Trump 25: Stephen King’s Next Horror Story

[GrumpyGran]

Well, all of this does seem to be distracting him from North Korea. That may be the plan there at Day Care.

[fraurosena]

It's keeping him from tweeting at least. Here's what Seth Abramson has to say about it:

 

 

 

[Howl]

On 10/29/2017 at 2:07 PM, Smoochie said:

LOL this whole uranium 'scandal' is such a red herring for their base.  If they were so concerned over the sale of a Canadian company to a Russian entity, that passed thru 11 committees approval and can't export the uranium, why didn't they investigate it at the time?

I went searching for a bit of information on this, with a cursory search for  "what are the US strategic uranium reserves" and came across a post on  oilprice.com dated May 06, 2015.  It provides an overview and a general timeline of who acquired what and when, US standing vis-à-vis the world uranium market, Rosatom and so forth. 

Does Russia Really Own 20% Of The US’ Uranium Reserves?

Quote

Yes, well, sort of – and they have for some time now. It’s relatively old news, but a recent Times report and an upcoming book from the Hoover Institute’s Peter Schweizer have refocused attention on a 2008 blockbuster uranium deal involving Russia, the United States, and a Canadian company Uranium One. Pushing connections and presidential candidacies aside – the Clintons’ complicity is still very much speculation at this point – lets return to the deal and take a look at the US nuclear industry and, globally, the rise of Rosatom.

Full text HERE

 

[GrumpyGran]

He probably told Sessions to resign and then go public, saying that it was all his idea and Dumpy knew nothing about it. I can see Keebler Elf looking at him like he had three heads.

[onekidanddone]

On 10/29/2017 at 9:28 AM, WiseGirl said:

Two (retiring) senators called TT out. The rest remain silent. You nailed it. 

Getting ready for tomorrow,   waiting to see if Chuck Todd is correct based on the type of lawyers Mueller hired.

I found a long expired packet of microwave popcorn in back of he cabinet, and I'm thinking about the risk of eating it while waiting for the tweet storm. I think said tweet storm might come tomorrow in the wee hours when his handlers aren't there to stop him.

[GrumpyGran]

This does provide an opportunity for people to resign in mock horror.

[AnywhereButHere]

3 hours ago, onekidanddone said:

I found a long expired packet of microwave popcorn in back of he cabinet, and I'm thinking about the risk of eating it while waiting for the tweet storm. I think said tweet storm might come tomorrow in the wee hours when his handlers aren't there to stop him.

Kelly and his fellow keepers may want to hit the espresso and No-Doz for the foreseeable future. Either that, or sleep with Caligula’s phone under their pillows. 

[GreyhoundFan]

From the WaPo editorial board: "What a presidential president would have said about Mueller’s indictments"

Spoiler

HERE IS how President Trump responded to the news that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has brought charges against Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Mr. Manafort’s deputy and a foreign policy aide on Mr. Trump’s campaign:

Sorry, but this is years ago, before Paul Manafort was part of the Trump campaign. But why aren’t Crooked Hillary & the Dems the focus????? . . . Also, there is NO COLLUSION!

Here is what a presidential president might have said:

“I will not deny that the charges made public today by Mr. Mueller are serious. Mr. Manafort and his deputy and business associate Richard Gates have pleaded not guilty and deserve the legal presumption of innocence foundational to our justice system. However, if the allegations of money laundering and tax evasion prove to be true, then all Americans — including myself and my supporters — should be troubled by the conduct of Mr. Manafort and Mr. Gates. I am particularly disturbed that this money laundering may have continued through the period during which they worked for my campaign. Though I had no involvement in Mr. Manafort’s alleged activities, I decided to hire him and must take full responsibility for my poor choice of staff.

“I am also disturbed by the news that my former foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos, has pleaded guilty to the charge of making false statements to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The information contained in the recently unsealed court documents shows that Mr. Papadopoulos worked to put my campaign in touch with Russian government officials and was told they had ‘dirt’ on the Democratic nominee for president, Hillary Clinton. Though I favor warmer relations between the United States and Russia, such an attempt to collaborate with a foreign government is a danger to our democratic process.

“Now is not the time to deflect blame, nor is it the time to focus on possible wrongdoing by my opponent. As president, it is right and appropriate that I and those around me face increased scrutiny proportional to the burdens of my office and the seriousness of these allegations.

