Can we turn dead malls into homeless shelters?

This is a great idea from Facebook for making use of the abandoned shopping malls around the country to give the homeless a place to live and receive decent food. The malls are there throughout the U.S., many already closed. In December 2017, CNN Money predicted 300 out of the 1,100 malls that now exist will close over five years. What happens is the anchor store closes, which brings down the smaller shops one by one until the mall becomes a ghost town. The facilities are still there like the food courts to convert to cafeterias and the stores to small apartments and business amenities.

This would require a philanthropic entrepreneur with enough money to get the job done. Maybe Warren Buffett and Bill Gates could team up and put their foundations behind something like this to solve one of this country's biggest problems, one a rich country like the USA shouldn't have. The renovation could include medical facilities, daycare for homeless mothers, financial centers for counseling and aid. There is no end to the possibilities of something that could be done about what has plagued this country for years. Think about it and let me know what you think.

More on this later.

Trump axes ex-Obama officials security clearance due to his criticism

Trump and a determined John Brennan

"Don't piss me off" should have been Donald Trump's 2016 campaign slogan. This dufus cannot tolerate criticism of any kind and retaliates for anything said or done that doesn't either promote or praise him. Check out this site where you will find a list of those who either resigned or were fired by Trump. But the security clearance thing is new and the Oval Office lunatic just revoked the security clearance for John Brennan, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Trump said the former Obama CIA chief has displayed “erratic behavior." Translated, he spoke ill of Trump.

Sarah Sanders in delivering the latest bomb citing instances where Brennan supposedly exhibited this behavior. The media has refuted this statement with facts and Brennan commented, nothing will stop me from criticizing the Trump administration. There are several more, all of which have somehow castigated T-rump, all but one from the former Obama administration. In the same CBS news article this observation...

"Brennan has been extremely critical of the president. He called Mr. Trump's joint press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin as part of the Helsinki summit last month "nothing short of treasonous."

In a tweet from Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky...

"Is John Brennan monetizing his security clearance? Is John Brennan making millions of dollars divulging secrets to the mainstream media with his attacks on @realDonaldTrump ?"

And this is a Republican who apparently agrees that Trump is off the deep end, as usual. The decision to revoke the clearance came a day after Brennan, who headed the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency under Democratic President Barack Obama, leveled a blistering attack against Trump for the president’s tweeted criticism of former White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman...

“It’s astounding how often you fail to live up to minimum standards of decency, civility, & probity. Seems like you will never understand what it means to be president, nor what it takes to be a good, decent, & honest person. So disheartening, so dangerous for our Nation.”

Damn! That says it all! 

Trump requires NDAs, Obama didn't

Omarosa: You want me to what?

Donald Trump has required non-disclosure agreements from all of his staff, as revealed recently by former Trump campaign and White House aide Omarosa Manigault, and confirmed by Kellyanne Conway. Barack Obama did not require these same kinds of NDAs because his Associate White House Counsel Ian Bassin did not consider it within their capability to require NDAs of their employees. Just another illegal move by the master, T-rump. Re. all this, the media is asking...

"Why should we trust anything you say, when you are legally bound to say good things?"

The non-disclosure seems to center around the recent exposure of trump using the "N" word and MSNBC’s Katy Tur's recent question, above, to Trump 2020 spokesperson, Marc Lotter, who replied...

if he ever felt he was in a position that compromised his integrity, “then I wouldn’t work for that candidate any longer, and that’s just not something I’ve come across.”

Tur pressed further what if he was "appalled" at something and re-asked her question...answer: “if there was something that wrote to a criminal level,” his NDA wouldn’t prevent him from communicating with “the proper authorities.” One major publication reported...

that copies of Trump NDAs that have either been given or described to its reporters “lay out breathtakingly broad prohibitions on behavior and appear to be drawn heavily from similar contracts used in the past by the Trump Organization, the president’s family firm.”

Additionally...

signers promised not to ‘demean or disparage publicly’ Trump, his company or any member of his family — and also not to assist any other politician exploring a federal or state office and barred signers from sharing any information they had learned in the building,  

It would appear to almost any literate person--this of course doesn't include Trump supporters--that Donald Trump has an awful lot to hide. 

Wisconsin Gov Scott Walker a model of Karl Rove scare tactics

GOP portrayal of Democrats

You can trace Karl Rove's back-hand connivances to the George W. Bush administration with every known use of lies and dirty tricks known to the political world. He was still doing it in the 2016 New Hampshire race threatening Senate candidate Kelly Ayotte's opposition. She lost. Wisconsin's Republican Gov, Scott Walker is basically mirroring Rove in his current campaign saying things like...

“Those other things — health care, education — none of that matters unless you’re safe.” then he adds, if Democrats win, you and your family are in danger. Democrats want to let violent criminals back onto the street.

One reporter commented...

"If you were to distill the prevailing Republican campaign message for the 2018 midterm elections to one image, it would be this: a hooded figure in the shadows, machete (or knife or bladed fingers) in hand, waiting to pounce if the wrong candidate wins.

