Trump 24: Fiddling, er, Tweeting While Rome Burns

[GreyhoundFan]

Okay, not about the TT, but it seemed appropriate because it feels like this is the flight we are all on this year: "Flight 666 to HEL took off one last time this Friday the 13th"

Spoiler

Just after the 13th hour on Friday, Oct. 13, Flight 666 took off for HEL — the International Air Transport Association code for Helsinki-Vantaa Airport in Finland — for one last time.

The Finnair flight departed Copenhagen, and landed safely roughly an hour and a half later. Greeting the aircraft, thankfully, were not hellish flames but “partly sunny weather.”

...

The Helsinki Airport made sure to receive the esteemed flight by having it arrive at gate 26 — double of 13.

...

Since 2006, Finnair has flown Flight 666 to Helsinki 21 times on Friday the 13th, according to the airline. The airline said it will be changing its flight numbers at the end of the month, and Flight 666 will become Flight 954.

The number 666, according to the King James version of the Book of Revelation, is “the number of the beast,” which many associate with the Devil. Friday the 13th has long been feared by the superstitious as a dreaded day of misfortune.

Possible reasons for the origins of the Friday the 13th bad luck story abound. For example, the 13th guest at the Last Supper, Judas, betrayed Jesus. Jesus may have been crucified on a Friday the 13th. There is a Norse myth about a god crashing a dinner as the 13th guest, wreaking havoc. A 1993 study published in the British Medical Journal even concluded the “risk of hospital admission as a result of a transport accident may be increased by as much as 52%” on Friday the 13th.

Why the change in flight numbers?

“We’re growing, so we need more flight numbers,” the company tweeted. “This is why we’ve done the renumbering.”

Those who aren’t spooked by traveling on Friday the 13th may be rewarded with cheaper flights. According to a study conducted by the travel search engine Kayak, the average cost of a flight departing from Britain on Friday, Jan. 13, this year was significantly cheaper than any other day that same month.

“Flight prices are very much based on demand — when demand is up they rise and when it is down they fall,” a Kayak spokesperson told The Telegraph. “Our data, therefore, indicates that many are choosing not to travel on Friday the 13th.”

Finnair’s morbid sense of humor won’t end quite yet.

“Farewell to Finnair AY666, but remember, we still have from SIN to HEL,” the airline wrote on Twitter, referring to Singapore.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Pretty much: "Trump’s obsession with his IQ is the opposite of wisdom"

Spoiler

Forgive me for dredging up ancient history, but back on Oct. 10 — an eternity in Trump time — Forbes magazine published an interview with the president in which he challenged Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to an IQ contest. Veteran Trump-watchers rushed to their e-files to show that this is a recurring theme. Trump brags about his IQ as freely as he boasts about his interior decorating; it’s like he has a chandelier between his ears.

If only I had a time machine to summon my 12-year-old self. That gormy little nerd would definitely throw down with the president.

In 1973, a much brighter version of me spent several hours in the school library untangling tricky word problems and picturing irregular solids turning in space. It’s a miracle I got any of the answers right, given that 98 percent of my mental energy was consumed by the breathtaking transformation the previous summer had wrought on the girls in seventh grade, and most of the remaining 2 percent was storing memorized dialogue from “Gilligan’s Island.”

The lad’s results, however, were impressive enough that — for a few weeks anyway — school officials eyed me with the mixed shock and pride of Farmer Arable gazing on Wilbur the pig under a spiderweb spelling out “radiant.” Thus began a lifetime’s discovery of the pointlessness of IQ tests and whatever it is that they measure.

I’m not saying that intelligence is useless. When I drive across a bridge or board an airplane, I give thanks for engineers who are a heck of a lot better than I am at math. As for genius, of course it exists. How else to explain a Michelangelo, a Curie, an Ellington or a Turing? The rare spark is struck in some unmapped dimension.

Yet to apply a single label, be it intelligence or genius, to the multifaceted power of the human brain, and then to reduce the label to a number, is folly. Brainpower shows in so many ways, from critic Helen Vendler reading a poem to quarterback Tom Brady reading a defense; from architect David Adjaye building a museum to author J.K. Rowling building a universe to investor Warren Buffett building a portfolio. Harvard University’s Howard Gardner is clearly correct when he observes that humans possess multiple intelligences in varying degrees. Mine may be more linguistic, yours more spatial, another person’s more musical or interpersonal or mathematical.

Compared with my 12-year-old self, I’ve undoubtedly lost at least 10 or 20 percent of my IQ points. What I’ve gained over the decades is a deep appreciation for all the things I don’t know, and will never know, because they require varieties of intelligence in which I am lacking. And thank God, because my world is so much richer for it. Albert Einstein is often credited with saying “the more I learn, the more I realize I don’t know.”

Amen to that.

Trump’s notion that intelligence is reflected in a single number — wearable on a jersey, flashable on a scoreboard — is the opposite of wisdom. Worse, it is the root of an intellectual isolation that endangers the country he leads. Trump finds himself increasingly at odds with his own staff and at war with would-be allies. He is squandering perhaps the most precious presidential power: the ability to surround oneself with a challenging mix of insightful and experienced advisers.

Some highly intelligent women and men serve on Trump’s staff, Tillerson among them. Yet sources tell Vanity Fair that the president has been fuming lately, “I hate everyone in the White House.” Frustrated with Congress, he attacks the political intelligence of Mitch McConnell, the moral intelligence of John McCain, the diplomatic intelligence of Bob Corker. A smarter president would be hungry for dissenting views and willing to hear from well-meaning critics, because listening is learning, and the more you learn, the more you win.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. suggested that intelligence matters less in a president than the qualities of judgment, discipline and discernment that he called “temperament.” That is even more true in our world of increasingly specialized knowledge and rapid change. No person, no matter how bright, can begin to know more than a small corner of all that a modern presidency encompasses.

I guess we’ll never find out how the young DVD would fare in an IQ showdown with Mensa Don. But I know one guy who could kick Trump’s tail for sure. His name was Socrates, and he lived in Athens nearly 2,500 years ago. Though the IQ test lay far in the future, Socrates spent a lot of time thinking about these matters — in a vivid demonstration of what Gardner calls “intrapersonal” intelligence, or the ability to understand oneself.

Here’s what Socrates concluded: “How is not this the most reprehensible ignorance, to think that one knows what one does not know?” If Trump is so smart, let’s hear his answer to that.

The whole TT bragging about his "yuge" IQ took me back. About 15 years ago, I had a young (early 20s) coworker who was always whining that he was "the most intelligent person here" and "this work is beneath" him. I sat him down one day in private and asked him if another coworker, "Pete" was intelligent (Pete was one of the smartest people I've ever met and was highly educated to boot, with multiple degrees from MIT). He said yes. I then asked him if he had ever heard Pete say he was intelligent. He thought about it and said no. I then told him that truly intelligent people don't have to say they're intelligent; their actions speak far louder than any words. At least I got the jerk to stop bitching about the job.

[GreyhoundFan]

Oh, for pity sake: "Trump: My presidency is 'substantially ahead of schedule'"

Spoiler

President Donald Trump on Friday pledged to an adoring crowd of evangelicals his commitment to religious liberty, as he declared that his administration is “substantially ahead of schedule” in delivering on campaign promises.

Speaking at the Values Voter Summit, Trump boasted about “tremendous strides” against ISIS and his plan to decertify the Iran nuclear deal, while saying he hoped to give Americans a Christmas gift of tax reform and to deliver on scrapping Obamacare, after multiple failed repeal efforts in Congress.

