Donald Trump and his Coterie of the Craven (part 16)

[candygirl200413]

I'm just mad/sad that it took essentially 20 years for this to happen. Fox only did this because they were losing all the money

[Cartmann99]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Uh-oh, one of Agent Orange's buddies is out: "Bill O’Reilly is officially out at Fox News"

Not that I watch Faux News, but I'm happy he's out.

If Tomi Lahren's lawsuit doesn't turn out the way she wants, I predict that she and O'Reilly will start a podcast or something together. Neither of them can survive for very long without the adoration of their fans.

[GreyhoundFan]

"The Trump administration has deported a ‘dreamer’ for first time, advocates say"

Quote

While Juan Manuel Montes Bojorquez, 23, was walking to a taxi station in Calexico, Calif., a Border Patrol agent on a bicycle stopped him, asking him for identification. Having accidentally left his wallet in a friend’s car, Montes says, he had no identification on him, and no way of proving his status as a “dreamer” allowing him to live in the United States legally.

Another officer was called to the scene and took Montes into custody that night, Feb. 17, driving him to a station near the border. Hours later, at about 1 a.m., immigration officials walked Montes across the border, physically removing him from the U.S. and leaving him in Mexico near Mexicali, Baja California.

Montes, immigration advocates and lawyers say, is believed to be the first “dreamer”— a beneficiary of President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program — to be deported. They say he has an active work permit.

The Department of Homeland Security disputes these claims and has provided no record of the incident. Officials only confirmed that Montes was deported when he tried to re-enter the country on or about Feb. 19, which he admits.

Attorneys on behalf of Montes filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act on Tuesday demanding that the federal government turn over all information about his sudden removal. The conflicting accounts surrounding the case leave many questions unanswered, but the allegations heightened existing concerns that DACA recipients are now being targeted for deportation, despite President Trump’s pledges to “show great heart” toward them.

“We have through the last few weeks attempted to get the records or any explanation about what happened to Juan Manuel,” said Nora Preciado, a Los Angeles attorney with the National Immigration Law Center and one of the lawyers who filed the lawsuit. The lawyers on March 15 requested all records of Montes’ interactions with immigration authorities, but DHS has not yet provided them. “We’re trying to get answers,” Preciado told The Washington Post.

...

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"It was huge: Trump inaugural drew slew of top-dollar checks"

Quote

Big money from billionaires, corporations and a roster of NFL owners poured into Donald Trump’s inaugural committee in record-shattering amounts — to pull off an event that was considerably lower-key than previous inaugural celebrations.

That leaves a bit of a mystery: What the $107 million was spent for and how much was left over — the excess, if any, to go to charity. It also raises a new round of questions about the influence of money in politics, this time for a president who promised to “drain the swamp” of Washington.

Contribution records from Trump’s inaugural committee, released Wednesday by the Federal Election Commission, show the president who railed as a candidate against the corrupting influence of big-money donors was only too willing to accept top-dollar checks for his swearing-in festivities.

Trump’s total take was about double the previous record set by Barack Obama, who collected $53 million in contributions in 2009, and had money left over to spend on the annual Easter egg roll and other White House events.

Trump’s top inaugural donor was Las Vegas gambling billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who gave $5 million. He and his wife came away with prime seats for Trump’s swearing-in ceremony on Jan. 20 and gained access to a private lunch with the new president and lawmakers at the Capitol. Phil Ruffin, another casino mogul and close friend of Trump, was among dozens of donors who gave $1 million each.

At least eight NFL team owners kicked in big money for the inauguration. Seven of them, including Patriots owner Bob Kraft, whose team won the Super Bowl and visited the White House on Wednesday, gave $1 million apiece. Kraft’s donation came via his limited liability company.

Trump plans to name the New York Jets’ Woody Johnson, one of those million-dollar donors, to be the country’s ambassador to the United Kingdom.

Asked whether the president feels conflicted about his committee accepting so much corporate and wealthy donor money, spokesman Sean Spicer said Wednesday that financing the inaugural is “a time-honored tradition” and there are “a lot of people who really take pride in helping us show the world a peaceful transformation of power.”

Brendan Fischer of the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit pro-transparency group, countered: “If you take Trump at his word that when political figures accept large amounts of money from corporate interests or special interests that they’re indebted to those big donors, there’s certainly reason to question what donors to Trump’s inaugural committee might expect in return.”

As is often the case with campaigns and inaugurations, some of the donations came from people doing business with the federal government.

Billionaire Texan Kelcy Warren, whose company is building the Dakota Access Pipeline, gave the inaugural committee $250,000. Christopher Cline, a billionaire coal magnate who owns Foresight Energy Partners, gave $1 million. Trump has vowed to bring back coal jobs, and his administration quickly approved the Dakota pipeline.

...

Russian-America businessman Alexander Shustorovich also was among the $1 million donors to Trump’s inauguration committee. The Republican National Committee refused a contribution from the U.S. citizen in 2000, citing news reports at the time that cautioned about his ties to Russian business. In more recent years, he’s given money to the party, to 2012 candidate Mitt Romney, and to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, FEC records show.

The inauguration offered donors who had held back during the presidential campaign a chance to show belated support for the incoming president.

...

While the government sets strict contribution limits on political campaigns, the only federal restrictions on donations to inaugural committees are a ban on foreign nationals, according to Fischer, of the Campaign Legal Center. Past presidents-elect have tended to set voluntary limits on their inaugural fundraising, but Trump’s only restriction was to ban money from lobbyists, he said.

Obama in 2009 set a $50,000 cap on individual contributions and banned money from corporations, political action committees and lobbyists. He lifted those caps in 2013, when he raised about $43 million for a lower-key event.