“For that reason, I recognize that the special counsel must be allowed to continue his probe without interference, and I pledge my administration’s full and open cooperation with both Mr. Mueller and the ongoing congressional investigations into possible Russian meddling in the election. The principles at stake are higher than partisan advantage or the fate of my administration. Foreign interference in our democracy should be of paramount concern no matter our party affiliation — and I owe it to the American people to do all I can to prevent such interference from taking place again.

“Leaders in a democracy must work to earn the public’s trust anew every day. I hope my efforts to support the special counsel in his work will reassure all Americans of my commitment to our nation’s founding principles, no matter the circumstances of my election. I am humbled both by the great responsibility you have given me and by the knowledge that in a democracy, nobody is above the law — not even the president.”

Yeah, too bad the tangerine toddler would be incapable of even one of the suggested sentences, much less the whole statement.

[VelociRapture]

Interesting. TT didn’t tweet at all until about an hour ago. Someone clearly hid his phone overnight.

Funny how George went from being “excellent” and having a spot on the NatSec team to “a low level volunteer” and “already proven to be a liar.” How does that bus feel George? You know, the one Trump is currently throwing you under?

And Trump, sweetie, you may want to redirect attention to something other than your tax plan. I have a feeling a LOT of people are going to be very pissed off, especially your supporters in blue states who may not be thrilled over the fact that certain cuts would subsidize red states at the expense of blue states even more. 

[GrumpyGran]

2 hours ago, VelociRapture said:

How does that bus feel George? You know, the one Trump is currently throwing you under?

Of all the people who have worked for Dumpy or are still working for him it appears that "young, low level volunteer George" is the only one who actually saw the bus coming and got out of the way. I'm sure he knows Dumpy will be trying to smear him. I hope so much that he wore a wire and talked to someone who will break this wide open.

I spend way too much time trying to figure out how Dumpy organizes his tweets. What prompts the capitalization of some words and not others? Why does he sometimes use unnecessary words and insert odd parentheses and quotes? Did he take some class at Wharton called 'Odd Communication: How to Distract and Confuse Your Competitors for More Success!'

[VelociRapture]

18 minutes ago, GrumpyGran said:

Of all the people who have worked for Dumpy or are still working for him it appears that "young, low level volunteer George" is the only one who actually saw the bus coming and got out of the way. I'm sure he knows Dumpy will be trying to smear him. I hope so much that he wore a wire and talked to someone who will break this wide open.

I spend way too much time trying to figure out how Dumpy organizes his tweets. What prompts the capitalization of some words and not others? Why does he sometimes use unnecessary words and insert odd parentheses and quotes? Did he take some class at Wharton called 'Odd Communication: How to Distract and Confuse Your Competitors for More Success!'

This is going to sound odd, but Papodoulpos is lucky. He’s lucky that Mueller went for him first, that he had something important to offer, and that Mueller went easy on him with the charges he was allowed to plead guilty to as a result. He’s facing what, five years at the most? And if he keeps cooperating fully he likely won’t get that full amount. He could be out of prison before he’s 35 - if he’s smart and stays out of trouble after this, then that’s young enough to get a fresh start. As opposed to Manafort and Gates, who currently both face some serious charges - I want to say I read that they were facing life, but I can’t knkw for sure. So even if one or both flip they’re still facing much more serious time than Papodoulpos is. It’s really unlikely he’d be facing such light charges if Mueller had pursued and flipped someone else first. 

I’m gleefully anticipating what kind of time the Trumps, Clovis, and Sessions might face if it can be proven they committed crimes. 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump and his allies are laying the groundwork for a Saturday Night Massacre"

Spoiler

Let’s be clear on what’s happening in our politics right now. President Trump and his media allies are currently creating a vast, multi-tentacled, largely-fictional alternate media reality that casts large swaths of our government as irredeemably corrupt — with the explicitly declared purpose of laying the rationale for Trump to pardon his close associates or shut down the Russia probe, should he deem either necessary.

We often hear that Trump and his allies are trying to “distract” from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s intensifying investigation. That’s true, but this characterization inadequately casts this in terms ordinarily applied to conventional politics. Instead, Trump’s trafficking in this stuff should be seen as another sign of his fundamental unfitness to serve as president. Similar efforts by his media allies should be labeled as a deliberate effort to goad Trump into sliding into full-blown authoritarianism, and to provide the air cover for him if he does do so.

The Associated Press reports that people who have spoken to Trump say that he has recently revisited the idea of trying to remove Mueller, now that Mueller appears to be digging into Trump’s finances. Meanwhile, CNN reports that former Trump strategist Stephen K. Bannon is privately urging Trump to try to get Republicans to defund Mueller’s probe.

