SunSeeker
SunSeeker's JournalHow To Cope With Trump-Era Depression
The psychological impact of Trump’s presidency is real and lasting. Many of his actions are unprecedented in modern presidential history. And Trump’s gaslighting is enough to cause anyone to feel like we’re losing control of our democracy. Psychologists have referred to the feelings that result from this presidency as “Trump Anxiety Disorder.” It can lead to increased blood pressure, depression, and chronic health problems. For that reason, it’s important to keep perspective and take care. If you’re tired of feeling sick over Trump’s actions, these friendly reminders may lift your spirits, empower you, give you hope, and effect change.
Trump doesn’t represent the American people. Trump got 62,984,828 votes. About 174 million Americans either voted against him or didn’t vote for him, which is about 73% of the eligible-to-vote American population. Trump’s term ends in a few months. We have an opportunity to replace him with someone who leads with compassion, believes in science, sets an example, and tells the truth. In some countries, dictators stay in power for decades.
Empower yourself. There’s so much we can do to offset the damage of Trump’s presidency. Volunteer for a campaign or a nonprofit, find a job that allows you to advance your interests full-time, register people to vote, or donate to a charity. Every act of kindness makes a difference. It’s also an impactful exercise to call your senators in Congress at (202) 224-3121 to express your thoughts.
Manage your social media exposure. Avoid arguing with people who are unlikely to change their minds. It’s emotionally draining, and it isn’t worth it. There are much better ways to spend your days. Think critically about how you’re using your time on social media.
[More suggestions at link]
https://kirschnerskorner.com/2020/02/02/trump-anxiety-disorder/
Conservatives spread false claims on Twitter about electoral fraud as Iowans prepare to caucus
The Iowa Democratic Party, in partnership with national Democratic officials, has labored to make the caucuses more transparent and to fend off the sort of confusion and conspiracy theories that marred the process in 2016. The Democratic National Committee has its own unit tracking viral disinformation and flagging falsehoods to campaigns, as well as to technology companies that have pledged to clean up their platforms after they were enlisted by Russian actors to boost Donald Trump in his campaign against Hillary Clinton.
But their efforts falter in the face of falsehoods pushed by users with massive online audiences, which social media platforms often refuse to remove, arguing they should not serve as the Web’s arbiters of truth. On Monday, Twitter affirmed its mostly hands-off approach, maintaining the false claims about Iowa’s voter rolls did not qualify as a form of voter suppression.
“The tweet you referenced is not in violation of our election integrity policy as it does not suppress voter turnout or mislead people about when, where, or how to vote," said spokeswoman Katie Rosborough.
Tom Fitton, the president of the conservative activist group Judicial Watch, wrote Sunday morning that “eight Iowa counties have more voter registrations than citizens old enough to register." That notion, based on a Judicial Watch report purporting to find similar irregularities in hundreds of counties across the country, is false, according to state officials and a Washington Post review of the most up-to-date data.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/03/conservatives-push-false-claims-voter-fraud-twitter-iowans-prepare-caucus/?itid=hp_hp-bignews3_voter-fraud-155pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory-ans
USMCA: "He didn't get much, he got to rename it," Kirkegaard said.
“USMCA is 95 percent the existing NAFTA agreement,” said Jacob Kirkegaard, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “There are provisions in there that cover things like e-commerce and digital services, but with regard to the manufacturing sector, for instance, there’s very little change.”
To the extent that Trump can claim credit for an economic lift provided by the USMCA, economists said that was more a function of the White House keeping most of the existing agreement in place after initially threatening to pull out of NAFTA entirely without a replacement in place.
“I would think of this more in terms of what would’ve happened if this agreement didn’t go back into place. That would’ve been disastrous for the economy,” said Dan North, chief economist at Euler Hermes North America.
Exiting NAFTA without replacing it would have forced the three nations to revert to WTO rules around trade, which would have upended supply chains and disrupted production throughout the continent.
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/trump-signs-usmca-trade-deal-replace-nightmare-nafta-n1125526
Kinda like the arsonist wanting credit for putting out the fire he started. 
WaPo: Trump and Netanyahu have made Mideast peace an even more distant prospect
THE MIDEAST peace plan that President Trump unveiled at the White HouseTuesday amounts, as a practical matter, to another one-sided gift to the right-wing Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Mr.?Trump promised U.S. recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Jordan Valley and all of the settlements Israel has constructed in the West Bank — a radical shift in a half-century-old American policy.