Inaugural committees have broad leeway in how they spend their money and what they do with the leftovers, although some limitations apply, according to Fischer. As a 501(c)(4) organization, for example, the committee could use some of the money to give bonuses to staff, but IRS rules say the committee couldn’t operate primarily to benefit a small group of individuals. Federal campaigns wouldn’t be able receive the money because it was raised outside contribution limits, he said.

Trump’s inaugural committee has promised to “identify and evaluate charities that will receive contributions left from the excess monies raised.”

Gee, if he hadn't shut down the Agent Orange Foundation, that could have been the recipient "charity".

[fraurosena]

Oh dear.

 

I wonder how long it'll be before the 'fake photo' tweets start?

[apple1]

28 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

I wonder how long it'll be before the 'fake photo' tweets start?

I had the same thought.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump’s ethical squalor is worse than you thought"

Quote

President Trump’s ethical sloth and financial conflicts of interest are unique in American history. (The Harding and Grant administrations were rife with corruption, but the presidents did not personally profit. Richard Nixon abused power but did not use his office to fatten his coffers or receive help from a hostile foreign power to get elected.) But it keeps getting worse.

Ryan Lizza’s stunning report reveals ample evidence that Trump misused the intelligence community and manipulated Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) to concoct a plot meant to distract from the investigation into his Russian ties:

It is now clear that the scandal was not [former national security adviser Susan] Rice’s normal review of the intelligence reports but the coordinated effort between the Trump Administration and Nunes to sift through classified information and computer logs that recorded Rice’s unmasking requests, and then leak a highly misleading characterization of those documents, all in an apparent effort to turn Rice, a longtime target of Republicans, into the face of alleged spying against Trump. It was a series of lies to manufacture a fake scandal. Last week, CNN was the first to report that both Democrats and Republicans who reviewed the Nunes material at the N.S.A. said that the documents provided “no evidence that Obama Administration officials did anything unusual or illegal.”

I spoke to two intelligence sources, one who read the entire binder of intercepts and one who was briefed on their contents. “There’s absolutely nothing there,” one source said. The Trump names remain masked in the documents, and Rice would not have been able to know in all cases that she was asking the N.S.A. to unmask the names of Trump officials.

If true, this would be a clear abuse of authority — the very type of politicization of intelligence that the Trump team claims the Obama administration was guilty of. Had President Barack Obama done anything remotely similar, Republicans would have drafted articles of impeachment. Moreover, Trump’s antics have done serious damage to our national security toolkit:

The fallout from Trump’s [March 4] tweet could have grave consequences for national security. The law governing the N.S.A.’s collection of the content of communications of foreign targets is up for renewal this summer. Known as Section 702, part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, it is perhaps the most important intelligence tool that America’s spy agencies have to gather information about potential terrorist attacks and about the intentions of regimes around the world. There are legitimate privacy concerns about allowing the N.S.A. to vacuum up such an enormous amount of communications. … Some American intelligence officials are now concerned that Trump and Nunes’s wild claims about intercepts and Rice have made Section 702 look like a rogue program that can be easily abused for political purposes.

Trump, the individuals who assisted in this gambit and Nunes have abused the public trust. They utterly failed to uphold their responsibility for national security, for maintaining public confidence in our intelligence community and for protecting legitimate privacy interests. (Rice has a darned good case for defamation, which of course she won’t pursue.) Former CIA and National Security Agency director Michael V. Hayden tells me he is concerned that the intelligence was “used by the White House for political purposes.” He explains: “To the degree people believe that, the whole legitimacy of American intelligence is undercut. Talk about collateral damage rather than simply telling the emperor in this case that he has no clothes. By that, I mean of course, trying to make true a tweet that was obviously very untrue.”

On the financial side of the Trump sewer, matters are going from bad to worse. Trump never divested himself of his business holdings or released his tax returns. The extent of his conflicts of interest are therefore unknown. He has now amended the trust (showing how flimsy it is if it can be altered on a whim) to allow him to withdraw funds and to receive periodic briefings from his son Eric (who “can do that as chair of the trust’s advisory board, and told Forbes magazine last month that he plans to give his father big-picture financial briefings every quarter or so”). All this should underscore how ludicrous it is to claim separation between Trump and his business operations.

Now, the sludge has engulfed Ivanka Trump. The Associated Press reports:

On April 6, Ivanka Trump’s company won provisional approval from the Chinese government for three new trademarks, giving it monopoly rights to sell Ivanka brand jewelry, bags and spa services in the world’s second-largest economy. That night, the first daughter and her husband, Jared Kushner, sat next to the president of China and his wife for a steak and Dover sole dinner at Mar-a-Lago, her father’s Florida resort.

The scenario underscores how difficult it is for Trump, who has tried to distance herself from the brand that bears her name, to separate business from politics in her new position at the White House.

That’s putting it mildly. As a federal employee, Ivanka Trump has an obligation under a criminal statute (18 U.S.C. § 208) to avoid “participating personally and substantially, in an official capacity, in any ‘particular matter’ that would have a direct and predictable effect on the employee’s own financial interests or on the financial interests.” As the government ethics guidelines specify:

Moreover, disqualification is often the appropriate way to prevent a conflict of interest in the long term, unless an “exemption” applies or the circumstances warrant use of other means of resolving conflicts of interest. …

An executive branch-wide regulation recognizes that a reasonable person may believe that an employee’s impartiality can be influenced by interests other than the employee’s own or those that are imputed to the employee by the conflict of interest laws. Under 5 C.F.R. § 2635.502, employees are required to consider whether their impartiality would be questioned whenever their involvement in a “particular matter involving specific parties” might affect certain personal or business relationships.

