I have heard of people who cannot hold their liquor, but this moron cannot even hold his water.

Such a fucking embarrassment.

UN Secretary General puts world on "Red Alert."

As we begin 2018, I am issuing a red alert for our world. I call for unity – our future depends on it. pic.twitter.com/fWtTa1irM3

— António Guterres (@antonioguterres) December 31, 2017

Courtesy of HuffPo:

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres issued a grim warning as 2017 drew to a close. 

In a somber video address posted to Twitter on New Year’s Eve, he cautioned that the globe was on “red alert” following a year marked by deepening conflicts and “new dangers.” 

“When I took office a year ago, I appealed for 2017 to be a year for peace,” Guterres said in the clip. “Unfortunately, in fundamental ways, the world has gone in reverse. ... Global anxieties over nuclear weapons are the highest since the Cold War, and climate change is moving faster than we are. Inequalities are growing, and we see horrific violations of human rights. Nationalism and xenophobia are on the rise.” 

Facing such challenges, Guterres said he was “not issuing an appeal” but a “red alert for our world.” Only international unity and cooperation, he stressed, could now help solve these many crises.

“I truly believe we can make our world more safe and secure. We can settle conflicts, overcome hatred and defend shared values but we can only do that together,” the U.N. chief said. “I urge leaders everywhere to make this New Year’s resolution: Narrow the gaps. Bridge the divides. Rebuild trust by bringing people together around common goals. Unity is the path. Our future depends on it.”

As you can read Guterres does not mention the Russian military buildup, and the back and forth between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un outright, but clearly that is the subtext. 

In decades past the United States was expected to be the voice of reason in working to make the world a safer place, but now that we have our own out of control oligarch in office, we are now seen as perhaps the number one threat to the people on this planet. 

When they coined the term "elections have consequences" I am not sure they ever envisioned consequences of this magnitude.

Some world leaders are bypassing the White House and dealing directly with blue state governors like California's Jerry Brown.

Courtesy of WaPo:  

Nearly a year into the Trump presidency, countries around the world are scrambling to adapt as the White House has struggled to fill key government positions, scaled back the State Department and upended old alliances. Now some nations are finding that even if they are frustrated by President Trump’s Washington, they can still prosper from robust relations with the California Republic and a constellation of like-minded U.S. cities, some of which are bigger than European countries. 

Brown’s 10-day trip to Europe, which ended Tuesday, was just the latest in a growing transatlantic back-and-forth that bypasses the Trump-era White House. In July, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio headlined a protest in Hamburg against the Group of 20. Several European countries have stationed ambassadors in Silicon Valley to boost trade ties.

Meanwhile, state and municipal governments are expanding or building new offices to help them manage the increased interest in Europe and Asia. This year, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti (D) created the position of deputy mayor for international affairs to better manage relations with foreign governments. 

Last week Garcetti huddled in Los Angeles with the Israeli president and Armenian defense minister. The latter stopped by on his way to a peacekeeping conference and briefly described his country’s ongoing dispute with Azerbaijan over the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region. 

The mayor’s motives for taking the meeting were simple. “We have a big Armenian population in Los Angeles that cares about events in Armenia,” said Nina Hachigian, who filled the international affairs position and previously served in the Obama administration as U.S. ambassador to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in Jakarta, Indonesia. 

Many world leaders say they have no illusions that they can avoid the White House on critical issues at the core of global stability, especially those related to security. But they have embraced efforts by Democratic governors and mayors to present a different face of U.S. power to the world, albeit at a lower level than the White House or State Department. 

“There is an impression by politicians here that President Trump in person is no longer the voice of the free Western world,” said Christian Ehler, a German lawmaker who heads the European Parliament’s delegation for relations with the United States and helped broker Brown’s visit to Brussels. “We are much more carefully looking now to the diversity of what is being discussed in the United States, and we see that California is one of the powerhouses of the world economically.”

Typically I would think that overall this would be a bad idea, because even though states do indeed make individual economic deals with foreign governments, the main negotiations have always been the work of the White House.

However since we have a White House that is currently critically understaffed, and in constant disarray, I am not sure what other options exist for keeping things moving forward.

One has to wonder however if this may devolve into a kind of quiet economic civil war where blue states continue to make trade deals and negotiate exchanges of information with foreign governments, which inflates their coffers, while red states sit on their hands waiting for the Republican White House to lead the way, and slip further and further into abject poverty?

Of course the solution to this is to elect a Democratic President next time and the entire country will have the opportunity to prosper as one.

