Trump 18: Info to Russia, With Love

[onekidanddone]

49 minutes ago, Howl said:

Yes, there are other plausible explanations, and yet, and yet, when considering all the Russia, Russia, Russia, Ukraine, Ukraine...

But his emails.

[apple1]

48 minutes ago, Howl said:

When I read about Kushner's attempt to co-opt the Russians into providing a secure back back-channel communication conduit, something pinged in my memory about allegations that a server in Trump Tower set up to communicate only with the Russian Alfa Bank.  As I recalled, the story surfaced and then sank. 

So I googled and up popped a post on Slate dated Oct. 31, 2016 (just a few days before the election) titled Was a Trump Server Communicating With Russia?

The Slate article amasses quite a compelling argument that, Yes, it was a Trump Tower server set up to communicate only with Alfa Bank in Russia.  Alfa Bank denied it and so did Trump spokespersons.  Nerd alert! The first part of the article delves into the technical aspects of how the server traffic was found, the patterns noted and why (why not) it was or wasn't innocuous.  The second portion delves into Alfa Bank's founder, Mikhail Fridman, who rose from basically nobody to one of the richest men in Russia in an astoundingly short period of time.  

  Reveal hidden contents

The researchers were seeing patterns in the data—and the Trump Organization’s potential interlocutor was itself suggestive. Alfa Bank emerged in the messy post-Soviet scramble to create a private Russian economy. Its founder was a Ukrainian called Mikhail Fridman...To build out the bank, Fridman recruited a skilled economist and shrewd operator called Pyotr Aven. In the early ’90s, Aven worked with Vladimir Putin in the St. Petersburg government—and according to several accounts, helped Putin wiggle out of accusations of corruption that might have derailed his ascent. (Karen Dawisha recounts this history in her book Putin’s Kleptocracy.) Over time, Alfa built one of the world’s most lucrative enterprises. Fridman became the second richest man in Russia, valued by Forbes at $15.3 billion...Unlike other Russian firms, Alfa has operated smoothly and effortlessly in the West...To protect its interests in Washington, Alfa hired as its lobbyist former Reagan administration official Ed Rogers. Richard Burt, who helped Trump write the speech in which he first laid out his foreign policy, previously served on Alfa’s senior advisory board.  

Russia, Russia, Russia, Ukraine, Ukraine.  The article doesn't end with a smoking gun, but Occam's Razor points in one direction.  The content of emails exchanged can't be known between the two servers can't be known.  The author of this article  (Franklin Foer) stands by it, but posted a second article titled Trump’s Server, Revisited: Sorting through the new evidence, and competing theories, about the Trump server that appeared to be communicating with a Russian bank.

Yes, there are other plausible explanations, and yet, and yet, when considering all the Russia, Russia, Russia, Ukraine, Ukraine...

I read that article at the time it was published, and talked to my husband about it. HIs comment was, "Why isn't ---- (insert mainstream news site of your choice) covering this?" The evidence was strong at that time, and it seems that it is now being corroborated, and more is to come. Seems to be a failure by the news organizations.

FTR My "older white male" husband voted Hillary, not because of being a committed Democrat (he isn't), but because he foresaw how dangerous Trump would be.

[47of74]

Now I have a new favorite photo of the tapeworm at the Vatican....

[fraurosena]

You'd think this is probably something innocuous, but we're talking about the Tangerine Toddler here. For him to cancel a rally means there absolutely is something going on here...

Damn it. Now I need to know what this 'unforseen change in the schedule' is all about. 

[fraurosena]

Here's our WUT for today.

Donald Trump Really Likes to Drop Military Secrets Into His Conversations

You'll be forgiven if you think this WUT is about blabbing about nuclear submarines to Duterte, but no. That's old news already. Take a look at this cut-out from the article. Take notice of what POTUS says, and more to the point, how he says it.

I mean, this is how he speaks all the time.  

[47of74]

43 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

You'd think this is probably something innocuous, but we're talking about the Tangerine Toddler here. For him to cancel a rally means there absolutely is something going on here...

Damn it. Now I need to know what this 'unforseen change in the schedule' is all about. 

Yeah I heard about that.  I'm glad that next week's rally bund meeting, is off.  We don't need any bund meetings here in Iowa now.

[JMarie]

1 hour ago, fraurosena said:

You'd think this is probably something innocuous, but we're talking about the Tangerine Toddler here. For him to cancel a rally means there absolutely is something going on here...

Damn it. Now I need to know what this 'unforseen change in the schedule' is all about. 

June 1 falls on a Thursday.  Early departure for Mar-a-Lago?

[fraurosena]

1 hour ago, JMarie said:

June 1 falls on a Thursday.  Early departure for Mar-a-Lago?

Hmm, could be. But I have a sneaking suspicion it has something to do with his son-in-law...

[fraurosena]

Apparently the presidunce feels so 'attacked' that he needs a War Room to counter the effects of all these pesky Russia investigations.

Donald Trump to set up 'war room' to fight Russia attacks and get presidency back on track

Quote

The Trump administration is due to launch its most aggressive effort yet to push back against allegations that the President had colluded with Russia during the election campaign.

Following a wave of fresh controversies sparked by the firing of FBI Director James Comey, Donald Trump’s young presidency looks to be under increasing threat as he faces mounting pressure from several investigations.

In a bid to fight back against the mounting criticism, Donald Trump’s advisers are planning to establish a “war room” filled with new aides and administration officials who will focus on delivering his agenda on healthcare reform, cutting taxes and increasing infrastructure investment.

The investigation, coupled with reports of chaos and infighting within the White House, has meant little of what Mr Trump had vowed to achieve in his first 100 days has materialised. 

Meanwhile the former reality star’s popularity among voters has dipped to even further lows. 

A poll conducted by Fox News this week found only 28 per cent of Americans surveyed “strongly approved” of Mr Trump’s performance – down from 45 per cent in April.

The President has consistently received the lowest approval ratings for the first 10 months in office of any President since the rating was introduced in 1953.

The new messaging effort will hit back at suggestions that the Kremlin directs the administration and will instead focus on the stalled policy agenda with Mr Trump likely to make more trips out of Washington and more of the raucous rallies with core supporters across the country.

In light of my earlier post, the last paragraph made me laugh. 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump’s weird adherence to this 1980s concept explains his whole presidency"

Spoiler

What’s the standard line on President Trump these days? That he’s an erratic creature of no fixed commitments and no stable policy objectives? Not so fast. In fact, Trump’s entire administration can be understood through the lens of his weird, consistent, unwavering adherence to a 1980s concept of the War on Drugs.

This adherence unifies his policy actions: not only the appointment of drug-war hard-liner Jeff Sessions as attorney general but also his approach to immigration and “the wall,” his calls for a revival of “stop and frisk” and “law and order” policies, key features of the Republican House health-care bill, the bromances with Rodrigo Duterte and Vladimir Putin, and even the initial proposal to defund the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

After descending that Trump Tower escalator in July 2015, Trump made headlines when he kicked off his campaign by proclaiming that Mexico was sending us “rapists.” Less noted has been that he began his list of woes coming from the South by castigating Mexican immigrants for “bringing drugs.” Already in that speech the solution he offered to this caricatured problem was “the wall.” Almost two years later, the wall is still meant to solve the problem of drugs, as in this tweet from April: “If the wall is not built, which it will be, the drug situation will NEVER be fixed the way it should be!”

Trump’s well-received joint address to Congress in February also explained his desire to limit immigration by focusing on drugs: “We’ve defended the borders of other nations while leaving our own borders wide open for anyone to cross and for drugs to pour in at a now unprecedented rate.”

