Wright Chat

Obama was the Jackie Robinson of our presidents.

Ty Cobb intentionally tried to cleat Jackie at every opportunity. Was Robinson ever going to make a fuss about that? Not a chance. Branch Rickey would have sent him back to the Negro Leagues in a heartbeat.

As a strange footnote Ty Cobb, a relative of the racist baseball all star is now an attorney for Donald Trump's White House.

Jackie Robinson got his break after proving that it was only racism that had kept him (and Satchel Paige) out of the majors. His mastery of the game had already been well established. Not so Obama, whose background was scant evidence of administrative competency. It's like saying Robinson got into the majors by proving he could sign a baseball for a fan.

The Obama race story will go around in circles for the rest of time, with no proof that it was what caused any of his Red Line in the Sand failures, or contributed to whatever successes he had. There is no adequate response to what will forever shadow his legacy, and I suspect he, of all people, will rue that sad fact. I for one never cared about his half-black/half-white status, and on the other side would gleefully have voted for J. C. Watts if he had decided to run in 1992 (when he first became eligible) or later. In fact, I would have jumped the line and voted for Shirley Chisholm in '72, if the DNC had had the kahunas to nominate her. I may have disagreed with some of her undemocratic Democracy, but her worthiness to be given a chance was unquestionable to me.

Ty Cobb? You use that example, by way of his (supposed) relationship to the lawyer, to attack Trump by association? Cobb was not only racist, he murdered two muggers with his bare hands. His career is proof that all one has ever needed to succeed in American sports is the ability to play the game. That doesn't even reflect well on Jackie Robinson's career. There's enough questionable stuff to deal with, Peter; you don't have to scramble for anything as tenuous as a distant cousin.

Tom, if you don't understand where my politics, you won't make much headway from this endless screed. Picture an Eloi amid a pack of Morlocks.

Here is the last little dickish bit:

"It's hard to believe that Elizabeth Southerland is retiring because of a budget proposal and not because she's eligible for her government pension,� EPA spokesman Jahan Wilcox told Environment & Energy Publishing in an email.

I mean, after 30 years she must be a deadbeat looking for a handout, right?

For the record. Ty Cob was done playing and managing by 28. Robinson played from 47 to 57.

Thank you. I stand corrected, and apologize for spreading nonsense. I'm not sure now where I heard the story in the first place.

Eloi and Morlocks
Had to look that up.
Class distinctions in the writing of HGWells
Never knew
gonna follow this up.

Give us this day our daily lie:

https://www.google.com/amp/thehill.com/ ... licy%3famp

"The Boy Scouts are also denying Trump’s claim that their leader told the president his politically charged speech at their national jamboree was “the greatest� the organization ever heard."

S

Pathetic little man...

Those Calls to Trump? White House Admits They Didn’t Happen
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/02/us/p ... appen.html

It all is so reminiscent of John Lovitz's "Tommy Flanagan".

https://youtu.be/pkYNBwCEeH4

" @BarackObama played golf yesterday. Now he heads to a 10 day vacation in Martha's Vineyard. Nice work ethic.
12:36 PM - Aug 15, 2011 " -DJT

From the article:

" On the campaign trail, Trump was adamant: He would rarely play golf — “I’m not going to have time to go play golf,� he once said — and he certainly wasn’t going to take a lot of vacation. (“There’s just so much to be done,� he told “60 Minutes,� “so I don’t think we’ll be very big on vacations.�) "

17 day vacation for the overprivileged one begins today:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/pol ... cdac14887f

peter - in this one case i blame the media. Trump has to vacate the White House because of repairs to the heating system. The press has had a field day with this, and its uncalled for. The hysteria surrounding this guy never stops.

Ahhh... There's nothing wrong with the heating. The Russians need seventeen days to bug the place ;- )

But I do find this relevant, only because he was so adamant in relentlessly criticizing Barack Obama, for all of the wrong reasons:

" By our count, by the end of August, Trump will have spent all or part of 53 days in office at leisure, compared with 15 days for Obama through August 2009. What’s more, Trump will have played at least 33 rounds of golf, nearly double Obama’s 17 rounds — and that’s even before Trump gets to his vacation spot, an actual golf course. "

White house not "a dump" ?

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/08/0 ... ine-241279

On a more serious subject:

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/07 ... MzMDM4NQS2

First two paragraphs:

On the morning after the election, November 9, 2016, the people who ran the U.S. Department of Energy turned up in their offices and waited. They
had cleared 30 desks and freed up 30 parking spaces. They didn’t know exactly how many people they’d host that day, but whoever won the election
would surely be sending a small army into the Department of Energy, and every other federal agency. The morning after he was elected president,
eight years earlier, Obama had sent between 30 and 40 people into the Department of Energy. The Department of Energy staff planned to deliver
the same talks from the same five-inch-thick three-ring binders, with the Department of Energy seal on them, to the Trump people as they would
have given to the Clinton people. “Nothing had to be changed,� said one former Department of Energy staffer. “They’d be done always with the
intention that, either party wins, nothing changes.�

By afternoon the silence was deafening. “Day 1, we’re ready to go,â€� says a former senior White House official. “Day 2 it was ‘Maybe they’ll call us?’ â€�


Last two paragraphs:

As I drove out of [the] Hanford [Nuclear Reservation] the Trump administration unveiled its budget for the Department of Energy. ARPA-E
[The Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy] had since won the praise of business leaders from Bill Gates to Lee Scott, the former C.E.O. of
Walmart, to Fred Smith, the Republican founder of FedEx, who has said that “pound for pound, dollar for dollar, activity for activity, it’s hard to find a
more effective thing government has done than ARPA-E.� Trump’s budget eliminates ARPA-E altogether. It also eliminates the spectacularly successful
$70 billion loan program. It cuts funding to the national labs in a way that implies the laying off of 6,000 of their people. It eliminates all research on
climate change. It halves the funding for work to secure the electrical grid from attack or natural disaster. “All the risks are science-based,� said John
MacWilliams when he saw the budget. “You can’t gut the science. If you do, you are hurting the country. If you gut the core competency of the D.O.E.,
you gut the country.�

But you can. Indeed, if you are seeking to preserve a certain worldview, it actually helps to gut science. Trump’s budget, like the social forces behind it,
is powered by a perverse desire—to remain ignorant. Trump didn’t invent this desire. He is just its ultimate expression.