Jerry Brown seems to already be doing the job, so maybe he really will be the best bet in 2020.

Elections have consequences.

Courtesy of Axios: 

From 2015 to 2017, Pew Research tracked global confidence in the U.S. president "to do the right thing" regarding world affairs. While almost all the countries surveyed have lost confidence over the years, Russia's significant increase stands out — jumping from 11% in 2011 under Obama to 53% under Trump. 

Other takeaways from the report: Merkel, Xi or Putin have more positive ratings globally than Trump. Arrogant was the most common word globally associated with Trump's characteristics. There is global disapproval across all of Trump's major policy proposals.

We have to keep reminding ourselves that this only took six months.

Though the data is from 2015 and 2017, I can guarantee that the numbers from 2016 would have lined up almost perfectly with the data from 2015.

That means that in only a six month period of time Donald Trump has completely trashed the reputation of the presidency of the United States.

I cannot even begin to imagine how much worse it will be in another six months.

This picture pretty much sums up Trump's visit to the G20 Summit.

Courtesy of CNN: 

World leaders at the G20 summit in Germany went into their final day of talks Saturday scratching their heads over what to do about a increasingly isolationist United States. 

Leaders appeared to be at an impasse over trade and climate change, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel making clear that the US' stance on the key issues were threatening to derail progress and that talks had been difficult. 

US President Donald Trump won the 2016 election on an "America First" platform that would pull the United States out of several multilateral trade deals and negotiations, as well as the landmark Paris Agreement on climate change.

Merkel illustrated an everyone-versus-the-US scenario late Friday, and said leaders were considering how they could now present these markedly different stances in one communique.

Isolated, alone, hated by the majority of the American people, and even more of the Europeans. 

If it were not for his bestie Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump would seem a tragic figure.

But then you just have to remember that this is something that he is doing to himself, as well as to our country, and any feelings of sympathy simply die on the vine.

While other world leaders walk toward location for group photo, Donald Trump is taken by golf cart.

Leaders of England, Italy, France, Germany, Japan & Canada walking in Taormina. Trump in a golf cart pic.twitter.com/jJ9B2wIQIE

— RiotWomenn (@riotwomennn) May 27, 2017

 Courtesy of The Hill: 

President Trump chose to ride in a golf cart while his foreign counterparts took a walk through Taormina, Sicily on Saturday during the Group of 7 (G7) summit. 

The Times of London reported the six other world leaders - from Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan - walked 700 yards to take a group photo at a piazza in a hilltop town. The U.S. leader decided to wait until he could get a golf cart. 

Trump was late for the photo, but joined the other world leaders during the walk down from the piazza.

As if that was not embarrassing enough Trump had earlier refused to pledge America's support for the Paris climate deal, making our country the only one present to do so.

It should be remembered that this summit used to be called the G8, before Russia was kicked out over it's invasion of Ukraine.

Now it appears that Trump might be angling to get the name changed again, this time to the G6.

By the way, according to Fox News, it is Donald Trump who is being disrespected:

Nile Gardiner said that NATO leaders acted in an "absolutely appalling" way toward President Trump. 

Gardiner, an aide to late British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, said he was disgusted at leaders who were caught smirking and chuckling during Trump's speech. 

He criticized Luxembourg Prime Minister Xavier Bettel for appearing to laugh when Trump spoke about the need for nations to pay what they owed to NATO. 

Gardiner called the actions of Bettel, French President Emmanuel Macron and Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel "absolutely appalling."

Yes, how shameful that these people laughed at the giant orange clown. 

Trump gets handed his first defeat over Muslim ban.

So yesterday started out like this.

Courtesy of Slate:  

There appears to be lots of chaos and confusion in airports around the world after President Donald Trump signed an executive order that effectively bans travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries— Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen—from entering the United States for 30 days.(Update at 4:30 p.m. Eastern: Contrary to initial reports, the ban is for 90 days.) It also places a four-month halt to the country’s refugee program. There are now scattered reports that the order is affecting those who already have green cards and visas. 

Some travelers are being turned away at airports around the world and not allowed to board flights to the United States despite having valid travel documents. Reuters, for example, hears word from sources at the airport in Cairo that six travelers—five from Iraq and one from Yemen—were forbidden from boarding a flight to the United States even though they had valid visas.

Hours after Trump signed the executive order a mosque was set on fire in Texas.

All of this inspired multiple protests.

And caused world leaders to condemn his actions: 

European leaders, the United Nations and international groups have condemned US President Donald Trump's measures against refugees and travellers from several Muslim-majority countries. 

