Picture This

My friend Buck, now of Hobbs NM, with his wishes to benefit some of his friends on Mackinac Island, Michigan, when they had to shut down the horse wagons for Pence’s Motorcade.

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45 thoughts on “Picture This”

  1. reposting 11th hour  links from fearless leader last night for emphasis:

    NYT — more Trump calls, Putin and Saudis

    WAPO: Trump greenlighted Russian election interference

  3. also from NYT:

    WASHINGTON — Kurt D. Volker, the State Department’s special envoy for Ukraine who got caught in the middle of the pressure campaign by President Trump and his lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, to find damaging information about Democrats, abruptly resigned his post on Friday.
    Mr. Volker, who told Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday that he was stepping down, offered no public explanation, but a person informed about his decision said he concluded that it was impossible to be effective in his assignment given the developments of recent days.
    His departure was the first resignation since revelations about Mr. Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukraine’s president to investigate former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and other Democrats. The disclosures have triggered a full-blown House impeachment inquiry, and House leaders announced on Friday that they planned to interview Mr. Volker in a deposition on Thursday.

     

    [continues]

  4. that NYT article concluded with:

    Mr. Volker’s departure, which was first reported by The State Press, the student newspaper at Arizona State University, leaves the Trump administration with few senior officials versed in Ukraine’s struggles with Russia.
    In recent months, the administration has lost John R. Bolton, the national security adviser; Fiona Hill, the top Europe official on the National Security Council staff; and Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, all of whom sympathized with Ukraine in its conflict with Russia.
    Moreover, the United States Embassy in Kiev is still without an ambassador after the administration yanked home Marie L. Yovanovitch, a career diplomat who was targeted by the president and Mr. Giuliani for ostensibly being insufficiently loyal, a charge heatedly disputed by her colleagues.
    Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, expressed regret at Mr. Volker’s resignation. “He has a well deserved reputation for fairness, toughness and integrity, which is why I was so disappointed to see him caught up in this mess,” Mr. Murphy wrote on Twitter. “He now must put country first, and tell what he did and what he knows.”

     

  5. excerpt from today’s the guardian:

    According to a New York Times report, the White House learned within days that the unorthodox call on 25 July with Zelenskiy had raised red flags among intelligence professionals and was likely to trigger an official complaint.
    That timeline has raised new questions over the timing of the Trump’s dismissal by tweet of the director of national intelligence (DNI), Dan Coats, on 28 July and his insistence that the deputy DNI, Sue Gordon, a career intelligence professional, did not step into the role, even in an acting capacity.

    […]

    The Office of the DNI (ODNI) and its inspector general has the authority to receive whistleblower complaints from across all US intelligence agencies and determine whether they should be referred to Congress.
    “We all knew Coats’ departure was coming because he had clashed with the president on several issues. What was weird was the president’s forcefulness in not wanting Sue Gordon to take over as acting director,” said Katrina Mulligan, a former official who worked in the ODNI, the national security council, and the justice department.
    “I was hearing at the time that Sue was getting actively excluded from things by the president that she would ordinarily have taken part in, and she was being made to feel uncomfortable,” said Mulligan, now managing director for national security and international policy at the Center for American Progress.
    “And then the president tried to install someone who was clearly unqualified,” she added. “Now the timeline of the whistleblower in the White House raises a lot of questions about the Sue Gordon piece of this.”

    [continues]

  9. Nancy:
    When asked if it was possible that impeachment might backfire, the Speaker of the House insisted that politics has nothing to do with it. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “He has given us no choice.” -@SpeakerPelosi #MomentOfTruth #Impeach https://newyorker.com/news/the-political-scene/nancy-pelosi-an-extremely-stable-genius?mbid=social_facebook&utm_social-type=owned&utm_brand=tny&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwAR39m63GHp8MARncOTKA58ocgBA9b5j3b7eu03UgBQ2PLyz1PTt9GWrkXgM

  10. from op ed in wapo:

    The other Ukraine scandal: Trump’s threats to our ambassador who wouldn’t bend

    […]

    But as investigations proceed and Americans consider these revelations, they should hold in mind another transgression: the president’s egregious mistreatment of one of the country’s most distinguished ambassadors. Even before the rough transcript of the call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was released, we knew that the administration had prematurely curtailed the appointment of U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch following public attacks on her by the president’s eldest son and by his personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani. Administration officials then falsely claimed that she was leaving her post “as planned.” Now, we also know that Trump went on to denigrate the ambassador in a phone call to a foreign leader, telling Zelensky that “the woman” was “bad news” and vaguely but ominously noting that “she’s going to go through some things.”

