Trump 18: Info to Russia, With Love

[fraurosena]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

This is priceless: "Conservative reporters are upset with Trump. And it has nothing to do with policy."

  Reveal hidden contents

Even the reporters who are supposed to like the Trump administration are grumbling about the Trump administration these days.

The frustration among conservative media outlets, which cheered for Donald Trump on the campaign trail, has nothing to do with the scandals and policy setbacks engulfing the president. Instead, they say they have become second-class citizens in their access and connections to the president and his closest aides.

Several are upset that big interviews and big scoops have gone to the mainstream news media. And some of the biggest have gone to the New York Times and NBC News, outlets Trump has branded “enemies of the American people.”

“The liberal mainstream media has gotten the big chunks of meat,” said a reporter for a conservative news organization. He added, “It’s infuriating to read [a mainstream news story] and see that they’re talking to them and not us. They’ve forgotten who got them here.”

The complaints come at a time when the mainstream media — particularly The Washington Post and New York Times — has delivered stories that have plunged the White House into its most serious turmoil to date. And it’s another knock against White House press secretary Sean Spicer, whose job security has been questioned over the past week. (Spicer and White House communications director Michael Dubke are the main gatekeepers who determine who gets to interview the president.) Trump reportedly is considering a shakeup in his communications staff; on Tuesday, Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle said she has been interviewed for Spicer’s job.

But the griping is also surprising in light of the unprecedented efforts Spicer and other White House officials have made to accommodate Trump-centric media organizations since he took office.

Trump himself has given interviews to such Trump-friendly outlets as Breitbart News, the Christian Broadcasting Network , the Washington Examiner and several to Fox News since the inauguration. The White House has also given press credentials to right-leaning hoax-peddlers like Gateway Pundit and enabled conservative talk-show hosts to ask questions via Skype during daily press briefings.

Not good enough, say several conservative journalists, who commented for this article on condition of anonymity to avoid damaging their relationships with the White House.

“There’s still this outsize focus on trying to work with the establishment media,” said an editor of a conservative journal. “The people who gave Trump 306 electoral votes aren’t reading The Washington Post or watching CNN. They’re reading Breitbart, the Daily Caller, listening to [Laura] Ingraham and watching Fox News. I think they run a risk [with Trump’s core supporters] by keeping the conservative media at arm’s length.”

The journalists took umbrage when Trump ignored them to call New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman and Washington Post reporter Robert Costa to comment on a failed effort to pass a health-care bill in March. They also said Trump’s top advisers, chief of staff Reince Preibus and chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, gave a rare joint interview to New York magazine in February, but have offered nothing similar to them. (Bannon is the former chairman of Breitbart News.)

One reporter noted that Trump has spoken to four of the five outlets (ABC, CBS, NBC and the New York Times) that he declared “enemies of the American people” in a notorious tweet in mid-February. “They call the establishment media the opposition party,” he said, “but they don’t act like it.

Last week, Trump gave interviews to NBC and Time magazine, again ignoring the conservative media. “This makes him look like a Manhattan snob,” the reporter said. “Those big New York-D.C. media people don’t play in the red states.”

The frustration among conservative journalists has grown to the point that there has been talk among them of breaking away from the venerable White House Correspondents Association to form an organization of their own that would lobby officials for access.

Spicer and his top deputy, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, did not return a request for comment Tuesday.

Several reporters are still sore about the last official White House outreach to the conservative press in late April.

During a White House reception featuring Trump and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross with about 30 editors, reporters and commentators, officials asked journalists to surrender their phones and declared that the meeting was on background. That meant comments could not be attributed to specific speakers.

Afterward, press staffers told the journalists that Trump’s remarks were on the record. But by then many in the group hadn’t taken notes or recorded the remarks, leaving them unable to render specific quotes. What’s more, given the broad guestlist, no one had an exclusive on anything.

“They treated us like children,” said one journalist who attended.

In some respects, Trump’s strategy of playing to the mainstream media shouldn’t surprise anyone, said the editor of another conservative website, who expressed less frustration with the White House.

The New York Times was the respected hometown newspaper during his salad days as a New York developer, he noted, and Time magazine was the gold standard when newsweeklies were prominent and prestigious. The TV networks were the biggest players of all, he said.

“The media he cares about is the media he reads and sees,” said this editor. “There’s a disconnect there between him and his staff. He wants to do the media he watches or reads. His staff has a different strategy at times.”

Several conservative journalists offered differing opinions on whether they’d like to see Spicer stay on the job. But they seem to agree on one thing:

“At the end of the day, all we want is a seat at table,” said one. “We think we’ve earned it.”

Cry me a river of tears.

So, let me get this straight. The conservative media is complaining that the mainstream media is reporting FAKE NEWS! and they are... not. Owkaaayyyyy...

[Rachel333]

New breaking story. Trump Told Russians That Firing ‘Nut Job’ Comey Eased Pressure From Investigation

 

Quote

“I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job,” Mr. Trump said, according to the document, which was read to The New York Times by an American official. “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”

It's almost breathtaking how wrong he was.  If he hadn't fired Comey this Russia story probably wouldn't be as big now as it is.

[formergothardite]

Just now, Rachel333 said:

“I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”

This made me laugh. He was so, so wrong. 

[fraurosena]

Hey, @onekidanddone, it didn't take that long did it? 

[Rachel333]

This tweet is amazing.

[PreciousPantsofDoom]

Have we talked about Erdogan bodyguards/goons beating up lawful protestors on American soil yet?  

The footage of it was sickening.  I am outraged on behalf of the US, and I'm not even American. 

From the sound of it, the thugs have diplomatic immunity. Only under the Orange Reich would this violent insult not have been the top story for weeks. (And I blame Fuck face for inviting Erdogan in the first place aND for ma king it cLear that human rights aND rule of law are just annoying impediments to doing what ever the fuck you want.  There is a reason that decent democratic legitimate governments try not to get to cozy with the likes of Erdogan. 

I agree with what McCain said, that the Turkish ambassador should be thrown out of the country. International relations are very tricky, but there should be consequences for such a blatant act.  Fuck. (Did I mention that I'm outraged?)