Oddly enough Trump's executive order only included countries that he does NOT do business with.

Interesting, don't you think?

Ultimately the ACLU and others filed a class action lawsuit, and this was the result: 

The American Civil Liberties Union announced Saturday evening that a federal court in New York had issued an emergency stay on President Trump’s executive order banning immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries. The court’s decision, which will affect people who have been detained in airports, came after the ACLU and other activist groups filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of two Iraqis who were held at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York as a result of the order. 

“I hope Trump enjoys losing. He’s going to lose so much we’re going to get sick and tired of his losing,” ACLU national political director Faiz Shakir told Yahoo News shortly after the decision was announced.

I think I agree with that statement.

The America people are fired up like I have never seen them before, and it seems very likely that they are willing to fight Donald Trump every step of the way on his agenda to destroy our country and undermine its values.

P.S. If you enjoyed this please go to our Facebook page and hit like.

President Obama: World leaders "rattled" by Donald Trump.

Courtesy of the Guardian:  

Speaking at the G7 summit in Ise-Shima, central Japan, Obama said his fellow leaders were “surprised by the Republican nominee” and unsure how to respond to his brash style of politics. 

“They are rattled by [him] and for good reason,” Obama said on Thursday. “Because a lot of the proposals he has made display either ignorance of world affairs, or a cavalier attitude, or an interest in getting tweets and headlines, instead of actually thinking through what it is required to keep America safe and secure and prosperous, and what’s required to keep the world on an even keel.”

Hard to blame the rest of the world for wondering just what the fuck is up with America these days.

One would think that after the disastrous presidency of George Bush, followed by the success of Obama's presidency, that the American voters would want to build on that success by working to elect a politician with competence and the ability to move us forward, not set the whole thing aflame and laugh while it burns.

By the way Trump responded to this news by saying that world leaders being rattled is a good thing:  

"When you rattle someone, that's good," Trump said at a news conference in North Dakota. "If they're rattled in a friendly way, that's a good thing ... not a bad thing."

I have no idea what "rattled in a good way" means, but then neither does Trump. He just says whatever idiotic thing pops into his head, which is part of the reason that those world leaders are  concerned.

I really think that once Trump is beaten that the Republican part will for all intents and purposes be undone as a national party and will have to work very hard to regain the country's trust.

Actually come to think of that I believe the same would hold true even if Trump won the presidency. 

More than 40 leaders attend mass demonstration against terrorism in Paris, France.

Courtesy of Salon:

 Leaders from across the world, including some countries with less-than-stellar freedom of expression records, linked arms and headed up a massive unity rally through the streets of Paris on Sunday to pay tribute to the 17 people killed in France by Islamist terrorist this past week. More than 1 million are expected to take part in what could very well be the largest march through the streets of Paris in modern times, notes Reuters.

 Maybe we have finally had enough of being bullied and are ready to treat Islam like every other stupid and unnecessary religious faith despite their immature tantrum throwing and threats to murder or maim those who dare to do so.

By the way here is the cartoon that is credited with inspiring the attack on Charlie Hebdo.

Here it is translated.

In other words it is suggesting that if Mohammad were to return today he would not understand the actions of his followers, and they would be unable, and unwilling, to accept him as he is rather than how they imagine him to be.

Isn't that provocative?

I think this image should be shared far and wide simply as an act of defiance in the face of terrorism, and out of respect for those who would not be silenced.

During the memorial service for Nelson Mandela President Obama shakes the hand of Cuba's President Raul Castro. Uh oh!

Courtesy of Business Insider:  

Barack Obama shook the hand of Cuban President Raul Castro on his way to speak at Nelson Mandela's memorial service. 

The moment is special and unprecedented since the U.S. has held an economic embargo on Cuba since 1953, and Mandela was praised for his ability to unite enemies across political and racial divides. 

During a powerful speech praising Mandela's life, Obama included a line that many thought was aimed at Castro, among others. 

"There are too many leaders who claim solidarity with Madiba’s struggle for freedom, but do not tolerate dissent from their own people," Obama said. 

Yeah but that little jab is not going to be enough to keep the Right Wing from losing their minds over the fact that Obama has shown civility to the brother of a man who Americans are supposed to hate. (And just like Mandela he is a "gasp" communist!)

Yep right now there are Tea Party conservatives stroking their hate inspired little erections getting ready to ejaculate vitriol and anger all over the Right Wing news sites.

P.S. You can watch the President's entire memorial speech here.

Update: Here is President Obama taking a selfie with other world leaders at the Mandela memorial.