No surprise, then, that Sessions has been working steadily, since his confirmation, to restore the building blocks of the War on Drugs that political leaders from both parties have been quietly removing for the past five years. He has ordered a review of federal policies on state legalization of marijuana and appears to be seeking an end to the policy of federal non-interference with the cascade of legalization efforts. He has ordered a review of consent decrees, whose purpose is to spur police reform, and sought to delay the implementation of Baltimore’s. He has recently handed down guidance requiring federal prosecutors to seek the stiffest possible sentences available for drug offenses.

To support these efforts, Trump has proposed hiring 10,000 immigration officers and 5,000 Border Patrol agents and beefing up support for police departments. According to the White House website, “The Trump Administration will be a law and order administration” for a country that “needs more law enforcement.”

The Obama administration had begun to drive toward replacing criminal-justice strategies for drug control with public-health strategies. It wasn’t whistling in the dark but following, at least in part, the innovative model of drug control pioneered by Portugal. Marijuana has been legalized there. Use and modest possession of other drugs have been decriminalized, but large-scale trafficking is still criminal. The criminal-justice system focuses on those large-scale traffickers, while public-health strategies and harm-reduction techniques pinpoint users and low-level participants in the drug economy. Adolescent drug use is down, the percentage of users seeking treatment is up, and Portugal is interdicting increased quantities of illegal narcotics.

Countries across Central and South America would like to follow Portugal and transition from a criminal-justice paradigm to an individual and public-health paradigm for drug control. They have advocated for this change at the United Nations but have been blocked by Putin’s Russia. Indeed, Putin is one of the world’s most steadfast advocates for the 1980s War on Drugs concept.

Of course, Trump has expressed a strange affinity for Putin and also for Duterte, the president of the Philippines. Duterte has called for the “slaughter” of the Philippines’ estimated 3 million addicts. The death toll from extrajudicial killings that he seems to have sparked has already reached into the thousands. The response from the United States? Trump praised Duterte for doing an “unbelievable job on the drug problem” and invited him to the White House.

Yet Trump’s initial budget plan involved proposing nearly complete defunding of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, which was founded by congressional legislation in 1988. How does that square?

The Obama administration deployed that office to “restore balance” to U.S. drug-control efforts, increasing emphasis on treatment, prevention and diversion programs, and fostering a move toward a health-based strategy. The expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act and requirements that insurers support mental-health and addiction treatment undergirded this effort, supporting the emergence of programs designed to divert low-level drug offenders out of the criminal-justice system and into treatment. This has made for the very promising beginnings of a health-based approach to drug control.

The Trump administration has painted a bull’s eye on this new policy strategy and is firing away. While the White House has backed off defunding the Office of National Drug Control Policy, it continues to pursue the reversal of the Medicaid expansion. The administration appears to think narcotics control can be achieved entirely through the tools of criminal justice.

But we tried that in the 1980s, the decade of “Miami Vice,” the era when the Los Angeles police chief, Daryl Gates, could testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee that casual drug users “ought to be taken out and shot.” We know where that story ends: with increased incarceration, further degradation of urban neighborhoods, no durable change in rates of drug use and a failure to address addiction.

So, yes, Trump has a vision, and he’s moving steadily toward it, wrongheaded though it is, dragging us along with him, as if into a wall.

Gee, Putin wants it so Agent Orange's administration pushes it. Color me surprised.

[GreyhoundFan]

We can't keep up with the crap: "The Trump administration just imposed a massive tax increase. You may have missed it."

Spoiler

This week the Trump administration managed to impose a massive tax increase on middle-income families beginning in 2018. You could be excused for missing this story if you were focusing instead on President Trump’s draconian budget or Republican efforts to take away health care from tens of millions of people. But, indeed, on Monday, the Trump Health Care Tax was born.

The new tax, 19 percent or more of premiums, will be added on top of the cost of policies purchased through the individual-market health insurance exchanges. It is a result of Trump’s decision to create as much chaos as possible in the health-care market — in this case by not committing to continue to reimburse billions of dollars of cost-sharing payments owed to insurers just as they set prices for next year. And the president couldn’t have been more clear about why he’s imposing this tax: He thinks disrupting the Affordable Care Act exchanges, which serve more than 12 million Americans, will force Democrats to agree to proposals in his budget and in the House health-care bill that would take coverage away from tens of millions.

There is something even more troubling about this tax. In an unusual twist, it will not be paid to the government but to insurance companies. That’s because, under the ACA, 83 percent of people who are insured on the exchanges are protected from premium increases by tax credits provided by the government. If premiums go up, government payments to insurers go up with them. Trump is even willing to sacrifice federal dollars to sink the ACA.

But let’s take a step back. This all started as a cynical ploy by Congress that got further out of hand when Trump won the presidency. In between more than 50 votes to adjust or outright repeal the ACA, Congress used a number of budget tricks and lawsuits to undermine the law. The effect was to eliminate billions of dollars in funding designed to keep rates lower, prevent millions of Americans eligible for Medicaid from accessing coverage and force a dozen co-ops designed to increase competition out of business.

Even with these headwinds, the exchanges are far from failing. Four million new people were added during last year’s open enrollment. Insurers have consistently reported profitability, putting the market on track for lower premium increases and more competition in 2018. Independent analysts at Standard & Poor’s affirmed, “If it remains business as usual, we expect 2018 premiums to increase at a far lower clip than in 2017.” But as bipartisan insurance commissioners and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office just confirmed, Trump’s tampering is badly destabilizing things.

When Trump became president, many of us wondered publicly whether the administration would at least carry out the law in ways that served the interests of the American public. We didn’t have to wonder for long.

Trump made clear right away what his strategy was. “The best thing we can do, politically speaking, is let Obamacare explode,” he said from the Oval Office. And Trump and his team proceeded to pour the oil and light the match.

Step one was to stop outreach during the week of open enrollment when the biggest number of young and healthy people get covered. Trump quickly took steps to stop enforcing the ACA’s individual mandate and adopted regulations increasing paperwork for consumers, reducing tax credits that help people pay premiums and shortening the period for consumers to sign up. And Trump’s budget indicates he is planning more cuts to outreach and consumer assistance. All of these steps reduce coverage and increase costs.

Worst of all for consumers, Trump’s move this week may be the last straw for insurers. Faced with an administration that has made clear it will do what it can to cause the exchanges to fail, insurers are questioning whether they can continue to participate. The administration is proving that the one thing it can succeed at is failure.

Remarkably, all of this is in service of something even worse: a plan to take health-care from 23 million Americans, raise costs for tens of millions more and eliminate access to care in large parts of the country.

With the CBO score of the House health-care bill out, it’s now time for senators to cry foul. Foul on a secretive process; foul on a bill that hurts millions of people; foul on ripping apart Medicaid coverage for kids, seniors and people with disabilities; and foul on taking away substance-abuse treatment and mental-health care from millions of people who need it. For a bill that could impact the course of Americans for generations to come, this is no time to “voice concerns” or “discuss challenges.” And it’s no time to act as a ratifying body for a president who doesn’t have the best interests of its constituents in mind.

The only way to alter the self-fulfilling, destructive course that Trump has set us on is for senators to publicly say that they will never vote for a bill that robs people of coverage and to tell the administration to undo the Trump tax, stop the antics that are driving instability in the exchanges, and do the real work of improving Americans’ access to high-quality health care.

Another "you couldn't make this shit up situation. The rich won't have to pay this tax because they have good jobs that include insurance. It's the poor, disabled, and retired who will be penalized once again. I'm furious about this.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Something is not right"

Spoiler

In the middle of one night

Miss Clavel turned on the light

And said, “Something is not right!”

— “Madeline,” by Ludwig
Bemelmans, 1939

Many of us these days find ourselves channeling our inner Miss Clavel.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, for one. In Dexter Filkins’s profile of Mattis for the New Yorker, the most striking moment comes when Mattis is asked what worries him most in his new role. Filkins expected to hear about the Islamic State, or Russia, or the defense budget.

