Trump 20: Sauron Doesn't Seem So Bad After All

June 30, 2017

3 hours ago, onekidanddone said:

Cooper opened his show by reading his audience a “passage from a book full of advice on how a president ought to behave.”

“‘The president of the United States is the most powerful person in the world. The president is the spokesman for democracy and liberty. Isn’t it time we brought back the pomp and circumstance and the sense of awe for that office that we all held?’”

“‘The writer went on to say, ‘That means everyone in the administration should look and act professionally, especially the president.’” Cooper read. “The writer concludes, ‘Impressions matter.’”

That quote was from a 2015 book called “Crippled America,” Cooper said. The author was Donald Trump.

No surprise that Trump doesn't follow his own advice for how a president should behave. He probably didn't write his own book.

I've been finding a modicum of comfort in reading about the campaigns and administrations of past American presidents. The latest I've read is "Destiny of the Republic" by Candice Millard. This book is about President Garfield, who was shot four months into his presidency and ultimately died in office.

What interested me most about this book was the story of Vice President Chester Arthur, who was waiting in the wings. Arthur was a seemingly weak character, who had his own Putin pulling the strings, a guy named Roscoe Conkling. The way the author presents the story of the Vice President turned President may give you some hope that decent things can arise from national tragedy. (Although the current administration may be too far gone, sigh...)

June 30, 2017

14 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked on Fox News about Trump’s “Morning Joe” screed and actually defended it. “Look, I don’t think that the president’s ever been someone who gets attacked and doesn’t push back,” she said. “There have been an outrageous number of personal attacks, not just to him but to frankly everyone around him. People on that show have personally attacked me many times. This is a president who fights fire with fire and certainly will not be allowed to be bullied by liberal media and the liberal elites within the media or Hollywood or anywhere else.”

Sarah, do you honestly believe that Trump doesn't make nasty comments about you, or Kellyanne Conaway, or any of the other women who work for him? This isn't about being a liberal or a conservative, it's about being a decent human being regardless of your political beliefs.

I know you think that being Huckabee's daughter is a shield that will protect you, but that's not true. I've had the "pleasure" of knowing a man like Trump, and sooner or later you'll do something to really displease him, and not only will you learn in graphic detail exactly how little he values you as a person, you'll also learn that some of the people who you thought were friends, will defend him just as you are doing now.

I'm no fan of yours Sarah, but Trump is toxic. If I knew you in the real world, I'd be advising you to get the hell outta Dodge. Yes, leaving the White House will anger your father, but ask yourself this, why is appeasing Trump more important to my father than my personal well-being?

June 30, 2017

"Don’t sugarcoat this. Trump just called for 32 million people to lose health coverage."

Spoiler

President Trump’s profound ignorance about policy and the inner workings of our system, and his total disinterest in informing himself about these topics, have produced an unfortunate result: Many of his tweets about matters of substance tend to get ignored as Trump just being Trump. Meanwhile, the viscerally disgusting insults (such as the one claiming Mika Brzezinski bled from her face-lift) make international news.

But Trump’s tweet this morning about health care actually does matter, a lot:

...

This is getting a lot of attention today, but mainly as a call for Republicans to adopt a particular legislative strategy. As such, it makes little sense: Republicans are struggling to find 50 votes for their current repeal-and-replace bill, with many moderates balking, so it’s hard to see how outright repeal could get a bare majority.

Beyond this, though, it’s worth taking Trump’s tweet as an actual policy statement. Trump has now called for total repeal of the Affordable Care Act, with no guarantee of any specific replacement later, or even a guarantee that any replacement would ever materialize at all.

It’s hard to estimate what would happen if Republicans did act on this and Trump signed it. Republicans probably wouldn’t be able to repeal some key portions of the Affordable Care Act — particularly its insurance-market regulations — via a simple majority “reconciliation” vote. But they could theoretically repeal things with a budgetary orientation, such as the individual mandate and the Medicaid expansion and the subsidies to lower-income people why buy insurance on the exchanges.

We can estimate the impact of repealing those things. Indeed, the Congressional Budget Office has already done so, when it analyzed a previous version of a GOP repeal bill over a year ago. And that analysis found that repealing those things would result in 32 million people losing coverage by 2026, 19 million of them people who would lose Medicaid coverage.

...

This is unequivocally what Trump has now called for. And it is substantially worse than what is currently being debated in the Senate, which would result in 22 million people losing coverage over 10 years, 15 million of them from Medicaid, per the CBO.

“When Republicans floated their repeal bill back in 2016, CBO concluded that 32 million people would lose coverage, relative to the current baseline, by 2026,” Nicholas Bagley, a health policy expert at the University of Michigan, emailed me today. “Fully 19 million people would be kicked off of Medicaid. Those coverage losses are even grimmer than the losses from the House and Senate bills that are currently under discussion.”

Whether Trump meant this or not, or even knew what he was calling for, are irrelevant. That’s because it could theoretically happen. In fact, conservative senators such as Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ben Sasse of Nebraska are actively calling on fellow Republicans to go forward with repeal alone right now. Sasse doubled down by tweeting an endorsement of Trump’s demand.

Trump, it pains me to inform you, is the president. When he calls on Congress to do something, he is basically saying that he would sign it if they did do it. There is no reason to treat this as trivial or frivolous simply because Trump is an ignoramus and a buffoon. Indeed, Republicans have in fact voted for repeal multiple times in the past. The only reason they aren’t doing so right now is because repeal cannot pass, now that there is a Republican in the White House who would actually sign such a bill. (Yes, Trump would sign such a bill in two seconds. He called for one today, remember?)

In this sense, Trump’s tweet is actually kind of useful. It reveals once again that Republicans have been running a massive scam on Obamacare for years. They constantly fulminated for repeal, and voted repeatedly for it, in the full knowledge that President Barack Obama would veto it and that they would not face the consequences of their rhetoric and vote. The promise of unspecified replacements allowed Republicans to claim they would act to make sure millions didn’t lose coverage, without saying how. But now that repeal could become a reality, they are no longer willing to vote for it, because they would be held accountable for those consequences. By calling for straight-up repeal right now, Trump has inadvertently called their bluff.

Indeed, it’s not even clear that Senate Republicans can pass repeal and replace, because it has become obvious that even this would result in many millions losing health coverage, extracting an immense human toll that is now a genuine possibility. Moderate Republican senators have conceded this to be the case, and their seemingly genuine qualms about this constitute a pleasant surprise. But Republicans who have no serious misgivings about such an awful outcome have resorted, for political reasons, to all manner of lies and obfuscation to obscure this reality.

This includes Trump and the White House, who have dissembled relentlessly about how their plan would leave everybody covered and wouldn’t cut Medicaid at all. But now Trump has confirmed that he is indeed for full repeal, full stop — which would result in 32 million fewer covered — without any guaranteed “replacement” providing any cover to advance the lie that millions wouldn’t lose coverage. Trump has unmasked his own scam.

...

He just wants to be able to sign "something" from congress, he couldn't care less what it is. I'm really feeling nauseous.

June 30, 2017

"Why we should be very afraid of Trump’s vote suppression commission"

Spoiler

Most presidential commissions don’t accomplish very much — they meet a few times, do some research, and produce a report, which then gets filed away and few people ever read, the list of recommendations seldom acted on. But President Trump’s Presidential Commission on Election Integrity is different.

Its goal is nothing less than the supercharging of recent Republican efforts to disenfranchise Democratic voters and permanently tip the scales of elections in the GOP’s favor. Its true name should be the Commission on Vote Suppression, and it’s getting right to work.

This commission is led by Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach, who is the country’s premier advocate of vote suppression (Vice President Pence is the nominal chair, but as vice chair, Kobach is obviously running things). We’ll get more into Kobach’s agenda in a moment, but first the latest news. This week the commission sent a letter to all 50 state governments demanding that they send the commission their full voter files, including names, addresses, birth dates, party affiliation, voting history, and Social Security numbers for every voter in America.

