Gay men in Russia’s Chechnya region are being lured into weeks of government torture

WHEN ONE CRITIQUES THE US WITH VITRIOL PLEASE PAUSE AND THINK ON THE STORY BELOW. I AM GUILTY OF GREAT ANGER TOWARDS THE RIGHT WING EXTREMIST NATIONALISTS THAT SAW FIT TO PUT A MENTALLY SICK MAN TRUMP IN THE MOST POWERFUL POSITION ON EARTH. STILL I AM MINDFUL ESPECIALLY WHEN STORIES LIKE THE ONE LINKED BELOW SHOUT THAT HOWEVER MUCH WE CRITIQUE THIS NATION WE ARE LIGHT YEARS FREER AND MORE OBSERVANT OF THE RULE OF LAW THAN MANY OTHER NATIONS OF THIS EARTH. THE STORY BELOW IS BONE CHILLING ESPECIALLY WHEN WE KNOW MANY OF THOSE IN THE ALT RIGHT MOVEMENT OCCUPY A SPOT IN THE TRUMP WHITE HOUSE AND SHARE THE SAME VIEW AS THE CHECHENS. WE AGAIN MUST RESIST!
 
‘They Starve You. They Shock You’: Inside the Anti-Gay Pogrom in Chechnya [https://www.nytimes.com/…/chechnya-russia-attacks-gays.html…

Using classic K.G.B. tactics, security officers lured gay men into traps and tortured them into giving up the identities of others like them.

Thoughts and One or Two More Things

Worried.  I just heard a rumor of another SCOTUS justice leaving.  I suspect it would be Kennedy.  No matter who it is it made me feel like I wanted to throw up.  This was such a huge election for Clinton to lose!!

I do not know why Leon Panetta when interviewed by Brian Williams last evening about Trump gave the jackass Trump a grade of "B" on foreign policy.  Is he kidding me?  Trump has pissed off our allies, insulted them, cannot figure out from the beginning of a Trump sentence to its end where his thoughts lie.  Trump as most know by now has zero foreign policy understanding because he has no idea about anything and he is not even curious to find out.  He does not like to read.  He refused to shake Angela Merkel's hand, he insulted Australia, just wrangled Canada and this is not including one of our biggest trading partners, Mexico, who will NOT, of course, pay for his damn wall. He said to the Italian president that Italy has given us great culture and included knowing "a very very good friend" of his, opera star Luciano Pavarotti!!!  One problem Pavarotti has been dead 10 years and his wife hates Trump!

He makes ping pong ball statements on policy to our enemies and the confrontation with a nuclear powered N. Korea our crackpot so called president does not even know which way the "powerful armada" he said is headed for N. Korea is going as it was headed south.  Worse his wonderful generals everyone seems to love because they are the only thing keeping us from nuclear annihilation got it wrong as well.  Truthfully, Trump is so bad he makes Kim Jong Un look good!  Leon Panetta where is your mind?  I give Trump an "F" in both foreign and domestic performance.  Maybe I know more than Leon Panetta?  Brian Williams was a good one to interview Panetta.  They both wax sugary sweet afraid they might offend someone.  The entire Trump "administration" should be an offense to everyone.  We are talking about millions of lives at risk both in the domestic and foreign sphere!

Trump is a true know nothing because he knows so little about anything.  He does not read, cannot spell and is a dope about everything else except himself, his buildings and golf in that order. This is our president?   If Democrats do not take back the House and the Senate in 2018 they will be an American tragedy hopeless as Republicans have all of politics bought hook line and sinker with their billions making so many states gerrymandered red (a new crayon color for Crayola.)   This should be an easy pick off blue (another Crayola crayon.)  Montana Republicans successfully this week beat back the ability to vote by mail which they have been using to make voting easier.  Republicans, of course, want to make voting difficult because if voting is easy too many Democrats vote and win.  The nerve.  I think they call voting part of a democracy.  Montana Republicans placed the voting day on a Thursday and think no one can figure out why.  I bet so many Montana voters will show up -- NOT.  How can one compete against that kind of slime?  It's impossible unless ALL of us become involved anad RESIST.

I heard Georgia Democrat Jon Ossoff on Rachel Maddow.  He is low on the charisma scale but very smart on the cerebral scale. Much better, naturally, than any Republican.  Ossoff should win as the HHS secretary Tom Price left that seat open for his wife Karen Handel.  Both she and Price were involved in nefarious activity. She regarding Susan Komen Breast Cancer Foundation and Secretary Price involved in an insider stock trading scandal you know the kind of thing for which Martha Stewart went to jail.  The DNC should have put big money into the Ossoff campaign and maybe he could have pulled it out with his very good showing in the preliminary of 48% (he needed 50%.)  Again, the DNC drops the ball.  I am fed up as Democrats are TOO weak and Republicans utterly billionaire saturated corrupt.  The big Con Trump, as Romney said he was, pulled the wool over white blue collar men in the Rust Belt and now they and the middle class will pay a massive price. 

What is happening with the so called investigation of the House and the Senate of treasonous hacking ties to Russia by Trump and his merry campaigners' to help throw the election to Trump?  If Democrats were accused of all that this "administration" has allegedly corruptly done the president would have been impeached, by now removed from office and his entourage and maybe even he would be going to jail. 

Oh yes, one more thing: Trump said that Korea was once held by China except it never was making the Koreans' blood pressure skyrocket.  We can relax, though, as he said the Chinese president at the Mir-A-Lago dinner taught Trump a lot about the history of Korea.  Korea is furious and who could blame them?  Have we gone ad infinitum insane electing a man that belongs in rehab but surely not in the White House with control over the entire world and his itchy trigger finger on the nuclear football? 

One more thing: his Everest size conflicts of interest and massive unethical behavior disadvantage most of us but place buckets of cash in his and other Republicans corrupt pockets.  It's unconstitutional under the Emoluments Clause but since Dick Cheney said "to hell with the Constitution" to justify Iraq Republicans think when it is advantageous to them that that is a pretty good idea.

And just one more thing: He praised Turkey's Erdogan who probably stole an election making Turkey once a democracy now a dictatorship.  Maybe Trump is learning from him as well.  If one wrote a script like this it would be rejected as too preposterous except we are living this horror in real time. 

Meanwhile US planes were sent to "monitor' N. Korea's behavior.  I bet even N. Korea doesn't know from one day to the next what this mendacious crackpot president will say much less do.  If you were the N. Korean dictator what would you be thinking?

I'm saying where is that building from which I can jump?!