Instead, Mattis went to a deeper, more unsettling problem: “The lack of political unity in America. The lack of a fundamental friendliness. It seems like an awful lot of people in America and around the world feel spiritually and personally alienated, whether it be from organized religion or from local community school districts or from their governments.”

Something is not right. If anything, Mattis’s diagnosis seems understated. This national distemper, the sour, angry mood infecting the body politic, was evident before Montana congressional candidate Greg Gianforte body-slammed a reporter for daring to ask a question; then had his campaign lie about it; then failed to apologize — until after he won the election.

It was evident before Gianforte’s current allies and future colleagues were muted, to put it mildly, in the face of his audio-taped assault. “We all make mistakes,” said Rep. Steve Stivers (R-Ohio), who chairs the House Republicans’ campaign arm. This was not a mistake; it was an assault on a reporter doing his constitutionally protected job.

Something is not right — and Gianforte’s attack is simply a well-documented illustration of this larger ill. The events of a single week serve to underscore the gravity of the malady.

Something is not right when the grieving parents of murdered Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich are forced to suffer the further injury of seeing their son’s death hijacked for political purpose, baselessly linked to WikiLeaked DNC emails.

Something is not right when President Trump’s commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, marvels, after traveling with the president to Saudi Arabia, that “there was not a single hint of a protester anywhere there during the whole time we were there. Not one guy with a bad placard.” Note to Ross: The absence of protest is not good news — it is evidence of the absence of democracy.

Something is not right when Trump’s housing secretary, Ben Carson, asserts that “poverty to a large extent is also a state of mind. You take somebody that has the right mind-set, you can take everything from them and put them on the street, and I guarantee in a little while they’ll be right back up there.” As if the poor have only themselves to blame for their condition. How can this man be entrusted with the task of ensuring affordable housing when he seems to believe that the inability to pay for housing stems from lack of will and moral backbone?

This is not simply about disagreeing with Trump’s ideology, such as it is, or even with more orthodox Republican views. It is about the increasing distrust of the other, whether a refugee or a political opponent, and the emergence of a fundamental mean-spiritedness inconsistent with American values.

About those American values: Something is not right when, as the Congressional Budget Office found, the House Republican health-care bill would result in 23 million more Americans without health coverage, inflicting the greatest harm on the oldest, sickest and least well-off.

Something is not right when Trump proposes a budget that would slash funding for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the program launched by President George W. Bush in 2003 that has saved nearly 12 million lives in Africa and elsewhere by providing antiretroviral drugs. Trump’s budget would cut the program by nearly one-fifth — and result in the deaths of at least 1 million people, according to researchers.

And that is just one particularly poignant example. Something is not right when Trump’s budget would cut food stamps and housing vouchers for needy families; health care for poor children — this on top of cuts already envisioned in the health-care bill — heating assistance for the low-income elderly; and job training programs to help the very Americans whose interests Trump vowed to champion.

Something is really not right when all this is done to help pay for trillions of dollars in tax cuts for the richest Americans. When it is built on an edifice of fairy-tale growth projections exacerbated by fraudulent accounting, double-counting savings from this supposed growth.

We are all Miss Clavel now, or should be.

Something is not right indeed.

[47of74]

TT used a golf cart instead of walking a bit to take part in a group photo. 

http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-golf-cart-g7-sicily-2017-5

Quote

President Trump rounded out his first foreign trip since taking office by joining other G7 leaders as they walked the streets of Taormina, Sicily. 

There was just one difference: as the leaders of the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, and Japan walked on foot, Trump followed in a golf cart, The Times of London reported on Saturday. 

"They walked the 700 yards from the traditional G7 group photo, taken at a Greek amphitheatre, to a piazza in the hilltop town, but Mr Trump stayed behind until he could take a seat in the electric vehicle," The Times reported.

It also noted that Trump arrived last for the photo as the 6 other leaders stood waiting for him.

Does it make me a bad person if this was the first mental image that popped in my head when reading that?

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump seems powerless to stop leaks"

Spoiler

A few weeks after Inauguration Day, White House policy adviser Stephen Miller declared on national television that “the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.”

Three months later, it is increasingly clear that the powers of the president to stop leaks are rather unsubstantial and will be questioned almost daily.

The Washington Post reported Friday — based on information from U.S. officials briefed on intelligence reports — that President Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, discussed setting up a secret communications channel between Trump’s transition team and the Kremlin using Russian facilities in Washington when he met in December with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States.

The revelation caps a remarkable two-week stretch of leaks to the press. Let’s recap:

• On May 15, The Post reported that Trump divulged classified information about a terrorist plot to Kislyak and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov during a meeting in the Oval Office five days earlier.
• On May 16, the New York Times and other news outlets reported that the intelligence Trump revealed to the Russians came from Israel.
• On May 16, the Times reported that Trump in February asked James B. Comey, the FBI’s director at the time, to drop an investigation centered on former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
• On May 17, The Post reported that House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy told fellow Republicans last year that he thinks Russian President Vladimir Putin pays Trump.
• On May 19, The Post reported that a federal law enforcement probe of ties between Trump’s team and Russia had reached a current senior White House adviser.
• On May 19, the Times reported that Trump said during his meeting with Kislyak and Lavrov that he “faced great pressure because of Russia” before firing Comey. “That’s taken off,” Trump reportedly said.
• On May 22, The Post reported that Trump asked the director of national intelligence, Daniel Coats, and the director of the National Security Agency, Adm. Michael S. Rogers, to publicly deny the existence of any evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election.
• On May 24, the Times reported that Russian officials schemed last summer to influence Trump through Flynn and campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
• On May 25, The Post and NBC News identified Kushner as the senior White House adviser under scrutiny by federal investigators.

“Leak” might not be the right word. Perhaps “gusher” is more descriptive.

Trump has railed against unauthorized disclosures to the press since he took office, but the issue came to a head Thursday on a matter unrelated to Russia. After the name of the suspected Manchester concert bomber leaked to U.S. news outlets, along with crime scene photos, Britain briefly suspended intelligence sharing on the case.

Trump tasked the Justice Department with rooting out the source of the leaks, and Britain resumed intelligence sharing after receiving what police there described as “fresh assurances.” Yet the strength of such assurances seems dubious. The leaks just keep coming.

I feel compelled, at this moment, to credit Politico’s Jack Shafer with nailing a pre-inauguration prediction. Arguing that Trump’s animosity toward the media might actually produce better journalism, Shafer wrote the following on Jan. 16:

As Trump shuts down White House access to reporters, they will infest the departments and agencies around town that the president has peeved. The intelligence establishment, which Trump has deprecated over the issue of Russian hacking, owes him no favors and less respect. It will be in their institutional interest to leak damaging material on Trump.

That is exactly how things have played out. And Trump seems powerless to stop it.

Gusher is a better term. We need to keep finding out what is really happening, because if it was up to the TT, the public would be kept in the dark about everything.

[fraurosena]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

We can't keep up with the crap: "The Trump administration just imposed a massive tax increase. You may have missed it."

  Hide contents

This week the Trump administration managed to impose a massive tax increase on middle-income families beginning in 2018. You could be excused for missing this story if you were focusing instead on President Trump’s draconian budget or Republican efforts to take away health care from tens of millions of people. But, indeed, on Monday, the Trump Health Care Tax was born.

The new tax, 19 percent or more of premiums, will be added on top of the cost of policies purchased through the individual-market health insurance exchanges. It is a result of Trump’s decision to create as much chaos as possible in the health-care market — in this case by not committing to continue to reimburse billions of dollars of cost-sharing payments owed to insurers just as they set prices for next year. And the president couldn’t have been more clear about why he’s imposing this tax: He thinks disrupting the Affordable Care Act exchanges, which serve more than 12 million Americans, will force Democrats to agree to proposals in his budget and in the House health-care bill that would take coverage away from tens of millions.