This is hardly an isolated event for Ivanka Trump. Recall that as she was working on a clothing deal with a Japanese apparel giant — whose parent company’s largest shareholder is wholly owned by the Japanese government — she was sitting in a transition meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Even aside from this, Jordan Libowitz, spokesman for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, observes: “This raises serious questions that we should not have to be asking. The White House is not a side gig.” He argues, “The Trump family should not be engaged in business dealings with foreign countries while making important policy decisions. Luckily, there is a clean and obvious way to clear all this up: from the president on down, they should divest themselves of their business interests and invest the proceeds in a true blind trust.”

What is striking is the degree to which the Trump clan publicly flaunts its ethical laxity and disinterest in complying with norms that every other president and his family have managed to follow.

Whether it is abuse of the instruments of government power or disregard for financial propriety, Trump is setting a new low. Republicans who ignore all this — or worse, defend Trump — are make the case for why one or both houses of Congress should be controlled by the opposing party, which would be likely to carry out its constitutional responsibilities.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"No, Mr. President, you can’t do what you want"

Quote

Two issues are paramount in American politics. The first is whether President Trump will get away with his arrogant dismissal of the public’s right to a transparent government free of corrupting conflicts of interest. The second is whether those who would hold him to account remain focused, mobilized and determined.

They are related. There are many reasons to stand against Trump, but the one that should take precedence — because it is foundational for decent governance — is his autocratic assumption that he is above the expectations that apply to us normal humans.

Should Trump separate himself completely from his business interests, as presidents had been doing for more than four decades? His implicit message is always: No, I can do what I want.

Should he release his income-tax returns so the public can see where conflicts might exist — including whether he will benefit from his own tax proposals? No, he says, I can do what I want.

Should he continue former president Barack Obama’s practice of making the White House visitor logs public so all can know who might be influencing his policies? No, he says, I can do what I want — including shutting down access to those logs and telling citizens to go stuff it if they claim any right to know what’s going on in the building they collectively own.

Should he stop turning the presidency into a permanent and profitable vacation by spending one out of every five minutes at Mar-a-Lago or nearby golf courses, as The Post’s Philip Bump reported? Should we know the full cost of his gallivanting and how many of the millions of dollars involved are circulating back to his family through the charges Trump’s resorts impose on the government? No, he says, I can do what I want.

Should we know why it is that, according to The Post’s Greg Miller, Trump “appears increasingly isolated within his own administration” in calling for warmer relations with Russia even as almost everyone else in his government issues “blistering critiques of Moscow”? Should he disclose details of his business ties to Russian interests and oligarchs? Should he stop resisting investigations into whether his campaign was complicit in Russia’s interference in the election that made him president? No, he says, I can do what I want.

And then there was Sunday’s referendum in Turkey (whose outcome the opposition says was rigged) that narrowly approved constitutional changes giving President Recep Tayyip Erdogan nearly authoritarian powers. Did Trump express concern about democracy? Nope. He called Erdogan to congratulate him. Why?

Asked about Turkey in a December 2015 interview with, of all people, Stephen K. Bannon — now his chief strategist who back then hosted a radio show on Breitbart — Trump admitted: “I have a little conflict of interest because I have a major, major building in Istanbul.” He also described Erdogan as “a strong leader” and added: “I thrive on complicated.” Should we be able to know how Trump was influenced by his “complicated” Turkish interests, including his “major, major” project? No, he says, I can do what I want.

And a last question: If Hillary Clinton had done any one of the things described above, is there any doubt about what Republicans in Congress would be saying and doing? As long as all but a few honorable Republicans remain silent, GOP leaders will be miring their party in the muck of Trump’s norm-breaking. No, they are saying, he can do what he wants.

This is why only pressure from an engaged and resolute citizenry can convince Republican politicians of the costs of being Trump enablers. Jon Ossoff, the Democratic hopeful in Tuesday’s special election in a very Republican Georgia congressional district, managed 48.1 percent of the vote, just missing the majority he needed to avoid a June 20 runoff.

Those who rallied to Ossoff (including Republicans and independents deeply offended by Trump’s ways) must remain committed between now and June to send a clear message to the president that transcends the usual partisanship: No, you can’t just do what you want in crushing transparency and blurring all lines between your own interests and the public’s.

It’s said that Trump always skates away. Not true. Those he ripped off in his Trump University scam stuck with the fight and forced Trump to settle a lawsuit he said (in an untruth typical of his approach) he would never settle. The country’s citizens can prevail, too, if we insist on calling out a self-absorbed huckster who treats us all as easily bamboozled fools.

...

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I am glad for this: "Berkeley cancels conservative firebrand Ann Coulter’s speech over fears of more violent protests"

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After riots and violent protests in and around their campus during the past three months, officials at the University of California at Berkeley said Wednesday that the school is canceling a planned speech by conservative firebrand Ann Coulter because of safety concerns.

In a letter to a campus Republican group that invited Coulter to speak, university officials said that they made the decision to cancel Coulter’s appearance after assessing the violence that flared on campus in February, when the same college Republican group invited right-wing provocateur and now-former Breitbart News senior editor Milo Yiannopoulos to speak.

The violence and protests caused by Yiannopoulos’s invitation garnered national attention and forced officials to put the campus on lockdown. And after the university canceled Yiannopoulos’s talk, President Trump criticized the school and threatened in a tweet to pull federal funds from UC-Berkeley.

...

The decisions by UC-Berkeley to cancel both events involving high-profile conservatives are especially notable given the campus’s role during the 1960s and 1970s as the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement and its long tradition of social protest.

