We’ve all seen Trump fawn all over brutal dictator Kim Jung Un, ignoring his human rights record, nuclear weapons threat, and outright brutality.  Last week, Trump sided with Kim against Japan, our most important Asian ally, after North Korea launched short range missiles towards Japan that fell into the sea.  Trump dismissed the launch saying,

“It doesn’t matter. All I know is that there have been no nuclear tests, there have been no ballistic missiles going out, no long-range missiles going out. And I think that someday we’ll have a deal. I’m not in a rush”

We all know that Trump is an unthinking, narcissistic ass.  No one or nothing is more important to him than himself.  He ignores his advisors, our allies, and all intelligence and law enforcement agencies.  He’s an “expert” and a “professional” in all matters, taking his own counsel.  He has done the same when it comes to Kim, playing games and coddling him.

Well, that behavior has now gotten at least five North Korean emissaries killed according to South Korean newspaper, Chosun Igbo.  Remember when Trump abruptly ended the sham negotiation with Kim over nuclear weapons last March?  Apparently, Kim showed his displeasure with Trump’s walkout by executing by firing squad chief negotiator Kim Hyok Chol and four of his staff.

The guy that Trump loves and trusts, who has a murderous track record, just murdered five diplomats because His Orangeness, in his all-knowing wisdom, is screwing around with nuclear weapons, close allies, and a brutal dictator for reality television storylines and more tweeting from the toilet in the WH.

Thanks a lot.

ProPublica is on the case, digging in on Trump’s personal self enrichment using his own resorts to reap millions in government money and stuff in his own pockets full of American taxpayer cash.   One textbook example of how he does it is described in detail, and it goes like this:  Trump and his merry band of criminals descend on Mara Lago for the visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping in April 2017.  Late in the evening of the state dinner (profits to Donald Trump), Steve Bannon and unknown number of his cronies take over the posh Library Bar in the resort, order the bartender out and post the Secret Service at the door.  In the ensuing hours, they consume 54 premium cocktails (self served) while the agents block the door from entry, including the bartender himself.  The bill, totaling over $1,000 (with the service charge) was later toted up and sent to the State Department which it refused to pay.  It was forwarded to the White House, which, of course approved the bill without question, writing the check, taxpayers paying the bill.

The article goes on the describe how the Trump administration has lifted the caps on hotel bills at Trump resorts, allowing trump to profit, selling rooms to the government for $500 dollars a night and more.

Trump is nothing more than a mobster, stealing money from Americans while 42% of them cheer him on in his criminality.  The corruption is jaw dropping, while his sycophants look wide-eyed saying “What?  You were serious about that?”

I wish I had thought of this, but alas, I didn’t.  But I’m going to steal it.  This is the best, most descriptive analogy EVER of Trump.  Wait for it…

Donald Trump is to the US Presidency as Ted Baxter is to Walter Cronkite.

Boom.

As we all know, Trump painted himself into a corner two weeks ago, driving a stake in the ground over his stupid wall notion after being excoriated by RWNJs Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh for caving.  He promised a wall to his mouth breathers, and, By God, he’s going to deliver.  Nevermind that he also stupidly promised that Mexico was going to pay for it.  While normal people laughed at such a ridiculous assertion, his base lapped it up, and now we find ourselves as Americans being held hostage for one of the most ridiculous self-inflicted crises in US history.

The irony, though, is that Trump did get his wall yesterday, and its name is Nancy Pelosi.  Last November, after playing to his xenophobic base, he got trounced and lost 40 congressional seats, even in safely gerrymandered districts.  These 40 new members were sworn in yesterday, and Pelosi started doing what she’s so good at – governing with an iron hand in a velvet glove.  When she gets finished with Trump he won’t understand what hit him, and won’t even see it until after he’s been run over by her.

Trump’s hastily called non-press conference press conference during the swearing in ceremony yesterday was evidence that he’s unhappy that the attention had shifted from himself and that he’s clearly rattled as the ground under his feet has shifted against him.  His baffling 8 minute nationally televised ramble was the first “press conference” of the year for him, and more amazing, the FIRST TIME he’s ever set foot in the WH briefing room.  That’s correct – Trump’s been president for two years, and has NEVER been to the press room until yesterday.

Trump has recklessly careened head on into the wall named Nancy, and he’s going to learn just how hard and high she is.  We all know that his time in the WH won’t end well, and we’ll soon learn how Pelosi is going to help him along to his final downfall.

Michael Lewis of Moneyball and The Big Short fame has a new book called The Fifth Risk.  This book describes the corruption/incompetency in the US government since Trump ascended to office in early 2017.  The main character in Lewis’s book is a guy named John MacWilliams, who joined DOE under Obama as chief risk officer.  For Lewis, MacWilliams identified five big risks to the US that he observed.  The first four are pretty obvious:

• Broken Arrows (loose nukes)
• North Korea
• Iran (keeping them from building nukes)
• Protecting the electric grid from cyberterrorism

The fifth risk, though, is the scariest – Program Management.  That doesn’t sound scary, but it is.  Lewis puts it this way:

“The risk a society runs when it falls into the habit of responding to long-term risks with short-term solutions. … ‘Program management’ is the existential threat that you never really even imagine as a risk. … It is the innovation that never occurs and the knowledge that is never created, because you have ceased to lay the groundwork for it. It is what you never learned that might have saved you.”

