Current Affairs Donald Trump POS: Judgement cometh and that right soon
- Thread starter kithnou
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I love not-news, which is different from fake-news:
Tillerson held a press conference to say he did not call Trump a moron.
Trump's Chief of Staff John Kelly held a press conference saying he is not thinking of quitting or frustrated with his job.
Tillerson held a press conference to say he did not call Trump a moron.
Trump's Chief of Staff John Kelly held a press conference saying he is not thinking of quitting or frustrated with his job.
Hehe
HRH Zinke
https://www.washingtonpost.com/amph...672476-aeb2-11e7-9e58-e6288544af98_story.html
At the Interior Department's headquarters in downtown Washington, Secretary Ryan Zinke has revived an arcane military ritual that no one can remember ever happening in the federal government.
A security staffer takes the elevator to the seventh floor, climbs the stairs to the roof and hoists a special secretarial flag whenever Zinke enters the building. When the secretary goes home for the day or travels, the flag — a blue banner emblazoned with the agency's bison seal flanked by seven white stars representing the Interior bureaus — comes down.
....
Zinke upset some of the 70,000 employees at the agency that manages public lands by stating that 30 percent of the workers are "not loyal to the flag" in a speech to oil and gas executives. It is unclear whether the reference was literal or figurative.
Zinke rode to work on horseback on his first day in office and displays animal heads on his wood-paneled office walls. For a while, he kept a glass-case display of hunting knives but was asked to remove them because of security risks, according to people familiar with the decision.
He has commissioned commemorative coins with his name on them to give to staff and visitors, but the cost to taxpayers is unclear. Zinke's predecessors and some other Cabinet secretaries have coins bearing agency seals, but not personalized ones.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/amph...672476-aeb2-11e7-9e58-e6288544af98_story.html
At the Interior Department's headquarters in downtown Washington, Secretary Ryan Zinke has revived an arcane military ritual that no one can remember ever happening in the federal government.
A security staffer takes the elevator to the seventh floor, climbs the stairs to the roof and hoists a special secretarial flag whenever Zinke enters the building. When the secretary goes home for the day or travels, the flag — a blue banner emblazoned with the agency's bison seal flanked by seven white stars representing the Interior bureaus — comes down.
....
Zinke upset some of the 70,000 employees at the agency that manages public lands by stating that 30 percent of the workers are "not loyal to the flag" in a speech to oil and gas executives. It is unclear whether the reference was literal or figurative.
Zinke rode to work on horseback on his first day in office and displays animal heads on his wood-paneled office walls. For a while, he kept a glass-case display of hunting knives but was asked to remove them because of security risks, according to people familiar with the decision.
He has commissioned commemorative coins with his name on them to give to staff and visitors, but the cost to taxpayers is unclear. Zinke's predecessors and some other Cabinet secretaries have coins bearing agency seals, but not personalized ones.
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tsubaki
Player Valuation: £90m
TBF Trump isn't attacking Puerto Rico, he is attacking the local government - and he should, because for at least the last twenty years (and almost certainly much longer than that) they have been absolutely awful. They are after all the main reason why the society it is their job to manage has collapsed to an extent not seen anywhere else affected by these disasters.
When should he? Right as they're dealing with the worst disaster to hit the island in 100 years?
Strongly disagree, there are still huge numbers of people lacking the basics such as access to clean water, enough food to survive and medical care - the focus of the federal government and thus the president should be on improving their dire conditions.
Once the critical period is over, I think it a very valid discussion to have about the administration and decisions that led to being particularly vulnerable to the disaster but even then it should be directed at those responsible rather than a generalized slur to a whole population.
In these events there are almost always actions by local/regional government that made the situation more prone to danger. For instance in the Harvey flooding there are questions about whether natural floodplains-water spillways should have been allowed to be built on https://www.dallasnews.com/news/har...s-recede-houston-homeowners-find-nature-blame.