While some of that information is publicly available for a fee (parties and candidates buy it to target voters), Democratic officials in a number of states have essentially told Kobach to buzz off. The secretaries of state in Kentucky, California, and Massachusetts have refused, and the secretary of state in Connecticut said she will withhold some parts of the data, noting that Kobach “has a lengthy record of illegally disenfranchising eligible voters in Kansas.” Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe said “I have no intention of honoring this request,” and other Democratic states are sure to follow.

The commission will probably end up obtaining most of the data they’re after one way or another. So what are they going to do with it? It’s no secret: under the guise of fighting “voter fraud,” they’ll use it as a tool to disenfranchise thousands, perhaps even millions of people, in order to solidify the Republican advantage in elections.

If you aren’t familiar with him, Kris Kobach has made a crusade out of denying people the right to vote, particularly racial minorities (I recommend this recent profile of Kobach by Ari Berman). Kobach, who is running for governor in Kansas, is currently the only secretary of state who has the power to prosecute voter fraud, a power he was granted by the Kansas legislature after convincing them that thousands upon thousands of people were voting illegally in the state. But as Berman reports:

Though Kobach received the authority to prosecute fraud cases after warning that voting by ‘aliens’ was rampant, the nine convictions he has won since 2015 have primarily been citizens 60 and over who own property in two states and were confused about voting requirements. Only one noncitizen has been convicted.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Kansans have been blocked from registering by the 2011 law he championed that requires documentary proof of citizenship in order to register.

Kobach was also recently fined by a federal judge for lying to the court about documents in a case in which he’s being sued by the ACLU. But his arguments about vast numbers of people voting illegally found a welcome audience in Donald Trump, who has convinced himself that millions of undocumented immigrants voted illegally for Hillary Clinton and that voters registered in two states is a major problem that has contributed to rampant voter fraud.

The truth is that while lots of people are registered in multiple places, there’s almost no evidence that double-voting is anything more than a miniscule problem. Here’s a news flash: People move, and when they register in their new home, they’ll be registered in two places. But that doesn’t mean they’re voting in two places. During the course of my voting life, I’ve registered in four states plus the District of Columbia. That doesn’t mean I’m committing voter fraud, it just means that my name is on a list in states I used to live in. No one is going to the polls claiming to be me.

We see this pattern again and again: Republicans complain that there is some huge voter fraud problem that requires sweeping new laws in order to solve, but when it’s investigated, it turns out that the problem is somewhere between microscopic and non-existent. But in the meantime, they’ve stolen thousands of people’s voting rights — people who just happen to disproportionately be Democrats.

So what is Kobach’s commission going to do with the data it gets? We don’t know for sure, but it appears that they have two broad goals. The first is essentially a PR effort aimed at public opinion and state legislatures: foster the impression that fraud is widespread, which then makes it easier for Republican-run states to impose draconian laws making it as hard as possible for people to register and vote. The second apparent goal is more direct: create lists of allegedly questionable voters that they’ll give to states in order to convince them to purge those people from the rolls, by showing that they might be registered in more than one place.

This is what Kobach has already been doing with a multi-state program called Crosscheck. One academic study of Crosscheck revealed that it flags thousands upon thousands of people who are allegedly voting in multiple states and recommends that they be purged from the rolls, when in fact these are simply people who have the same name and birthdate as someone in another state. How many people named John Smith or Jennifer Wilson who were born on July 30th do you think there are in the United States?

In addition, Kobach is apparently planning to use a Homeland Security database of non-citizens — visa holders, green card holders, and the like — to flag voters to be purged. At this point you might be asking: Won’t all this affect Republicans, too? It will, but when done on a sufficiently broad scale, this is a numbers game that works to Republicans’ benefit. Let’s say there’s a green card holder named Hector Gonzales who was born on April 3rd, and they find 75 different voters named Hector Gonzales with that birthday around the country and purge them all on the dubious grounds that they all might be that one non-citizen Hector Gonzales. Even if there are a few Republicans born on April 3rd named Hector Gonzales who lose their voting rights, the GOP will come out ahead, since most of those Hector Gonzalezes are probably Democrats.

The same is true of voter ID laws. Some Republicans may be unable to find their birth certificates and be disenfranchised, but everyone knows that Democrats are affected more. One statistical analysis found that “strict ID laws cause a reduction in Democratic turnout by 8.8 percentage points, compared to a reduction of 3.6 percentage points for Republicans.” So the math works out in the GOP’s favor.

Let’s be clear: the sole purpose of this commission on “election integrity” is to suppress votes and give the GOP a structural advantage in every election. It’s being led by Kris Kobach, whose twin missions in life are to scale back immigration and to make voting more difficult. Other commission members include Ken Blackwell, a far-right activist who as secretary of state of Ohio in 2004 (while he was simultaneously serving as state co-chair of the Bush campaign) tried to disenfranchise people whose registration forms were submitted on insufficiently heavy paper stock. The administration just added Hans von Spakovsky, who before Kobach emerged was known as the country’s most prominent advocate of vote suppression.

These people are not trying to determine whether there are problems with our voting system and find the best solutions to those problems. They have come together to promote the myth of voter fraud and enable vote suppression in order to advantage the Republican Party. No one should be fooled into thinking this enterprise is anything other than that.

Another case where I don't know if we'll ever be able to recover from the damage this administration is doing.

June 30, 2017

4 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Don’t sugarcoat this. Trump just called for 32 million people to lose health coverage."

Reveal hidden contents

President Trump’s profound ignorance about policy and the inner workings of our system, and his total disinterest in informing himself about these topics, have produced an unfortunate result: Many of his tweets about matters of substance tend to get ignored as Trump just being Trump. Meanwhile, the viscerally disgusting insults (such as the one claiming Mika Brzezinski bled from her face-lift) make international news.

But Trump’s tweet this morning about health care actually does matter, a lot:

...

This is getting a lot of attention today, but mainly as a call for Republicans to adopt a particular legislative strategy. As such, it makes little sense: Republicans are struggling to find 50 votes for their current repeal-and-replace bill, with many moderates balking, so it’s hard to see how outright repeal could get a bare majority.

Beyond this, though, it’s worth taking Trump’s tweet as an actual policy statement. Trump has now called for total repeal of the Affordable Care Act, with no guarantee of any specific replacement later, or even a guarantee that any replacement would ever materialize at all.

It’s hard to estimate what would happen if Republicans did act on this and Trump signed it. Republicans probably wouldn’t be able to repeal some key portions of the Affordable Care Act — particularly its insurance-market regulations — via a simple majority “reconciliation” vote. But they could theoretically repeal things with a budgetary orientation, such as the individual mandate and the Medicaid expansion and the subsidies to lower-income people why buy insurance on the exchanges.

We can estimate the impact of repealing those things. Indeed, the Congressional Budget Office has already done so, when it analyzed a previous version of a GOP repeal bill over a year ago. And that analysis found that repealing those things would result in 32 million people losing coverage by 2026, 19 million of them people who would lose Medicaid coverage.

...

This is unequivocally what Trump has now called for. And it is substantially worse than what is currently being debated in the Senate, which would result in 22 million people losing coverage over 10 years, 15 million of them from Medicaid, per the CBO.

“When Republicans floated their repeal bill back in 2016, CBO concluded that 32 million people would lose coverage, relative to the current baseline, by 2026,” Nicholas Bagley, a health policy expert at the University of Michigan, emailed me today. “Fully 19 million people would be kicked off of Medicaid. Those coverage losses are even grimmer than the losses from the House and Senate bills that are currently under discussion.”

Whether Trump meant this or not, or even knew what he was calling for, are irrelevant. That’s because it could theoretically happen. In fact, conservative senators such as Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ben Sasse of Nebraska are actively calling on fellow Republicans to go forward with repeal alone right now. Sasse doubled down by tweeting an endorsement of Trump’s demand.

Trump, it pains me to inform you, is the president. When he calls on Congress to do something, he is basically saying that he would sign it if they did do it. There is no reason to treat this as trivial or frivolous simply because Trump is an ignoramus and a buffoon. Indeed, Republicans have in fact voted for repeal multiple times in the past. The only reason they aren’t doing so right now is because repeal cannot pass, now that there is a Republican in the White House who would actually sign such a bill. (Yes, Trump would sign such a bill in two seconds. He called for one today, remember?)

