:

    The Mystery Of Nicole Mincey
    By JOSH MARSHALL
    Published AUGUST 7, 2017 12:59 PM

    We’re working on more reporting on this as we speak. But I wanted to introduce the topic here in the Editors’ Blog to get us started. You may have heard of this, probably not. Over the weekend, President Trump RT’d a shout-out of praise from a woman on Twitter named Nicole Mincey.

    Around the same time, I noticed that Mincey’s tweets had been showing up high in Trump’s twitter threads. And as I mentioned in this tweet from Saturday evening, while I wasn’t sure whatever details there were about her, the accounts had all the tell-tale signs of a grift, most notably because of the stylized personal presentation and the focus on a Trump store where this woman – probably better to call her a “persona” – sold all manner of low-tier Trump shirts, hats, hoodies, etc.

    ……………………………………..

    What’s more, seemingly all the pictures of Mincey were stock model photos from around the web.

    I was looking at all this stuff late Saturday evening. It was quite the rabbit hole as you can see. But what got me more interested is that the elaborateness of the Mincey ‘legend’ seemed much more detailed than would be necessary to make a quick buck off hats and t-shirts. One thread in “Nicole’s” twitter account was about a new organization she was forming for other pro-Trump black conservatives like her – ‘Young Black Republicans’ or YBR. She had a large number of other bot accounts which were her notional friends, which mainly seemed to exist to retweet her posts. But among these were some with vlog type videos of young African-American men talking up the YBR group. Notionally, these were followers of hers also planning to join YBR and looking for support for the group.

    AI is pretty advanced. But it can’t do that. Someone got these men to make these videos. As I said, it all seemed like a very elaborate operation just for a merch store.

  7. rikyrah says:

    During an all-hands-on-deck moment, Trump is short on hands
    08/09/17 10:57 AM
    By Steve Benen

    Former Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.) left Congress to join the Obama administration eight years ago, initially serving as Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs. In 2012, Tauscher took on a new role, becoming Special Envoy for Strategic Stability and Missile Defense at the State Department.

    This morning on Twitter, Tauscher raised an interesting point (translated slightly from Twitter abbreviations):

    “Where is the Trump Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security? NO ONE has been nominated? Unheard of in 40 years. I should know.”

    She’s referring, of course, to the job she used to have. And Tauscher’s correct: Donald Trump hasn’t even nominated someone to fill that post – which seems like an important oversight in light of the world’s newfound interest in arms control.

    If this were an isolated incident, it might be easier to overlook, but the larger point is that the Trump administration hasn’t bothered to fill a wide variety of key posts that are suddenly quite relevant. There is, for example, currently no U.S. ambassador to South Korea.

    The Washington Post maintains a helpful list tracking key Trump administration posts and their status, and perusing the database this morning, I found all kinds of relevant State Department offices awaiting a presidential nominee. Here are some of the more notable vacancies:

    • yahtzeebutterfly says:

      Wow!

      More from the article(with repeat of first sentence) :

      The Washington Post maintains a helpful list tracking key Trump administration posts and their status, and perusing the database this morning, I found all kinds of relevant State Department offices awaiting a presidential nominee. Here are some of the more notable vacancies:

      * Undersecretary for arms control and international security affairs

      * Assistant secretary for intelligence and research

      * Assistant secretary for arms control, verification, and compliance

      * Assistant secretary for international security and nonproliferation affairs

      * Assistant secretary for political-military affairs

      * Assistant secretary for conflict and stabilization operations

      * Assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific affairs

      * Special envoy for North Korea human rights issues

      * Special representative of the president for nuclear non-proliferation

      For each of these posts – and this is just a partial list of positions in the State Department – the Trump White House hasn’t even nominated anyone.

      In other words, this isn’t a series of vacancies the president can credibly blame on “Democratic obstructionism.” No one has been confirmed to these positions because Trump hasn’t yet sent a nominee for these posts to the Senate for consideration.

