chromodynamics

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/1701589

Not a few people have suggested that Pr*sident Donald J. Trump, the guy who has embarrassed even a few Republicans with his 6th grader tweets and colossal ignorance, is wagging the dog over North Korea to distract attention from his political incompetence and the Mueller investigation. Perhaps Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un and his foreign minister are doing the same to divert attention from their problems. 

Do they mean what they say? Or are they just spouting off for the home audience with no intent to go to war? Maybe it’s all just a bluff. But if this competitive waving of twangers is just bluffing with the idea of ratcheting up the bellicose rhetoric until the other side blinks and backs off, it’s a damned risky move. 

So risky, in fact, that retired Admiral James Stavridis told Los Angeles Times reporter Barbara Demick Sunday that he puts the chances of a conventional war in Korea at 50-50 and a nuclear one at 10 percent:

“We are closer to a nuclear exchange than we have been at any time in the world's history with the single exception of the Cuban missile crisis,’’ Stavridis said.

Of course, those odds are just one fellow’s educated guess, and he could be far from the mark. 

But Stavridis is not some Pentagon also-ran engaged in breathless fearmongering. While he has retired from his military career, he’s now dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, chairman of the board of the U.S. Naval Institute and a senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. When someone of that stature gives odds of war in that range, it’s wise to pay attention.

Joe Cirincione is someone who has been paying attention. And he thinks the admiral’s nuclear estimate is too optimistic. He’s president of the Ploughshares Fund, a group focused for 35 years on getting us to a world without nuclear weapons. Cirincione worked on the staffs of the House Committee on Armed Services and the Committee on Government Operations for nearly a decade and has written hundreds of articles on nuclear weapons issues. He is not given to hyperbole.

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/1701589

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/1701747

Puerto Rico's 3. 5 million citizens, U.S. citizens, are facing "near-death conditions" following Hurricane Maria. "Just yesterday, we have been canvassing one by one all of our elderly homes, finding our elderly―and I’m not kidding―we [had] to transfer 11 of them in near-death conditions, no food, no water, no electricity and really the sanitary conditions were deplorable," reports San Juan's mayor, Carmen Yulín Cruz.

So what's the U.S. House of Representatives doing about it? Nothing, unless you count scheduling a vote on an unconstitutional abortion ban some kind of help.

The bill, sponsored by Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.), would make it a crime to perform or attempt an abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy, with the possibility of a fine, up to five years in prison, or both.

They're tweeting about this with a hashtag #theyfeelpain. Funny how they use the hashtag #theyfeelpain bill for fetuses but not for people, oh, needing Medicaid. Or medical marijuana. Or for people starving and stranded in Puerto Rico.

It's always time for some red meat for the base when you're a Republican. They can't deliver Obamacare, so they might as well do this. Or, you know, spend some time trying to actually save actual living people.

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/1701747

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/1701710

Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III is set to make a speech at Georgetown University. The topic of that speech: free speech. The environment of the speech: anything but.

More than 130 students who had followed official channels to register for a seat in the auditorium were told they could attend, Lauren Phillips, a student at the school, wrote in an email Monday night. But the students were later suddenly uninvited because they were not part of a group that, Phillips believes, would ensure a sympathetic audience.

The attorney general of the United States, in a speech at a major university on the topic of “free speech,” is requiring a sympathetic audience scoured of any student who might object to anything he says. That’s despite the fact that in applying for these seats the students agreed not to disrupt Sessions’ speech. It’s a level of delicacy that makes snowflakes look like cast iron.

… students “find it extraordinarily hypocritical that AG Sessions would lecture future attorneys about the importance of free speech on campus while actively excluding the wider student body...”

It’s no coincidence that this comes at the same time that Donald Trump is actively attacking athletes who want to use their free expression to highlight racial inequality in the justice system. The Trump regime is attempting to redefine “free speech” as “speech that supports Trump.”

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/1701710

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/1701690

Now that he’s completed his plan to bring mining and clear-cut logging to National Monuments, Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zink has looked around his own department. And according to the AP, what he’s determined is that one third of the Interior Department is composed of traitors,

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said Monday that nearly one-third of employees at his department are not loyal to him and President Donald Trump, adding that he is working to change the department’s regulatory culture to be more business friendly.