In this sense, Trump’s tweet is actually kind of useful. It reveals once again that Republicans have been running a massive scam on Obamacare for years. They constantly fulminated for repeal, and voted repeatedly for it, in the full knowledge that President Barack Obama would veto it and that they would not face the consequences of their rhetoric and vote. The promise of unspecified replacements allowed Republicans to claim they would act to make sure millions didn’t lose coverage, without saying how. But now that repeal could become a reality, they are no longer willing to vote for it, because they would be held accountable for those consequences. By calling for straight-up repeal right now, Trump has inadvertently called their bluff.

Indeed, it’s not even clear that Senate Republicans can pass repeal and replace, because it has become obvious that even this would result in many millions losing health coverage, extracting an immense human toll that is now a genuine possibility. Moderate Republican senators have conceded this to be the case, and their seemingly genuine qualms about this constitute a pleasant surprise. But Republicans who have no serious misgivings about such an awful outcome have resorted, for political reasons, to all manner of lies and obfuscation to obscure this reality.

This includes Trump and the White House, who have dissembled relentlessly about how their plan would leave everybody covered and wouldn’t cut Medicaid at all. But now Trump has confirmed that he is indeed for full repeal, full stop — which would result in 32 million fewer covered — without any guaranteed “replacement” providing any cover to advance the lie that millions wouldn’t lose coverage. Trump has unmasked his own scam.

...

He just wants to be able to sign "something" from congress, he couldn't care less what it is. I'm really feeling nauseous.

"We need to repeal! We need to...take a break?" You knew it was going to come to this. This what they've always wanted. Pretend like Obama never existed. So many stupid voters.

And yeah, "Bring me something to sign! NOW! And find some people to stand behind me!" Narcissistic wind bag.

June 30, 2017

This is a good op-ed from the NYT: "I’ve Overestimated Donald Trump"

Spoiler

I have to confess I’ve overestimated Donald Trump.

Back in the day, he sent me a copy of a column he objected to, with some notes suggesting I was a “dog and a liar” with “the face of a pig.”

I’ve had many opportunities to make use of that story since Trump became a presidential candidate, so it’s all fine for me. However, I have to admit that it did not occur to me he’d keep doing that kind of stuff as president of the United States.

The latest story involves Trump taking umbrage at the MSNBC “Morning Joe” hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough. So he took to Twitter, insulting them both and claiming that Brzezinski had come to Mar-a-Lago “bleeding badly from a face-lift.” Both she and Scarborough are plenty capable of taking care of themselves. But the country is, you know, sort of a different matter.

Every time one of these tweeting disasters occurs, it reminds us that the United States president has no more discernible self-control than a 10-year-old bully who works out his failure to pass third grade by tormenting the little kids on the playground.

The tweeting took place around 9 a.m. on a weekday and I believe that I speak for almost all Americans when I wonder whether he should have been in meetings instead.

The official White House position appears to be that Brzezinski deserved it since she had said mean things about the president on TV. Among Trump’s small band of pathetic defenders we found Dan Scavino Jr., who is in charge of White House social media, who claimed “#DumbAsARockMika and lover #JealousJoe are lost, confused & saddened since @POTUS @realDonaldTrump stopped returning their calls! Unhinged.”

...

The important messages here are A) the White House expert on social media thinks dragging this out is a good plan and the White House expert on social media used to be Trump’s golf caddy.

A lot of top Republican leaders have expressed their dismay about what was obviously a sexist insult, but that’s hardly sufficient. This is the same party, after all, that recently produced its Senate health care bill drafted by a committee of 13 men. A bill whose defenders have argued, in effect, that making maternity health coverage more expensive is not a problem because guys don’t get pregnant.

The Republicans’ many variations on “oh God” isn’t enough. The least they could do is hold a prayer vigil on the White House lawn.

I'm confused, I thought the TT was in charge of WH social media?

July 1, 2017

2 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

A lot of top Republican leaders have expressed their dismay about what was obviously a sexist insult, but that’s hardly sufficient. This is the same party, after all, that recently produced its Senate health care bill drafted by a committee of 13 men. A bill whose defenders have argued, in effect, that making maternity health coverage more expensive is not a problem because guys don’t get pregnant.

I'm glad to see some of the Republican women get mad about the tweets toward Mika, but I'm perplexed by how they seem to not have ever noticed that misogyny is baked into their party.

July 1, 2017

Not likely: "Is this it for Trump?"

Spoiler

For months, Trump watchers have wondered: What will it take?

Meaning: What would finally force Republicans to face the fact, so obvious to so many, that President Trump isn’t quite right? Not in the correct sense but in the head sense.

The answer, apparently, is Mika Brzezinski of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

“This is not normal,” people are finally saying in response to Trump’s latest Twitter attacks in which the president of the United States limboed under his own low bar and chastised Brzezinski and co-anchor/fiance Joe Scarborough with his usual knuckle-dragging flair. Applying his 140-character attention span, he squibbed:

“I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don’t watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year’s Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!”

Classic Trump.

This probably isn’t the way Brzezinski would have preferred things to go, but in Trump’s vernacular, she’s been cruisin’ for a bruisin’ for a long time. That is, she’s been calling out The Donald with everything but an engraved invitation to duel at dawn.

And, high time, I might add. For months during the early part of Trump’s campaign, “MoJo,” as the show is nicknamed, was a welcome station for the celebrity firing squad. Around Washington, people had begun referring to the morning manfest, where Brzezinski gamely serves as reluctant den mother, as “Morning Trump.” This was also the period when then-candidate Trump constantly bragged that he hadn’t spent any money on advertising — and no one wondered why. He regularly called in to the show, essentially running his campaign from Trump Tower.

Trump had ample coverage elsewhere as well. When your strength is branding and your name is the brand, there’s little challenge to getting airtime. Cable television anchors and producers not only became Trump’s unpaid marketers but also bear some of the responsibility/blame for Trump’s election. Then, things got strange. Trump won. Then Trump became even odder than usual, even according to his friends and others inclined to like him. Always fiercely competitive, obviously, as well as flawed, Trump nevertheless was able to control his worst impulses before becoming president, Scarborough and Brzezinski co-wrote in a Post op-ed Friday.

Or, perhaps, something is actually wrong with the guy. Plenty of physicians, psychiatrists and psychologists think so and have written me volumes in off-the-record diagnoses. A group of them have joined forces to co-write a book due out this fall.

It isn’t so much that The Donald always hits back, and harder, as his flacks boast. It’s that he’s so thin-skinned, such a political amateur — and so utterly lacking in the fine art of disregard — that he can’t let anything pass. This is the single greatest concern for the witted, not his idiotic tweets in the night. Impulsivity combined with narcissistic injury is a red flag to many for the man with access to the nuclear codes.

And so, as more and more Americans embrace “This is not normal” as the bumper sticker du jour, many are wondering again: Will this be it? Will the final straw be Brzezinski’s alleged badly bleeding face-lift, which she needlessly denied in the op-ed? She only tweaked some skin beneath the chin, she said. CNN’s Brian Stelter, meanwhile, has posted a photo of Brzezinski on the day in question and she shows no evidence of surgery and certainly not blood. What woman has a face-lift and goes bleeding to a famous club where tout le beau monde are partying?

To the point, is this it? My friends, don’t count on it.

Nothing will happen until GOP constituents start shouting and, remember, these are the same people Trump has taught to hate the media. Also, this is hardly the worst example of Trump’s errant charm. Yet, suddenly, his insulting Brzezinski, widely characterized as evidence of misogyny (what about “Psycho Joe”?), is supposed to send congressional Republicans into paroxysms of penitential rebuke-and-replace?

Brzezinski is wonder woman — smart, strong, wealthy — and engaged to marry her best friend. I seriously doubt she has been wounded by Trump’s pathetic second-grader taunts. But I get it. The most one can hope for these days is that enough Republican men can be shamed into defending Brzezinski, a woman many of them know personally — and who has thumbs-down power over potential guests on the show everybody in Washington watches.

Whatever works.

Sadly, we're probably stuck for the foreseeable future.