Monday night, Sean Hannity delivered perhaps the most perfect expression yet of efforts to create the rationale for such moves. Hannity dismissed the news of major allegations against Trump’s campaign chair Paul Manafort and the cooperation adviser George Papadopoulos as big nothingburgers. He also hit all the high points of the new Trump/media campaign, points that Trump himself and the White House have made repeatedly in public statements. Those include reviving the made-up scandal that Hillary Clinton approved a deal for a Russian nuclear agency to gain access to U.S. uranium extraction rights in exchange for kickbacks, and the absurdly exaggerated claim that the Clinton campaign, having paid through various intermediaries for research that ultimately led to the “Steele Dossier,” actually colluded with Russia to interfere in the election. These have been extensively fact checked and debunked.

In an important new piece, Post fact checker Glenn Kessler blows another big hole in one of this campaign’s key story lines. Kessler notes that multiple Trump media allies are repeating the claim that Clinton gave away “20 percent” of our uranium capacity to Russia. And he shows that, for various technical reasons, this figure is itself absurdly inflated, and the description of this as a Clinton giveaway has no relation to reality.

But the real point of Hannity’s presentation came when he flatly accused Mueller of trying to “change the narrative to distract from the real Russia collusion and massive cover-ups.” Hannity added that Mueller “is clearly complicit in the Uranium One scandal.” This is a reference to the fact that Mueller headed the FBI when the uranium deal happened. Reports that the FBI was investigating a Russian energy official’s efforts to corrupt a U.S. company at the time have led to GOP questions about why the Obama administration green-lighted the deal anyway. But this is also absurd, as Kessler explains, since the deal went through an extensive multi-agency process and no evidence has been presented that this process improperly skirted any FBI probe.

Regardless, Hannity concluded: “We are at a real crisis point in America tonight.” Trump has tweeted in support of many of these allegations. And as Jonathan Chait details, other Trump media allies have explicitly cited these and other similar story-lines (Mueller’s investigators are Dem donors!) in support of the notion that Mueller should resign or that Trump should close down the Russia probe.

We don’t know if Trump will go full authoritarian or not. But as Brian Beutler says, the mere fact that congressional Republicans are not flashing a bright warning sign itself suggests that we cannot count on any procedural response meeting it, if it does come to that.  The continued media treatment of efforts to lay the groundwork for such an eventuality as mere efforts to “distract” from Mueller suggests another guardrail is inadequate as well.

Indeed, it’s important to reckon with the scope of what Trump and his allies are alleging. The idea is that Mueller — who was originally appointed to head the FBI by George W. Bush, and who became special counsel because of Trump’s own firing of his FBI director over the Russia probe — originally participated in a hallucinatory conspiracy to cover up Clinton collusion with Russia. Now Mueller is using the current investigation to distract from it. In this alternate universe, all of that is the crisis (Hannity’s word) we face, and the only way to address it is for Trump to close all of it down. Dem strategist Simon Rosenberg is right to point out that Trump’s trafficking in all of this — his endorsement of the idea of preposterous levels of corruption and conspiracy theories unfurling at many levels throughout the government — itself raises questions about Trump’s fitness to serve. We need to confront the insanity and depravity of all this forthrightly, and convey it accurately.

...

 

[onekidanddone]

17 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Trump and his allies are laying the groundwork for a Saturday Night Massacre"

This scares the shit out of me. I don't know how to process this with out having a complete mental breakdown. Really I don't. Our imperfect country is about to see the Constitution suspended and martial law. Do I sound overly dramatic? Yea, well these are the times in which we live.

[GreyhoundFan]

@onekidanddone, you need a chuckle. Here's the latest from Alexandra Petri: "Nothing could have less to do with Donald Trump than the campaign that made him president"

Spoiler

This indictment story has everything. Vladimir Putin’s “niece.” $934,350 worth of carpet. Catfishing. Paul Manafort, whose involvement with the Trump campaign — as its chairman — apparently came as a total surprise to the campaign. At least, that’s what Sarah Huckabee Sanders repeatedly reassured the American people on Monday, after reading them a bizarre and lengthy story about 10 journalists going out to buy beer together that concluded, “And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how our tax system works!” It was the worst Aristocrats joke I have ever heard. Here is her account, somewhat condensed: 

First, this has nothing to do with Donald Trump.

For several months, the chairman of the Trump campaign was a man no one knew anything about and who was completely unaffiliated with Donald Trump in any way.

