America is failing

Because your favorite president can't admit a mistake

Deputy Dawg was in the Sharpie scandal even though he was out of the country.

The Secretary of Commerce [Wilbur Ross] threatened to fire top employees at NOAA on Friday after the agency’s Birmingham office contradicted President Trump’s claim that Hurricane Dorian might hit Alabama, according to three people familiar with the discussion.

That threat led to an unusual, unsigned statement later that Friday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration disavowing the office’s own position that Alabama was not at risk. The reversal caused widespread anger within the agency and drew criticism from the scientific community that NOAA, a division of the Commerce Department, had been bent to political purposes.

[...]

Mr. Ross phoned Neil Jacobs, the acting administrator of NOAA, from Greece where the secretary was traveling for meetings and instructed Dr. Jacobs to fix the agency’s perceived contradiction of the president.

  NYT

Did Deputy Dawg get a phone call from Old Lardass?

Dr. Jacobs objected to the demand and was told that the political staff at NOAA would be fired if the situation was not fixed, according to the three individuals, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the episode. Unlike career government employees, political staff are appointed by the administration. They usually include a handful of top officials, such as Dr. Jacobs, and their aides.

Sadly, Dr. Jacobs didn't have the moral courage to refuse to debase himself.

[A] senior administration official who asked not to be identified when discussing internal deliberations said that the Birmingham office had been wrong and that NOAA had simply done the responsible thing and corrected the record.

That official suggested the Twitter post by the Birmingham forecasters had been motivated by a desire to embarrass the president more than concern for the safety of people in Alabama. The official provided no evidence to support that conclusion.

Another staffer thrown under the bus.

On Monday, Craig N. McLean, NOAA’s acting chief scientist, sent an email to staff members notifying the agency that he was looking into “potential violations” in the agency’s decision to ultimately back Mr. Trump’s statements rather than those of its own scientists. He called the agency’s action “a danger to public health and safety.”

At least somebody's got some integrity. He'll get fired, of course.

On Monday, the National Weather Service director, Louis W. Uccellini, got a standing ovation from [attendees at a weather industry conference in Huntsville, Alabama,] when he praised the work of the Birmingham office and said staff members there had acted “with one thing in mind, public safety” when they contradicted Mr. Trump’s claim that Alabama was at risk.

Courage is contagious.

Cue nasty tweets about the courageous scientists and the New York Times.

And impeach the motherfucker.

UPDATE:



There was no degrading to be done.  Wilbur Ross was already as low as a person can possibly get.

UPDATE:  Email letter from McLean

Excerpt:

As I'm sure you also know, there was a complex issue involving the President commenting on the path of the hurricane. The NWS Forecaster(s) corrected any public misunderstanding in an expert and timely way, as they should. There followed, last Friday, an unsigned press release from "NOAA" that inappropriately and incorrectly contradicted the NWS forecaster. My understanding is that this intervention to contradict the forecaster was not based on science but on external factors including reputation and appearance, or simply put, political. Our NOAA Scientific Integrity Policy and Code of Scientific Conduct make clear that all NOAA employees shall approach all scientific activities with honesty, objectively, and completely, without allegiance to individuals, organizations, or ideology. The content of this press release is very concerning as it compromises the ability of NOAA to convey life-saving information necessary to avoid substantial and specific danger to public health and safety. If the public cannot trust our information, or we debase our forecaster's warnings and products, that specific danger arises. 

 [...] 

In my role as Assistant Administrator for Research, and as I continue to administratively serve as Acting Chief Scientist, I am pursuing the potential violations of our NOAA Administrative Order on Scientific Integrity. Thankfully, we have such policies that are independently cited as among the best in the federal community, if not the best. Your NOAA and OAR management and leadership team believes in these policies and principles. I have a responsibility to pursue these truths. I will.

 

Somebody found out they're black people

Lindsey Graham should be sidelined

Here he is just being a jerk in general...

And here he is grinning and schmoozing with well-known known white supremacist Geert Wilders...

LOL.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:  From January 2018 

NOAA is now just another Trump service

Nearly a week before the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration publicly backed President Trump over its own scientists, a top NOAA official warned its staff against contradicting the president.

In an agencywide directive sent Sept. 1 to National Weather Service personnel, hours after Trump asserted, with no evidence, that Alabama “would most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated,” staff was told to “only stick with official National Hurricane Center forecasts if questions arise from some national level social media posts which hit the news this afternoon.”

They were also told not to “provide any opinion,” according to a copy of the email obtained by The Washington Post.

