Cogitate a little.....

Timmy Dalrymple

Lake County Democratic Party Michigan is with Gina Mancini Becker.

Aletheia

Sandy Bulman

Thanks to Citizens UnTied

Cut revenue and double spending and somehow ended up out of money and massively in debt?
Crazy!

I totally thought it would be different from the last ten times Republicans did this and got exactly the same results.

The Steamed Punk

"This is what the goddamn president is telling us he does. He tweets something and then watches the numbers on them. It's like the Nielsens of the damned for him. Trump needs those RTs and Likes to keep rolling up. He craves that validation, and he fears not having it, like an oxy freak getting to the bottom of the scrip bottle."

RUDEPUNDIT.BLOGSPOT.COM

At His Nutzoid Summit, Trump Admits He Stares at Twitter Instead of Working

At His Nutzoid Summit, Trump Admits He Stares at Twitter Instead of Working

Yesterday, Donald Trump, who I occasionally feel nauseated remembering is still the president of the United States, hosted what was billed as a Social Media Summit at the White House. What really happened is that Trump invited a range of conservative idiots, inveterate assholes, festering fucknuts, conspiracy crazies, and Charlie Kirk to sit around and tell Trump how awesome he is while he reciprocated and then whined about them being censored. It was like when you go visit your grandpa and he's invited all his old racist friends over. Actually, it wasn't "like that." It pretty much was that, with the added bonus of villainous walrus Sebastian Gorka going apeshit on reporters.

Honestly, if intelligence could create energy, the vortex from the absence of it would have swallowed the Rose Garden.

In his completely insane remarks after the summit, where, one presumes, Trump walked around with his dick out and asked each of them to yank, telling them, "One of you is getting a special surprise" as circus music played and a shirtless Mick Mulvaney cackled in the corner as he pinched his nipples bloody, Trump completely missed the point of the "free" part of "free speech," saying, "Free speech is not when you see something good, and then you purposely write bad. To me, that’s very dangerous speech, and you become angry at it. But that’s not free speech." Freedom, to Trump, means free to agree with him.

But the main focus of his wayward ire was what he believes is censorship on Twitter and other social media platforms. See, sometimes he doesn't get as many likes and retweets as he thinks he should get. Trump said, no, really, "We got a lot of people. Way, way over 100 million, but I used to pick them up… And when I say 'used to,' I’m talking about a few months ago. I was picking them up, a hundred thousand people every, very short period of time. Now, it’s, I would say, ten times as long. And I notice things happening when I put out something—a good one, that people like, right? Good tweet. It goes up. It used to go up, it would say 7,000, 7,008, 7,000, 7,017, 7,024, 7,032, 7,044. Right? Now it goes, 7,000, 7,008, 6,998. Then they go, 7,009, 6,074." The audience of lepers and whores and leper whores booed the injustice of people undoing their "like."

Because we live in an odd version of Hell, he continued, "I never had that before. I used to watch it. It’d be like a rocket ship when I put out a beauty. Like when I said, remember I said somebody was spying on me? That thing was like a rocket. "

You got that, right? This is what the goddamn president is telling us he does. He tweets something and then watches the numbers on them. It's like the Nielsens of the damned for him. Trump needs those RTs and Likes to keep rolling up. He craves that validation, and he fears not having it, like an oxy freak getting to the bottom of the scrip bottle.

Then he revealed that he tweets just because he likes to see his shit on TV.  Trump slurred, "I said watch, I’m going to do this. And I said, 'We recognize the Golan Heights as being part of Israel.' It was a big thing. I go, watch this: boom! I press it, and within two seconds: 'We have breaking news.' John Roberts of Fox was over. He said, 'We have breaking news. Please, break it up.' Doesn’t matter what they’re talking about, John does it. He breaks it up." Beyond obviously not understanding what the word "breaking" means in "breaking news," that's some scary shit right there. It's some fin de siecle megalomaniacal fuckery, like a cruel, inbred king executing a servant because he can.

So Trump, again, ostensibly the leader of the free world, says that he wastes his days thinking of tweets to fuck with the flow of the news cycle and watches to see how much people love him. Add to that his daily viewing of Fox and Friends and whatever fucking nonsense One America has on, and, really, except when he's in front of the cameras telling us shit like "You know, there’s a word called 'communism,'" except when he's glad-handing dictators and right-wing crazies and congressional fellaters, he's not doing a goddamn thing at his job.

It's pathetic. It's pathetic that he cares so much about his shitty tweets. And it's pathetic that I'm fucking relieved that he's so lazy and incompetent.

Occupy Democrats

"Learn English!" Scream the MAGAts.