    […]

    It takes much time and effort to build a strong institution, but tearing it down can happen fast. Morale at the State Department is low, applications to join the Foreign Service are at the lowest level since 2008, and many senior officers have retired, resigned or been pushed out. These trends will only worsen if diplomats must live in fear that they will be cast aside for failing to support a president’s personal or partisan agenda. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo — who prided himself on restoring “swagger” to the State Department and committed himself to reinvigorating it — should thus be asked to explain how his organization is going to function if its best people must live in fear of presidential denunciation and retribution for doing their jobs. Secretary of State Colin Powell, a retired four-star general, told many of the career Foreign Service officers who served there that they were his diplomatic “battalion commanders.” As a former Army officer himself, Pompeo should know better than others that leaders who denigrate and demean their troops do not win many battles.
    What Yovanovitch was doing in Ukraine — along with her colleagues from the European Union, International Monetary Fund and other multilateral institutions — was the tireless, difficult work of pressing the Ukrainian government to fight corruption, push ahead with reforms and continue to resist Russia’s aggression. It was not her job to press the Ukrainians to focus on what Trump apparently wanted them to focus on, namely digging up information to further his political interests. That Trump was apparently willing to leverage U.S. military assistance — potentially leaving Ukraine vulnerable to military threats from Russia — to advance those political interests is shocking and deeply damaging. That he was apparently willing to throw a U.S. ambassador under the bus as part of that effort makes it even worse.

     

  12. Might be something to this global warming thing. High temps for today through Wednesday- 90,89,90,90,92.  (Yes, I know, I’m talking about weather. Regardless, it’s unseasonably hot. )

  14. Jamie, good one.  had similar thought when I first saw the photo (“and they call me a clown”).

    also wondered if that was a ring transmitter volodymyr was desperately whispering into pleading for them to get him out of there before the twit made him beg (or worse) on camera.

  17. Caption:
    Zelensky…   oh shit…  now I have to deal with this joker….  he’s not even funny.

    ps…. happy birthday, Buck!

  18. For all of you unseasonably sweltering, my part of the country is getting snow in the Cascades before the end of September.  We were in a heat wave a couple of weeks ago.  It’s getting crazy out there.

    Over the weekend a Winter Storm Warning will remain in place for the central and north Cascades… snow totals 8-14″ in the higher elevations just an advisory to the south. Be prepared for winter driving conditions.  Expect rain to snow to rain.  Winds will pick up the further east you go as well.

     

     

  19. Jaime – coming from Colorado, anything after Labor Day is always expected to be a brighter and flakier drop of water, sometimes measuring in feet.  The ski industry likes to have the Broncos on Monday Night Football when it is snowing in October.  Immediately the phones ring for reservations in the resorts.

  20. Jamie, my niece has soccer somewhere up there and my bro-in-law is concerned about the temps and precipitation. Pat, 100in Louisville in October?  Geez. 

  25. flatus, look what they’re doing in your old stomping grounds

    according to Clevelandplaindealer :

    COLUMBUS, Ohio — State officials have canceled more than 182,000 registrations in the most recent purge of inactive voters from Ohio’s rolls, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose announced Friday.
    That compares to the 230,000-plus voters who in June got “last chance” notices from the state informing them they were close to having their registration’s canceled. That means tens of thousands of voters — who were targeted by community groups like the League of Women Voters and the NAACP for outreach — have avoided being purged by taking some type of action to update their registrations since June.
    The list of cancelations is not final — state officials said they’re still waiting for information from Portage and Tuscarawas counties. But they’re releasing the list now since the deadline to register to vote for the November election is on Oct. 7. The purge was supposed to be finalized on Sept. 7, but the process has been delayed by last-minute problems that had they not been detected, may have caused voters to have their registrations canceled improperly.

    [continues]

  26. now can we say it’s bi-partisan?  and tri-partisan if you count Amash.

    NYT:

    Representative Mark Amodei of Nevada on Friday became the first Republican member of the House of Representatives to back the rapidly escalating impeachment inquiry — but he said he was reserving judgment on whether President Trump should be impeached.
    Mr. Amodei, 61, a four-term congressman from Carson City, is the chairman of Trump’s re-election campaign in Nevada, a swing state that the president lost by 27,000 votes to Hillary Clinton in 2016.
    He said it made sense for Congress to investigate a whistle-blower’s complaint, made public on Thursday, that Mr. Trump used a July 25 phone call with Ukraine’s president to advance his personal interests, including asking him to look into unsubstantiated allegations of corruption against former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his younger son.
    Mr. Amodei discussed the impeachment inquiry process during a conference call on Friday with members of the news media from his home state, and in a follow-up statement issued by his office.

