Trump 23: The Death Eaters Have Taken the Fucking Country

[Palimpsest]

14 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Week 13: Hounded on All Sides, a Cornered President Snarls"

  Reveal hidden contents

If and when the American Kennel Club gets around to assigning a new breed for dogs that resemble President Donald Trump—portly with short paws and a chow chow mane of Clorox blond?—it should not neglect to single out the breed’s primary behavioral trait: Trump is what dog handlers would call a “fear-biter,” not a naturally fierce or aggressive hound, but one that snaps and chomps when frightened.

A panicky and snarling Trump toothed his way down to bone this week, even burning chief strategist Steve Bannon in a Farewell Friday pyre. Trump’s ostensible topic of the week was white supremacists, with whom he threw in at a news conference and via a tweet triptych. But the intensity of his fury could not be easily explained. Who could have known he felt this strongly about Southern “heritage” beyond the casual racism he drools from time-to-time? As with canine rage, Trump’s fulmination was probably a matter of transference, with some other trauma setting him off. You’d be swamped with generalized wrath, too, if Congress and special counsel Robert Mueller were slithering through your prodigious paper trail as they are Trump’s.

Mueller’s people called on the White House, the New York Times reported on Sunday, about setting up interviews with current and former administration officials to chat about Russian interference in the 2016 election. Mueller wants notes, transcripts, documents, and other markers of meetings hosted inside the Trump kennel. “Among the matters Mr. Mueller wants to ask the officials about is President Trump’s decision in May to fire the FBI director, James B. Comey,” the paper stated, as it pursues its obstruction of justice angle. Of special interest to Mueller: Fired chief of staff Reince Priebus. He appears to have met with former campaign director Paul Manafort on the same June 2016 day Manafort, Donald Trump Jr., and Jared Kushner met with all of those Russians to inspect allegedly incriminating evidence against Hillary Clinton.

Former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti intuited the greater meaning of Mueller’s interview request in a Tweetstorm, and it indicates that the investigation has reached ramming speed: “It means that Mueller has already acquired all of the documents he believes he needs to question White House staffers. He wouldn’t want to interview them before gathering evidence because he wants to know exactly what questions to ask and be able to confront them with documents if they contradict what he’s being told.”

Journalists like to call evidential stacks of paper “paper trails.” In Trump’s case, the records of business transactions better resemble a paper superhighway. In the August 21 New Yorker, Adam Davidson published his roadmap to just one sliver of Trump’s financial history. As the Mueller dragnet sweeps through Trump’s shady business arrangements, real-estate deals with partners in former Soviet Georgia, Brazil, India, Indonesia, and other places, the special counsel has a good chance of snagging on money-laundering operations, Davidson asserts. One deal in Georgia, which earned Trump a reported million dollars, “involved unorthodox financial practices that several experts described to me as ‘red flags’ for bank fraud and money laundering,” he writes, and “intertwined his company with a Kazakh oligarch who has direct links to Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin.”

Trump can’t plead that he knew nothing about crooked money, if it comes to that. As retired IRS special agent John Madinger puts it to Davidson, if you’re part of a deal you must perform due diligence on the source of your money. “You have to care—otherwise, you’re at risk of violating laws against money laundering,” Madinger says.

It’s easier than playing fetch with puppies to find the parallels between Trump’s assessment of the white supremacists as “very fine people” and the ease with which he’s done real-estate deal with dodgy people both in Manhattan and overseas. It speaks to the ethical blind spots—a self-inflicted blindness, I should add—that run through everything he touches. At one time or another, we all look the other way when we shouldn’t. Does Trump look away every time?

One must be mindful of who they do business with. They must also be mindful of who works for them. In the early days of the Trump campaign, George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy wonk of exceeding greenness volunteered his service to Trump. He repeatedly tried to arrange meetings between the campaign and Russian leaders, as the Washington Post, which had “internal emails read” to it, reported. Papadopoulos’ campaign elders kept slapping his invitations down, but his persistence poses the question of whether the Russians had deployed low-level Trump aides to “penetrate” his campaign. It was only three months after Papadopoulos tried to broker a Trump-Putin meeting that Junior, Manafort and Kushner met with the Russians, as the paper notes.

Were Russians running Papadopoulos? If so, what were they up to? “I think they were doing very basic intelligence work,” retired CIA officer Steven L. Hall told the Post. “Who’s out there? Who’s willing to play ball? And how can we use them?”

Worming his way into the Russia interference story this week was Julian Assange, profiled at length in the New Yorker by Raffi Khatchadourian, and attempting some sort of handoff of “new information” to Representative Dana Rohrabacher, the California Republican known as one of Congress’ most pro-Russia members. Assange has long insisted that the hacks of Democratic National Committee emails, which his WikiLeaks organization published, were not provided by the Russians, not even through a cutout. At the same time, his efforts have earned him the status of a Russian intelligence asset in Washington—a “non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia,” as CIA Director Mike Pompeo has said.

Khatchadourian concludes that the Podesta emails, liberated in a separate hack and published by WikiLeaks, “only make the connections between WikiLeaks and Russia appear stronger.” If remotely true, this presumably puts Assange on Mueller’s list as an interview subject as well as a suspect in the criminal hacking of the DNC. Trump has distanced himself from WikiLeaks, but we know it makes his heart beat. In the final two months of the campaign, he lavished love on the organization, mentioning it by name 124 times.

A definitive call on who actually hacked the DNC mails beyond “The Russians” got a nudge this week in an unusually dense piece published in the New York Times: An author of malware, who goes by the alias “Profexer,” has turned FBI witness in Ukraine. It’s still not apparent whether Profexer’s malware—which has been used in other Russian hacks in the United States—was used on the DNC servers. But the story adds another dimension to all of the sleuthing and primes us for a follow-up.

Why do some dogs become fear-biters and some do not? Dog handlers tell us that the beasts can become fear-imprinted by trauma after being beaten with sticks or terrorized by sudden and violent intrusions into what they consider their territory. It’s anybody’s guess what made Trump so enraged. Every president has clashed with the press, but there was something about Trump’s Charlottesville presser that placed him in a special category. Always sensitive to criticism, he now growls and nips at every doubting question, baring his teeth at questioners. If he keeps going mad dog on the press, how sanely will he perform when Mueller asks him questions in depositions?

The point in the article that Mueller's investigation must be moving faster than we think because they wouldn't start questioning key staffers, like Rancid Penis, unless they already knew quite a bit. I bet anyone in this sham administration with more than two brain cells is shitting a brick. Also, has it really only been 13 weeks? It seems like 13 years.

I'm afraid the article made a doggy misdiagnosis.  I'd say Trump has Rage Syndrome. You can work with a fear-biter, they can get past it, and they can be lovely animals when not scared out of their tiny minds.  Rage syndrome is incurable.

But I agree that the investigation is scaring the shit out of the current administration.  Good.

18 hours ago, sawasdee said:

Please tell me that these commenters are not representative of the 'silent majority', and that there are still people of sense and judgment, outnumbering the loons? And they are too busy having real lives to crouch over the net?

