Extraordinary, really.

The shareholder rebellion at the ExxonMobil annual meeting in Dallas was led by major financial advisory firms and fund managers who traditionally have played passive roles. Although the identity of voters wasn’t disclosed, a source familiar with the vote said that major financial advisory firm BlackRock had cast its shares in opposition to Exxon management and that Vanguard and State Street had likely done the same. All three financial giants have been openly considering casting their votes against management on this key proxy resolution.

This kind of activism, the same week as Trump’s stupid actions, show how futile climate change denial is.  Futile and sad.  Strides are being made everywhere towards a renewable future.  Like with many actions by our present “conservative” government, they’re wasting precious time perpetuating ideas and policies that make no damn sense and do not work – and people will needlessly suffer.

Of course he’s going to leave the accord.  The only political organization in the whole world that denies climate change is the Republican Party.  It’s part of the entire propaganda campaign against, really, the rest of the world not just American liberals, is that climate change is a hoax.  It was a campaign promise to his fact averse followers. So how would it cost him anything to do this?

In the same partisan world, the only repercussions for Kathy Griffin and her PR picture of a decapitated Donald Trump mask is that the Right Wing World has made her their distraction of the moment (calling her “CNN comedian Kathy Griffin” for her once a year appearance on CNN) and they will pressure CNN to take her off New Year’s.  And it puts her in the right wing nut job cross hairs – not a comfortable place to be – so she has to hire personal security now, if she doesn’t already.  Nobody who buys tickets to a Kathy Griffin show will care, they hate Trump.  She’ll lose ticket sales like Gianforte lost votes in Montana. Whoever the photographer was who set up the picture was playing towards her resistance audience.  It’s art.  It’s not nearly as bad as press reports which describe her actively beheading Trump.

Don’t forget it’s about PR.  The photographer’s spokesman said something altogether weird considering they gave her the prop and set up the photo.

“Kathy is all about pushing the limits and she went above and beyond on this one. Now lets just hope she stays out of jail,” a representative for Shields told HuffPost.

‘Let’s hope she stays out of jail”?  Now that’s a betrayal of the actions of a provocateur looking for reaction.

On the other hand, because everybody is afraid of Republicans, and Trump, Fox and talk radio will play this to the hilt, CNN might give in and some of her venues might cancel her sold-out shows giving in to the promises of violence that will come their way in crayon smeared threats.  So it won’t work for her the way it would for say, Ann Coulter to photographically behead Barack Obama, or Donald Trump to say Obama was not born here.  No amount of outrage ever actually hurts Republicans, they get elected over it.

You know Trump dictated this.  Who has so little self-worth that they would submit themselves to this?

President Trump has a magnetic personality and exudes positive energy, which is infectious to those around him. He has an unparalleled ability to communicate with people, whether he is speaking to a room of three or an arena of 30,000. He has built great relationships throughout his life and treats everyone with respect. He is brilliant with a great sense of humor . . . and an amazing ability to make people feel special and aspire to be more than even they thought possible.

Trump always gets holes in one and has never bowled a less than 300 game.  Women rend their garments in front of him in order to feel his essence.

They’ve come to an agreement to let the Muslims build the mosque and give them $3.25 million in taxpayer money for their trouble to boot.

That worked out well.

Bernards Township will pay $3.25 million to the Islamic Society of Basking Ridge after the town denied the group a permit to build the mosque, the Justice Department announced. The group can now start building the mosque, and the town will be required to train officials on religious land-use laws and amend its zoning restrictions related to houses of worship.

The town’s lawyers might have to go back to Nick & Tony’s School of Law and Trucking for a refresher, as well.

Maybe I should try to build a mosque.  So many rubes.