July 1, 2017

"Why some inside the White House see Trump’s media feud as ‘winning’"

Spoiler

To President Trump, no place is more comfortable than the middle of a fight.

This week had it all: Vicious tweets, nasty nicknames, an entrenched foe in the mainstream media and the reprisal by Trump of one of his favorite roles — the victim.

Sure, Trump’s health-care push stalled on Capitol Hill, his “energy week” went largely unnoticed and the president faced almost universal condemnation for an unpresidential attack on MSNBC anchor Mika Brzezinski.

But to many inside the White House, as well as outside allies, what looked like a public relations debacle amounted to an abundance of “winning” — a Trumpian catchphrase playfully repeated Friday by some West Wing officials, even as they were discomfited by the Brzezinski broadside.

Trump spent the week at war with what he calls the “fake news media,” attacking some of the news organizations reporting most aggressively on Russian interference in the 2016 election. CNN gave him fresh ammunition with the resignations of three investigative journalists over a retracted story connected to the Russia probe.

For Trump and his legions of loyalists, the media has become a shared enemy.

“They like him, they believe in him, they have not to any large degree been shaken from him, and the more the media attacks him, the more it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy on the side of the Trump supporters who fervently believe the media treat him unfairly,” said Tony Fabrizio, the chief pollster for Trump’s campaign. “It’s like, ‘Beat me with that sword some more!’ ”

Stoking the base was hardly a preplanned strategy. Instead, some White House officials described it as an inadvertent upside of the president’s impulse to punch back at critics in the media.

West Wing aides showed little support for Trump’s Thursday morning tweet about Brzezinski’s appearance. Deputy White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended it forcefully, but other top officials privately voiced disapproval and dismay at what they saw as a gratuitous and unnecessary swipe by their boss.

Trump labeled Brzezinski “low I.Q. Crazy Mika,” and called her co-host and fiance, Joe Scarborough, “Psycho Joe.” The president charged that Brzezinski and Scarborough visited “Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year’s Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!”

Trump’s attack was roundly condemned by more than three dozen congressional Republicans and Democrats, as well as by Brzezinski and Scarborough, who responded to the president on their show Friday and in a column in The Washington Post.

“President Trump launched personal attacks against us Thursday, but our concerns about his unmoored behavior go far beyond the personal,” the couple wrote in The Post. “America’s leaders and allies are asking themselves yet again whether this man is fit to be president. We have our doubts, but we are both certain that the man is not mentally equipped to continue watching our show, ‘Morning Joe.’ ”

Fabrizio estimated that just a quarter of Americans know who Brzezinski is and predicted that conservatives would instinctively side with Trump, as they did when he attacked then-Fox News Channel anchor Megyn Kelly and other media personalities during last year’s campaign.

“Everybody inside the Beltway knows who she is, but the average working guy doesn’t know who she is,” Fabrizio said of Brzezinski.

Jason Miller, a former Trump campaign adviser who is close to the White House, said, “It does energize the base. . . Certainly a big part of the success the president had last year was this sweeping, counterculture pushback against information being dictated to the American people.”

Roger Stone, a former Trump adviser and longtime confidant, likened Trump’s attacks on the media to the strategy employed by former president Richard M. Nixon to discredit organizations such as The Post that were breaking stories on the Watergate investigation.

“The difference is Nixon had no Internet-based alternative media [that] would aggressively cover his side of the argument,” Stone said. He added that “the Trump constituency has deep distrust for the media as well as all political institutions,” arguing that “lopsided coverage” of the president causes his voters to become angrier and more distrustful.

The media can serve as an easy scapegoat, although that tactic is ultimately unlikely to pay long-term dividends, said Frank Sesno, a former CNN Washington bureau chief who is now the director of the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University.

“The White House appears to have decided that one of its key talking points is going to be its war with the media, and this is an ongoing campaign that explains the president’s misfortunes, rallies the base and gives some kind of meaning to the narrative of this presidency,” Sesno said. “It may resonate with the base or at least some of the base, but it is utterly misguided. It will prove to be counterproductive, and I think it shows both the shallowness and the fundamental disrespect the White House has for the media and a free press.”

In a White House where the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s widening Russia probe seems to have infused everything from the daily rhythms to the president’s mood, the news about the three CNN journalists who had exited the network drew cheers.

CNN came under fire after publishing a story alleging ties between Russia and Trump transition official Anthony Scaramucci that was retracted because the network said it did not meet CNN’s editorial standards.

West Wing officials viewed CNN’s mistake as a public vindication that the Russia investigation — and its ensuing media coverage — is simply a “witch hunt,” as Trump has labeled it. Trump and his aides also sought to publicize undercover videos released this week by a conservative group showing CNN employees saying disparaging things about the president and his supporters.

Some White House advisers said they were frustrated that the Brzezinski feud — which continued to unfurl throughout the day Friday with accusations and counteraccusations — overtook the president’s fight with CNN, which seemed in their eyes to have clearer villains and heroes.

One senior White House official said Trump would prefer not to battle with the media but has grown exasperated by what he considers to be gross negligence and near-constant disparagement by The Post and the New York Times, as well as five of the six major television news channels: ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC and NBC. By contrast, Trump lavishes praise on Fox News, especially its popular morning show, “Fox & Friends,” which reliably trumpets the president’s point of view.

“Everyone would much prefer not to be at war,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly address the president’s mind-set. “I think we would much rather be getting covered fairly and not be in this constant, very hostile environment where things escalate very quickly between both sides.”

The official disputed the notion that the White House’s hostility toward the news media has been an intentional strategy to rally Trump supporters.

“This isn’t just us looking to be at war because it’s appealing to our base,” the White House official said. “I would much rather appeal to our base with positive news stories about all the things he’s doing. I don’t think he’ll ever be treated fairly. I don’t think he ever was treated fairly.”

But Trump has been short on major political wins and remains mired at historically low levels in public opinion polls. Health-care legislation, for instance, is stalled in the Senate, with senators heading home for the July 4 recess without holding a vote as originally expected. The administration has yet to unveil detailed proposals for tax reform or infrastructure, two other domestic priorities.

Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, said on Friday that the media discussion about Trump has become “a one-way conversation of toxicity.”

“It’s incredible to watch people play armchair psychologist, outright ridiculing the president’s physicality, his mental state, calling him names that you won’t want your children to call people on a playground,” Conway said on “Fox & Friends.” “You would punish them for doing that, and then all of a sudden feigning shock when he wants to fight back and defend himself and hopefully change the conversation.”

Maybe they're winning, but the American public is losing.

July 1, 2017

Again for obvious reasons, he should have been done when he called Mexicans rapists, made fun of the disabled reporter, and his countless words against women, but no matter what as he continuously shows how shitty of a person he is no one will ever actually do anything.

July 1, 2017

14 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Don’t sugarcoat this. Trump just called for 32 million people to lose health coverage."

Reveal hidden contents

President Trump’s profound ignorance about policy and the inner workings of our system, and his total disinterest in informing himself about these topics, have produced an unfortunate result: Many of his tweets about matters of substance tend to get ignored as Trump just being Trump. Meanwhile, the viscerally disgusting insults (such as the one claiming Mika Brzezinski bled from her face-lift) make international news.

But Trump’s tweet this morning about health care actually does matter, a lot:

...

This is getting a lot of attention today, but mainly as a call for Republicans to adopt a particular legislative strategy. As such, it makes little sense: Republicans are struggling to find 50 votes for their current repeal-and-replace bill, with many moderates balking, so it’s hard to see how outright repeal could get a bare majority.

Beyond this, though, it’s worth taking Trump’s tweet as an actual policy statement. Trump has now called for total repeal of the Affordable Care Act, with no guarantee of any specific replacement later, or even a guarantee that any replacement would ever materialize at all.

It’s hard to estimate what would happen if Republicans did act on this and Trump signed it. Republicans probably wouldn’t be able to repeal some key portions of the Affordable Care Act — particularly its insurance-market regulations — via a simple majority “reconciliation” vote. But they could theoretically repeal things with a budgetary orientation, such as the individual mandate and the Medicaid expansion and the subsidies to lower-income people why buy insurance on the exchanges.