In other words, the biggest risk to the US is likely something you’ve never even thought about thinking about.  Lewis outlines a number of issues that the US government assesses used to assess that could be cataclysmic if it occurred.  However, when Trump took over the government, he didn’t give a hoot about those threats, or, more tragic, was too stupid to even recognize those threats; since then he has stripped funding and slashed key staff positions that manage those risks.  One typical example of this negligence is the Office of Chief Scientist at the Department of Agriculture. This office manages $3 billion a year in research grants for important programs such as how to grow food in a changing climate, which seems sort of important.  The person holding that job was a distinguished research scientist in agriculture named Cathie Woteki.  Trump fired her and named a climate denying talk radio host, Sam Clovis, who had ZERO science background to be chief scientist.  Ol’ Sam, though, withdrew suddenly from the nomination when he became embroiled in the Mueller investigation.  Trump has since named a Dow Chemical pesticide executive as chief scientist.  Swell.

Another glaring example of Trump’s incompetence is naming our own Rootin’ Tootin’ Rick Perry to be Secretary of Energy.  Perry famously announced during the 2012 primary that he wanted to shut down Energy, Education, and, er… that other one (oops), so Trump thought he would be the perfect pick to protect our power grid, nuclear arsenal, and fossil fuel industries.  Perry clearly has no idea what he’s doing, so our energy security is in the hands of devoted public employees who are not morons like him.  He didn’t even take a briefing from staff, and has left day to day management to lieutenants, who are more interested in promoting the oil and coal industries and couldn’t care less about nuclear security or resilience of the power grid.

Even worse, budgets for data collection have been slashed.  That includes everything from weather data at NOAA to climate science and food safety and the USDA.  Essentially, the federal bureaucracy has been set adrift with slashed funding and no appointed leadership.  Career employees have been either ignored or fired, and so the US is essentially blind to threats against everything from our power grid to pharmaceuticals to nuclear weapons.

This bungling of management of the government is certainly incompetence on the part of Trump and his cronies; but that is not the only problem.  There is the profit motive.  If Trump succeeds in cutting off weather data from the public, then private providers of that data are then free to sell it for a profit.  And since that data is critical to state and local governments, farmers, ranchers, distribution companies, then the value of their monopoly of critical data is virtually limitless.

The Trump administration is nothing but a gigantic robber baron scheme.  The rich get richer, government services crumble and private companies receive soaring profits.  Lewis’s book should be a wakeup call, but I fear no one who can do anything is paying attention.  And that is when the threat you’ve never even thought about thinking about strikes with tragic consequences.

Don’t say I didn’t tell you so.

Anyone paying attention knows that SCOTUS nominee Brett Kavanaugh is a radical partisan activist who’s main job has been installing radical partisans in judicial positions throughout the federal court system.  We also know the he lives on the teetering far right edge of judicial thought, supporting a totalitarian executive branch (only if a Republican is running that branch).  The character trait that is emerging, though, is one that many male politicians own, and that is obsession with sex.  His radical obsession with controlling women’s healthcare decisions to keeping them subjugated to unfair employment and pay practices, his singular focus on dominating the female members of our society is clear.  But apparently it’s worse than that.  Not only is he all of the above, apparently he’s a real shitbag.  Dr. Blasey Ford’s charges of attempted rape are credible (especially since Kavanaugh’s male friends have sudden cases of amnesia), but now the pattern of his misogyny is becoming more clear.

But before we talk about new revelations about Kavanaugh, let’s talk about his spokesman who has been carefully crafting the messaging about his image to the press.  Said spokesman’s name is Garrett Ventry, who is (was) a communications aide to the Senate Judiciary Committee and chair, Chuck Grassley.  Well, Garrett was shown the door yesterday after NBC News started asking questions about allegations about…wait for it…sexual harassment made by female staff when he worked for the North Carolina House Majority leader at the North Carolina General Assembly.  Not only were there allegations against him about sexual harassment, he also apparently “embellished” his resume.  He was canned from that job.  Nice.

Anyhoo, back to Kavanaugh.  Late this week, stories started emerging about how Kavanaugh insists that his female clerks “look like models” and now the Dean of Yale Law has called allegations about a faculty member grooming female candidates’ appearance for clerkships in Kavanaugh’s office “…of enormous concern to me and to the School.”

GOP Senators have leapt to Kavanaugh’s defense, saying that if he really was a sexual predator that the pattern of behavior would have followed him throughout his career.  Apparently, it has.

Boy, Republicans sure can pick ’em.