The Daily Mail

But when I think of plutocrats fondling an orb I think of this:

Trump/Ryan Care is awful, everybody gets that it is a tax cut bill with some very bad healthcare aspects that would cause millions of people to lose coverage.  So the only thing left for Republicans who want those tax cuts is to criticize that damning CBO score. Their means of criticizing it is saying that the CBO score for the Affordable Care Act was “so off” that the CBO can’t be trusted.

Okay, nevermind that the CBO is a venerated non-partisan organization that is headed by a director hand-picked by Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan that is constantly cited by Republicans when they like the numbers.

It may not surprise you that the CBO estimates for Obamacare were not really off at all. They estimated 30 million people would gain coverage and the healthcare initiative only achieved 27 million (because they underestimated how many Republican governors would choose party pettiness over the care and well being of their citizens).

So the massive error that they’re hanging their hat on here is 10%.

The question to ask GOP operatives who rely on the “CBO was off” defense, is to cite the 10% and ask if the current CBO score is off by 10% does that mean only 21.6 million people lose insurance coverage?  (Or does it go the other way and it’s 26.4M?)

Not that you need this in order to make these idiots look silly, they generally do that all on their own.  But the 10% observation might make them stammer 10% more than usual.

Some say there are too many German cars in the U.S. Ever notice there are no Russian cars?  Hm, and Russia’s the bad guy?  Riiiiiiight!

It is worth noting, I think, that Russia’s population is less than half of the population of the U.S. despite being roughly the size of 55 Montanas, the ruble is worth two shiny pennies, and their GDP is behind Canada’s and South Korea’s and just ahead of Australia. If not for those leftover nuclear weapons Putin’s country is not a world power in any way.  And whatever wealth they do have in natural resources is being hijacked by the nation’s creepy, hooker-loving, oligarchs like a Central American banana republic, just with the Cyrillic alphabet and blinis.  So all of this fol-de-rol in Syria, Crimea and trying to upend NATO and the EU are desperate attempts to look bigger than they are, like some small animal standing on its hind legs to deceive a predator.

Macron makes his case as being Robin to Merkel’s Batman.  He’s winning hearts for his willingness to tell inconvenient truths right to Putin’s face, you know, rather than blow the former KGB agent and democratically elected (cough, bullshit, cough) leader of the Russian Federation.

With Mr. Putin standing beside him, he accused two news organizations with ties to Russia of acting as “organs of influence” rather than as true outlets of journalism. And he publicly warned the Russian leader that the use of chemical weapons was a “red line” for France. “The use of chemical weapons by anyone will be the object of reprisals and immediate retaliation on the part of France,” he said.

Veteran Jacob McGreevey lost his house during his third tour in Iraq.  He came home, got a business degree, went to court and fought back using laws that were supposed to protect active duty veterans against repossession.  He expected to fight the crappy lender in the courts.

He didn’t expect having to fight the U.S. government too.

What neither McGreevey nor Riddell anticipated was that PHH Mortgage wasn’t going to be their only adversary. Five months after the U.S. Department of Justice announced a major initiative to crack down on financial institutions taking advantage of active-duty service members, the agency intervened in McGreevey’s case.

But it didn’t come in on the side of the Marine . It went with the lender.

Loretta Lynch’s Justice Dept. was cracking down on lenders violating the law and good faith with veterans.  But when Sessions took over they did a 180 and started going to bat for the lenders.  Not really a surprise, they did the same thing in environmental cases. But while the Trump Administration’s anti-environment protection stance is as well known as it is stupid, they do purport, hypocritically and inaccurately, to support veterans.

In the age of bullshit, nothing stinks more than Republican phony waling for respect for the troops in public while treating them as shoddily as all us other low life consumers behind courtroom doors.

Luxembourg’s ‘First Gentleman’ Gloriously Photographed With Partners Of World Leaders

Could have been Bill there in the back with him.  Missed that opportunity.

If an actor was told, “play a boorish dick” and did this shoving and then preening action the director would say “um, too on the nose, too stereotypical no?”  He is the epitome of the ugly American. Shame on all of us.