Another article from Boston.  40,000 of the silent majority spoke out yesterday!   https://patch.com/virginia/reston/s/g7k2e/boston-free-speech-rally-counter-protesters-overwhelm-rally-few-arrests-and-injuries

The Patch is as local as you can get, and there were very few arrests considering the numbers.  It does seem there was a tiny sub-group of the counter-demonstrators trying to provoke the police.  But still.

The "rally" they were protesting was really pathetic.  Less than 50 people holding what every single news outlet called a "so-called" Free Speech rally.  And they whined a lot afterwards.  

Mayor Marty Walsh isn't going to take any shit from Trump:  "Today, Boston stood for peace and love, not bigotry and hate. We should work to bring people together, not apart."

[JMarie]

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/evangelical-students-returning-university-diplomas-to-protest-trump/ar-AAqoq5o?li=BBmkt5R&ocid=spartanntp

Quote

Former students at Liberty University are preparing to return their diplomas in a group protest of university president Jerry Falwell Jr.'s support for President Trump's agenda.

In a group letter first reported by NPR, a small group of alumni is criticizing Falwell for supporting the president in the wake of Trump's remarks blaming "many sides" for violence at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., last weekend. The letter slams Falwell for defending Trump's comments, specifically for his saying there were "very fine people" protesting on both sides.

"This is incompatible with Liberty University's stated values, and incompatible with a Christian witness," the letter says.

One former student government president told NPR that Falwell was "complicit" in Trump's support for "Nazis and white supremacists."

"I'm sending my diploma back because the president of the United States is defending Nazis and white supremacists," Chris Gaumer said. "And in defending the president's comments, Jerry Falwell Jr. is making himself and, it seems to me, the university he represents, complicit."

Falwell responded to the letter and Gaumer's remarks on ABC's "This Week," saying that the alumni "completely misunderstand" his support for Trump.

"[Gaumer] completely misunderstands my support," Falwell said in response to his quote. "My support for the president is his bold and truthful willingness to call terrorist groups by their name.

"And that's something we haven't seen from presidents in recent years," he added.

The letter asks graduates to sign on to the group letter and return their diplomas to Falwell, or if they can't find their diplomas, to send individual letters to Falwell and the university. It was unclear how many signatures the letter has gathered so far.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"The Trump administration just disbanded a federal advisory committee on climate change"

Spoiler

The Trump administration has decided to disband the federal advisory panel for the National Climate Assessment, a group aimed at helping policymakers and private-sector officials incorporate the government’s climate analysis into long-term planning.

The charter for the 15-person Advisory Committee for the Sustained National Climate Assessment — which includes academics as well as local officials and corporate representatives — expires Sunday. On Friday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s acting administrator, Ben Friedman, informed the committee’s chair that the agency would not renew the panel.

The National Climate Assessment is supposed to be issued every four years but has come out only three times since passage of the 1990 law calling for such analysis. The next one, due for release in 2018, already has become a contentious issue for the Trump administration.

Administration officials are currently reviewing a scientific report that is key to the final document. Known as the Climate Science Special Report, it was produced by scientists from 13 different federal agencies and estimates that human activities were responsible for an increase in global temperatures of 1.1 to 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit from 1951 to 2010.

The committee was established to help translate findings from the National Climate Assessment into concrete guidance for both public and private-sector officials. Its members have been writing a report to inform federal officials on the data sets and approaches that would best be included, and chair Richard Moss said in an interview Saturday that ending the group’s work was shortsighted.

“It doesn’t seem to be the best course of action,” said Moss, an adjunct professor in the University of Maryland’s Department of Geographical Sciences, and he warned of consequences for the decisions that state and local authorities must make on a range of issues from building road projects to maintaining adequate hydropower supplies. “We’re going to be running huge risks here and possibly end up hurting the next generation’s economic prospects.”

But NOAA communications director Julie Roberts said in an email Saturday that “this action does not impact the completion of the Fourth National Climate Assessment, which remains a key priority.”

While many state and local officials have pressed the federal government for more concrete guidance on how to factor climate change into future infrastructure, President Trump has moved in the opposite direction. Last week, the president signed an executive order on infrastructure that included language overturning a federal requirement that projects built in coastal floodplains and receiving federal aid take projected sea-level rise into account.

Seattle Mayor Ed Murray (D) said in an interview Saturday that the move to dissolve the committee represents “an example of the president not leading, and the president stepping away from reality.” An official from Seattle Public Utilities has been serving on the panel; with its disbanding, Murray said it would now be “more difficult” for cities to participate in the climate assessment. On climate change, Trump “has left us all individually to figure it out.”

Richard Wright, the past chair of the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Committee on Adaptation to a Changing Climate, has been working with the committee to convey the importance of detailed climate projections in next year’s assessment. The society establishes guidelines that form the basis of building codes across the country, and these are based on a historical record that may no longer be an accurate predictor of future weather extremes.

“We need to work on updating our standards with good estimates on what future weather and climate extremes will be,” Wright said Saturday. “I think it’s going to be a serious handicap for us that the advisory committee is not functional.”

The committee was established in 2015, but its members were not appointed until last summer. They convened their first meeting in the fall. Moss said members of the group intend to keep working on their report, which is due out next spring, even though it now will lack the official imprimatur of the federal government. “It won’t have the same weight as if we were issuing it as a federal advisory committee,” he said.

Other Trump Cabinet officials have either altered the makeup of outside advisory boards or suspended these panels in recent months, though they have not abolished the groups outright. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt decided to replace dozens of members on one of the agency’s key scientific review boards, while Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is “reviewing the charter and charge” of more than 200 advisory boards for his department.

I'm surprised the TT hasn't tweeted that Hillary and Obama are responsible for climate change. Oh, wait, it's a "Chinese hoax". Argh.

[Ali]

23 hours ago, sawasdee said:

And I misspelt Arpaio - not once, but twice!

We can forgive you for misspelling Arpaio. However, if you had misspelled heal twice...

[VelociRapture]

On 8/19/2017 at 1:47 PM, sawasdee said:

And all the honorees bar one are people from ethnic minorities.

And he's scared of being booed.....poor little snowflake.

Never mind, maybe President and First Mother Pence will attend.

Fixed it for you. 

Abd I don't know what will happen in Phoenix. I'd strongly caution everyone to be on their guard though regardless of where you are, but especially in the Phoenix area.

[GreyhoundFan]

More $$$ slipping out of the tiny tangerine fists: "NEW: Palm Beach Zoo gala, MorseLife luncheon leaving Trump’s Mar-a-Lago"

Spoiler

And then there were two.

Or maybe four, depending on what happens when a couple of boards meet this week.

Today, the Palm Beach Zoo & Conservation Society and MorseLife both announced a change of venue for their annual Palm Beach fundraisers, from the Mar-a-Lago Club to – well, not the Mar-a-Lago Club. That brings to 19 the number of charities that have decided to leave Mar-a-Lago in recent months, many in the past week.

The defections leave only the Palm Beach Police Foundation’s Policeman’s Ball and the Achilles Freedom Team of Wounded Vets “Spirit of America” holiday gala as remaining at the presidential retreat.

Both have confirmed their commitment to the venue in recent days.

“We have a contract with Mar-a-Lago,” said Mary Bryant McCourt, president and co-founder of the organization, in a statement e-mailed Friday. “They have been loyal supporters since 2007. We’re about supporting veterans and people with disabilities, not politics.”