"We're taking a little different route than we had hoped because getting Congress — they've forgotten what their pledges were," Trump said, referring to multiple plans he's rolled out in the past 24 hours to undermine the health care law. "So we're going a little different route, but you know what, in the end it will be just as effective and maybe it will even be better."

Trump, who received standing ovations throughout his speech, promised to restore "moral clarity" to the United States' view of the world, as he touted his success in office.

"In the last 10 months we have followed through on one promise after another," Trump said. "I didn't have a schedule, [but] if I did have a schedule, I would say we are substantially ahead of schedule."

For Trump, Friday marks his third appearance at the Values Voter Summit and the first from a sitting president. He previously spoke at the event in 2016 during the general election campaign as the Republican presidential nominee and in 2015, during the Republican primary race.

“One of the promises I made you was that I would come back,” he said during his remarks. “See? And I don't even need your vote this year, that's even nicer.”

Tony Perkins, the evangelical president of the Family Research Council, introduced Trump at the summit and noted “we now have a president who reveres the Constitution and honors the laws of our land."

Perkins, in a statement, particularly hailed the Trump administration's move last week to roll back an Obama-era directive on birth control, allowing virtually any employer to claim a religious or moral objection to the Obamacare mandate to provide FDA-approved contraception at no cost. Perkins called the action a demonstration of Trump's commitment “to undoing the anti-faith policies of the previous administration and restoring true religious freedom."

During his speech, Trump extolled a separate order he signed on Thursday that would encourage cheap, loosely regulated health insurance plans and his move to scrap Obamacare subsidy payments to insurers — two actions that threaten to unravel the health care law.

“You saw what we did yesterday with respect to health care, it is step by step by step,” Trump said. “And that was a big step yesterday, another big step was taken the day before yesterday, and one by one it is going to come down and we're going to have great health care in our country.”

He also promised to deliver on tax reform, another major legislative goal that faces an uphill climb in Congress.

"And as a Christmas gift to all of our hard-working families, we hope Congress will pass massive tax cuts for the American people," he said. "That includes increasing the child tax credit and expanding it to eliminate the marriage penalty because we know that the American family is the true bedrock of American life."

During his 31-minute speech, the president promoted his rollback of Obama-era regulations — “By the way, we are cutting regulations at a clip that nobody has ever seen before. Nobody,” he said.

Returning to well-worn rhetoric on the “all-time historic high” of the stock market and a “17-year low” in unemployment, the president also said his administration has done more against ISIS in nine months than the Obama administration accomplished in years and referenced Iran and North Korea.

“ISIS is now being dealt one defeat after another,” Trump said. “We're confronting rogue regimes from Iran to North Korea, and we are challenging the communist dictatorship of Cuba and socialist oppression of Venezuela, and we will not lift the sanctions on these repressive regimes until they restore political and religious freedom for their people.”

But his remarks did not come without backlash from advocacy groups, including some that see the president's appearance as another anti-LGBT step from an administration that does not support LGBT rights.

“Though it is reprehensible that a sitting President would headline this gathering of hate and fearmongering, it is no longer surprising, as President Trump continues to lead a culture war against LGBTQ Americans and other marginalized groups at every turn," said Sarah Kate Ellis, president and CEO of GLAAD in a statement.

But in his own statement from earlier this week, Family Research Council’s Perkins said values voters have waited eight years for a leader like Trump, "who puts America's mission first and respects the values that made America into a great nation."

Trump spoke to that notion directly on Friday.

“I pledged that in a Trump administration our nation's religious heritage would be cherished, protected and defended like you have never seen before,” Trump said. “[And] that's what's happening.”

“How times have changed,” Trump added. “You know? Now they're changing back again.”

“we now have a president who reveres the Constitution and honors the laws of our land." -- Perkins must be smoking something strong.

[47of74]

17 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Oh, for pity sake: "Trump: My presidency is 'substantially ahead of schedule'"

  Reveal hidden contents

President Donald Trump on Friday pledged to an adoring crowd of evangelicals his commitment to religious liberty, as he declared that his administration is “substantially ahead of schedule” in delivering on campaign promises.

Speaking at the Values Voter Summit, Trump boasted about “tremendous strides” against ISIS and his plan to decertify the Iran nuclear deal, while saying he hoped to give Americans a Christmas gift of tax reform and to deliver on scrapping Obamacare, after multiple failed repeal efforts in Congress.

"We're taking a little different route than we had hoped because getting Congress — they've forgotten what their pledges were," Trump said, referring to multiple plans he's rolled out in the past 24 hours to undermine the health care law. "So we're going a little different route, but you know what, in the end it will be just as effective and maybe it will even be better."

Trump, who received standing ovations throughout his speech, promised to restore "moral clarity" to the United States' view of the world, as he touted his success in office.

"In the last 10 months we have followed through on one promise after another," Trump said. "I didn't have a schedule, [but] if I did have a schedule, I would say we are substantially ahead of schedule."

For Trump, Friday marks his third appearance at the Values Voter Summit and the first from a sitting president. He previously spoke at the event in 2016 during the general election campaign as the Republican presidential nominee and in 2015, during the Republican primary race.

“One of the promises I made you was that I would come back,” he said during his remarks. “See? And I don't even need your vote this year, that's even nicer.”

Tony Perkins, the evangelical president of the Family Research Council, introduced Trump at the summit and noted “we now have a president who reveres the Constitution and honors the laws of our land."

Perkins, in a statement, particularly hailed the Trump administration's move last week to roll back an Obama-era directive on birth control, allowing virtually any employer to claim a religious or moral objection to the Obamacare mandate to provide FDA-approved contraception at no cost. Perkins called the action a demonstration of Trump's commitment “to undoing the anti-faith policies of the previous administration and restoring true religious freedom."

During his speech, Trump extolled a separate order he signed on Thursday that would encourage cheap, loosely regulated health insurance plans and his move to scrap Obamacare subsidy payments to insurers — two actions that threaten to unravel the health care law.

“You saw what we did yesterday with respect to health care, it is step by step by step,” Trump said. “And that was a big step yesterday, another big step was taken the day before yesterday, and one by one it is going to come down and we're going to have great health care in our country.”

He also promised to deliver on tax reform, another major legislative goal that faces an uphill climb in Congress.

"And as a Christmas gift to all of our hard-working families, we hope Congress will pass massive tax cuts for the American people," he said. "That includes increasing the child tax credit and expanding it to eliminate the marriage penalty because we know that the American family is the true bedrock of American life."

During his 31-minute speech, the president promoted his rollback of Obama-era regulations — “By the way, we are cutting regulations at a clip that nobody has ever seen before. Nobody,” he said.

Returning to well-worn rhetoric on the “all-time historic high” of the stock market and a “17-year low” in unemployment, the president also said his administration has done more against ISIS in nine months than the Obama administration accomplished in years and referenced Iran and North Korea.

“ISIS is now being dealt one defeat after another,” Trump said. “We're confronting rogue regimes from Iran to North Korea, and we are challenging the communist dictatorship of Cuba and socialist oppression of Venezuela, and we will not lift the sanctions on these repressive regimes until they restore political and religious freedom for their people.”

But his remarks did not come without backlash from advocacy groups, including some that see the president's appearance as another anti-LGBT step from an administration that does not support LGBT rights.

“Though it is reprehensible that a sitting President would headline this gathering of hate and fearmongering, it is no longer surprising, as President Trump continues to lead a culture war against LGBTQ Americans and other marginalized groups at every turn," said Sarah Kate Ellis, president and CEO of GLAAD in a statement.

But in his own statement from earlier this week, Family Research Council’s Perkins said values voters have waited eight years for a leader like Trump, "who puts America's mission first and respects the values that made America into a great nation."