"YOU FIRST!" I shout right back.

Being Liberal

Report Shows How War Profiteers Are Now Refugee Profiteers, Too

About this website

COMMONDREAMS.ORG

Report Shows How War Profiteers Are Now Refugee Profiteers, Too

As Europe comes to terms with a Brexit vote fueled in large part by anti-immigrant hate-mongering, a new report exposes how war profiteers are influencing EU policy to make money from unending Middle East conflicts as well as the wave of refugees created by that same instability and violence.

(Image: Stop Wapenhandel)

The report (pdf), Border Wars: The Arms Dealers Profiting from Europe's Refugee Tragedy, released jointly by the European Stop Wapenhandel and Transnational Institute (TNI) on Monday, outlines arms traders' pursuit of profit in the 21st century's endless conflicts.

"There is one group of interests that have only benefited from the refugee crisis, and in particular from the European Union's investment in 'securing' its borders,'" the report finds. "They are the military and security companies that provide the equipment to border guards, the surveillance technology to monitor frontiers, and the IT infrastructure to track population movements."

The report shows that "far from being passive beneficiaries of EU largesse, these corporations are actively encouraging a growing securitization of Europe's borders, and willing to provide ever more draconian technologies to do this."

In the past decade, the report says, corporate players have viewed intractable Middle East warfare as a windfall: "Several large international arms companies cited instability in the Middle East to assure investors about future prospects for their business. The arms companies are assisted by European governments, which actively promote European arms in the region and are very reluctant, to say the least, to impose stricter arms export policies."

"The human rights of refugees play no real role in this thinking, except for promotional purposes."
—Mark Akkerman, Stop Wapenhandel

Indeed, "from 2005 to 2014, EU member states granted arms exports license to the Middle East and North Africa worth over 82 billion euros," according to the report.

The report details how a steady flow of arms from outside the Middle East supplies all players in multi-part conflicts, such as Syria's civil war, with an endless supply of high-tech weaponry—thus ensuring that those conflicts endure.

And as these wars create more and more refugees who seek asylum in Europe, the very same corporations are lobbying the EU to 'securitize' its borders against them—thus creating additional profit for those in the business of militarization.

Moreover, Stop Wapenhandel and TNI found "industry representatives, government officials and military and security personnel meet around the year at conferences, fairs and round tables."

The report quotes Nick Vaughan-Williams, international security professor at the University of Warwick, saying: "At these events it is possible to identify a cyclical culture whereby the presentation of new technologies not only responds to, but also enables and drives the formulation of new policies and practices in the field of border security and migration management."

And these "special fairs and congresses on border security are relatively new," the report notes. "They all started within the last decade."

"I believe the influence of the military and security industry on the shaping of the [EU's] border security policy is quite big, especially on the securitization and militarization of these and on the expanding use of surveillance technology and data exchange," Stop Wapenhandel's Mark Akkerman told Common Dreams."Industry efforts include regular interactions with EU's border institutions (including high ranking officials and politicians), where ideas are discussed that later turn up in new EU policy documents."

"For example, the industry has been pushing for years to upgrade [EU border agency] Frontex to a cross-European border security agency," Akkerman added. "The new European Border and Coast Guard Agency the European Commission has proposed, which has a lot more powers (has its own equipment, direct interventions in member states, binding decisions forcing member states to strengthen border security capacities) than Frontex has now, is exactly that."

"If the establishment of the European Border and Coast Guard Agency proceeds," the report notes, "this would mean a fundamental shift to an EU-controlled system of border security, with the possibility of bypassing the member states and forcing them to strengthen controls and purchase or upgrade equipment."

"It is not hard to predict that this will lead refugees to use increasingly dangerous routes, strengthening the business case for traffickers. For the military and security industry, however it means the prospect of more orders from the agency itself and from member states," the report continues.

Akkerman pointed out the EU's stunning dismissal of human rights in this profit-motivated process:

The human rights of refugees play no real role in this thinking, except for promotional purposes. Both the policy makers and the industry sometimes try to sell the increase in and militarization of border security as a humanitarian effort, in terms of strengthening search and rescue capacities. The EU has repeatedly tried to put all the blame for refugee deaths on traffickers. This has resulted in narrowing its response to 'taking away the business model of smugglers', with even more military means to try to accomplish this.

This creates a downward spiral: the greater the controls and the more the repression, the greater the risks refugees are forced to take resulting in more deaths. Experts (academics) and human rights organizations have been warning about this for years, but they have been ignored.

As death tolls rise and a record number of people are displaced by conflict, it seems that the fear-mongering and profiteering—and devastating human rights abuses—will only continue.

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