Coulter said in an email to The Washington Post on Wednesday that the university had been trying to force her to cancel her speech by “imposing ridiculous demands” on her but that she still agreed “to all of their silly requirements.” She said she believes that her speech “has been unconstitutionally banned” by the “public, taxpayer-supported UC-Berkeley.”

Coulter said the university insisted that her speech take place in the middle of the day, that only students could attend and that the exact venue wouldn’t be announced until the last minute. She said that she agreed with the conditions but that that apparently wasn’t good enough.

“They just up and announced that I was prohibited from speaking anyway,” Coulter said, noting that her speech topic was to be immigration, the subject of one of her books. “I feel like the Constitution is important and that taxpayer-supported universities should not be using public funds to violate American citizens’ constitutional rights.”

A conservative national group that was helping to organize the event, Young America’s Foundation, said Coulter also made demands of her own, including that any students engaging in violence be expelled. In her email, Coulter said she is still planning to give her speech, and YAF spokesman Spencer Brown said she has told them that she plans to appear at Berkeley on April 27.

“If Berkeley wants to have free speech, they are going to get it,” Brown said.

A university spokesman said the school has not been in direct contact with Coulter but conveyed its concerns with the student group that invited her. He said the university was especially concerned that holding the event in the late afternoon would risk protests and potential violence stretching into the evening when the area would get crowded with commuters and students.

...

At Berkeley, university officials said the recent violence has caused them to rethink where and when to hold such events. In their letter, university officials also partly blamed the college Republican group for inviting Coulter and setting a date for the event — April 27 — without consulting the university.

Officials learned of Coulter’s event, the letter said, from reading about it in newspapers. And after consulting with university police, officials said, they could not find a venue available on that date that would allow them to protect Coulter, the audience and bystanders.

I don't know about you, but I would pay money to NOT hear her speak.

 

Here are a few good George Takei Tweets for me to close out my evening:

[apple1]

@Destiny

Suddenly I realized - couple days ago, I think - the jerky rolling after tweets are posted in a thread is gone. Yay!! and thank you if it was you that fixed it. Now I can actually read the entire thread. :-)

[fraurosena]

For the love of GOLF!

Donald Trump criticised for golfing habit after playing 19 times in 13 weeks

Quote

[...] US President Donald Trump is attracting even more attention than ever after it emerged the President has already visited the golf course 19 times in the past 13 weeks. [...]

According to the New York Post, the sport is more than a pastime and is potentially good for his business and Golf Digest dubbed him the “Golfer in Chief”.

The President “has been noisily and passionately promoting his golf properties in every corner of the typically staid golf community for more than a decade” the Post reported.

Mr Trump has long been a fan of the sport and in doing business in or around the course. The President even brought up a game last month played between corporate executives, even encouraging the chief executive of General Electric Jeffrey R. Immelt to reveal a story about a game they played years ago at one of his courses.

“Jeff actually watched me make a hole in one; can you believe that?” Mr Trump said. “I was the best golfer of all the rich people.”

Mr Trump even made a point of raising his predecessor’s love of the game during a campaign rally in Virginia last year where he sad: “I’m going to be working for you, I’m not going to have time to play golf.”

The irony hasn’t gone unnoticed in Congress.

Opposition Democrats have long demanded Donald Trump scale back his weekend escapes to Florida and just this week a fellow Republican joined the call for the US president to spend more time working in Washington.

“I’ve had those same concerns myself,” Senator Joni Ernst told a town-hall meeting in Iowa when a constituent asked about Mr Trump’s taxpayer-funded trips to Mar-a-Lago, his members-only resort in Palm Beach.

“I do wish that he would spend more time in Washington, DC. That’s what we have the White House for,” she said, suggesting she was not alone among Republicans frustrated by Trump’s frequent flying.

Note that the Repubs are finally beginning to complain about it too, albeit tentatively, after questions by constituents.

[GreyhoundFan]

Another four Pinocchios for Agent Orange: "Trump’s claim that ‘no administration has accomplished more in the first 90 days’"

Quote

“No administration has accomplished more in the first 90 days.”

— President Trump, remarks in Kenosha, Wis., April 18, 2017

The first 100 days of a presidency is a rather artificial milestone, but one by which all presidents have been measured since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s whirlwind of action when he took office in the midst of the Great Depression. President Trump appears especially conscious of this marker. During the presidential campaign, he even issued a list of 60 promises that he said he would fulfill in his first 100 days.

We’ve been tracking Trump’s promises, and so far he has not even taken action on 60 percent of the promises — and he’s broken five of them, such as his promise to label China as a currency manipulator.

Yet here’s the president declaring that he’s accomplished more in his first 90 days than any previous president. So how does he stack up?

The Facts

There are various ways to measure presidential performance, such as number of laws passed. But of course not every law is created equally, so you have to parse through the data. The same goes for executive orders and memorandums.

We sought an explanation from the White House for Trump’s claim but did not get an answer. However, White House press secretary Sean Spicer on Wednesday was asked what single piece of legislation the president was most proud of in his first 100 days.

Spicer did not really answer the question but instead responded with a laundry list that he said demonstrated a “very robust agenda of activity,” such as reversing a dozen regulations set by President Barack Obama and the Senate confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Neil M. Gorsuch. He also noted a drop in illegal immigration at the southern border and “a lot of activity that we’ve been very proud to see in America manufacturing and job creation” — claims we have fact-checked in the past.

Frankly, this is rather thin gruel if you are going to compare yourself to Roosevelt or other notable presidents. So let’s go through the data.

There were 76 bills signed into law under Roosevelt in the first 100 days, compared with 28 (with a week to go) under Trump. “This is higher than any first-term 100 days since 1949 (55 bills signed), but less than all first terms from 1901-1949 except for 1909,” said John Frendreis, a political science professor at Loyola University in Chicago who co-wrote a well-regarded study of legislative output in the first 100 days from 1997 to 1995.