Trump spoke to that notion directly on Friday.

“I pledged that in a Trump administration our nation's religious heritage would be cherished, protected and defended like you have never seen before,” Trump said. “[And] that's what's happening.”

“How times have changed,” Trump added. “You know? Now they're changing back again.”

“we now have a president who reveres the Constitution and honors the laws of our land." -- Perkins must be smoking something strong.

 

Here, Tony, I fixed it for you. 

“We now have a president who wipes his gigantic orange ASS with the Constitution and pisses and shits on the laws of our land."

[fraurosena]

Well this could potentially spell trouble for the presidunce. I sincerely hope it does!

Trump Given A Subpoena For All Documents Relating To Assault Allegations

Spoiler

A woman who said Donald Trump groped her has subpoenaed his campaign for documents about “any woman alleging that Donald J. Trump touched her inappropriately.” Trump has denied her accusations and is fighting the subpoena.

A high-stakes legal showdown is brewing for President Donald Trump, as a woman who said he groped her has subpoenaed all documents from his campaign pertaining to “any woman alleging that Donald J. Trump touched her inappropriately.”

The subpoena — whose contents have not been previously reported — was issued in March but entered into the court file last month. The White House did not respond to a request for comment, nor did Trump’s attorney.

Summer Zervos, a former contestant on the Trump’s reality TV show The Apprentice, accused Trump of kissing and grabbing her when she went to his bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel in 2007 to discuss a possible job at the Trump Organization. After Zervos made the accusation last October, just weeks before the election, Trump denied her accusation and called it a lie.

She responded by suing him for defamation. As part of that suit, her lawyers served a subpoena on his campaign, asking that it preserve all documents it had about her.

They also asked for “all documents” concerning other women who have accused Trump of groping them, including Jessica Leeds, Mindy McGillivray, Rachel Crooks, Natasha Stoynoff, Temple Taggart, Kristin Anderson, Cathy Heller, Jill Harth, and Jessica Drake. The subpoena seeks “all documents concerning any accusations that were made during Donald J. Trump’s election campaign for president, that he subjected any woman to unwanted sexual touching and/or sexually inappropriate behavior.” Last year, Trump tweeted a blanket denial, saying, “Nothing ever happened with any of these women.”

The subpoena did not make its way into the court file until last month, when Zervos’s attorneys, including the high-profile lawyer Gloria Allred, filed it as part of motion disputing a contention from Trump’s legal team that her subpoena was too broad.

Trump's lawyers have sought to have the suit dismissed or at least delayed until he is out of office. His lawyers argued that he is protected from civil lawsuits in state court while in office. They also made a number of other claims in a July filing, among them that the entire suit is politically motivated and that Allred is using it to dredge up ammunition to impeach him. As for the subpoena, they argued that it is "far-reaching" and "seeks wholly irrelevant informationintended solely to harass the president."

Last month, Zervos’s attorneys rejected that accusation and provided the subpoena as evidence.

Trump’s response to Zervos’s motion is due Oct. 31, according to Zervos’s attorney, Gloria Allred. In a statement Allred said: “We are hopeful that the court will deny President Trump’s motion to dismiss, so that we may move forward with discovery and obtain relevant documents and testimony.”

I wonder if the presidunce will forget this deadline like he did the Russian sanctions one...

(BTW, where have I heard the name Gloria Allred before?)

[GreyhoundFan]

@fraurosena -- she's a high-profile attorney who has taken on many controversial cases. She also LOVES to be on TV. While her push for women's rights is great, she is very shrill.

[fraurosena]

6 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

@fraurosena -- she's a high-profile attorney who has taken on many controversial cases. She also LOVES to be on TV. While her push for women's rights is great, she is very shrill.

Ah, I think I probably know of her from the Bill Cosby cases.

If she loves being on TV so much, that might even be a good thing. She and the presidunce can have a reality tv style showdown on the telly. I'd sure watch that show! If we tell the presidunce that the ratings will be through the roof, then he's sure to participate, right? 

[fraurosena]

What a sad sack of shit the presidunce is!

Correction:

What a SAD sack of shit the presidunce is!

[Ali]

Has he said or tweeted anything about Niger yet?

[Smoochie]

Not that I have seen, just him patting himself on the back about how wonderful he is and how everything is so much better now that he is president...

[Audrey2]

Knowing him, he probably won't be briefed on it until tomorrow, and it will only be a quick item on a short list. As I remember, he bragged awhile ago about being so smart that he didn't need regular intelligence briefings, because he "got it the first time." I can see this same philosophy used in any reports given to him. 

Yes, that thought is absolutely disgusting. 

[fraurosena]

Wouldn't it be the pinnacle of irony if the Mandarin Moron would be brought down by the king of Porn?

 

[Howl]

The wording on that offer is interesting.  If it said "resignation or impeachment", I wouldn't put it past the Donald to resign and try to collect the $10 million. 

[Howl]

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo knocked it out of the ballpark this morning with this editor's blog:  For Me To Win, You Have to Lose

DH, an accountant, has often noted how Trump consistently screwed his contractors, sub-contractors and vendors.   It's been a consistent pattern through his business life and dealings;  US banks would no longer lend to him, which is how he ended going to various oligarchs and miscellaneous scumbags overseas to fund his real estate ventures scams. 

In negotiations, there are two basic types of dynamics: win-lose and win-win.  Trump, of course, only knows win-lose (he knows he has won when you lose) and ties this into Trump's behaviors re:  Obamacare, NAFTA, Iran nuclear deal, various bilateral treaties and trade agreements and interactions with the press and everybody else.  It's clear that this is what the next 3.25 years will look like.  And this is what it looks like when you run a country like a Trump business. 

I'll just link here, since Talking Points Memo editor's blog content is open: For Me To Win, You Have to Lose

Also, unrelated to the above, except that some insanely crazy shit happens in Washington on a daily basis these days, Rex Tillerson is defending himself as "fully intact" against Sen. Bob Corker's remarks that Trump has castrated Tillerson.  Corker's a Senate Republican who is not running for re-election; his pic needs to be showing up in the dictionary beside the definition for "loose cannon on deck."  *munches on popcorn*

And yesterday, Nikki Haley became the poster child for how you lose your soul while trying to defend Trump. 

Spoiler

 

Then

Now

 

 

[Howl]

So, today, Trump claimed he was the only president to have contacted the families of fallen soldiers.  

Trump Says Obama Didn’t Call Families Of Fallen Soldiers, Quickly Walks It Back  (well sort of, maybe they did call or maybe not, somebody told me nobody did, check with the generals). 

Spoiler

 

During a press conference on Monday afternoon, President Donald Trump made the dubious claim that former President Barack Obama and other former presidents did not personally call the families of soldiers who died in combat.

Trump quickly walked back the claim when a reporter followed up.

The President first told reporters that he had written letters to the families of soldiers who died in the recent attack in Niger and said he would soon call the families as well. He then claimed that his approach was unique, and that not all past presidents made those calls.

“The traditional way, if you look at President Obama and other presidents, most of them didn’t make calls. A lot of them didn’t make calls,” he said. “I like to call when it’s appropriate, when I think I’m able to do it. They have made the ultimate sacrifice so generally I would say that I like to call. I’m going to be calling them.”

Former aides to Obama quickly pushed back on Trump’s claim, calling it a “lie” [on twitter]. 

A reporter followed up with Trump later in the press conference, prompting Trump to walk back his claim and say that he “was told” that Obama didn’t call the families of fallen soldiers.

“I don’t know if he did. No, no. I was told that he didn’t often and a lot of presidents don’t. They write letters,” Trump said.

