Your lunch hour time waster

Due to numerous requests, the once wildly popular Random Pixels feature known as the Lunch Hour Time Waster returns today with this video of a kitten playing with a dog's tail.

'If he thinks his phones were tapped, then he believes we know everything.'

Journalists know: When leaders go berserk, furiously denying there's anything going on, blaming others--that's when you're getting close.

— Nicholas Kristof (@NickKristof) March 4, 2017

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Former Miami Herald senior writer Marty Merzer analyzes the latest news out of Mar-a-Lago this morning....

Via The Minority President Report:

He’s going down, and in the not-too-distant future. Though the technological details are more modern, this is all very Nixonian. The patterns - denial, then weak and partial actions in failed attempts to quell the scandal, then total psychosis ahead of capitulation - are precisely the same. [Emphasis added]

- Beginning at 6:26 a.m. today and continuing throughout the early morning, the Minority President posted five six seven bizarre - even by his standards - tweets. The activity was clearly manic.

- As you read the rest of this, keep in mind that the Minority President has a long history of accusing others of doing precisely what he has done. Psychologists call it “projection.” It's the "So's your mother" form of debate.

- In this morning’s series of tweets, the Minority President accused President Obama of undermining “the very sacred election process.” He said: “This is Nixon/Watergate.” These are precisely the accusations and comparisons being made about the Minority President and the scandal that is closing in on him.

- He accused Obama of wiretapping him at Trump Tower. (Point of fact: No president can order a wiretap.) He said: “This is McCarthyism!” Again, that’s precisely a charge that has been leveled against him. In addition, one of the Minority President’s early and most influential mentors was the notorious Roy Cohn, who served as McCarthy’s chief counsel during the infamous Army-McCarthy hearings.

Click here to continue reading.

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.@MalcolmNance on Trump: "He knows something's going on...if he thinks his phones were tapped, then he believes we know everything." pic.twitter.com/Kbd1rNZbuK

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) March 4, 2017

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And now....let's go live to Mar-a-Lago ....

Jerry Lee Lewis -Whole Lotta Shakin' Going On (Live 1964)

Jerry Lee Lewis performing live in 1964 in the UK on the TV show, "Don't Knock the Rock."

Commander who organized bin Laden raid says Trump’s anti-media comments are the 'greatest threat to democracy'

Via The Washington Post:

William H. McRaven, a retired four-star admiral and former Navy SEAL, defended journalists this week, calling President Trump’s denunciation of the media as “the enemy of the American people” the “greatest threat to democracy” he’s seen in his lifetime.

That’s coming from a man who’s seen major threats to democracy.

McRaven, who was commander of the secretive Joint Special Operations Command, organized and oversaw the highly risky operation that killed Osama bin Laden almost six years ago. The admiral from Texas had tapped a special unit of Navy SEALs to carry out the May 2011 raid on the elusive terrorist’s hideout, a high-walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

Two days after making those remarks, McRaven had this to say on his blog on the University of Texas website:

In my sixty years, most of the serious threats to our nation have come from the outside: the Cold War, the Vietnam War, terrorism and the wars that followed. While at times, these external pressures encouraged some within our government to adopt a barricade mentality – hiding information from the public, acting secretly outside the bounds of the law, and encouraging behavior that had an extralegal feel to it – never has the government openly challenged the idea of a free press.

Each of us in government swears an oath to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States." The first amendment to that constitution assures freedom of speech and of the press.

The news media have not always been kind to me. However, I can tell you – as someone who has been to 90 countries and spoken to the press in almost all of them – the United States has the finest press corps in the world, bar none.
[...]
But what makes journalism so essential to our democracy is that – when done right – it holds all of us accountable, to our country, to its ideals, and to each other. As an Admiral, and now as a Chancellor, I haven’t always enjoyed being asked tough questions. But being held accountable by the press has only made me and the organizations I lead better.

Just as it has made America better.

My message to our aspiring journalists, and journalists everywhere: We need you more than ever.

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In 2014 McRaven delivered an extraordinary commencement speech at the University of Texas.




He ended his speech with this advice for the graduates:

Start each day with a task completed. Find someone to help you through life. Respect everyone.

Know that life is not fair and that you will fail often. But if take you take some risks, step up when the times are toughest, face down the bullies, lift up the downtrodden and never, ever give up — if you do these things, then the next generation and the generations that follow will live in a world far better than the one we have today.

