No evidence

Mar 16th, 2017 1:32 pm | By

Congressional intelligence people to Trump: we don’t believe you.

The Republican and Democrat leading the Senate investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election appeared on Thursday to counter White House claims that there may have been surveillance of some sort on Trump Tower around the campaign, even if there was not specific wiretapping as President Trump said in a tweet nearly two weeks ago.

“Based on the information available to us, we see no indications that Trump Tower was the subject of surveillance by any element of the United States government either before or after Election Day 2016,” Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., and Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., said in a joint statement on Thursday.

Spicey is trying to spin that as “We haven’t found anything yet but that doesn’t mean we won’t!!”

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes said on Wednesday he doesn’t believe “there was an actual tap of Trump Tower,” but the statement from the Senate intelligence leaders represents broader pushback.

Asked to weigh in on wiretapping on Thursday, House Speaker Paul Ryan said, “We’ve cleared that up. That — that we’ve seen no evidence of that.”

Trump has not produced any evidence to back his assertion. White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said this week that, “I think there is significant reporting about surveillance techniques that have existed throughout the 2016 election.” “I think he feels very confident that what will ultimately come of this will vindicate him,” Spicer said, referring to the president.

Of course he feels confident, but that’s because he’s a fucking fool, not because he has good reasons.



There are things

Mar 16th, 2017 1:21 pm | By

Chris Cillizza at the Post has the whole transcript of PP’s conversation with Tucker Carlson yesterday.

The Twitter section is worth reading carefully.

CARLSON: So on March 4, 6:35 in the morning, you’re down in Florida, and you tweet, the former administration wiretapped me, surveilled me, at Trump Tower during the last election. How did you find out? You said, I just found out. How did you learn that?

TRUMP: Well, I’ve been reading about things. I read in, I think it was January 20 a “New York Times” article where they were talking about wiretapping. There was an article, I think they used that exact term. I read other things. I watched your friend Bret Baier the day previous where he was talking about certain very complex sets of things happening, and wiretapping. I said, wait a minute, there’s a lot of wiretapping being talked about. I’ve been seeing a lot of things.

Now, for the most part, I’m not going to discuss it, because we have it before the committee and we will be submitting things before the committee very soon that hasn’t been submitted as of yet. But it’s potentially a very serious situation.

CARLSON: So, 51,000 people retweeted that. So a lot of people thought that was plausible, they believe you, you’re the President — you’re in charge of the agencies. Every intelligence agency reports to you. Why not immediately go to them and gather evidence to support that?

TRUMP:  Because I don’t want to do anything that’s going to violate any strength of an agency.  We have enough problems.

And by the way, with the CIA, I just want people to know, the CIA was hacked, and a lot of things taken — that was during the Obama years.  That was not during us.  That was during the Obama situation.  Mike Pompeo is there now doing a fantastic job.

But, we will be submitting certain things and I will be perhaps speaking about this next week, but it’s right now before the committee, and I think I want to leave it.  I have a lot of confidence in the committee.

CARLSON:  Why not wait to tweet about it until you can prove it?  Don’t you devalue your words when you can’t provide evidence?

TRUMP:  Well, because “The New York Times” wrote about it.  Not that I respect “The New York Times”.  I call it the failing “New York Times”.  But they did write on January 20 using the word wiretap.  Other people have come out with —

CARLSON:  Right, but you’re the President.  You have the ability to gather all the evidence you want.

TRUMP:  I do.  I do.  But I think that frankly we have a lot right now.  And I think if you watch — if you watched the Bret Baier and what he was saying and what he was talking about and how he mentioned the word wiretap, you would feel very confident that you could mention the name.  He mentioned it.  And other people have mentioned it.  But if you take a look at some of the things written about wiretapping and eavesdropping —

And don’t forget, when I say wiretapping, those words were in quotes.  That really covers, because wiretapping is pretty old fashioned stuff.  But that really covers surveillance and many other things.  And nobody ever talks about the fact that it was in quotes, but that’s a very important thing.