“President Obama I think probably did sometimes and maybe sometimes he didn’t. I don’t know. That’s what I was told. All I can do is ask my generals,” the President continued. “Other presidents did not call. They’d write letters and some presidents didn’t do anything.”

 

 

[JMarie]

On 10/15/2017 at 4:20 PM, fraurosena said:

Well this could potentially spell trouble for the presidunce. I sincerely hope it does!

Trump Given A Subpoena For All Documents Relating To Assault Allegations

  Hide contents

A woman who said Donald Trump groped her has subpoenaed his campaign for documents about “any woman alleging that Donald J. Trump touched her inappropriately.” Trump has denied her accusations and is fighting the subpoena.

A high-stakes legal showdown is brewing for President Donald Trump, as a woman who said he groped her has subpoenaed all documents from his campaign pertaining to “any woman alleging that Donald J. Trump touched her inappropriately.”

The subpoena — whose contents have not been previously reported — was issued in March but entered into the court file last month. The White House did not respond to a request for comment, nor did Trump’s attorney.

Summer Zervos, a former contestant on the Trump’s reality TV show The Apprentice, accused Trump of kissing and grabbing her when she went to his bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel in 2007 to discuss a possible job at the Trump Organization. After Zervos made the accusation last October, just weeks before the election, Trump denied her accusation and called it a lie.

She responded by suing him for defamation. As part of that suit, her lawyers served a subpoena on his campaign, asking that it preserve all documents it had about her.

They also asked for “all documents” concerning other women who have accused Trump of groping them, including Jessica Leeds, Mindy McGillivray, Rachel Crooks, Natasha Stoynoff, Temple Taggart, Kristin Anderson, Cathy Heller, Jill Harth, and Jessica Drake. The subpoena seeks “all documents concerning any accusations that were made during Donald J. Trump’s election campaign for president, that he subjected any woman to unwanted sexual touching and/or sexually inappropriate behavior.” Last year, Trump tweeted a blanket denial, saying, “Nothing ever happened with any of these women.”

The subpoena did not make its way into the court file until last month, when Zervos’s attorneys, including the high-profile lawyer Gloria Allred, filed it as part of motion disputing a contention from Trump’s legal team that her subpoena was too broad.

Trump's lawyers have sought to have the suit dismissed or at least delayed until he is out of office. His lawyers argued that he is protected from civil lawsuits in state court while in office. They also made a number of other claims in a July filing, among them that the entire suit is politically motivated and that Allred is using it to dredge up ammunition to impeach him. As for the subpoena, they argued that it is "far-reaching" and "seeks wholly irrelevant informationintended solely to harass the president."

Last month, Zervos’s attorneys rejected that accusation and provided the subpoena as evidence.

Trump’s response to Zervos’s motion is due Oct. 31, according to Zervos’s attorney, Gloria Allred. In a statement Allred said: “We are hopeful that the court will deny President Trump’s motion to dismiss, so that we may move forward with discovery and obtain relevant documents and testimony.”

I wonder if the presidunce will forget this deadline like he did the Russian sanctions one...

(BTW, where have I heard the name Gloria Allred before?)

I was wondering what happened to all those women who were assaulted by Trump, the ones he said he'd sue once he was elected?

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump’s quote on shifting blame just about says it all"

Spoiler

President Trump almost admitted Monday that he is failing on his agenda. Then he caught himself.

“We're not getting the job done,” he began, before quickly shifting course. “And I'm not going to blame myself. I'll be honest: They are not getting the job done,” he said, referring to Congress.

You hear that, Congress? Trump is washing his hands of you. That “bully pulpit” that Theodore Roosevelt talked about? Overrated. Lyndon Johnson's physical intimidation of wavering lawmakers? Trump shouldn't be expected to dirty his hands. Harry Truman's “buck stop here?” Nope, it actually stops over there, down Pennsylvania Avenue.

Points for honesty, I guess. If there was one microcosm of Trump's attitude toward blame acceptance, this was it. In the span of a few seconds, Trump served notice that he separates himself from any responsibility for what Congress does or doesn't do. It's all on them.

This is quite a different tune than Trump was singing when President Obama was in the same situation in his first two years:

... < tweet from twitler >

This might be the most obvious bit of blame-shifting from Trump, but it's certainly not the first time he's done it:

• He has talked repeatedly about the really “bad hand” he was dealt as president.
• He blamed the far right for an Obamacare repeal bill failing in the House in March.
• In June, he said the Justice Department should have defended his more stringent travel ban rather than the “watered down” version after the latter was halted by a court.
• He blamed Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) for the debt-ceiling “mess,” saying they should have tied the increase to a Veterans Affairs bill — despite never lodging that idea publicly.
• He has repeatedly suggested Puerto Rico is somewhat to blame for its current crisis, especially given how faulty its economic situation and infrastructure were before Hurricane Maria.
• He has blamed Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) for the failure of the Senate to pass the health-care bill, suggesting that McCain switched his vote at the last moment unbeknownst to anyone (wrong) and that it would have passed if Cochran weren't hospitalized (wrong again).
• He blamed his staff for feeding him a bad talking point about the size of his election win.
• He suggested “the generals” were responsible for the botched raid in Yemen that led to the death of Ryan Owens. “They lost Ryan,” he said, again pulling out the t-word.

(This is necessarily a partial list.)

Look: It's fine to note that things aren't completely under your control as president — we don't have a dictator — but presidents do get a chance to exert influence over the things the country talks about and Congress passes. The president can bring to bear plenty of pressure when it comes to swaying wavering lawmakers. When it comes to health care, Trump needed only to help win over skeptical Republican senators.

But Trump has shown considerably less interest in providing a helping hand to McConnell and Ryan than he has in absolving himself of the blame for their failures to produce. He has frequently given conflicting signals about what he wants to see from the health-care effort, has feuded with senators who provide key votes — often after the bills have already failed — and has generally shown very little interest in policy details. It's one thing to not be a details guy; it's another to seem completely clueless about what's working its way through Congress at any given moment. Trump is almost always far to the latter end of the spectrum.

Shortly after making the comments above, Trump also suggested he understood why his former top White House aide, Steve Bannon, would target a bunch of Republican incumbents in primaries. That's a message that has to have the National Republican Senatorial Committee screaming right now. But Trump seems to be attempting in one fell swoop something he's failed to do on an individual basis when it has counted — win the votes of key lawmakers using his bully pulpit.

And at it's core, it's more a sign of desperation than it is of his power as president. To be clear: The president admitted Monday that he's been neutered in the Oval Office. And whether you think he shoulders lots of blame or even just a little, he certainly carries at least some of the blame for that.

"not my fault". Yeah, that's the norm for the TT, just like a toddler.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump’s dumbfounding, expansive press conference with Mitch McConnell, annotated". I can't quote, because of the notes, but it's worth a read. I couldn't bear to watch the actual video.

[GreyhoundFan]

This is an excellent op-ed: "Trump, Chieftain of Spite"

Spoiler

It must be cold and miserable standing in the shadow of someone greater and smarter, more loved and more admired. It must be infuriating to have risen on the wings of your derision of that person’s every decision, and even his very existence, and yet not be able to measure up — in either stratagem or efficacy — when you sit where that person once sat.

This is the existence of Donald Trump in the wake of President Barack Obama. Trump can’t hold a candle to Obama, so he’s taking a tiki torch to Obama’s legacy. Trump can’t get his bad ideas through Congress, but he can use the power of the presidency to sabotage or even sink Obama’s signature deeds.

In fact, if there is a defining feature of Trump as “president,” it is that he is in all ways the anti-Obama — not only on policy but also on matters of propriety and polish. While Obama was erudite, Trump is ignorant. Obama was civil, Trump is churlish. Obama was tactful, Trump is tacky.

