Political Irony

There is some great video of Trump in this. Watch while Trump — at a fundraiser in Fargo ND — waves some papers in the air. He brags “It’s four pages of things that the Trump administration has accomplished in a short period of time.” He obviously hasn’t even read them because he later changes his mind and reduces the number of pages to three. But we do know how much he loves bullet points, saying “Each dot is a thing, ok? And some of those things are very big things.”

Later he tries to make fun of California, but fumbles, saying “California has just become one really large person.” Wait, what? How senile do you have to be to say something like that? Well, we find out when we watch Trump try repeatedly, very hard to pronounce the word “anonymous” and fail, bigly.

The Trump administration is not fighting a war against climate change, it is collaborating with the enemy. And it is doing it in the sneakiest way possible. In July, the EPA made it easier to release carbon dioxide pollution from vehicle tailpipes. Then in August, made it easier for coal-fired power plants to release carbon dioxide. And finally, this month, the EPA is planning on making it easier to release methane into the atmosphere.

Methane is one of the most powerful greenhouse gasses, which leaks from oil and gas wells, and is also intentionally vented and “flared” (burned) from drilling operations. Energy companies have often complained that the regulations requiring them to test for methane emissions are costly and burdensome. So the Trump administration will just waive them.

New, more powerful hurricanes are pounding this country, but unlike the entire rest of the world we aren’t fighting, we are rolling over and surrendering to powerful oil and gas interests.

© Dan Wasserman

But that is just one example of collaboration. In 2006, Trump stopped borrowing money from banks to finance his projects, and instead suddenly started making all of his investments in cash. That’s $400 million on 14 real estate projects since then, and nobody knows where the money comes from.

Well, maybe we do. Remember when Eric Trump blurted out to a golf magazine that the Trump organization doesn’t rely on American banks because they have all the funding they needed from Russia? Hmmmm.

In the book “Fear” (released today) there are some interesting quotes. Three weeks before the presidential election, Steve Bannon told Kushner that the campaign needed $50 million from Trump. Kushner balked saying “He’ll never do it,” and adding “He doesn’t have a lot of cash.” So Bannon and Kushner told Trump that they needed $25 million. Trump responded “No way. Fuck that. I’m not doing it.”

Remember that Trump promised that he would self-fund his campaign. I guess that was another lie. In the end, Trump made a $10 million loan to his campaign, to be repaid using the small cash donations that were coming in from his supporters.

In addition, the founder of Fusion GPS (who commissioned the famous dossier by Christopher Steele) told Congress that the Trump organization must have some outside funding because “he doesn’t have enough money to do this and that he would have had to have outside financial support for these things.”

So where is this money coming from? The one thing I hope (and expect) the Democrats will do if/when they take over either the House or the Senate is to launch an investigation into Trump’s finances, including getting Trump’s income tax returns. Trump has a bad habit of giving himself away, and he has repeatedly said that investigating his personal finances is off limits. What is he trying to hide?

© Drew Sheneman

The Republican party has lurched from claiming that climate change doesn’t exist (including Trump’s claim that it is a Chinese hoax), to admitting that it does exist but that it is not caused by humans, to just attacking it as a job killer. What they are really doing is “picking winners and losers” by trying to prop up old failing technologies like coal. Why? Because it gets them cold, hard cash in the form of campaign contributions from fossil-fuel energy companies (who may be failing, but still have donations to throw around).

So they go negative and pull out of the Paris climate accords, reverse anti-pollution regulations, and try to kill sustainable energy initiatives.

You know, the same kind of strategy they are executing to kill Obamacare to keep the health insurance companies making money so they can donate contributions. It is a cynical strategy that obviously won’t work over the long term (like giving tax breaks to the wealthy), but they don’t care as long as it gets them their money fix.

Unfortunately for them, even their claim that fighting climate change will be a “job killer” is a big lie. A new report from the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate points out something important that should be fairly obvious: a war against climate change will create jobs, not kill them.

After all, it was World War II that finally got us out of the great depression. War stimulates the economy. But not just real wars, but virtual ones too. Like the space race (part of the cold war) ushered in the age of computers and cell phones. One can only imagine that if something like this were happening now, the Republicans would be campaigning to save land-line phones and all those jobs manufacturing slide rules.

The report points out that fighting climate change would provide economic benefits of $26 trillion by 2030, and create more than 65 million new jobs worldwide. And unlike a real war, a war against climate change would prevent 700,000 premature deaths.

There is plenty of evidence that fighting climate change would generate jobs. After all, the coal industry, which Trump is fighting so hard to save, employed only 160,119 Americans in 2016, while the solar energy industry employed 373,807 Americans — more than twice as many. And that doesn’t include other sustainable energy industries, like wind (101,738) and bioenergy (130,677). These numbers come from a report from the US Department of Energy.

Apparently, Washington (and everywhere else) is going crazy trying to figure out who wrote the bombshell anonymous op-ed published in the NY Times.

The NY Times just published an article by a senior Trump administration official titled “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration“. The name of the author was withheld (for obvious reasons), but is known to the newspaper.

The article echos what Bob Woodward is saying about the administration in his upcoming book.

Meanwhile, Trump is claiming that Woodward’s book is complete fiction. I guess we’ll see.

© Clay Bennett

The Wall Street Journal reports that sales of AR-15 assault rifles and other “long guns” have cratered. Revenues are down 50% since Trump got elected, most likely because gun lovers believe their second amendment rights are safe now that Trump is in office.

What’s a gun manufacturer to do? Maybe they should work to get more Democrats elected so they can get their boogey man back and make money again.