Mr. Netanyahu, who gleefully pledged to immediately “apply Israeli law to all areas the plan recognizes,” reciprocated by calling Mr. Trump “the greatest friend Israel has ever had in the White House.” Mr. Trump can be expected to flog that endorsement as he seeks reelection this year. Mr. Netanyahu, in turn, will present himself to Israeli voters in a March election as the leader who extracted once-unimaginable concessions from Washington. Both leaders can hope to distract from ongoing scandals: Mr. Trump from his impeachment trial and Mr. Netanyahu from his indictment Tuesdayon corruption charges.
U.S. sanctions for the annexation of settlements will meanwhile deliver a devastating blow to the prospects for a two-state resolution between Israelis and Palestinians. Those who actually favor that, as we do, will have to hope that the remainder of the plan is soon forgotten. Otherwise, it may provide a new set of benchmarks that will make peace impossible and from which future Israeli and U.S. governments will find it hard to retreat.
The terms Mr. Trump set for Palestinian statehood are virtually identical to those promoted by Mr. Netanyahu, which is no doubt why the latter was so quick to endorse them. The Palestinian “state” would lack many conventional aspects of sovereignty, including control over its borders, airspace, territorial waters and international relations. Israel would retain “overriding security responsibility,” including the right to send its own forces into Palestinian territory. Tens of thousands of Israelis would go on living in settlements inside the new Arab state and would be governed by Israel. And Israel would have full sovereignty over Jerusalem, except for a few areas already outside the city’s security barrier.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/trumps-mideast-peace-plan-is-a-one-sided-gift-to-netanyahu/2020/01/28/43708452-4201-11ea-aa6a-083d01b3ed18_story.html
Susan Collins becomes the Joe Wilson of the Impeachment Trial.
Like Joe Wilson, who screamed (incorrectly) "You lie!" at President Obama when Obama said the ACA would not cover undocumented immigrants, Susan Collins broke decorum and Impeachment Trial rules by shouting from the floor "Not true" several times as Adam Schiff relayed a story he had heard that Trump threatened Senators that if they voted against the President their "head" would end up "on a pike."
Of course, she has no way of knowing if Trump did indeed issue such a warning, so has no basis to yell "not true." And of course there is nothing untrue about Schiff relaying a report he had heard. She broke decorum to yell a lie, like Joe Wilson.
And that's after she passed a note to Roberts to complain that Nadler used the word, "liar," and got Roberts to issue an admonishment about maintaining decorum.
Collins can hardly call call herself a moderate if she has stepped into Joe Wilson's shoes.
John Roberts comes face to face with the mess he made
Roberts’s captivity is entirely fitting: He is forced to witness, with his own eyes, the mess he and his colleagues on the Supreme Court have made of the U.S. political system. As representatives of all three branches of government attend this unhappy family reunion, the living consequences of the Roberts Court’s decisions, and their corrosive effect on democracy, are plain to see.
...
Ten years to the day before Trump’s impeachment trial began, the Supreme Court released its Citizens United decision, plunging the country into the era of super PACs and unlimited, unregulated, secret campaign money from billionaires and foreign interests. Citizens United, and the resulting rise of the super PAC, led directly to this impeachment. The two Rudy Giuliani associates engaged in key abuses — the ouster of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, the attempts to force Ukraine’s president to announce investigations into Trump’s political opponents — gained access to Trump by funneling money from a Ukrainian oligarch to the president’s super PAC.
The Roberts Court’s decisions led to this moment in indirect ways, as well. The court’s 2013 ruling in Shelby County gutted the Voting Rights Act and spurred a new wave of voter suppression. The decision in 2014?s McCutcheon further surrenderedcampaign finance to the wealthiest. The 2018 Janus decision hobbled the ability of labor unions to counter wealthy donors, while the 2019 Rucho ruling blessed partisan gerrymandering, expanding anti-democratic tendencies.
...
It’s a symbiotic relationship. On the day the impeachment trial opened, the Roberts Court rejected a plea by Democrats to expedite its consideration of the latest legal attempt by Republicans to kill Obamacare. The court sided with Republicans who opposed an immediate Supreme Court review because the GOP feared the ruling could hurt it if the decision came before the 2020 election.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/01/23/john-roberts-comes-face-face-with-mess-he-made/
That was an anti-abortion loon who interrupted Jeffries from the gallery.