But wiretap covers a lot of different things.  I think you’re going to find some very interesting items coming to the forefront over the next two weeks.

CARLSON:  Do you talk to anyone before you tweet?  And is there anyone in the White House who can say to you, Mr. President, please don’t tweet that, who you would listen to?

TRUMP:  Well, let me tell you about Twitter.  I think that maybe I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Twitter, because I get such a fake press, such a dishonest press.  I mean, if you look at — and I’m not including Fox, because I think Fox has been fair to me, but if you look at CNN and if you look at these other networks, NBC — I made a fortune for NBC with “The Apprentice”.  I had a top show where they were doing horribly, and I had one of the most successful reality shows of all time.  I made — and I was on 14 seasons.  And you see what happened when I’m not on.  You saw what happened to the show was a disaster.  I was on — I was very good to NBC, and I — they are despicable.  They’re despicable in their coverage.

CBS, ABC, you take a look at what’s going on — I call it the fake press, the fake media.  It is a disgrace what’s happening.  So, let me just tell you —

CARLSON:  But then they say to you, but you’re — I mean, as you know, the response — look, so you had this big speech to the joint session on Tuesday.  You had great press all week, bipartisan, and then you let off this tweet, and immediately, people say —

TRUMP:  No, it wasn’t that tweet.  They had other things —

CARLSON:  You can’t back up what you say.

TRUMP:  Excuse me.  I had a very successful night.  Joint session, it was very successful.  I got reviews even from people that I would never think I was going to get good reviews.  I got great reviews. And then all of a sudden they came up with a new dialogue in order to kill that.  So that speech was hot for about two or three hours after the speech was made, because they came up with other things, having to do with other people, that they shouldn’t have been able to do and they shouldn’t have done, but they did it.  And you know exactly what I’m talking about.

So the news is not honest.  Much of the news.  It’s not honest.  And when I have close to 100 million people watching me on Twitter, including Facebook, including all of the Instagram, including POTUS, including lots of things — but we have — I guess pretty close to 100 million people.  I have my own form of media.  So if I tweet two or three or four or five times a day, and if most of them are good — and I really want them all to be good — but if I make one mistake in a month — this one, I don’t think is going to prove to be a mistake at all.

CARLSON:  Do you think it’s OK to make — the counterargument, even from people who support you, who say look, I support Donald Trump, I believe what he believes, and I want him to succeed badly, but if the President says something that cannot be proved or is demonstrably untrue, he devalues his own currency.

TRUMP:  Let’s see whether or not I proved it.  You looked at some proof.  I mean, let’s see whether or not I prove it.  I just don’t choose to do it right now.  I choose to do it before the committee, and maybe I’ll do it before the committee.  Maybe I’ll do it before I see the result of the committee.  But I think we have some very good stuff.  And we’re in the process of putting it together, and I think it’s going to be very demonstrative.  But just on Twitter, if I don’t do that, I won’t get my word out.  Because when I tell — when I say things, the press doesn’t cover it accurately.  They cover it very inaccurately.  Much of the press.

Some of the press — by the way, some of the finest people I know are reporters.  Reporters are wonderful.  I’m talking about the fake media, the fake news.  And there’s a lot of fake news.  So if I’m not going to — if they’re not going to do me the honor and the public the honor of spreading my word accurately as it was meant, and you know exactly what I’m talking about, because there’s been nobody in history that got more dishonest media than I’ve gotten.  You look at some of the stories in “The New York Times”.  You look at some of the stories in “The Washington Post”.  Take a look at what’s going on with CBS and NBC in particular and ABC — take a look at CNN.  It’s a complete hit job.  No matter what you do, no matter how good — no matter how great it is, they don’t report it in a positive fashion.

So, when I can reach, whether it’s 90 million or 100 million or 80 million, however many people it may turn out to be, when you add everything up — and then of course it gets disseminated from there, when I can reach that many people, Twitter is a wonderful thing for me, because I get the word out.

CARLSON:  Does it ever go through any kind of mediator —

TRUMP:  Sure it does.  Sure.  Sometimes I’ll —

CARLSON:  Do you show your staff and —

TRUMP:  Sometimes I’ll have something and I’ll say, what do you think about this?  A lot of times, my staff comes to me and they say, could you do a tweet on this or that?  Because it’s not being shown correctly.  I mean, they’ll come to me a lot and they’ll say, could you do — I probably wouldn’t be here — I’m not talking about Twitter, because it’s really Twitter, Facebook, and lots of other things, OK.  But I might not be here talking to you right now as President if I didn’t have an honest way of getting the word out. 



Fidelity to the teachings of the Church

Mar 16th, 2017 11:49 am | By

A press release from the State Department March 13:

The Department of State is pleased to announce the U.S. delegation to the 61st Session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), to be held March 13 through 24, 2017 at United Nations Headquarters in New York. The CSW’s annual two-week session is the most important annual meeting on women’s issues at the United Nations. Representatives of the CSW’s 47 member governments convene to discuss ways to improve women’s lives at an event that also features the active participation of civil society representatives from around the world. The theme of this year’s session is “Women in the Changing World of Work.”

Ambassador Nikki Haley, U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations, will serve as the Head of Delegation. Ambassador Michele J. Sison, Deputy U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations, will serve as the Deputy Head of Delegation.

They will be accompanied by two Public Delegates:

Lisa Correnti, Executive Vice President, Center for Family & Human Rights (C-FAM); and Grace Melton, Associate for Social Issues at the United Nations, The Heritage Foundation.

A press release from Human Rights First March 15:

Human Rights First today expressed deep concern over the Department of State’s designation of the Center for Family and Human Rights (C-FAM) as one of two organizations joining the U.S. delegation to the 61st Session of the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women. C-FAM is classified as an anti-lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

“The United States has worked hard to position itself as a leader on human rights within the United Nations and that progress is now in great jeopardy,” said Human Rights First’s Shawn Gaylord. “C-FAM is not just a conservative organization, but a radical organization that supports criminalizing the behavior of LGBT people, which often ends up criminalizing their very identities.“

Under the guise of “reestablishing a proper understanding of international law, protecting national sovereignty and the dignity of the human person,” C-FAM promotes an anti-LGBT platform including by supporting countries notorious for the criminalization of LGBT people and systematic human rights violations against members of the LGBT community. The organization has been vocal in its support for Russia’s 2013 propaganda law and other similar laws in the region. The organization partners with country missions at the United Nations that promote initiatives targeting the LGBT community under the guise of protecting the family. C-FAM sponsored a U.N. event in May 2016 titled, “Uniting Nations for a Family Friendly World.” Among the U.N. country missions leading the event were Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Somalia, Uganda, and other nations notorious for policies and laws that infringe on the human rights of LGBT people.

And women. The policies and laws of those nations infringe on the human rights of women, too.

Let’s visit C-FAM:

C-Fam was founded in the summer of 1997 in order to monitor and affect the social policy debate at the United Nations and other international institutions.

C-Fam is a non-partisan, non-profit research institute dedicated to reestablishing a proper understanding of international law, protecting national sovereignty and the dignity of the human person.

Notice what’s not mentioned – human rights, women’s rights, equality, the freedom or equal rights of the human person.

C-Fam publishes and promotes scholarship related to the proposition that the UN and other international institutions harm a true understanding of international law and in the process undermine the family and other institutions man requires for a just, free and happy life.

And never mind what woman requires.

Their Mission Statement is more blunt.

C-Fam’s Mission:  To defend life and family at international institutions and to publicize the debate.

C-Fam’s Vision:  The preservation of international law by discrediting socially radical policies at the United Nations and other international institutions.