If Irma had hit Tampa it would likely have been devastating
https://www.washingtonpost.com/grap...mate-change/?tid=a_inl&utm_term=.1a3996d20874
Prior to a disaster hitting is the best time to discuss these issues, I would genuinely welcome for instance if Trump wants to question whether California is prepared for a major earthquake on the San Andreas as I don't think it is. The second best is at the start of the rebuilding phase as that is the point that lessons learnt can be best applied. However during the emergency response phase I think it counter productive to saving lives and just an all round disgusting thing to do as president.
tsubaki
Player Valuation: £90m
Yes - if a government is incompetent before a disaster, it isn't suddenly going to become competent after the disaster happens. You need to have competence in there or people will suffer and phenomenal waste of effort occurs, which is exactly what we are seeing in PR.
Its like the aftermath of the Grenfell fire here - no amount of assistance, pressure or direction from the public or central government has been able to get RBKC operating as it should have been, because they were rubbish to begin with. The end result is that almost all the survivors remain in hotels, or are housed off the borough, without any sign that things are going to change. Most of the housing / certainty issues they face could and should have been dealt with within the first week.
abelard
Player Valuation: £35m
Isn't that basically just the NRA argument though? Mass shootings are a time for thoughts and prayers, and it's wrong to politicise them by discussing gun control?
I think this is the perfect time to discuss why Puerto Rico has been so poorly run for so long, because it is probably the only time that Puerto Rico will ever be discussed in the United States (which barely even knows about its own jurisdiction), and the only time there will ever be any impetus to do anything constructive. If we wait until the crisis subsides, then the possibility of, say, debt relief or modifying the Jones Act will be nil.
And it seems like a false dichotomy to suggest that FEMA doing its job properly can't occur alongside raising awareness of what has made Puerto Rico (or Houston) so susceptible.
That is not to edify Trump though - he is not "attacking the local government," which he does not understand well enough to form a cogent critique; rather, he is picking a personal fight imbued with racist insinuations with the mayor of San Juan specifically, who, whatever her party's record, has been extremely energetic and committed to helping her constituents, and to demanding that the federal government - ie: Trump - do its job. And in any case, the reason why PR has been so badly managed has at least as much to do with Washington and Wall Street as it does with the island's relatively weak leadership.
Wow, Trump is clearly using deflectionary tactics by trying to force the spotlight off his own ham fisted response to the disaster and on to local government and you guys are drawing comparisons with the NRA and Grenfell??
The NRA comparison is way off as there is a clear difference between a natural disaster and a man made disaster. The gun control argument is in response to continued mass shootings and a continued avoidance of an obvious solution.
Lay off the PR local government and wait till they are not dealing with people drinking dirty water or no water before questioning their longterm ability to govern.
Then look at giving PR statehood or independence because as it stands, they're trying to govern with their hands tied behind their backs and that's the fault of the federal government who want to have their cake and eat it.
Lay off the PR local government and wait till they are not dealing with people drinking dirty water or no water before questioning their longterm ability to govern.
Then look at giving PR statehood or independence because as it stands, they're trying to govern with their hands tied behind their backs and that's the fault of the federal government who want to have their cake and eat it.
I don't think it is as by starting an argument about the existing governance, most particularly with the San Juan mayor but also in general, it immediately puts up barriers between FEMA and the local politicians. You had the FEMA director go on tv and say he "filtered out the San Juan mayor's complaints as political noise" - that can't be helpful to anyone.
Unfortunately poor local officials will always have in the back of their minds how things look rather than their full focus on the recovery effort. The federal government attacking them will only make it more likely they concentrate on blaming FEMA for the issues whilst it does zero to help the good local officials with their immediate needs. It also allows FEMA to bury any of its own shortcomings under a "look what we have to work with" excuse - as president he should be holding both sides to metrics such as how many people have clean drinking water and not allow any sidetracking into political squabbling and mutual fingerpointing. I thimkmthings suchnas the Jones act or the debt relief are s
I do agree however with a lot of your latter points and that there is a concern that after the emergency response period is over that Puerto Rico will be forgotten in a way that New Orleans could not but tbh I think that an ongoing problem with Trump anyway, I'm not sure Houston is getting much post storm federal attention either.
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