“We are going ahead with our 2018 plans,” said foundation president and co-founder John Scarpa, via a spokesperson on Friday. “It is the only venue in town which can accommodate a crowd of our size. However, we will be keeping an eye on developments.”

Andrew Aiken, zoo president/CEO, cited potential “distractions” for the withdrawal.

“We have an unyielding commitment to inspire people to act on behalf of wildlife and the natural world,” said Aiken. “After thoughtful consideration by zoo leadership, we have decided it is important that we not allow distractions to deter us from our mission and culture. It is critical that the focus of this special night remains on saving species and raising awareness and money for the hundreds of animals, many of them endangered, in our care.”

The MorseLife Luncheon is the second of the elder care organizations’ two major fundraising events, which have taken place at the Mar-a-Lago Club for nearly a decade. The December dinner dance opted to move to The Breakers earlier this year.

The foundation did not offer a reason for the move in its announcement.

Both the Palm Beach Habilitation Center and The Kravis Center were calling board meetings for early this week to discuss whether to keep their events – The Hab-a-Hearts Luncheon and the Wine Auction – at the club.

The Bethesda Hospital Foundation’s luncheon and the Gateway for Cancer Research dinner dance, both of which took place at Mar-a-Lago last season, have not yet submitted dates for calendar listings.

I wish they'd all cancel.

[JMarie]

http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/20/politics/camp-david-pic/index.html

Everybody looks miserable in the group photo.

[Flossie]

5 hours ago, JMarie said:

http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/20/politics/camp-david-pic/index.html

Everybody looks miserable in the group photo.

I think they all look like they're getting bad news, and are all quietly thinking about how they're going to make it look like they've got everything in hand, but they're all going to go home and cry into their pillows.

This would actually be a good picture to put funny balloon quotes over the heads of these guys.

Trumps thinking "Who am I going to blame for this?" and the guy with his hands clasped in front of him while he looks down is thinking "He's going to blame me for this".

[GreyhoundFan]

"The Daily 202: The elites strike back — getting under Trump’s skin"

Spoiler

THE BIG IDEA: The 2016 election represented, as much as anything else, a repudiation of America’s elites and everything they believe in. By running on the hollow promises of populism, nativism and isolationism, an angry outsider challenged many of the bipartisan shibboleths that have long united most of the highly educated and affluent leaders of our country and culture.

Seven months into President Trump’s reign, the elites are striking back. From Wall Street to West Palm Beach and West Hollywood, the past week has been a turning point, perhaps even a tipping point. Since Trump abdicated his moral leadership after Charlottesville, the well-connected have used their leverage — like checkbooks and celebrity — to send a message about what truly makes America great.

The growing number of groups canceling galas, stars boycotting ceremonies and chief executives resigning from advisory boards is further isolating Trump.

People in his orbit say the president has been in a sour mood about all of this. He stormed the barricades, but now he’s the one under siege. Unlike most of the criticism he’s engendered since taking office, the past week has actually impacted his bottom line. The value of the Trump “brand,” which he once said is worth billions, has taken a bath since he declared that some “fine people” were protesting alongside the neo-Nazis and white supremacists at the University of Virginia.

-- Afraid of losing major contributors, a stampede of charities has canceled planned fundraising events at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida:

On Thursday, the Cleveland Clinic, American Cancer Society and American Friends of Magen David Adom pulled out.

On Friday, the Salvation Army, American Red Cross and Susan G. Komen joined them.

On Saturday, the Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach canceled its dinner dance that had been scheduled for next March. This alone probably represents a quarter-million in lost revenue.

On Sunday, the Palm Beach Zoo and an elder care organization called MorseLife both announced that they will not hold their annual fundraisers at Mar-a-Lago.

Both the Palm Beach Habilitation Center and the Kravis Center are calling emergency board meetings for early this week to discuss whether to keep their events at the club, per today’s Palm Beach Post.

...

“If he returns to the club for weekends next winter, the president could often find its grand ballrooms quiet and empty,” Drew Harwell and David Fahrenthold report. “One of the cancellations cut close to home for the Trumps. Big Dog Ranch Rescue said Friday it would no longer hold an upcoming event at the club and would instead move it to the group’s facility nearby. Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, was scheduled to co-chair the event.”

-- The White House announced on Saturday that neither the president nor first lady Melania Trump will attend the annual Kennedy Center Honors in December. For the first time since the award was created in 1978, they also will not invite the honorees over for a reception beforehand.

That came after three of the five honorees — television producer Norman Lear, singer Lionel Richie and dancer Carmen de Lavallade — said they would or may boycott the traditional reception. “As for the other two, rapper LL Cool J had not said whether he would attend, and Cuban American singer Gloria Estefan said she would go to try to influence the president on immigration issues,” per David Nakamura, Amy B Wang and Peter Marks.

On Friday, the members of the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities announced their resignation en masse. “Ignoring your hateful rhetoric would have made us complicit in your words and actions,” they wrote in an open letter. “Supremacy, discrimination, and vitriol are not American values. Your values are not American values. We must be better than this. We are better than this. If this is not clear to you, then we call on you to resign your office, too.”

With so many consequential stories in the news, it can be easy to dismiss the intrigue swirling around a ceremony for Hollywood stars. After all, we’ve got Afghanistan, North Korea and Russia to worry about. But Trump’s decision to pull out of the Kennedy Center honors more than three months ahead of time is significant.

Make no mistake, Trump cares deeply about these snubs. He has spent his entire life trying to get onto the A-list. He’s a Queens kid who has tried hard to win acceptance in Manhattan. The pomp and circumstance of the presidency were big draws when he chose to run. He was genuinely excited about the ceremonial duties of the office after he unexpectedly won the election. More than most presidents, whatever he may say to the contrary, he has shown a love for ceremonies like the one at the Kennedy Center.

What he does not like, and goes to great lengths to avoid, is public humiliation. After his experience at the 2011 White House Correspondent’s Dinner, when Barack Obama and Seth Meyers ridiculed him from the stage, he announced that he’d skip this year’s. He didn’t throw the ceremonial first pitch at the Nationals home opener, as past presidents have, because he was afraid of getting booed.

As an alpha male, Trump seems to take special satisfaction when people who are richer, cooler and better looking than him kowtow. It seems silly to have to write this, but it’s true: Having his ring kissed seems to be one of Trump’s favorite parts of the job. But there’s not been very much ring-kissing lately.

-- Trump fancies himself a great businessman, but most truly elite business executives have never seen him as in their league. He’s a former reality television star and a developer who ran a family real estate business, failing spectacularly in Atlantic City and driving companies into bankruptcy. The true titans of industry, so-called masters of the universe, have said privately that they see him as a wannabe. But most tried to make nice after the election to advance their interests and get access.

Risking their stock prices, many chief executives spoke out last week. It started with Merck’s Kenneth C. Frazier, who quit the president’s American Manufacturing Council as “a matter of personal conscience.” Citing “a responsibility to take a stand against intolerance and extremism,” Frazier made it harder for others to justify staying in the tent. Many other chief executives then received heavy pressure from their employees and predecessors to follow suit.

By the end of the week, the manufacturing council, the president's Strategy & Policy Forum and an infrastructure council had all disbanded. Trump attacked Frazier on Twitter, then ripped the other chief executives as “grandstanders” and finally – bizarrely and falsely -- claimed that he had chosen to disband the councils, not the other way around. The net effect was to undercut Trump's image as a leading figure in the business world who commanded the respect of fellow chief executives.

Steven Pearlstein, a Washington Post business writer, believes that last week’s resignations from the advisory councils are “likely to be looked back upon as a turning point in the evolution of American capitalism — an acknowledgment from some of the nation’s top corporate executives that the single-minded focus on maximizing profits and share prices that has been their mantra for the past three decades is no longer politically viable or morally acceptable.”

“It is unlikely that any of smiling executives who posed for photographs with the president this spring at the first meeting of the White House Strategic and Policy Forum and the Manufacturing Jobs Initiative had been enthusiastic supporters of candidate Trump,” Pearlstein wrote in Sunday’s paper. “Publicly, most had opposed the president’s positions on immigration, trade, climate change and gay rights. Privately, many thought him unsuited for the job. Nonetheless, the president’s economic advisers had convinced the executives that they would be able to help shape the administration’s economic program. And the executives were eager to lend their support and legitimacy to administration efforts to boost their profits by lowering taxes and reducing regulation. …

“Now, after decades of preaching that what was good for General Motors is good for America, corporate leaders have acknowledged that it might actually be the other way around — that what’s good for America is good for General Motors,” he concludes. “However belated the conversion, their action this past week was courageous and impactful. We owe them our gratitude.”

-- It’s not just Trump. The elites who tied their fortunes to Trump are on the defensive like never before – under pressure from fellow elites.

On Friday, more than 300 people who also graduated from Yale University in the class of 1985 urged Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin to resign. “We understand that graduates of Yale College have served the United States proudly … and that rarely, if ever, have any of us made such a request of a classmate, whatever our differences in political opinion have been,” they wrote in a letter. “We do so today because President Trump has declared himself a sympathizer with groups whose values are antithetical to those values we consider fundamental to our sacred honor as Americans, as men and women of Yale, and as decent human beings. … We can disagree on the means of promoting the general welfare of the country, on the size and role of government, on the nature of freedom and security, but we cannot take the side of what we know to be evil. … We know you are better than this, and we are counting on you to do the right thing.”

On Saturday, the Treasury Department issued a 582-word response from Mnuchin. In it, he strongly condemned the racism and hatred that was on display in Charlottesville. “As someone who is Jewish, I believe I understand the long history of violence and hatred against the Jews (and other minorities) and circumstances that give rise to these sentiments and actions,” Mnuchin wrote. “While I find it hard to believe I should have to defend myself on this, or the President, I feel compelled to let you know that the President in no way, shape or form, believes that neo-Nazi and other hate groups who endorse violence are equivalent to groups that demonstrate in peaceful and lawful ways …

“I don’t believe the allegations against the President are accurate,” the secretary concluded, “and I believe that having highly talented men and women in our country surrounding the President in his administration should be reassuring to you and all the American people.”

-- The Mnuchin letter generated a great deal of additional pushback from elites over the rest of the weekend, including this from former treasury secretary and ex-Harvard president Larry Summers last night:

...

I'm sure the TT is having a hissy because more and more people are refusing to kiss his ring. Good.

[fraurosena]

Well then.

Secret Service can't pay agents for Trump and his family, report says

Spoiler

The Secret Service cannot pay hundreds of agents to protect President Donald Trump and his large family, according to a report published Monday morning.

Secret Service Director Randolph "Tex'' Alles told USA Today more than 1,000 agents have already hit the federally mandated caps for salary and overtime allowances -- which were meant to last the entire year.

"The president has a large family, and our responsibility is required in law,'' Alles told USA Today. "I can't change that. I have no flexibility.''

Trump has taken trips almost every weekend of his presidency so far, to his properties in New Jersey, Virginia and Florida, as well as internationally -- and his adult children also require protection during their business trips and vacations.

In Trump's administration, 42 people have protection, which includes 18 members of his family -- an increase from the 31 people who had Secret Service protection in Obama's administration.

In June, CNN reported that the Secret Service was relaxing its drug policy for potential hires, as Alles laid out a plan to swell the agency's ranks by more than 3,000 employees in the coming years.

"I think between that and the fact that he has a larger family, that's just more stress on the organization. We recognize that," Alles said at the time, and added that he had been allocating resources in accordance.

Alles has met with congressional lawmakers to discuss planned legislation to increase the combined salary and overtime cap for agents -- from $160,000 per year to $187,000. He told USA Today this would be at least for Trump's first term.

But he added that even if this were approved, about 130 agents still wouldn't be able to be paid for hundreds of hours already worked.

The Secret Service and the White House have not responded to CNN's requests for comment.

In April, CNN reported that Trump's travel to his private club in Florida has cost more than an estimated $20 million in his first 80 days in office, putting the President on pace to surpass former President Barack Obama's eight years of spending on travel -- in only his first year in office.

Before and during the campaign season, Trump regularly criticized Obama for costing the American taxpayer money every time he took a trip, and Trump the candidate repeatedly called for belt-tightening across government agencies.

In 2014, Trump tweeted: "We pay for Obama's travel so he can fundraise millions so Democrats can run on lies. Then we pay for his golf."

Golf, by the way, is also one of Trump's regular presidential pastimes.

The solution is quite simple, really. No pay? No security. 

 

[allthegoodnamesrgone]

16 hours ago, VelociRapture said:

Fixed it for you. 

Abd I don't know what will happen in Phoenix. I'd strongly caution everyone to be on their guard though regardless of where you are, but especially in the Phoenix area.

Pence and 'Mother' are creep AF, as much as I want Trump gone, the idea of a president Pence is even more terrifying.  Because he is calm and rational (as rational as a far right wing misogynistic monster can be) and understands how our government works, he can do so much more damage than Trump can.  

[fraurosena]

What an asshole.

'That's too bad': Donald Trump criticised for response to news ten sailors missing, five injured after US warship collides with oil tanker near Singapore

Quote

Ten US sailors were missing after a US destroyer collided with an oil tanker in southeast Asia, the second serious accident involving American Navy ships in the region in little more than two months.

Returning to the White House on Sunday night, President Donald Trump responded to reporters’ questions about the accident by saying: “That’s too bad.”

Strongly criticised on social media for his response, he later tweeted: "Thoughts & prayers are w/ our @USNavy sailors aboard the #USSJohnSMcCain where search & rescue efforts are underway."

Search and rescue efforts were launched  after the USS John S McCain was involved in a collision with the Alnic MC east of Singapore and the Strait of Malacca, the US 7th Fleet said in a statement.

[...]

How many examples do the repubs need that this person is no way suitable to be president?

[Cartmann99]

54 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

Strongly criticised on social media for his response, he later tweeted: "Thoughts & prayers are w/ our @USNavy sailors aboard the #USSJohnSMcCain where search & rescue efforts are underway."

I'm betting that a staff member used Trump's account to tweet that.

[GreyhoundFan]

A great op-ed from the NYT: "Failing All Tests of the Presidency"

Spoiler

We are leaderless. America doesn’t have a president. America has a man in the White House holding the spot, and wreaking havoc as he waits for the day when a real president arrives to replace him.

Donald Trump is many things — most of them despicable — but the leader of a nation he is not. He is not a great man. Hell, he isn’t even a good man.

Donald Trump is a man of flawed character and a moral cavity. He cannot offer moral guidance because he has no moral compass. He is too small to see over his inflated ego.

Trump has personalized the presidency in unprecedented ways — making every battle and every war about his personal feelings. Did the person across the street or around the world say good or bad things about him? Does the media treat him fairly? Is someone in his coterie of corruption outshining him or casting negative light on him?

His interests center on the self; country be damned.

What some have always known about Trump, others are slowly coming to realize, and with great shock and horror. The presidency is revealing the essence of the man and that essence is dark.

What America saw clearly in Trump’s disastrous handling of the violence in Charlottesville was a Nazi/white nationalist apologist if not sympathizer, a reactionary rage-aholic, a liar, and a person who has absolutely no sense or understanding of history.

By claiming that there were some “very fine people” among the extremists marching in Charlottesville, the president made a profound declaration: The accommodation of racists is his creed.

As Susan Bro, whose daughter, Heather Heyer, was killed in Charlottesville, said last week, “You can’t wash this one away by shaking my hand and saying, ‘I’m sorry.’ ” Heather Heyer was killed when James Alex Fields Jr. used a speeding car to mow down a crowd of protesters who had gathered to rebuke the Nazis and white nationalists.

According to The Chicago Tribune, one of Fields’s high school teachers said he once “wrote a three-page homework paper that extolled Nazi ideology and the prowess of the Führer’s armed forces,” and that even before then, the teacher said, “he had been well aware of Fields’s racist and anti-Semitic beliefs from private discussions he had with Fields during his junior year.”

And even worse, The Tribune reported:

“At least four times when the boy was in the eighth and ninth grades, Florence police were summoned to his home, mostly by his frantic mother, Samantha Bloom, an I.T. specialist. It was just the two of them living together, and young James, among other incidents, was reported to have spat in her face, smacked her head with a phone and frightened her with a foot-long knife, according to records of the 911 calls. Neighbors, in interviews, similarly described a troubled youth who treated his mother cruelly.”

This was no fine person, and no person who walked shoulder-to-shoulder with him is a fine person. There are no good Nazis. There are no good white nationalist accommodators. There are no good people who see racists and don’t want to retch.

But somehow, the person we now call “president” saw what happened in Charlottesville, saw that a car had been used to kill Heyer, and still found it appropriate to say that there were bad people on “both sides.”

He cleaned that up in a teleprompter speech, but the next day returned to the defense of the indefensible, this time with even more verve and venom.

He apparently felt that the media had unfairly condemned him for his original remarks and he was going to be the counterpuncher and strike back at the media. Again, it was all about him, not us. But when he lashed out at the media, the cameras were rolling. There were no prepared remarks. There was no teleprompter. Trump stood exposed and in the raw, the deepest, truest thoughts of his soul erupting from his face, and what came out were bitterness and bile.

He was not there to heal the nation or to uplift it. He was there for personal exoneration and redemption. He wasn’t there to plead the case that America could rise on the wings of its better angels. He was there to defend the demons.

But, when one attempts to do a thing that can’t be done — that shouldn’t be done — one must employ the tools of deception: obfuscation, revisionism and flat-out lying.

Trump said that he had not initially condemned both sides because he wanted to wait to get all the facts, because that’s what he likes to do.

Lies.

On Saturday, when tens of thousands of protesters turned out to counter a small group of radical racists, Trump’s first response was to tweet: “Looks like many anti-police agitators in Boston. Police are looking tough and smart! Thank you.”

This man doesn’t wait for facts. This man doesn’t care about facts, or much else for that matter. He only cares about himself, his image and his positioning.

America is functioning, barely, without a functioning president. Trump is failing every test of the office. How frightening is that?

"...waits for the day when a real president arrives to replace him." Sadly, the men in line behind him are no great shakes.

[mamallama]

Who'd've thunk Orrin Hatch would be our best hope.

 

[fraurosena]

Yes, Trump retweeted another bot and ranted about 'fake news'

Spoiler

After thanking an entrepreneur who turned out to be a bot, it seems that Donald Trump has just retweeted another fake fan account — either an advanced bot or linked to a bot network. 

On Monday morning, the US president thanked @Aroliso for slamming the #FakeNews media. "You never falter, you always stand strong," Aroliso tweeted as part of a thread. This is what Trump posted:

A quick look at @Aroliso shows that somebody created the account in October 2015 but it first tweeted just 3 days ago, gathering over 6,000 followers with memes and posts exclusively celebrating Donald Trump:  

>screenshots of maga tweets<

The account only follows 5 people — interestingly it includes singers Bjork and Tori Amos — and the bio just says "MAGA".

All these elements point to a possible fake pro-Trump account. But there's more. 

The current @Aroliso is actually a very recent takeover. Until last Friday, it had just one follower and used to exclusively retweet another account, @AvoTovA:

>another screenshot<

@AvoTovA had around 7,700 followers before it was deleted and restarted:

>another screenshot<

And at the time — surprise surprise — it also used to tweet pro-Trump messages, mostly nonsensical support statements: 

>more screenshots<

Some people on Twitter noticed that @Aroliso tweeted to the President via something called "Avotova 06" (!!!), which is probably an API registered with Twitter:

>screenshot<

To close the circle, the now-dead website has "Donald Trump parody videos in its metadata, as noticed by Daily Beast's Ben Collins:

 

>another screenshot<

If this not proof that Trump retweeted a fake account, we don't know what is. 

The fool just falls for anything sychophantic, doesn't he?

What a poor little bruised ego he must have, that he needs it to be stroked so much and so often.

[Howl]

2 hours ago, allthegoodnamesrgone said:

Pence and 'Mother' are creep AF, as much as I want Trump gone, the idea of a president Pence is even more terrifying.  Because he is calm and rational (as rational as a far right wing misogynistic monster can be) and understands how our government works, he can do so much more damage than Trump can.  

This times eleventy.  Better the devil you know.....As I tell people, Trump is better than a theocracy any day of the week. 

[GreyhoundFan]

"With or without Bannon, Trump will likely get a lot worse. Here’s what to watch for next.'

Spoiler

Now that Stephen K. Bannon has been booted from the White House, the political press is salivating at the prospect of a public struggle between Bannon as outsider and the “globalists” who remain inside the White House. Bannon now rails that his ouster means the Trump presidency as he conceived of it is “over,” and vows to use Breitbart to pressure the administration into hewing to the “economic nationalist” agenda that (he maintains) the globalists may now derail.

But looming in the near future are some major flash points that will test whether Bannon’s departure actually heralds any kind of new direction for President Trump. Here’s a partial rundown:

Arizona speech. Trump is set to hold a rally Tuesday night in Arizona. That was the setting for the festival of hate, lies and xenophobia otherwise known as his main campaign speech on immigration. Little has changed since: Trump recently embraced a plan to slash legal immigration and in the process has recently amplified more lies about the impact that low-skilled immigration has on U.S. workers and about the degree to which immigrants drain welfare benefits. If you hear more of these lies about immigration tomorrow — and in coming days — we’ll see little has changed post-Bannon.

New rhetoric about race. Meanwhile, some Republicans have urged Trump to use the Arizona rally to sound a conciliatory, unifying tone, after his refusal to unambiguously condemn white supremacy in the wake of the Charlottesville violence. But Bannon internally urged Trump not to back down on this point, arguing that he shouldn’t capitulate to pressure from the media. What Trump says tomorrow will tell us a lot.

The fate of the “dreamers.” The Trump administration faces a tough decision on Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which currently shields around 800,000 people brought here illegally as children from deportation, while granting them permits to work. The White House won’t say whether Trump will cancel the program. If he does not, a coalition of states will sue to get it overturned, and the question then will be whether Trump will instruct Attorney General Jeff Sessions to defend the program in court.

Incredibly, the New York Times reports that Bannon had privately urged Trump not to show flexibility toward the dreamers, arguing that this would buy no goodwill for Trump from Democrats. (It’s always, always, always just about Trump, and the question of whether it is humane or just to scrap protections for hundreds of thousands of people brought here as kids, through no fault of their own, is beside the point entirely.) Trump’s decision on DACA will be revealing.

Joe Arpaio’s pardon. If Trump goes through with pardoning former Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio, an authoritarian racist with a fondness for dabbling in birtherism and a history of reprehensible abuses toward Latinos, that will speak for itself.

Afghanistan. Trump is reportedly set to expand our engagement in Afghanistan by several thousand troops, and the New York Times reports that Bannon’s departure tips the balance in favor of those who, unlike Bannon, favor a more interventionist military posture abroad. This is partly a reflection of Bannon’s “America first” foreign policy nationalism. But as Ben Smith notes, it’s more than that: Bannon has long dreamed of achieving a cross-racial political realignment of working people via a combination of protectionist trade policy, ramped-up spending at home, tighter immigration restrictions, and bringing home their sons and daughters from foreign wars.

Trump, too, campaigned on a similar narrative built of these same intertwined themes, vaguely suggesting he would be less inclined toward military adventurism abroad than bipartisan Washington elites tend to be. So it will be very telling if Trump departs from Bannonism in this area while retaining its hostility toward immigration. Which brings us to …

Trade, infrastructure and taxes. We have been told endlessly that the appeal of Trump/Bannon “populist economic nationalism” depends in part on Trump’s willingness to break from House Speaker Paul D. Ryan’s orthodox Republicanism on economic policy and the safety net. But Bannon reportedly urged Republicans to support the GOP health bill, which would have slashed Medicaid for millions, including untold numbers of Trump voters, while delivering the rich a huge tax cut. In short, Bannon went all in with Ryanism when it really counted.

Now Bannonism will be tested again. We are told Bannon wanted Trump to adopt pro-worker protectionist policies; we know he has long talked of huge infrastructure spending; and word was leaked that he pushed for a tax hike on the rich. But we never saw the meat of any of these policies, making it hard to judge what the Bannonist agenda is really supposed to amount to, beyond the stepped-up deportations, the immigration restrictionism and the thinly disguised Muslim ban, areas in which (surprise) we have seen concrete policies. At some point, we may see plans from Trump and the GOP on trade, infrastructure and tax reform. If so, you’d think the now-unshackled Bannon will be unsparing in his criticism of them where they fail working people and benefit elites, and in so doing will finally reveal what the Bannon agenda really looks like in these areas. Right?

The most likely outcome: Trump will remain fully in thrall to Bannonism’s impulses on immigration and race while failing to offer anything on trade or infrastructure that actually benefits workers — or anything that seriously challenges conventionally plutocratic GOP priorities on taxes.

...

I agree, he's likely to keep getting worse.

[GreyhoundFan]

I guess they're trying to make up for all the events not being held at Mar-a-loco: "Republican committees have paid nearly $1.3 million to Trump-owned entities this year'

Spoiler

The Republican National Committee paid the Trump International Hotel in Washington $122,000 last month after the party held a lavish fundraiser at the venue in June, the latest example of how GOP political committees are generating a steady income stream for President Trump’s private business, new Federal Election Commission records show.

At least 25 congressional campaigns, state parties and the Republican Governors Association have together spent more than $473,000 at Trump hotels or golf resorts this year, according to a Washington Post analysis of campaign finance filings. Trump’s companies collected an additional $793,000 from the RNC and the president’s campaign committee, some of which included payments for rent and legal consulting.

The nearly $1.3 million spent by Republican political committees at Trump entities in 2017 has helped boost his company at a time when business is falling off at some core properties. Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club in Palm Beach, Fla., lost at least 10 of the 16 galas or dinner events it had been scheduled to host next winter in the wake of Trump’s controversial response to a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville.

The market has been much more bullish for the president’s new hotel in Washington, which has emerged as the go-to venue for GOP power brokers and groups on the right. Trump International, whose room rates appear to be the most expensive in the city, generated nearly $2 million in profit in its first four months, as The Washington Post previously reported.

In late June, an estimated 300 Trump supporters attended a $35,000-a-person RNC fundraiser at the ornate hotel, raising a reported $10 million for the party and Trump’s reelection committee.

The RNC is among 19 federal political committees that have patronized the Pennsylvania Avenue establishment this year. One of the biggest spenders has been Trump’s reelection committee, which has shelled out nearly $15,000 for lodging there, filings show.

The Washington hotel also hosted events for Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (Calif.), whose campaign committee spent more than $11,000 on event space and catering in late May and mid-June, as well as Rep. Jodey Arrington (Tex.), whose committee paid nearly $9,700 in early January for facility usage, food and beverages. The campaign of Rep. Bill Shuster (Pa.) spent more than $6,000 for “event facility rental” in early April. And the committee of Rep. David Valadao (Calif.) paid $1,744 on March 9 for a fundraiser at the BLT restaurant in the hotel.

Additional GOP lawmakers whose campaign committee or leadership PACs spent money at the hotel include Sen. Bob Corker (Tenn.), Rep. Eric A. “Rick” Crawford (Ark.), Rep. Mike Kelly (Pa.), Rep. Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) and Rep. Ted Yoho (Fla.).

Trump’s other signature properties also have drawn GOP fundraising events. The Republican Party of Virginia spent $9,705 on room rental and catering at Trump’s Virginia golf club in May. A joint fundraising committee for Rep. Tom MacArthur (N.J.) spent $15,221 in June for “venue rental/catering” at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., which the president has been visiting frequently.

One of the largest expenditures by a political committee at a Trump property was made by the Republican Governors Association, which paid more than $408,000 to hold an event this spring at the Trump Doral Golf Course, according to tax filings – a gathering the RGA said had been booked more than two years in advance.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

This is so freaking true: "The White House’s secretiveness is getting so bad, it’s probably illegal'

Spoiler

PRESIDENT TRUMP’S White House appears to be even less transparent than it seemed a few months ago. According to a new lawsuit from the advocacy group Public Citizen, the Trump administration is refusing to release information on even a subset of visitors to the White House grounds. This is likely illegal and certainly wrong.

Public Citizen says it has asked repeatedly that the Secret Service turn over records on who has visited four executive agencies on the White House grounds, including the Office of Management and Budget, which crunches numbers for the president on a wide range of policies, and the Council on Environmental Quality, another important policy department.

But, according to Public Citizen’s attorney, the Trump administration rebuffed the organization’s requests, citing legal and logistical barriers. Among them: It would be difficult to sort out who visited which agency and, therefore, which records need to be released and which do not. Here’s a solution: Go back to releasing all visitor logs, except when doing so would endanger national security.

Public Citizen’s suit comes on the heels of another, broader complaint from a separate collection of advocacy groups, charging that all White House visitor records should be, as a matter of course, public, including records on visits to Mar-a-Lago and other places where Mr. Trump routinely sets up shop. This was more or less the approach the Obama administration took, after facing similar lawsuits. The Trump administration nevertheless said in April that an open policy would present “grave national security risks and privacy concerns.” At that time, the White House said the Trump administration would, when asked, still release visitor records relating to agencies not technically under the executive office of the president, agencies that are almost certainly subject to the Freedom of Information Act. Now, in turning down Public Citizen’s requests, the administration appears to be defying even that policy.

Public Citizen argues that more transparency would reveal that Trump administration staffers are taking a lot of meetings with industry groups. This would not be surprising. Even so, knowing exactly whose counsel the president’s staff is taking would nevertheless advance public understanding of its leaders and how those leaders are making policy.

Reasonable public scrutiny, meanwhile, can have a beneficial effect on how staffers behave, particularly when higher-ups are not watching. Former Obama administration officials say that the previous visitor records policy discouraged staff from taking meetings and cultivating associations they probably should not have. Concerns about harm to national security did not bear out.

It should not fall on the courts to enforce basic transparency from the public’s elected leaders. But with this administration, the judiciary may have an essential role to play.

 

[fraurosena]

25 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I guess they're trying to make up for all the events not being held at Mar-a-loco: "Republican committees have paid nearly $1.3 million to Trump-owned entities this year'

  Hide contents

The Republican National Committee paid the Trump International Hotel in Washington $122,000 last month after the party held a lavish fundraiser at the venue in June, the latest example of how GOP political committees are generating a steady income stream for President Trump’s private business, new Federal Election Commission records show.

At least 25 congressional campaigns, state parties and the Republican Governors Association have together spent more than $473,000 at Trump hotels or golf resorts this year, according to a Washington Post analysis of campaign finance filings. Trump’s companies collected an additional $793,000 from the RNC and the president’s campaign committee, some of which included payments for rent and legal consulting.

The nearly $1.3 million spent by Republican political committees at Trump entities in 2017 has helped boost his company at a time when business is falling off at some core properties. Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club in Palm Beach, Fla., lost at least 10 of the 16 galas or dinner events it had been scheduled to host next winter in the wake of Trump’s controversial response to a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville.

The market has been much more bullish for the president’s new hotel in Washington, which has emerged as the go-to venue for GOP power brokers and groups on the right. Trump International, whose room rates appear to be the most expensive in the city, generated nearly $2 million in profit in its first four months, as The Washington Post previously reported.

In late June, an estimated 300 Trump supporters attended a $35,000-a-person RNC fundraiser at the ornate hotel, raising a reported $10 million for the party and Trump’s reelection committee.

The RNC is among 19 federal political committees that have patronized the Pennsylvania Avenue establishment this year. One of the biggest spenders has been Trump’s reelection committee, which has shelled out nearly $15,000 for lodging there, filings show.

The Washington hotel also hosted events for Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (Calif.), whose campaign committee spent more than $11,000 on event space and catering in late May and mid-June, as well as Rep. Jodey Arrington (Tex.), whose committee paid nearly $9,700 in early January for facility usage, food and beverages. The campaign of Rep. Bill Shuster (Pa.) spent more than $6,000 for “event facility rental” in early April. And the committee of Rep. David Valadao (Calif.) paid $1,744 on March 9 for a fundraiser at the BLT restaurant in the hotel.

Additional GOP lawmakers whose campaign committee or leadership PACs spent money at the hotel include Sen. Bob Corker (Tenn.), Rep. Eric A. “Rick” Crawford (Ark.), Rep. Mike Kelly (Pa.), Rep. Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) and Rep. Ted Yoho (Fla.).

Trump’s other signature properties also have drawn GOP fundraising events. The Republican Party of Virginia spent $9,705 on room rental and catering at Trump’s Virginia golf club in May. A joint fundraising committee for Rep. Tom MacArthur (N.J.) spent $15,221 in June for “venue rental/catering” at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., which the president has been visiting frequently.

One of the largest expenditures by a political committee at a Trump property was made by the Republican Governors Association, which paid more than $408,000 to hold an event this spring at the Trump Doral Golf Course, according to tax filings – a gathering the RGA said had been booked more than two years in advance.

 

Bringing up the emoluments clause again is becoming boring, so... maybe... nope, still gonna do it.

EMOLUMENTS CLAUSE: Ain't worth the paper it's written on, apparently. As the Dutch saying goes: you could just as well wipe your ass with it.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Jerry Falwell Jr. and other religious backers of Trump embarrass themselves"

Spoiler

Former conservative congressman J.C. Watts, appearing on “Meet the Press,” reminded the audience that after Charlottesville, two of the president’s business advisory councils disbanded. He noted that “you saw the exodus of many people on the business council, who resigned, who said those are not my personal values, those are not our corporate values, and those — we don’t believe — are the values of our country.” He noted that when it came to President Trump’s faith council, only pastor A.R. Bernard resigned. Watts said candidly that he was “quite disappointed … that we didn’t have more.”

Lack of principle, however, has been par for the course for the vast number of politically active Christian conservatives who endorsed and defended Trump, rationalized every outlandish, hateful statement (on Mexicans, POWs, a federal judge, “Access Hollywood,” etc.) and gave a pass to a thrice-married, dishonest narcissist who displays no religious sensibilities or ethical principles. They have continued to vouch for him, acting as a political shield, not as a spiritual force. They are mute when Trump measures success purely in monetary terms (just billionaires and generals in his Cabinet, thank you) and omits any mention of Jews from an International Holocaust Remembrance Day statement. They rejoice when he enacts a religiously bigoted travel ban and wants to throw honorably serving transgender people out of the military.

Watts would have been even more horrified had he seen Jerry Falwell Jr., who had this exchange with ABC News’s Martha Raddatz:

RADDATZ: On Twitter this week, you praised what you called the president’s bold, truthful statement about Charlottesville saying you were so proud of Donald Trump. But the president said Tuesday, there were quote very fine people on both sides. Who were those very fine people marching with the neo-Nazis?

JERRY FALWELL JR., PRESIDENT, LIBERTY UNIVERSITY: The bold and truthful statements I was referring to were his willingness to call evil and terrorism by its name, to identify the groups, the Nazis, the KKK, the white supremacists. And that’s something a leader should do. And I admire him for that. . . .

RADDATZ: Well, let me tell you what he said, though, let’s go back to this. He said, there were very fine people on both sides. Do you believe there were very fine people on both sides?

FALWELL: He has inside information that I don’t have. I don’t know if there were historical purists there who were trying to preserve some statues. I don’t know.

But he had information I didn’t have. And I believe that he spoke what was…

RADDATZ: What made you think he knew that…

FALWELL: I think he saw videos of who was there. I think he was talking about what he had seen, information that he had that I don’t have.