There is something even more troubling about this tax. In an unusual twist, it will not be paid to the government but to insurance companies. That’s because, under the ACA, 83 percent of people who are insured on the exchanges are protected from premium increases by tax credits provided by the government. If premiums go up, government payments to insurers go up with them. Trump is even willing to sacrifice federal dollars to sink the ACA.

But let’s take a step back. This all started as a cynical ploy by Congress that got further out of hand when Trump won the presidency. In between more than 50 votes to adjust or outright repeal the ACA, Congress used a number of budget tricks and lawsuits to undermine the law. The effect was to eliminate billions of dollars in funding designed to keep rates lower, prevent millions of Americans eligible for Medicaid from accessing coverage and force a dozen co-ops designed to increase competition out of business.

Even with these headwinds, the exchanges are far from failing. Four million new people were added during last year’s open enrollment. Insurers have consistently reported profitability, putting the market on track for lower premium increases and more competition in 2018. Independent analysts at Standard & Poor’s affirmed, “If it remains business as usual, we expect 2018 premiums to increase at a far lower clip than in 2017.” But as bipartisan insurance commissioners and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office just confirmed, Trump’s tampering is badly destabilizing things.

When Trump became president, many of us wondered publicly whether the administration would at least carry out the law in ways that served the interests of the American public. We didn’t have to wonder for long.

Trump made clear right away what his strategy was. “The best thing we can do, politically speaking, is let Obamacare explode,” he said from the Oval Office. And Trump and his team proceeded to pour the oil and light the match.

Step one was to stop outreach during the week of open enrollment when the biggest number of young and healthy people get covered. Trump quickly took steps to stop enforcing the ACA’s individual mandate and adopted regulations increasing paperwork for consumers, reducing tax credits that help people pay premiums and shortening the period for consumers to sign up. And Trump’s budget indicates he is planning more cuts to outreach and consumer assistance. All of these steps reduce coverage and increase costs.

Worst of all for consumers, Trump’s move this week may be the last straw for insurers. Faced with an administration that has made clear it will do what it can to cause the exchanges to fail, insurers are questioning whether they can continue to participate. The administration is proving that the one thing it can succeed at is failure.

Remarkably, all of this is in service of something even worse: a plan to take health-care from 23 million Americans, raise costs for tens of millions more and eliminate access to care in large parts of the country.

With the CBO score of the House health-care bill out, it’s now time for senators to cry foul. Foul on a secretive process; foul on a bill that hurts millions of people; foul on ripping apart Medicaid coverage for kids, seniors and people with disabilities; and foul on taking away substance-abuse treatment and mental-health care from millions of people who need it. For a bill that could impact the course of Americans for generations to come, this is no time to “voice concerns” or “discuss challenges.” And it’s no time to act as a ratifying body for a president who doesn’t have the best interests of its constituents in mind.

The only way to alter the self-fulfilling, destructive course that Trump has set us on is for senators to publicly say that they will never vote for a bill that robs people of coverage and to tell the administration to undo the Trump tax, stop the antics that are driving instability in the exchanges, and do the real work of improving Americans’ access to high-quality health care.

Another "you couldn't make this shit up situation. The rich won't have to pay this tax because they have good jobs that include insurance. It's the poor, disabled, and retired who will be penalized once again. I'm furious about this.

Ok, THIS deserves the WUT OF THE WEEK award. 

I hope with a fiery passion that this presiduncy ends sooner rather than later. And by presiduncy, I mean the entire corrupt lot of them, in the administration, in the House, in the Senate, in the DOH itself. This makes me really angry, and it doesn't even affect me or mine.

[onekidanddone]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Trump seems powerless to stop leaks"

  Reveal hidden contents

A few weeks after Inauguration Day, White House policy adviser Stephen Miller declared on national television that “the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.”

Three months later, it is increasingly clear that the powers of the president to stop leaks are rather unsubstantial and will be questioned almost daily.

The Washington Post reported Friday — based on information from U.S. officials briefed on intelligence reports — that President Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, discussed setting up a secret communications channel between Trump’s transition team and the Kremlin using Russian facilities in Washington when he met in December with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States.

The revelation caps a remarkable two-week stretch of leaks to the press. Let’s recap:

• On May 15, The Post reported that Trump divulged classified information about a terrorist plot to Kislyak and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov during a meeting in the Oval Office five days earlier.
• On May 16, the New York Times and other news outlets reported that the intelligence Trump revealed to the Russians came from Israel.
• On May 16, the Times reported that Trump in February asked James B. Comey, the FBI’s director at the time, to drop an investigation centered on former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
• On May 17, The Post reported that House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy told fellow Republicans last year that he thinks Russian President Vladimir Putin pays Trump.
• On May 19, The Post reported that a federal law enforcement probe of ties between Trump’s team and Russia had reached a current senior White House adviser.
• On May 19, the Times reported that Trump said during his meeting with Kislyak and Lavrov that he “faced great pressure because of Russia” before firing Comey. “That’s taken off,” Trump reportedly said.
• On May 22, The Post reported that Trump asked the director of national intelligence, Daniel Coats, and the director of the National Security Agency, Adm. Michael S. Rogers, to publicly deny the existence of any evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election.
• On May 24, the Times reported that Russian officials schemed last summer to influence Trump through Flynn and campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
• On May 25, The Post and NBC News identified Kushner as the senior White House adviser under scrutiny by federal investigators.

“Leak” might not be the right word. Perhaps “gusher” is more descriptive.

Trump has railed against unauthorized disclosures to the press since he took office, but the issue came to a head Thursday on a matter unrelated to Russia. After the name of the suspected Manchester concert bomber leaked to U.S. news outlets, along with crime scene photos, Britain briefly suspended intelligence sharing on the case.

Trump tasked the Justice Department with rooting out the source of the leaks, and Britain resumed intelligence sharing after receiving what police there described as “fresh assurances.” Yet the strength of such assurances seems dubious. The leaks just keep coming.

I feel compelled, at this moment, to credit Politico’s Jack Shafer with nailing a pre-inauguration prediction. Arguing that Trump’s animosity toward the media might actually produce better journalism, Shafer wrote the following on Jan. 16:

As Trump shuts down White House access to reporters, they will infest the departments and agencies around town that the president has peeved. The intelligence establishment, which Trump has deprecated over the issue of Russian hacking, owes him no favors and less respect. It will be in their institutional interest to leak damaging material on Trump.

That is exactly how things have played out. And Trump seems powerless to stop it.

Gusher is a better term. We need to keep finding out what is really happening, because if it was up to the TT, the public would be kept in the dark about everything.

Will his shake up make any difference? He would have to purge everybody and start fresh. But I wonder who would want to hitch their wagon to he Trump train wreck.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Alternately charming and boorish, Trump plays the role of a lifetime overseas"

Spoiler

TAORMINA, Italy — Little matters more to Donald Trump, the brander-turned-American president, than imagery. Trump staffed his government out of central casting, and this past week it was time for him to audition for his role: Leader of the free world.

In Washington, Trump is mostly seen only when he chooses. At a lectern in the Rose Garden. Saluting as he boards Marine One. Behind the Resolute Desk of the Oval Office signing jumbo-sized executive orders, pushing his red button to summon a butler with Diet Coke or flashing a thumbs up from his high-backed cherry leather chair.

But a nine-day, marathon foreign trip that concluded Saturday here in Sicily has offered the first extended — and often unfiltered, thanks to the steady stream of raw camera footage provided by his host countries — look at Trump on the world stage.