We can estimate the impact of repealing those things. Indeed, the Congressional Budget Office has already done so, when it analyzed a previous version of a GOP repeal bill over a year ago. And that analysis found that repealing those things would result in 32 million people losing coverage by 2026, 19 million of them people who would lose Medicaid coverage.

...

This is unequivocally what Trump has now called for. And it is substantially worse than what is currently being debated in the Senate, which would result in 22 million people losing coverage over 10 years, 15 million of them from Medicaid, per the CBO.

“When Republicans floated their repeal bill back in 2016, CBO concluded that 32 million people would lose coverage, relative to the current baseline, by 2026,” Nicholas Bagley, a health policy expert at the University of Michigan, emailed me today. “Fully 19 million people would be kicked off of Medicaid. Those coverage losses are even grimmer than the losses from the House and Senate bills that are currently under discussion.”

Whether Trump meant this or not, or even knew what he was calling for, are irrelevant. That’s because it could theoretically happen. In fact, conservative senators such as Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ben Sasse of Nebraska are actively calling on fellow Republicans to go forward with repeal alone right now. Sasse doubled down by tweeting an endorsement of Trump’s demand.

Trump, it pains me to inform you, is the president. When he calls on Congress to do something, he is basically saying that he would sign it if they did do it. There is no reason to treat this as trivial or frivolous simply because Trump is an ignoramus and a buffoon. Indeed, Republicans have in fact voted for repeal multiple times in the past. The only reason they aren’t doing so right now is because repeal cannot pass, now that there is a Republican in the White House who would actually sign such a bill. (Yes, Trump would sign such a bill in two seconds. He called for one today, remember?)

In this sense, Trump’s tweet is actually kind of useful. It reveals once again that Republicans have been running a massive scam on Obamacare for years. They constantly fulminated for repeal, and voted repeatedly for it, in the full knowledge that President Barack Obama would veto it and that they would not face the consequences of their rhetoric and vote. The promise of unspecified replacements allowed Republicans to claim they would act to make sure millions didn’t lose coverage, without saying how. But now that repeal could become a reality, they are no longer willing to vote for it, because they would be held accountable for those consequences. By calling for straight-up repeal right now, Trump has inadvertently called their bluff.

Indeed, it’s not even clear that Senate Republicans can pass repeal and replace, because it has become obvious that even this would result in many millions losing health coverage, extracting an immense human toll that is now a genuine possibility. Moderate Republican senators have conceded this to be the case, and their seemingly genuine qualms about this constitute a pleasant surprise. But Republicans who have no serious misgivings about such an awful outcome have resorted, for political reasons, to all manner of lies and obfuscation to obscure this reality.

This includes Trump and the White House, who have dissembled relentlessly about how their plan would leave everybody covered and wouldn’t cut Medicaid at all. But now Trump has confirmed that he is indeed for full repeal, full stop — which would result in 32 million fewer covered — without any guaranteed “replacement” providing any cover to advance the lie that millions wouldn’t lose coverage. Trump has unmasked his own scam.

...

He just wants to be able to sign "something" from congress, he couldn't care less what it is. I'm really feeling nauseous.

This is beyond apalling. I cannot believe the infantile levels of the tangerine toddler's petty little desires, and the way he seems to go along with what the latest fawning sycophant (Sasse) has whispered in his ear...

I am very glad to read this though:

24 states refusing to provide voter data to Trump election panel

Spoiler

At least 24 states are pushing back or outright refusing to comply with the Trump administration’s request for voter registration data.

The Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, formed by President Trump to investigate his widely debunked claim that millions of illegal votes cost him the popular vote in the 2016 presidential election, sent letters this week to the 50 secretaries of state across the country requesting information about voters.

The letter, signed by commission vice chairman and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R), asked for names, addresses, birth dates and party affiliations of registered voters in each state. It also sought felony convictions, military statuses, the last four digits of Social Security numbers and voting records dating back to 2006, according to a copy of the letter obtained by The Hill.

Many states immediately raised concerns and voiced their opposition to providing the information.

Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes (D) said that she does not intend to release the data.

"The president created his election commission based on the false notion that ‘voter fraud’ is a widespread issue — it is not,” Lundergan Grimes said. “I do not intend to release Kentuckians' sensitive personal data to the federal government.”

Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann, a Republican, similarly said he won't turn over any information to the panel, telling members of the voter fraud commission to, "go jump in the Gulf of Mexico."

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, took a similar line.

You can add PA to that list. We will not participate in this systematic effort to suppress the vote. https://t.co/EHnY2NJI5R

— Governor Tom Wolf (@GovernorTomWolf) June 30, 2017

Trump has alleged that millions of illegal votes cost him the popular vote in November’s election, an assertion for which he has offered no evidence. Repeated academic and state studies of voter files show that only a handful of improper votes were cast in recent elections.

Chief election officials from both sides of the aisle expressed skepticism about Trump’s claim of voter fraud.

“In Ohio, we pride ourselves on being a state where it is easy to vote and hard to cheat,” said Jon Husted, Ohio’s Republican secretary of state. “Voter fraud happens, it's rare and when it happens we hold people accountable. I believe that as the Commission does its work, it will find the same about our state."

“California’s participation would only serve to legitimize the false and already debunked claims of massive voter fraud,” Democratic Secretary of State Alex Padilla said in a statement about the letter.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, both Democrats, said their states would not provide confidential information.

“New York refuses to perpetuate the myth voter fraud played a role in our election,” Cuomo said in a statement. “We will not be complying with this request.”

Even a member of the Kobach commission said her state would not comply. Indiana Secretary of State Connie Lawson (R), the president of the National Association of Secretaries of State, announced in a statement that her state wouldn’t release certain information requested by Kobach.

“Indiana law doesn’t permit the Secretary of State to provide the personal information requested by Secretary Kobach,” Lawson said. “Under Indiana public records laws, certain voter info is available to the public, the media and any other person who requested the information for non-commercial purposes. The information publicly available is name, address and congressional district assignment.”

Officials in Wisconsin, Colorado and Texas said their states would release public information, but certain data, including full dates of birth and Social Security numbers, were confidential and would not be released. North Dakota’s director of elections, John Arnold, told The Hill that state law would not allow the presidential commission access to voter information.

“Wisconsin statutes do not permit the state to release a voter’s date of birth, driver license number or Social Security number,” Michael Haas, the administrator of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, said in a release.

Officials in Connecticut, Minnesota, Rhode Island and Utah also expressed skepticism and said their states would withhold nonpublic information.

Rhode Island Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea (D) took her criticism further, saying Kobach was unfit to lead the commission, given his record of strict voting laws and a recent court fine for failing to produce documents related to a lawsuit over voting laws.

“It is deeply troubling that he has been given oversight of this commission by the president,” Gorbea said.

Kobach is an advocate of strict voter identification laws, which he says are necessary to combat fraud. Opponents say those laws hinder access to the polls primarily for elderly and minority voters.

Officials have raised questions about the commission’s discretion obtaining the confidential documents.

“State statutes permit the [Wisconsin commission] to share confidential information in limited circumstances with law enforcement agencies or agencies of other states,” Haas said. “The Presidential Commission does not appear to qualify under either of these categories.”

Trump appointed another voter identification supporter, Heritage Foundation fellow Hans von Spakovsky, to the commission Thursday. Von Spakovsky, one of Kobach’s mentors, has long advocated for stricter voter access rules.

The 21 states are Arizona, California, Connecticut, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, New Mexico, Nevada, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia and Wisconsin.

Quote

The 21 states are Arizona, California, Connecticut, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, New Mexico, Nevada, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia and Wisconsin.

I would sincerly hope that more states refuse their cooperation. Republican states most of all should be up in arms about this invasion of personal privacy by the gubmint...

July 1, 2017

First Amendment rules!

July 1, 2017

20 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Though Kobach received the authority to prosecute fraud cases after warning that voting by ‘aliens’ was rampant, the nine convictions he has won since 2015 have primarily been citizens 60 and over who own property in two states and were confused about voting requirements. Only one noncitizen has been convicted.