Life is a horror movie and it’s Democrats behind the hockey mask. Vote Republican."

The mostly white and uneducated supporters of Donald Trump eat this shit up with words like “Kill, Rape, Control” and absorb it like the gospel. The Republican no holds barred campaign has even added...

"Kathy Griffin holding the decapitated head of a mock Donald Trump doll, limousines burning in the street. Snoop Dogg literally shoots a Trump impersonator at the end."

Sure looks like to me the GOP is running scared. 

GUN CONTROL: Political gamble Dems must take

Students like these started it all

A confused and uninformed public has welcomed gun rights political candidates for years, but after the recent wave of shootings, has apparently at least somewhat come to their senses. Let's see now, they muse, which is best, the right of a gun nut to carry his weapons anywhere he or she wishes, or the right of innocent individuals, especially children, to live? Even the lowest double-digit IQ should have chosen the latter, but National Rifle Assn. head Wayne LaPierre has drummed the rights of these ringed-nose followers and the sacredness of the 2nd Amendment into the public for years now.

The new trend becomes obvious with the rash of mass shootings, including the killing of 17 students and staff members at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida six months ago. Here's an example of one candidate's message, Philip Levine, in Florida’s Democratic gubernatorial primary...

“I’m running for governor because I’m a parent who will not stop at anything until we make our gun laws stronger and our children safe.”

To illustrate the difference in attitudes, the number of political candidate ads for gun control has risen from only 559 in 2014 to 18,416 in 2018, a phenomenal jump that would indicate that these contenders are no longer running scared of the NRA. In the races covered there were 57,500 anti-gun-control spots so far, mostly by Republicans. In the Senate, Democrats are picking the gun rights candidates to oppose, although that branch still leans toward gun control opposition. Two-thirds of the American public now wants stronger gun control, and with a Democratic Congress, who knows.

QAnon's strange beginnings

Ever heard of the 4chan site? I hadn't either until I also heard of QAnon, which came up in some research I was doing on Alex Jones. It is described as being "one of the most extreme message boards on the internet," and after viewing it, I would agree, but also adding, downright weird. You can post messages to its board. and people reply like any other social media site, except half of what I read I don't understand but then, I didn't really spend the time. It all started with a small-time YouTube video creator and two moderators of the 4chan website who...

"banded together and plucked out of obscurity an anonymous and cryptic post from the many conspiracy theories that populated the website's [4chan] message board."

They ended up with...

"a Reddit community, a business and an entire mythology based off the 4chan posts of 'Q,' the pseudonym of a person claiming to be a high-ranking military officer."

Some think the mysterious three are doing it just for money, but others believe they are really "Q." Here is another viewpoint...

"QAnon is a convoluted conspiracy theory with no apparent foundation in reality. The heart of it asserts that for the last year the anonymous “Q” has taken to the fringe internet message boards of 4chan and 8chan to leak intelligence about Trump’s top-secret war with a cabal of criminals run by politicians like Hillary Clinton and the Hollywood elite. There is no evidence for these claims."

Read the rest of the NBC coverage here. It looks like one more of those conspiracy theories that you must decide, do I just dump it or take it for what it's worth and make it what I want to? This one does look like it could have longevity. 

Even more on QAnon and 4chan tomorrow

Tomorrow I will share some research I've done on the 4chan site which is responsible for promoting the QAnon conspiracy theory.

Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey snubs gun control again

Doug Ducey, Governor of Arizona, isn't the brightest politician in the pack, and he has been considered a worse governor than Jan Brewer, if that's possible, but he made a recent move that may just cost him even more votes in November, based on recent progressive moves in Arizona. The liberals are waking up here, tired of living under the conservative mantle of a bunch of gun nuts who love their firearms more than they do the lives of their children. My gut would tell me these are the same people who drown their kids daily in backyard pools.

Ducey was invited to debate gun violence and school safety at a town hall invitation from March for Our Lives Arizona. All other gubernatorial candidates will be there. Jordan Harb, March for Our Lives Arizona director said...

"Ken Bennett [GOP candidate] clearly does not agree with anything we propose, yet he is still willing to have this conversation with our community. I think, ultimately, this shows how much of a coward Doug Ducey is."

Well, we knew how dumb our governor was, now we confirmed that he is a coward. Not sure if this is the way Harb meant it, but Ducey's cowardice stems from his connection to the National Rifle Assn. who heartily endorsed him in his 2014 run for the office. The Arizona gun nuts took it from there and helped put him in the Gov's seat. The question is, as November draws closer, and the NRA slides further into oblivion when it comes to their power, will Ducey, plus the rest of the gun nut candidates across the U.S., abandon the group for greener pastures, which really aren't there.

Is the Conspiracy theory QAnon's explosion on Internet out of control?