  8. Liza says:

    Three years…

    3 years ago, we went to the streets & stayed there for over 300 days because the Ferguson PD killed #MikeBrown. He should be alive today.— deray mckesson (@deray) August 9, 2017

    //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  9. rikyrah says:

    Report: US Diplomats Instructed To Sidestep Questions On Paris Accord
    By ESME CRIBB
    Published AUGUST 8, 2017 6:22 PM

    U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson sent a cable telling diplomats to give vague answers to questions about what it would take to convince President Donald Trump’s administration to re-enter the Paris Agreement on climate change, Reuters reported on Tuesday.

    Reuters reported, citing a diplomatic cable Tillerson sent to embassies on Friday, that U.S. diplomats were told to answer questions like “What is the process for consideration of re-engagement in the Paris Agreement?” with “We are considering a number of factors. I do not have any information to share on the nature or timing of the process.”

    According to text Reuters published purportedly of the cable, Trump’s administration “is considering options for potential re-engagement in the Paris Agreement under different terms” but presently has “no plans to do so.”

    “The Department recognizes that questions about the Paris Agreement and other climate policy issues will continue to arise,” the text reads.

  10. rikyrah says:

    Report: Trump Receives ‘Propaganda Document’ That’s Only Good News
    By MATT SHUHAM
    Published AUGUST 8, 2017 3:40 PM

    The Republican National Committee and White House communications staff produce what’s known by some in the White House as the “Propaganda Document” for President Donald Trump twice a day, Vice News reported Tuesday.

    The documents are exclusively composed of positive media coverage. Citing three unnamed current and former White House officials, Vice described them:

    [T]he folders are filled with screenshots of positive cable news chyrons (those lower-third headlines and crawls), admiring tweets, transcripts of fawning TV interviews, praise-filled news stories, and sometimes just pictures of Trump on TV looking powerful.

  11. rikyrah says:

    If You Weren’t Worried Yet, You Can Start Now
    By JOSH MARSHALL
    Published AUGUST 8, 2017 3:43 PM

    In response to a new round of threats from North Korea, themselves spurred by new US sanctions led by the US, President Trump has now, rather casually, threatened North Korea with a nuclear holocaust. At a meeting on the opioid crisis a short time ago Trump just said: “They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen,” Trump said. “He has been very threatening, beyond a normal state, and as I said they will be met with fire and fury and, frankly, power the likes of which this world has never seen before.”

    The deteriorating situation on the Korean Peninsula and between the US and North Korea is neither new nor entirely of President Trump’s making. His volley of threats over recent months appears to have spurred the North Koreans to quicken the pace of their ICBM tests. There are reports today of US intelligence findings that the North Koreans are much further along than the US realized in miniaturizing a nuclear weapons to make them transportable on an ICBM. Given the administration’s credibility on this issue and generally, I think a good deal of skepticism is warranted on that front. But the pace of advance on building an ICBM is public and from what I can tell not really in dispute.

    ………………………………..

    This is a really bad and dangerous situation to start with. It was bad when President Obama left office. It’s gotten much worse since – through some mix of US threats and North Korean testing out the new administration. The worst possible thing is a President who is stupid, impulsively emotional and has something to prove, which is exactly what we have. (You think his litany of failures as President so doesn’t make him eager for a breakout, transformative moment?) At the risk of stating the obvious, threats like this from a country that has the ability to kill everyone in North Korea at close to a moment’s notice can set off a highly unpredictable chain of events. What if North Korea issues more threats? Presumably Trump fails to respond with a nuclear attack and reveals his threats as empty or – truly, truly unimaginably – he launches a nuclear attack. These are not good choices to face.

    The situation with North Korea would be an extreme challenge for a leader with ability and judgment. President Trump is simply too erratic, unstable and dangerous to be in charge in a situation like this.

  12. rikyrah says:

    Iowa Democrat Phil Miller wins by 10 points in special election in House District 82 that Trump carried by 22 https://t.co/aOzEwc6aht

    — Ari Berman (@AriBerman) August 9, 2017

  13. rikyrah says:

    WaPo: FBI conducted predawn raid of former Trump campaign chairman Manafort’s home https://t.co/Iu34RiFCuf

    — Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) August 9, 2017

  14. rikyrah says:

    White House remains silent following Minnesota mosque bombing
    08/09/17 10:18 AM
    By Steve Benen
    Earlier today, a vehicle plowed into a group of French soldiers as they left their barracks in a town near Paris. While it appears none of the targets were killed, the local mayor described it as a “terrorist” incident, and the suspected was apprehended soon after.