Trump was both charming and boorish. He was deferential to the berobed king of Saudi Arabia and Pope Francis, yet aggressively rude to his European colleagues, brushing aside a Balkan prime minister to get to his place lining up for a photo shoot at NATO. The French newspaper Le Monde admonished Trump for “verbal and physical brutality” toward NATO allies and said he “lectured them like children.”

He strode around hulkingly. He nervously buttoned and unbuttoned his suit jacket. He sometimes seemed unsure whether to smile his toothy grin or glare, as he does when posing for portraits, so he alternated back and forth. At formal events, Trump did not always know where to go or what to do.

“What is the protocol?” he asked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as they walked down a red carpet at an airport arrival ceremony in Tel Aviv.

“Who knows,” Netanyahu replied. “I think they’ll just tell us where to stand.”

Trump was visibly comfortable in environs that evoked his own, like Saudi Arabia’s gilded-and-chandeliered palaces, yet appeared out of place in others. He arrived like a wrecking ball at the new NATO headquarters, a glass-and-steel behemoth that stands as a symbol of globalism and bureaucracy.

Trump’s family members took center stage. Daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, both White House advisers, stood behind or next to the president when he delivered his speech to Muslim leaders, prayed at the Western Wall, addressed Israeli-Palestinian peace and met Pope Francis. They peeled off the trip in Rome, mid-way through.

First lady Melania Trump was omnipresent, though largely silent and emotionless. She and her husband were rarely seen exchanging words, and he sometimes walked ahead of her, almost as if she were an ornament. 

But the first lady came out of her shell at solo events, handing out Dr. Seuss books and coloring with children. She was especially moved by her visit to Bambino Gesù Children’s Hospital in Rome, where she read a book to and held hands with a boy who was awaiting a heart transplant. A few hours later, the first lady learned the hospital had found a donor. “Receiving that news is a moment I will never forget,” she said.

A Slovenian-born former model, Melania received considerable attention for her fashion. The Saudi media fawned over her attire in Riyadh as “conservative” and “classy,” though she raised eyebrows strolling the streets of Sicily in a colorful floral jacket by the Italian designer Dolce & Gabanna that reportedly retails for $51,500.

While critics at home had predicted major gaffes, the president made none. And Trump participated in and contributed to substantive meetings on issues ranging from counterterrorism and trade to climate change and migration.

“A president becomes presidential,” said Fred Davis, a Republican media strategist. “I’m hoping this trip brings him a level of personal peace, confidence and gravitas that he can use back home.”

In Saudi Arabia, Trump’s call for cooperation in the fight against the Islamic State unquestionably pushed the issue forward, with renewed emphasis on stopping terror financing and blocking militant messaging and recruitment. Beyond any substantive accomplishment, Trump revitalized Arab leaders, particularly in the Persian Gulf, who felt they had been disrespected and ignored by President Obama.

“The United States shifted over the last eight years as a neutral player, at best, that looked the other way at Iranian aggression around the world,” said Ari Fleischer, a White House press secretary under former president George W. Bush. “We are now where we should be.”

In Israel and on the West Bank, Trump repeated his pledge to bring Israelis and Palestinians together in a peace deal, although no progress was made on starting that process. He delighted Netanyahu, and likely discouraged Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, by not mentioning a two-state solution as a goal.

In Europe, Trump’s badgering remarks on defense spending — during a NATO ceremony memorializing the joint alliance response to the September 2001 terrorist attacks — left a bad taste. There was widespread disappointment at Trump’s failure to use the occasion to reaffirm U.S. commitment to the alliance’s joint defense pact, Article 5, although national security adviser H.R. McMaster said that “of course” Trump supports it.

Trump’s behavior, said Stefan Leifert of Germany’s public broadcaster ZDF, was “a slap in the face of all other alliance members.”

But there were also positive reactions. Germany’s Die Welt newspaper commentator Christoph B. Schiltz wrote that Trump’s “urging, his bugging and his persistence have left the alliance finally engaging more in the fight against international terrorism.” 

The White House appeared to step on its own media applause lines by failing to provide timely fact sheets or copies of signed agreements Trump was touting in public as “historic” and “epic.” Press spokesmen sometimes were ill-equipped to provide basic information. And unlike virtually every president before him on similar journeys, Trump held no news conferences.

On the campaign trail, as Trump assessed Obama’s foreign policy, he fixated on an image from China that he thought symbolized America’s declining power: Obama disembarking Air Force One in Hangzhou, where he was attending a Group of 20 summit, on a metal ladder extending from the plane’s belly.

“They have pictures of other leaders who are. . .coming down with a beautiful red carpet. And Obama is coming down a metal staircase,” Trump said at a stop in Ohio. “If that were me, I would say, ‘You know what, folks, I respect you a lot but close the doors, let’s get out of here.’”

Trump did not have to make that call on this trip. At each stop, there were better than satisfactory staircases from which he could descend. At the Riyadh airport, trumpets blared, soldiers stood at attention, fighter jets flew overhead, and a spotless red carpet stretched across the tarmac. The aging King Salman, arriving in a golf cart, and aided by a cane, warmly greeted the president at the foot of the staircase.

“It was very spectacular,” Trump later told European leaders, using his characteristic hyperbole to describe his welcome in Saudi. “I don’t think there was ever anything like that. That was beyond anything anyone’s seen.”

On arrival in Tel Aviv, another band, another red carpet and another head of state stood waiting. Even in Rome and Brussels, which are hardly Trump-friendly locales, the president received a grand welcome.

Trump often found himself the center of attention, both because of America’s place in the world and his singular standing as an international curiosity. But he seemed most at ease playing the undisputed leading man, such as in Riyadh, where the Saudi royal family treated him like one of their own, or in Jerusalem, where Netanyahu lifted him up every opportunity.

“It is disturbing to see how impressionable he is,” said Jennifer Palmieri, a former communications adviser to Obama and Hillary Clinton. “His standard for whether or not a visit went well is how well he was treated. It is unnerving to see the leaders of other countries attempt to outdo each other in appealing to his ego as a means of bending the United States to their will.” 

Trump’s confidence was less apparent at the Vatican, where he played the supplicant to Pope Francis, sitting across a wooden desk as if he were interviewing for a job.

As the trip went on, Trump seemed to be having less of a good time, perhaps in part because scandals were brewing in Washington that would await him.

In Brussels, where he attended a series of events celebrating NATO, Trump looked downright bored. As the king of Belgium and other leaders took turns at the lectern, Trump got fidgety, shifting in his seat, looking up to the sky and down to his feet, and crossing his arms over his chest.

The president — whom aides say has little patience for listening to other people speak — then endured a dinner session in which the leaders of all 28 NATO partners gave remarks.

And here in picturesque Taormina, at the Group of Seven summit on the rocky Sicilian coast, Trump struggled to look interested during long meetings with allies in a room decorated with the flags of other countries. As the other G-7 leaders strolled the streets of this ancient fortress town, Trump followed along in a golf cart.

A weight seemed to lift from Trump’s shoulders when he touched down by helicopter at the U.S. Naval Air Station Sigonella, on the Sicilian island, for a pep rally with military families before flying home to Washington.

The need for diplomatic niceties was over. The music playing was his campaign soundtrack. The American flag hanging behind him was several stories tall. Trump could be Trump. 

The president riffed about winning — “you’re going to do a lot of winning!” — and, evoking President Reagan, said his trip would pave the way for “peace through strength.”

“That’s what we’re gonna have,” Trump said. “We’re gonna have a lot of strength and we’re gonna have a lot of peace.”

"Hulkingly", what a great description for the way the TT acts.