[Cartmann99]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

This is priceless: "Conservative reporters are upset with Trump. And it has nothing to do with policy."

  Reveal hidden contents

Even the reporters who are supposed to like the Trump administration are grumbling about the Trump administration these days.

The frustration among conservative media outlets, which cheered for Donald Trump on the campaign trail, has nothing to do with the scandals and policy setbacks engulfing the president. Instead, they say they have become second-class citizens in their access and connections to the president and his closest aides.

Several are upset that big interviews and big scoops have gone to the mainstream news media. And some of the biggest have gone to the New York Times and NBC News, outlets Trump has branded “enemies of the American people.”

“The liberal mainstream media has gotten the big chunks of meat,” said a reporter for a conservative news organization. He added, “It’s infuriating to read [a mainstream news story] and see that they’re talking to them and not us. They’ve forgotten who got them here.”

The complaints come at a time when the mainstream media — particularly The Washington Post and New York Times — has delivered stories that have plunged the White House into its most serious turmoil to date. And it’s another knock against White House press secretary Sean Spicer, whose job security has been questioned over the past week. (Spicer and White House communications director Michael Dubke are the main gatekeepers who determine who gets to interview the president.) Trump reportedly is considering a shakeup in his communications staff; on Tuesday, Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle said she has been interviewed for Spicer’s job.

But the griping is also surprising in light of the unprecedented efforts Spicer and other White House officials have made to accommodate Trump-centric media organizations since he took office.

Trump himself has given interviews to such Trump-friendly outlets as Breitbart News, the Christian Broadcasting Network , the Washington Examiner and several to Fox News since the inauguration. The White House has also given press credentials to right-leaning hoax-peddlers like Gateway Pundit and enabled conservative talk-show hosts to ask questions via Skype during daily press briefings.

Not good enough, say several conservative journalists, who commented for this article on condition of anonymity to avoid damaging their relationships with the White House.

“There’s still this outsize focus on trying to work with the establishment media,” said an editor of a conservative journal. “The people who gave Trump 306 electoral votes aren’t reading The Washington Post or watching CNN. They’re reading Breitbart, the Daily Caller, listening to [Laura] Ingraham and watching Fox News. I think they run a risk [with Trump’s core supporters] by keeping the conservative media at arm’s length.”

The journalists took umbrage when Trump ignored them to call New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman and Washington Post reporter Robert Costa to comment on a failed effort to pass a health-care bill in March. They also said Trump’s top advisers, chief of staff Reince Preibus and chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, gave a rare joint interview to New York magazine in February, but have offered nothing similar to them. (Bannon is the former chairman of Breitbart News.)

One reporter noted that Trump has spoken to four of the five outlets (ABC, CBS, NBC and the New York Times) that he declared “enemies of the American people” in a notorious tweet in mid-February. “They call the establishment media the opposition party,” he said, “but they don’t act like it.

Last week, Trump gave interviews to NBC and Time magazine, again ignoring the conservative media. “This makes him look like a Manhattan snob,” the reporter said. “Those big New York-D.C. media people don’t play in the red states.”

The frustration among conservative journalists has grown to the point that there has been talk among them of breaking away from the venerable White House Correspondents Association to form an organization of their own that would lobby officials for access.

Spicer and his top deputy, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, did not return a request for comment Tuesday.

Several reporters are still sore about the last official White House outreach to the conservative press in late April.

During a White House reception featuring Trump and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross with about 30 editors, reporters and commentators, officials asked journalists to surrender their phones and declared that the meeting was on background. That meant comments could not be attributed to specific speakers.

Afterward, press staffers told the journalists that Trump’s remarks were on the record. But by then many in the group hadn’t taken notes or recorded the remarks, leaving them unable to render specific quotes. What’s more, given the broad guestlist, no one had an exclusive on anything.

“They treated us like children,” said one journalist who attended.

In some respects, Trump’s strategy of playing to the mainstream media shouldn’t surprise anyone, said the editor of another conservative website, who expressed less frustration with the White House.

The New York Times was the respected hometown newspaper during his salad days as a New York developer, he noted, and Time magazine was the gold standard when newsweeklies were prominent and prestigious. The TV networks were the biggest players of all, he said.

“The media he cares about is the media he reads and sees,” said this editor. “There’s a disconnect there between him and his staff. He wants to do the media he watches or reads. His staff has a different strategy at times.”

Several conservative journalists offered differing opinions on whether they’d like to see Spicer stay on the job. But they seem to agree on one thing:

“At the end of the day, all we want is a seat at table,” said one. “We think we’ve earned it.”

Cry me a river of tears.

Trump wants as many eyeballs as possible reading about him, so it makes sense to give interviews to the MSM over the Family Faith Liberty Pro-life Jesus American Exceptionalism Guns, Baby, Guns!! & Doom Bucket Report.

[onekidanddone]

29 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

Hey, @onekidanddone, it didn't take that long did it? 

Thanks for heads up. His lawyers must be telling him to shut the fornicate up, but he can't.  Just like I can't eat just one potato chip, he can't stop incriminating himself.  Does he  have ANY idea at all how guilty he looks?  Comey was a show boat and a nut job? Stunningly lacking of self awareness.

Song played over the Oval Office's sound system...."Freaking at the Freakers Ball..Y'all"

[kunoichi66]

3 hours ago, onekidanddone said:

Is there anybody anywhere who buys the "for my family" story? Like somebody installed one of the pull strings in his back, you know like the ones dolls have.  "Going to spend more time with my family".  

I think I need to call my doctor because I've rolled my eyes so much they are stuck that way.

http://www.robot-hugs.com/injury/

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump’s media firewall is collapsing as the Russia probe gets closer"

Spoiler

A current, senior White House adviser — not merely another former campaign aide or distant associate of President Trump — has been identified by federal investigators as a significant person of interest in a probe aimed at determining whether Trump's political team colluded with Russia to meddle in the 2016 election.

Let that sink in.

Among many things, the focus on someone close to the president means that the firewall protecting him from the full heat of media scrutiny is crumbling. Though he complained this week that “no politician in history … has been treated worse or more unfairly,” the reality is that Trump has been somewhat insulated by journalists’ inability to show that the FBI investigation touches him or anyone on his White House staff directly.