There is a thing present in Obama and absent from Trump that no amount of money or power can alter: a sense of elegant intellectualism and taste.

The example Obama set makes the big man with the big mouth look smaller by the day. But I believe that this nonadjustable imbalance is part of what has always fueled Trump’s rage against Obama. Trump, who sees character as just another malleable thing that can be marketed and made salable, chafes at the black man who operated above the coarseness of commercial interests and whose character appeared unassailable.

America — even many of the people who were staunch opponents of Obama’s policies — admired and even adored the sense of honor and decency he brought to the office. Trump, on the other hand, is historically unpopular, and not just in America. As The Pew Research Center pointed out in June: “Trump and many of his key policies are broadly unpopular around the globe, and ratings for the U.S. have declined steeply in many nations.” Trump is reviled around the globe and America’s reputation is going down with its captain.

All of this feeds Trump’s consuming obsession with undoing everything Obama did. It is his personal crusade, but he also carries the flag for the millions of Americans — mostly all Republicans — who were reflexively repulsed by Obama and the coalition that elected him.

Trump has done nearly everything in his power to roll back Obama’s policies, but none are as tempting a target as the one named after him: Obamacare.

Republicans — including Trump — campaigned for years on a lie. They knew it was a lie, but it was an enraging one that excited their base: Obama was destroying America’s health care system, but Republicans could undo the damage and replace it with their own, better bill.

...

First, Obama wasn’t destroying America’s health care system. To the contrary, he simply sought to make it cover more people. He moved to take American health care in a more humane, modern and civilized direction, to make it more universally accessible, even by the sick and poor who often took its absence as a given.

Second, the Republicans had no replacement plan that would cost less and cover as many or more people. That could not be done. So, their repeal-and-replace efforts failed. But that also meant that Trump’s promise was proven a lie. Trump has no problem lying, but in the end he wants his lies to look plausible.

Trump makes assertions for which there is no evidence — either knowingly lying, recklessly boasting or wishfully thinking — then seeks support for those statements, support that is often lacking because the statements are baseless.

He violates a basic protocol of human communication: Be sure of it before you say it. His way is to say something wrong, then bend reality to make it appear right. This is why the age of Trump is so maddening and stupefying: He is warping reality.

Last week he took more swipes at undermining the A.C.A.: Asking his administration to find ways to increase competition among insurers (a move many worry will move younger, healthier people out of the marketplace) and stopping the so-called “cost-sharing reduction” (CSR) payments — federal subsidies paid to insurance companies to help finance coverage for low-income Americans (a move many believe will send premiums soaring for those people).

Trump is doing this even though it will likely wreak havoc on countless lives. He is doing this even though a Kaiser Health Tracking Poll released Friday found that most Americans want Trump and Congress to stop trying to repeal the law, and instead work on legislation to stabilize the marketplaces and guarantee health care to Americans.

Furthermore, six in 10 Americans believe Congress should guarantee cost-sharing reduction payments, as opposed to only a third who view these payments as a “bailout of insurance companies,” as Trump has called them. There is no real reason to cut these payments, other than to save face and conceal the farce.

Trump isn’t governing with a vision, he’s governing out of spite. Obama’s effectiveness highlights Trump’s ineptitude, and this incenses Trump.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Inside the ‘adult day-care center’: How aides try to control and coerce Trump"

Spoiler

During the campaign, when President Trump’s advisers wanted him to stop talking about an issue — such as when he attacked a Gold Star military family — they sometimes presented him with polls demonstrating how the controversy was harming his candidacy. 

During the transition, when aides needed Trump to decide on a looming issue or appointment, they often limited him to a shortlist of two or three options and urged him to choose one.

And now in the White House, when advisers hope to prevent Trump from making what they think is an unwise decision, they frequently try to delay his final verdict — hoping he may reconsider after having time to calm down.

When Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) described the White House as “an adult day-care center” on Twitter last week, he gave voice to a Trumpian truth: The president is often impulsive, mercurial and difficult to manage, leading those around him to find creative ways to channel his energies.  

Some Trump aides spend a significant part of their time devising ways to rein in and control the impetuous president, angling to avoid outbursts that might work against him, according to interviews with 18 aides, confidants and outside advisers, most of whom insisted on anonymity to speak candidly.

“If you visit the White House today, you see aides running around with red faces, shuffling paper and trying to keep up with this president,” said one Republican in frequent contact with the administration. “That’s what the scene is.” 

The White House dismissed Corker’s suggestion that administration officials spend their days trying to contain the president. The point was highlighted last week in an unusual briefing by White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, who sought to tamp down reports that he was focused on attempting to control Trump.  

“I was not brought to this job to control anything but the flow of information to our president so that he can make the best decisions,” Kelly told reporters. “So, again, I was not sent in to — or brought in to — control him.”

Kelly also praised Trump as “a decisive guy” and “a very thoughtful man” whose sole focus is on advancing American interests. “He takes information in from every avenue he can receive it,” Kelly said. “I restrict no one, by the way, from going in to see him. But when we go in to see him now, rather than onesies and twosies, we go in and help him collectively understand what he needs to understand to make these vital decisions.” 

Trump is hardly the first president whose aides have arranged themselves around him and his management style — part of a natural effort, one senior White House official said, to help ensure the president’s success. But Trump’s penchant for Twitter feuds, name-calling and temperamental outbursts presents a unique challenge.

One defining feature of managing Trump is frequent praise, which can leave his team in what seems to be a state of perpetual compliments. The White House pushes out news releases overflowing with top officials heaping flattery on Trump; in one memorable Cabinet meeting this year, each member went around the room lavishing the president with accolades.

Senior administration officials call this speaking to an “audience of one.”

One regular practitioner is Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who praised Trump’s controversial statements after white supremacists had a violent rally in Charlottesville and also said he agreed with Trump that professional football players should stand during the national anthem. Neither issue has anything to do with the Treasury Department.

Former treasury secretary Larry Summers wrote in a Twitter post, “Mnuchin may be the greatest sycophant in Cabinet history.”

Especially in the early days of his presidency, aides delivered the president daily packages of news stories filled with positive coverage, and Trump began meetings by boasting about his performance, either as president or in winning the White House, according to one person who attended several Oval Office gatherings with him. 

Some aides and outside advisers hoping to push their allies and friends for top postings, such as ambassadorships, made sure their candidates appeared speaking favorably about Trump in conservative news outlets — and that those news clippings ended up on the president’s desk.

H.R. McMaster, the president’s national security adviser, has frequently resorted to diversionary tactics to manage Trump.

In the Oval Office, he will volunteer to have his staff study Trump’s more unorthodox ideas. When Trump wanted to make South Korea pay for the entire cost of a shared missile defense system, McMaster and top aides huddled to come up with arguments that the money spent defending South Korea and Japan also benefited the U.S. economy in the form of manufacturing jobs, according to two people familiar with the debate.

“He plays rope-a-dope with him,” a senior administration official said. “He thinks Trump is going to forget, but he doesn’t. H.R.’s strategy is to say, ‘Let us study that, boss.’ He tries to deflect.”

Sam Nunberg, who worked for Trump but was fired in 2015, said he found him to be “reasonable” but noted that delaying a decision often helped influence the outcome. 

“If [Trump] wanted to do something that I thought could be problematic for him, I would simply, respectfully, ask him if we could possibly wait on it and then reconsider,” Nunberg said. “And the majority of the time he would tell me, ‘Let’s wait and reconsider,’ and I would prepare the cons for him to consider — and he would do what he wanted to do. Sometimes he would still go with the decision I may have disagreed with, and other times he would change his mind.”

 Of course, the president chafes at the impression that his aides coddle him or treat him like a wayward teenager. During the campaign, after reading a story in the New York Times that said Trump’s advisers went on television to talk directly to him, the candidate exploded at his then-campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, chastising his top aide for treating him like “a baby,” according to “Devil’s Bargain,” a book that chronicles Trump’s path to the presidency.

Some aides and advisers have found a way to manage Trump without seeming to condescend. Perhaps no Cabinet official has proven more adept at breaking ranks with Trump without drawing his ire than Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who has disagreed with his boss on a range of issues, including the effectiveness of torture, the importance of NATO and the wisdom of withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal. 

 The president appreciates how Mattis, a four-star Marine general, speaks to him candidly but respectfully and often plays down disagreements in public. A senior U.S. official said that Mattis’s focus has been on informing the president when they disagree — before the disagreements go public — and maintaining a quiet influence. 

Unlike his fellow Cabinet secretaries, Mattis has also gone out of his way not to suck up to the president — a stance made easier perhaps by his four decades in uniform and his combat record.

At the laudatory Cabinet meeting this summer, he was the lone holdout who did not lavish praise on the president. Instead, Mattis said it was “an honor to represent the men and women of the Department of Defense.”

Mattis has also worked to get on Trump’s good side by criticizing the media for putting too much emphasis on his disagreements with Trump. “I do my best to call it like I see it,” he told reporters in late August. “But, right now, if I say six and the president says half a dozen, they are going to say I disagree with him. You know? So, let’s just get over that.”

When he has broken with the president, Mattis has done it as subtly possible. This month he said it was in America’s interest to stick with the Iran nuclear agreement — which Trump called “the worst deal ever” — but voiced the opinion only in answer to questions from the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Corker’s quip comparing the White House to a day-care center on Oct. 8 came in the middle of a feud between him and Trump, who attacked Corker by tweeting that the retiring senator “didn’t have the guts” to run for reelection and had begged for his endorsement. Corker fired back on Twitter and in a New York Times interview, warning that Trump was running the White House like “a reality show” and that his reckless threats against other nations could put the country “on the path to World War III.”

“I know for a fact that every single day at the White House, it’s a situation of trying to contain him,” Corker said, adding later that most GOP lawmakers “understand the volatility that we’re dealing with and the tremendous amount of work that it takes by people around him to keep him in the middle of the road.”

Trump seems to hold many Republican lawmakers, and some members of his own Cabinet, in similarly low regard. Several people who have met with Trump in recent weeks said he mocks other officials in Washington, especially fellow Republicans.

In a meeting at the White House last month with House and Senate leaders from both parties, for instance, Trump upset Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) by cutting a deal with Democrats. In subsequent days behind closed doors, the president mocked the reactions of McConnell and Ryan from the meeting with an exaggerated crossing of his arms and theatrical frowns.

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich, an informal Trump adviser, scoffed at the suggestion that Trump needs to be managed by his advisers as parents would handle an unruly child. 

“He’s the president of the United States. Period. Is he an unusual president? Sure. But so was Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt,” Gingrich said. “You guys in the media would have had a field day with them, too.”

 Still, Corker’s comments underscored the uneasy dichotomy within the West Wing, where criticism of the president’s behavior is only whispered.

“They have an on-the-record ‘Dear Leader’ culture, and an on-background ‘This-guy-is-a-joke’ culture,” said Tommy Vietor, who served as a spokesman for President Barack Obama. “I don’t understand how he can countenance both.” 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Another good and snarky one from Dana Milbank: "Trump’s Cabinet is the absolute best of all time. Ever."

Spoiler

It’s about time somebody gives Donald Trump the credit he deserves. Even if that person is Donald Trump.

“We’re doing a lot of great things,” the president said at the start of a Cabinet meeting Monday. Further, he said, “we are getting tremendous accolades for what we’re doing.” What’s more, “the Justice Department is doing a fantastic job,” while the economy is growing “phenomenally,” except for the drag on it from those hurricanes — the handling of which, Trump would again say Monday, earns him an “A-plus” grade. He also boasted about his yet-to-be-passed (or even proposed) tax cuts — the “largest tax cuts in the history of our country.”

But the highest praise of all came for his Cabinet — or, rather, his own acumen in choosing this truly exceptional group of people seated at the table around him. “There are those that are saying it’s one of the finest group of people ever assembled as a candidate — as a Cabinet,” he said. (Trump’s candidate-Cabinet mix-up followed his Friday mishap when he praised parents who sacrifice for the “furniture,” rather than future, of their children.) “This is a tremendous amount of talent,” Trump continued. “We have just gotten really, really, great people. I’m very proud of them.”

And I’m very proud of Trump for recognizing the greatness of his Cabinet. But he is being modest. This isn’t just “one of the finest” Cabinets. There has never been a Cabinet like this before — and there probably will ever be one like it in the furniture.

Sure, George Washington sat around the Cabinet table with John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Henry Knox and Edmund Randolph. Abraham Lincoln won the Civil War with William Seward, Salmon Chase and Edwin Stanton. Franklin Roosevelt beat the Depression and the Nazis with Henry Morgenthau, Harold Ickes and Henry Stimson.

But Washington didn’t have a professional-wrestling executive in his Cabinet, nor an education secretary foresighted enough to warn the country about the danger posed to schools by bears. He didn’t even have an education secretary!

Lincoln didn’t think to hire a Cabinet secretary who proposed abolishing the very Cabinet agency he runs, as Trump has found in Energy Secretary Rick Perry. As Lincoln would have said: Oops!

FDR never had on his Cabinet someone he’d compared to a child molester, as Trump has with Ben Carson, his secretary of housing and urban development.

No matter how you measure it — billionaires, white men, oddballs — this Cabinet is extraordinary. Alexander Hamilton’s entire treasury probably didn’t have the amount of money EPA chief Scott Pruitt has spent on a soundproof phone booth, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has spent on her personal security detail, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and his wife spent taking a government jet to Kentucky, where they viewed the eclipse, or tried to spend, requesting a government plane for their honeymoon.

They are so good that Trump doesn’t need to be modest about it. John F. Kennedy may have brought Camelot to Washington, but he thought it necessary to acknowledge the genius of his predecessors, declaring a White House gathering of Nobel laureates the most extraordinary collection of talent — except for “when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”

Even Jefferson, however, would have to tip his tricorn to the superior accomplishments of this Trump Cabinet.

Never before has a Cabinet been this obsequious. Recall Trump’s first Cabinet meeting? “Mr. President, what an incredible honor.” “I can’t thank you enough.” “It is just the greatest privilege of my life.”

Never has a Cabinet incurred so many probes and reprimands in so little time. U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley earned a reprimand for improper political activity, while Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s attempted intimidation of lawmakers has come under review, as have actions by Pruitt and Mnuchin.

Never has a presidential team endured more humiliation with more aplomb. Two members (Reince Priebus and frequent-flier Tom Price) have already been sacked. Trump publicly eviscerated Attorney General Jeff Sessions and contradicted Mnuchin and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. CIA Director Mike Pompeo has routinely endured Trump’s criticism of his workers, and Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao has watched Trump savage her husband (Trump’s “friend”) Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, recently disemboweled by Trump in tweets and, after the “moron” comment became public, challenged by Trump to an IQ test, sat at Trump’s right arm on Monday. Like all other Cabinet members he remained silent, seen but not heard, as the president did all the talking in front of the cameras.

Tillerson, clinging to his job by his fingertips, has been so badly undermined by Trump that Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) says he’s been castrated. Tillerson denies he’s a eunuch. “I checked,” he said Sunday on CNN. “I’m fully intact.”

