Trump Getting Dumped Around the World

December 14, 2015 by Leave a Comment

Let’s see, today it was announced that Trump’s Turnberry golf course in Scotland is no longer being considered as a host for the 2020 Open.  In July the PGA pulled the Grand Slam tournament from his National Golf Club in LA. See Fortune.

Earlier in December he lost distribution of his Trump branded products from a major international distributor:

Lifestyle, a home decor chain based in Dubai, is removing all Trump-branded products from the shelves of its 195 outlets across the Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan and Tanzania.

Along with that, one of Dubai’s biggest property developers will no longer work with Trump.

“I think he damaged all his brand in all the Muslim countries … nobody will accept him,” said Al-Habtoor, who initially had supported Trump.

And he’s getting into a pissing match with a Saudi Prince who once snapped up some Trump distressed properties.

This is after, in July, Macy’s joined a growing list of big corporations not wanting their name to be sullied by association with Trumbigotry.

Hit ‘im again, harder! harder!

Not much I can find that a low net worth individual could join in not buying…basically anything with his name on it…fragrances, foods.. the list goes on.  Here’s a couple of them, here and here.

Filed under Extremism, Politics Tagged with , , ,

Republican Flip-Flop: Now No Experience is a Great Asset

September 9, 2015 by Leave a Comment

Andy Borowitz at the New Yorker nails it again:

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Republicans, who mercilessly mocked Barack Obama’s lack of government experience before he became President, now favor Presidential candidates with no experience whatsoever, the head of the Republican National Committee has confirmed.

 

Filed under Politics, Republicans Tagged with , ,

Telling Who a Man is by Who His Friends Are

September 8, 2015 by Leave a Comment

Heard Evan Osnos of the New Yorker being interviewed the other day.  Made my stomach do a turn or two.  Here’s the article about which he was being interviewed.  Set aside some time to read it.

On June 28th, twelve days after Trump’s announcement, the Daily Stormer, America’s most popular neo-Nazi news site, endorsed him for President: “Trump is willing to say what most Americans think: it’s time to deport these people.” The Daily Stormer urged white men to “vote for the first time in our lives for the one man who actually represents our interests.”

Titled The Fearful and the Frustrated, Osnos is writing about an ominous wave coalescing around Trump.  It was just such a wave in Italy and Germany, of the fearful and the frustrated, that was harnessed to incomprehensible evil.

Filed under Politics Tagged with , ,

Alberta, Canada: Pigs Do Fly

May 8, 2015 by Leave a Comment

“The New Democratic Party (NDP) ended the Progressive Conservatives’ (PC) 44-year rule of the province.

“Political observers were stunned by the result, with one commentator saying: “Pigs do fly”.

“Alberta’s Premier Jim Prentice, a former member of Tory Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s cabinet, said he was stepping down from political life.

BBC

Rachel Notley, the new Premier-designate for Alberta, promised “during the campaign, … to withdraw provincial support for the Keystone XL project, raise corporate taxes and also potentially to raise royalties on a regional oil industry already reeling from the collapse in world prices.”

“Ordinary Canadians were reeling from the sheer magnitude of the shift in Alberta, which has placed the country’s most notoriously conservative province, taken for granted as an impregnable redneck kingdom, in the hands of its most progressive regional government. To explain the phenomenon, Toronto-based writer Doug Saunders asked his American Twitter followers to imagine socialist presidential candidate Bernie Saunders “becoming Texas governor by a big majority”.

The Guardian

Now if the US democrats can get a hold of the Notley New Democratic Party play-book and tear up whatever led to the Conservative rout in England, our own 2016 would be looking a lot better.

Filed under Politics Tagged with ,

Pizza Lovers — Watch Out!

March 6, 2015 by Leave a Comment

Paul Krugman opens the eyes of the hungry today. Who would have known that there is an enormous Pizza Lobby, and it gives enormously to Republicans?

 

A recent Bloomberg report noted that major pizza companies have become intensely, aggressively partisan. Pizza Hut gives a remarkable 99 percent of its money to Republicans. Other industry players serve Democrats a somewhat larger slice of the pie (sorry, couldn’t help myself), but, over all, the politics of pizza these days resemble those of, say, coal or tobacco. And pizza partisanship tells you a lot about what is happening to American politics as a whole.

… some parts of the food industry have responded to pressure from government agencies and food activists by trying to offer healthier options, but the pizza sector has chosen instead to take a stand for the right to add extra cheese.

The rhetoric of this fight is familiar. The pizza lobby portrays itself as the defender of personal choice and personal responsibility. It’s up to the consumer, so the argument goes, to decide what he or she wants to eat, and we don’t need a nanny state telling us what to do.

… At one level, there is a clear correlation between lifestyles and partisan orientation: heavier states tend to vote Republican, and the G.O.P. lean is especially pronounced in what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention call the “diabetes belt” of counties, mostly in the South, that suffer most from that particular health problem. Not coincidentally, officials from that region have led the pushback against efforts to make school lunches healthier.

Filed under Health, Politics Tagged with ,

Arming The Rebels? Laughable Nonsense

August 20, 2014 by Leave a Comment

Give Tom Friedman his due.  His response to the recent Hillary Clinton slam on President Obama’s decisions years ago to not arm Syrian rebels against Dictator Assad, not only has a great soundbite, it has 6 questions to be understood:

“The notion that the only reason that the Islamist militias emerged in Syria is because we created a vacuum by not adequately arming the secular rebels is laughable nonsense.”

and the questions, here.

