Liberal Forum

PostmodernProphet » 03 Oct 2017 1:25 pm » wrote:nothing dishonest about that.....it obviously was a staged photo op........have you still not realized why there was a television camera and twenty reporters on the truck with her?.....

PostmodernProphet » 03 Oct 2017 1:27 pm » wrote:they also can't get through if the union drivers are on strike.......that's been pretty well documented already.....

Did Puerto Rico's Teamsters Union Go on Strike During Hurricane Maria Relief Efforts?



http://www.snopes.com/puerto-rico-teamsters

The Department of Defense's primary military liaison to the Federal Emergency Management Agency said Puerto Rico experienced the worst damage he's ever seen.

“Sometimes we don’t know what’s going to happen until the storm actually hits," Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan said in an interview published on Saturday with PBS NewsHour's Monica Villamizar.

"And this is the worst I’ve ever seen."

Now, he said, Puerto Rico is having the biggest problems in the interior of the island.

"And it's because of roads. The roads are not clear on the outside of the island and we’re slowly working our way in," he said.

"But we obviously need to get all the roads cleared so we can get supplies to people who desperately need them.”

http://thehill.com/homenews/administrat ... -ever-seen

Trump's Puerto Rico Visit Is a Political Disaster

Making his first appearance in hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico since Maria’s landfall, President Trump offered a hearty round of congratulations to federal relief efforts and thanked the island’s governor.

But the president also suggested Maria was not a “real catastrophe,” made an odd and misleading comparison to the death toll from Hurricane Katrina, and joked about how the hurricane would affect the federal budget.

It was a typically strange, disjointed appearance by the president, and it came just days after Trump spent much of the weekend picking fights with the mayor of San Juan and insisting that, against all evidence, the recovery effort had largely responded to Puerto Rico’s needs.

At Muñiz Air Force Base, Trump was eager to praise the work of federal agencies, including FEMA, the Air Force, the Navy, and the Coast Guard, amid a chorus of criticism that Washington’s response has been too slow and too small.

But that praise led him in strange directions.

“Every death is a horror, but if you look at a real catastrophe like Katrina, and you look at the tremendous hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people that died, and you look at what happened here and what is your death count?

Sixteen people, versus in the thousands,” Trump said.

“You can be very proud. Sixteen versus literally thousands of people.”

That statement is problematic in several ways.

The idea that Maria was not a “real catastrophe” defies all evidence, and any discussion of the death toll is premature.

While the official number remains at 16, where it has been for several days without update, officials have acknowledged it will end up much higher.

The Center for Investigative Journalism reported Monday that “dozens” of people are dead, with bodies piling up in morgues, even as the official count has not kept pace.

Trump’s decision to use Hurricane Katrina as a benchmark also makes little sense and belittles the suffering in Puerto Rico.

Katrina is both the deadliest hurricane in U.S. history since 1928 and a prime example of a mismanaged disaster.

Trump also overstated the toll of Katrina, which was less than 2,000.

Trump also misstated Maria’s strength at landfall.

“Few people have ever even heard of a Category 5 hitting land, but it hit land, and boy did it hit land,” he said, but the storm was a Category-4 storm when it struck.

Trump also said the Coast Guard had saved 16,000 lives in Texas.

It’s unclear where he got that number; the Coast Guard has claimed 11,000 rescues.

Later, after his briefing, Trump visited a church where he tossed toilet paper and paper towels into the crowd, shooting them like basketballs to a crowd.

Throughout the aftermath of the storm, Trump has often appeared more interested in the political ramifications of the storm than on the human effects, focusing on approval of himself and the federal government (though he doesn’t really draw a distinction between the two).

This was also true at Muñiz Air Force Base.

In praising Governor Ricardo Rosselló, for example, Trump reached for the lens of partisan affiliation.

“He’s not even from my party and he started right at the beginning appreciating what we did,” Trump said.

“Right from the beginning, this governor did not play politics.

He was saying it like it was, and he gave us the highest rates.”

This was an implicit jab at San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, who has been critical of relief efforts, and whom Trump claimed over the weekend was doing so because Democrats had put her up to it.

As I noted, his broadside against Cruz serves as a warning to politicians like Rosselló not to follow her lead, lest Trump punish them too.

(Speaking in Washington Tuesday, before taking off, Trump said of Cruz, “Well, I think she’s come back a long way.
I think it’s now acknowledged what a great job we’ve done, and people are looking at that.” It’s unclear what he is referring to. She attended Tuesday’s briefing.)

Trump also greeted Jenniffer González-Colón, a Republican who is Puerto Rico’s delegate to the U.S. House, and asked her to praise federal efforts.

“I watched the other day and she was saying such nice things about a lot of the people who are working so hard,” he said.

“Jenniffer, do you think you could say a little bit what you said about us?

It’s not about me, it’s about these incredible people from the military, from FEMA, the first responders.”

Yet as with his premature celebration of the death toll, Trump’s comments about Puerto Rico and Maria still fell far short of empathy, and were in some cases strangely tone-deaf.

Before leaving for Puerto Rico, Trump complained that rather than the federal government not doing enough, it was Puerto Rican authorities who weren’t doing enough to hasten the recovery.

“On a local level, they have to give us more help,” he said in Washington.

“But I will tell you, the first responders, the military, FEMA, they have done an incredible job in Puerto Rico.”

During his briefing, he made an apparent attempt at joke about the cost of recovery.

“I hate to tell you Puerto Rico, but you’ve thrown our budget a little out of whack,” he said.

“That’s fine. We saved a lot of lives.”

Yet the remark comes in the context of Trump repeatedly mentioning Puerto Rico’s debts as both a reason for the slow recovery and a reason to think hard about reconstruction there.