[GreyhoundFan]

Another good one from Jennifer Rubin: "A week that reveals how rotten today’s Republican Party is"

Spoiler

President Trump has had more-scandalous weeks. He has had weeks with more bombshell bad-news stories. But no week has matched this one in revealing the moral and intellectual rot at the center of the GOP. Pandemic intellectual dishonesty and celebration of uncivilized conduct now permeate the party and its support in the conservative ecosystem. Consider what we saw and learned this week:

• Trump in Saudi Arabia disclaims any concern for human rights.
• Trump bullies NATO allies in public (and physically shoves one leader).
• Trump’s budget is built on a rickety scaffold of math errors, economic nonsense and fantasyland predictions.
• Trump’s advisers defend massive cuts to the safety net, coupled with huge giveaways to the rich.
• The Congressional Budget Office score, which the House did not require before voting on a mammoth health-care bill, confirms that GOP leaders falsely claimed they protected people with preexisting conditions.
• Trump’s lawyers contemptuously swat away a request for information relating to his receipt of foreign monies, finding that it is too impractical to abide by his own promise and the Constitution.
• Trump has nothing but praise for thuggish autocrats, including Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte.
• Trump continues to pursue a Muslim ban, repeatedly struck down by the courts as bigotry disguised under the cloak of national security.
• A GOP congressional candidate, conclusive evidence suggests, attacks a reporter and apparently lies about it (he later apologizes for actions he denied less than 24 hours earlier), but party leaders do not repudiate him or demand that he withdraw.
• Jared Kushner, the beneficiary of egregious nepotism, now is a focus of the FBI’s Russia investigation, bringing a once-in-a-lifetime scandal one step closer to the presidency.
• Sean Hannity is forced to stop propagating a detestable hoax about a young man’s murder; Fox News after a week withdraws the original false report without much explanation or an apology.

This is the state of the GOP — a refuge for intellectual frauds and bullies, for mean-spirited hypocrites who preach personal responsibility yet excuse the inexcusable.

Conventional wisdom says that Trump executed a hostile takeover of the GOP. What we have seen this week suggests a friendly merger has taken place. Talk radio hosts have been spouting misogyny and anti-immigrant hysteria for years; Trump is their ideal leader, not merely a flawed vehicle for their views. Fox News has been dabbling in conspiracy theories (e.g. birtherism, climate-change denial) for decades; now Republicans practice intellectual nihilism. Nearly every point of criticism raised against the left — softness on foreign aggressors, irresponsible budgeting, identity politics, executive overreach, contempt for the rule of law, infantilizing voters — has become a defining feature of the right.

Anti-Trump Republicans have debated whether the GOP can be “reformed” or must be abandoned. Where would one even begin to reform a party such as this — and who would lead such an effort? (Sorry, but Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska cannot themselves run a national party.) It would take a clean sweep of not merely officeholders but also right-wing media outlets to recover anything approaching the intellectual rigor and moral decency conservatives used to cherish.

The country needs two parties and benefits from the ideas associated with classical liberalism (small “l”) — the rule of law (over the law of the jungle), respect for the dignity of every individual, prosperity-creating free markets (including trade), values-based foreign policy. The Republican Party no longer embodies those ideals; it undermines them in words and in deeds. It now advances ideas and celebrates behavior antithetical to democracy and simple human decency. Center-right Americans, we have become convinced, must look elsewhere for a political home.

She is so correct. It will be interesting to see if we get one ore more new political parties out of this mess -- maybe one centrist or a center-right and center-left party.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump’s latest tantrum will hurt hundreds of thousands of people. Here’s how."

Spoiler

We now have our first clear evidence that President Trump’s threats to blow up Obamacare — whether or not he actually intends to make good on them — are going to hurt a lot of people here in the real world. In Trump’s mind, these threats are supposed to force Democrats to make a deal on repeal, but minimal logic reveals that this is extremely far-fetched — meaning the only impact his threats will likely have is a destructive one, for no evident purpose whatsoever.

Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina has announced that it intends to try to raise premiums by 22.9 percent next year. The company says it would have tried to raise them by only 8.8 percent, but it is going for the larger increase because the Trump administration has not said whether it will continue paying the law’s so-called “cost-sharing reductions” (CSRs) to insurance companies, which subsidize out-of-pocket costs for lower-income people who get insurance on the individual markets. Democrats in Congress want to appropriate money to cover these subsidies, but Republicans have not done so.

In an interview with me this morning, Brad Wilson, the president and chief executive of Blue Cross Blue Shield North Carolina, said flat-out that the failure of the Trump administration and Congress to guarantee that these subsidies will continue is why rates are going to soar for hundreds of thousands of people in his state.

“The failure of the administration and the House to bring certainty and clarity by funding CSRs has caused our company to file a 22.9 percent premium increase, rather than one that is materially lower,” Wilson told me. “That will impact hundreds of thousands of North Carolinians.” The company says it has approximately half a million customers getting individual insurance via Obamacare.

“We filed a 22.9 rate increase for 2018 based on the assumption that the CSRs will not be in place,” Wilson also said. “The rate increase would be 8.8 percent if the CSRs were guaranteed for 2018. Because they are not, the rate is 22.9 percent.”

Trump has repeatedly threatened to cut off the CSRs. Doing so could cause many insurers to exit the market, potentially costing millions their insurance, while causing others to dramatically hike premiums. The administration paid them for May, but officials continue to refuse to say whether the payments will continue after that. The CSRs are tied up in court: House Republicans sued to stop them under Barack Obama, whose administration appealed the decision, and the payments continued pending the appeal, but the Trump administration has not said whether it will continue the appeal (dropping it would cause the payments to halt) and recently asked for a 90-day delay from the court while it mulls their fate. But this has only injected further uncertainty, and while some congressional Republicans have said they think the funds must be appropriated to stabilize the situation, there’s no sign whether they actually will.

But it must be stressed that Trump’s own stated rationale for threatening to cut off the payments is just nonsense. The threat appears rooted in pique over the failure to secure the “win” of repeal. Trump has repeatedly said the threat will force Democrats to the table to make a deal on Obamacare’s future. But Republicans are currently pursuing a repeal-and-replace plan that would do a lot more damage to the law than ending the payments would, so it’s unclear why any Democrats would join them in that effort, in response to a threat to do relatively less (though still severe) damage. The only conceivable way Democrats could make a deal with Trump is if he were open to fixing, rather than repealing, the law, which he isn’t.

Thus, the only thing Trump’s threat is really accomplishing is to drive up premiums for people. Even worse, the news out of North Carolina previews what could happen with other insurers in other states if Trump actually goes through with the threat to cut off the CSRs, and congressional Republicans don’t appropriate the money. The key point is that Blue Cross Blue Shield North Carolina is acting on the assumption that the CSRs will not be there. And in that scenario, the company has decided, massive premium hikes are necessary. So, if it comes to pass that the CSRs actually aren’t there, you will see similar premium hikes across the country.

“The effect will be the same across the country,” Wilson predicted. “Rates will be materially higher if CSRs aren’t funded.” Indeed, a recent Kaiser Family Foundation study found that insurers would likely boost premiums on average nationally by 19 percent on some plans to compensate for it if the CSRs are halted.

One last point: This whole dynamic shows that one of the leading GOP health care talking points is also complete nonsense. Paul Ryan loves to say that Republicans are performing a “rescue mission” by stepping in to save people from the allegedly collapsing ACA by replacing it, and that they don’t want any people to be hurt in the transition. As it is, their “rescue mission” would result in 23 million people losing insurance over 10 years, and in soaring premiums for sick people, with many priced out of the market. But that aside, if their own stated goal is to avoid hurting people during the transition, it’s unclear why they would not fund the CSRs, since the failure to do so is going to hurt untold numbers of them.

...

It's just unreal.

[Howl]

Quote

While critics at home had predicted major gaffes, the president made none. And Trump participated in and contributed to substantive meetings on issues ranging from counterterrorism and trade to climate change and migration.