A NOAA meteorologist who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution said the note, understood internally to be referring to Trump, came after the National Weather Service office in Birmingham contradicted Trump by tweeting Alabama would “NOT see any impacts from the hurricane.”

The Birmingham office sent the tweet after receiving a flurry of phone calls from concerned residents following Trump’s message.

[...]

“This is the first time I’ve felt pressure from above to not say what truly is the forecast,” the meteorologist said. “It’s hard for me to wrap my head around. One of the things we train on is to dispel inaccurate rumors and ultimately that is what was occurring — ultimately what the Alabama office did is provide a forecast with their tweet, that is what they get paid to do.”

  WaPo

Not any more, apparently.

Late Friday afternoon, NOAA officials further angered scientists within and beyond the agency by releasing a statement, attributed to an unnamed agency spokesperson, supporting Trump’s claims on Alabama and chastising the agency’s Birmingham meteorologists for speaking in absolutes.

That statement set off a firestorm among scientists, who attacked NOAA officials for bending to Trump’s will.

[...]

Keith Seitter, executive director of the American Meteorological Society, said in a statement that “the criticism of the Birmingham forecast office is unwarranted; rather they should have been commended for their quick action based on science in clearly communicating the lack of threat to the citizens of Alabama.”

[...]

“I have never been so embarrassed by NOAA. What they did is just disgusting,” Dan Sobien, president of the National Weather Service’s labor union, wrote on Twitter Friday. “Let me assure you the hard working employees of the NWS had nothing to do with the utterly disgusting and disingenuous tweet sent out by NOAA management tonight.”

[...]

Acting NOAA administrator Neil Jacobs was involved in drawing up the statement as was the NOAA director of public affairs, Julie Kay Roberts, who has experience in emergency management and worked on the president’s campaign.

The leadership of the Commerce Department, headed by Secretary Wilbur Ross, also approved the release, though Ross was out of the country at the time.

[...]

“It makes me speechless that the leadership would put [Trump’s] feelings and ego ahead of putting out weather information accurately,” said Michael Halpern, a deputy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “If we’re politicizing the weather what is there left to politicize? We’re seeing this kind of clamp down of scientists across the government, and it’s been an escalating trend.”

In 2018, a survey of scientists at 16 federal agencies found a culture of fear and self-censorship in an administration that has sidelined scientific evidence, especially as it related to climate change, in favor of political expediency.

Scientists are anathema to an authoritarian regime.

Burn it all down governance

The Navy has quietly stood down its Task Force Climate Change, created in 2009 to plan and develop "future public, strategic, and policy discussions" on the issue.

The task force ended in March, a spokesperson said, and the group's tab on the Navy's energy, environment and climate change website was removed sometime between March and July, according to public archives.

There is still a climate change link in the lower right corner of the site that led, at last check, to an empty page titled "Climate Change Fact Sheets."

Since it started, the TFCC released several reports on the strategic challenge climate change poses, taking a close look at what the melting Arctic means for strategic planning, and the dangers sea-level rise and extreme weather pose to many naval installations.

Alice Hill, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and former senior director for resilience on the National Security Council under President Obama, said she created a Department of Homeland Security task force modeled on the one created by the Navy.

[...]

In an email, the Navy spokesperson said the TFCC was ended because its processes are "now duplicative as functions have been transitioned to existing business processes; therefore, the original components of the task force are no longer needed."

  EE News

The DHS under Trump is going to seriously address climate change? And I'm the king of the world.

[Retired Navy Rear Adm. Jon White, who ran TFCC from 2012 to 2015, said] he sees "little evidence" that the task force's work has been fully incorporated into the Navy's decisionmaking process.

"Across all of [the Department of Defense], it is hard for me to see that climate change is taken as seriously at it should be," said White, who is currently president of the Consortium for Ocean Leadership. "The task force ended, in my opinion, without full incorporation of climate change considerations."

[...]

White said he is "suspicious" of how quietly the TFCC shut down, something that even he, as a former director, only heard about "third and fourth hand" as more of a rumor than actual fact.

[...]

"It's consistent with the patterns we've seen: Efforts with the title 'climate change' have either been suspended or renamed," Hill said.

"By not mentioning climate change, we are signaling the events that we're experiencing now, the impacts, are not something that immediately needs to be attended to and planned for," she added.

[...]

"It all goes back to the White House," White said. "That's what changed, the White House," he added.

