The New Norm?

“And thus I clothe my naked villainy
With odd old ends stol'n out of holy writ;
And seem a saint, when most I play the devil.”
― William Shakespeare, Richard III


As the likelihood of impeachment draws closer, one has to wonder what was Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani and others thinking about in their attempt to undermine the candidacy of a political opponent in the 2020 Presidential election? Did they actually believe that a single allegation of corruption would bring down the Biden candidacy and no one would see the incongruity of this notion to Trump's own history of corruptible behavior?

If ever there were a model for the pot calling the kettle black it is Donald J. Trump trying to paint someone as unworthy to vote for. From the early 1970's to the present he has epitomized an unsavory and illicit persona, and it's all a matter of record. From 1973 when the Department of Justice sued Trump and his father for housing discrimination at 39 sites around New York, to the 2005 Access Hollywood tapes and the Trump University scam that robbed students of millions of dollars. 

And now he’s embroiled in what’s becoming more and more apparent in a cover up for his part in a deal to withhold military weapons to Ukraine to find unfounded corruption evidence on Joe Biden

Trump has avoided jail time for his past miscreant acts, as many wealthy people are able to do, with a source of wealth that allows him to settle out of court or intimidate plaintiffs with bogus counter-suits. Much of what he's been able to avoid in legal fights results from his tutoring by the infamous attorney Roy Cohn, who had worked for Joe McCarthy and who taught Trump the art of denial, blame shifting and inflating your own importance.

So I am confused why Trump and his coterie would think voters would find that any allegation of corruption as a cause not to vote for someone after many of them did that very thing back in 2016.

As perhaps the most corrupt administration in the last 100 years, Trump’s actions have set a new low for what passes as electability. He has demeaned the press, offended our allies while aligning with autocrats and uses his office for personal gain. Our prestige around the world will take years to recover, especially after he abandoned our Kurdish allies in Syria who fought and died to take out the ISIS terror threat there and giving Russia a foothold in Mideast territory they have heretofore never had.  Has the U.S. under Trump gone down the path of other rogue states.

It's inconceivable that voters can be mislead once again after seeing the real Trump these last four years, whose hypocrisy and hyperbole have become legendary outside his staged performance as a reality TV character.  But I could be wrong. There is still that disturbing element in his rallies that cheers on the man who once said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn’t lose any voters, okay?”

Can enough voters be fooled twice and allow a double standard to prevail when selecting someone to fill the highest office in the land? The bar has been set low. Our democracy, I fear, is at risk of being lost to those who feel they only have to answer to themselves.

Changing Denton’s Gas and Oil well ordinances

In our attempt to reach out to the City of Denton to express our concerns about the current state of our oil and gas well ordinances, the City Manager expressed concerns to Denton’s Drilling Awareness Group (DAG) Board Chairman Ed Soph that in making any necessary changes by the City would produce “substantial financial and legal risks” if we attempted to establish 1000 ft. setbacks. Added to this was the belief that any efforts to performing our “own study that might surpass a 600’  setback that Fort Worth adopted and whether that study would be recognized, which is critical to its long term success and the City’s legal exposure, would likely be rejected by the TCEQ and the Railroad Commission based on their methodology for studies to determine safe setbacks distances.”

This is the legal quagmire we face and yet one has to ask our elected officials if they are willing to fight for their citizens over state agencies that are clearly under the thumb of the very people they are supposed to regulate.  To paraphrase an old quote, “Better to have fought and lost than not to have fought at all”.  The fact that rules and laws have been written that tie our hands doesn’t mean they arose in the best interests of the public.

With oil and gas industry interests controlling the TCEQ, The Railroad Commission and many of our state legislators and Senators, the common working class citizen whose health and safety are threatened by drilling cannot fund and sustain a battle with these giants.  They are often characterized as anti-drilling naysayers by the likes of Steve Everley, who works in Washington, D.C., for Energy in Depth, a research, education and public-relations arm of the Independent Petroleum Association of America.

Now there are those of you who may feel it is an unfair assessment to depict the state regulators for the oil and gas industry as puppets for a source of revenue that has a long tradition of influencing legislation that favors them over every day people.  So let me offer you a sample of the information that may change your mind

An eight-month study by the Center for Public Integrity, InsideClimate News and The Weather Channel using records obtained from Texas regulatory agencies revealed a system that does more to protect the industry than the public.   Though this study was focused on conditions in and around the Eagle Ford Shale, it none the less reflects similarities in other shale deposits in the state, including the Barnett Shale that we sit atop of.  Some of the findings are as follows

• Texas' air monitoring system is so flawed that the state knows almost nothing about the extent of the pollution in the Eagle Ford. There were only five permanent air monitors installed in the 20,000-square-mile region, and all are at the fringes of the shale play, far from the heavy drilling areas where emissions are highest.
• Thousands of oil and gas facilities are allowed to self-audit their emissions without reporting them to the state. The TCEQ, which regulates most air emissions, doesn't even know some of these facilities exist. An internal agency document acknowledges that the rule allowing this practice "[c]annot be proven to be protective."
• Companies that break the law are rarely fined. Of the 284 oil and gas industry-related complaints filed with the TCEQ by Eagle Ford residents in a 3-year period, only two resulted in fines despite 164 documented violations. The largest was just $14,250. 
• The Texas legislature has cut the TCEQ's budget by a third since the Eagle Ford boom began, from $555 million in 2008 to $372 million in 2014. At the same time, the amount allocated for air monitoring equipment dropped from $1.2 million to $579,000.
• There’s been a 100 percent statewide increase in unplanned, toxic air releases associated with oil and gas production since 2009. Known as emission events, these releases are usually caused by human error or faulty equipment.

Who are the people in those state agencies that essentially determine life and death issues for our citizens?

The TCEQ is led by three commissioners appointed by former Gov. Rick Perry and our current governor, Greg Abbot.  Both have voiced deep skepticism about climate change and whether humans are responsible. They insist that even if the science were true, Texas can do nothing meaningful to reverse climate change without hurting its economy. All current appointees have been drawn mostly from within the ranks of state government, including their own staff members, rather than someone willing to hold corporate polluters accountable, like former Commissioner Larry Soward whose term recently expired.

The TCEQ is unique among state environmental agencies. It is the only one whose mandate to protect public health and natural resources is qualified by a requirement that its actions be “consistent with sustainable economic development.”

“Sustainable economic development” in this context actually means “the private interests of oil and gas companies.” It’s no secret that the TCEQ operates in service of industry, especially the petrochemical companies. How else can we explain the fact that the commission penalizes companies for only 3% of self-reported violations of clean air laws?

Meanwhile, a recent Indiana University study found that unauthorized releases of air pollution in Texas account for more than $150 million in health costs annually.

As for the Texas Railroad Commission, they too represent more the industry of gas and oil well producers over the health and safety of Texas citizens.  As flaring gas at well
sites now exceeds more than residential gas demand for the whole of Texas. the TRRC has never turned down a request to burn excess gas.  Flaring is not only wasteful but contributes to the carbon-dioxide emissions in our atmosphere that are raising global temperatures faster than natural events.

  

According to David Prindle, a professor of political science at UT-Austin and author of  Petroleum, Politics and the Texas Railroad Commission, “the homegrown producers finance Railroad Commission elections through campaign contributions, [making them] essentially … the constituency of commissioners,” he says.

In fact, most people who serve on or run for the commission are pretty up-front about their view that the oil and gas business is not just an industry to be regulated, but a constituency to be served.  

A Center for Public Integrity analysis of personal financial disclosure forms showed that State legislators who enact the laws that regulate the industry are often tied to it. Nearly one in four state legislators, or his or her spouse, has a financial interest in at least one energy company active in the Eagle Ford,

Despite an interoffice memorandum obtained through the Texas Public Information Act that indicated the TCEQ knows its statewide air monitoring system is flawed, the agency told the authors of this study that air pollutants in the Eagle Ford Shale area “have not been a concern either from a long-term or short-term perspective.  Therefore, we would not expect adverse health effects, adverse vegetative effects, or nuisance odors in this area."

"The executive director has extensive records of underestimated or previously undetected emissions from oil and gas sites”, according to Richard A. Hyde, then deputy director of the TCEQ's Office of Permitting and Registration, who wrote in the Jan. 7, 2011, memo.

The health issues faced by people who live in drilling areas simply don't carry enough weight to counterbalance the financial benefits derived from oil and gas development, says Robert Forbis Jr., an assistant professor of political science at Texas Tech University who has studied this issue.

In the summer of 2013 the TCEQ used infrared cameras during two flyovers to capture hundreds of images of the Eagle Ford. A contractor then surveyed over 16,000 oil and gas storage tanks and found 800 with leaks.  When asked how the agency dealt with the polluters, TCEQ spokesman Terry Clawson did not respond.

Scientists say that while these spot checks are important, they are no substitute for strategically placed, stationary monitors that continuously measure how air quality changes over time.
Even the EPA doesn't know much about methane emissions or the other pollutants from oil and gas production.  A 2013 EPA Inspector general’s report concluded that the agency's air emissions database is incomplete and "likely underestimates" those emissions. The lack of reliable data, the report said, "hampers EPA's ability to accurately assess risks and air quality impacts from oil and gas production activities."

The Railroad Commission's enforcement record, like the TCEQ's, has come under criticism. In fiscal year 2012, it referred for enforcement action only 2 percent of the 55,000 violations its field staff found statewide, according to the state Sunset Advisory Commission, whose mission is to eliminate "waste, duplication, and inefficiency in government agencies." Of the 217 fines levied, the average was less than $9,000.

What’s truly sad here for the Eagle Ford residents is that many of the conditions allowed by our gas and oil regulators were conditions noted earlier in the Barnett shale

A 2012 agency memo shows the TCEQ was fully aware that drilling companies needed more oversight. Titled "Findings and Lessons Learned from Barnett Shale Oil and Gas Activities," it said "nearly all of the issues documented [in the Barnett] arose from human or mechanical failure that were quickly remedied and could have been avoided through increased diligence on the part of the operator.

Proving a causal relationship between the emissions from natural gas facilities,  and negative health effects is a challenge. But one solution is simply to provide the means to establish emission level data that detects the thousands of small leaks dispersed over several thousand square miles.  Sadly this is not the case in the Barnett or other shale plays in Texas where some of the facilities — called “super-emitters” — are erratic.

“If one well was a super-emitter the day we measured them, it could change the next day,” said Daniel Zavala-Araiza, lead researcher of a 2015 Environmental Defense Fund study of methane emissions in the Barnett Shale. “It’s not just about finding a handful of sites. You need to be looking continuously to keep finding the ones that are malfunctioning.”

The study found that about 2 percent of the oil and gas equipment there is responsible for half of the total methane emissions at any given time.

Malfunctions are one of the major causes of high methane emissions, Zavala-Araiza said. A valve that is periodically supposed to open and vent gas might get stuck and continuously emit methane. Such events are unpredictable.

“If you don’t have frequent monitoring, there’s no way you’re going to know when one of these super-emitters begins spewing,” said Zavala-Araiza.


OTHER SOURCES

California Capped a Massive Methane Leak, but Another is Brewing — Right Here in Texas 


Reconciling divergent estimates of oil and gas methane emissions

Texas’ Losing Fight With Rising Sea Levels

In a previous essay on this blog I raised the concern about the misinformation and misunderstanding that various individuals convey to a poorly informed public.   It bears repeating here to address the recent damages that Tropical Depression Imelda had on Texas’ Gulf Coast 

Following Trump’s absurd notion to buy Greenland earlier this year, Trump apologist and Conservative columnist Marc Thiessen expressed a view typical of people who display little to no knowledge about human actions and their impact on global warming.   “What makes Greenland particularly valuable to the United States is global warming”,  Thiessen dismissively stated.  “The unavoidable receding of Arctic sea ice will open a new sea route in the Arctic that can be used for both commercial and military vessels." 

This near-sighted view that arctic ice receding is “unavoidable” is only because humans are doing very little to stop what’s causing it.  Thiessen and every other individual who looks at man-made global warming as an economic opportunity ignores the larger view of how increased green house gases (GHGs) in our atmosphere are doing far more to destroy life as we know it than adding to it.

Sea level rise (SLR) from global ice melts is just one of the destructive results of a warming planet.  With arctic and glacier ice melting at record rates, where does all this melted ice go?

Ask the people who live along the Texas Gulf coast.  After suffering catastrophic damages from Hurricane Harvey in 2017 they were hit this September with Tropical Depression Imelda that wreaked havoc on the area that some said was “worse than Hurricane Harvey.”  These storms have become more deadly in part from rapidly rising sea levels effected by melting ice and warming sea waters.

As sea ice melts and polar snow cover recedes, some of the water is released into the sea. In addition, it causes the Earth to become less reflective, which in turn allows the surface of the Earth, including oceans, to absorb more sunlight and become warmer. Warmer water temperatures will cause water to expand taking up more space in the ocean basins.

Sea level is rising more rapidly along the upper Texas coast than worldwide because some coastal lands are sinking. Studies by the EPA have estimated that along the Gulf Coast 1-foot rise in sea level is likely by 2050.  In general, for every 0.39 inches that sea level rises, 3.28 ft. of coastal land could be lost.  According to SeaLevelRise.org, “The sea level off the coast of Texas is already up to 18 inches higher than it was in 1950.

SLR will create irreparable damage to fragile ecosystems and Texas taxpayers will be faced with a $12 billion outlay just to push back on rising water along our coast in the form of “storm surge protections, flood mitigation projects and strategies to mitigate beach erosion, protect wildlife, and fortify sea walls.”

And if you think population growth around you is moving too fast for comfort now, look at how one study predicts rising sea levels in two Southern states will impact Texas communities.   Rising sea levels in Florida and Louisiana will create forced evacuations of upward to 3 million people moving to inland communities in states like Texas, according Mathew E. Hauer, the study's author.

Hauer says that “unmitigated SLR is expected to reshape the US population distribution, potentially stressing landlocked areas unprepared to accommodate this wave of coastal migrants—even after accounting for potential adaptation.”

Take note Marc Thiessen, et al.  The need then for more accessible shipping lanes in the Arctic Sea will seem frivolous at best. 

We are a Community. Not an Island Unto Ourselves

“The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but can not do at all, or can not so well do, for themselves – in their separate, and individual capacities.” -  Abraham Lincoln

When recently asked by Stephen Colbert on his Tuesday 9/17/19 Late Night show if her Medicare for all plan would raise the income taxes for hard working class families, presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren tapped-danced around it explaining how “the wealthiest were going to pay more and hard working class families will see their costs go down.”   Her redirected narrative was an explanation of the cost savings these families would experience without conceding that it would require them to see higher payroll taxes to accomplish this.

When I see Senator Warren doing this I become as uncomfortable as some Trump supporters who hear him say the Syrian Kurds are better off after we abandoned them.  While the former is a form of obfuscation, the latter is a moral betrayal, but both are sources of frustration to voters that continue to generate distrust with elected officials

Everyone knows raising income taxes is what it requires to achieve Medicare for all.  Avoiding the obvious only gives your enemies an opening to dramatically twist the facts to fit some apocalyptic scenario that will play to the worst fears of their constituencies.

Everyone knows raising income taxes is what it requires to achieve Medicare for all.  Avoiding the obvious only gives your enemies an opening to dramatically twist the facts to fit some apocalyptic scenario that will play to the worst fears of their constituencies.

Democrats who support a single payer health care bill need to quit white washing this issue and be honest with the American people.  Polls show “that 70 percent of Americans now support Medicare-for-all, otherwise known as single-payer health care, according to a new Reuters survey. 

A December 2017 Gallup polled showed that 71% of those polled say our current for-profit healthcare system is "in a state of crisis" or "has major problems" and even reflected that “Republicans have become more critical in the past decade”.  

In her circumlocution of Colbert’s question she did spell out in detail how her plan would lower costs for middle income working families even as it raises their taxes.  It is those details that need to follow the affirmation that “yes, your payroll taxes will increase, but …”, so Americans can understand that though there may be no free rides, there is a plan here to fix our broken health care system while keeping more of their earned income.

Will it be a perfect system?  Of course not.  But then neither is the current for-profit system where the median amount spent annually on both premiums and out-of-pocket costs for households with employer provided insurance ranges from $1,500 (Hawaii) to $5,540 (South Dakota).   Health insurance providers often deny coverage whenever and wherever they can, give consumers fewer choices based on where they live and add to the long-term financial cost with burdensome record keeping imposed upon physicians and hospitals.

But even those experts who try to put a more positive slant on our current system realize that “there are some things that have to be imposed from above,”  according to Shannon Brownlee, senior vice president of the Lown Institute, a health advocacy organization.  

America ran dead last in a Commonwealth Fund, 11-country comparison on their healthcare systems.   Consumers are essentially left to defend themselves to battle outrageous rising costs left to them after doctors, hospitals and health insurance providers have negotiated how best to preserve their profits.  Since 1990, health care costs have risen 276 percent as wages, when adjusting for inflation, have barely grown at all.

Health Care coverage in America, like public schools, good roads & bridges and parks should be considered a right, not a privilege.  It’s an essential that only governments can provide at costs that eliminate price gouging and ensures that economic productivity isn’t stifled by a labor force burdened with out-of-control medical expenses.

The Hate You Harbor

A study earlier this year found what most of us already suspected – we are an unhappy people.“Our happiness, or what researchers refer to as ‘subjective well-being,’ is down” across the nation, according to a detailed study by the Gallup Organization and the healthcare information service Sharecare. From 2016 to 2017, America saw its largest year-over-year drop in well-being in the 10 years that Gallup has tracked these data. Furthermore, 21 states registered absolute declines in their levels of well-being, and not a single state showed a statistically significant improvement in 2017.”

Now there are a multiplicity of reasons that can be attributed to this sad state of mind but you have to wonder if something didn’t impact many of us following the 2016 election. Though there are those who are happy with the Presidential outcome it’s probably safe to say that many of those are more unhappy with the choice the felt they HAD to make rather than actually being elated about it.

Our political elections can have both deleterious and uplifting affects on our psyche, depending of course on who you voted for. But despite this, the anger quotient is likely to remain unchanged following the choices made in 2016. Not only for those who feel a sense of remorse that a con man has debased the office of the presidency with his puerile utterances and his affinity for authoritarianism, but also for those who must now defend him against that reality.

It’s easy to point out the foibles of a man who in his earlier life had some dubious success as a real estate magnate in NY City but who overtime let this success lead him to believe he was invincible and beyond reproach and in so doing let his ego over rule common sense and traded civility for derision of those who challenged his imagined perfection.

Trump has likely developed what psychologist refer to as a dark triad – “in personality, representing a perfect-storm combination of narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism. People high in the dark triad traits callously use people to their own advantage, seeing them as tools to exploit in order to get what they want.”  And here’s where the anger – and by default, unhappiness – comes into play for some of Trump’s supporters. Unless they are experiencing elements of the dark triad themselves they are forced to ignore it in their president simply because they voted for the guy and got caught up in his appeal that massaged their own fears and prejudices about Hillary, immigrants, socialism and white privilege before realizing who Trump really is deep down.

To many he is the fellow traveler they never found in the other GOP candidates back when the GOP had a soul.

Of course there will be those that reject this premise about the Gallup/Shareware study I’ve laid out here. And they may well be right. Yet the fact that the study shows our happiness quotient diminishing in light of Trump’s unfounded claim of America’s prosperity under his reign could well suggest that many are simply deceiving themselves to shield their inner disappointment as they become aware that they elected a carnival wheeler dealer rather than the savior he told him he would be.

Another (Vape)Smoke and Mirrors Charade Taking Place in the White House

 

 

Headlines about vaping expressing fears that it may become the latest national health problem are drawing concerns from the public, even Donald Trump supposedly and the First lady.

While holding court with his wife Melania and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar in the White House on the 18th anniversary of 911, Trump announced that “We can’t allow people to get sick and we can’t have our youth be so affected. People are dying” he said with no sense of irony.

Such concern falls on the deaf ears of those who see people die each day because they lack the financial means for life-saving health care services and the medications that are priced out of their income range. As the cheerleader who wants to kill Obamacare without having anything to replace it, Trump and the GOP will put millions in harms way who face life-ending conditions without the medical & pharmaceutical necessities that will keep them alive.

After failing to respond to the gun violence in this country and now threatening to revoke California’s authority to set auto emissions rules that will improve air quality for residents there, the president wants us to believe he really cares about the death of vape users?

If he shows as much concern for them however as he has for the lives lost from gun violence and extreme climate conditions resulting from an increasingly warm planet, the only action we’ll be seeing Trump taking will be his poor back swing on a tee box at one of his private golf clubs.

Unlike the fossil fuel and gun industries whose huge campaign contributions influence federal and state legislation to their benefit, the vaping industry is low-lying fruit for Trump that currently lack the impact of the NRA and the American Petroleum Institute.  Not wanting to leave any corporate donor behind however, Trump has agreed to ban only flavored vaping products — not those with tobacco-flavor.

