All Things Trump: Is it over yet?

[L'Emmerdeur]

well, I don't remember if the Bill of Rights was adopted at the same time as the Constitution or some time later... a plague on the guys at the Uni who decided that the American culture course should bear only on the colonial period...

The Bill of Rights was adopted more or less along with the US Constitution. However it originally was determined to pertain only to the federal government. Its authority pertaining to state laws developed in piecemeal fashion beginning in the latter part of the 19th century. Various US Supreme Court rulings based on the 14th and 15th Amendments (ratified in 1868 and 1870 respectively) extended the protections of assorted rights contained in the Bill of Rights to all citizens regardless of which state they lived in. Some of those rulings came as late as the 1960s.

[Tero]

Guy in Tennessee is all ready to vote for a guy who will not give him a job or anything else. He does not want a job!

[Tero]

yall qaeda.jpg (32.65 KiB) Viewed 2326 times

[Tero]

Rewind to 2016, day after election.

The Egyptian president calls Trump at Trump Tower.
Trump: I love the Bangles.
He: ?
Trump: You know, Walk Like an Egyptian.

[Tero]

Reading another Lewis book. Not all his books are on politics.
https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Risk-Undoi ... is+&sr=8-1

Chris Christie was initially set up as transition leader. He was ordered fired by Kushner. Bannon did the firing. No transition team was in place by Dec 2016. Only in 2017 were teams of young men and men set out to gov't departments. Their jobs were
1 find dirt on Obama or his running that department
2 destroy that department

The DOE has a budget of 30 billion and thousands of employee. It is also the nuclear watchdog of the planet. It too was to be at least crippled.

[L'Emmerdeur]

In the 'that's not really news' department Trump's acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is using the most recent antisemitic attack in the US to enhance his anti-immigrant narrative:

'Trump Boss Twists Hanukkah Attack to Push Anti-Immigrant Agenda'

The Trump administration appeared on Monday to be trying to turn the latest violent anti-Semitic attack in New York into an anti-immigrant parable.

Ken Cuccinelli, the Trump administration’s acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, claimed in a morning tweet that 38-year-old Grafton Thomas, a U.S. citizen who allegedly stabbed five people at a Hanukkah party over the weekend, was the “son of an illegal alien who got amnesty under the 1986 amnesty law for illegal immigrants.” It’s not clear where Cuccinelli got that information or if it was correct.

“Apparently, American values did not take hold among this entire family, at least this one violent, and apparently bigoted, son,” Cuccinelli wrote.

Cuccinelli has pushed for aggressive anti-immigrant policies since his time as a state lawmaker in Virginia. For the Trump White House, he has argued against birthright U.S. citizenship for children of undocumented parents and suggested the words on the Statue of Liberty were only aimed at European immigrants.

...

[The attacker's] family told CNN he had no history of anti-Semitism, violent behavior, or prior convictions. They said he is “not a member of any hate groups” and have reportedly asked his attorney, Michael Sussman, to request a mental-health evaluation for Thomas, who has “a long history of mental illness and hospitalizations” and “was raised in a home which embraced and respected all religions and races.”

[Joe]

Reading another Lewis book. Not all his books are on politics.
https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Risk-Undoi ... is+&sr=8-1

Chris Christie was initially set up as transition leader. He was ordered fired by Kushner. Bannon did the firing. No transition team was in place by Dec 2016. Only in 2017 were teams of young men and men set out to gov't departments. Their jobs were
1 find dirt on Obama or his running that department
2 destroy that department

The DOE has a budget of 30 billion and thousands of employee. It is also the nuclear watchdog of the planet. It too was to be at least crippled.

One of the most frightening books I've ever read, primarily because most Americans are oblivious to the damage Trump's combination of arrogance and incompetence is doing to the fundamental functions of our government.

The gutting of the State Department will probably haunt us for years, and Lewis' account of the Hanford nuclear site should keep everybody awake at night, but won't.

[Brian Peacock]

Fill us in on the Hanford nuclear site thing.

[JimC]

It will probably involve radioactive zombies who demand a white theocracy...

[Tero]

It may be the kittie litter one.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way ... e-accident

[Tero]

OK, no, it was just a long period leak into soil, liquid waste
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site
.... and that one of them had been leaking about 640 US gallons (2,400 l; 530 imp gal) per year into the ground since about 2010. In 2012, DOE discovered a leak also from a double-shell tank caused by construction flaws and corrosion in the bottom, and that 12 double-shell tanks have similar construction flaws.

[Joe]

Yeah, and Trump wanted to slash its budget. Here's a good description of the problem.

Four hours out of Portland I arrive at what is maybe the single finest case study of the problem. In December 1938, German scientists discovered uranium fission. Physicist Enrico Fermi’s report on the Germans’ work made its way to Albert Einstein, and in 1939 Einstein wrote a letter to Franklin Roosevelt. That letter is the founding document of the Department of Energy. By the early 1940s the United States government understood that for democracy to survive it needed to beat Hitler to the atom bomb, and that the race had two paths—one required enriched uranium, the other plutonium. In early 1943, the United States Army was evicting everyone from an area in Eastern Washington nearly half the size of Rhode Island and setting out to create plutonium in order to build a nuclear bomb. The site of Hanford was chosen for its proximity to the Columbia River, which could supply the cooling water while its dams provided the electricity needed to make plutonium. Hanford was also chosen for its remoteness: the army was worried about both enemy attacks and an accidental nuclear explosion. Hanford was, finally, chosen for its poverty. It was convenient that what would become the world’s largest public-works project arose in a place from which people had to be paid so little to leave.

From 1943 until 1987, as the Cold War was ending and Hanford closed its reactors, the place created two-thirds of the plutonium in the United States’ arsenal—a total of 70,000 nuclear weapons since 1945. You’d like to think that if anyone had known the environmental consequences of plutonium, or if anyone could have been certain that the uranium bomb would work, they’d never have done here what they did. “Plutonium is hard to produce,” said MacWilliams. “And hard to get rid of.” By the late 1980s the state of Washington had gained some clarity on just how hard and began to negotiate with the U.S. government. In the ensuing agreement the United States promised to return Hanford to a condition where, as MacWilliams put it, “kids can eat the dirt.” When I asked him to guess what it would cost to return Hanford to the standards now legally required, he said, “A century and a hundred billion dollars.” And that was a conservative estimate.

More or less overnight Hanford went from the business of making plutonium to the even more lucrative business of cleaning it up. In its last years of production the plutonium plant employed around 9,000 people. It still employs 9,000 people and pays them even more than it used to. “It’s a good thing that we live in a country that cares enough to take the time it will take, and spend the money it will spend, to clean up the legacy of the Cold War,” said MacWilliams. “In Russia they just drop concrete on the stuff and move on.”

The Department of Energy wires 10 percent of its annual budget, or $3 billion a year, into this tiny place and intends to do so until the radioactive mess is cleaned up. And even though what is now called the Tri-Cities area is well populated and amazingly prosperous—yachts on the river, $300 bottles of wine in the bistros—the absolute worst thing that could happen to it is probably not a nuclear accident. The worst thing that could happen is that the federal government loses interest in it and slashes the D.O.E.’s budget—as President Trump has proposed to do. And yet Trump won the county in which Hanford resides by 25 points.

[Tero]

We've been ising up a good bit of the plutonium in reactors. Only thing that consumes it.

[Tero]

We have to keep running nuclear reactors with MOX fuel till we use up all the plutonium

[Tero]