“A president becomes presidential,” said Fred Davis, a Republican media strategist. “I’m hoping this trip brings him a level of personal peace, confidence and gravitas that he can use back home.”

Not realizing that Israel is part of the Middle East is a major gaffe.  Insulting NATO leaders is a major gaffe.  Criticizing BMW for exporting too many cars to the US, when indeed, most of those cars were manufactured here is a big gaffe. 

According to Business Insider,

Quote

Trump threatened to impose a hefty import tax of 35% on German cars coming into the US in January, Reuters reported at the time.

BMW has a manufacturing facility in Spartanburg, South Carolina where it builds its X3, X4, X5 and X6. Roughly 65% of the cars produced at BMW's South Carolina facility are exported overseas, according to the Reuters report.

Volkswagen has a facility in Chattanooga, Tennessee and Mercedes-Benz has one in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

MAGA = Make Another Gaffe Again

[GreyhoundFan]

"About Melania Trump and that $51,500 jacket she wore in Italy …"

Spoiler

First lady Melania Trump stepped out in Sicily on Friday wearing a Dolce & Gabbana floral coat with multicolored silk flowers that retails for $51,500. No one was more excited about this than designer Stefano Gabbana, who lauded the occasion on his personal Instagram with a flurry of heart emoji. Others on social media wondered what exactly could possibly make a coat worth so much money. And, of course, there was the how-dare-she contingent who contrasted the costly coat with her husband’s health care bill, which is estimated to strip 23 million people of their medical insurance by 2026: The lady wears Dolce while the middle class implodes.

...

The head-shaking and tsk-tsking over Melania Trump’s coat calls to mind the outrage and indignation that erupted in 2009 when Michelle Obama wore $540 Lanvin sneakers to a Washington food bank. There’s a big price gap between a pair of designer sneakers and a coat that costs as much as a house in some parts of the country, but the fundamental point is the same: fashion shame.

...

Clothes can be deeply symbolic. And Trump’s choice of Dolce & Gabbana — an Italian brand that has been deeply inspired by Sicilian culture — for a trip to Sicily makes sense. Gabbana also has been quite vocal and enthusiastic in his willingness to associate his brand with the first lady, something many designers have not been comfortable doing because of her husband’s policies and temperament. Indeed, Trump has worn the label multiple times on her inaugural foreign trip.

And frankly, the floral coat is beautiful.

...

The focus on the cost of designer fashion, whether sneakers or silk coats, is not so much about questioning whether a garment is too expensive, but about questioning the intrinsic value of fashion itself. There’s a presumption that fashion’s worth should be calculated only in terms of its raw materials and labor. Instead, creativity, artistry, beauty, status, delight, individuality and a host of other intangible notions should be tallied as well. After all, people tend to understand that the value of a car is not just the cost of fiberglass, metal and the hourly wage of the folks who assembled it. The value of a multicourse fine-dining experience is not simply the grocery bill.

...

President Trump campaigned on a promise to speak for the working class and to represent those who feel that financial advancement has eluded them. And more broadly, there’s a belief that leaders of all stripes should display empathy for the less fortunate. Fancy apartments, expensive cars, private clubs and designer clothes can easily wall a person off from those who struggle to buy groceries every week.

But they also can serve as a reminder of one’s good fortune and subsequent responsibility to society. Noblesse oblige and all. Fashion is no greater indication of being divorced from life’s hardships than any other benefit of wealth. And it’s often glorious evidence of life’s beauty. Clothes aren’t cruel or uncaring. That’s left to the people who wear them.

I disagree with the author -- I don't think the coat is beautiful. It is pretty tone-deaf to wear something so ridiculously expensive while your husband and his buddies are pissing on the poor and middle class.

[47of74]

2 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Another good one from Jennifer Rubin: "A week that reveals how rotten today’s Republican Party is"

  Reveal hidden contents

President Trump has had more-scandalous weeks. He has had weeks with more bombshell bad-news stories. But no week has matched this one in revealing the moral and intellectual rot at the center of the GOP. Pandemic intellectual dishonesty and celebration of uncivilized conduct now permeate the party and its support in the conservative ecosystem. Consider what we saw and learned this week:

• Trump in Saudi Arabia disclaims any concern for human rights.
• Trump bullies NATO allies in public (and physically shoves one leader).
• Trump’s budget is built on a rickety scaffold of math errors, economic nonsense and fantasyland predictions.
• Trump’s advisers defend massive cuts to the safety net, coupled with huge giveaways to the rich.
• The Congressional Budget Office score, which the House did not require before voting on a mammoth health-care bill, confirms that GOP leaders falsely claimed they protected people with preexisting conditions.
• Trump’s lawyers contemptuously swat away a request for information relating to his receipt of foreign monies, finding that it is too impractical to abide by his own promise and the Constitution.
• Trump has nothing but praise for thuggish autocrats, including Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte.
• Trump continues to pursue a Muslim ban, repeatedly struck down by the courts as bigotry disguised under the cloak of national security.
• A GOP congressional candidate, conclusive evidence suggests, attacks a reporter and apparently lies about it (he later apologizes for actions he denied less than 24 hours earlier), but party leaders do not repudiate him or demand that he withdraw.
• Jared Kushner, the beneficiary of egregious nepotism, now is a focus of the FBI’s Russia investigation, bringing a once-in-a-lifetime scandal one step closer to the presidency.
• Sean Hannity is forced to stop propagating a detestable hoax about a young man’s murder; Fox News after a week withdraws the original false report without much explanation or an apology.

This is the state of the GOP — a refuge for intellectual frauds and bullies, for mean-spirited hypocrites who preach personal responsibility yet excuse the inexcusable.

Conventional wisdom says that Trump executed a hostile takeover of the GOP. What we have seen this week suggests a friendly merger has taken place. Talk radio hosts have been spouting misogyny and anti-immigrant hysteria for years; Trump is their ideal leader, not merely a flawed vehicle for their views. Fox News has been dabbling in conspiracy theories (e.g. birtherism, climate-change denial) for decades; now Republicans practice intellectual nihilism. Nearly every point of criticism raised against the left — softness on foreign aggressors, irresponsible budgeting, identity politics, executive overreach, contempt for the rule of law, infantilizing voters — has become a defining feature of the right.

Anti-Trump Republicans have debated whether the GOP can be “reformed” or must be abandoned. Where would one even begin to reform a party such as this — and who would lead such an effort? (Sorry, but Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska cannot themselves run a national party.) It would take a clean sweep of not merely officeholders but also right-wing media outlets to recover anything approaching the intellectual rigor and moral decency conservatives used to cherish.

The country needs two parties and benefits from the ideas associated with classical liberalism (small “l”) — the rule of law (over the law of the jungle), respect for the dignity of every individual, prosperity-creating free markets (including trade), values-based foreign policy. The Republican Party no longer embodies those ideals; it undermines them in words and in deeds. It now advances ideas and celebrates behavior antithetical to democracy and simple human decency. Center-right Americans, we have become convinced, must look elsewhere for a political home.

She is so correct. It will be interesting to see if we get one ore more new political parties out of this mess -- maybe one centrist or a center-right and center-left party.

Yeah.   To be honest as much as I despise the Republicans the Democrats aren't exactly winning with me either.  I support the Democrats because of how God-Awful the Republicans are these days, but if there were actual alternatives that could and did win important elections instead of being spoilers for Republicans I would at least seriously consider supporting them. 

And fuckhead has returned to the US, and right away went on the twitters.  

http://us.blastingnews.com/news/2017/05/donald-trump-returns-to-twitter-after-ending-foreign-trip-quickly-regrets-tweet-001731713.html

Quote

After a week out of the #United States, #Donald Trump is on his way back to the White House. As he was making his return home on Saturday, the president decided to send out multiple tweets, many of which didn't go over well with his critics.