I'm sure there are a few cases of voter fraud out there and they should be dealt with, but from what I've read, the state and local election staff do a good job keeping it down to a minuscule meow. If there are ways to ensure future elections are safeguarded against fraud and interference (looking at you, Russian hackers), I would think this would be a more worthy task for a commission to work on. Back to paper ballots, or whatever.

Another grandiose notion by an incompetent administration. What a waste of time, taxpayer money, and doing nothing but generating tension and ill-will. Grrrr.

On a side note, I was sad that our state (Washington) is sending in even the bare minimum required.

July 1, 2017

Firstly, Sasse is no sycophant of Trumps. Just trust me. Second,I knew he would be no help in this. He ran and was elected on repealing Obamacare. I'm just shocked he would be okay with no replacement. But just trust me, he isn't no sycophant, he despises Trump. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that he will hold a town hall.

July 1, 2017

1 hour ago, VixenToast said:

Firstly, Sasse is no sycophant of Trumps. Just trust me. Second,I knew he would be no help in this. He ran and was elected on repealing Obamacare. I'm just shocked he would be okay with no replacement. But just trust me, he isn't no sycophant, he despises Trump. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that he will hold a town hall.

The point I was trying to make is that, although he may well despise the TT, Sasse is willing to use sycophantic behaviour to get the TT to do what he wants him to. I find that rather disturbing, to be honest. Not Sasse's actions (if he's willing to do that to get what he wants, that's entirely up to him), but the fact that the presidunce can be played in such a way.

Just blow some smoke up his ass, and he'll do whatever is.... disconcerting, to say the least.

July 1, 2017

John Fugelsang just gave me another name for the orange one to add to the mix.

July 1, 2017

Now here's a novelty: a good idea from a Republican.

I'd love to see them launching from Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico!

July 1, 2017

9 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

Now here's a novelty: a good idea from a Republican.

I'd love to see them launching from Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico!

Especially if it's a one way trip. Of course I wouldn't want to inflict them on any one else by having them wash up on their shores to spread their reich wing poison elsewhere.

July 1, 2017

On 6/30/2017 at 2:30 PM, GreyhoundFan said:

This week the commission sent a letter to all 50 state governments demanding that they send the commission their full voter files, including names, addresses, birth dates, party affiliation, voting history, and Social Security numbers for every voter in America.

I'm in stasis with these Trump times, because there is new shit every. single. day. and it isn't possible to stay upset all the time. I still do have some WTAF moments.....

However, this has me steamed and scared for so many reasons. There can be NO reason anyone should be aggregating this voter information. No good can come of it. It also aggregates information about all US voters in one place, and I'm sure Russian hackers are wetting their pants in excitement at treasure trove of data like that. Think of how much fun you could have and how much money you could make and how many identities one could steal and how much havoc one could wreak with that information.

Keep in mind the that this would be ideal for data mining operation and making the results operational for micro targeting on social media, something that had resounding success in the Trump campaign and probably won him the election.

Crap, crap, crap. I'm sure Texas has already rolled over and given up everything without a whimper.

July 1, 2017

20 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Why some inside the White House see Trump’s media feud as ‘winning’"

Reveal hidden contents

To President Trump, no place is more comfortable than the middle of a fight.

This week had it all: Vicious tweets, nasty nicknames, an entrenched foe in the mainstream media and the reprisal by Trump of one of his favorite roles — the victim.

Sure, Trump’s health-care push stalled on Capitol Hill, his “energy week” went largely unnoticed and the president faced almost universal condemnation for an unpresidential attack on MSNBC anchor Mika Brzezinski.

But to many inside the White House, as well as outside allies, what looked like a public relations debacle amounted to an abundance of “winning” — a Trumpian catchphrase playfully repeated Friday by some West Wing officials, even as they were discomfited by the Brzezinski broadside.

Trump spent the week at war with what he calls the “fake news media,” attacking some of the news organizations reporting most aggressively on Russian interference in the 2016 election. CNN gave him fresh ammunition with the resignations of three investigative journalists over a retracted story connected to the Russia probe.

For Trump and his legions of loyalists, the media has become a shared enemy.

“They like him, they believe in him, they have not to any large degree been shaken from him, and the more the media attacks him, the more it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy on the side of the Trump supporters who fervently believe the media treat him unfairly,” said Tony Fabrizio, the chief pollster for Trump’s campaign. “It’s like, ‘Beat me with that sword some more!’ ”

Stoking the base was hardly a preplanned strategy. Instead, some White House officials described it as an inadvertent upside of the president’s impulse to punch back at critics in the media.

West Wing aides showed little support for Trump’s Thursday morning tweet about Brzezinski’s appearance. Deputy White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended it forcefully, but other top officials privately voiced disapproval and dismay at what they saw as a gratuitous and unnecessary swipe by their boss.

Trump labeled Brzezinski “low I.Q. Crazy Mika,” and called her co-host and fiance, Joe Scarborough, “Psycho Joe.” The president charged that Brzezinski and Scarborough visited “Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year’s Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!”

Trump’s attack was roundly condemned by more than three dozen congressional Republicans and Democrats, as well as by Brzezinski and Scarborough, who responded to the president on their show Friday and in a column in The Washington Post.

“President Trump launched personal attacks against us Thursday, but our concerns about his unmoored behavior go far beyond the personal,” the couple wrote in The Post. “America’s leaders and allies are asking themselves yet again whether this man is fit to be president. We have our doubts, but we are both certain that the man is not mentally equipped to continue watching our show, ‘Morning Joe.’ ”

Fabrizio estimated that just a quarter of Americans know who Brzezinski is and predicted that conservatives would instinctively side with Trump, as they did when he attacked then-Fox News Channel anchor Megyn Kelly and other media personalities during last year’s campaign.

“Everybody inside the Beltway knows who she is, but the average working guy doesn’t know who she is,” Fabrizio said of Brzezinski.

Jason Miller, a former Trump campaign adviser who is close to the White House, said, “It does energize the base. . . Certainly a big part of the success the president had last year was this sweeping, counterculture pushback against information being dictated to the American people.”

Roger Stone, a former Trump adviser and longtime confidant, likened Trump’s attacks on the media to the strategy employed by former president Richard M. Nixon to discredit organizations such as The Post that were breaking stories on the Watergate investigation.

“The difference is Nixon had no Internet-based alternative media [that] would aggressively cover his side of the argument,” Stone said. He added that “the Trump constituency has deep distrust for the media as well as all political institutions,” arguing that “lopsided coverage” of the president causes his voters to become angrier and more distrustful.

The media can serve as an easy scapegoat, although that tactic is ultimately unlikely to pay long-term dividends, said Frank Sesno, a former CNN Washington bureau chief who is now the director of the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University.

“The White House appears to have decided that one of its key talking points is going to be its war with the media, and this is an ongoing campaign that explains the president’s misfortunes, rallies the base and gives some kind of meaning to the narrative of this presidency,” Sesno said. “It may resonate with the base or at least some of the base, but it is utterly misguided. It will prove to be counterproductive, and I think it shows both the shallowness and the fundamental disrespect the White House has for the media and a free press.”

In a White House where the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s widening Russia probe seems to have infused everything from the daily rhythms to the president’s mood, the news about the three CNN journalists who had exited the network drew cheers.

CNN came under fire after publishing a story alleging ties between Russia and Trump transition official Anthony Scaramucci that was retracted because the network said it did not meet CNN’s editorial standards.

West Wing officials viewed CNN’s mistake as a public vindication that the Russia investigation — and its ensuing media coverage — is simply a “witch hunt,” as Trump has labeled it. Trump and his aides also sought to publicize undercover videos released this week by a conservative group showing CNN employees saying disparaging things about the president and his supporters.

Some White House advisers said they were frustrated that the Brzezinski feud — which continued to unfurl throughout the day Friday with accusations and counteraccusations — overtook the president’s fight with CNN, which seemed in their eyes to have clearer villains and heroes.

One senior White House official said Trump would prefer not to battle with the media but has grown exasperated by what he considers to be gross negligence and near-constant disparagement by The Post and the New York Times, as well as five of the six major television news channels: ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC and NBC. By contrast, Trump lavishes praise on Fox News, especially its popular morning show, “Fox & Friends,” which reliably trumpets the president’s point of view.

