January: Donald Trump is inaugurated. He causes a furor when he interrupts his inaugural address mid-sentence to complain about two female reporters covering the event and call them fat. Later on, the Rockettes perform on schedule at the inauguration but strategically line up behind the President-elect so while dancing the can-can they get to take turns kicking his butt.
February: The Seattle Seahawks win Super Bowl LI over the New England Patriots. The key play comes in the third quarter, when former Arizona Cardinal and current Patriots receiver Michael Floyd fumbles a short pass but then falls down and is found draped over the ball with a BAC of .217. Since he fell on it, the ruling on the field is that the Patriots recover the fumble, but the reason it is a key play is because the pile on squeezes some of the air out of the ball. On the next play, Tom Brady is unprepared for a properly inflated ball and throws a pick-six to Richard Sherman. After the game Sherman gives another typical Sherman interview and is shortly thereafter given a fifteen yard penalty by NFL President Roger Goodell for illegal use of the Mouth.
March: President Trump wakes up at 3:00 in the morning to tweet about a pharmacist in an obscure town in Colorado who called him a name in an online chat room. Trump says the pharmacist is 'so unfair' and threatens to sue. Trump's followers immediately crash the pharmacy's website with derogatory comments, threats and insults.
April: President Trump precipitates a crisis when he fails to sign a debt ceiling increase in time, threatening to default on the U.S. debt. His initial response is that 'walking away from debt worked for me, it can work for the country,' but it later turns out that he was on the phone with a Scottish official arguing about the view from his golf course and couldn't be bothered with unrelated matters until it was resolved.
May: The Scottish golf course issue not being resolved to Trump's satisfaction, he orders the U.S. marines to invade and seize Scotland. When British Prime Minister Theresa May objects and points out that Scotland is part of the United Kingdom, Trump asks what the U.K. has ever done for the U.S., reminds everyone that the U.S. won World War II, and calls the Brits 'losers.'
June: Trump begins building a border wall by confiscating taco trucks from street corners in the U.S. and stacking them along the border. In order to make Mexico pay for it, he sends troops to occupy Juarez. He says he will give it back when Mexico sends a check.
July: Following up on his pledge to expand America's nuclear arsenal, Trump withdraws from the test ban treaty, and announces his special Fourth of July program involving nuclear fireworks will be held in California. He also promises that other Americans can participate and show their patriotism by going outside to cheer when the nuclear fallout cloud passes over THEIR state !
August: Secretary of State and Exxon-Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson suggests in an interview that the U.S. should invade Iran to get the oil. A sense of deja vu pervades the room and dead silence ensues, until Trump bails out Tillerson by adding, "and to do more of our nuclear testing."
September: President Trump and Labor Secretary Andrew Puzder celebrate Labor Day by signing an executive order abolishing minimum wage, maternity leave, overtime pay and sick leave, and making unions and collective bargaining illegal.
October: The Cubs win the World Series again. People start getting bored and talking about how the 'Cubs are always winning.' Yankee fans are jealous.
November: Once again, Trump is late signing a routine debt ceiling increase, nearly causing a national default. It turns out that the reason why is because the phone lines to the Kremlin were jammed, so Trump had to wait before he got the official OK from Putin to sign it.
December: Trump's promise to create jobs in coal states actually turns out to be true. That's because in a country full of Trump supporters, Santa needs to buy tons of the stuff.
Showing posts with label nuclear weapons. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nuclear weapons. Show all posts
Saturday, December 31, 2016
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Hillary was right to dodge a GOP photo op
Today Hillary Clinton is being derided for backing out of a rally at the United Nations to protest Iranian nuclear development once she found out that Sarah Palin would also be there.
I think she made a wise decision. There is nothing wrong with protesting Iranian nuclear development or the failure of the U.N. to take a stronger stand against it (though I believe that the Iranians will do what they want to do whether the U.N. toughens their stand or not; and our own misadventure in Iraq has effectively taken any real threat of a U.S. invasion of Iran off the table for the foreseeable future since we right now don't have the available military units to be able to carry it out.)
There is also nothing wrong with Governor Palin going as a representative of the McCain campaign, clearly indicating Senator McCain's support for stronger U.N. action against Iran.