White said the president's insistence that climate change is not a national security threat has led to a culture in Navy leadership where people either do not care enough about the matter or they are too afraid for their careers to fight for climate considerations.

"They don't want to get targeted by the administration; it's a battle they don't want to fight," he said.

It's amazing how many moral cowards are in high positions in this coutry.

Ten years ago, I left my job as a tenured university professor to work as an intelligence analyst for the federal government, primarily in the State Department but with an intervening tour at the National Intelligence Council. My focus was on the impact of environmental and climate change on national security, a growing concern of the military and intelligence communities.

[...]

I always appreciated the apolitical nature of the work. Our job in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research was to generate intelligence analysis buttressed by the best information available, without regard to political considerations. And although I was uncomfortable with some policies of the Trump administration, no one had ever tried to influence my work or conclusions.

That changed last month, when the White House blocked the submission of my bureau’s written testimony on the national security implications of climate change to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The stated reason was that the scientific foundation of the analysis did not comport with the administration’s position on climate change.

[...]

Perhaps most important, this written testimony on a critical topic was never entered into the official record.

[...]

After an extended exchange between officials at the White House and the State Department, at the 11th hour I was permitted to appear at the hearing and give a five-minute summary of the 11-page testimony.

[...]

The intelligence community has repeatedly warned of the dangers that climate change poses to national security. Early this year, for instance, Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, warned in the annual “Worldwide Threat Assessment,” “Global environmental and ecological degradation, as well as climate change, are likely to fuel competition for resources, economic distress, and social discontent through 2019 and beyond.” ([In July, President Trump announced that Mr. Coats would step down shortly, to be replaced by one of his biggest defenders, Representative John Ratcliffe, a Texas Republican.)

In blocking the submission of the written testimony, the White House trampled not only on the scientific integrity of the assessment but also on the analytic independence of an arm of the intelligence community. That’s why I recently resigned from the job I considered a sacred duty, and the institution I loved.

[...]

My last day on the job was July 12. In the weeks since the hearing I came to understand that there was little left for me to achieve in my position. More than most officers in the intelligence community, I interacted often with the public in discussions of environmental security issues. After the experiences of the prior two months, I wondered whether I could continue public engagements without being tainted by questions about my own analytic independence.

[...]

We need to better understand and anticipate the challenges facing the nation and its partners. Whatever my next step might be, I believe these issues remain critical, and I will try to continue this work going forward.

  Rod Schoonover @ NYT

And....from former NOAA chief David Titley:






...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Speaking of the Bahamas

Put that responsibility off on private companies.

What do you want to bet that some cruise ship company offered, and he tweeted this out to make it appear that he arranged it?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 9/9:  Oh look.

Close to 1,000 lined up Friday at a port in Freeport [Bahamas]. All of them, clutching bare suitcases, hoped to return back to the U.S. with a cruise ship that had just arrived and was planning to leave for Palm Beach later that night with 1,500 precious seats. Unfortunately, it was not clear who would be able to board the ship when it leaves, and who won’t.

In a news release Thursday, Bahamas Paradise, the company that owns the ship, said it would evacuate Bahamian residents who had “proper documentation.”

[...]

It is unclear whether passengers were supposed to have a visa ready to go or would be able to apply for one at the port. "To be honest, we don’t know,” the spokeswoman said. "That’s the information coming to us.”

[...]

The suggestion that people who have just survived the worst storm to ever hit the Atlantic — a storm that shredded homes and all the valuables in them — would happen to have the precise documentation they would need to satisfy these requirements seemed absurd to some.

[...]

As of Friday afternoon, the federal government had yet to comment on the status of whether Bahamian residents who wish to flee the islands will be allowed into the United States to stay with any family they may have.

[...]

The cruise ship, which departed Palm Beach Thursday night loaded with relief supplies, EMS workers, doctors and Bahamian-Americans from South Florida eager to check on their family and property, is said to be able to accommodate 1,500 passengers on the return trip. By noon Friday, it was reported that more than 1,500 people were already waiting at the port to board. By 9 p.m., 1,173 people were on board, but there was no telling how many had been turned away.

  Sun Sentinel

UPDATE:



Someone found out they're black people.

He'll take credit for that

"Their" instead of "there" aside, and saying he gives all credit to others, he couldn't leave it at "help of the United States."  He had to include himself.  So, not all credit to others.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The serious side of Sharpiegate

This is insane and dangerous.  We are all at risk as long as Trump is president.

Impeach the motherfucker.

