Uprisings: Harder than he thought

We’ve all been in over our heads before. All the vocational training you can crack two credit cards at will still never ensure that somebody at your new job is not going to roll their eyes at you, call you stupid behind your back and talk to management about your mistakes, even – if not especially – in your first 100 days. There’s acclimation to be had, names to be remembered, systems and files, the whole rhythm of the gossip train as it runs to the water cooler.

That, in part, is why most U.S. Presidents dip their toes in the water in the field – you start as an organizer, you become a state representative, you rise to a governorship or a U.S. Senate seat, you learn the ropes by actually walking across them.

And so it is that we heard this statement from our commander in chief in an interview with Reuters reporters; this little bit of humility that is, perhaps in the larger scheme of a public relations nightmare, supposed to make the idiot base that elected a television narcissist to the highest office in the nation and the world feel empathy. This bit of poetry was brought to you by President Donald J. Trump, he of the gold faucets and the fake tan.

“I loved my previous life. I had so many things going. This is more work than in my previous life. I thought it would be easier,” Trump reportedly said.

Was the Civil War easy – don’t even get us started on Trump’s misunderstanding of that “negotiable” conflict? Was the New Deal easy? Is war easy? Was the Cuban Missile Crisis easy? Was the boom and burst and crash of the economic bubble easy? Was reviving confidence and, dare we say “hope,” easy? No, but buying a building with your name emblazoned across it apparently is. Going to Mar-a-Lago for some mom-pants golf is kind of nice. Running a television show with yesterday’s celebrities scripted into acrimony all in the name of capitalism, well that’s a piece of cake. But being president? Not so much.

Trump dug his hole even deeper during his interview with John Dickerson on CBS’ Face the Nation on Day 100 of his slow governmental torture.

“Well, I think the big difference is, for what we’re doing here, Washington, you really need heart, because you’re talking about a lot of people. Whereas business, you don’t need so much heart. You want to make a good deal,” he said. “One of the worries about a presidency is that everybody tells you yes. Nobody helps you figure out where your blind spots are.”

Trump’s blind spots have been numerous – from the appointment of a rag-tag cabinet beholden to corporate and religious interests to, well, just not being there because the golf course was calling. He’s also, through his glazed over eyes now on tour for the 2020 election while the world crumbles, turned political cynicism into an epidemic. They’re all the same, your parents say? Well, this one’s worse.

It’s hard being an American citizen – harder than we thought.

Trump loses on health cuts

Proving once again that America is not (quite) a dictatorship, the president lost his battle against a bipartisan attempt to keep the government from shutting down (oh, no; this again). According to The Hill, Trump was seeking to cut funding for the National Institutes for Health by 1.2 billion, which would make a severe dent in research presently being conducted to cure serious diseases. In true form, Trump is the only one who wants to rip the Band-Aid off a system that’s been working. In odd form, Congress is bucking back against him, raising the budget by $2 billion to a total $34.1 billion over the next five months.

“We got rid of most of the draconian budget cuts proposed by President Trump, like the NIH, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., told Huffington Post. “You can’t turn scientific research on health care on and off. You either continue it or you don’t.”

The devil you know

Speaking of health and the lack thereof, the president has nabbed yet another miscreant for his cabinet of horrors hidden in plain view. This time, it’s Charmaine Yoest, who is slated to become the assistant secretary of public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services, the White House announced last week.

This is bad news for women, even if Yoest is of that gender. Yoest is a noted pro-lifer, the former head of anti-abortion group Americans United for Life – which brought you the blanket of hate-filled, anti-woman bills clogging your legislatures’ pipelines – and, as if we needed more reasons to be frightened, she worked the communications for the Family Research Council. She’s also a friend of Huckabee.

Expect attacks on STI testing, abortion, Planned Parenthood and everything helping the sometimes helpless. She falls right in line with Trump’s current plan to allow states to deny Planned Parenthood funding, Mother Jones reports.

Guns in court

If there’s been any standout for “least likely to be liked” in the current Florida Legislature, it’s state Sen. Greg Steube, R-Sarasota, a man who has put forth such brilliant ideas as sealing criminal records and, well, if there’s a gun in it, Steube is in it.

This session Steube has been pushing a bill that would allow people to bring guns to courthouses, because most people in courthouses – let’s be honest – are there because of guns or drugs, so it makes perfect sense. SB 616 would require that said firearms be protected in a “safe place,” but political erosion is funny like that. The safe place will likely be your pocket, soon. America!

What’s most peculiar about SB616, however, isn’t it’s illogical posturing, but the process by which it has been allowed to skip committee hearings in the House – there was no companion bill in the House – and escorted straight to the House floor. As of press time, we don’t know the outcome of that vote, but are we even pretending to have a governmental infrastructure anymore?

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