Trump has insisted that he is not in the FBI’s crosshairs, claiming last week that the agency’s former director, James B. Comey, told him on three separate occasions that he is not a target. And the White House has attempted to distance itself from known targets such as Paul Manafort, Roger Stone and Carter Page.

At one point, White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters that Manafort, who chaired Trump’s campaign before being replaced by Kellyanne Conway, “played a very limited role for a very limited amount of time.”

Laughable as that assertion was, the press has felt obligated to exercise dual restraint: It is possible that any contacts between campaign officials and Russians were not part of a coordinated effort to collect and disseminate damaging information about Hillary Clinton. And it is possible that even if there was collusion, it happened without Trump’s knowledge.

Both possibilities are still, well, possible. But in the context of the FBI investigation, the separation between Trump and those working on his behalf is shrinking, as the probe pushes nearer to his inner circle. Though it is too early to know what the FBI will conclude, the attention on someone Trump continues to lean on as president would appear to increase the likelihood that if collusion occurred, he might have been aware of it.

In the simplest terms, there is a big difference between headlines that say “one of the president’s senior advisers is under investigation” and headlines that say “some people who used to work for candidate Trump are under investigation.”

Trump now enters a new phase in which the focus of press coverage will sharpen. Many stories have been written about his failure to vet staffers more thoroughly. The New York Times reported Wednesday that Trump’s team knew Michael Flynn was the subject of a separate FBI investigation yet still named him national security adviser, making the president’s judgment all the more questionable.

It is getting harder and harder to give Trump the benefit of the doubt — to continue attributing his hiring of people who draw FBI scrutiny to innocent carelessness. Expect the White House to confront more aggressive inquiries about whether Trump knew what his staffers might have been up to.

Yeah, crumbling is the right term.

[GreyhoundFan]

 

Okay, this is good: "In 119 days, President Trump has made 586 false and misleading claims". Way, way, way too much to quote, but I love their succinct response to his claim that, “No politician in history -- and I say this with great surety -- has been treated worse or more unfairly.”  -- 

Quote

Four presidents have been assassinated.

Yeah, that pretty much says it all. Of course, the TT would probably say that they were assassinated as a sign of respect or some such nonsense. He truly lives in his own world. It puts me in mind of an old TV show. I don't know if anyone here remembers it, the wonderful "St. Elsewhere". At the very end of the series, it was revealed that:

Spoiler

The whole series was a figment of the autistic Tommy Wesfall's imagination

 

[fraurosena]

24 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Yeah, that pretty much says it all. Of course, the TT would probably say that they were assassinated as a sign of respect or some such nonsense. He truly lives in his own world. It puts me in mind of an old TV show. I don't know if anyone here remembers it, the wonderful "St. Elsewhere". At the very end of the series, it was revealed that:

Ahhhhhhhh, St. Elswhere!

Loved that series. And just look at how many of those very young faces became very famous after that!

 

[onekidanddone]

4 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

Ahhhhhhhh, St. Elswhere!

Loved that series. And just look at how many of those very young faces became very famous after that!

 

Just checked and only one season is on Nextfilx. Loved that show and cried when it went off the air.

[fraurosena]

4 minutes ago, onekidanddone said:

Just checked and only one season is on Nextfilx. Loved that show and cried when it went off the air.

There are full seasons posted on youtube. Not always the best quality, but still.

[laPapessaGiovanna]

1 hour ago, Rachel333 said:

  Quote

“I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job,” Mr. Trump said, according to the document, which was read to The New York Times by an American official. “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”

He's Putin's lap dog. He reported back to his master as soon as possible. How much does he owe to the Russians? I hope his tax returns will be subpoenaed soon.

[fraurosena]

8 minutes ago, laPapessaGiovanna said:

He's Putin's lap dog. He reported back to his master as soon as possible. How much does he owe to the Russians? I hope his tax returns will be subpoenaed soon.

I agree that his tax returns should be subpoenaed. However, do you really think he's filled them in truthfully? I have more faith in the 'follow the money' investigations that are going on behind the scenes to unearth the full extent of the presidunce's indebteness to the Russians.

[fraurosena]

This is what you get for putting a contemptible, colluding and corrupt businessman in the Oval Office.

The (Possibly Illegal) Art of a $100 Billion Saudi Arms Deal

Quote

As Donald Trump heads to Riyadh today on his first international trip as president, he brings with him a gift: a massive arms deal reportedly worth more than $100 billion for Saudi Arabia. [...]  According to the New York Times, earlier this month, in the middle of a meeting with high-level Saudi delegates, Kushner greased the gears by calling Lockheed Martin chief Marilyn A. Hewson and asking her to cut the price on a sophisticated missile defense system. Other details of the package, though, have been somewhat shrouded in mystery—Congress, which will have to approve any new arms deal, has to yet to be notified of specific offerings—but it is said to include planes, armored vehicles, warships, and, perhaps most notably, precision-guided bombs.

It's that last detail in particular that is making many in Washington sweat. The Obama administration inked arms deals with the kingdom worth more than $100 billion over two terms, but it changed course in its last months. As Mother Jones has regularly reported, the Saudi-led war against the Houthi armed group in Yemen has been fueled in part by American weapons, intelligence, and aerial refueling, and it has repeatedly hit civilian targets, including schools, marketplaces, weddings, hospitals, and places of worship. Civilian deaths are estimated to have reached 10,000, with 40,000 injured. In response, the Obama White House suspended a sale of precision-guided bombs to the country in December.

But now, despite the kingdom's track record, President Trump is aiming to revivethe deal. "Lifting the suspension on precision-guided munitions is a big deal," says William Hartung, the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy. "It's a huge impact if it reinforces the Saudi bombing campaign in Yemen, and also the signal that it's okay with us. It's saying, 'Have at it. Do what you want.'"

