Donald Trump is Time's "Man of the Year"

Donald Trump is the “Man of the Year” of Time Magazine.  So he is in the same company as Adolph Hitler and Bill Clinton and the Pope and Ghandi.  I wonder what Shawn’s opinion of Ghandi or the Pope is anyhow?  Donald Trump picked Gen John F Kelly, the highest ranking military officer for a the head of Homeland Security today who ever lost a son in the Iraq war.  This is the third retired general to be picked for the Trump cabinet.  It seems like there's been more than that.  Perhaps this is showing some sign of empathy.  Of course in the campaign Trump made critical remarks about top military brass saying he knew more than they did and would override their wishes. Trump is like an invasive salvo unleashed on us the same way Pearl Harbor was unleashed on us 75 years ago today.  My dad was in high school when that happened making him younger than Norman Goldman’s dad.  He knew that the minute he graduated he’d get drafted before you could say “Jack Robinson”.  None of us who were not alive then cannot possibly imagine what is was like to live through that and the traumatic changes it unleashed upon this nation.  Some people are STILL shell-shocked from the news of Trump’s election.  Trump’s favorability figure has jumped seventeen percent since August.  He has “skyrocketed up from 33% to 50%.  Trump is head of “The Divided States of America”.  Shawn didn’t like that headline.   Trump can’t even get along with natural allies now.  He’s attacking Boeing Aircraft because he feels they’re trying to cheat the federal government out of money.  There was a Federation article today sticking up for Boeing Aircraft.  I will say this.  If you’re a blue state after this election you can really be called “true blue”.  Maybe the Pacific Time Zone states will want to secede because now they say Jeff Sessions won’t allow our liberalized marijuana laws to continue.  Trump leads Hillary by 22,000 votes in Pennsylvania, and eleven thousand in Michigan and 44,000 votes in Pennsylvania.  So you have a grand total of 77 thousand votes keeping Hillary Clinton out of the White House.  Hillary Clinton’s lead has grown to 2.7 million according to two independent sources.  I don’t know if they’re done with the vote recount.  However in Wayne county Michigan they say they will NEVER be able to count those votes because the provisional ballots were destroyed or something.  Well, you heard it from the horse’s mouth.  Trump said it would be a rigged election.  They say that Hillary Clinton is trailing significantly more in places with voting machine than places with paper ballots.  Also it’s interesting that the margin of votes in the winning states is so slim.  What if this had happened with Hillary?  What would Trump be saying?  Of course Trump’s appointment of the head of the Environmental Protection Agency is a major salvo we’ve had to endure in the news today. 

Ohio has basically decided to rescind Roe verses Wade today.  Their legislature voted to ban all abortions after six weeks.  They say they picked a time when you could detect a fetal heartbeat.  I don’t know you could detect one that soon.  The only thing that remains is for Governor John Kasich to sign the bill.  If he refuses to sign the bill you know he’s going to take a lot of flack from Limbaugh and Hannity.

There was a concert going in in that Oakland warehouse when the fire broke out.  Now they say that the fire was caused by a malfunctioning refrigerator that was shorting out.  The owner of the property is in heap big trouble both from zoning irregularities and from the many lawsuits that will occur.  It seems that this whole building had devolved from an artist's colony living together to just a place to smoke crack.    

President-elect Donald Trump is expected to nominate Scott Pruitt, the attorney general of the oil and gas-intensive state of Oklahoma, to head the Environmental Protection Agency, a move signaling an assault on President Obama’s climate change and environmental legacy.  Pruitt has spent much of his energy as attorney general fighting the very agency he is being nominated to lead.  He is the third of Trump’s appointees who have key philosophical differences with the missions of the agencies they have been tapped to run. Ben Carson, named to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development, has expressed a deep aversion to the social safety net programs and fair housing initiatives that have been central to that agency’s activities. Betsy DeVos, named education secretary, has a passion for private school vouchers that critics say undercut the public school systems at the core of the government’s mission.  The news about the choice of Pruitt was confirmed by a transition official, who would not speak for attribution before the official announcement.  Pruitt, who has written that the debate on climate change is “far from settled,” joined a coalition of state attorneys general in suing the agency’s Clean Power Plan, the principal Obama-era policy aimed at reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions from the electricity sector. He has also sued, with fellow state attorneys general, over the EPA’s recently announced regulations seeking to curtail the emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, from the oil and gas sector.  On his Linked In page, Pruitt boasts of being “a leading advocate against the EPA’s activist agenda.”

[Trump has vowed to kill the Clean Power Plan. Here’s how he might — and might not — succeed]

After he was elected attorney general in 2010, Pruitt established a “Federalism Unit” to “more effectively combat unwarranted regulation and systematic overreach by federal agencies, boards and offices,” according to his online bio.  And he has gone on to challenge the administration not just over the environment but over a host of other areas. He joined other Republican attorneys general in a lawsuit over Obama’s immigration policies. He has also sued the administration over the Affordable Care Act, saying the health-care mandate on religious employers to provide coverage including contraception was unconstitutional. He has sued over the Dodd-Frank financial reform.