Those hoping for an HRC presidency had better get her thinking about the real world and less about the campaign trail.

Filed under War Tagged with , , ,

Oysters on Acid

August 4, 2014 by Leave a Comment

Billions of baby oysters in the Pacific inlets here are dying and Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington is busy spreading the bad news.

“It used to be the canary in the coal mine,” Mr. Inslee said in a recent interview. “Now it’s the oyster in the half shell. You can’t overstate what this means to Washington.”

Oysters Under Acid

Oysters On Acid

Mr. Inslee, who is campaigning for his agenda across the state this summer with oyster farmers in tow, is trying to position himself as America’s leading governor in the climate change fight. But Mr. Inslee does not have the support of the majority of the Washington State Senate, particularly those conservative lawmakers from the rural inland … NY Times: Davenport

This is a strangely snarky report on Inslee using out of state money to get his ideas out — after out-of-staters have poured billions into the political troughs to do just the opposite, deny and define down the dangers of climate change.  In this year of WW I centenary it’s like complaining about French taxi drivers carrying soldiers to the front after the Germans have poured across the border….

For more, here’s a Science Daily article:

Marine researchers have definitively linked the collapse of oyster seed production at a commercial oyster hatchery in Oregon to an increase in ocean acidification.

Filed under Climate Change, Environment, Water Tagged with , ,

Yee Indicted in Major FBI Sweep

March 26, 2014 by Leave a Comment

Update: The dollar speaks!  This is about as big, and ugly, as it gets.

Yee, a Democrat who represents half of San Francisco and most of San Mateo County, was one of 26 people ensnared in a five-year federal investigation that targeted Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow, a notorious Chinatown gangster who had claimed to have gone straight, officials said.

An outspoken advocate of gun control and open government, Yee is charged with conspiring to traffic in firearms as well as six counts of scheming to defraud citizens of honest services. He has not commented on the allegations.

SF Gate (With many more links)

I am always suspicious about entrapment cases but what is surely true here is that Lee was entrapped by the need not for personal wealth, at least in the beginning, but for campaign money.  The stories about hours spent, arms twisted, promises made in order to make the daily take are enough to fill the Library of Congress — and ought to be doing so.

*

Wow!  For a moderately interested observer of San Francisco politics this comes as a surprise.

State Sen. Leland Yee has been indicted for public corruption as part of a major FBI operation Wednesday morning spanning the Bay Area, law-enforcement sources said, casting yet another cloud of corruption over the Democratic establishment in the state Legislature and torpedoing Yee’s aspirations for statewide office in California.

Mercury News

Filed under Corruption Tagged with , ,

Toxic Contributions Foul Democracy’s Air

March 18, 2014 by Leave a Comment

The photo of Paris, below, gripped by a week-long smog could as well be of the air of Democracy in the United States.  In one more report of hidden financial corruption, but an especially damning one, Nicholas Confessore at the NY Times, shines a light through the smog in Utah.

It is the nightmare scenario for those who worry that the modern campaign finance system has opened up new frontiers of political corruption: A candidate colludes with wealthy corporate backers and promises to defend their interests if elected. The companies spend heavily to elect the candidate, but hide the money by funneling it through a nonprofit group. And the main purpose of the nonprofit appears to be getting the candidate elected.

But according to investigators, exactly such a plan is unfolding in an extraordinary case in Utah, a state with a cozy political establishment, where business holds great sway and there are no limits on campaign donations.

Public records, affidavits and a special legislative report released last week offer a strikingly candid view inside the world of political nonprofits, where big money sluices into campaigns behind a veil of secrecy. The proliferation of such groups — and what campaign watchdogs say is their widespread, illegal use to hide donations — are at the heart of new rules now being drafted by the Internal Revenue Service to rein in election spending by nonprofit “social welfare” groups, which unlike traditional political action committees do not have to disclose their donors.

Filed under Corruption, Politics Tagged with ,

Non Troglodyte Republican Wins Mayors Race in San Diego

February 13, 2014 by Leave a Comment

Following up on earlier post about the San Diego mayoral election:

Republican Councilman Kevin Faulconer defeated Democratic Councilman David Alvarez, 54.5% to 45.5%, to become the city’s next mayor, according to unofficial results tallied by the county registrar of voters.

The tally includes all absentee votes and votes from all 582 precincts. Unofficial turnout for the special election was 37%.  LA Times

A couple of things worth mentioning:  Faulkner is not one of your troglodyte  Republicans, enraged by human behavior not his own.  According to some of the commentors in the LA Times link (above), he supports marriage equality, is well thought of by the LGBT community, has marched in Gay Pride parades and supports reproductive rights.  Secondly, the turn out was 37% — not what it would have been in a full election year.  This doesn’t mean he wouldn’t have won had participation been fuller, but discouragement in the ranks of the opposition must have taken its toll.  Thirdly, the most recent scandal, and the more salacious — Democrat Bob Filner’s persistent pushiness with women— is more remembered than the previous scandal — GOP fiscal malfeasance and corruption.

The important question now is, how Faulkner’s plans to renege on pension contracts, and to job out city services to low bidders will affect the city and its citizens.  If streets can be kept clean at lower cost, and if the lower wages to accomplish that do not drive down city tax collection, throw more onto welfare or homeless rolls, folks will be happy.  If on the other hand such private contracts devolve to cronyism, shoddy services and increased income inequality, second thoughts will surface.

Filed under Elections, Uncategorized Tagged with ,

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