Thirteen of the Trump bills disapprove of major regulations put in place by Obama, which signifies a reversal of action, not new action — though the agency is barred from ever re-promulgating the rule in question or anything similar without congressional approval. Other bills include such actions — what Frendreis called “minor or housekeeping bills” — as naming a Veterans Affairs outpatient clinic in Pago Pago in American Samoa or creating a waiver to allow Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to be appointed even though he had recently served in the military.

Moreover, none of Trump’s bills can be considered “major” legislation according to political science standards, whereas at least nine of Roosevelt’s bills met that standard. Historians H.W. Brands of the University of Texas at Austin and David M. Kennedy of Stanford University count 15 major bills in FDR’s first 100 days, including some that remain in place.

“In this regard, Trump’s tenure has been less impressive, with no major pieces of legislation passed,” Frendreis said. “By contrast, the stimulus package was passed during Obama’s first 100 days” — actually, within Obama’s first 30 days.

Frendreis noted that the 73rd Congress was highly unusual because of the crisis atmosphere and the huge Democratic majorities, giving Roosevelt an opportunity to make a quick impact.

“Some of FDR’s initiatives were submitted to Congress in the morning and back on his desk that very same day for signatures,” said Max J. Skidmore, a political science professor at the University of Missouri in Kansas City. “Hardly anything other than the most extreme of emergencies could bring that about.”

“FDR’s first session of Congress was a special session he himself had called,” Brands said. “He also had the advantage of preparation, having been governor of New York for four years, three of them Depression years. So he knew what he wanted, what was popular and what might work. Trump is a novice.”

As for executive actions, Trump has issued 24 executive orders, 22 presidential memorandums and 20 proclamations. One of his executive orders, imposing a travel ban from certain Muslim-majority countries, was a redo of an earlier executive order that had been blocked in the courts. But the new one has also been stymied by court challenges and thus has not been implemented.

To some extent, it’s difficult to compare executive orders and memorandums among presidents, because only executive orders are numbered, but it’s somewhat arbitrary how something is labeled. (We explored this at length in 2014.) In any case, Trump’s first 90 days of executive actions does not stand out as especially unusual.

Meanwhile, Trump is woefully behind in presidential appointments, especially in naming people for Senate-confirmed posts.

In contrast to many other presidents, Trump has also not led on legislation but mostly taken his cue from Congress.

...

At this point, President George W. Bush was well ahead in ensuring passage of a major tax cut that he had pressed for in the election campaign. He proposed comprehensive tax legislation on Feb. 9, about three weeks after taking office, and a $1.35 trillion tax cut was passed by both houses of Congress by May 26, less than a month after Bush’s first 100 days was completed. Trump has yet to release a tax plan — and his bid to repeal and replace Obama’s signature health-care law was blocked in the House.

“Trump’s ‘skinny’ budget is not a strong start on the budget issue, even for a first-term president,” Frendreis said, adding that “my own professional judgment is that he is off to a slower-than-normal start.”

Few presidents achieve much on foreign policy in their first 100 days, and Trump is no exception. Trump has signaled a tougher posture toward North Korea and Iran and launched a brief volley of cruise missiles to punish Syria for a chemical-weapons attack. But it’s too early to tell whether his policies will result in positive outcomes.

“Trump actually is unusual for his first 100 days, but for a reason opposite of what he said,” said Skidmore, author of “Presidential Performance: A Comprehensive Review.” “Not only has he accomplished almost nothing, but rather his initiatives (executive orders stayed by courts, a major legislative proposal failing even to come to a vote when his party controls both houses, etc.) have notoriously been unsuccessful.”

“FDR definitely outclasses Trump,” Brands said. “Fifteen major bills through Congress, to zero for Trump.”

The Pinocchio Test

It’s rather silly for any president to suggest that his first 100 days somehow topped Roosevelt’s achievement. Lyndon B. Johnson, Ronald Reagan and Obama are credited with significant legislative achievements early in their first terms, but much of their success generally came after the first 100 days. Trump would be well advised to not make such a big deal about this because the available evidence shows that he in no way comes close to matching FDR’s record.

Four Pinocchios

...

 

[fraurosena]

3 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Trump would be well advised to not make such a big deal about this because the available evidence shows that he in no way comes close to matching FDR’s record.

Evidence? Who needs evidence? So...  Just believe me! it's true.

[GreyhoundFan]

"The risks of the Trump administration hollowing out American leadership"

Quote

On the surface, much of President Trump’s foreign policy seems to be reverting to the mainstream upon first contact with reality. Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s horrific use of chemical weapons produced a quick military response, applauded across partisan lines in Washington. Relations with Russia have settled to predictably adversarial depths. The administration is full of appropriately reassuring words about NATO, and the one-China policy was safely back in place for the visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping. Senior national security appointments have been mostly traditionalist, with radical voices in retreat. In a Washington always impatient for sweeping judgments as a new administration wraps up its first 100 days, it is tempting to conclude that convention is ascendant.

Beneath the surface, however, lurk more troubling trend lines. Through policy incoherence and not-so-benign neglect, the Trump team risks hollowing out the ideas, initiative and institutions on which U.S. leadership and international order rest.

...

The idea of America has been at the heart of our success in the world for 70 years. For all our imperfections, we have embodied political and economic openness, respect for human dignity and a sense of possibility. The power of our example has mattered more than the power of our preaching, and enlightened self-interest has driven our strategy

What we often saw during the Trump campaign, and still bubbling in the background of this administration, has been more “self” than “enlightened” — a nasty brew of mercantilism, unilateralism and unreconstructed nationalism, flavored by indiscipline and overpersonalization. At a moment when the international order is under severe strain, power is fragmenting and great-power rivalry has returned, the values and purpose at the core of the American idea matter more than ever. Against this backdrop, acting in defense of a critical international norm in Syria is reassuring; going mute on human rights issues in dealing with authoritarian leaders is not.