There is nothing less connected to Donald Trump than the campaign that worked to elect him president.

Paul Manafort is a total stranger to the campaign. He just showed up one day and started running things, and we were too polite to stop him. There was a lot of hand-wringing (very large hand-wringing, the largest), but in the end we felt it would be rude to stop these strange volunteers from taking over. Which is how Paul Manafort (Is that the correct spelling? Again, the name is not familiar.) wound up temporarily in charge.

George Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI, was, again, just some sort of random volunteer who appeared one day. We tried our best to discourage him from helping because no one knew who he was or what his affiliations were, but there was a big mix-up and we named him to a list of key foreign policy advisers instead. Fortunately, we had no intention of listening to these foreign policy advisers. Seriously, look at this administration. Genuinely, the fact that we had any foreign policy advisers came as a total unpleasant surprise to the Trump campaign.

These people appeared unannounced and they were NO HELP AT ALL. It is possible that they were in a meeting with us, but we had no idea who was in any room at any given time. Who ran the campaign? I don’t know. Who’s running the government? It certainly seems to me like we’re lurching from crisis to crisis without any clear guidance or direction.

The real tragedy here is that Papadopoulos (whoever he is!) has been communicating back and forth with a mysterious professor and someone who claimed to be Vladimir Putin’s niece, but wasn’t. Women are so deceptive and full of lies. Which reminds me of Hillary Clinton, a deceptive woman, whom we should really be talking about.

In brief, all we know is that even President Trump’s fine-grained and majestic memory could detect no trace of Manafort, his friend Bob or George Papadopoulos ever having worked for the campaign. So any charges brought against them (of which they are, of course, innocent) could not have LESS to do with the Trump campaign if they were related to the Clinton campaign. Speaking of which, you should look into the Clinton campaign.

Also, although it doesn’t matter because they are, again, strangers to us, they’re not even GOOD at colluding. What matters is not that they tried to collude. (Trying is what matters when President Trump tries to console a military widow, or conduct a relief effort.) What matters is that they did not succeed. Anyway, President Trump doesn’t know them. Anyway, Hillary Clinton.

No more questions, please.

 

[VelociRapture]

Two more tweets:

I just can’t even. 

[GreyhoundFan]

"ABA deems another Trump judicial nominee ‘not qualified’"

Spoiler

Another one of President Donald Trump’s judicial nominees — this time, to the powerful appellate courts — has been deemed "not qualified" by the American Bar Association.

Leonard Steven Grasz was nominated in August to fill a vacancy on the U.S. Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals and has his confirmation hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee this week. But in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee obtained by POLITICO, the American Bar Association says members of its standing committee unanimously concluded, with one person abstaining, that he was not qualified to serve as a federal judge.

The letter did not elaborate. But a separate, eight-page statement from the ABA detailed numerous concerns from Grasz's colleagues in Nebraska about his fitness to serve on the federal bench — including whether Grasz was committed to judicial precedent and if he would be "unable to separate his role as an advocate from that of a judge."

Some of his colleagues interviewed by the ABA as part of its evaluation process said Grasz's behavior was "gratuitously rude." The bar association also noted that a 1999 article Grasz wrote argued that the lower courts should be able to overrule Supreme Court decisions on abortion rights because “abortion jurisprudence is, to a significant extent, a word game."

"In sum, the evaluators and the Committee found that temperament issues, particularly bias and lack of open-mindedness, were problematic," Pam Bresnahan, the chair of the ABA's standing committee that reviews nominees, said in the statement. "The evaluators found that the people interviewed believed that the nominee's bias and the lens through which he viewed his role as a judge colored his ability to judge fairly."

Grasz is currently a lawyer in Omaha and served for more than 11 years as Nebraska’s chief deputy attorney general. His home-state senators — Nebraska Republicans Deb Fischer and Ben Sasse — effusively praised him when Grasz was nominated, with Fischer promoting his “sterling credentials and impressive experience” and Sasse deeming him a “by-the-book kind of guy.”

A White House spokeswoman did not immediately return a request for comment on the ABA rating. But both of his home-state senators made it clear they would still stand behind his nomination.

Sasse said in an emailed statement: “It’s sad that the ABA would contort their ratings process to try to tarnish Steve’s professional reputation in order to drive a political agenda.”

“In more than a decade as Chief Deputy Attorney General, whether he was litigating cases before the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington or the Nebraska Supreme Court in Lincoln, Republicans and Democrats alike knew that Steve represented Nebraska with integrity and professionalism,” Sasse said. “He’s a Nebraskan through and through and he knows that under our Constitution judges don’t write laws but rule fairly on the facts of each case.”