George Washington’s Cabinet was pretty good. But this? Best. Cabinet. Ever.

 

[fraurosena]

5 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Trump’s quote on shifting blame just about says it all"

  Hide contents

President Trump almost admitted Monday that he is failing on his agenda. Then he caught himself.

“We're not getting the job done,” he began, before quickly shifting course. “And I'm not going to blame myself. I'll be honest: They are not getting the job done,” he said, referring to Congress.

You hear that, Congress? Trump is washing his hands of you. That “bully pulpit” that Theodore Roosevelt talked about? Overrated. Lyndon Johnson's physical intimidation of wavering lawmakers? Trump shouldn't be expected to dirty his hands. Harry Truman's “buck stop here?” Nope, it actually stops over there, down Pennsylvania Avenue.

Points for honesty, I guess. If there was one microcosm of Trump's attitude toward blame acceptance, this was it. In the span of a few seconds, Trump served notice that he separates himself from any responsibility for what Congress does or doesn't do. It's all on them.

This is quite a different tune than Trump was singing when President Obama was in the same situation in his first two years:

... < tweet from twitler >

This might be the most obvious bit of blame-shifting from Trump, but it's certainly not the first time he's done it:

• He has talked repeatedly about the really “bad hand” he was dealt as president.
• He blamed the far right for an Obamacare repeal bill failing in the House in March.
• In June, he said the Justice Department should have defended his more stringent travel ban rather than the “watered down” version after the latter was halted by a court.
• He blamed Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) for the debt-ceiling “mess,” saying they should have tied the increase to a Veterans Affairs bill — despite never lodging that idea publicly.
• He has repeatedly suggested Puerto Rico is somewhat to blame for its current crisis, especially given how faulty its economic situation and infrastructure were before Hurricane Maria.
• He has blamed Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) for the failure of the Senate to pass the health-care bill, suggesting that McCain switched his vote at the last moment unbeknownst to anyone (wrong) and that it would have passed if Cochran weren't hospitalized (wrong again).
• He blamed his staff for feeding him a bad talking point about the size of his election win.
• He suggested “the generals” were responsible for the botched raid in Yemen that led to the death of Ryan Owens. “They lost Ryan,” he said, again pulling out the t-word.

(This is necessarily a partial list.)

Look: It's fine to note that things aren't completely under your control as president — we don't have a dictator — but presidents do get a chance to exert influence over the things the country talks about and Congress passes. The president can bring to bear plenty of pressure when it comes to swaying wavering lawmakers. When it comes to health care, Trump needed only to help win over skeptical Republican senators.

But Trump has shown considerably less interest in providing a helping hand to McConnell and Ryan than he has in absolving himself of the blame for their failures to produce. He has frequently given conflicting signals about what he wants to see from the health-care effort, has feuded with senators who provide key votes — often after the bills have already failed — and has generally shown very little interest in policy details. It's one thing to not be a details guy; it's another to seem completely clueless about what's working its way through Congress at any given moment. Trump is almost always far to the latter end of the spectrum.

Shortly after making the comments above, Trump also suggested he understood why his former top White House aide, Steve Bannon, would target a bunch of Republican incumbents in primaries. That's a message that has to have the National Republican Senatorial Committee screaming right now. But Trump seems to be attempting in one fell swoop something he's failed to do on an individual basis when it has counted — win the votes of key lawmakers using his bully pulpit.

And at it's core, it's more a sign of desperation than it is of his power as president. To be clear: The president admitted Monday that he's been neutered in the Oval Office. And whether you think he shoulders lots of blame or even just a little, he certainly carries at least some of the blame for that.

"not my fault". Yeah, that's the norm for the TT, just like a toddler.

Hmm. If what he says is true, what then is the added value of having a president? No added value is reason enough to cut him off and get rid of the institution, as it’s only draining resources. That’s just basic good business sense, which he should know all about, being such a successful businessman and all. 

[Howl]

Was scrolling a news site yesterday and saw a headline that implied GOP was nervous about midterms, because a Dem majority could initiate impeachment proceedings.  It's taking me a long sentence to recap that succinct headline, but there you have it.  Soooooo, there's a lot at stake for the midterm elections. 

We (all of America) need to get our act together to understand the breadth and depth of the Russian election interference; otherwise our last democratic election is way in the rear view mirror.  There are so many ways they can interfere -- social media, hacking election machines, power outages. 

But then again, gerrymandering and the electoral college in Texas have totally screwed the election process here long, long ago.  We libs have our hopes set on our current congressman from El Paso, Beto O'Rourke, who is running for Senate against Ted Cruz. 

[GreyhoundFan]

Because we are living in a reality show: "For each scene of his presidency, Trump casts a villain (or two, or three …)"

Spoiler

Hillary Clinton is not running for president again in 2020 — she has said so, her aides know it, and there is no political rationale that would argue otherwise. But for President Trump, facts like those simply miss the point.

“I was recently asked if Crooked Hillary Clinton is going to run in 2020?” Trump declared in a tweet Monday morning. “My answer was, ‘I hope so!’ ”

Just like that, Trump had accomplished his morning task, conjuring and then belittling a political villain with little more than taps on a phone. Using a bit of deadpan humor and his unconventional grammar, Trump’s tweet formed the next turn in his us-against-them story line, which employs an endlessly evolving band of enemies to anchor his presidency.

By the afternoon, his tweet had become a topic in an impromptu Rose Garden news conference, where he was able to repeat the performance in person. “Hillary, please run again,” he called out in a mocking tone.

Most days bring another round, often at dawn, like plot points in a 24-7 miniseries. In just the past few weeks, Trump has started, without any clear provocation, fights with football players who kneel during the national anthem, department stores that declare “happy holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas,” and late-night television hosts for their “unfunny and repetitive material.”

Then there are the individual targets: Clinton, of course, but also “Liddle” Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker, North Korea’s “Little Rocket Man” Kim Jong Un, ESPN anchor Jemele Hill, Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), and a shifting array of reporters, newspapers and networks he labels as the “fake news.”

Although the targets often appear tangential, if not contradictory, to his governing priorities, both the president and his senior aides see them as central to his political strategy. In each instance, the combat allows Trump to underline for his core supporters the populist promise of his election: to challenge the power of political elites and those who have unfairly benefited from their “politically correct” vision.

It’s a tactic he has employed for years — defining himself against a negative space, as a tough truth teller who opposes others. In 1990, he condemned his New York real estate rival, Leona Helmsley, as a “truly evil human being,” and decades later he spent years nursing a viciously personal feud with Rosie O’Donnell, a daytime television host, largely through social media. His rise to politics was built upon sometimes shocking denunciations and insults.

Without a fresh foe to rail against in real time, his political aides have observed, Trump can struggle, uncertain of his next move and unable to frame the political debate.

“The low points, if there are any, are often when his opponent is not clearly defined,” said one senior White House official, who insisted on anonymity to speak freely about the president. The official described the days after the first failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act in March and the weeks near the general election in 2016 as particularly trying times, since Trump was unable for days to clearly define his enemy.

But when the president is on track — he calls Twitter “my voice”-- he can script his presidency like a professional wrestling match, where the heel, or bad guy, is the one who makes the face, or good guy, shine in the ring. This is, as it happened, exactly how he scripted his one appearance in the professional wrestling ring, at the 2007 WrestleMania.

In what was billed as the “battle of the billionaires,” his foe was Vince McMahon, the owner of WWE, who long ago mastered the art of playing the clown who inspired hatred. With McMahon winning the animosity of the crowd, Trump’s participation was limited to a few straight lines and stoic looks. The sputtering fury of the loser McMahon — whose wife Linda now leads Trump’s Small Business Administration — told the story for him.