A second crucial asset has been American initiative — our willingness and ability to mobilize others to deal with shared problems. From regional challenges to wider global dilemmas such as climate change and trade, U.S. leadership has been critical to the unprecedented peace and prosperity of the post-World War II era. Of course we got a lot of things wrong, sometimes at grievous cost, most painfully in Vietnam and Iraq. And of course we need to make significant adjustments in a world in which the United States is no longer dominant but still preeminent.

But many in the new administration still seem to think much differently. Theirs is a United States held hostage by the very international order it created. Alliances are millstones, multilateral arrangements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership and NAFTA are constraints rather than opportunities, and the United Nations and other international bodies are distractions, if not irrelevant. We’re Gulliver, in their view, and it’s time to break the bonds of the Lilliputians.

That is more than just an attitude, and more than just a re-articulation of a recurring isolationist instinct in U.S. politics. It’s already proving corrosive, by creating a trade vacuum in Asia that China is eagerly filling; threatening to squander hard-won gains in our own hemisphere and Africa; and unnerving European allies by indulging populist nationalists and encouraging more actions similar to Brexit. Others in the administration clearly understand the risks inherent in such views, but early policy inconsistency has created worries for friends and temptations for foes.

A third ingredient of American leadership is the institutions that sustain it. Trump’s first budget guts institutions responsible for translating our ideas and initiative into action. By relying so heavily on hard power, Trump’s budget reinforces a pattern over much of the difficult post-9/11 period in which we have often inverted the roles of force and diplomacy, underselling the virtue of diplomacy backed up by the threat of force, while relying more on lethal force as our tool of first resort, with diplomacy an under-resourced follow-up, untethered to strategy.

The issue here is not whether real reforms are needed in domestic or international agencies. They are long overdue. The State Department has too many layers and ought to be streamlined. But cuts of nearly 30 percent are not motivated by an interest in sensible change; they reflect a dismissiveness of the role of nonmilitary instruments, and a disruptive passion for neutering or dismantling existing institutions.

Likewise, draconian reductions in assistance programs are penny wise and pound foolish. Rather than helping key fragile states avoid the kinds of failures and conflicts that often drag in the U.S. military, at far greater cost, we will, through abdication, become less secure.

The frustrations that helped produce the Trump presidency are real. So is the profound fatigue about engagement with the world, after more than 15 years of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and almost a decade removed from the Great Recession. But overcompensating through general global detachment, episodic assertions of American muscle and “creative destruction” of institutions would be a dangerous illusion, not a workable strategy.

At home, we have checks and balances that cushion the domestic consequences of such illusions. The wider world lacks those brakes. Without U.S. leadership and its fundamental elements — the idea our country represents, the initiative animating alliances that set us apart from lonelier powers such as Russia and China, and the institutions that underpin our influence — the realities around us will grow more complicated and more threatening.

...

 

[Destiny]

@Destiny
Suddenly I realized - couple days ago, I think - the jerky rolling after tweets are posted in a thread is gone. Yay!! and thank you if it was you that fixed it. Now I can actually read the entire thread. :-)

I might have since I upgraded a couple of weeks ago. Glad it seems to have fixed you.

[47of74]

The South Koreans are none to happy about Presidence Putinfluffer's "bluff" about the carriers.

cnn.com/2017/04/20/asia/south-korea-worries-donald-trump-uss-carl-vinson/index.html

Quote

"What Mr. Trump said was very important for the national security of South Korea," Presidential candidate Hong Joon-pyo told the Wall Street Journal.

"If that was a lie, then during Trump's term, South Korea will not trust whatever Trump says," said Hong, who is currently trailing in the polls.

South Korean media also seized on the conflicting reports on Trump's "armada" -- led by the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson.

One newspaper headline called it Trump's "Carl Vinson lie," and speculated that the Russian and Chinese leaders must have had a good laugh at its absence.

 

[fraurosena]

5 minutes ago, 47of74 said:

the Russian and Chinese leaders must have had a good laugh at its absence.

Sadly, the presidunce is making a laughing stock of America, and this stupid stunt is just one of many examples why.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump must decide whether to support or undermine Obamacare"

Quote

President Trump is pressuring Congress to sink parts of the Affordable Care Act. But now that the first attempt at a GOP health-care overhaul has failed, he must decide whether to throw the law a line.

The White House and Republican lawmakers are facing key decisions that could either improve the insurance marketplaces established by the ACA next year or prompt insurers to further hike rates or withdraw from those marketplaces entirely. Republicans had hoped to protect those with marketplace coverage while lawmakers replaced Obamacare.

But with that effort hitting a wall, Trump and his health-care decision-makers are in a bind: They can either let the current system fail and risk raising the ire of 11 million Americans who use the marketplaces, or help stabilize Obamacare and potentially make it harder for Republicans in Congress to abandon the law itself.

“It’s an awkward political environment, there’s no question about it,” said Lanhee Chen, a health-policy expert and former adviser to 2012 presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

Republican objections to the ACA naturally lead them away from assisting it, but the party now bears some responsibility for what happens to it, Chen added.

“The reality of this is Republicans will face some political repercussions for what happens to Obamacare,” he said.

Trump and other Republicans have long predicted a so-called death spiral for the state-based marketplaces set up under President Obama’s signature domestic achievement. Trump has often tweeted and said on the campaign trail that the law will “die of its own weight.” He shrugged off the recent failure of the GOP health-care bill by saying the law is “exploding” anyway.

“The best thing we can do, politically speaking, is let Obamacare explode,” Trump said in the Oval Office last month. “It’s exploding right now.”

The dire predictions have partially come true: Although some state marketplaces offered multiple plan options and only modest premium raises last year, many others provided only one plan choice and double-digit premium hikes. Next year’s outlook is still unclear, but it’s unlikely the marketplaces will suddenly attract a better mix of healthy enrollees to help lower costs.

If the marketplaces further deteriorate, Republicans may take the fall, surveys show. A recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that a majority of Americans will now blame Republicans, not Democrats, for marketplace problems, because the GOP spent the past seven years promising to fix and replace the system.

That reality is forcing Republicans, including Trump, to seriously consider a half-dozen actions that could help improve — or at least sustain — the marketplaces where Americans without employer-sponsored plans buy coverage.

“Looking at next year, if we imagine that the marketplace right now is, say, a C-minus, there are several things that need to be done to just preserve it at its C-minus level,” said Mike Adelberg, who under Obama directed the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight established at the Department of Health and Human Services.

There is a list of actions the administration must decide whether to take to keep the marketplaces humming, most of them through regulatory actions at the Health and Human Services Department or through the Internal Revenue Service.

The actions center on three programs: cost-sharing reductions, reinsurance and risk corridors. Cost-sharing refers to government subsidies to low-income Americans to help them pay for insurance. Trump threatened recently to let such subsidies lapse, but Democrats say they will shut down the government as part of the spending negotiations next week if the president follows through.

Administration officials and lawmakers are still deciding how to handle the issue. A White House spokesman said only that “no decisions have been made at this time.”

Reinsurance and risk corridors are two programs set up under the ACA to redistribute funds from insurers with healthier enrollees to insurers with sicker, more expensive customers.

The marketplaces could also be hurt or helped depending on whether the IRS enforces the ACA’s individual mandate to buy coverage and whether the administration enforces new, tighter rules around enrollment.

By pulling these levers, Congress and the administration could buy goodwill with insurers and also help shield themselves from criticisms that they’re ignoring the plight of those who have already seen the cost of their Obamacare plans rise dramatically. The marketplaces are already facing enough problems without Republicans trying to hurt them even more, said Gail Wilensky, who directed Medicare and Medicaid under George H.W. Bush.

...

Trump and his administration have given mixed signals on how they will approach the issue.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services issued tighter enrollment rules last week that shorten the sign-up period for marketplace plans, mandate people pay any outstanding premiums before new coverage begins and, if they’re trying to sign up outside the regular season, require them to prove they meet the qualifications. These are all changes that pleased insurers selling marketplace plans.

But the administration has also essentially stopped enforcing the individual mandate to buy coverage, which was supposed to be an important ACA tool to ensure that not just sick people, but also those who are healthy, buy coverage.

The outgoing Obama administration had said that starting this year, the IRS wouldn’t accept tax filings if people failed to indicate whether they had been insured. But under Trump, the agency has said it will continue the practice of accepting forms with that answer left blank, saying the decision meshes with the president’s executive order to reduce the burdens of the health-care law.

“Processing silent returns means that taxpayer returns are not systematically rejected, allowing them to be processed and minimizing burden on taxpayers, including those expecting a refund,” the agency said in a statement, referring to returns that don’t indicate the taxpayer’s health-care status.

It remains unclear whether the Trump administration and Republicans will provide extra payments to insurers, which insurers say are essential for helping them hold down premiums. The most pressing of those payments are cost-sharing reductions, which reimburse insurers for discounting extra insurance costs such as co-payments and deductibles for those with incomes lower than 250 percent of the federal poverty level.

The payments amount to about $7 billion next year. That’s far less than the $110 billion the federal government pays every year to subsidize premiums but still a significant amount for insurers who are overwhelmingly losing money on the marketplaces.

Congress must decide whether to provide those payments in a government funding bill it is taking up next week. Although top Republicans appear reluctant to withhold them, Trump has suggested they could be used as leverage to get Democrats on board with other GOP priorities, such as funding a border wall.

Insurers are also closely watching the administration for how it will treat the reinsurance and risk-corridor programs. They are due one more set of reinsurance payments before the program phases out, and it’s unclear whether the administration will pay all the money available or repay some of the funds to the U.S. treasury, as some Republicans have called for and as the law seems to direct.

A number of insurers have also sued for risk-corridor payments, which the federal government lacked sufficient funds to cover over the past few years. If they get those payments, some insurers might be more prone to continuing to sell marketplace plans next year.

“Hypothetically, if the administration was to settle on the risk corridors, it would make people feel a whole heck of a lot better about sticking around,” Adelberg said.

 

I can see the tangerine toddler being petulant and refusing to do anything to help the ACA continue covering American citizens.

[AnywhereButHere]

@Destiny

Yes! The crazy scrolling is gone. Yay! Thanks so much.

On the Caligula front, this has got to be driving the Orange Emperor to drink.

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/judge-curiel-once-criticized-trump-gets-deported-dreamer-case-n748651

Quote

A federal lawsuit brought by a so-called "Dreamer" deported to Mexico has been assigned to District Court Judge Gonzalo Curiel — the jurist famously attacked by then-candidate Donald Trump over his "Mexican heritage" in a separate case involving Trump University.

Juan Manuel Montes, 23, filed a complaint Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California, alleging that the government did not provide any documentation explaining the legality of sending him back to Mexico. The suit seeks documents related to his case.

The case was assigned at random to Curiel, the Indiana-born judge whose impartiality was called into question by Trump last year due to what the then-candidate called Curiel's "Mexican heritage."

 

[47of74]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Trump must decide whether to support or undermine Obamacare"

I can see the tangerine toddler being petulant and refusing to do anything to help the ACA continue covering American citizens.

The toddler and the GOP think that health care should only be something that the wealthy should have and everyone else should go off and die horribly and painfully.   They do not give a fuck about human life once it's born.

And I honestly believe that too.   

[JMarie]

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2017/04/20/sarah-palin-ted-nugent-kid-rock-visit-white-house/100688570/

 

"Sarah Palin, Kid Rock and Ted Nugent walk into a bar......"

 

Not a joke I'm interested in hearing.

[47of74]

5 minutes ago, JMarie said:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2017/04/20/sarah-palin-ted-nugent-kid-rock-visit-white-house/100688570/

 

"Sarah Palin, Kid Rock and Ted Nugent walk into a bar......"

 

Not a joke I'm interested in hearing.

Yeah the toddler just had to welcome those three fornicate sticks to the White House.  Ugh.  I can smell the oil mixed with shit form here.

[sawasdee]

4 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Beneath the surface, however, lurk more troubling trend lines. Through policy incoherence and not-so-benign neglect, the Trump team risks hollowing out the ideas, initiative and institutions on which U.S. leadership and international order rest.

THIS is what scares the s@*t out out of me!

@GreyhoundFanThank you for posting this article - it has depressed but energised me.  But not living in the US , there is so  little I can do to lessen the risk to the entire world - the US president influences everything, but 'Mr Pissed Off ' in Michigan, by his vote for an animated eejit, puts my life and future at risk.

[samira_catlover]

On 4/19/2017 at 9:53 AM, GreyhoundFan said:

"Trump makes rare effort to sell his ‘America first’ agenda outside Washington"

Helen Powell, who is quoted in this article, is a nitwit. Agent Orange has "God in his life"? Seriously?

Hon, Fearless Leader DOES have "God in his life".  Every time he looks in the mirror, he gets a chance to pay homage and worship the Only Divine Being in his universe. 

[GreyhoundFan]

57 minutes ago, JMarie said:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2017/04/20/sarah-palin-ted-nugent-kid-rock-visit-white-house/100688570/

 

"Sarah Palin, Kid Rock and Ted Nugent walk into a bar......"

 

Not a joke I'm interested in hearing.

Alex, I'll take "Dumb, Dumber, and Dumbest" for $200...

 

 

"A Fake and a Fraud"

Quote

Donald Trump’s mounting reversals, failures and betrayals make it increasingly clear that he is a fake and a fraud.

For many of us, this is affirmative reinforcement; for others, it is devastating revelation.

But it is those who believed — and cast supportive ballots — who should feel most cheated and also most contrite. You placed your faith in a phony. His promises are crashing to earth like a fleet of paper airplanes.

He oversold what he could deliver because he had no idea what would be required to deliver it, nor did he care. He told you what you wanted to hear so that he could get what he wanted to have. He played you for fools.

...

Trump has done a complete about-face on the Federal Reserve chairwoman, Janet Yellen, and when was the last time you heard him threaten to lock up Hillary Clinton?

This is by no means an exhaustive list of the positions he took for in-the-moment advantage that have been quickly converted into in-reality abandonment.

He isn’t cunningly unpredictable; he’s tragically unprepared and dangerously unprincipled.

No wonder then that a Gallup poll released Monday found:

“President Donald Trump’s image among Americans as someone who keeps his promises has faded in the first two months of his presidency, falling from 62 percent in February to 45 percent. The public is also less likely to see him as a ‘strong and decisive leader,’ as someone who ‘can bring about the changes this country needs’ or as ‘honest and trustworthy.’”

...

Even so, The Washington Post’s The Fix warned readers to beware “the myth of the disillusioned Trump voter,” citing a Pew Research Center poll released Monday “showing very little buyer’s remorse among Trump voters.”

As the newspaper pointed out: “The poll showed just 7 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say Trump has performed worse than they expected him to. Fully 38 percent — five times as many — say he has performed better.”

This seems to me a fair point, but it requires us to have a better handle on the expectations for him in the first place. After all, the union has yet to crumble into ashes and his Twitter tirades have yet to push us into an impulse war.

Furthermore, the stubborn human resistance to admitting a mistake should never be underestimated. Admitting that Trump is failing, even when he is failing you and your family specifically, is an enormous pill to swallow. Acknowledging that your blindness, selfishness and fear compelled you to buy into a man who is selling you out may take more time.

But I think that time is coming, because Trump is an unabashed leech and an unrepentant liar.

Trump cares only about Trump, his brand and his image, his family and his fortune. Indeed, his personal philosophy as president might best be described as clan over country.

Instead of being a grenade-throwing iconoclast bent on blowing up the D.C. establishment and the big-money power structures, he has stocked his inner circle with billionaires and bankers, and he has bent to the establishment.

Trump sold himself as a populist only to line his own pockets. Trump built his entire reputation not as the champion of the common man, but by curating his image as a crude effigy of the cultural elite.

He accrued his wealth by selling hollow dreams of high society to people who wanted to flaunt their money or pretend that they had some.

Put another way, Trump’s brand is built on exclusivity, not inclusivity. It is about the separate, vaulted position of luxury, above and beyond the ability for it to be accessed by the common. It is all about the bourgeois and has absolutely nothing to do with the blue collar.

And yet somehow, it was the blue collar that bought his bill of goods. People saw uncouth and thought unconventional; they saw raffish and thought rebel.

They projected principle and commitment onto a person anathema to both. Now, we all have to pay a hefty toll as Trump’s legions cling to thinning hope.