UPDATE:





UPDATE 9/8:

From former NOAA chief:

Desperate Don and his fake news Twitter account

China is paying for "Patriot Farmers" like Mexico is paying for the wall. 

And still going on the Sharpie incident...

Say it all together now:  Donald Trump never makes mistakes.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

#Sharpiegate

Now THAT's funny.

We're reduced to making fun of the guy whose actions put people's lives in danger.  There's a reason it's illegal to falsify a National Weather map.

Trump's map is fake news defined.

Some more funnies:

And I was about to ask why Sharpie doesn't use a tag line in its ads referencing it as the favorite pen of the president, or some such, when I saw that someone made one for them:







UPDATE:



Did Trump Sharpie Debra's eyelashes?

If she hasn't portrayed Lucille Ball in a movie or documentary, she should.

UPDATE:

Sit down, this is going to shock you

President Trump was the one who doctored a projection of Hurricane Dorian's path before the map was displayed during a White House meeting between Trump and acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan, according to a White House official.

An unnamed official told The Washington Post that Trump himself edited the map provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to include a projection that included the state of Alabama.

“No one else writes like that on a map with a black Sharpie,” the official told the news outlet.

[...]

The president did not respond to shouted questions from reporters about his Alabama defense during a Medal of Freedom ceremony on Thursday at the White House.

  The Hill

Of course not. And when he was asked on the day he did it who had altered the map, he said he didn't know.  Everyone knew.

We'll never hear the end of it

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.


UPDATE 9/6 am:  This will shock you:

President Trump was the one who doctored a projection of Hurricane Dorian's path before the map was displayed during a White House meeting between Trump and acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan, according to a White House official.

An unnamed official told The Washington Post that Trump himself edited the map provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to include a projection that included the state of Alabama.

“No one else writes like that on a map with a black Sharpie,” the official told the news outlet.

  The Hill

UPDATE 9/6 pm:  Still going...

For the love of Pete

We can never say, "I've seen it all, now."

Remember the other day when the president* said that Hurricane Dorian posed a threat to Alabama, and then the National Weather Service told all the people in Alabama to relax because the president* didn't know what he was talking about, so they all shouldn't run off to the Piggly Wiggly to buy 250 loaves of bread? Whereupon, the president* expressed his annoyance at his own National Weather Service for its role in helping him look foolish? Again. (Maybe it was just their turn.) This resulted in a couple of days of social-media snark directed at the president*s Very Great Brain.

Cut to Wednesday morning in the Oval Office.

  Charles P Pierce

On Wednesday, during an Oval Office briefing on Hurricane Dorian, President Trump displayed what appeared to be an official National Weather Service map from last Thursday, in which the storm's projected path was extended to Alabama by someone using a black marker.

  NPR

"Someone."

Trump is known to use Sharpies to sign bills and to mark up newspaper and magazine articles. But the White House has so far not commented on who altered the weather map, or if indeed a Sharpie was used.

[...]

At a subsequent event, Trump was asked about the apparent addition to the map. "I don't know," he answered.

"I know that Alabama was in the original forecast they thought it would get it as a piece of it," he said. He again insisted there were forecasts in which Alabama was considered in the storm's path.

It's because he said Alabama was in the hurricane path and got made fun of.

Over the weekend, President Trump also insisted that Dorian's projected path included Alabama. "Alabama could even be in for at least some very strong winds and something more than that, it could be," he said Sunday.

[...]

Some on Twitter also noted that, under law, knowingly issuing a false weather report is a violation of the law subject to imprisonment and or fine.

But as we all know, he's above the law.

At the end of last week, the National Hurricane Center did include Alabama in its prediction for tropical-force winds.

Of course they did. They got the memo.

But by Sunday, the National Weather Service in Birmingham, Ala., clarified that the state would not feel any affects of Dorian.

He's been consumed by this.

The tweet that started it:



The next day:





Today:





Not "almost all" models predicted Alabama.  Only a handful.  And those aren't predictions.  They're computer-generated possibilites from the inception date. And it also shows Louisiana and Mississippi as possibilities, so why not mention them?






...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.


UPDATE 9/5: We'll never hear the end of it.




 





UPDATE 9/6:  This will shock you:

President Trump was the one who doctored a projection of Hurricane Dorian's path before the map was displayed during a White House meeting between Trump and acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan, according to a White House official.

An unnamed official told The Washington Post that Trump himself edited the map provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to include a projection that included the state of Alabama.

“No one else writes like that on a map with a black Sharpie,” the official told the news outlet.

  The Hill

UPDATE: