Trump 22: Not Even Poe Could Make This Shit Up

[GreyhoundFan]

$89,000 a year to spot and distribute positive stories about the TT? "Trump bashes the media but still loves good press"

Spoiler

Media bashing has become one of the organizing principles of Donald Trump’s presidency. But behind the scenes, the Trump machine is eagerly promoting the nuggets of positive press it receives from the very outlets the president seeks to discredit.

The White House director of rapid response, Andy Hemming, 31, spends his days immersed in cable television, Twitter, print and online media to suss out positive stories about Trump, which he blasts back out to his list of more than 1,000 influencers — mainly reporters, but also television talking heads — who together craft the overall story of Trump’s presidency.

There’s nothing new about an administration trying to promote its wins. But in the Trump White House, where Hemming’s job is not to discredit the mainstream media but to celebrate stories the administration likes, it can seem like he is trying to bail out a sinking boat with a teacup.

And it’s a role that feels out of sync with Trump’s constant attacks on the press. Trump spent the first day of his summer break Monday tweetstorming about the country's major cable networks and newspapers. “Hard to believe that with 24/7 #Fake News on CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, NYTIMES & WAPO, the Trump base is getting stronger!” Trump tweeted Monday morning from Bedminster, New Jersey, where he is installed on his golf course for a two-week vacation.

He followed up later on a wet, unconducive-to-golfing afternoon, with a honed Twitter attack launched at his favorite target: “How much longer will the failing nytimes, with its big losses and massive unfunded liability (and non-existent sources), remain in business?”

A New York Times spokesperson said the business is actually growing in profit, income, revenues and paid subscriptions.

In July, Trump posted a video of himself wrestling to the ground a man with a CNN logo obscuring his face — a post that has since been retweeted more than 370,000 times. But Hemming that same month highlighted clips from the network, including one of California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein telling anchor Wolf Blitzer she saw no evidence of collusion between Russian operatives and the Trump campaign.

“They don’t always get it wrong,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said of mainstream news outlets like The New York Times and CNN. “But for every one good story we push out, there are probably 150 really bad process stories, or hit pieces, on the administration. We think a lot of times, the stories that we push out have been given very little coverage.”

On July 18, for instance, while Trump tweeted about the “Fake News story of secret dinner with Putin” — he called the story “sick” — Hemming was highlighting a story from the allegedly ailing Grey Lady.

“The New York Times’ Carl Hulse has a solid explainer on the Senate Democrats’ unprecedented effort to block President Trump’s nominees,” Hemming wrote, with a link to the story. Earlier in July, Hemming emailed out a New York Times piece that he called “a good article on how small businesses across the country are cheering President Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris Accord.”

“It’s an important role,” said Jason Miller, a former Trump campaign spokesman who worked closely with Hemming from the 2016 war room in Trump Tower. “There’s so much good news that’s coming out of this administration, that we have to continue pushing all of these positive messages ourselves to remind people there’s a lot going on.” (Miller is now a paid contributor on CNN.)

Hemming, who is paid $89,000 a year, is a career Republican campaign operative who until he entered Trump’s orbit had worked for establishment GOP figures like Meg Whitman, during her failed run for governor in California; Mitt Romney, during his unsuccessful 2012 bid for president; and Greg Abbott, during his successful run for Texas governor. Last year, he worked for former Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s campaign before going to the Republican National Committee and being embedded in Trump Tower for the final 100 days of the general election.

He’s always been a behind-the-scenes operative, associates said, but for the first few weeks of the administration, Hemming was toiling, perhaps for the first time in his life, in total obscurity. Hemming would blast out his carefully curated clips, sometimes multiple times a day, with the goal of driving more positive news coverage.

But for weeks, sources inside the White House said, no one informed him that the White House IT system could not handle an email going out to such a big list, and all of his emails were being blocked by a firewall and reaching an audience of zero readers. That glitch has since been corrected, and the administration thinks Hemming is helping to slowly change the course of the coverage it gets.

“Andy does an incredible job of finding those hidden gems and trying to amplify those positive messages,” Sanders said. “He’s quick, and I would say he has a very good pulse on what’s hot, but also on what wasn’t hot but should be.”

He declined to comment for this story.

The fact-checker column in the newspaper Trump now refers to disparagingly as the “Amazon Washington Post” has been highlighted by Hemming and the rapid response team on multiple occasions, for example, for knocking down misleading statements about Trump’s policies made by lawmakers like House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Kamala Harris, also a California Democrat.

“What makes it so audacious and confusing is that no president has been so outspoken — and outrageous — about impeaching mainstream news outlets,” said David Axelrod, a former top adviser to President Barack Obama, who is also a paid CNN analyst. “If these outlets are ‘fake,’ then why should we believe that their positive reporting about the president and the administration is real? It’s a tacit acknowledgment that, despite the president’s calculated and persistent assaults, these news sources are very credible.”

Also undercutting Trump’s constant assaults, Axelrod noted, is how Trump frequently participates in interviews with reporters representing the very news organization he rails against.

Others warned that to take Trump literally is to misunderstand the president. “Understanding Trump means you have to have a healthy dose of humor and skepticism about the spoken word,” said Ari Fleischer, a former press secretary to President George W. Bush.

Of the White House’s efforts to promote stories from the same organizations the president discredits, Fleischer pointed to a moment last March, when former White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters that the monthly jobs numbers produced by the labor department that Trump had previously discredited “may have been phony in the past, but it’s very real now.”

“How do you square it?” asked Fleischer. “You square it with a smile.”

Shaking my head.

[JMarie]

While he was making his "fire and fury" speech, did you all see who was on either side of Trump?  Tom Price, Secretary of Health and Human Services, and Melania.  Do you think either of them offered any military strategies?  Were they there to fill out the conference table?

[GreyhoundFan]

WTAF? "Trump Adviser Suggests Minnesota Mosque Attack Could Have Been Faked ‘By The Left’"

Spoiler

Sebastian Gorka, a White House national security adviser, defended President Donald Trump’s silence on an explosion at a Minnesota mosque by suggesting it could have been a fake hate crime “propagated by the left.”

When asked on MSNBC Tuesday why Trump had yet to publicly comment on the Saturday incident, Gorka said the president wants to wait until he learns more about it. Trump, though, often is quick to comment on other attacks, particularly those carried out by Muslims. 

“When we have some kind of finalized investigation, absolutely,” Gorka said of whether Trump would respond to the bombing at the Dar al-Farooq Islamic Center in Bloomington. He then suggested the attack could have been a “fake” hate crime.

“There’s a great rule: All initial reports are false,″ Gorka said. “You have to check them and find out who the perpetrators are. We’ve had a series of crimes committed, alleged hate crimes, by right-wing individuals in the last six months, that turned out to actually have been propagated by the left.”

“So let’s wait and see,” he said. “Let’s allow the local authorities to provide their assessment, and then the White House will make its comments.”

No one was injured in the blast that occurred at about 5 a.m. as a few congregants gathered for morning prayers. The FBI is investigating the attack, which Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton (D) declared “a criminal act of terrorism” as he visited the site on Sunday.

In June, Trump immediately seized on a terror attack in London, using it to promote his travel ban targeting six majority-Muslim countries and lashing out at the city’s mayor, Sadiq Khan.

Gorka on Tuesday claimed that Trump commented swiftly in that case because the attack was “unequivocally clear for what it is.”

Of the explosion at the Minnesota mosque, Gorka said, “People fake hate crimes.”

“The question of who does it is a question, when you’ve had people fake hate crimes with some regularity in the last six months,” Gorka reiterated. He cited no specific examples.

Host Stephanie Ruhle pointed out that Trump could simply denounce the mosque attack. “You don’t have to make a statement about who did it, but you can make a public statement denouncing how terrible it would be to attack a building of worship,” she told Gorka.

“That’s fine, and I’m sure the president will do that,” he responded.

When Ruhle noted that on Twitter, Trump’s usual medium for communication, the president has spent the week mostly tweeting insults and accusations, Gorka said to wait.

“Just hold your horses, count to 10, and the president will do what he deems fit,” Gorka said.

You really couldn't make this shit up.

[Audrey2]

23 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

WTAF? "Trump Adviser Suggests Minnesota Mosque Attack Could Have Been Faked ‘By The Left’"

  Reveal hidden contents

Sebastian Gorka, a White House national security adviser, defended President Donald Trump’s silence on an explosion at a Minnesota mosque by suggesting it could have been a fake hate crime “propagated by the left.”

When asked on MSNBC Tuesday why Trump had yet to publicly comment on the Saturday incident, Gorka said the president wants to wait until he learns more about it. Trump, though, often is quick to comment on other attacks, particularly those carried out by Muslims. 

“When we have some kind of finalized investigation, absolutely,” Gorka said of whether Trump would respond to the bombing at the Dar al-Farooq Islamic Center in Bloomington. He then suggested the attack could have been a “fake” hate crime.

“There’s a great rule: All initial reports are false,″ Gorka said. “You have to check them and find out who the perpetrators are. We’ve had a series of crimes committed, alleged hate crimes, by right-wing individuals in the last six months, that turned out to actually have been propagated by the left.”

“So let’s wait and see,” he said. “Let’s allow the local authorities to provide their assessment, and then the White House will make its comments.”

No one was injured in the blast that occurred at about 5 a.m. as a few congregants gathered for morning prayers. The FBI is investigating the attack, which Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton (D) declared “a criminal act of terrorism” as he visited the site on Sunday.

In June, Trump immediately seized on a terror attack in London, using it to promote his travel ban targeting six majority-Muslim countries and lashing out at the city’s mayor, Sadiq Khan.

Gorka on Tuesday claimed that Trump commented swiftly in that case because the attack was “unequivocally clear for what it is.”

Of the explosion at the Minnesota mosque, Gorka said, “People fake hate crimes.”

“The question of who does it is a question, when you’ve had people fake hate crimes with some regularity in the last six months,” Gorka reiterated. He cited no specific examples.

Host Stephanie Ruhle pointed out that Trump could simply denounce the mosque attack. “You don’t have to make a statement about who did it, but you can make a public statement denouncing how terrible it would be to attack a building of worship,” she told Gorka.

“That’s fine, and I’m sure the president will do that,” he responded.

When Ruhle noted that on Twitter, Trump’s usual medium for communication, the president has spent the week mostly tweeting insults and accusations, Gorka said to wait.

“Just hold your horses, count to 10, and the president will do what he deems fit,” Gorka said.

You really couldn't make this shit up.

I'd love to say that I was surprised, but was figuring Fake News! or Muslim Terrorists did it and blamed it on us! or something like that. At this point, if Trump said it was raining, I'd stick my head out the window just to check.

[Cartmann99]

More words of wisdom from Stephen Miller:

https://twitter.com/FoxNews/status/895081686681124864

[AuntK]

6 hours ago, AnywhereButHere said:

Can someone - anyone, make him shut up?! I think (hope) Kelly will sit on him and hogtie him long before he hits the button (although maybe not), but I can see his words riling up Kim Jong-un, and we'll be on the receiving end of the fire and fury.

I have a whole lot of fear that basically, we're screwed. Eventually, they're going to goad each other into action.

Can someone puh-leez go get a grownup immediately to handle Crazy Kim? Congress? The minions? Pence? Anybody? Can any of you put your f'ing egos aside for one minute and realize that the crazy man in North Korea has just been called out by the Orange lunatic in New Jersey? That the security and safety of thousands of US citizens, maybe more, is at stake? That the future of the earth itself could be at stake if these two lunatics unleash the nuclear power that neither one of them should be allowed to control. What in the f**k is going on? When will the powers that be WAKE UP? Will we have to have a nuclear "incident" first? This is terrifying!

[PreciousPantsofDoom]

7 hours ago, AnywhereButHere said:

I miss this show.

Love the West Wing!  Although we regularly re -watch the whole series anyways (we have it on dvd because we are technology dinosaurs) I have noticed something.  At the beginning of the Trumpian Epoch, we would watch the occasional episode from time to time as an antidote to the real life crazy.  Now, as the crazy piles onto the crazy in depressingly large quantities, we have been watching the videos less often.  It's like it's becoming an almost too painful reminder of saner, more hopeful times. 

[AuntK]

27 minutes ago, PreciousPantsofDoom said:

Love the West Wing!  Although we regularly re -watch the whole series anyways (we have it on dvd because we are technology dinosaurs) I have noticed something.  At the beginning of the Trumpian Epoch, we would watch the occasional episode from time to time as an aforntidote to the real life crazy.  Now, as the crazy piles onto the crazy in depressingly large quantities, we have been watching the videos less often.  It's like it's becoming an almost too painful reminder of saner, more hopeful times. 

Yeah, I know what you mean,  it's like looking at Pete Souza's Instagram pics of Obama that he posts regularly to throw shade on the Orange Menace.  (sigh) Like the numerous pics of Obama playing with kids, calming babies, vs. the few awkward pics of the clown with frightened children!  Those pictures make me feel so good, but not for long, unfortunately.

[K'Z'K]

2 minutes ago, PreciousPantsofDoom said:

It's like [watching the West Wing is] becoming an almost too painful reminder of saner, more hopeful times. 

Alas, you could be describing "Veep." You know, that calm, sober look at an incredibly well-run, competent White House filled with perfectly ethical people who speak in only the most sophisticated manner possible. Compared to reality, anyway.

Some disturbingly on-topic examples (warning: sometimes approaches Scaramucci levels of sophistication):

Quote

Dan: I was trying to use Jonah for intelligence!

Selina: That's like trying to use a croissant as a fucking dildo!

Dan: I thought—

Selina: No, no! Let me be more clear: it doesn't do the job, and it makes a fucking MESS! Get out of my office.

 

Quote

Ted: Hey, you know what? Thanks for returning my call. The message was, "Please don't fucking call me again." So why don't you just take your beak and shove it up some corpse's ass, okay, you vulture motherfucker?

Selina: Was that a journalist?

Ted: Yes.

Selina: Oh, God! What are you doing, Ted? You can't tell him to fuck his mother!

Ted: Her mother, actually.

Selina: What the hell.

 

Quote

Kent: We're all on the same team here.

Furlong: Right, team Fuck Up. Yeah, I've got my membership card here, somewhere, I can't find it.

Kent: You need to look at the bigger picture!

Doyle: Oh, I've seen the bigger picture! It show's POTUS lying to the American people! I'm telling you, this is not just a crisis, this is at least ten years of Oliver Stone movies!

Furlong: Yeah, and not the good ones. Not Platoon.

Doyle: I mean, what the fuck is wrong with you, Kent?! Seriously, when you pull the pin out, you're supposed to throw the grenade away. You don't stick it up your own fricking ass!

Ben: That I'd like to see.

 

Quote

Amy: I have bitten my tongue so long, it looks like a dog's cushion. But no more! You have made it impossible to do this job. You have two settings—no decision and bad decision. I wouldn't let you run a bath without having the Coast Guard and the fire department standing by, but yet here you are running America. You are the worst thing that has happened to this country since food in buckets and maybe slavery! I've had enough. I'm gone.

Selina: [as Amy walks to the door] Well, I guess she's finished with her little... [Amy walks back to her] Oh, nope, look at that, there's more.

Amy: You have achieved nothing apart from one thing. The fact that you are a woman means we will have no more women presidents because we tried one and she fucking sucked. Goodbye, ma'am.

 

[bashfulpixie]

I adore Veep!! But I never expected the satire to become real life

[AnywhereButHere]

@KZK I have never seen Veep. May need to find it and start.

@PreciousPantsofDoom Hold on to that DVD player. We've been using the xBox to watch our old discs (dinosaurs here too), but it keeps shorting out lately, so we can't watch anything. Apparently, even inanimate technology is telling us that there's no respite from the vulgar reality we have in DC. 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Why the Trump Organization could be Trump’s undoing"

Spoiler

When you think of something as mundane as laundry, you don’t think of the gold-plated Trump Organization. Yet the business of selling multimillion-dollar condominiums — a sector where the Trump name looms large — is deeply entangled with a certain kind of washing.

Money laundering.

A peculiar problem of despots and crime lords the world over is how to make dirty money look clean. Years ago, a federal prosecutor in Miami told me that cocaine cowboys would take as little as 50 cents on the dollar for seemingly legitimate income, passing their money through car washes, vending machines, convenience stores and other cash-intensive businesses. They even paid elderly pensioners steep commissions to deposit drug money in their innocent-looking bank accounts, then draw it back out as honest tender.

But few laundries can match the efficiency of an eight-figure luxury condominium in New York or San Francisco or South Florida. It works like this: The holder of a great deal of tainted money sets up a shell company, funds it through the shadow banking system, then uses the shell to purchase exclusive property. Voila! No one knows where the money came from or who the buyer might be. But when the condo is eventually resold, the proceeds emerge from the spin cycle as clean as Eliot Ness.

Given the scrutiny special counsel Robert S. Mueller III is likely to bring to Trump Tower in coming months, the good news for the president is that this unsavory customer service is completely legal in most cases. Thanks to the lobbying power of the real estate industry, efforts by national and international law enforcement to crack down on corrupt money flows have scarcely touched the condo trade. Unlike bankers, who are required by law to be diligent about the sources of incoming money, condo developers and real estate agents don’t have to ask where the cabbage comes from for their all-cash sales to hidden buyers.

I asked Ross Delston, a D.C. attorney and anti-money-laundering expert, what a law-abiding developer in Manhattan, say, is legally required to do to make sure the anonymous buyer of a $50 million penthouse is not Vladimir Putin or the Sinaloa Cartel.

“Nothing,” Delston answered.

Loopholes in U.S. regulations serve to “carve out an area that money launderers use all the time: high-end real estate,” Delston said. So flagrant is the flood of soiled money in this age of kleptocracies and digital mobsters that the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) has identified a half-dozen U.S. real estate markets for heightened scrutiny. New York is on the list, and South Florida, as well as the Bay Area, Los Angeles, San Diego and San Antonio. The Trump Organization is active in at least half of these markets.

Yet FinCEN continues to “tiptoe around the real estate industry,” in Delston’s words. Rather than require due diligence from sellers and agents in the targeted markets, Treasury has assigned the title insurance industry to serve as watchdogs. But in these cash transactions, parties are free to skip title insurance entirely.

An investigation by the New York Times disclosed the tip of this rotten iceberg in 2015. Reporters spent more than a year piercing some of the many shell corporations set up to obscure luxury condo purchases on Central Park South in Manhattan. Along with chief executives and celebrities buying primo properties, the Times found miscreants and crooks.

At the Trump International, on the southwest corner of Central Park, the Times noted that more than half of all condo sales were to hidden buyers. A more recent study by USA Today found that the number of veiled transactions involving the Trump Organization took a big jump as the boss man’s political fortunes rose. Since Trump captured the Republican nomination last summer, the share of hidden buyers of his branded properties has climbed to 70 percent, the newspaper found.

The president may be waking to the possibility that Mueller will drag this unseemly marketplace into the glare of public scrutiny. In a revealing interview with the Times last month, Trump signaled that he expects investigators to find some transactions that will undercut his claims to do no business with Russia. “I mean, it’s possible there’s a condo or something,” he said. “I sell a lot of condo units, and somebody from Russia buys a condo, who knows?”

Exactly. Who knows? Our president has been operating for years in an industry notorious for blurred lines between honest and dishonest money. Whether he and his family have managed to walk this tightrope without slipping is something only time, and Mueller, will tell.

I don't care what puts the TT and his offspring in orange jumpsuits, but money laundering would be one route to the penitentiary.

[AmazonGrace]

Today in the We're-All-Doomed sweepstakes:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

This is a good opinion piece from Dana Milbank. The picture at the beginning of the article is nauseating. "The 144 million people who like Trump best"

Spoiler

The fake news media is full of accounts about how President Trump’s standing is slipping among his “base” — his most loyal supporters.

Balderdash.

There is absolutely no reason to think Trump’s support has slipped in the slightest among those who like him best: the 144 million men, women and children of the Russian Federation. A poll released by the Pew Research Center last month found that fully 53 percent of Russians have confidence in Trump, 67 percent there think him a strong leader and 62 percent find him charismatic and well qualified.

The poll was conducted earlier this year, but there’s every reason to think Trump’s numbers in Russia have held steady or improved. (Vladimir Putin has had plenty of time to send those who disapprove of Trump to Siberia.) Trump is performing almost 20 points better in Russia than in the United States, which, of course, only proves true the biblical aphorism: A prophet is not without honor except in his own country.

Unfortunately for Trump, most Russian nationals are not (yet) eligible to vote in the United States. But Trump’s eastern base nevertheless has ways of boosting his popularity at home, and not only by hacking the Democratic National Committee and doing other things of interest to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.

As The Post’s Abby Phillip reported, “a virtual army of accounts identified as having ties to a Russia-backed disinformation campaign targeting the U.S. political system zeroed in on efforts among Trump’s supporters to attack his national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, over the firing of two Trump loyalists.”

That’ll teach the national security adviser to cross Trump’s Kremlin cohort.

Phillip noted that Trump, on his golf vacation, retweeted with thanks a tweet Saturday from the subtle handle @Protrump45, an account that “bears a lot of signs of a Russia-backed disinformation campaign.” Though there are conflicting reports about the nature of this account, there are undoubtedly many Russian “bots” that boost Trump’s line and blast his critics, often with misspellings and odd grammar.

But while it’s generous of Putin to put his bots to work for Trump, this White House is perfectly capable of importing Russian-style propaganda without help from Moscow.

Trump’s White House has been churning out so much that it literally overloaded the system. Rapid-response director Andy Hemming had been sending out positive stories about Trump to so many journalists that, Politico reported, “the White House IT system could not handle an email going out to such a big list, and all of his emails were being blocked by a firewall.” The glitch was fixed.

This week, meanwhile, saw the debut of Trump TV: a Web-based broadcast of “real news” by Kayleigh McEnany, a pro-Trump pundit formerly of CNN. In the first installment, she announces, in front of a Trump-Pence campaign backdrop in Trump Tower: “President Trump has created more than 1 million jobs. . . . President Trump has clearly steered the economy back in the right direction. . . . President Trump is finally putting the American worker first. . . . President Trump is dedicated to honoring these men and women who fought valiantly for our country.”

Former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul tweeted: “Wow. Feels eerily like so many state-owned channels I’ve watched in other countries.”

We hardly need Trump TV, though, because we already have “Fox & Friends,” the Fox News morning show. Vox this week analyzed transcripts of 17 months of the show and found some extraordinary changes since the election: They started using “we” statements with much more frequency (“we need to,” “we are going”), referred to the occupant of the Oval Office as “the president” far more often than under President Barack Obama, and had many more statements instructing or advising Trump and predicting actions.

Then there’s “the president” himself, a one-man propaganda machine. This week he has, among other things, gone after Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who had spoken on TV about Russia’s election meddling.

Trump attacked Blumenthal for lying about serving in Vietnam. (He served in the Marine Reserve during the war but not in Vietnam.) Trump, in addition to falsely claiming Blumenthal bragged about Vietnam “battles” and “conquests,” said Blumenthal “cried like a baby” when caught. This was similar to Trump’s attack on ABC News’s Martha Raddatz, claiming she was “crying” and in “tears” after Trump won. Neither appears to be true.

Happily, the Trump White House has not yet borrowed all forms of propaganda employed by the Putin regime. Russian state media released several photographs this week of a shirtless Putin boating and fishing on a Siberian lake. If the White House follows suit and releases photos of a shirtless Trump golfing in New Jersey, it will be time to talk seriously about impeachment.

Okay, releasing photos of a shirtless TT would be enough to nauseate many Americans into losing tons of weight.

[AmazonGrace]

So today Trump was tweetbragging that he's modernized the nuclear arsenal and it's now bigger and stronger than ever before.

1. it's been downsized according to various treaties for years

2. the modernization was ordered by Obama.

Thanks Obama

[GreyhoundFan]

Good grief: "‘God has given Trump authority to take out Kim Jong Un,’ evangelical adviser says"

Spoiler

Texas megachurch pastor Robert Jeffress, one of President Trump’s evangelical advisers who preached the morning of his inauguration, has released a statement saying the president has the moral authority to take out North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

“When it comes to how we should deal with evil doers, the Bible, in the book of Romans, is very clear: God has endowed rulers full power to use whatever means necessary — including war — to stop evil,” Jeffress said. “In the case of North Korea, God has given Trump authority to take out Kim Jong Un.”

Jeffress said in a phone interview that he was prompted to make the statement after Trump said that if North Korea’s threats to the United States continue, Pyongyang will be “met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.”

The biblical passage Romans 13 gives the government authority to deal with evildoers, Jeffress said. “That gives the government to the authority to do whatever, whether it’s assassination, capital punishment or evil punishment to quell the actions of evildoers like Kim Jong Un,” he said.

He said that many pacifist Christians will cite Romans 12, which says, “Do not repay evil for evil,” but Jeffress says that that passage is referring to Christians, not to the government.

“A Christian writer asked me, ‘Don’t you want the president to embody the Sermon on the Mount?’ ” he said, referring to Jesus’s famous sermon. “I said absolutely not.”

In his sermon on the morning of Trump’s inauguration, Jeffress, senior pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, compared Trump to the story of the biblical leader Nehemiah who helped rebuild the city of Jerusalem.

The first step of rebuilding the nation, Jeffress said, was the building of a wall around Jerusalem to protect its citizens. “You see, God is not against building walls,” Jeffress said in his sermon at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington.

Jeffress is no stranger to controversy. He has said in the past that former president Barack Obama paved the way for the antichrist and drew wide attention for calling Mormonism a cult during the 2012 Republican primaries. Jeffress knows his comments on North Korea could be considered controversial, even among fellow evangelicals.

“Some Christians, perhaps younger Christians, have to think this through,” he said. “It’s antithetical to some of the mushy rhetoric you hear from some circles today. Frankly, it’s because they are not well taught in the scriptures.”

Over the past two years, Jeffress said, Trump has been “very measured, very thoughtful in every response.”

“People instinctively know that this president is not going to draw an imaginary red line and walk around it like President Obama did,” he said.

Attitudes about North Korea among evangelicals are unclear, he said.

“I think many evangelicals, like most Americans, really don’t pay attention to global affairs,” Jeffress said. “I believe we’re all going to be forced to soon if North Korea isn’t dealt with decisively.”

Jeffress last met with Trump in July when a group of pastors laid hands on the president in the Oval Office. He said now that health care is off the table, evangelicals are hoping for tax reform, though he didn’t have any specifics in mind.

Jeffress, who was was an early supporter of Trump, has said that after sharing Wendy’s cheeseburgers in Iowa, he believed Trump would be the next president and that it would be because God placed him there. In July, his church choir and orchestra performed a song called “Make America Great Again” at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts where Trump was in attendance.

I despise Jeffress.

[AmazonGrace]

6 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Good grief: "‘God has given Trump authority to take out Kim Jong Un,’ evangelical adviser says"  

I despise Jeffress.

The only thing worse than a narcissistic madman with bad ideas and lousy advisors is a narcissistic madman whose lousy advisors say his bad ideas are ordained by gods.

[onekidanddone]

15 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

$89,000 a year to spot and distribute positive stories about the TT? "Trump bashes the media but still loves good press"

  Reveal hidden contents

Media bashing has become one of the organizing principles of Donald Trump’s presidency. But behind the scenes, the Trump machine is eagerly promoting the nuggets of positive press it receives from the very outlets the president seeks to discredit.

The White House director of rapid response, Andy Hemming, 31, spends his days immersed in cable television, Twitter, print and online media to suss out positive stories about Trump, which he blasts back out to his list of more than 1,000 influencers — mainly reporters, but also television talking heads — who together craft the overall story of Trump’s presidency.

There’s nothing new about an administration trying to promote its wins. But in the Trump White House, where Hemming’s job is not to discredit the mainstream media but to celebrate stories the administration likes, it can seem like he is trying to bail out a sinking boat with a teacup.

And it’s a role that feels out of sync with Trump’s constant attacks on the press. Trump spent the first day of his summer break Monday tweetstorming about the country's major cable networks and newspapers. “Hard to believe that with 24/7 #Fake News on CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, NYTIMES & WAPO, the Trump base is getting stronger!” Trump tweeted Monday morning from Bedminster, New Jersey, where he is installed on his golf course for a two-week vacation.

He followed up later on a wet, unconducive-to-golfing afternoon, with a honed Twitter attack launched at his favorite target: “How much longer will the failing nytimes, with its big losses and massive unfunded liability (and non-existent sources), remain in business?”

A New York Times spokesperson said the business is actually growing in profit, income, revenues and paid subscriptions.

In July, Trump posted a video of himself wrestling to the ground a man with a CNN logo obscuring his face — a post that has since been retweeted more than 370,000 times. But Hemming that same month highlighted clips from the network, including one of California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein telling anchor Wolf Blitzer she saw no evidence of collusion between Russian operatives and the Trump campaign.

“They don’t always get it wrong,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said of mainstream news outlets like The New York Times and CNN. “But for every one good story we push out, there are probably 150 really bad process stories, or hit pieces, on the administration. We think a lot of times, the stories that we push out have been given very little coverage.”

On July 18, for instance, while Trump tweeted about the “Fake News story of secret dinner with Putin” — he called the story “sick” — Hemming was highlighting a story from the allegedly ailing Grey Lady.

“The New York Times’ Carl Hulse has a solid explainer on the Senate Democrats’ unprecedented effort to block President Trump’s nominees,” Hemming wrote, with a link to the story. Earlier in July, Hemming emailed out a New York Times piece that he called “a good article on how small businesses across the country are cheering President Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris Accord.”

“It’s an important role,” said Jason Miller, a former Trump campaign spokesman who worked closely with Hemming from the 2016 war room in Trump Tower. “There’s so much good news that’s coming out of this administration, that we have to continue pushing all of these positive messages ourselves to remind people there’s a lot going on.” (Miller is now a paid contributor on CNN.)

Hemming, who is paid $89,000 a year, is a career Republican campaign operative who until he entered Trump’s orbit had worked for establishment GOP figures like Meg Whitman, during her failed run for governor in California; Mitt Romney, during his unsuccessful 2012 bid for president; and Greg Abbott, during his successful run for Texas governor. Last year, he worked for former Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s campaign before going to the Republican National Committee and being embedded in Trump Tower for the final 100 days of the general election.

He’s always been a behind-the-scenes operative, associates said, but for the first few weeks of the administration, Hemming was toiling, perhaps for the first time in his life, in total obscurity. Hemming would blast out his carefully curated clips, sometimes multiple times a day, with the goal of driving more positive news coverage.

But for weeks, sources inside the White House said, no one informed him that the White House IT system could not handle an email going out to such a big list, and all of his emails were being blocked by a firewall and reaching an audience of zero readers. That glitch has since been corrected, and the administration thinks Hemming is helping to slowly change the course of the coverage it gets.

“Andy does an incredible job of finding those hidden gems and trying to amplify those positive messages,” Sanders said. “He’s quick, and I would say he has a very good pulse on what’s hot, but also on what wasn’t hot but should be.”

He declined to comment for this story.

The fact-checker column in the newspaper Trump now refers to disparagingly as the “Amazon Washington Post” has been highlighted by Hemming and the rapid response team on multiple occasions, for example, for knocking down misleading statements about Trump’s policies made by lawmakers like House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Kamala Harris, also a California Democrat.

“What makes it so audacious and confusing is that no president has been so outspoken — and outrageous — about impeaching mainstream news outlets,” said David Axelrod, a former top adviser to President Barack Obama, who is also a paid CNN analyst. “If these outlets are ‘fake,’ then why should we believe that their positive reporting about the president and the administration is real? It’s a tacit acknowledgment that, despite the president’s calculated and persistent assaults, these news sources are very credible.”

Also undercutting Trump’s constant assaults, Axelrod noted, is how Trump frequently participates in interviews with reporters representing the very news organization he rails against.

Others warned that to take Trump literally is to misunderstand the president. “Understanding Trump means you have to have a healthy dose of humor and skepticism about the spoken word,” said Ari Fleischer, a former press secretary to President George W. Bush.

Of the White House’s efforts to promote stories from the same organizations the president discredits, Fleischer pointed to a moment last March, when former White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters that the monthly jobs numbers produced by the labor department that Trump had previously discredited “may have been phony in the past, but it’s very real now.”

“How do you square it?” asked Fleischer. “You square it with a smile.”

Shaking my head.

89 grand a year to live in the District isn't really all that much if he wants to live in the cushy new condos in places like Penn Quarter or U Street/Shaw

1 hour ago, AmazonGrace said:

Today in the We're-All-Doomed sweepstakes:

So much for Kelly bringing order and sanity to the White House. How is he supposed to keep the staff in check when it is clear he as no control over the boss? If he doesn't get out soon he is going to go down with Trump.

[GreyhoundFan]

40 minutes ago, onekidanddone said:

89 grand a year to live in the District isn't really all that much if he wants to live in the cushy new condos in places like Penn Quarter or U Street/Shaw

Oh, I know. But we shouldn't be paying this yahoo 89 cents a year to highlight positive news about the TT. Let this dude go live in Anacostia or PG County.

[AmazonGrace]

Isn't there a subreddit they could crowdsource the positive spin newsrelease from?

 

 

 

[JMarie]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Good grief: "‘God has given Trump authority to take out Kim Jong Un,’ evangelical adviser says"

  Hide contents

Texas megachurch pastor Robert Jeffress, one of President Trump’s evangelical advisers who preached the morning of his inauguration, has released a statement saying the president has the moral authority to take out North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

“When it comes to how we should deal with evil doers, the Bible, in the book of Romans, is very clear: God has endowed rulers full power to use whatever means necessary — including war — to stop evil,” Jeffress said. “In the case of North Korea, God has given Trump authority to take out Kim Jong Un.”

Jeffress said in a phone interview that he was prompted to make the statement after Trump said that if North Korea’s threats to the United States continue, Pyongyang will be “met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.”

The biblical passage Romans 13 gives the government authority to deal with evildoers, Jeffress said. “That gives the government to the authority to do whatever, whether it’s assassination, capital punishment or evil punishment to quell the actions of evildoers like Kim Jong Un,” he said.

He said that many pacifist Christians will cite Romans 12, which says, “Do not repay evil for evil,” but Jeffress says that that passage is referring to Christians, not to the government.

“A Christian writer asked me, ‘Don’t you want the president to embody the Sermon on the Mount?’ ” he said, referring to Jesus’s famous sermon. “I said absolutely not.”

In his sermon on the morning of Trump’s inauguration, Jeffress, senior pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, compared Trump to the story of the biblical leader Nehemiah who helped rebuild the city of Jerusalem.

The first step of rebuilding the nation, Jeffress said, was the building of a wall around Jerusalem to protect its citizens. “You see, God is not against building walls,” Jeffress said in his sermon at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington.

Jeffress is no stranger to controversy. He has said in the past that former president Barack Obama paved the way for the antichrist and drew wide attention for calling Mormonism a cult during the 2012 Republican primaries. Jeffress knows his comments on North Korea could be considered controversial, even among fellow evangelicals.

“Some Christians, perhaps younger Christians, have to think this through,” he said. “It’s antithetical to some of the mushy rhetoric you hear from some circles today. Frankly, it’s because they are not well taught in the scriptures.”

Over the past two years, Jeffress said, Trump has been “very measured, very thoughtful in every response.”

“People instinctively know that this president is not going to draw an imaginary red line and walk around it like President Obama did,” he said.

Attitudes about North Korea among evangelicals are unclear, he said.

“I think many evangelicals, like most Americans, really don’t pay attention to global affairs,” Jeffress said. “I believe we’re all going to be forced to soon if North Korea isn’t dealt with decisively.”

Jeffress last met with Trump in July when a group of pastors laid hands on the president in the Oval Office. He said now that health care is off the table, evangelicals are hoping for tax reform, though he didn’t have any specifics in mind.

Jeffress, who was was an early supporter of Trump, has said that after sharing Wendy’s cheeseburgers in Iowa, he believed Trump would be the next president and that it would be because God placed him there. In July, his church choir and orchestra performed a song called “Make America Great Again” at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts where Trump was in attendance.

I despise Jeffress.

Will Jeffress be going to North Korea to help "take out Kim Jong Un"?

[sawasdee]

2 hours ago, onekidanddone said:

So much for Kelly bringing order and sanity to the White House. How is he supposed to keep the staff in check when it is clear he as no control over the boss? If he doesn't get out soon he is going to go down with Trump.

I wonder how long he can take the humiliation of being ignored and sidelined by the eejit. I felt he took the post out of patriotism  - to serve the country and try and introduce some sense - when will the humiliation outweigh the need to serve? Or will he hang in there trying to prevent catastrophe?

I actually hope for the latter.

[GrumpyGran]

3 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

Isn't there a subreddit they could crowdsource the positive spin newsrelease from?

 

 

 

This is right up there with his most ridiculous ones. In six months' time he's renovated and modernized the nuclear arsenal? I know his supporters are idiots but most of Americans knows this is NOT POSSIBLE.

He acts like the nuclear arsenal is a kitchen in Pittsburgh. "We renovated it completely, we did it completely. Beautiful renovation. Very modern, tremendously modern. And so chic, it's the best renovation ever done on it. You won't believe, and I've done this before, many many times, but you won't believe how beautiful it is. And everyone is going to get to see it so they can see the tremendous job I've done, they'll all get to see how beautiful it is soon. Very soon."

[sawasdee]

Remember when in the Republican candidate debates it was obvious he didn't even know what the nuclear triad was - just the man to update it!

[Destiny]

FFS, it’s fucking 2017, why am I watching a CNN story about Hawaii planning for nuclear attack? JFC this asshole is gonna get us all killed.