Verdicts Speak Louder

PBS reports: Trump avoids mention of Cohen, Manafort legal drama at West Virginia rally

Hours before the rally, Manafort was convicted in federal court in Virginia on eight counts of financial crimes. Cohen pleaded guilty in federal court in New York to eight felonies, including breaking federal campaign finance law by arranging payments to two women who said they had sexual relationships with Trump before he became president.

 

Trump has denied the relationships.

 


 

He called his supporters to gather
And whipped them up into a lather.
But Cohen and Manafort
Had a bad day in court:
Bigger news than the president’s blather.

2018 Colleen Anderson

 


Half-witted Wall

Quoting from the Herald Tribune article, “Trump border wall would waste billions“:

The U.S. Government Accountability Office has just published a report saying the Trump administration has no idea how to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico and even if it did, the cost would be monumentally more than estimates.

 

The GAO provides facts on a non-partisan basis to Congress about federal spending. Obviously, nothing there to interest Trump.

 

The 49-page report issued this month was done because, in January 2017, Trump signed an executive order calling for the construction of a wall. Since then the U.S. Customs and Border Protection has built eight prototype panels that stick up in the desert in an Orwellian kind of way.

 

One major problem, says the GAO, is that the agency’s “strategy did not include analysis of the costs associated with deploying barriers in each location or segment, which can vary depending on topography, land ownership, and other factors. Without assessing costs, consistent with leading practices for capital decision making, CBP does not have complete information for prioritizing locations to use its resources in the most cost-effective manner.”

 

In other words, Trump is wasting billions — and wants to waste billions more — on a border wall because nobody involved considered the cost of building each segment or who owns the land. Possibly worse, the border protection people selected locations for barriers without assessing where they were needed to prevent illegal border crossings.

 

In other words, this is no Hoover Dam that will awe people for generations.

 

 


 

His boasting and bragging wear thin.
Trade wars are not easy to win.
And that half-witted wall,
If it rises, will fall
Like the wall that divided Berlin.

2018 Colleen Anderson

Children in Cages

Quoting Splinter‘s article “Children in Cages, a Symbol of Trump’s America“:

Children being separated from their parents and put into chain-link cages. That image will forever remain a symbol of President Donald Trump’s America.

 

Trump has already backed away from this cruel directive, which was carried out at the southern border during the first weeks of his administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy, but most of the 2,300 children taken from their families, most of whom come from Central American nations, have not yet been returned to their parents. And the situation still doesn’t seem to be a matter of urgency for his administration. I suspect that if they’d been American children, the response would have been completely different.

 

Continue reading

 

 


We’ve had presidents, wise and courageous,
Whose legacies shine through the ages,
But when this one is gone,
His disgrace will live on:
A thug who kept children in cages.

2018 Colleen Anderson

 

Mr. Blankenship talks about jobs

New York Magazine reports:
Fresh Out of Prison, Reviled Coal Baron Don Blankenship Is Running for the U.S. Senate

Blankenship is not a charismatic figure. His business success was achieved more with brute force than a winning personality, but he has shown a flair for marketing that could help him as a politician. The Kentucky native was instrumental in crafting the bogus idea that President Obama was waging a “war on coal,” and he generously backed Friends of Coal, an organization that boosted the industry in and around West Virginia. The propaganda campaign, which equated support for coal companies to patriotism and brought people like Ted Nugent and Sean Hannity to rallies in West Virginia, was wildly effective at convincing the people who worked in the mines to side with the coal companies against the federal government and other regulators.

 

Still, there are plenty in West Virginia who refuse to see Blankenship as the hero he believes himself to be. His company didn’t just get 29 men killed by cutting corners in 2010, it also wreaked havoc on West Virginia’s waterways, busted unions, and extracted billions of dollars of wealth from the mountains in Appalachia while telling people they were lucky to have jobs that might get them killed.

 

 


 

Mr. Blankenship talks about jobs
Settin’ up there so mighty and high
But he’s not the one who goes down in his mine
And he doesn’t care if you die

Colleen Anderson, 11/30/17

 

When asked about questions of race

President Donald Trump had a chance to explicitly denounce white supremacy and racism on Saturday after violence broke out at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, leaving three dead ― one 32-year-old woman, who was struck by a car, and two state troopers, whose helicopter crashed outside the city while they were responding to the situation ― and at least 35 others injured.

 

But instead of specifically criticizing members of the Ku Klux Klan, the white supremacists or the neo-Nazis who brought torches and bats to the rally, Trump blamed the unrest on “many sides.”

 

In fact, Trump commented on the fighting in Charlottesville several times on Saturday ― on Twitter and in front of the press ― but none of his remarks named the violence for what it was: a fight over white supremacy.

So people did it for him.

 

SAY IT: People Beg Trump To Clearly Denounce White Supremacy
Huffington Post

 


When asked about questions of race,
He quickly averted his face.
But beneath his coiffure,
He knew one thing for sure:
He was scared to denounce his own base.

© 2017 Colleen Anderson

 

Good men of good counsel can’t reach him;

“We have as president an unhinged narcissistic child who tweets absurd lies and holds rallies to prop up his fragile ego, whose conflicts of financial interest are ubiquitous and whose presidency is under a ‘gray cloud’ of suspicion (according to the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee) for colluding with Russian agents to obtain office in the 2016 election.”

 

ROBERT REICH: WHERE ARE THE GROWN-UPS IN THE WHITE HOUSE?
Newsweek

 

Robert Reich: Four Grounds of Impeachment for Trump (video)

 


 

Good men of good counsel can’t reach him;
Wise counselors try, but can’t teach him.
Before it gets worse,
This American Curse,
Enough. It is time to impeach him.

© 2017 Colleen Anderson

 

While his ban and his plan for a wall

Chelsea Handler: Trump Needs to Golf More (video)

“The only time you’ve acknowledged climate change is when it caused erosion at one of your seaside golf resorts. So now we just need to get one of your golf courses pregnant so you’ll change your stance on Planned Parenthood.”

 

While his ban and his plan for a wall
Seem to stutter and sputter and stall,
He’ll whip up his fan base,
Then head for some green space
To play with a little white ball.

© 2017 Colleen Anderson

Corporate tax cuts

“Trump would not be alone among the super-rich to benefit from the plan, analysts said, although the structure of the Trump organization, an agglomeration of hundreds of owner-operated entities, made it a prime potential beneficiary.

 

“The secretive nature of the Trump organization, which the president has not divested from, and the lack of Trump’s own tax returns to work with, made it difficult to pin down how much the president and his family could stand to gain from the tax code changes proposed on Wednesday, analysts said.”

 

Trump tax plan could save him millions under guise of helping small businesses

 


 

“Corporate tax cuts,” proclaims the Big Boor,
“Will be good for us, you can be sure!”
The truth of the matter:
Fat cats will get fatter,
And the poor will grow ever more poor.

© 2017 Colleen Anderson

 

So he’s backing away from The Wall,

“Trump has long promised that Mexico would pay for the wall along the southern border, something officials in that country have said is not going to happen.

 

Lawmakers in Congress had little interest in footing the bill — costs could be as high as $70 billion, according to one new report — and even less interest in shutting down the government over it.”

 

Trump backs off border wall fight for now, easing government shutdown threat
Los Angeles Times

 


 

So he’s backing away from The Wall,
Says he’ll put it on hold until fall.
Like most of his plans,
Just a chant for his fans,
And a stupid idea, after all.

© 2017 Colleen Anderson

 


 

The BLOTUS is truly vainglorious

“In an appearance at the University of Chicago on Monday, former President Barack Obama unloaded a relentless barrage of complete sentences in what was widely seen as a brutal attack on his successor, Donald Trump.

 

“Appearing at his first public event since leaving office, Obama fired off a punishing fusillade of grammatically correct sentences, the likes of which the American people have not heard from the White House since he departed.”

 

OBAMA’S BARRAGE OF COMPLETE SENTENCES SEEN AS BRUTAL ATTACK ON TRUMP
Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker

 


Seriously, the Transcript of AP Interview with Trump will make you weep for America.

 

The BLOTUS is truly vainglorious,
But his word choice is not meritorious.
He’d be talking less trash
If — (with thanks, Ogden Nash) —
He would go out and buy a thesaurious

© Colleen Anderson, 2017