    Soon after U.S. media took note of what happened, there was Donald Trump, retweeting a Fox News report on the apparent attack. That’s not especially surprising, of course, since the American president routinely makes note of suspected terrorist incidents.

    This does, however, make it all the more curious that Trump has had literally nothing to say about a makeshift bomb that was detonated early Saturday morning at a Minnesota mosque. Fortunately, no one was injured, but local officials suspect this was an anti-Muslim terrorist incident.

    So, why has Trump said nothing about a bombing targeting Americans on American soil? Sebastian Gorka, one of the president’s more controversial national security advisers, appeared on MSNBC yesterday, and shed some light on the White House’s thinking.

    [Gorka] suggested the attack could have been a “fake” hate crime.

    “There’s a great rule: All initial reports are false,″ Gorka said. “You have to check them and find out who the perpetrators are. We’ve had a series of crimes committed, alleged hate crimes, by right-wing individuals in the last six months, that turned out to actually have been propagated by the left.”

    …………………………………………….

    But let’s not play games. When Trump learns of a suspected terrorist incident, and he believes the attacker is Muslim, he pounces without a whole lot of thought or information. In June, in the immediate aftermath of a deadly attack in London, Trump not only exploited the incident to advance his political agenda, his public reaction drew conclusions before British officials had provided details to the public.

    Trump’s rhetoric in response to suspected terrorism has been so profoundly irresponsible that the Associated Press published a fact-checking piece in June that said the president “can’t be counted on to give accurate information to Americans when violent acts are unfolding abroad.”

    It’s against this backdrop that Sebastian Gorka wants us to believe Trump is simply being cautious, taking his time before saying anything about the Minnesota bombing. It’s far easier to believe there’s something pernicious about the president’s attitudes.

  15. rikyrah says:

    Trump hopes to shift blame to Obama for opioid crisis
    08/09/17 09:20 AM
    By Steve Benen

    Donald Trump interrupted his vacation yesterday to host an event on the opioid crisis at one of his golf resorts, delivering brief remarks on the deadly national emergency. The president reflected, for example, on preventing addiction by stopping the problem before it starts.

    “If they do start, it’s awfully tough to get off,” Trump said. “So we can keep them from going on, and maybe by talking to youth and telling them, ‘No good; really bad for you’ in every way.”

    I’m going to hope there’s more to the White House plan.

    But there was another message in the president’s remarks that struck me as notable:

    “[F]ederal drug prosecutions have gone down in recent years. We’re going to be bringing them up and bringing them up rapidly. At the end of 2016, there were 23 percent fewer than in 2011. So they looked at this scourge and they let it go by, and we’re not letting it go by.”

    In context, it seems “they” referred to Obama administration officials.

    There are a couple of core problems with the argument, aside from Trump’s creepy preoccupation with trying to blame his predecessor for everything. The first is Barack Obama and his team didn’t “let” the opioid crisis “go by”; they pleaded with Congress to make serious investments in the emergency, and by large, lawmakers balked.

    The second is the subtle assumption Trump is making: he apparently sees the opioid crisis as a problem that can be solved through “prosecutions.” In other words, this White House doesn’t see a public-health emergency; it sees a test for law enforcement.

    This does not bode well for the near future.

    Postscript: Though this angle was largely overlooked yesterday, this entire subject is one Trump World should approach with some trepidation. The White House enthusiastically supported Republican health care legislation that would have made the opioid crisis vastly worse, and then endorsed deep Medicaid cuts, which would have had a brutal effect on substance-abuse treatments if implemented.

  16. rikyrah says:

    The Party of George W. and Jeb Bush Is Dying
    by Nancy LeTourneau
    August 8, 2017

    I have often said that Republicans faced a difficult choice after the 2008 election. Their economic policies had given us the Great Recession, while their militaristic foreign policy had given us torture, Guantanamo, and two seemingly endless wars in the Middle East. That led to massive electoral defeats in both the 2006 midterms and the 2008 general election.