This question of 'who is Q" cannot be answered until we know what QAnon is, and so far that is a mystery that only Q knows. As one reporter commented, since it, “first crawled out of the Internet’s churning goo, the theory has metastasised.” In its gooey slime, it has added Donald Trump to the conundrum. Q followers, who call themselves bakers, follow a path of conspiracy theories called "breadcrumbs," basically believing "the US government has been secretly investigating Democrats and the Justice Department will soon reveal compromising information about Hillary Clinton."

The above, alone, would surely seem to associate QAnon with Donald Trump and his attacks on the Democratic establishment. The whole thing got its start on "the 4chan internet forum titled “Calm Before the Storm.” The page link here has a video of a follower that amassed a lot of information if you are willing to spend an hour with it. The narrator emphasizes that QAnon is neither religious nor political and has its followers such as Rosanne Barr and Curt Schilling. At Trump's Florida rally, signs read  “We are Q,” another “WHERE WE GO ONE WE GO ALL.”

Sarah Sanders commented...

“The president condemns and denounces any group that would incite violence against another individual and certainly doesn't support groups that would promote that type of behavior.”

It's hard to tell if she knows something we don't or this is just another of her air-head statements.

In Arizona, the home of conspiracy theories, Q falsely claimed an abandoned homeless encampment in Tucson was a child sex trafficking camp even after local authorities investigated and found no evidence to support the claim. Another incident, unexplained, in June, an armed Q follower blocked an entrance to the Hoover Dam with his vehicle. But this statement from a NY Times reporter tops them all, commenting on conspiracy theories that are usually about evil cabals manipulating world events...

QAnon, by contrast, “is a conspiracy theory in which the good guys - in this case, Trump and his allies - are in charge."

 Michelle Goldberg should just go back under her rock.

There will be more on QAnon.

NRA "mission" a blatant oxymoron

The mission of the National Rifle Assn. (NRA), whether they want to admit it or not, most likely not, is to put as many guns on the street as possible. They can deny this all they want, but over the years it has been clearly established that Wayne LaPierre's NRA works for gun manufacturer's not its 5 million or so membership. These poor slobs eat up LaPierre's rhetoric, passing it around like facts, which most aren't, while gun makers drool over profits. Their stated mission is to protect the 2nd Amendment and the rights of gun nuts. Simply analyzed, it is a glaring oxymoron.

They just filed a claim in New York against Governor Andrew Cuomo that his "blacklisting" is "jeopardizing" their mission. No doubt they did not define their mission as "to put as many guns on the street as possible," which would seem to me to invalidate the charges to begin with. If they chose that flowery crap about the 2nd Amendment, although this may be true, it is not the real meaning about their existence. It is to sell more and more guns and LaPierre and the NRA will never be satisfied until every house in America is armed from a handgun to an AR-15. God help us!

You'll see more on QAnon tomorrow

It seems appropriate to cover this mysterious subject more since there are so many connections between it and Donald Trump, and I do that in my first blog post tomorrow. I would like to see your comments.

Gun nuts take hit on "Stand Your Ground" law

Stand Your Ground is without a doubt one of the stupidest laws to ever be passed in this country, thanks to Florida's Marion Hammer, top National Rifle Assn. lobbyist. First it was Trayvon Martin killed by George Zimmerman in 2012, who eventually got off scot-free, but since has experienced a number of personal problems as a result. This time Michael Drejka, 47, didn't get away with it with the killing of another black man, Markeis McGlockton in Clearwater, Florida. McGlockton, 28, was shot and killed on July 19, after shoving Drejka to the ground at a convenience store.

Drejka invoked the Stand Your Ground law, the sheriff refused to arrest him on that basis of the law, but Bernie McCabe, the state attorney for Pinellas County, decided to file charges based on the exact same investigation sheriff Bob Gualtieri had collected but did not file charges. Good 'ole boy vs. finally some common sense in Florida. So, another NRA creation for the purpose of protecting the gun nut over the innocent public from gun violence suffers a setback. It is prime time for the public to understand that the only way to stop this daily rampage of bloodshed is to get rid of the NRA.

Most agree Medicare for All is NOW

FactCheck.org has probed the recent study published by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University that says the "Medicare-for-all plan laid out by Bernie Sanders will save American people $2 trillion over a 10-year period. The author of the study, Charles Blahous, says 'wait a minute, maybe I didn't say that.' First of all, I have to tell you that Blahous' paper was sponsored by the Koch Bros., who contribute heavily to George Mason U. And Bernie's $2 trillion savings have a lot to do with his projected savings on medical care and prescriptions that seem to me perfectly logical.

Blahous doesn't disagree with Sanders, just prefers to believe his figures instead, which are less optimistic. Bernie counters with, of course Medicare for all will cost more overall but with its collective savings in purchasing power, plus cutting back on health care needs by helping those who need it, resulting in more general wellness. As before, Sanders presents other major companies who do have universal health care like Canada, Denmark, Germany, Israel, Mexico, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom, plus several more smaller and even third-world countries.

The real question is, one Bernie Sanders has been asking for years, is, can we really afford not to have UHC in such a rich country like the U.S., especially when you see so many homeless on the streets, many of which are suffering from mental illness?