And what started here will indeed have changed the world — for the better.

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Washington Post, May 4, 2011: Adm. William McRaven: The terrorist hunter on whose shoulders Osama bin Laden raid rested

Mia the beagle does whatever the hell she wants

Mia, an easily-distracted beagle, didn't win the agility competition at the Westminster Dog Show earlier this month, but she did win a lot of hearts.

What has Donald Trump done for veterans?

Donald Trump placed planters in front of his Fifth Avenue building
to discourage veterans - some disabled war vets - from setting up pushcarts.
(via Google Maps, August 2013)
Click image to enlarge.

Last Friday, Local 10 News sent a reporter to Palm Beach County to cover the weekend visit - his third weekend in a row - of Donald Trump.

The reporter managed to get some some interesting sound bites from the dozens of Trump loyalists who showed up to demonstrate their support.

One of the supporters, Chris Nick, choked back tears as he told the reporter that Trump was "a good man."

"I just appreciate what he's doing for the veterans," said Nick.



I'm sure if the reporter had asked Nick just exactly what it was that Trump had done for "the veterans," he would have struggled to answer.

The reality is that Trump has done nothing for "the veterans."

In May of last year — after being squeezed by Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold — Trump announced he'd given away money to veterans groups that he'd raised four months before.

On Tuesday [May 31], Donald Trump announced that he'd given away the last of the $5.6 million that he raised four months ago, at a benefit for veterans' causes in Iowa. In a bitter, combative press conference, Trump made clear that he'd been pressured into giving up these details by the news media, including The Washington Post.

[...]

How many new donations were announced on Tuesday?

By The Post's count, 18 new gifts, totaling about $1.5 million.

In each case, Trump was giving away other people's money. Other donors, both large and small, had entrusted this money to the Donald J. Trump Foundation, on the understanding that Trump would then distribute it to veterans.

On the same day the Post published its story, the New York Times reported:

[Trump] called a news conference ostensibly to answer questions about his fund-raising for charities that benefit military veterans. But Donald J. Trump instead spent most of his time on live television Tuesday berating the journalists covering his presidential campaign in unusually vitriolic and personal terms.

“You’re a sleaze,” he told a reporter for ABC.

“You’re a real beauty,” he told a reporter for CNN, snidely denigrating the man’s competence.

For 40 minutes, Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, assailed those reporting on his candidacy with a level of venom rarely seen at all, let alone in public, from the standard-bearer of a major political party. Then he warned that a Trump White House would feature more of the same.

Historians reached back to the Nixon administration, with its reporter-stocked enemies list, for a fair comparison. Other scholars and political analysts suggested that Mr. Trump failed to appreciate the role journalists play in scrutinizing candidates as surrogates for the public, or drew connections to his denunciations of other adversaries and critics — like a federal judge in a case where Mr. Trump is being sued, or the Republican governor of New Mexico, whom Mr. Trump denigrated while campaigning in her state last week.

Let's go over that again: "Mr. Trump...assailed those reporting on his candidacy with a level of venom rarely seen at all, let alone in public."

Hmmm...sounds familiar, doesn't it?

But back to Trump and the vets....not all veterans are as gullible and ill-informed as the veteran interviewed in Palm Beach County last week.



With minimal effort and an Internet connection, Chris Nick would have learned that Trump hasn't done sh*t for veterans.

In 2015, the New York Daily News reported that Trump had complained on several occasions that veterans were ruining "the ambiance of Fifth Ave. — the address of his gleaming Trump Tower headquarters — was being wrecked by peddlers, including some he accused of only posing as vets."

“While disabled veterans should be given every opportunity to earn a living, is it fair to do so to the detriment of the city as a whole or its tax paying citizens and businesses?” Trump wrote in a 1991 letter to John Dearie, then-chairman of the state Assembly’s Committee on Cities.

In its story, the News noted that "New York’s original peddling exceptions for veterans date back to 1894 — created to give those disabled during the Civil War a chance to support themselves."

In May 2016, one of the New York City vets, former Marine Dan Rossi, a disabled veteran and longtime New York City street vendor, told Politico, "[Trump has] done more damage to the disabled veterans in this city than any other man.”

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Forbes: When It Comes To Veterans, Donald Trump's Rhetoric Is Much More Generous Than His Giving Record