Category: Barack Obama

Donald Trump Betrays America. He Must Be Stopped.

The GOP must get on board with stopping Donald Trump. The man is selling out this country piece by piece.

He must be impeached. As soon as possible.

From his Twitter rants today.

Trump’s latest Tweets

Trump’s latest Tweets

Why does Trump want to be Kim Jong-un’s friend?

why does he trust Putin over American intelligence?

Why is he still obsessed with Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama? Why does he feel so inadequate?

Why is he still in office?


Rolling Stone Ranks Anthony Scaramucci’s 10 Days in the White House

Anthony Scaramucci
Anthony Scaramucci

Anthony Scaramucci

Yes, it happened.

Turning Left readers are always very well informed, so this is not a breaking story.

Anthony Scaramucci was fired by President Donald Trump.

Rolling Stone ranks his 10 days in the White House, from “biblical murder analogies to denials of auto-fellatio, the Mooch’s brief tenure will be, at the very least, memorable.”

There was a false report today that Scaramucci’s wife was leaving him, filed for divorce, because he posted nude photos of her and loved politics more than she.

But that was satire.

What’s real?

Anthony Scaramucci lasted 10 days in the White House.

Here are notable firings and resignations from the Trump Administration, from our friends at LATimes.com:

  • Anthony Scaramucci, Director of communications (fired), 10 days
  • Reince Priebus, White House chief of staff (resigned), 189 days
  • Derek Harvey, National Security Council Middle East advisor (fired), 186 days
  • Michael Short, Assistant press secretary (resigned), 186 days
  • Sean Spicer, White House press secretary, White House director of communications (resigned), 182 days
  • Walter Shaub, Director of the Office of Government Ethics (resigned), 180 days
  • Robert Iger, Advisory council (resigned), 133 days
  • Elon Musk, Advisory council (resigned), 132 days
  • Mike Dubke, Director of communications (resigned), 85 days
  • K.T. McFarland, Deputy national security advisor (reassigned), 177 days
  • James B. Comey Jr., FBI director (fired), 109 days
  • Angella Reid, White House chief usher (fired), 105 days (and the only Person of Color on the list)
  • Katie Walsh, Deputy White House chief of staff (resigned), 69 days
  • Craig Deare, National Security Council senior director for Western Hemisphere affairs (fired), 26 days
  • Mike Flynn, National security advisor (resigned), 22 days
  • Sally Yates, Acting attorney general (fired), 10 days

That’s a list to rival, well, any previous administration.

More details here.

Candidate Donald Trump, The Don, Donnie “Make-America-Great-Again” T., boasted that he knew the best people. He would hire only the best people.

But he’s treating the West Wing like an episode of that little-watched The Apprentice, even calling the Cabinet Room as the “boardroom.”

Donald Trump, the most insecure man in America, governing, if you can call it that, out of spite for President Obama.

Who is next to go?

Bingo, anyone?

next to go, Trump administration

Who will be next to go in the Trump Administration.


Eight Years Ago? Fox News Attacked Pres. Obama For Using Dijon Mustard

Barack Obama eating hamburger
Barack Obama eating hamburger

Barack Obama eating a hamburger.

Here’s some perspective for you.

At this point in his presidency, Fox News was attacking Barack Obama for using — gasp! — Dijon mustard on a hamburger.

Think about that.

And then think about the Comey hearings, Lyin’ Donnie T., and all that noise coming from The Big Oval these days.

Did the Predator In Chief invite you to dinner recently. After you arrived, did you suddenly feel uneasy because you were the only two in the room?

Creepy. Creepy. Creepy.

From Newsweek via Yahoo! News:

In news from eight years ago that appears to be from some alternate reality, Obama left the White House and went out for a local bite to eat with vice president and BFF Joe Biden in May. The two politicians ordered hamburgers, MSNBC journalist Andrea Mitchell reported at the time, with the sitting president requesting mustard on his red meat.

The story was featured on Sean Hannity’s show, Hannity’s America, as a screen showed a photoshopped image of Obama surrounded by bottles of mustard with the words “PRESIDENT POUPON” plastered on a red and white banner.