    The question facing Republican leaders was whether or not to double down on policies that had failed so miserably or go back to the drawing board and re-think their position. They did neither. Instead, they chose to simply obstruct everything Obama and the Democrats attempted to do. In order to justify that position, they inflamed their extremist base—leading to the development of the Tea Party and the Freedom Caucus. When Republicans regained majorities in Congress, it became clear that they couldn’t govern and eventually their leader in the House, Speaker John Boehner, was ejected.

    During the 2016 Republican primary, Jeb Bush was the candidate who most clearly embraced the idea of doubling down on the failed policies of the past. He ran on what his father once called “voodoo economics” combined with a militaristic foreign policy and lost spectacularly. Instead, the inflamed extremist base helped nominate Donald Trump. It has often been said that he is non-ideological. Jelani Cobb coined the phrase “resentment agenda” to describe his platform. It appealed to what Robert Jones described as “nostalgia voters.”

  17. rikyrah says:

    Sessions’s Justice Department Supports Voter Purge
    This poses a grave threat to our democracy.

    by Nancy LeTourneau
    August 9, 2017

    Civil rights groups are challenging Ohio in the courts for an attempt to purge their voter rolls.

    The Ohio procedure allows the state to purge voters meeting certain criteria for being inactive. If a voter has not cast a ballot in two years, the person is sent a notice asking to confirm registration. If the voter does not respond and does not cast a ballot over the next four years, the person is removed from the rolls.

    Obama’s Justice Department previously filed an amicus brief siding with the civil rights groups. That has now been reversed.

    The Justice Department has reversed itself in a high-profile voting case in Ohio to side with the state and allow the purging of voters from the rolls for not answering election mail and not voting in recent elections.

    In a court filing Monday, Justice attorneys took the opposite position from the Obama administration in a case that involved the state’s removal of thousands of inactive voters from the Ohio voting rolls.

    Civil rights groups last year challenged Ohio’s process, arguing that such purges are prohibited under the National Voter Registration Act…

    But in an unusual turn, the department filed a new amicus brief Monday arguing that the purges of voters are legal under federal law. This brief, unlike the prior one, was not signed by career attorneys in the Civil Rights Division.

    ………………………………………

    I’d also remind you that the previous Acting Director of the Civil Rights Division at DOJ, Vanita Gupta, recently warned that the purge of voter rolls is coming.

    Lost amid the uproar over the [election integrity] commission’s request was a letter sent at the same time by the Justice Department’s civil rights division. It forced 44 states to provide extensive information on how they keep their voter rolls up-to-date. It cited the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, known as the Motor-Voter law, which mandates that states help voters register through motor vehicle departments.

    The letter doesn’t ask whether states are complying with the parts of the law that expand opportunities to register. Instead it focuses on the sections related to maintaining the lists. That’s a prelude to voter purging.

  18. rikyrah says:

    The Unconscious Bias of Sanders and Some of His Supporters
    by Nancy LeTourneau
    August 8, 2017

    I’m arriving late to the whole discussion about Ryan Cooper’s takedown of three African American potential Democratic presidential candidates. That is partly because I like to give myself some time to let these kinds of thing simmer. But it’s also because I think Martin did a good job of pointing out that people like Cooper dismiss the entirety of these candidate’s history by simply suggesting that they are corrupted by corporate connections. To get an idea of what was left out of his portrayal of Sen. Kamala Harris, check out this twitter thread:

    If you write about @KamalaHarris record as AG, and dont mention her $20B settlement she delivered for CA homeowners – youre doing it wrong

    — Tyrone Gayle (@TyroneGayle) August 8, 2017

    What Cooper did to Harris, Booker and Patrick is the same thing Sanders did to Clinton and the Democrats during the 2016 primary: shut down all discussion about issues by claiming the disagreements are based on corruption. That is one of the main reasons why these differences have been so difficult to resolve.

