Iraqi parliament has voted to order US troops out of Iraq.  Trump has single handedly, and stupidly escalated violence in the Middle East.  More later.

Yesterday, Trump did what only Trump can do, and that is to lie on national television to prove that he hadn’t made an untrue statement.  This time, he was trying to justify blurting out that Hurricane Dorian was forecast to hit Alabama, which it wasn’t.  He was so obsessed with the press calling him out for the  mistake that he actually took a print of the National Hurricane Center’s forecast map from last Thursday and actually altered it with a Sharpie.  Yes, that’s right, he altered it with a Sharpie:

I’m sure the only ones fooled by this ham handed alteration of the NHC forecast map were Trumpists, but the National Weather Service corrected Trump with their own tweet saying that Alabama would not be affected.  After Trump showed the altered map, Twitterverse lit up, and #sharpiegate became trending, showing a number of solutions to Trump’s other problems.  Here are a few:

While the trending is pretty entertaining, Trump’s tampering with National Weather Service forecasting is dangerous.  All of us from Texas understand the life and death threats of hurricanes.  Accurate forecasting of hurricane tracks is essential for people to make their own decisions about life and property.  Trump has no business muddying the water by serving around like this just to prove himself right after saying something really stupid.

Last night, CNN persisted with their silly lightning round “debate” format encouraging 0% candidates to attack the few actual serious candidates.  Whoever thought that was a good idea was wrong, dead wrong, because it gave idiots like Bill De Blasio, who has ZERO chance of being nominated, an amplified voice to attack the front runner.  To illustrate the point, here is a chart I built that plots each candidate’s average national poll average from realclearpolitics.com against the minutes they talked during this round of debates as timed by the Washington Post.  To be clear, though, what’s illustrated here is total airtime, not the subject of that airtime.  For example, over HALF of Biden’s airtime was spent defending himself from attacks most of who are polling at less than 5% nationally.  The blue bars are national average poll percentage.  The orange bars are airtime spent in this round of debates.  Have a look:

This chart illustrates how goddam stupid the DNC is allowing 0% candidates on a national debate stage.  What it doesn’t illustrate, and it’s an important point, is that these 0% candidates used their time to attack…wait for it…Barack Obama.  It was shocking how, to get at Biden (and to be fair, Harris did it, too) these candidates attacked policies of the Obama administration.  The burning dumpster in the room, Donald Trump, was almost completely ignored while Joe Biden fought off withering attacks on his record of 50 years of public service.  The entire episode was shameful, set up by CNN as some silly cage match, and enabled by the incompetence of Tom Perez and the other leadership of the DNC.

During both of these most recent debates circular firing squads I followed several debate threads.  Almost every one of those threads, which were of DEMOCRATS, had a number of “Sleepy Joe” and “sleepy old white man” comments that were surprising.  And what was shocking were that many of those making those comments supported Warren or Sanders.  Let’s look at some of the ages of some well known people:

Bernie Sanders – 77
Joe Biden – 76
Elizabeth Warren – 70
Charlie Watts – 78
Mick Jagger – 76
Keith Richards – 75
Ronnie Woods – 72

I saw the last four guys outperform most 20 year olds onstage last Saturday.  So let’s be fair here.  If you’re a Bernie or Warren supporter, attacking Biden for his age is hypocritical and a Trump talking point.

But I digress from slamming the DNC and CNN for yet another disastrous night for Democrats that HURT not helped them mount an offense against the worst president in US history.  It’s long past time for the DNC to stop being stupid, get 75% of those people off the stage so we can have a serious discussion about the future of our nation and strengthening actual candidates so they can aim their fire where it should be aimed, Donald Trump, not each other.

In a moment of bag of horse manure stupid, 97 year old Lila Cockrell, former mayor of San Antonio, was turned away by officials from the polls for the mayoral runoff last Thursday because she didn’t have the proper ID.  Texas has one of the most idiotic voter ID suppression laws in the country.  For example, you can vote with your gun license, but can’t vote with your University of Texas ID.  The law is an incredible burden for the elderly and economically disadvantaged, as Republicans have made voter fraud suppression a key plank in their platform power grab.  Shockingly, the courts have often gone along (or delayed decision until it’s too late) over voter suppression and radical gerrymandering.

To make this story even more enraging, Bexar County voting official Jacque Callanen said (in his most Nazi-like apologist voice), “It was uncomfortable for the election officials to tell her, ‘No.’ Obviously, they knew who she was,” Callanen said. “But the law is the law. The election officials did what they’re supposed to do.”  Hey, Jacque – when the law turns away a qualified voter who everyone in the place knows is qualified over “the law”, the goddam law is wrong and needs to be struck down.  If Ray Charles were alive today, even he could see that, dumbass.

File under “Tone Deaf to Tone Deafness”, Rudy Giuliani thought it would be a really good idea to go to Ukraine to dig for dirt on Hunter Biden, Joe’s youngest son, who has been on the board of Burisma, a Ukranian oil company.  He was also seeking out Ukranian prosecutors to urge them to launch investigations of the younger Biden.  Apparently, he was also seeking information about who in Ukraine may have spoken to Robert Mueller’s investigators.  You read that correctly; even after two years of investigations into Trump’s connections to the Russians and Ukrainians (and thousands of denials from Trumpland), Rudy Giuliani thought it would be a good idea to…wait for it…ask the Ukrainians for help in the 2020 election.

When word got out about the trip, the press pounced, causing a media storm, and the Dems piled on, shaming Rudy to the point where he cancelled the trip.  He attributed the cancellation to “spin” from the Dems, not to his own tone deafness and stupidity.

Remember that back in June, Trump caved on his cruel and illegal policy of separating children from their parents on the border.  Even though many kids remain separated , the stated strategy of tearing families apart was reversed.  Well, just now, Trump caved again, agreeing to a short term continuing resolution to reopen the government, and it doesn’t include money for his idiotic wall.  What changed?  Public opinion really did start turning as television reports of weeping federal employees hit the air waves.  Then Christopher Wray, director of the FBI, spoke out to all of his employees about how angry he is over the shutdown; the commandant of the Coast Guard spoke out publicly in opposition, and then, the FAA ordered a ground stop this morning at La Guardia airport in New York citing a shortage of controllers to safely move aircraft through our airspace.  Apparently, this was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and the tsunami of opposition to his shutdown FINALLY got through the orange ferret sitting on his head.  And he caved.

Trump is now right back to where he was two weeks before Christmas except that millions of Americans have been injured from his folly and his poll numbers are lower if that was even possible.  Oh, and he lied about how so many federal employees wanted him to keep going on the shutdown which is outrageous.  His “deal” to reopen government is only for 3 weeks.  We’ll see what the Dems do.

The funny thing? Trump did get his wall, and her name is Nancy Pelosi.