Let that soak in for a minute. Trump tweeted his support for Fox News Friday, commending them for the network’s morning show Fox And Friends’ “great reporting” job on ex-FBI Director James Comey’s Thursday testimony. The network’s rejection of Obama’s taste palette compared to its incredible support of the embattled Trump White House was seen by Twitter users as shocking at best, and propagandistic at worst.

That was “news” eight years ago.

And, now, Trump.


Trump Backs Off His Obama “Birther” Lies, Now Says Hillary Started It

Donald Trump lies again.
“Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy,” Mr. Trump said. “I finished it.”
During the 2008 Democratic contest, a senior strategist for Mrs. Clinton at one point pondered, in an internal memo that was later leaked, the ways in which Mr. Obama’s personal background differed from many Americans. But contrary to Mr. Trump’s assertion, neither Mrs. Clinton nor her campaign ever publicly questioned Mr. Obama’s citizenship or birthplace, in Hawaii.
Another WTF? moment from Donald Trump.,

America Opens Its Arms To Our Transgender Brothers And Sisters

Did you ever think it would happen in this country?

I have to admit that I’m not sure I’m there yet.

As a gay man, I’m still becoming comfortable with the notion of transgender men and women. I’m still learning.

Amazed, though, at how quickly America has embraced transgender men and women. In spite of the bathroom laws and the hysteria from the right.

And the cool, compassionate, adult-in-the-room Barack Obama.

Were you as amazed as I to see this?

Incredible.

We’ve come so far as a country the past 7+ years.

As Barack Obama “evolved” on LGBTQ issues–and as some of us lost our patience entirely with him, given his remarkable history on such issues when he was in Springfield, Illinois–as he evolved, we evolved too.

But he led. And continues to lead.

America, hats off to you.

Hats off to you, Mr. President.


A New Direction For Turning Left

Readers no doubt have noticed that I haven’t been posting much over the past several months.

Heck, over the past few years.

Turning Left is always in the back of my mind, but I really didn’t know what to do. What to write.

I didn’t want to be that snarky guy any more who just wrote for the sake of writing, that guy who just made fun of people, or went on rants.

I wanted to be more substantive than that.

I was so angry at times during the Bush years. Many of us were. But to look for people at which I could be angry, or to just be that angry guy during the Obama years, well, that didn’t make much sense.

And I was not always pleased with President Obama.

But, for the most part, I was.

I am.

So what to do with this blog, which has awesome page rank on Google despite the fact that I rarely touch it?

Found my solution today.

We need a new direction.

No, not right. Or center.

Let’s take direction as focus.

We need a new focus. A new plan.

And here it is…

We don’t want to become the anti-Fox News blog. We don’t want to become the anti-conservative blog.

We don’t want to discriminate against people because of who they are.

But we will be critical about people because of what they do.

That will be our new focus.

We will still laugh. We will still likely be snarky at times.

But we can’t be self-righteous. We can’t ignore our own faults.

But we can write.

We invite you to join us for the ride. Please visit often, enjoy, and, please, feel free to share our posts.

We have something to say that needs to be said.

We have words that need to be heard.

We are Turning Left


Watch: Rachel Maddow on Secret Service Chaos

From Rachel Maddow on the chaos inside the Secret Service and the numerous security breaches since President Obama took office.

And how many before did we hear nothing about?


Video: Vermont Approves Single-Payer Health Care: ‘Everybody in, nobody out’

From our friends at Occupy Democrats regarding the state of Vermont adopting a single-payer health care system where all hospitals will operate as not-for-profits:

The program will be fully operational by 2017, and will be funded through Medicare, Medicaid, federal money for the ACA given to Vermont, and a slight increase in taxes.  In exchange, there will be no more premiums, deductibles, copay’s, hospital bills or anything else aimed at making insurance companies a profit.  Further, all hospitals and healthcare providers will now be nonprofit.