The Trump regime is one in which you can head up a department whose name you’ve forgotten and whose purpose you never knew, run something that doesn’t even interest you, or head up a department you actively want to destroy, so long as you show the one critical trait: Loyalty to Trump.

Dedication to the nation is off the table. Efficiency is not an issue. Knowledge is an actual detriment. Loyalty is what counts. People who don’t realize that are getting in the way of making arbitrary decisions and implementing “business friendly” decisions.

Zinke said he wants to speed up permits for oil drilling, logging and other energy development that now can take years.

“The president wants it yesterday,” Zinke said, referring to permits for energy development.

So Zinke has no option but to shed those people and offices who insist on studying an area before it’s destroyed in favor of new people in new places who know to salute first, ask questions never.

Zinke said he is pursuing a major reorganization that would push much of the agency’s decision-making outside Washington and move several agencies, including the Bureau of Reclamation and Bureau of Land Management, to undetermined Western states.

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/1701690

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/1701516

Five—that's the total number of U.S. citizens who were finally allowed to remain in the Senate Finance Committee's hearing on the GOP's Graham-Cassidy healthcare repeal bill. As large hearing rooms that could have accommodated hundreds of onlookers sat empty, Republican Finance chair Orrin Hatch gaveled the meeting to order with about 20 disabilities rights activists present. Outside the hearing room doors, a line of hundreds of interested citizens snaked through the halls. But even 20 proved too many when they started chanting, "No cuts to Medicaid! Save our liberty!”

After they were forcibly removed by Capitol Police, the Washington Post's Dana Milbank writes:

[Finance Committee Chairman Orrin] Hatch returned after seven minutes and started scolding: “If you can’t be in order then get the heck out! . . . Shut that door and keep it shut!”

Who he was yelling at wasn’t clear, because after the mayhem the cops had allowed only five spectators to remain in the room — and three of them looked like lobbyists.

That’s right: Five members of the public allowed to witness the lone hearing for a plan that would cut more than a trillion dollars from health care, deny health insurance to millions and dump the whole health-care mess on ill-equipped states.

As Milbank quipped: “Maybe the Senate janitor’s closet was already booked?”

It’s honestly hard to believe Republicans even allowed this farce of a hearing to move forward. They apparently weren’t even sure the version of the Graham-Cassidy bill they were examining was the one that would come to vote. 

Cassidy says he *thinks* this is the final version of #GrahamCassidy that senators may vote on later this week

As Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) noted in her statement announcing her opposition to the monstrosity:

Sweeping reforms to our health care system and to Medicaid can’t be done well in a compressed time frame, especially when the actual bill is a moving target. Today, we find out that there is now a fourth version of the Graham-Cassidy proposal, which is as deeply flawed as the previous iterations. The fact that a new version of this bill was released the very week we are supposed to vote compounds the problem.

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/1701516

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/1701635

Follow Jen on Twitter at @JenSorensen

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/1701635

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/1701674

On Monday evening, Donald Trump finally got around to mentioning Puerto Rico for the first time since Hurricane Maria finished passing over the island. And what he delivered was a level of cruelty usually reserved for four-year-olds holding  a magnifying glass above ants.

Texas & Florida are doing great but Puerto Rico, which was already suffering from broken infrastructure & massive debt, is in deep trouble..

Trump followed this initial tweet with a couple of followup. They did not make things better.

It’s old electrical grid, which was in terrible shape, was devastated. Much of the island was destroyed, with billions of dollars owed to Wall Street and the banks which, sadly, must be dealt with. Food, water, and medical are top priorities — and doing well. #FEMA 

Donald Trump finally deigned to notice three and a half million Americans in Puerto Rico. Americans without power, without shelter, and—despite Trump’s afterthought—without clean water, without adequate food or medical care. Americans living in the shattered ruins of their homes unable to even communicate with loved ones to let them know they’re still alive. And he blamed them. 

It took Donald Trump five full days to respond to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Maria on the lives of 3.5 million Americans in Puerto Rico, and when he finally did so his comments on Twitter were so devoid of empathy it threatened to spark a new controversy.

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/1701674