[...]  Trump is ready to jettison any human rights concerns," he says, noting that the administration has all but explicitly stated as much. Of course the White House has already excised "human rights" from the top of its agenda; Secretary of State Rex  Tillerson has announced plans to cut 2,300 diplomatic and civil service jobs and, in a speech to State Department employees outlining the administration's "America First" strategy, Tillerson argued that pushing US values on other countries, such as protecting human rights, "creates obstacles to our ability to advance our national security interests, our economic interests."

Following that logic, this arms package might just exemplify the elusive "America First" doctrine. "It's good for the American economy," a White House official told Reuters of the deal, suggesting that it would result in jobs in the defense sector. According to analysis by Abramson, Trump's first 100 days in office resulted in $6 billion worth of notified arms sales—eight times that of Obama's, whose first 100 days totaled $713 million.

[...] Both Republicans and Democrats in Congress have continued to highlight the need to address the Yemen war through humanitarian means, as well as limiting US support.

Even if Congress doesn't put up a fight, which seems unlikely, Trump's new deal may fall prey to other obstacles. Earlier this week, the American Bar Association's Center for Human Rights released their expert opinion on arms sales to Saudi Arabia and concluded that future sales may not pass legal muster. "In the face of persistent reports of wrongdoing, Saudi Arabia has failed to rebut allegations or provide detailed evidence of compliance with binding obligations arising from international humanitarian law," the report states. "Under these circumstances, further sales under both the Arms Export Control Act and the Foreign Assistance Act are prohibited until the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia takes effective measures to ensure compliance with international law and the president submits relevant certifications to the Congress."

Furthermore, Hartung isn't convinced a deal of such tremendous proportions can realistically come to fruition unless it incorporates deals previously made under the Obama administration—especially considering that it won't include big ticket items like the F-35 fighter jet, an offer that would make Israel deeply uncomfortable. "Where are they gonna get $100 billion worth of stuff to sell?" Hartung asks. "I don't see where it is going to come from—are we going to ship our whole Navy over there? Under Obama, under Foreign Military Sales, they offered $115 billion in weapons over his two terms. This would be a one-shot deal that would be almost equal to that, and the Obama numbers were a record," he says. "It seems like part of this is: Trump just likes big numbers. It's like when he claims credit for jobs he didn't really help create."

If it's for optics, there's one clear benefit. "Even if it doesn't happen, it's got the short-term benefit of Trump showing that he cares about the Saudis," says Hartung, suggesting that it possibly could be political theater as the two countries mend ties and as the US tries to project hard power in the region.

Of course, what Trump often fails to realize is that optics go both ways. In addition to what human rights groups have called indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets, on multiple occasions, the Saudi coalition has blocked humanitarian aid from entering Yemen, contributing to the growing catastrophe that's left millions on the brink of starvation and millions more who have been forced to flee their homes. "It appears that war crimes are being committed in Yemen, and if the United States is supporting that war, in a way it is also culpable for those war crimes," says Abramson. "Most Americans don't want their country to be engaged in war crimes. That's another reason why we really need to pay attention to this."

 

[bashfulpixie]

2 hours ago, Cartmann99 said:

Trump wants as many eyeballs as possible reading about him, so it makes sense to give interviews to the MSM over the Family Faith Liberty Pro-life Jesus American Exceptionalism Guns, Baby, Guns!! & Doom Bucket Report.

That is amazing.

[Rachel333]

According to CNN sources (link has an autoplaying video, just fyi) White House lawyers are researching impeachment for what they believe is a distant possibility.

[GreyhoundFan]

49 minutes ago, onekidanddone said:

Just checked and only one season is on Nextfilx. Loved that show and cried when it went off the air.

I wish they would release the rest of the seasons, but it doesn't seem likely. It was such a great show.

 

This is alternatively hilarious and sad: "‘People Here Think Trump Is a Laughingstock’"

Spoiler

“Chaos.”
“Circus.”
“Laughingstock.”

Those were just a few of the comments I heard in Berlin this week from senior European officials trying to make sense of the meltdown in Washington at just the moment when a politically imploding President Trump embarks on what he called “my big foreign trip” in this morning’s kickoff tweet.

For months, the American president has raised unprecedented questions about the future of the American-led alliance that has persisted since the end of World War II. He has slagged off NATO, evinced skepticism about the European Union, cheered for like-minded right-wing populists, boosted antidemocratic strongmen like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and vowed to rip up free trade deals—and Europe’s political class has been outraged, confused and even terrified.

Trump’s tumultuous last two weeks—from firing his FBI director to allegedly sharing highly classified information with Russian officials even as a formidable special counsel was being named to investigate his campaign team’s possible collusion with the Kremlin—has them still confused about his foreign policy. But now they are more appalled than afraid of the man with whom they have no choice but to partner.

Many I spoke with said they had made a fundamental mistake of viewing Trump primarily as an ideologue with whom they disagreed rather than what he increasingly appears to be: an ill-prepared newcomer to the world stage, with uninformed views and a largely untested team that will now be sorely tried by a 9-day, 5-stop world tour that would be wildly ambitious even for a seasoned global leader.

“People are less worried than they were six weeks ago, less afraid,” a senior German government official with extensive experience in the United States told me. “Now they see the clownish nature.” Or, as another German said on the sidelines of a meeting here devoted to taking stock of 70 years of U.S.-German relations, “People here think Trump is a laughingstock.”

“The dominant reaction to Trump right now is mockery,” Jacob Heilbrunn, the editor of the conservative journal the National Interest, told the meeting at the German Foreign Office here while moderating a panel on Trump’s foreign policy that dealt heavily on the difficulty of divining an actual policy amid the spectacle. Heilbrunn, whose publication hosted Trump’s inaugural foreign policy speech in Washington during last year’s campaign, used the ‘L’ word too. “The Trump administration is becoming an international laughingstock.” Michael Werz, a German expert from the liberal U.S. think tank Center for American Progress, agreed, adding he was struck by “how rapidly the American brand is depreciating over the last 20 weeks.”