This system will provide an instant boost the state economy.  On the one side, you have workers that no longer have to worry about paying medical costs or a monthly premium and are able to use that money for other things.  On the other side, you have the burden of paying insurance taken off of the employers side, who will be able to use the saved money to provide a better wage and/or reinvest in their company through updated infrastructure and added jobs.  It is a win-win solution.

Win-win indeed.

This, by the way, is precisely the way Canada moved to a single-payer health care system: state by state.

And now it’s our turn.

Thank you, President Obama!


Video: Republicans in Congress are Blocking Immigration Reform

Immigration reform. Another GOP lie?

From Democrats.org:

While the majority of Americans support comprehensive immigration reform, Republicans continue to stand in its way. They have had more than enough time to get this done but continue to hide behind excuses.

And the worst part is that they could make a choice to pass immigration reform tomorrow. There’s a bipartisan bill that has been in the House for nearly 5 months, which already has enough support to pass — all we need is a vote but Speaker Boehner refuses.

If we want to move forward with immigration reform and the rest of President Obama’s agenda, we need to elect a new Democratic majority. Watch this video on immigration, then donate so we have the resources it takes to make John Boehner an ex-speaker come 2014.


Damn the GOP. What They’re Doing Is Unprecedented, Immoral, and Evil

The GOP government shutdown just hit home for a close friend.

His son, a laborer who lives in a so-called "Right To Work" state, was out of work. He had been let go from his previous job because he became injured outside of work. Rather than give him a month to heal, which is all he needed, his employer at the time just let him go. Tried to tell him that he was doing him a favor. That he could collect unemployment, as opposed to making nothing for the 30 days or so he would need to heal.

And his employer knew that this lad had only worked for him for five months, therefore not qualifying for unemployment. And, it turns out, this employer has done this to other workers, letting them go in the fifth month of employment, so the employer has to pay neither benefits nor unemployment.

This is what the GOP refers to as "Right To Work," the myth that, forbidding unions from requiring workers to join a union when they get a job, workers now can be "free" of union dues and work, because, dammit, they have the right to work.

In reality, it means states full of workers, like my friend’s son, who have no union protection, no unions who negotiated fair working conditions. None of that. Not at all.

And employers can be as ruthless as the nasty members of the GOP, some of the meanest pols we’ve seen since just before the Great Depression, when robber barons ruled, and pols danced to their commands.

So my friend’s son applied for another job. Went through the entire interview process. Passed every background check, drug test — paid for by the hiring company — and was given his "new employee" packet.

And, on what was supposed to be his first day of work, was told that the company could not start him, because of the government shutdown.

Because of the government shutdown, the company was not certain that some contracts would be upheld.

That’s not what they told him at first. But, after he pressed them, they admitted this was, in fact, the case. The government shutdown.

The damn GOP government shutdown.

His son says it was evident the company was scrambling. Some news from on high had reached the blue collar workers, and the company, and American company, was being downsized.

These inglorious GOP members of Congress have got to go.

All of them.

They claim that this shutdown is the fault of the Democrats and the Democratic President who "refuse to negotiate.

Bullshit.

And here’s proof.

From BillMoyers.com, proof that this debt ceiling crisis is not politics as usual:

Never before has a minority party linked controversial legislative demands with a threat to shut down the government or imperil the global economy. But House Republicans would have you believe otherwise.

In an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal this morning, Rep. Paul Ryan writes that president Obama “says he ‘will not negotiate’ on the debt ceiling. He claims that such negotiations would be unprecedented. But many presidents have negotiated on the debt ceiling—including him. ”

Ryan was referring to a speech given in September before the Business Roundtable — an association of CEOs of large US companies — in which the president said, “You have never seen in the history of the United States the debt ceiling or the threat of not raising the debt ceiling being used to extort a president or a governing party, and trying to force issues that have nothing to do with the budget and have nothing to do with the debt.”

Ryan continued: “He’s refusing to talk, even though the federal government is about to hit the debt ceiling. That’s a shame — because this doesn’t have to be another crisis. It could be a breakthrough.”

But that’s spin: Negotiating would set a dangerous precedent, because Obama’s right that this time really is different. Here are three reasons why.

Go to the original article here and read, and then act.