And Fischer said in her own statement that Grasz is “highly respected by a bipartisan group of Nebraskans” and that the state Supreme Court has deemed the nominee in “good standing” with the state’s bar association.”

Grasz is the second judicial nominee from Trump to get a "not qualified" label from the bar association; the first was Charles Goodwin, who has been nominated to a district court in Oklahoma.

The Trump White House, in tandem with Senate Republicans, are undertaking an ambitious effort to remake the federal judiciary, particularly in the circuit courts that are the final call for the vast majority of cases that never reach the Supreme Court.

The Republican-controlled Senate has already installed four of Trump’s appellate picks and is on track to confirm four more in the next several days, starting with Amy Coney Barrett, a Notre Dame law professor who has been nominated for the 7th Circuit.

Gee, who'd have thunk it -- the TT's judicial pick has temperament issues, just like the nominator.

[GrumpyGran]

7 minutes ago, VelociRapture said:

Two more tweets:

I just can’t even. 

Is he having mini-strokes? "dither"? "What he know"? "earth shattering." This is bad, even for him.

[Rachel333]

I've seen plenty of liberals talk about the Podesta news -- it was on the front page of the fairly left-leaning /r/politics yesterday -- and the consensus is pretty much that if he did something wrong then he should be punished for it too.

It seems like people on the right have this idea that liberals will be devastated if someone on the left turns out to be bad, but that really isn't true. It feels like people on the right are projecting their own deference for authority to those on the left.

[Rachel333]

I just discovered the Gollum J Trump twitter account. 
 

Spoiler

 

 

[onekidanddone]

50 minutes ago, GrumpyGran said:

Is he having mini-strokes? "dither"? "What he know"? "earth shattering." This is bad, even for him.

Hold it. "He and his brother could drain the swamp, which would be another campaign promise fulfilled".  If 'he', and I'm assuming he means Podesta drains the swamp then it is not  Trump's promise fulfilled because Podesta is the one doing the draining.  Or maybe he thinks Podesta and Podesta made the promise.  Either way my brain hurts trying to figure out was sludge is saying.

[fraurosena]

27 minutes ago, Rachel333 said:

I just discovered the Gollum J Trump twitter account. 
 

  Hide contents

 

 

Oh dear.. how incredibly SAD that Gollum makes more sense than the presidunce's real tweets. 

However, @GrumpyGran 'dither' happens to be an existing word. It's old-fashioned, true, but... http://www.dictionary.com/browse/in-a-dither  states:

"All of a dither; in a flutter or tizzy. In a state of tremulous agitation, as in 'Planning the wedding put her in a dither', or 'He tried to pull himself together, but he was all of a dither', or 'She showed up in such a flutter that our meeting was useless'. The noun dither dates from the early 1800s and goes back to the Middle English verb didderen, "to tremble'; in a flutter dates from the mid-1700s; in a tizzy dates from about 1930 and is of uncertain origin."

Apart from the coincidental use of an old-fashioned 'real' word though, I agree with your assessment: the tweets make no sense whatsoever.

[Howl]

3 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Trump and his allies are laying the groundwork for a Saturday Night Massacre"

  Reveal hidden contents

Let’s be clear on what’s happening in our politics right now. President Trump and his media allies are currently creating a vast, multi-tentacled, largely-fictional alternate media reality that casts large swaths of our government as irredeemably corrupt — with the explicitly declared purpose of laying the rationale for Trump to pardon his close associates or shut down the Russia probe, should he deem either necessary.

We often hear that Trump and his allies are trying to “distract” from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s intensifying investigation. That’s true, but this characterization inadequately casts this in terms ordinarily applied to conventional politics. Instead, Trump’s trafficking in this stuff should be seen as another sign of his fundamental unfitness to serve as president. Similar efforts by his media allies should be labeled as a deliberate effort to goad Trump into sliding into full-blown authoritarianism, and to provide the air cover for him if he does do so.

The Associated Press reports that people who have spoken to Trump say that he has recently revisited the idea of trying to remove Mueller, now that Mueller appears to be digging into Trump’s finances. Meanwhile, CNN reports that former Trump strategist Stephen K. Bannon is privately urging Trump to try to get Republicans to defund Mueller’s probe.