The reason Hillary was right to decide against going is that she might have been stuck with a no-win situation, completely unrelated to Iran or nukes.
Keep in mind that last week Hillary informed the Obama campaign that while she is willing to keep up the attack on McCain she refused to jump all over Palin. And I can see why that is, she herself would gain nothing from such an attack and frankly is probably happy in at least the most general sense that a woman (even one she herself would never support) is now running for VP. It does in a sense validate the historic nature of Hillary Clinton's campaign earlier this year.
Suppose that Governor Palin made a point of seeking out Senator Clinton and making a light conversation, possibly including a handshake? In this hyper-political year, that would be all over the front page and would seem to imply that Hillary at least found a McCain-Palin Presidency acceptable (remember that the McCain folks have spent a lot of time and effort going after disaffected Clinton supporters.) So if that is not a message that Hillary Clinton wants to send she can't afford to be photographed yukking it up while shaking hands with Sarah Palin (though publically neither woman has said anything negative about the other recently).
The other alternative, to publically snub Governor Palin, would be even worse. That would cast Hillary as purely a party hack (not that you would find many Republicans who would say she's not, but it's still a label she doesn't want to refresh.) It would also cast her to a lot of people as rude and would seem to undercut the whole success she had in earning 18 million votes. And that would also be a headline that the Obama campaign doesn't need right now, with Obama gaining momentum in the polls this week thanks to a combination of the Lehman Brothers-Dow Jones-AIG economic woes and McCain's gaffe on Monday that have definitively moved the focus away from Sarah Palin and onto the economy.
So going to the rally was a lose-lose proposition for Hillary. True she is now still getting some bad press (and the right will spin this is a snub of Palin anyway) but it's a minor story and doesn't look one fiftieth as bad as a face to face snub would be.
I think she made a wise decision. There is nothing wrong with protesting Iranian nuclear development or the failure of the U.N. to take a stronger stand against it (though I believe that the Iranians will do what they want to do whether the U.N. toughens their stand or not; and our own misadventure in Iraq has effectively taken any real threat of a U.S. invasion of Iran off the table for the foreseeable future since we right now don't have the available military units to be able to carry it out.)
There is also nothing wrong with Governor Palin going as a representative of the McCain campaign, clearly indicating Senator McCain's support for stronger U.N. action against Iran.
The reason Hillary was right to decide against going is that she might have been stuck with a no-win situation, completely unrelated to Iran or nukes.
Keep in mind that last week Hillary informed the Obama campaign that while she is willing to keep up the attack on McCain she refused to jump all over Palin. And I can see why that is, she herself would gain nothing from such an attack and frankly is probably happy in at least the most general sense that a woman (even one she herself would never support) is now running for VP. It does in a sense validate the historic nature of Hillary Clinton's campaign earlier this year.
Suppose that Governor Palin made a point of seeking out Senator Clinton and making a light conversation, possibly including a handshake? In this hyper-political year, that would be all over the front page and would seem to imply that Hillary at least found a McCain-Palin Presidency acceptable (remember that the McCain folks have spent a lot of time and effort going after disaffected Clinton supporters.) So if that is not a message that Hillary Clinton wants to send she can't afford to be photographed yukking it up while shaking hands with Sarah Palin (though publically neither woman has said anything negative about the other recently).
The other alternative, to publically snub Governor Palin, would be even worse. That would cast Hillary as purely a party hack (not that you would find many Republicans who would say she's not, but it's still a label she doesn't want to refresh.) It would also cast her to a lot of people as rude and would seem to undercut the whole success she had in earning 18 million votes. And that would also be a headline that the Obama campaign doesn't need right now, with Obama gaining momentum in the polls this week thanks to a combination of the Lehman Brothers-Dow Jones-AIG economic woes and McCain's gaffe on Monday that have definitively moved the focus away from Sarah Palin and onto the economy.
So going to the rally was a lose-lose proposition for Hillary. True she is now still getting some bad press (and the right will spin this is a snub of Palin anyway) but it's a minor story and doesn't look one fiftieth as bad as a face to face snub would be.
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