    “Listen, I want to see what the process produces,” Mr. Amodei said on the conference call, explaining that he had not ruled out impeachment. “And quite frankly, if there’s something there that rises to that level, then guess what, that’s not something that we can have by a Democrat or a Republican.”

    [continues]

  27. that NYT story above concluded with this:

    Mr. Amodei, a former federal prosecutor, said that he was a big fan of oversight and that Congress should let the chips fall where they might.
    “Please, nobody hang up the phone and say, ‘Amodei is Pelosi’s defender,’ ” he said on the conference call.

     

  28. Dialogue you’ll never hear in a western movie:
    Cowboy 1: Howdy, Buck; have some coffee?
    Cowboy 2:  Ummm….Do you have any tea?

  32.  

  36. Bertrand Russel’s reply to noted fascist who invited Russel to debate.
    Shortly before his 90th birthday, Russell writes:

    Dear Sir Oswald, 
    Thank you for your letter and for your enclosures. I have given some thought to our recent correspondence. It is always difficult to decide on how to respond to people whose ethos is so alien and, in fact, repellent to one’s own. It is not that I take exception to the general points made by you but that every ounce of my energy has been devoted to an active opposition to cruel bigotry, compulsive violence, and the sadistic persecution which has characterised the philosophy and practice of fascism. 
    I feel obliged to say that the emotional universes we inhabit are so distinct, and in deepest ways opposed, that nothing fruitful or sincere could ever emerge from association between us. 
    I should like you to understand the intensity of this conviction on my part. It is not out of any attempt to be rude that I say this but because of all that I value in human experience and human achievement. 
    Yours sincerely,
    Bertrand Russell

  37. I’ll really be disappointed when it cools off; going outside at noon, cutting the yard and the entrance to the habitat followed by scrubbing Rosie behind the ears is truly humbling. Now, after an hour and a half of rest I’m ready to take a shower and scrub behind my ears.

  38. In case any of you carnivores are going out to dinner tonight:

    Waiter: And how would you like your steak done, sir? Me: Like going a day without Trump doing or saying something stupid! Waiter: Very rare it is then, sir…

  39. Two weeks ago, I removed a quilt because it was too hot to sleep.  Today, I’ve got my heater on because I’m freezing in the middle of the day.

     

  40. Oh, God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son”
    Abe said, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on”
    God said, “No” Abe say, “What?”
    God say, “You can do what you want, Abe, but
    The next time you see me comin’, you better run”
    Well, Abe said, “Where d’you want this killin’ done?”
    God said, “Out on Highway 61
    —-Bob

  42. I am still framing the problem of people who consider themselves moderate and tolerant.  They are church goers.  They support charities their church tells them to.  They might not agree with gays marrying each other, but they accept the law of the land.  They tell me a lot of things they think make them sound “good”.
     
    Then a few minutes in I get to hear about their relative, son or daughter, mother or father, cousin or aunt, who is a teacher or something that sounds authoritative.  The relative or person or Martian, is in contact with welfare recipients for some reason.  The teacher story is the kids do not bother to study or anything needed to succeed in the world.  They are just waiting to turn “18” so they get the check.
     
    The “check” is five hundred dollars each month, along with Section Eight housing, and free healthcare and food stamps.  What is amazing is this is the same thing I heard in Colorado, in California, in D.C., in Maryland, in Virginia, in Florida, in North Carolina, in  Michigan (1968),  and you can name more. 
     
    I did not bother asking if the man was racist.  It is obvious as he stated the black people are getting this free ride and have no desire to “better themselves”.  He was a nice guy, but would not understand that I want to have nothing to do with him after that far right evangelical (yes he found some god or something) rote exercise.  I suppose I could have asked him about Hispanic people but that might have caused a short circuit in his highly trained brain.

  43. BB, I socialize with very few people outside my family because it is not worth the constantly occurring disappointments when people let loose on their fellow human beings. My immediate family is composed of Black, White and Asian (Yellow?) humans. They are  the family of which I am the patriarch. I love each and every one of them.

  44. I am related to a host of “good” evangelicals who are “blessed” and thank “God” in virtually every tweet and facebook entry.  They do love each other and anyone who is like them.  They do a great deal of charity.  Unfortunately, they are about as vicious as I’ve ever known any group of human beings to be.  Needless to say we don’t speak.  

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