Monday night, Sean Hannity delivered perhaps the most perfect expression yet of efforts to create the rationale for such moves. Hannity dismissed the news of major allegations against Trump’s campaign chair Paul Manafort and the cooperation adviser George Papadopoulos as big nothingburgers. He also hit all the high points of the new Trump/media campaign, points that Trump himself and the White House have made repeatedly in public statements. Those include reviving the made-up scandal that Hillary Clinton approved a deal for a Russian nuclear agency to gain access to U.S. uranium extraction rights in exchange for kickbacks, and the absurdly exaggerated claim that the Clinton campaign, having paid through various intermediaries for research that ultimately led to the “Steele Dossier,” actually colluded with Russia to interfere in the election. These have been extensively fact checked and debunked.

In an important new piece, Post fact checker Glenn Kessler blows another big hole in one of this campaign’s key story lines. Kessler notes that multiple Trump media allies are repeating the claim that Clinton gave away “20 percent” of our uranium capacity to Russia. And he shows that, for various technical reasons, this figure is itself absurdly inflated, and the description of this as a Clinton giveaway has no relation to reality.

But the real point of Hannity’s presentation came when he flatly accused Mueller of trying to “change the narrative to distract from the real Russia collusion and massive cover-ups.” Hannity added that Mueller “is clearly complicit in the Uranium One scandal.” This is a reference to the fact that Mueller headed the FBI when the uranium deal happened. Reports that the FBI was investigating a Russian energy official’s efforts to corrupt a U.S. company at the time have led to GOP questions about why the Obama administration green-lighted the deal anyway. But this is also absurd, as Kessler explains, since the deal went through an extensive multi-agency process and no evidence has been presented that this process improperly skirted any FBI probe.

Regardless, Hannity concluded: “We are at a real crisis point in America tonight.” Trump has tweeted in support of many of these allegations. And as Jonathan Chait details, other Trump media allies have explicitly cited these and other similar story-lines (Mueller’s investigators are Dem donors!) in support of the notion that Mueller should resign or that Trump should close down the Russia probe.

We don’t know if Trump will go full authoritarian or not. But as Brian Beutler says, the mere fact that congressional Republicans are not flashing a bright warning sign itself suggests that we cannot count on any procedural response meeting it, if it does come to that.  The continued media treatment of efforts to lay the groundwork for such an eventuality as mere efforts to “distract” from Mueller suggests another guardrail is inadequate as well.

Indeed, it’s important to reckon with the scope of what Trump and his allies are alleging. The idea is that Mueller — who was originally appointed to head the FBI by George W. Bush, and who became special counsel because of Trump’s own firing of his FBI director over the Russia probe — originally participated in a hallucinatory conspiracy to cover up Clinton collusion with Russia. Now Mueller is using the current investigation to distract from it. In this alternate universe, all of that is the crisis (Hannity’s word) we face, and the only way to address it is for Trump to close all of it down. Dem strategist Simon Rosenberg is right to point out that Trump’s trafficking in all of this — his endorsement of the idea of preposterous levels of corruption and conspiracy theories unfurling at many levels throughout the government — itself raises questions about Trump’s fitness to serve. We need to confront the insanity and depravity of all this forthrightly, and convey it accurately.

...

 

Based on what we know about Trump, how could he NOT be contemplating firing Mueller?  Besides, several of Trump's lawyers claim that it hasn't been brought up and won't be brought up in the future, meaning they are desperately trying to talk him out of it.  Manafort and Gates will swing in the breeze, because at this point, their financial misdeeds predate the campaign and they aren't perceived as a direct threat, although they should be. 

Bannon is attempting to leverage his influence to stop funding for the investigation.  

Republicans don't know whether to shit or go blind because they can't figure out which way the wind is blowing, and at this point are not moving forward with any legislation to protect the investigation.   Hannity and Fox & Trump Humpers are flogging the long debunked Uranium One non story with all their might.  WaPo discusses how the numbers originally discussed  (20%!) are no longer relevant.  The 20% referenced in the original story referred to 20% if US strategic reserves and in the current climate, would be a fraction of the original number.  Basically, according to WaPo, uranium is so yesterday. 

[JMarie]

http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/31/politics/caputo-papadopoulos-coffee-boy-cnntv/index.html

Quote

Former Trump campaign adviser Michael Caputo downplayed George Papadopoulos' role in the 2016 campaign, calling him a volunteer "coffee boy" -- despite the fact that then-candidate Donald Trump called him an "excellent guy" last year.

"He never showed up at Trump Tower. Never had any interaction with any of the campaign leaders around me, and the leaders of the Washington office of the campaign didn't even know who he was until his name appeared in the press," Caputo told CNN's "New Day" on Tuesday.