Trump and other so-called opponents of vaping have already left the door open for this health threat to continue with their reluctance to ban all vape products. Advocates of vaping assure us that vaping doesn’t pose a health & safety risk. To appease them, Trump is willing to ban only flavored vaping products — not those with tobacco-flavor.

This neutering of a full ban is a meaningless gesture that keeps vape supporters in denial from the serious health issues vaping poses.  A growing body of research indicates that it may lead to negative health consequences, including damage to the brain heart and lungs, cancerous tumor development and preterm deliveries and stillbirths in pregnant women, according to the Center on Addiction. 

It is the same mindset that says the easy and abundant access to guns having nothing to do with the high suicide rates in this country or that adding green house gases (GHGs) like CO2 and methane in the atmosphere poses no threat because they already exist in nature. Never mind that what makes suicides easier and deadlier is also profitable for the gun industry or what GHGs that humans emit into the atmosphere are not the result of natural conditions.

It’s all about the Benjamins. In an unfettered free market system where industries whose products pose health and safety risks for the public, capital investments and their rewards for a wealthy few supersede the human capital who suffer from their existence.

As a member of that wealthy club Trump’s words will never match any action that requires confronting his comrades at the top.  Remember his 2016 campaign promise to “drain the swamp” of wealthy corporate lobbyists?

Another Case of Ignoring That the Emperor is Naked

“Power has to be protected from scrutiny. That's the principle of every dictatorship, of every autocracy.” - Noam Chomsky

It isn’t clear why Donald Trump stubbornly insisted Alabama was in line to be impacted by Hurricane Dorian.  The National Weather Service days earlier had already altered the trajectory of Dorian that initially included Alabama and confirmed that the state was no longer under the hurricane’s threat.

Was the man-child merely creating some kind of smoke screen to conceal the fact that after he cancelled a trip to Poland to commemorate the 80th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s invasion, supposedly to show concern for Dorian’s devastation, only to be discovered playing golf over 8 hours for two days at his private course in Northern Virginia?

What’s extremely sad about this whole bizarre action is that Trump’s staff, as they do so often, failed to discourage the so-called leader of the free world from participating in a series of lies just to sustain the illusion that he’s never wrong.    Or were his underlings just trying to cover themselves for their utter failure to make the president understand the seriousness of Dorian’s destructive impact on our Caribbean neighbors?

Upon hearing from so many many Alabamans  who were reacting fearfully to Trump’s bogus forecast, the National Weather Service office in Birmingham felt compelled to tweet that Alabama would “NOT see any impacts from the hurricane.”  But then, rather than being dedicated to supplying the public with the most accurate weather information available, “a top NOAA official warned its staff against contradicting the president.”  A disguised threat that seems to have come via Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to deter those NOAA staff who dared to correct Trump’s Alabama snafu, now being tagged as “Sharpiegate”.

That people charged with the public safety would diminish their role to protect the delusions Trump frequently creates for himself is scary to say the least.  It’s a frightening prospect to consider that the man who’s ultimately responsible for our national security seems more captivated with a fantasy world than the reality the rest of us exist in.

Former White House communications director and Trump ally, Anthony Scaramucci, recently suggested that “the president is now surrounded by people that are not going to tell him the truth, and they’re gonna confirm his biases, which may not be correct” saying that this could be “a recipe for disaster."

"The president likes to double down on stuff and he never likes to apologize ...”, Scaramucci said.  Does this not strongly suggest someone who is out of control and whose staff live in fear of speaking out when they see the error of the President’s comments?  This is the kind of behavior we expect from autocrats in countries like North Korea, Russia and Saudi Arabia where criticism of any kind could result in execution or imprisonment.

Fortunately, for now, we still have the rule of law that blocks any attempt by a would-be dictator to eliminate his adversaries.  But if Trump had his way, would locking them up be more than just a crowd chant at a Trump rally aimed at Hillary Clinton?  Would most major news sources be shut down?   The Republican National Committee itself is being hijacked by Trump operatives revealed recently by Greg Sargent of the The Washington Post.   Even Trump-friendly FOX news is being chided for stories that give the president bad press

How the hell did this country allow someone like this to hijack the once prestigious office of President of the United States?