“Everyone would much prefer not to be at war,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly address the president’s mind-set. “I think we would much rather be getting covered fairly and not be in this constant, very hostile environment where things escalate very quickly between both sides.”

The official disputed the notion that the White House’s hostility toward the news media has been an intentional strategy to rally Trump supporters.

“This isn’t just us looking to be at war because it’s appealing to our base,” the White House official said. “I would much rather appeal to our base with positive news stories about all the things he’s doing. I don’t think he’ll ever be treated fairly. I don’t think he ever was treated fairly.”

But Trump has been short on major political wins and remains mired at historically low levels in public opinion polls. Health-care legislation, for instance, is stalled in the Senate, with senators heading home for the July 4 recess without holding a vote as originally expected. The administration has yet to unveil detailed proposals for tax reform or infrastructure, two other domestic priorities.

Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, said on Friday that the media discussion about Trump has become “a one-way conversation of toxicity.”

“It’s incredible to watch people play armchair psychologist, outright ridiculing the president’s physicality, his mental state, calling him names that you won’t want your children to call people on a playground,” Conway said on “Fox & Friends.” “You would punish them for doing that, and then all of a sudden feigning shock when he wants to fight back and defend himself and hopefully change the conversation.”

Maybe they're winning, but the American public is losing.

The Trump White House does some things brilliantly and with great effect. Trump goes "Blart pfigrmpllig" and immediately there are Trump mouthpieces in TV interviews defending Trump without remorse and relentlessly repeating talking points for Trump's base. Relentlessly. These talking points have been carefully crafted and spun for maximum effect. For example, Trump insults the Morning Joe people and Kellyanne is right there Trumpsplaining: Trump's a fighter and that's what we elected him to do. Why is everybody so surprised? When pressed, she pivots to: the MSM are ALWAYS saying such MEAN things about The Donald, it's so unfair. Anderson Cooper, George Stephanopoulos and Jake Tapper are the best about calling out Kellyanne's bullshit. One of them got her on the show and showed a clip of Kellyanne criticizing Trump, from when Kellyanne was working for Cruz. She of course, had some bullshit spin and just kept going.

I wish Democrats had this going for them. To get some hot talking points and stay relentlessly on message. However, Trump's sheer dominance of the MSM puts the Dems permanently on the defensive. The relentless onslaught of Trump's WTF-ery means that, even though the MSM (except FOX) is typically critical, it is ALWAYS talking about Trump, Trump, Trump.

July 1, 2017

15 minutes ago, Howl said:

I wish Democrats had this going for them. To get some hot talking points and stay relentlessly on message.

Last night on Bill Maher's show, one of the panelists brought this up. He said that Repugs go into their little closed meetings and come out with "the party line" and they all beat it into the ground until it becomes part of the lexicon of the country as a whole. It doesn't matter if the party line is nonsense, like "partial-birth abortions", but the Dems need to do better about getting on, and staying on message. Also, it was pointed out that Dems need to stop being afraid to fight like Repugs, that's really the only way to win.

Here's a good article (with graphics) about the ridiculous voter fraud commission: "Trump says states are ‘trying to hide’ things from his voter fraud commission. Here’s what they actually say."

Spoiler

...

More than two dozen states have refused to fully comply with a sweeping and unprecedented White House request to turn over voter registration data, including sensitive information like partial Social Security numbers, party affiliation and military status.

Overall, the states that have said they will not be complying at all with the Kobach commission's request represent over 30 percent of the nation's population. That could complicate any efforts to build a truly national voter file, although it remains unclear what the commission's ultimate goal is in collecting the data.

...

Those states found themselves the targets of the President Trump's ire on Twitter on Saturday morning: “Numerous states are refusing to give information to the very distinguished VOTER FRAUD PANEL. What are they trying to hide?”

As it turns out, the bipartisan group of state officials withholding information from the commission have been very forthcoming about their reasons for not complying. Here's what a number of them have said.

“I will not provide sensitive voter information to a commission that has already inaccurately passed judgment that millions of Californians voted illegally,” said California Secretary of State Alex Padilla, a Democrat.

“California's participation would only serve to legitimize the false and already debunked claims of massive voter fraud made by the President, the Vice President, and Mr. Kobach,” he added. "[Kobach's] role as vice chair is proof that the ultimate goal of the commission is to enact policies that will result in the disenfranchisement of American citizens.”

Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes, another Democrat, struck a similar note.

“The president created his election commission based on the false notion that 'voter fraud' is a widespread issue — it is not,” Grimes said. “Kentucky will not aid a commission that is at best a waste of taxpayer money and at worst an attempt to legitimize voter suppression efforts across the country.”

A number of states said they would only provide limited, publicly available information, as required by state law.

Vermont Secretary of State James Condos (D) said “I am bound by law to provide our publicly available voter file, but will provide no more information than is available to any individual requesting the file.”

North Carolina will comply with the request by handing over “publicly available data as already required under state law,” said Kim Westbrook Strach, the executive director of the bipartisan North Carolina State Board of Elections and Ethics enforcement.

Mississippi rejected the request on privacy and states' rights grounds. “They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico,” Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann, a Republican, said on Friday. “Mississippi residents should celebrate Independence Day and our State's right to protect the privacy of our citizens by conducting our own electoral process."

In Alabama, another GOP stronghold, Secretary of State John Merrill told the Montgomery Advertiser he will not comply with the request until he learns more about how the Kobach commission will keep the data secure. “We’re going to get answers to our questions before we move on this,” Merrill said.

Perhaps most strikingly, at least two of the holdouts were members of the commission, including commission co-chairman Kris Kobach himself, who said that state law prevented them from fully complying with the request.

The Kansas secretary of state, a Republican, told the Kansas City Star on Friday that he would not be providing any parts of Kansas voters' Social Security numbers because that data is not publicly available under state law. “In Kansas, the Social Security number is not publicly available,” he said. “Every state receives the same letter, but we’re not asking for it if it’s not publicly available.”

Similarly, Indiana Secretary of State Connie Lawson said in a statement that “Indiana law doesn't permit the Secretary of State to provide the personal information requested by Secretary Kobach.” Lawson, another Republican, is also a member of the commission.

Trump's tweet suggests the commission's work remains a top priority for him. That's going to cause concern for elections experts and voting rights activists, many of whom are concerned that Kobach will use the state voter registration data to manufacture “evidence” of widespread voter fraud.

“We're concerned about unlawful voter purging, which has been something that Kris Kobach has been leading the charge,” said Vanita Gupta of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and former head of the Justice Department's civil rights division, in an interview Friday.

Gupta and others argue that Kobach doesn't exactly have a reputation for being honest about his work on voter fraud. Just a week ago, a federal judge fined Kobach $1,000 for “presenting misleading arguments in a voting-related lawsuit.”

Of course twitler had to whine on twitter about states protecting private information. Sigh.

July 2, 2017

"Spicer, Bannon and Conway among Trump aides earning top salaries"

Spoiler

Some of the best-known faces in the Trump administration are also some of the best-paid, according to a new list of White House salaries.

Advisers Kellyanne Conway and Stephen K. Bannon, along with Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and Press Secretary Sean Spicer, are among the White House employees receiving the top salary of $179,700. Omarosa Manigault, whose title is listed as director of communications for the Office of Public Liaison, is also one of the 22 Trump aides bringing in that top salary.

Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, and her husband, Jared Kushner, do not take salaries for their roles as presidential advisers, according to the list released Friday evening. The annual list is mandated by Congress.

Reed Cordish, a Baltimore developer and friend of Kushner’s who was hired to run an initiative focused on technology initiatives, is also not taking a salary for his White House work, while Gary D. Cohn, a former Goldman Sachs chief executive serving as Trump’s director of the National Economic Council, is being paid $30,000.

Christopher P. Liddell, a former top executive at Microsoft and other businesses, is also taking a $30,000 salary for his work as a White House adviser. He and Cohn are the lowest-paid employees who receive a salary. The bottom of the scale for regular White House hires is $40,000.

Deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders is paid $165,000, the next rung down from the top level.

Trump defended his hiring of rich advisers such as Cohn and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross during an address to supporters last month in Iowa.