Similarly, the outrage of liberals and Trump skeptics, including many in the media, at Trump’s denunciations often helps the president with his base voters and serves to spread the Trump message further.

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich, a supporter of the president, says he has come to see the value of Trump’s strategy, which can frame public debates to his advantage. “In the spring, I quit worrying about his tweets — and I think some of the stuff he does is outrageous — but he has a larger vision of creativity,” Gingrich said. “He intuits how he can polarize.”

Trump’s approach to finding and elevating enemies is more personal and more specific than past presidents. His predecessor, Barack Obama, defined and elevated political enemies. But he followed in the tradition of Theodore Roosevelt, speaking of abstract wealthy and selfish economic interests that had conspired with Republicans against the middle class.

Like the other Democratic populists of the 20th century, including Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman, Obama rarely named specific people, and largely refrained from launching personal attacks on the character of his opponents.

If anything, Trump is harking back to an earlier tradition, including the populist movement of the late 19th century. “A villain was needed, marked with the unmistakable stigmata of the villains of melodrama,” the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote in his 1955 book “The Age of Reform.” “It was not enough to say that a conspiracy of the money power against the common people was going on.”

The early populist villains were the rich, including the Rothschild banking family and the nation’s newspapers, which were portrayed as puppets for the powerful. Trump has embraced some but not all of those approaches, says Michael Kazin, a political scientist at Georgetown University who has written several histories of populism.

“It’s a populism that looks at the political elite and the media elite as opposed to the economic elite,” Kazin said of Trump. “Obviously, more than any president I can remember, he thrives on conflict.”

Several of Trump’s closest advisers have taken to echoing their boss’s tactics. Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., has also made a hobby of firing off social media provocations. In just the past week, he has attempted to quarrel with late-night host Jimmy Kimmel (over his response to Hollywood sexual harassment), the Boy Scouts (for accepting girls as members) and British lawmakers (for their response to acid attacks), among others.

Similarly, Trump senior adviser Kellyanne Conway began attacking Clinton last week after news broke alleging years of harassment and sexual abuse by Harvey Weinstein, the Hollywood producer. Conway focused on how the time it took Clinton to release a statement on Weinstein, a critique that neatly fit the news about a Hollywood predator into a conservative political story line.

When Fox News invited Conway on to talk more about Clinton’s alleged culpability, the Trump adviser left little doubt about her underlying motivations.

“I tweet very sparingly yet strategically,” she said with a smile. “I’m always amazed how easily baited some people are.”

Kellywise needs to go back to the sewer.

[GreyhoundFan]

The picture that accompanies this article is nauseating. The shit-eating grin on the face of the orange menace combined with him holding up the executive order like a kindergartner holding up his art project makes me sick. "Candidate Trump attacked Obama’s executive orders. President Trump loves executive orders."

Spoiler

As he campaigned for the presidency, Donald Trump argued that Barack Obama’s frequent use of unilateral administrative tools made Obama a weak leader. “We have a president that can’t get anything done,” Trump told an interviewer in January 2016, “so he just keeps signing executive orders all over the place.”

That spring he added,

I want to not use too many executive orders, folks. … Obama, because he couldn’t get anybody to agree with him, he starts signing them like they’re butter. So I want to do away with executive orders for the most part.

Fast forward to a White House news release marking President Trump’s first 100 days in office. It claimed that Trump had “accomplished more in his first 100 days than any other President since Franklin Roosevelt.” The proof? He had signed more executive orders in that period than any of Roosevelt’s other successors.

And while Republicans fiercely criticized Obama for pledging to use his “pen and his phone” to get around legislative gridlock, this week — using his phone — Trump touted his pen. The president tweeted:

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Indeed, last week gave us many examples of President Trump’s wallow in the buttery goodness known as “the administrative presidency.” Atop the executive order promising great health care came a directive to cease cost-sharing reduction (CSR) payments to insurance companies as well as new rules allowing more entities to opt out of providing contraception coverage for their employees; these followed numerous prior HHS efforts to undercut Affordable Care Act markets. And the week’s directives went far beyond the ACA, ranging from the treatment of transgender people to environmental regulations to the international agreement aimed at reining in Iran’s nuclear program.

In light of Trump’s past pronouncements, it is tempting to simply shout “Hypocrisy!” and move on. It is certainly telling that Trump’s turn to unilateralism, unlike his predecessors’, comes when both chambers of Congress are run by his own party. Using executive orders as a substitute for legislation is far more common in divided government.

But in fact presidents of all parties, policy preferences and personality types have strong institutional incentives to embrace administrative tactics. As Richard Nathan wrote nearly 35 years ago, “in a complex, technologically complex society in which the role of government is pervasive, much of what we would define as policy-making is done through the execution of laws in the management process.” So presidents have developed a wide range of tools to execute those laws, well beyond executive orders themselves. Further, partisan polarization and divided government makes new legislation harder to obtain.

Thus, presidents have both opportunity and motive to seek unilateral solutions to policy problems. As George W. Bush put it in 2004,

I got a little frustrated in Washington because I couldn’t get the bill passed out of the Congress. They were arguing process. … Congress wouldn’t act, so I signed an executive order — that means I did it on my own.

Doing it “on my own” — and doing it fast, even “FAST” — is very tempting to presidents of all stripes.

But even as Trump’s directives shape policy implementation, they also show the potential fragility of administrative action. As Peter Baker recently noted, Trump’s use of executive power has often been directed at undoing President Obama’s.

The ease of that undoing varies by the kind of action. Regulations can only be rescinded when an agency can make a strong substantive case for doing so, meaning that while announcing the end of Obama’s Clean Power Plan is easy, actually repealing or replacing it will take time and sustained effort.

By contrast, executive orders can be reversed by subsequent executive orders — for instance, in shifting the rules for government contracting. And where statutes have been interpreted to yield certain policy results, they can be reinterpreted to yield others. The latest Trump executive order on the Affordable Care Act, encouraging federal agencies to expand insurance options not subject to ACA requirements, may run up against statutory language limiting their ability to do as much as promised. Any resulting rules changes will almost certainly wind up in court.

Indeed, Trump claimed illegality as the reason he reversed both the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and halted CSR payments. His September statement on DACA emphasized its threat to “the core tenets that sustain our Republic,” claiming that “virtually all other top legal experts have advised that the program is unlawful and unconstitutional.” And the Justice Department delivered a legal opinion stating that CSR payments could not be made because they had not been appropriated by Congress.

The Trump administration’s reading of the law might well be correct in these cases; the CSR opinion, notably, is buttressed by a 2016 federal district court decision. It’s worth noting, though, that no small number of “top legal experts” have in fact taken opposite positions on both matters. The district court’s CSR ruling was under appeal — and in other cases President Trump has certainly not treated the rulings of individual judges as sacrosanct. Nor has he renounced aggressive interpretations of statute in other arenas. As usual, what counts as “faithful” execution of the law is at least in part a function of competing policy preferences.

And that means it’s not just presidents who like the use of executive power. Others gladly encourage it, so long as it serves their own policy goals. As the DACA and CSR debates indicate, for instance, many in Congress are happy with the substance of such policies — and also happy to avoid accountability for supporting them.

The upshot is that Trump’s new love of executive action has managed mostly to put legislators on the spot. This is ironic, but not inappropriate: It is indeed Congress’s responsibility to resolve statutory ambiguity and define the boundaries of executive discretion. This is a job legislators have long shirked — but as they do so, they might find their institutional prerogatives melting away. Like butter.