A “bomb cyclone” has created blizzard conditions from the Rocky Mountains to the Midwest. About half of the United States is feeling the adverse effects of the bomb cyclone.
Donald Trump denies climate change, which has been caused by Republicans’ illusions about the state of the planet. Trump’s close personal friend James Inhofe, 84 and Oklahoma’s senior GOP senator, is the author of The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future (2012); and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the senator from Coal Country, vociferously supports Trump’s rollback of President Obama’s Clean Power Plan and all EPA regulations designed to save the planet from the eventual thawing of the polar ice caps.
Because of decades of emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, Terra Infirma has experienced increasingly dangerous storms such as hurricanes, as well as deadly wildfires, which, with the assistance of Pacific Gas & Electric, caused the deaths of 86 people in California last year. After Paradise, in Butte County, was destroyed, Trump went to Paradise for a photo-op with then Gov. Jerry Brown and then Lt. Gov. (now Gov.) Gavin Newsome.
Today, US District Judge Amy Berman Jackson sentenced Manafort, who was Trump’s Campaign Chairman, to three and one-half years in federal prison for conspiracy against Trump’s America and for witness tampering, which he committed after his arrest.
All-told, after Senior US District Judge T.S. Ellis, a Reagan appointee who gave Manafort’s prosecutors the devil of a time while they were merely doing their job, reluctantly sentenced Manafort to a mere 47 months for bank and tax fraud, Manafort will serve at least seven and one-half years in federal prison until he is pardoned by Trump.
Within an hour of Judge Jackson’s also somewhat mild sentence, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. announced that a state grand jury has indicted Manafort for state crimes (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/nyregion/manafort-indictment.html). Once Trump’s former Campaign Chairman is convicted of those state crimes, Trump, who feels sorry for Manafort, cannot pardon him.
Several years ago, your solitary reporter was travelling from Washington National Airport to New York City. A shuttle bus carried the solitary reporter and a clearly agitated sixty-something man bearing a precise resemblance to Manafort. The agitated man was loudly complaining that because of flight delays, he would miss his flight from JFK to Kiev.
We must not forget that Manafort was the brains behind the campaign of now-exiled Ukrainian president Ві́ктор Фе́дорович Януко́вич (Viktor Yanukovich), and that he also lobbied extensively on behalf of Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos, Zaire dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, and Angolan guerilla leader Jonas Savimbi.
Had the agitated man on the shuttle bus known that he was being closely observed by a solitary reporter, he undoutedly would have slugged the solitary reporter for the mere offense of being a Democrat.