Of course, Americans have had presidential scandals before, and Europe has a long history of substantive clashes with U.S. presidents over everything from the Vietnam war and confronting the Soviets to the widely opposed 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Even Trump flying off on a poorly timed international tour isn’t entirely unfamiliar territory: Many embattled U.S. leaders have hit the road for a dose of statesman-like pageantry, red-carpet receptions and global superpower-style pomp to compensate for pressing investigations and congressional uproar back home. Bill Clinton toured Russia and Northern Ireland after testifying to the grand jury in the Monica Lewinsky affair and was in Israel when he learned the House of Representatives had the votes to impeach him. Ronald Reagan summited with Mikhail Gorbachev as the congressional Iran-Contra hearings threatened to derail his second-term agenda.

But Trump’s tribulations have confounded the world, and especially America’s closest allies here in Europe, in a whole different way. Never has a U.S. president flailed so early in his tenure at a time when he is still such an unknown quantity in the world. In Trump’s case, he will arrive in a skeptical Europe with an inexperienced or nonexistent staff appointed to deal with global problems and a record of wildly contradictory statements even on matters of core principle. Does he think NATO is still “obsolete” or not? Is he prepared to offer the Russians anything more than the symbolism of his recent, chummy Oval Office visit with its foreign minister? Want to blow up carefully negotiated agreements with Europe on climate change and trade?

No one knows.

***

When European diplomats meet these days, they often swap stories about Trump—and how to manage their volatile new ally. “The president of the United States has a 12-second attention span,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told a former senior official in April after meeting Trump in the Oval Office. Not only that, this person told me, the president seemed unprepared and ill-informed, turning the conversation to North Korea and apparently unaware that NATO is not a part of the ongoing North Korea saga.

Such anecdotes have shaped how Europe’s anxious leaders are preparing for Trump’s trip this week – he will come to Brussels for a NATO session on Thursday—and for another one planned for early July, when he visits Germany for a G-20 summit at which he is expected to meet Putin face to face for the first time.

Some of the reported preparations for the NATO session in Brussels this week suggest just how much the volatile-clown theory of the American president has now taken hold.

NATO has downgraded the May 25 session to a meeting from a summit and will hold only a dinner to minimize the chances of a Trump eruption. Leaders have been told to hold normally windy remarks to just two to four minutes to keep Trump’s attention. They are even preparing to consider a “deliverable” to Trump of having NATO officially join the U.S.-led coalition fighting the Islamic State in Syria, as Trump has said his priority is getting NATO to do more in combating terrorism. “It’s a phony deliverable to give to Trump, a Twitter deliverable,” said a former senior U.S. official, pointing out that the individual NATO member states are already members of that coalition.

A Trump photo-op with a chunk of the World Trade Center has been choreographed in hopes of convincing the president who called NATO “obsolete” to reaffirm the basic principles of an organization committed to the mutual security of its members. The World Trade Center wreckage is part of a memorial to the victims of the 9/11 attacks at NATO’s new headquarters that Trump is set to officially open (though the building is not in fact finished), and NATO observers hope he will use the occasion to finally endorse the principle in Article V of the NATO Treaty that requires countries to treat an attack on one NATO country as an attack on all – an article that has only been invoked once in the organization’s history: after 9/11. “The purpose of the 9/11 memorial opening is to try to get Trump to mention the Article V commitment, since how can he get around it? It’s the only time Article V was ever used,” the former official said.

This is viewed as an especially crucial moment for Trump to do so, given his stated goal of working more closely with Russia even as Russia threatens neighboring states like the three Baltic countries that are now NATO members. But Trump has resisted it, and as Thomas Wright of the Brookings Institution has reported, “Trump’s failure to endorse Article V is not an oversight. Members of his cabinet have unsuccessfully tried to insert this language into his remarks, including at his meeting with Stoltenberg.”

Now, they are finally hoping he will do so – but have no promise.

No promises might well be the theme of Trump’s trip. Consider Trump’s original campaign-trail threat to blow up NATO if member states don’t live up to their commitment to put 2 percent of the budget into defense; even that, it appears, might now might be back on the table. Trump has publicly claimed victory on that score, crowing that he had already forced allies to comply, but in fact, few countries have actually raised their spending – and an anonymous senior White House official told a reporter this week that “he is not going to stay in NATO if NATO does not make a lot more progress.”

No doubt jittery officials have reason to be nervous. In an interview as Trump departed, Stoltenberg told Bloomberg TV that “Trump has clearly stated to me in several conversations … that he’s strongly committed to NATO.” As for Thursday’s meeting in Brussels? “I hope and expect that he will reiterate his strong commitment to NATO.”

But will he? And what would it mean if he does?

The question of Donald Trump’s real views on NATO might not be as entertaining as the political spectacle unfolding in Washington, but the answer is just as uncertain.

***

On Tuesday night, Germany Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel opened the conference on U.S.-German relations, sponsored by the American Council on Germany and the Atlantik-Brucke think tank here, with a lengthy, serious speech on the Marshall Plan’s legacy, a paean to American leadership in Europe and a rebuttal to Trump’s “America First” mantra.

“We associate the United States with the idea of freedom and democracy,” he said, before warning of the erosion of the global order that America made. “A recalibration of the world is in full swing.”

An hour later, former Democratic National Committee chair Donna Brazile was taking questions over dinner from a largely German group of current and former government officials and international business leaders.

What did they want to know?

How does impeachment work? Did James Comey’s last-minute reopening of the Clinton investigation swing the election to Trump? Did the Russians? Oh, and once again: Will Trump be impeached?

“Well, people seem to think he’s just going to be removed. I don’t know,” Brazile said, after telling the Europeans that she thought Democrats, not Russians or the ousted FBI director, bore more blame for the Trump victory. “He’s the president, he was elected.” Brazile said she prayed for Trump in church. “I want my president to succeed,” she said, before adding, “But no one is above the law.”

A few minutes after she finished speaking, the New York Times posted the latest revelation of a week filled with them: that Comey had kept contemporaneous notes of his meetings with Trump, including the allegation that the president asked him to shut down the investigation of his first national security adviser, Michael Flynn.

The Europeans, just like their American counterparts, were glued to their phones.

 

[onekidanddone]

25 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I wish they would release the rest of the seasons, but it doesn't seem likely. It was such a great show.

 

This is alternatively hilarious and sad: "‘People Here Think Trump Is a Laughingstock’"

  Reveal hidden contents

“Chaos.”
“Circus.”
“Laughingstock.”

