Month: March 2017

A Trump Foreign Visit Delayed, Oh My…

Donald Trump’s state visit to the UK is to be delayed until October and will take place mostly in Scotland, according to reports.

The Daily Mail has reported that planners want to shift much of the US president’s trip – originally pencilled in for the first week in June – to the Queen’s residence at Balmoral, Aberdeenshire, in a bid to deter protesters.

The president could spend as little as one day in London before heading to Scotland.

A senior Whitehall source told the paper: “The Americans have asked to push it back.

“They don’t want what will be one of his first big foreign trips to be overshadowed.

”Mr Trump’s mother, Mary, was born in Stornoway on the isle of Lewis.

There is also speculation that Mr Trump may wish to visit the area during his stay.

He has substantial business interests in Scotland, including the Trump International Golf Course in Aberdeenshire.

However, Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon was among those calling for his state visit to be cancelled in retaliation for his “deeply wrong” travel ban.

The reported delay also means that Parliament will be in recess, making it impossible for MPs to “snub” the President by refusing him the honour of making an address.

Officials believe the delay could also allow tempers to cool over Mr Trump’s controversial policies, and that the autumn weather may make mass protests less likely.

It is unlikely , given the character damage President Trump has brought upon himself, that a delay will change the desire to protest Trump’s visit to he UK and Scotland. Foreigners are able to see Presdent Trump for who and what he really is.

It is clear that the Trump administration will be running damage control operations everywhere he visits. He simpy is not well like by anyone or any nation. Except maybe Russia.

Rock and Roll Anybody?…

Making a move from jazz to some old time rock and roll this evening. Music has been called the universal language (by me anyway),  and indeed it is. As a former active musician appreciation for most music genre’s s is a natural art of my being.

Enjoy.

Two Issues Inextricably Intertwined…

President Trump certainly has a record of making statements that are false. Or put another way, statements for which there is no credible evidence in support of his support his statements in question. Does this mean he lied? It might, but only if he knew the actual facts relative to his statements and intentionally misrepresented the truth. Something we all know politicians of both parties do more than just occasionally.

Does Donald Trump lie? If you read the fact checks conducted by a growing number of major media outlets, you bet. Like, all the time. And not just little stretches of the truth.

 Just over half the Trump statements checked by Politifact’s Truth-o-Meter were classified as false or pants-on-fire false, for example, while The Washington Post’s fact checker gave a four Pinocchio rating (its highest falsehood) to nearly 65 percent of the Trump claims it checked.

But what if we can’t agree on the facts? How do you determine “truth?” And if there is no agreement, is it still OK for the mainstream media to call them lies? Chuck Todd asked Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Gerard Baker as much on “Meet the Press”, and Baker’s response sort of broke the Internet.

“I’d be careful about using the word ‘lie.’ ‘Lie’ implies much more than just saying something that’s false. It implies a deliberate intent to mislead. I think it’s perfectly — when Donald Trump says thousands of people were on the rooftops of New Jersey on 9/11 celebrating, thousands of Muslims were there celebrating, I think it’s right to investigate that claim, to report what we found, which is that nobody found any evidence of that whatsoever, and to say that.

“I think it’s then up to the reader to make up their own mind to say, ‘This is what Donald Trump says. This is what a reliable, trustworthy news organization reports. And you know what? I don’t think that’s true.’ I think if you start ascribing a moral intent, as it were, to someone by saying that they’ve lied, I think you run the risk that you look like you are, like you’re not being objective.”

Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent shot back that of course the media has an obligation to call out Trump’s lies – and use the word lies – because Trump continues to repeat falsehoods even after they have been debunked. He’s a new kind of political animal, Sargent argued, and the media is utterly unprepared to cover his presidency.

The takeaway? It’s going to be a long four years for the press, and this debate has only just begun. (MORE BELOW THE FOLD)

Our nation is now divided by starkly different political ideologies, With the exception of The War Between The States we have never been so divided. Right now our major political parties are, on most important issues affecting all Americans, 180 degrees apart. And it seems as though there exists no desire to find common ground.

Unless Americans start demanding from their congressional representatives and senators  a degree of bipartisanship, mutual cooperation, concern for America rather than party ideology, and putting the welfare of all Americans as their foremost responsibility we are doomed as a democratic republic.

Appropriate…

Mending Wall

by Robert Frost
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs.
The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.

I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.

We keep the wall between us as we go.

To each the boulders that have fallen to each.

And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.

Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side.
It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

He only says, “Good fences make good neighbors.
”
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
“Why do they make good neighbors?  Isn’t it
Where there are cows?  But here there are no cows.

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.
”  I could say “Elves” to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself.
I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.