Nor did he make similar remarks after hurricanes in Texas and Florida.

Meanwhile, after thanking an Air Force general present at the briefing, Trump went on a strange digression about the F-35 fighter jet, a troubled boondoggle whose cost Trump negotiated down with the manufacturer.

The discussion of the plane was roughly as lengthy as the president’s discussion of the victims of the storm, and it had nothing to do with the hurricane.

If the Puerto Rico visit sought to reverse the impression that Trump has not taken Maria seriously and does not feel empathy for its victims, Tuesday’s briefing did not help the cause.

PostmodernProphet » 03 Oct 2017 1:25 pm » wrote:nothing dishonest about that.....it obviously was a staged photo op.......

Misty » 03 Oct 2017 2:59 pm » wrote: You wanna see a staged photo op?
Take a look at our president tossing rolls of toilet paper into a crowd of hurricane victims.

Even North Korea is laughing at us.

indago » 03 Oct 2017 5:29 pm » wrote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgMDjIiT01Y

Hundreds of White House emails sent to third Kushner family account.

White House officials are reviewing a third email account associated with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s private email domain.

White House officials have begun examining emails associated with a third and previously unreported email account on Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump’s private domain, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Hundreds of emails have been sent since January from White House addresses to accounts on the Kushner family domain, these people said.

Many of those emails went not to Kushner’s or Ivanka Trump’s personal addresses but to an account they both had access to and shared with their personal household staff for family scheduling.

The emails — which include nonpublic travel documents, internal schedules and some official White House materials —were in many cases sent from Ivanka Trump, her assistant Bridges Lamar and others who work with the couple in the White House.

The emails to the third account were largely sent from White House accounts but occasionally came from other private accounts, one of these people said.

The existence of additional accounts on the family domain beyond the two personal accounts used by Kushner and Ivanka Trump and reported earlier raises new questions about the extent of personal email use by the couple during their time as White House aides.

Their use of private email accounts for White House business also raises concerns about the security of potentially sensitive government documents, which have been forwarded to private accounts.

The family has declined to say what privacy measures have been placed on the domain, but a person familiar with the setup said some security measures were taken when it was installed.

Many of the emails came from Ivanka Trump’s assistant and included work-related “data,” according to a person familiar with the exchanges. Such messages were sent “daily,” this person added.

“They’ve pretty much been using it since they got here,” this person said.
[..........]
The revelations about the Kushner family email domain have drawn parallels to Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server for official business during her tenure as secretary of state.

Clinton’s emails were a major point of contention during the 2016 election.

President Trump criticized Clinton’s email habits and frequently called for Clinton’s arrest on the campaign trail, leading crowds at rallies in chants of “lock her up,” and urged the Justice Department to reopen the investigation into her emails.

indago » 03 Oct 2017 5:38 pm » wrote:I wonder if it was Trump Toilet Paper...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgaiUbLGIDs

Misty » 03 Oct 2017 12:42 pm » wrote: Because like I said, he had a Republican Congress for much of his time in office.
This is why he tried to do some things by Executive Order, and you guys whined about it.

crimsongulf » 03 Oct 2017 6:51 pm » wrote: Not till 2011. Two full years of total control.
His accomplishment is that he **** up healthcare.

Misty » 03 Oct 2017 6:57 pm » wrote: He only had 60 votes in the Senate for 72 days.
That is not full control.
The House passed a bunch of bills that were then filibustered in the Senate.

The Myth of the Filibuster-Proof Democratic Senate

Trump admin denied Puerto Rico request to let victims use food stamps for fast food.

Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rossell says the federal government has denied the U.S. territory's request for its citizens to redeem food stamps for ready-to-eat hot meals, amid widespread food shortages and power outages in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.

The nearly 1.3 million people on food stamps in Puerto Rico - almost 40 percent of its population- are unable to use the benefits of the federal program to buy fasts food or pre-prepared meals at supermarkets, according to The New York Times.

Food-stamp recipients are usually prohibited from buying hot foods and other items that can be eaten "in store" such as sandwiches, soup or pizza.

Puerto Rico requested the administration temporarily lift the restrictions on the program, formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

So far, the administration has refused, even after granting similar waivers in Texas after Hurricane Harvey and in Florida after Hurricane Irma.

Misty » 03 Oct 2017 6:57 pm » wrote: He only had 60 votes in the Senate for 72 days.
That is not full control.
The House passed a bunch of bills that were then filibustered in the Senate.

The Myth of the Filibuster-Proof Democratic Senate

crimsongulf » 03 Oct 2017 7:01 pm » wrote:Maybe y'all ought to review your strategy of winning elections and management 101.

Misty » 03 Oct 2017 2:07 pm » wrote: There were TV crews and reporters all over Puerto Rico.
That's why we were able to see the devastation on TV.
She was still in the water going door to door while 45 was playing golf.

Misty » 03 Oct 2017 7:12 pm » wrote: The SCOTUS heard a case about gerrymandering today, but I don't hold out much hope anything will change.
Voters don't choose their representatives, the representatives choose their voters.
Take a look at how they carve up the districts.
45 was right. The system is rigged.

Misty » 03 Oct 2017 7:12 pm » wrote: The SCOTUS heard a case about gerrymandering today, but I don't hold out much hope anything will change.
Voters don't choose their representatives, the representatives choose their voters.
Take a look at how they carve up the districts.
45 was right. The system is rigged.

Misty » 03 Oct 2017 7:02 pm » wrote: Once again Puerto Ricans are treated like second class citizens.

Misty » 03 Oct 2017 6:45 pm » wrote: Hypocrisy.

Misty » 03 Oct 2017 12:42 pm » wrote: Because like I said, he had a Republican Congress for much of his time in office.
This is why he tried to do some things by Executive Order, and you guys whined about it.