“Somebody said, ‘Why did you appoint a rich person to be in charge of the economy?’ No, it’s true. And Wilbur’s a very rich person in charge of commerce. I said: ‘Because that’s the kind of thinking we want.’” Trump said. “They had to give up a lot to take those jobs.”

“And I love all people, rich or poor, but in those particular positions I just don’t want a poor person. Does that make sense?” he added.

Trump is correct that wealthy advisers give up much larger salaries to accept White House or other administration jobs. Although the top White House salary level of nearly $180,000 is well above the national average of roughly $50,000, it is low by comparison to salaries in the top echelons of law, finance and other fields from which many senior Trump aides were drawn.

There is one employee listed as earning more than the $179,700 top tier. Policy adviser Mark S. House earns $187,100 because he is a senior executive with the Federal Aviation Administration, where the salary range is higher. He is on loan to the White House.

The number of Trump employees earning the top amount is in line with some years of the Obama administration, although in his final year in office in 2016, President Obama listed just 16 aides who earned the then-top figure of $176,461.

Here's the full list, if you'd like to be nauseated. I can't believe my taxes pay Spicey, Omarosa, Bannon, K-Con, and so many others, such a ridiculously high salary.

July 2, 2017

Wow: "‘It has to be something, but it could be infinity’: Trump ponders space in strange ceremony"

Spoiler

President Trump's ceremony Friday to bring back the National Space Council began to confuse people even before it took place.

It was, Trump would say, a big deal: an executive order to resurrect an advisory council that kick-started the first moon missions 60 years ago, went dormant in the 1990s, and could now lead astronauts into deep space — even Mars.

“At some point in the future, we’re going to look back and say how did we do it without space?” is how the president put it.

Yet the signing surprised many: The White House had not listed the ceremony on the president's calendar, no one from NASA headquarters came, and the only female astronaut in attendance was left off the thank-you list.

Not to mention the president's sometimes baffling remarks about the cosmos.

... <Buzz Aldrin's reaction to the TT in the video is priceless>

Praise for the (male) astronauts

Vice President Pence, who will chair the new space council, introduced the president and others gathered in the Roosevelt Room.

“Especially the three American astronauts,” he said, listing NASA's Alvin Drew, former astronaut David Wolf, and “the second man on the moon: the legendary Buzz Aldrin.”

“Welcome to the White House,” Pence said.

But he didn't mention the former astronaut standing about five feet away — Sandy Magnus.

Trump would also name the three male astronauts without mentioning Magnus — an omission quickly noticed in the wider space community.

...

Magnus didn't seem put out, though. The next morning she wrote she had attended the ceremony as executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and hadn't been wearing a NASA uniform like two of the men.

“Can you believe that space is going to do that?”

After Pence finished his introduction, it was on to the president — a known space aficionado who once phoned astronauts in orbit and asked them to hurry up and get to Mars.

“Our travels beyond the Earth propel scientific discoveries that improve our lives in countless ways here,” Trump said, listing new industry, technology and “space security” among the benefits.

“At some point in the future, we’re going to look back and say how did we do it without space?” Trump then said, causing Buzz Aldrin's eyebrows to shoot up.

Eyebrows across the Internet would do likewise as Trump proceeded through his speech, a mix of eloquence and questionable ad-libs.

...

“The human soul yearns for discovery,” Trump said, for example. “Our journey into space will not only make us stronger and more prosperous, but will unite us behind grand ambitions and bring us all closer together.

“Wouldn’t that be nice? Can you believe that space is going to do that?”

...

“Mike is very much into space.”

Vice President Pence, as mentioned, will chair the new council.

Some who learned this remembered that when Pence was a congressman, he once chaired a Republican study group that recommended canceling NASA's space exploration program — no moon or Mars trips — to save money.

But Pence's 2005 plan didn't go anywhere, and on Friday, he said he was “honored and frankly enthusiastic” about leading the National Space Council.

Trump assured those gathered that “Mike is very much into space.”

...

The advisory group will also include Cabinet secretaries, the head of NASA and other administrators — almost none of whom were at the ceremony.

“The only member of the Council other than Pence who was there was Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross,” Space Policy Online reported.

And as Sarah Kaplan noted for The Washington Post, Trump has not even named a NASA administrator, who will sit on the council. Likewise for the director of Office of Science and Technology Policy, which was entirely unstaffed as of Friday, according to CBS News.

Heavyweights of the “new space” industry such as Elon Musk of SpaceX and Jeffrey P. Bezos of Blue Origin (who also owns The Post) were nowhere to be seen, either, Kaplan wrote.

Bezos and Musk had been invited, Ars Technica reported, but couldn't make it on short notice.

Infinity, or something.

“This is going to launch a whole new chapter for our great country,” Trump said near the end of his speech.

Then he sat down at a table and opened the executive order.

“I know what this is,” he said. “Space!”

Beside him, Aldrin chimed in with a quote from the astronaut character Buzz Lightyear from the movie “Toy Story.”

“Infinity and beyond!” Aldrin said.

Everyone laughed.

Then Trump added some lines of his own.

“This is infinity here,” he said. “It could be infinity. We don’t really don’t know. But it could be. It has to be something — but it could be infinity, right?”

Trump then signed the order and revived the National Space Council, leaving his final words on the subject a mystery.

...

The idiocy of the TT is without bounds.

July 2, 2017

3 hours ago, Howl said:

Crap, crap, crap. I'm sure Texas has already rolled over and given up everything without a whimper

Quote

Texas Secretary of State Rolando Pablos said his office will share any publicly available information with Trump's Presidential Advisory Commission on Voter Integrity as requested, including the names, addresses, dates of birth and political party affiliations of the state's more than 15 million voters. But the state will not be sharing partial social security numbers that the Trump commission asked for because that information is not part of voter rolls.

"The Secretary of State's office will provide the Election Integrity Commission with public information and will protect the private information of Texas citizens while working to maintain the security and integrity of our state's elections system," Pablos said. "As always, my office will continue to exercise the utmost care whenever sensitive voter information is required to be released by state or federal law."

http://www.chron.com/news/politics/texas/article/Texas-will-turnover-voter-data-to-Trump-commission-11259933.php

If President Obama had requested this information, the states' rights folks would be rioting in DC at this very moment.

July 2, 2017

9 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Wow: "‘It has to be something, but it could be infinity’: Trump ponders space in strange ceremony"

Hide contents

President Trump's ceremony Friday to bring back the National Space Council began to confuse people even before it took place.

It was, Trump would say, a big deal: an executive order to resurrect an advisory council that kick-started the first moon missions 60 years ago, went dormant in the 1990s, and could now lead astronauts into deep space — even Mars.

“At some point in the future, we’re going to look back and say how did we do it without space?” is how the president put it.

Yet the signing surprised many: The White House had not listed the ceremony on the president's calendar, no one from NASA headquarters came, and the only female astronaut in attendance was left off the thank-you list.

Not to mention the president's sometimes baffling remarks about the cosmos.

... <Buzz Aldrin's reaction to the TT in the video is priceless>

Praise for the (male) astronauts

Vice President Pence, who will chair the new space council, introduced the president and others gathered in the Roosevelt Room.

“Especially the three American astronauts,” he said, listing NASA's Alvin Drew, former astronaut David Wolf, and “the second man on the moon: the legendary Buzz Aldrin.”

“Welcome to the White House,” Pence said.

But he didn't mention the former astronaut standing about five feet away — Sandy Magnus.

Trump would also name the three male astronauts without mentioning Magnus — an omission quickly noticed in the wider space community.

...

Magnus didn't seem put out, though. The next morning she wrote she had attended the ceremony as executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and hadn't been wearing a NASA uniform like two of the men.

“Can you believe that space is going to do that?”

After Pence finished his introduction, it was on to the president — a known space aficionado who once phoned astronauts in orbit and asked them to hurry up and get to Mars.

“Our travels beyond the Earth propel scientific discoveries that improve our lives in countless ways here,” Trump said, listing new industry, technology and “space security” among the benefits.

(snipped)

...

The idiocy of the TT is without bounds.

..."space security"..?

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