    But in defending his position, Cooper also took to twitter with something that brings racism/sexism back into the discussion.

    because the elite will probably try to stand up some minority candidate and cast policy disagreement as bigotry of some form

    — ryan cooper (@ryanlcooper) August 4, 2017

    Do you see what he did there? He preemptively robbed those “minority candidates” of any agency by suggesting that the so-called “elite” would simply stand them up as a way to cast any disagreement as a form of bigotry. Is it impossible for him to imagine that a person of color might simply disagree with him? Are they only hollow vessels to be manipulated by the elite? Since he isn’t even referring to a particular individual on which a statement like that might be judged, I can find no other explanation than the fact that it emanates from a form of unconscious bias.

    Last November, I pointed out that Sanders himself did something similar when he assumed that a young woman who identified herself as Latina would run for office on a platform of simply saying, “I’m a Latina, vote for me.” He went on to suggest that unless she was willing to embrace his issues, that wasn’t good enough.

    When I called that out as a form of white supremacy, a lot of people pushed back and said that was too extreme. Personally, I’m not that interested in what we call it. Robbing a woman and/or person of color of their own agency and, in doing so, attempting to shut down any conversation with them about where we might disagree is a problem. To give people like Sanders and Cooper the benefit of the doubt, I don’t believe that is their intention. Rather, it springs from a form of white privilege that produces what some people call unconscious bias.

  19. rikyrah says:

    These Sugar Barons Built an $8 Billion Fortune With Washington’s Help
    By Justin Villamil
    August 9, 2017, 4:00 AM CDT

    As Cuban refugees, the Fanjuls have a familiar story to tell. They fled the revolution. Fidel Castro’s forces seized everything they owned on the island, business interests, homes, a fortune in fine art.

    But they didn’t arrive in Florida in 1960 empty handed. Patriarch Alfonso Fanjul Sr., one of the world’s most prosperous sugar barons before Castro came onto the scene, had piled up assets in the U.S. Within two years, he’d acquired new refining plants and begun to recreate the Fanjul empire in exile.

    Now his two oldest sons are barons themselves, and among the most effective political donors in America. They have the Trump administration’s ear as it aims to rewrite Nafta — with protections for U.S. sugar growers and millers firmly baked in.

    While the brothers and their three siblings share a fortune that the Bloomberg Billionaires Index values at $8.2 billion, the exact split among them is unknown. But, Alfonso, 80, known as Alfy, and Jose, 73, nicknamed Pepe, control the industry giant Florida Crystal Corp., and according to a Bloomberg analysis also control the family’s wealth. They didn’t respond to requests for comment for this story.

    The pair have shared so much of their money with politicians over the years that it could be that “sugar, dollar for dollar, is the most influential commodity in the U.S.,” said Gary Hufbauer, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and former deputy assistant secretary in the Treasury Department. As long as the brothers are around, “I would fall out of my chair at any approach that leads to a free market in sugar.”

    History, it seems, taught the family some lessons. “One of the reasons why we get involved in American politics is because of what happened to us in Cuba,” Alfy Fanjul told Vanity Fair in 2011 in a rare interview. “We do not want what happened in Cuba to happen to us again.”

  20. rikyrah says:

    THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 8/8/17
    Trump bellicosity is frightening new variable in N Korea standoff
    Rachel Maddow reviews what is known about North Korean military capability and its history of overblown threats and notes that the Donald Trump administration’s inconsistency on policy and equally overblown threats are the new, frightening variable in .

    THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 8/8/17
    With stakes high, Trump loses cool in face of North Korea threats
    Joe Cirincione, president of The Ploughshares Fund, talks with Rachel Maddow about why Donald Trump is taking the exact wrong approach to North Korea with his empty threats and bellicosity.

  21. rikyrah says:

    THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 8/8/17
    Trump camp gives thousands of documents to Senate Russia probe
    Rachel Maddow reports breaking news from Bloomberg News that among thousands of documents turned over to the Senate Judiciary Committee investigating Trump-Russia, roughly 20,000 of them are from the Trump campaign.