Quote

Trump described Papadopoulos by name in 2016 as an "excellent guy" when listing his advisers for foreign policy to The Washington Post. An image released on Trump's Instagram account last year also shows Papadopoulos seated at the same table with Trump and then-Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, who was leading Trump's national security advisory team, during a meeting.

Gee, it was awfully nice of Trump and his high-level advisers to let a "coffee boy" sit in on a meeting with them.

[Destiny]

http://www.newsweek.com/trump-2020-election-white-house-manafort-696089

Newsweek thinks the orange menace might not run for re-election. I’m ok with this!

[fraurosena]

What's the presidential thing to do when national tragedies occur? Blame the Dems, of course!

‘A Chuck Schumer beauty’: Trump and allies gin up a new culprit for New York terrorist attack

Quote

President Trump and some of his allies on the extreme right have found a new culprit in Tuesday’s deadly terrorist attack in Manhattan: Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.).

As details emerged about the incident, prominent right-wing commentators and news outlets seized on an ABC7 story reporting that alleged attacker Sayfullo Saipov had come to the United States from Uzbekistan under a State Department program known as the Diversity Visa Lottery.

That story is unconfirmed, but Trump appeared off base in his criticism of Schumer. The program originated in part in a bill introduced by the New York Democrat in 1990; but Schumer was also among a group of lawmakers who later sought to drop the visa protocols assailed by Trump.

Still, Schumer was singled out as the brains behind the program and therefore, critics said, bears responsibility for the attack.

In news interviews, blog posts and tweets, critics tried to pin blame on the leading Democrat, saying he was “responsible” for allowing the 29-year-old suspect’s entry into the country.

Trump joined the criticism early Wednesday morning.

Schumer’s response: “I guess it’s not too soon to politicize a tragedy.”

In 2013, he was part of the Senate’s Gang of Eight, which came up with a sweeping bipartisan proposal to revamp U.S. immigration laws. Among other things, that proposal called for eliminating the diversity lottery. The bill passed the Senate but died in the House.

Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), another member of the Gang of Eight, defended Schumer, recalling that the group had tried to end the program.

In a statement, Schumer also criticized Trump for proposed budget cuts to counterterrorism programs.

“I have always believed and continue to believe that immigration is good for America,” the statement read. “President Trump, instead of politicizing and dividing America, which he always seems to do at times of national tragedy, should be focusing on the real solution — anti-terrorism funding — which he proposed cutting in his most recent budget. “I’m calling on the President to immediately rescind his proposed cuts to this vital anti-terrorism funding.”

The midyear budget proposal from President Trump called for cutting more than half a billion dollars from “critical counterterrorism programs” administered by the Department of Homeland Security, according to a congressional report.

That report, released in July, said the proposed budget would increase DHS funding by 7 percent while “numerous critical programs that mitigate terror threats are cut dramatically,” including programs aimed at targeting violent extremism, responding to terrorist attacks and patrolling United States airports.

The report was written by the Democratic staff of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs at the request of Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), the ranking Democrat on the committee.

Many conservatives blame terrorism and violent crime on the nation’s immigration laws. It’s how Trump has justified his travel ban.

After a labor policy event at the U.S. Capitol, Schumer declared that “the terrorists can’t divide us.”

He declined to discuss the specifics of the diversity lottery program because some details, including how the suspect entered the United States, were still unclear. Schumer said he did not speak with Trump after Tuesday’s attack and that he was offered “nothing” – no briefing by the White House on the situation.

Instead, he had to call the deputy director of the FBI on Tuesday to get updates.

The diversity visa program has been a target of many conservatives for years, with Trump supporting legislation to eliminate it in favor of a “merit-based” immigration system.

Associating the New York attack with the diversity visa lottery thus serves a double purpose, advancing their immigration law agenda and bashing Schumer.

It also appeared to play well on the Internet with some Trump boosters, who recoil at the word “diversity” as part of the politically correct liberal lexicon.

“I’m sick and tired of seeing men, women and children being sacrificed to the liberals’ false deity of diversity, while we all get invaded,” said one Twitter user, echoing a theme that coursed through the Internet overnight.

The diversity visa program has been around for more than 20 years, offering a limited number of visas to people from parts of the world that have relatively few immigrants in the United States.

Schumer did play a key role in drawing up the program in 1990. His proposals eventually became part of a broader immigration package that was passed by Congress in a bipartisan vote and signed into law by a Republican president.

