US Politics Mega-thread - Page 8970

President Donald Trump on Tuesday night rebuffed what he said was a news report claiming that his chief of staff “will soon be fired,” even though there appeared to be no such reporting by the national media.

“The Fake News is at it again, this time trying to hurt one of the finest people I know, General John Kelly, by saying he will soon be fired,” the president tweeted, without citing any media outlet.

Trump added: “This story is totally made up by the dishonest media.The Chief is doing a FANTASTIC job for me and, more importantly, for the USA!”

A Vanity Fair report published on Monday called Kelly and Trump’s relationship “irreparable,” and a Washington Post article the same day cited sources in the president’s “inner circle” as floating potential replacements for the chief of staff should the dynamic in the West Wing become “unsustainable.” Neither report said that Kelly’s departure was on the horizon.

Trump has been vocal in his public support of Kelly, repeatedly praising the former homeland security secretary’s influence on the West Wing. On Saturday, Trump told reporters Kelly “will be here — in my opinion — for the entire seven remaining years.”

The residents of Journey’s End mobile home park didn’t have much before the fire. Now they had even less.

On Tuesday, Jan Davis climbed through the charred rubble that used to be her home in Santa Rosa, California, calling for her missing cat. “Annie, Annie, Annie,” she called. Her friend, Diane Hart, thought she heard a meow, but then all went silent.

Amid heaps of broken pottery and ash, a birdcage with burnt feathers was visible.

“All my birds died,” Davis said. “They burned in their cages.”

As of Tuesday afternoon at least 15 people had died in the wildfires that swept through northern California, whipped up by heavy winds on Sunday evening. Nearly 200 others were missing, though authorities hoped the number was inflated by the lack of cellphone service due to the fire.

In a middle-class subdivision of Santa Rosa, Barbara Nichols stood on the sidewalk of Pine Meadow Drive, bracing herself. She wasn’t ready to inspect the damage. The house she had lived in for most of her life – the house where she raised her children and planted apple trees from grafts of her own parents’ trees – was gone. All that remained was a smoldering heap of rubble.

“Thirty-one years in this house,” she said through tears. “It’s where my children grew up. This is my life.”

Like all of her neighbors, Nichols fled in the early hours of Monday, as smoke filled the air and the power cut out. The wildfire, one of 17 wildfires burning across the state, that eventually raked the residential neighborhood left a landscape of utter devastation in its wake.

On Tuesday, residents of a neighborhood that one described as the kind of place where “everyone talks to each other” returned to a different world. Block after block of houses were leveled, with just a few brick chimneys, the twisted remains of ventilation systems, and scorched trees standing up amid the debris. Metal mailboxes lay on the streets, the wooden posts that once held them up in ashes.

Within the grime-covered landscape, the only hint of sparkle came from streams of melted metal trailing away from burnt-out cars.

Residents who had returned on foot to sift through the ashes expressed a sense of disorientation. All of the familiar landmarks were gone.

“I grew up here,” said Pamela Ochoa, 22, who walked the streets offering bottles of water to people who had returned. “You can’t even recognize it.”

Haley Albano, 27, picked through the remains of her parents’ house. “It was the house to be at” when she was growing up, Albano said. “There was a pool, a trampoline. Everyone would come here. Everything happened here.”

She paused. Thinking about her childhood here any more would make her cry, she said.

Albano’s parents were staying in Sacramento for now – this was the second fire they had suffered in five years – but she had walked over in sweatpants and cowboy boots to see if she could find any mementos to salvage for them. In her hand she clutched a single recipe page, singed around the edges. On the sidewalk were two tea cups and an angel figurine. “Maybe because it’s an angel it’s a good sign,” she said.

Santa Rosa firefighter Keenan Lee had been working for 55 hours straight when he and his crew took a break in a Safeway parking lot. The crew had started work on Saturday morning, and weren’t able to stop as the fire barreled into Santa Rosa proper, leveling 2,000 structures.

“We’re certainly all tired, but this is our city,” Lee said. “We certainly want to do everything we can to protect it.”

With the fires continuing to burn in the hills around the city, thousands of people crowded into emergency shelters around town. Vaughn Held, 57, sat in his wheelchair at the Santa Rosa Veterans Building, where volunteers served up tacos in the parking lot and evacuees crowded around extension cords, eager to charge their phones.

“Embers the size of quarters were falling out of the sky,” Held recalled of early Monday morning, when a knock on the door by police prompted him to get out. The police had known about his disability, and assisted him into his wheelchair and car. “It’s kind of scary. If people like myself are in that position, how are they going to get out? I’m lucky I have my own wheels.”

One such story has already emerged. Charles and Sara Rippey, 100 and 98 years old, respectively, were the fire’s first identified victims, after their son found their bodies in the debris of their Napa home on Monday.

Mike Rippey, their other son, said his father may have been heading to his mother’s room when he was overcome by the smoke and flames.

“My father certainly wouldn’t have left her,” he said.

At Journey’s End, Johannah Lonnes stood among the ruined homes and burnt out cars in sweatpants and a pinstripe shirt. “These are poor people,” she said. “Some of these people will actually die because they won’t be able to handle the process of resettling one more time.”

Though 15 mobile homes survived the blaze that swept through the park, their residents face an uncertain future. The water and power are shut off, and they don’t know if the park will ever reopen.

For Lonnes, the fire will mean the end of her life in the Bay Area. She won’t be able to afford to stay, she said, and would move with her disabled daughter, Evie Rayno, to be with other family in Richmond, Virginia.

Whether the fire will lead to widespread displacement of the poor and the working class was on several people’s minds. Rents in Santa Rosa have risen recently, said Held, thanks to pressure from the skyrocketing rental market in the rest of the Bay Area.