  22. rikyrah says:

    THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 8/8/17
    Nunes aide behind secretive UK trip to find Trump dossier author
    Julian Borger, world affairs editor for The Guardian, talks with Rachel Maddow about why a staffer to Rep. Devin Nunes sent people to London to find Christopher Steele, the author of the Trump dossier, and why he didn’t tell investigators what he was doing.

  23. rikyrah says:

    THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 8/8/17
    Trump bluster divorced from any real North Korea strategy
    Courtney Kube, NBC News national security and military reporter, talks with Rachel Maddow about whether Donald Trump is seriously considering privatizing the war in Afghanistan, and whether Trump’s bluster on North Korea has any basis in strategy.

  24. rikyrah says:

    In a crisis, Trump looks like the wrong leader at the wrong time
    08/09/17 08:00 AM
    By Steve Benen

    At various times during last year’s presidential candidates, some of the nation’s highest-profile figures tried to make the case that Donald Trump was unprepared for a nuclear standoff.

    In February, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said Trump was so “erratic,” he couldn’t be trusted with the nation’s nuclear codes. In July, Hillary Clinton told voters, “Imagine him in the Oval Office facing a real crisis. A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.” As late as October, then-President Barack Obama said at a rally, in reference to Trump, “How can you trust him with the nuclear codes? You can’t do it.”

    Nearly 63 million Americans nevertheless thought it’d be wise to put Trump in the Oval Office, and now the nation’s first amateur president faces a possible nuclear crisis with North Korea. The Atlantic’s David Graham had a great piece yesterday on why Trump is so unsuited for this specific challenge.

    At a moment of nuclear brinksmanship like this, any citizen of the United States wants a few things from a leader. You want someone you can trust to tell the truth, and who foreign leaders view as credible, so that threats and statements alike are taken seriously. You want someone who is known to be able to carefully sift through a lot of evidence and assess upsides from downsides. You want someone who has a team of expert advisers whose judgment he trusts and takes seriously. And you want someone who is able to take bad news.

    In other words, Trump is the opposite of what Americans need under circumstances like these. The president is untrustworthy; he’s widely recognized as an international joke; he lacks anything resembling critical thinking skills and struggles to differentiate between facts and falsehoods; and he only listens to experts who tell him what he wants to hear.

  25. rikyrah says:

    Trump’s claims on nuclear modernization crumble under scrutiny
    08/09/17 08:40 AM
    By Steve Benen

    Donald Trump spent the morning tweeting away, which wouldn’t ordinarily be especially interesting, except for one online missive about nuclear weapons. Given the context of a burgeoning crisis with North Korea, this presidential message was bound to raise eyebrows:

    “My first order as President was to renovate and modernize our nuclear arsenal. It is now far stronger and more powerful than ever before….”

    We talked earlier about how important it is for Americans to be able to trust a leader during a crisis, and Trump’s tweet serves as a timely reminder that the president has thrown away whatever credibility he may have brought to the office.

    As exercises in fact-checking go, this one’s surprisingly easy:

    1. Trump’s “first order” as president dealt with health care, not the nation’s nuclear arsenal.

    2. It was actually Barack Obama, not Donald Trump, who launched a massive, multi-year effort to modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

    3. For Trump to say, the arsenal “is now far stronger and more powerful than ever before,” suggests he believes the modernization process is done. That’s bonkers: the process has barely started and will take decades to complete.

  26. rikyrah says:

    They kicked out the head of the Mormon Church..

    Man…there must be some scandal there!!!

  27. yahtzeebutterfly says:

    Address by the governor of Guam, Eddie Baza Calvo:
    “Special Address August 9, 2017: Response to North Korea threat”
    https://youtu.be/YgdXG-LPUBw&rel=0

  28. yahtzeebutterfly says:

    Whitney Houston was born August 9, 1954. She would have been 54 today.

    https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DGxzZi0XcAAZ7yu.jpg

    I miss her. She is a legend who gave the world so much through her music. She sang her songs with such deep, powerful emotion!

  29. rikyrah says:

    Being unoriginal?
    You don’t say😒😒😒

  30. rikyrah says:

    Good Morning,Everyone 😄😄😄

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