From NBC News:
Jeffries was briefly interrupted by a protester yelling loudly.
The protester was escorted out of the chamber within seconds, and Jeffries resumed his remarks, but the protester continued to scream loudly just outside the chamber, on the third floor near the press gallery.
He could be heard yelling, "Schumer is the devil," "Dismiss the trial of impeachment," and he repeatedly mentioned abortion, as he was arrested and led away by Capitol Police.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-impeachment-inquiry/live-blog/live-trump-impeachment-senate-trial-coverage-n1119061/ncrd1120786#liveBlogHeader
I fucking hate anti-abortion nutbags. They want to be the loudest voice in the room and drown everyone else out, whether by volume or violence.
Women put in 12.5 billions of hours ($10.8 trillion) of unpaid, undervalued care work.
The report, called “Time to Care,” puts a spotlight on those who care for the young, the sick and the elderly, the vast majority of whom are women and girls working long hours for little or no pay. Globally, women provide 12.5 billion hours a day of care work without pay, which the Oxfam report calculates adds at least $10.8 trillion of value to the economy every year. This work is undervalued socially and economically, but, the report says, “It also lays the foundations in society that make possible enormous economic wealth accrued by others and helps to generate enormous economic wealth.”
Gowland gave the example of a woman in rural Zimbabwe who has to walk four hours a day to fetch water for her family. “The consequences of that are really obvious,” she said. “Girls are pulled out of school to do this unpaid care work, women can’t access fair, decent jobs and wages, and the biggest thing is the fact that they just don’t have time to contribute to societies, to any kind of political discourse or engagement with how their societies are run.”
This care crisis is not just affecting developing countries. The U.S. child care system, for example, is costing the country hundreds of billions of dollars a year in lost wages and lost opportunities, according to a report published Wednesday by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). Child care providers in America are overwhelmed and underpaid, with a median wage of $12 an hour, according to the report’s findings. Meanwhile, parents, most often women, are being forced to give up work or turn down better-paying jobs because of the expense of child care.
https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5e20db1bc5b674e44b94eca5
2019 capped off the world's hottest decade in recorded history
Source: Washington Post
The past decade was the hottest ever recorded on the planet, driven by an acceleration of temperature increases in the past five years, according to new data released Wednesday by the U.S. government.
The findings, released jointly by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), detail a troubling trajectory: 2019 was the second-hottest year on record, trailing only 2016. The past five years each rank among the five hottest since record-keeping began. And 19 of the hottest 20 years have occurred during the past two decades.
The warming trend also bears the unmistakable fingerprint of humans, who continue to emit tens of billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year, scientists say.
In fact, Berkeley Earth researchers said, no place on Earth experienced a record cold annual average during 2019. But 36 countries — from Belize to Botswana, from Slovakia to South Africa — experienced their hottest year since instrumental records began. Those same researchers estimated that more warming lies ahead, and that a 95 percent chance exists that 2020 will become one of the five hottest years.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/01/15/2010s-hottest-decade-world/?arc404=true
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/01/15/2010s-hottest-decade-world/?arc404=true
US tried to kill Iranian commander in Yemen same night as Soleimani strike: Officials
Source: ABC News
An unsuccessful strike on another high-ranking Iranian military commander took place in Yemen on the same night a U.S. drone strike killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad, two sources told ABC News.
The Jan. 2 nighttime strike targeted Abdul Reza Shahla'i, a key Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force commander, at his compound in Yemen, where he led Iran's military support for the Houthi rebel group backed by Iran, according to a counterterrorism official and a U.S. official.
The strike on the compound was carried out by a drone, the counterterrorism official told ABC News, adding that by the next morning the U.S. learned the strike was unsuccessful.
A former counterterrorism official told ABC News Shahla'i was in charge of Iran's operations inside Yemen, particularly the flow of missiles and drones to Iranian-backed Houthi rebels who have used those weapons to attack Saudi Arabia.
Read more: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/us-kill-iranian-commander-yemen-night-soleimani-strike/story?id=68200887&cid=clicksource_4380645_null_hero_hed
Looks like now we're Saudi Arabia's mercenaries. Jared must need cash.
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Gender: Do not displayHome country: USA
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