“If you have homeowners’s insurance, I would assume there will be rebuilding,” he said. “But if you’re a renter in an apartment complex, the housing is so tight – where do you go?

“The greed up here is incredible.”

Even as they sorted through the wreckage of their homes, some residents managed to joke and smile. Becky Young, who had only moved into her home four months before it burned, held up a burnt spice kit: “Eau de char, anyone?”

A few blocks away, Tony Manno displayed the objects he had salvaged from the house he bought in 1986 on the sidewalk: a teacup, four saucers, a porcelain unicorn, a hockey mask.

“No,” he said to an approaching visitor. “We’re not having a garage sale.”

On October 11 2017 14:25 Wegandi wrote:


Last I heard, the Executive Branch is a pretty big arm of the Government. It's one thing to make dumb tweets, but another to use the tax-code as a way to engineer behavior. Surely, you're not in favor of using the Government and the power of taxation to mold citizen behavior and thought no?

On October 11 2017 14:42 Danglars wrote:

He's extremely way out of line with the tax code threat on twitter. My best hope is for across the board reduction in tax rates and less of these social engineering projects with myriad different tax treatments. Employer health insurance, retirement, estate tax, alternative minimum, all that. I know the tax code is fucked up so hopefully we get closer to a simple tax code you can do by yourself in an hour with increased awareness of all the factors. I'm sure we can talk about the partisan use of the office of the President in popular opinion vs using the compulsory power of the state via executive order/agency memo at a future time.

...Who literally was saying that they imagine that General Kelly and Secretary Mattis..."

On October 11 2017 15:36 Liquid`Jinro wrote:


That's a very weasely way of phrasing things. No idea who that guy is but doesn't sound very reliable.

On October 11 2017 12:42 Shiragaku wrote:

We're suffering from a heroin overdose, de-industrialization, rising crime, breaking apart of the family, but a moral lecture on our privilege and pretentious analysis of our bigotry is the real problem.


I voted against Trump and I hate Trump, but this kind of arrogance and refusal to empathize with Trump voters by defining them in ways that many of them cannot relate to is just infuriating.

On October 11 2017 12:36 RealityIsKing wrote:


The reason why Trump won is because he is much more down to Earth than Hillary.

The average people look at Hillary's rallies with the celebrities and they say "Nope, can't relate."

On October 11 2017 22:38 Uldridge wrote:
48% vs. 46% in favor of Hillary makes it pretty even and only 55.5% of the population voting, makes it an astoundingly large portion not even having an impact on this at all, makes you unable to say what the average people voted for.
Nearly half of the US population doesn't care whether a Lizard or a Clown becomes president. They don't care if the platform is given to someone more competent or care if the difference is actually made. These people are also "average" at the very least.

Federal officials privately admit there is a massive shortage of meals in Puerto Rico three weeks after Hurricane Maria devastated the island.

Officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) say that the government and its partners are only providing 200,000 meals a day to meet the needs of more than 2 million people. That is a daily shortfall of between 1.8m and 5.8m meals each day.

The scale of the food crisis dwarfs the more widely publicized challenges of restoring power and communications. More than a third of Puerto Ricans are still struggling to live without drinking water.

However, Fema provides no details on food deliveries, keeping its public statements to the most general terms. On its website, Fema says it has provided “millions of meals and millions of liters of water.”

In fact many of those meals are military ready-to-eat meals that civilians find hard to digest if consumed for more than a few days.

Now the biggest provider of cooked meals says Fema is putting its operations at risk of closure.

World Central Kitchen, founded by chef José Andrés, cooks and distributes 90,000 meals a day through a network of local chefs and kitchens.

Its Fema contract, to provide just 20,000 meals a day, ended on Tuesday. Fema insists it is bound by federal rules that mean it will take several weeks for a new contract to emerge to feed more Americans.

“There is no urgency in the government response to this humanitarian crisis,” Andrés said. “They have all the officials and armed guards at headquarters, but they have no information about the island. They don’t even have a map they can share about who needs food. Fema is over-paying and it is under-delivering.”

According to Donald Trump, his own response to the disaster in Puerto Rico has been exceptional.



“Nobody could have done what I’ve done for Puerto Rico with so little appreciation. So much work!” he tweeted on Sunday. The tweet was posted along with a White House video of helicopters and trucks in Puerto Rico, and a title card saying, “What the fake news media will not show you in Puerto Rico.”

However, the Trump administration has limited insight into whether food is getting distributed and how many hungry Americans are struggling to find food.

Trump is receiving little appreciation from the American people for his response to the Puerto Rico disaster. According to a recent poll for the Associated Press, just 32% of Americans approve of Trump’s performance after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico.

That poll was conducted before Trump visited the island last week, when he tossed paper towels into a crowd in San Juan. The mayor of San Juan called the sight of him throwing rolls of paper “terrible and abominable.”

Conditions on Puerto Rico remain dire; just 16% of islanders having access to electricity. While commercial flights have resumed, and most gas stations have re-opened, much of the island’s economy remains at a standstill. Less than 400 miles of the island’s 5,000 miles of road are open to traffic.

Many residents are voting with their feet and leaving their homes behind. The population of the island of Vieques has declined from around 9,000 to little more than 6,000, according to relief workers.

On October 11 2017 22:38 Uldridge wrote:
48% vs. 46% in favor of Hillary makes it pretty even and only 55.5% of the population voting, makes it an astoundingly large portion not even having an impact on this at all, makes you unable to say what the average people voted for.
Nearly half of the US population doesn't care whether a Lizard or a Clown becomes president. They don't care if the platform is given to someone more competent or care if the difference is actually made. These people are also "average" at the very least.

On October 11 2017 16:10 GreenHorizons wrote:
Somehow conservatives think this is Trump "winning"... Disgusting.

https://twitter.com/ABC/status/917890340174159872