Not long after Donald Trump sent out his tweet about saving "billions" from the Middle East, social media critics hit back. "It means you sold a shitload of weapons to Saudi Arabia," Tony Posnanski tweeted in reference to Trump's recent $110 billion weapons deal with the Saudi.

"Seriously starting to question your legitimacy, Sir," author Joe Papp wrote on Twitter. "Your approval ratings are terrible, you've yet to accomplish nothing but talk conspiracies during your presidency—Way to go down in history," another social media user added. "What will it take for GOP to put country over party? Does Putin have to literally be sitting in the Oval Office?" actor and director Rob Reiner went on to write.

 

[AuntK]

31 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"About Melania Trump and that $51,500 jacket she wore in Italy …"

  Hide contents

First lady Melania Trump stepped out in Sicily on Friday wearing a Dolce & Gabbana floral coat with multicolored silk flowers that retails for $51,500. No one was more excited about this than designer Stefano Gabbana, who lauded the occasion on his personal Instagram with a flurry of heart emoji. Others on social media wondered what exactly could possibly make a coat worth so much money. And, of course, there was the how-dare-she contingent who contrasted the costly coat with her husband’s health care bill, which is estimated to strip 23 million people of their medical insurance by 2026: The lady wears Dolce while the middle class implodes.

...

The head-shaking and tsk-tsking over Melania Trump’s coat calls to mind the outrage and indignation that erupted in 2009 when Michelle Obama wore $540 Lanvin sneakers to a Washington food bank. There’s a big price gap between a pair of designer sneakers and a coat that costs as much as a house in some parts of the country, but the fundamental point is the same: fashion shame.

...

Clothes can be deeply symbolic. And Trump’s choice of Dolce & Gabbana — an Italian brand that has been deeply inspired by Sicilian culture — for a trip to Sicily makes sense. Gabbana also has been quite vocal and enthusiastic in his willingness to associate his brand with the first lady, something many designers have not been comfortable doing because of her husband’s policies and temperament. Indeed, Trump has worn the label multiple times on her inaugural foreign trip.

And frankly, the floral coat is beautiful.

...

The focus on the cost of designer fashion, whether sneakers or silk coats, is not so much about questioning whether a garment is too expensive, but about questioning the intrinsic value of fashion itself. There’s a presumption that fashion’s worth should be calculated only in terms of its raw materials and labor. Instead, creativity, artistry, beauty, status, delight, individuality and a host of other intangible notions should be tallied as well. After all, people tend to understand that the value of a car is not just the cost of fiberglass, metal and the hourly wage of the folks who assembled it. The value of a multicourse fine-dining experience is not simply the grocery bill.

...

President Trump campaigned on a promise to speak for the working class and to represent those who feel that financial advancement has eluded them. And more broadly, there’s a belief that leaders of all stripes should display empathy for the less fortunate. Fancy apartments, expensive cars, private clubs and designer clothes can easily wall a person off from those who struggle to buy groceries every week.

But they also can serve as a reminder of one’s good fortune and subsequent responsibility to society. Noblesse oblige and all. Fashion is no greater indication of being divorced from life’s hardships than any other benefit of wealth. And it’s often glorious evidence of life’s beauty. Clothes aren’t cruel or uncaring. That’s left to the people who wear them.

I disagree with the author -- I don't think the coat is beautiful. It is pretty tone-deaf to wear something so ridiculously expensive while your husband and his buddies are pissing on the poor and middle class.

The floral coat was hideous! I wouldn't wear such a tacky thing, but then, I've never been a trend-setter. And to wear a coat which costs more than most Americans make in a year while your husband is doing everything he can to take funding away from health care, social security, disability benefits, education, the elderly, and just about everything everybody else in America that is not a millionaire relies upon, shows a total self-absorption and lack of compassion. She cares about no one but herself and her offspring.

And it wasn't even cool enough for that damn coat!  It appeared to be fairly heavy. Did you notice? Others were in short sleeves and sleeveless garments.  This was an "in your face statement" by the former nude model, a real trumpish act. She's  a selfish bitch - she made her bed. . . let her lie in it with her orange husband.

Rant over.

[GreyhoundFan]

"The reason behind Macron’s firm handshake with Trump, revealed: He was warned!"

Spoiler

Emmanuel Macron was warned!

To be more specific, the newly elected president of France was told to be prepared for the sometimes awkward and always aggressive handshakes of President Trump. And it happened after Gérard Araud hosted a salon dinner Monday at the spectacular Washington, D.C., home he lives in as the French ambassador to the United States.

I was among the journalists, politicians, philanthropists and think tankers who gathered at the Kalorama neighborhood manse to participate in a conversation co-hosted by the Atlantic on the rise of populism in Western liberal democracies. A friend and I were talking during the pre-dinner cocktail hour about our summer plans when the affable and impish Araud approached.

As with all conversations in this town for the last 126 days (as of this writing), ours turned to Trump. The ambassador, whose previous post was as France’s ambassador to the United Nations, allowed that he had just sent a memo to Macron advising him on how to handle the American president during their first meeting at the NATO summit in Brussels on Thursday. When I asked him what he told the new boss, Araud diplomatically told me to buzz off with a roll of the eye and a smirk. But the fact that he sent guidance back to Paris was not surprising since there have been reports about how European leaders were gearing up for meeting The Donald.

“Did you warn him about Trump’s handshakes?” my philanthropist friend asked. A look of surprise popped on Araud’s face as he inquired what exactly did that mean. Both of us told him about Trump’s affinity for the alpha male, grab-and-pull power pump that always seemed to reduce the other person to a rag doll. Forewarned, Araud said he would alert Macron.

The Post’s Philip Rucker captured the intensity of that first handshake.

As President Trump met French President Emmanuel Macron for the first time, welcoming him to lunch Thursday at the residence here of the U.S. ambassador to Belgium, the two men shook hands for six long seconds. Their knuckles turned white, their jaws clenched and their faces tightened. Trump reached in first, but then he tried to release, twice, but Macron kept his grip until letting go.

There was even more arm wrestling upon Macron’s arrival at the festivities at the NATO headquarters.

Macron strides along the blue carpet to the wall of world leaders walking toward him. As the president of the United States stretches out his arms in a “hey, buddy!” greeting of the newest member of the elite club, Macron veers to the right like a decoy Marine One from the South Lawn of the White House. Trump looks on as his French counterpart double kisses German Chancellor Angela Merkel and shakes hands with other leaders. When Macron does get around to greeting Trump, Trump goes for the grab-and-pull. But Macron immediately yanks back and employs his left hand to try to hold down The Donald’s rising right arm as the insecure alpha tries to assert his dominance as cameras clicked.

Araud will retire from the French foreign service in a month or two. A masquerade reception at his residence Thursday evening was his chance to say thank you and farewell to a city he enlivened with his elan and good cheer. As my husband and I said our goodbyes to the openly gay career diplomat, I asked him if he’d seen the videos of the handshakes and if he indeed had a chance to warn Macron.

“Yes!” he said, eyes sparkling behind his black mask as he smiled and enthusiastically pantomimed the grab-and-pull.

As funny as it is, the fact of the matter is that it is pitiful that the TT is so transparent and ridiculous that other leaders have to do this type of warning and preparation.

[AuntK]

Damn! I saw a photo of the Orange shithead and Melania in the silver dress heading to a concert in Italy and now I can't find it. It is a close-up and his tie is out of place and you can see that the shirt buttons over his belly are straining and about to pop! And this is with him standing! And you know what happens when your shirt is too tight and you SIT! I wish those buttons would start flying! He obviously needs a larger size shirt! Now you know why you never see him without his coat!

Yes I am being petty, but I hate him.