Those were just a few of the comments I heard in Berlin this week from senior European officials trying to make sense of the meltdown in Washington at just the moment when a politically imploding President Trump embarks on what he called “my big foreign trip” in this morning’s kickoff tweet.

For months, the American president has raised unprecedented questions about the future of the American-led alliance that has persisted since the end of World War II. He has slagged off NATO, evinced skepticism about the European Union, cheered for like-minded right-wing populists, boosted antidemocratic strongmen like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and vowed to rip up free trade deals—and Europe’s political class has been outraged, confused and even terrified.

Trump’s tumultuous last two weeks—from firing his FBI director to allegedly sharing highly classified information with Russian officials even as a formidable special counsel was being named to investigate his campaign team’s possible collusion with the Kremlin—has them still confused about his foreign policy. But now they are more appalled than afraid of the man with whom they have no choice but to partner.

Many I spoke with said they had made a fundamental mistake of viewing Trump primarily as an ideologue with whom they disagreed rather than what he increasingly appears to be: an ill-prepared newcomer to the world stage, with uninformed views and a largely untested team that will now be sorely tried by a 9-day, 5-stop world tour that would be wildly ambitious even for a seasoned global leader.

“People are less worried than they were six weeks ago, less afraid,” a senior German government official with extensive experience in the United States told me. “Now they see the clownish nature.” Or, as another German said on the sidelines of a meeting here devoted to taking stock of 70 years of U.S.-German relations, “People here think Trump is a laughingstock.”

“The dominant reaction to Trump right now is mockery,” Jacob Heilbrunn, the editor of the conservative journal the National Interest, told the meeting at the German Foreign Office here while moderating a panel on Trump’s foreign policy that dealt heavily on the difficulty of divining an actual policy amid the spectacle. Heilbrunn, whose publication hosted Trump’s inaugural foreign policy speech in Washington during last year’s campaign, used the ‘L’ word too. “The Trump administration is becoming an international laughingstock.” Michael Werz, a German expert from the liberal U.S. think tank Center for American Progress, agreed, adding he was struck by “how rapidly the American brand is depreciating over the last 20 weeks.”

Of course, Americans have had presidential scandals before, and Europe has a long history of substantive clashes with U.S. presidents over everything from the Vietnam war and confronting the Soviets to the widely opposed 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Even Trump flying off on a poorly timed international tour isn’t entirely unfamiliar territory: Many embattled U.S. leaders have hit the road for a dose of statesman-like pageantry, red-carpet receptions and global superpower-style pomp to compensate for pressing investigations and congressional uproar back home. Bill Clinton toured Russia and Northern Ireland after testifying to the grand jury in the Monica Lewinsky affair and was in Israel when he learned the House of Representatives had the votes to impeach him. Ronald Reagan summited with Mikhail Gorbachev as the congressional Iran-Contra hearings threatened to derail his second-term agenda.

But Trump’s tribulations have confounded the world, and especially America’s closest allies here in Europe, in a whole different way. Never has a U.S. president flailed so early in his tenure at a time when he is still such an unknown quantity in the world. In Trump’s case, he will arrive in a skeptical Europe with an inexperienced or nonexistent staff appointed to deal with global problems and a record of wildly contradictory statements even on matters of core principle. Does he think NATO is still “obsolete” or not? Is he prepared to offer the Russians anything more than the symbolism of his recent, chummy Oval Office visit with its foreign minister? Want to blow up carefully negotiated agreements with Europe on climate change and trade?

No one knows.

***

When European diplomats meet these days, they often swap stories about Trump—and how to manage their volatile new ally. “The president of the United States has a 12-second attention span,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told a former senior official in April after meeting Trump in the Oval Office. Not only that, this person told me, the president seemed unprepared and ill-informed, turning the conversation to North Korea and apparently unaware that NATO is not a part of the ongoing North Korea saga.

Such anecdotes have shaped how Europe’s anxious leaders are preparing for Trump’s trip this week – he will come to Brussels for a NATO session on Thursday—and for another one planned for early July, when he visits Germany for a G-20 summit at which he is expected to meet Putin face to face for the first time.

Some of the reported preparations for the NATO session in Brussels this week suggest just how much the volatile-clown theory of the American president has now taken hold.

NATO has downgraded the May 25 session to a meeting from a summit and will hold only a dinner to minimize the chances of a Trump eruption. Leaders have been told to hold normally windy remarks to just two to four minutes to keep Trump’s attention. They are even preparing to consider a “deliverable” to Trump of having NATO officially join the U.S.-led coalition fighting the Islamic State in Syria, as Trump has said his priority is getting NATO to do more in combating terrorism. “It’s a phony deliverable to give to Trump, a Twitter deliverable,” said a former senior U.S. official, pointing out that the individual NATO member states are already members of that coalition.

A Trump photo-op with a chunk of the World Trade Center has been choreographed in hopes of convincing the president who called NATO “obsolete” to reaffirm the basic principles of an organization committed to the mutual security of its members. The World Trade Center wreckage is part of a memorial to the victims of the 9/11 attacks at NATO’s new headquarters that Trump is set to officially open (though the building is not in fact finished), and NATO observers hope he will use the occasion to finally endorse the principle in Article V of the NATO Treaty that requires countries to treat an attack on one NATO country as an attack on all – an article that has only been invoked once in the organization’s history: after 9/11. “The purpose of the 9/11 memorial opening is to try to get Trump to mention the Article V commitment, since how can he get around it? It’s the only time Article V was ever used,” the former official said.

This is viewed as an especially crucial moment for Trump to do so, given his stated goal of working more closely with Russia even as Russia threatens neighboring states like the three Baltic countries that are now NATO members. But Trump has resisted it, and as Thomas Wright of the Brookings Institution has reported, “Trump’s failure to endorse Article V is not an oversight. Members of his cabinet have unsuccessfully tried to insert this language into his remarks, including at his meeting with Stoltenberg.”

Now, they are finally hoping he will do so – but have no promise.

No promises might well be the theme of Trump’s trip. Consider Trump’s original campaign-trail threat to blow up NATO if member states don’t live up to their commitment to put 2 percent of the budget into defense; even that, it appears, might now might be back on the table. Trump has publicly claimed victory on that score, crowing that he had already forced allies to comply, but in fact, few countries have actually raised their spending – and an anonymous senior White House official told a reporter this week that “he is not going to stay in NATO if NATO does not make a lot more progress.”

No doubt jittery officials have reason to be nervous. In an interview as Trump departed, Stoltenberg told Bloomberg TV that “Trump has clearly stated to me in several conversations … that he’s strongly committed to NATO.” As for Thursday’s meeting in Brussels? “I hope and expect that he will reiterate his strong commitment to NATO.”

But will he? And what would it mean if he does?

The question of Donald Trump’s real views on NATO might not be as entertaining as the political spectacle unfolding in Washington, but the answer is just as uncertain.

***

On Tuesday night, Germany Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel opened the conference on U.S.-German relations, sponsored by the American Council on Germany and the Atlantik-Brucke think tank here, with a lengthy, serious speech on the Marshall Plan’s legacy, a paean to American leadership in Europe and a rebuttal to Trump’s “America First” mantra.

“We associate the United States with the idea of freedom and democracy,” he said, before warning of the erosion of the global order that America made. “A recalibration of the world is in full swing.”

An hour later, former Democratic National Committee chair Donna Brazile was taking questions over dinner from a largely German group of current and former government officials and international business leaders.

What did they want to know?

How does impeachment work? Did James Comey’s last-minute reopening of the Clinton investigation swing the election to Trump? Did the Russians? Oh, and once again: Will Trump be impeached?

“Well, people seem to think he’s just going to be removed. I don’t know,” Brazile said, after telling the Europeans that she thought Democrats, not Russians or the ousted FBI director, bore more blame for the Trump victory. “He’s the president, he was elected.” Brazile said she prayed for Trump in church. “I want my president to succeed,” she said, before adding, “But no one is above the law.”

A few minutes after she finished speaking, the New York Times posted the latest revelation of a week filled with them: that Comey had kept contemporaneous notes of his meetings with Trump, including the allegation that the president asked him to shut down the investigation of his first national security adviser, Michael Flynn.

The Europeans, just like their American counterparts, were glued to their phones.

 

When will are long national nightmare be over?

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump faces a higher authority: Pope Francis"

Spoiler

Historically, the relationship between American presidents and pontiffs is a complicated one. But seldom has a first meeting been as awkward as the upcoming one between Donald Trump and Pope Francis.

When Trump sits down with the spiritual leader of America’s 50-plus million Catholics next Wednesday, he’ll be face-to-face with perhaps the only person with a bigger global megaphone than his own. There will be little common ground between them — Trump sparred with Pope Francis on the campaign trail, and the pontiff has been critical of the president on issues ranging from climate change to immigration to refugee resettlement.

“There is a tradition and a real purpose: you have the leader of the big temporal superpower meeting with the leader of the spiritual superpower, if you will. It’s really an imperative that the two people with that much responsibility for not just their respective domains, but for the world writ large, that they get acquainted and develop a relationship,” said Jim Nicholson, the former secretary of Veterans Affairs and Republican National Committee chairman who served as ambassador to the Holy See under George W. Bush from 2001 to 2005.

“They will not probably agree on things like immigration, they won’t agree on capital punishment,” he said. “But it’s very important that, going forward in this president’s young presidency, he gets to know the pope, that he can know he can call on the pope for discussion and advice, as President Bush did.”

Both sides are feeling pressure to put a happy face on their private meeting. Nicholson said the trip came about after he reminded White House senior staffers — who’d been debating whether to visit the Vatican — that a papal meeting has been the practice for every president who's visited Italy since World War II.

But in this case, the politics are especially tricky. Trump will be meeting with a Catholic leader who enjoys far higher approval ratings in the United States than his own. The pope must keep in mind that while Trump maintains support from a majority of white Catholics, he faces deep disapproval ratings among Hispanic Catholics, the fastest-growing group in the American church.

The two have not engaged directly since Trump’s inauguration, but tensions have not cooled much since their initial hostile exchange in February 2016, when Francis told reporters, “A person who only thinks about building walls — wherever they may be — and not building bridges, is not Christian,” in an apparent reference to the president’s proposed Mexican border wall.

At the time, Trump shot back: “No leader, especially a religious leader, should have the right to question another man’s religion or faith,” he said at a rally in South Carolina. “If and when the Vatican is attacked by ISIS, which as everyone knows is ISIS’ ultimate trophy, I can promise you that the pope would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been president.”

The exchange reverberated in Rome, said longtime Vatican analyst Iacopo Scaramuzzi, because it made clear that Francis was willing to step out of papal tradition to rally his own backers against an American political candidate — setting the stage for an uneasy relationship with the eventual president.

“When he criticized Trump [over the wall], even Vatican diplomats were surprised by an attack like that [against] a possible U.S. president,” he said. “But that was an intentional attack. An explicit conflict can be useful: to take the other one as an example of what’s wrong can be very useful to send a message to your supporters.”

While the two leaders have not spoken since Trump moved into the White House, the discord has subtly intensified. The pope made waves in Europe just days after Trump took office, for example, by bringing up Adolf Hitler unprompted in an interview with a Spanish paper when asked about the rise of xenophobia and the new American president. The next month, he appeared to jab at Trump’s repeated claim that he would build a border wall and force Mexico to pay for it by urging Catholics “to not raise walls but bridges” and adding “A Christian can never say: I’ll make you pay for that."

People close to the Vatican also interpreted Francis’ designation of Indianapolis’ Joseph Tobin as a cardinal in October — and his subsequent move to the higher-profile Newark archdiocese the day before Election Day — as a message to Trump. Tobin had recently publicly clashed with Vice President Mike Pence, then Trump’s running mate and the governor of Indiana, when he helped a Syrian refugee family settle in the city despite Pence’s announcement that he wouldn’t support such relocation efforts.

“The risk for Trump here is that the contrasts between him and Francis are so stark on so many of the political and moral questions of our time,” said John Gehring, the Catholic program director at Faith in Public Life, a liberal advocacy group.

But the message-sending has gone both ways: Francis' critics noted with interest April reports that Trump had given Argentine President Mauricio Macri a collection of recently declassified documents relating to his country’s “dirty war” in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The pope has often faced questions in Argentina about his role in his home country's affair, when he was still known as Jorge Maria Bergoglio, and his relationship with Macri has long been tense.

Nonetheless, early signals suggest Pope Francis — who has said he accepts any foreign leader who asks for an audience — has already gone out of his way to pave a diplomatic path forward with Trump, say Vatican experts.

“Trump and Bergoglio will try to display a constructive attitude, although what they have in common is to be unpredictable,” added Scaramuzzi. “The two diplomacies have worked in order to provide a smooth meeting. So that nobody will leave the room with his bones broken.”

With no ambassador to the Holy See in place while his administration reportedly prepares to nominate Callista Gingrich — the wife of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich — much of the coordinating work has been done by that office’s new Charge d’Affaires, Louis Bono, said a Vatican official.

Florida Rep. Francis Rooney, who succeeded Nicholson as ambassador and served until 2008, said he expected few of the controversial points of disagreement to come up in the brief conversation, instead pointing to human trafficking as a likely topic of discussion because of its importance to both American diplomats in the Holy See and Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter.

“They’ll put the past behind them,” he said. “It’s an inflection point in the relationship between the United States and the Holy See.”

Close observers in Italy note that Francis will have most of the power in his home-court meeting. Courtesies like agreeing to hold the meeting on Wednesday morning — shortly before his regularly scheduled general audience in Saint Peter’s Square — suggest he may not be looking to pin Trump into a politically difficult corner, and that he will have an easy out if the meeting takes an uncomfortable turn.

Trump’s aides were considering scheduling the meeting after the G7 conference, but determined that the president needed to return to Washington for Memorial Day, Nicholson said, hence the unorthodox timing.

By 9:00 or 9:15 most Wednesdays, Francis is out greeting the crowds in his Jeep, explained Robert Mickens of the European Catholic publication La Croix. So if he perceives that the meeting is not going well, he can simply leave.

“This allows the pope to say, ‘I’m sorry, I have to go. He has not cleared his calendar for the entire morning to meet Trump," said Mickens. "It does mean that he cannot spend more than a certain amount of time with Trump, just because of the sheer fact that he has another important weekly meeting."

The first in-person meeting of the unorthodox president and the unpredictable pontiff — populist outsiders whose unexpected ascents to power were accompanied by an eagerness to shake up the status quo — is a part of the first foreign trip for Trump that has an explicit focus on religious symbolism. The president’s itinerary also includes Israel and Saudi Arabia.

“They’ll have a good chance to look each other in the eyes and see how much they have in common,” said Nicholson. “They recognize what transcendent figures they are on the world stage, and how important what they say and do and believe and message is to people. Because so many people are watching them.”

After speculation during the 2016 campaign that voters of faith would abandon Trump, his ultimate support among American Catholics closely mirrored that of other Republican presidential candidates: 6 in 10 white Catholics backed him in November, according to a Pew analysis of exit polls, and his approval rating among that group had fallen only slightly by April, to 53 percent.

A number of Catholic and evangelical leaders have since rallied even closer to his side after the president bolstered the Mexico City Policy axing American funding to nongovernmental organizations that perform abortions, cut funding for Planned Parenthood, installed the conservative Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, and signed a new executive order focused on religious liberty.

Yet that support belies his serious weakness among another slice of the Catholic community: just around one-quarter of Hispanic Catholics voted for him, according to Pew’s analysis, and his approval rating with that group had dropped to 15 percent by last month. And on the issue of Trump’s proposed ban on travel to the United States from a collection of Muslim-majority countries, 6 in 10 Catholics — including roughly half of white Catholics — said they disapproved.

Veteran Vatican watchers believe any kind of public clash over those flash points remains unlikely, despite the popular pope's prior willingness to confront the president in a manner uncharacteristic of previous Vatican-Washington relations.

“I don’t expect to hear it,” said Rooney. “I think the president values the role the Holy See plays in the world of international diplomacy."

It will be interesting to see what happens.

[Cartmann99]

Oh look, Trump's picking another winner to work in his administration:

Spoiler

President Trump is elevating yet another far-right activist in his administration. Ben Penn of Bloomberg BNA reports today that former WorldNetDaily correspondent Curtis Ellis is a contender to run the Department of Labor’s Bureau of International Labor Affairs.

[...]

Ellis has written in the past that Democrats are trying to literally exterminate white workers as part of “the radical left’s ethnic cleansing of America,” likened Democratic policies to those of Pol Pot, and compared Barack Obama’s economic agenda to Joseph Stalin’s liquidation of the kulaks.

[...]

In the same interview, Ellis hailed Hungarian president Viktor Orban for standing up against the supposed effort by globalist elites to create “a global mongrel culture” and destroy national citizenship, while claiming that George Soros is trying to realize the Communist Party’s aim of creating a one-world system of government.

[...]

He also praised Russian president Vladimir Putin.

[...]

The refugee crisis, he said, is really an “Islamic invasion,” and touted Russia as traditionally serving as “the defenders of the Christian faith against the Asiatic hordes.”

[...]

Putin’s intervention in the Syrian conflict, Ellis said, was a signal to European countries that he is ready to “defend our precious heritage” abroad.

[...]

Ellis named George Soros as the chief architect of this evil globalist plot, asserting that Soros was behind “the coup in Ukraine,” or the popular uprising that toppled the country’s corrupt president who was closely linked to Russia—a line eerily reminiscent of Russian propaganda.

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/trump-official-warned-that-satanic-elites-run-the-world-islamic-invasion-creating-mongrel-culture/

Something tells me this is guy is a Doom Bucket connoisseur. 

[Destiny]

Comey is gonna testify!

My CSPAN and I are ready. :-D

[formergothardite]

Have they announced when because I will clear my schedule, grab some popcorn and stay glued to the TV. This will be more interesting than Netflix. 

On another note, I was stopped for a survey this week and the guy asked what website I visited most to get news and I told him Free Jinger. It is true, but he looked confused.