All I know is it was pure evil. The media has tried to paint this as Republican versus Democrat, black versus white, Jew versus gentile, but it’s just pure evil versus good. And that’s what we all need to unite behind. We all need to unite behind stopping evil, whether it’s Timothy McVeigh who is the terrorist in Oklahoma City, or it’s Muslim terrorists in Barcelona, or it’s somebody flying a plane into the World Trade Center, it’s all evil.

RADDATZ: But when you say things like that, when you say it’s all evil, but you say you’re so proud of Donald Trump, that’s the message that resonated. It didn’t resonate that you think he might have some information.

Falwell continued to dodge and weave, but Raddatz persisted:

RADDATZ: So, would you say, given what you know, there were no very fine people on that side, that other — the side of the neo-Nazis?

FALWELL: I don’t have that information. All I know is those people are pure evil. And there’s no moral equivalency — the secretary of the Treasury said this morning that Donald Trump does not believe there is any moral equivalency. …

RADDATZ: The president also said there is blame on both sides. Susan Bro, the mother of the woman killed in the car attack, Heather Heyer, said she wouldn’t talk to the president, as we heard there, because he equated counter protesters with the KKK.

Raddatz confronted Falwell with the fact that “a growing number of Liberty University graduates are preparing to return their diplomas” to protest his support for Trump. (One student explained that Falwell was “making himself … [and] the university he represents, complicit.”) Falwell insisted that his support for Trump stemmed from the president’s “bold and truthful willingness to call terrorist groups by their names, and that’s something we haven’t seen in presidents in recent years.” (This is a religious perspective?) Raddatz questioned why he is not applying the same standard to Trump, who has refused to call the neo-Nazis domestic terrorists, as he did to President Barack Obama. Falwell pronounced himself confused by this point and refused to criticize Trump.

Robert P. Jones, author of “The End of White Christian America” observes, “I think Falwell, Jr.’s defense of President Trump’s recent remarks is unsurprising. If there’s anything surprising about Trump’s Evangelical Advisory Council over the last week, it’s that anyone resigned.” He explains that “like most things in the Trump orbit, the committee is mostly constituted as a Trump fan club rather than a group that broadly represents the major entities in the evangelical world and who might be conduits of concern on these issues. Loyalty, not moral guidance or prophetic voice, is the coin of the realm.” Even worse, he reminds us, “Given white evangelicals’ own checkered past supporting segregation and remaining silent about white supremacy groups (something I covered in my book), there may in fact be widespread agreement with Trump’s remarks.”

Falwell’s intellectual dishonesty — the president must know something we don’t! — and refusal to apply religious (or even secular) values to Trump’s ratcheting up of racial tension would be something you’d expect from a sleazy politician, not a religious or academic leader. (“But at least he’s not politically correct; he’s not so concerned about rehearsing and focus grouping every statement he makes and that’s one of the reasons I supported him.”) The debasement of so many Christian conservatives, who could call for Trump to practice self-reflection on matters of tolerance and national unity, may be one of Trump’s lasting legacies. Quite simply, who’s going to take these people seriously in the future?

David French, an evangelical Christian, veteran of the Iraq War, constitutional litigator and columnist, sees a familiar pattern. “At this point nothing surprises me from Falwell,” he told me. “Remember, this is the guy who posed with the grin and thumbs-up right in front of Trump’s Playboy cover.” French observed, “Like many of Trump’s most zealous Evangelical supporters, he’s not making arguments. He’s just offering an unconditional, mindless defense — and grounding it all in opposition to political correctness.”

The decision to pursue access and power, to act as political advocates for Trump rather than as spiritual leaders, has stripped the religious right of any claim to the moral high ground. Instead of amplifying the worst traits in our political debate — rapid partisanship, angry populism, tribalism and  blind xenophobia — they might consider challenging, not defending, the purveyor in chief of racial animosity and xenophobia.

Sad, but true. JF Junior is as morally bankrupt as the TT. I know one person who graduated from JFU (Liberty). He told me he is one who has returned his diploma.

[GreyhoundFan]

The WaPo has been keeping a running article, "White House aides can’t stop talking about President Trump like he’s a toddler". Too many tweets (71) to quote, but it's a good read.

[allthegoodnamesrgone]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

This is so freaking true: "The White House’s secretiveness is getting so bad, it’s probably illegal'

  Reveal hidden contents

PRESIDENT TRUMP’S White House appears to be even less transparent than it seemed a few months ago. According to a new lawsuit from the advocacy group Public Citizen, the Trump administration is refusing to release information on even a subset of visitors to the White House grounds. This is likely illegal and certainly wrong.

Public Citizen says it has asked repeatedly that the Secret Service turn over records on who has visited four executive agencies on the White House grounds, including the Office of Management and Budget, which crunches numbers for the president on a wide range of policies, and the Council on Environmental Quality, another important policy department.

But, according to Public Citizen’s attorney, the Trump administration rebuffed the organization’s requests, citing legal and logistical barriers. Among them: It would be difficult to sort out who visited which agency and, therefore, which records need to be released and which do not. Here’s a solution: Go back to releasing all visitor logs, except when doing so would endanger national security.

Public Citizen’s suit comes on the heels of another, broader complaint from a separate collection of advocacy groups, charging that all White House visitor records should be, as a matter of course, public, including records on visits to Mar-a-Lago and other places where Mr. Trump routinely sets up shop. This was more or less the approach the Obama administration took, after facing similar lawsuits. The Trump administration nevertheless said in April that an open policy would present “grave national security risks and privacy concerns.” At that time, the White House said the Trump administration would, when asked, still release visitor records relating to agencies not technically under the executive office of the president, agencies that are almost certainly subject to the Freedom of Information Act. Now, in turning down Public Citizen’s requests, the administration appears to be defying even that policy.

Public Citizen argues that more transparency would reveal that Trump administration staffers are taking a lot of meetings with industry groups. This would not be surprising. Even so, knowing exactly whose counsel the president’s staff is taking would nevertheless advance public understanding of its leaders and how those leaders are making policy.

Reasonable public scrutiny, meanwhile, can have a beneficial effect on how staffers behave, particularly when higher-ups are not watching. Former Obama administration officials say that the previous visitor records policy discouraged staff from taking meetings and cultivating associations they probably should not have. Concerns about harm to national security did not bear out.

It should not fall on the courts to enforce basic transparency from the public’s elected leaders. But with this administration, the judiciary may have an essential role to play.

 

It can't be illegal when republicans do it.  They are above the law.  They are held to no standard and the Dems are held to impossible ones, because when ever the standard is met they change it.

[Ali]

I put my toddler down for a nap during the eclipse. I suspect Ivanka is regretting allowing her toddler outside today.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/21/politics/trump-solar-eclipse/index.html

Quote

That's Donald John Trump on the White House South Portico, seemingly looking directly into the sun. At the peak of the solar eclipse. Without any sort of protective eyewear on.

This, from the White House pool report of the moment filed by the Guardian's Ben Jacobs is, um, amazing: "At approximately 2:39, the President initially gesticulated to the crowd below and pointed at the sky. As he did so, one of the White House aides standing beneath the Blue Room Balcony shouted 'don't look.'"

Trump did, eventually, put on protective eyewear -- as did first lady Melania Trump

So are kids around the world going  to come to the conclusion he is an idiot or are they going think it is okay to look at the sun during an eclipse because he did? I hope it is the former.