For Sebastian Gorka, a former aide to Trump known for his anti-immigration views, that was enough string to connect the minority leader to Saipov, who is accused of plowing a truck into people on a bike path, killing eight.

“He ‘won’ his visa under the Diversity Lottery program introduced by none other than @SenSchumer,” Gorka tweeted Tuesday.

Speaking with Sean Hannity on Fox News, conservative radio host Mark Levin gave a similar assessment.

“You know who the sponsor was? Chuck Schumer,” he said, to which Hannity responded, “Good grief.”

“This diversity visa program should be gutted,” Levin said. “The purpose of immigration, historically, is to improve the United States, is to benefit the United States, not to ensure diversity from the foreigners coming into this country, not to ensure that certain countries are well represented.”

Breitbart News wrote that Schumer had “created” the program and referred to the visas as “Schumer visas.”

“One of the Schumer-visa winners was Sayfulloh Saipov,” read Breitbart’s article.

By early Wednesday morning, “Diversity Visa” was trending on Twitter. Some users shared graphic illustrations of a pair of hands with blood dripping from them. “You have blood on your hands Chuck,” one tweet read.

Congress approved the Diversity Visa Lottery, also known as the green card lottery, as part of the Immigration Act of 1990, but it didn’t take effect until 1995.

Under the program, the State Department offers 50,000 visas each year to immigrants from parts of the world with relatively low immigration rates over the previous five years. Most visas go to people from African nations, as The Washington Post has reported.

To qualify, applicants must have a high school education or two years in an occupation that requires formal training. Those who meet eligibility requirements are selected at random from a computer lottery. The State Department refers to them as “diversity immigrants.”

The program did originate in part in a bill introduced in 1990 by Schumer, who was then a member of the House. He proposed making a set number of visas available each year to “diversity immigrants” from “low-admission” countries.

Schumer’s measure was absorbed into a broader House immigration bill, which was sponsored by Schumer and 31 others, including several Republicans. The legislation passed in a bipartisan vote of 231 to 192. The Senate version, which contained the “diversity immigrants” provision, passed in an overwhelming 89-8 vote and was signed into law by President George H.W. Bush at the end of 1990.

For the past decade or so, political leaders have debated whether to keep issuing diversity visas.

A Congressional Research Service report from 2011 noted that some lawmakers and government officials had raised concerns about the program, suggesting that there were national security reasons to eliminate it. The report mentioned one case in which an Egyptian immigrant whose spouse was a diversity immigrant shot and killed two people at Los Angeles International Airport. It also cited disagreement over the reliability of background checks in countries that qualified at the time for the diversity lottery.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office reviewed the program in 2007 and found no documented evidence that diversity immigrants posed a terrorist threat, but concluded that the program was vulnerable to fraud. The State Department under President George W. Bush rejected the agency’s recommendations, contending that its fraud screening program was robust.

Trump said earlier this year that he supported legislation to eliminate diversity visas. The Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment (RAISE) Act in the Senate would scrap the program entirely and introduce a “merit-based” immigration system prioritizing foreigners with job skills, English abilities and higher education.

Black lawmakers and civil rights advocates have argued against ending diversity visas, as the Hill has reported. Doing so, they say, would take away an important pathway for African and Caribbean immigrants to lawfully enter the United States.

The Uzbek immigrant community in the United States is small, numbering in the tens of thousands, and few Uzbek immigrants enter the country each year, making Uzbekistan a prime candidate for the diversity visa program. The U.S. Embassy in Uzbekistan even advertises diversity visas on its website. By comparison, nearly 170,000 people immigrated to the United States from India in 2015, along with 143,200 from China and 139,400 from Mexico, according to figures from the Migration Policy Institute. As a result, those countries do not qualify for diversity visas.

At the Capitol on Wednesday, Schumer blasted Trump’s response to the attack.

“This is a tragedy,” Schumer said. “It’s less than a day after it occurred and he can’t refrain from his nasty, divisive habits. He ought to lead.”

Schumer said he hoped his most recent spat with the president wouldn’t affect attempts to resolve disputes over how to address the legal status of hundreds of thousands of young “dreamers,” or the children of undocumented immigrants.

“I have always believed in immigration as good for America – so do the vast majority of Americans; I stand by that today,” Schumer said. “It’s a good thing for America. Whether President Trump believes that or not, we don’t know, because some days he’s very anti-immigrant, and then he calls Leader Pelosi and I to the White House and says, ‘Let’s help the dreamers.’”

Asked by reporters, Schumer said he last spoke with the president “two or three weeks ago.”