C-Fam’s Core Values:  Fidelity to the teachings of the Church  –  Perseverance –  Professionalism –  Truth telling

THE teachings of THE church? Church with a capital C? So it’s Catholic then, but slightly covert about it.

So President Pussygrabber, he of the three marriages and the boasted freelance fucking, has seen fit to put a lobbyist for the Catholic church’s views on women and “the family” on its delegation to the UN Commission on the Status of Women. He’s not that kind of theocratic conservative himself, but he’s happy to do what he can to force it on women, because he’s not a woman so why should he care?



The committee may resort to a compulsory process

Mar 16th, 2017 9:31 am | By

Even Republicans in Congress, even Devin Nunes, don’t like it when Trump tells libelous lies on Twitter and then puts it all on Congress to deal with.

Late Monday, a spokesman for House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) threatened to subpoena the Trump administration to produce evidence of Trump’s claim that President Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower during the campaign. The White House has declined to produce this evidence publicly, offering various excuses, including the Constitution’s separation of powers and — most recently on Monday — arguing that Trump wasn’t speaking literally when he made the claim.

The Justice Department missed Nunes’s deadline to provide evidence Monday, which drew Nunes’s subpoena threat.

“If the committee does not receive a response, the committee will ask for this information during the March 20 hearing and may resort to a compulsory process if our questions continue to go unanswered,” Nunes spokesman Jack Langer said.

Aw, when they were such great friends, too.

Then, on Tuesday, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) made his own threat. Last week, Graham — who is clearly skeptical of the wiretapping claim and chairs a subcommittee looking into it — asked the Justice Department and the FBI to provide copies of any warrants or court orders related to the alleged wiretapping. Having not received anything, Graham said he may push for a special committee.

“They’re about to screw up big time if they keep running to the intel committee and not answer that letter,” Graham said, according to CBS’s Alan He. He added: “If they don’t honor this request and give us an answer, then I would say that we need a joint select committee because regular order is not working.”

But he’s the Big Boss. He doesn’t have to pay attention to what little underlings say. Does he?

It’s clear as day what’s going on here.

The White House’s reactions to Trump’s evidence-free claims — be it this one or the one about millions of illegal votes in 2016 — is to call for investigations. That has the triple benefit of putting the onus on someone else to look into it, to buy some time and hope people forget that the president is making such wild allegations, and, in this case, to give themselves an excuse to clam up. The White House initially said it wouldn’t comment on Trump’s wiretapping claim while it was being investigated and then it said it couldn’t provide evidence because of separation of powers — another claim that strained credulity.

But that also puts Republicans such as Nunes and Graham in the position of having to account for these claims…

And guess what: they don’t wanna.



Citing his campaign rhetoric

Mar 16th, 2017 9:13 am | By

Poor Donnie. His malevolent racist hatemongering is what got him elected, but now it’s what’s preventing him from keeping the brown people out.

Rarely do a presidential candidate’s own words so dramatically haunt his presidency.

For the second time in two months, a federal judge on Wednesday refused to allow President Trump to impose a travel ban, citing his campaign rhetoric as evidence of an improper desire to prevent Muslims from entering the United States.

The judge’s stunning rebuke was a vivid example of how Mr. Trump’s angry, often xenophobic rallying cries during the 2016 campaign — which were so effective in helping to get him elected — have become legal and political liabilities now that he is in the Oval Office.

Now about those conflicts of interest…

[T]he decision by the Hawaii judge to block even that narrower ban raises new questions about the administration’s legal acumen and undercuts its political strategy of seeking to move quickly to make good on the president’s promises.



Donnie’s babbling

Mar 16th, 2017 8:36 am | By

I think he might be getting even worse.

He was babbling on Fox News yesterday and it seems more empty and fatuous than ever. The Post has the few threadbare words:

“I’ve been reading about things,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News Channel. Trump said that after noticing an article in the New York Times and commentary by Fox anchor Bret Baier, Trump said he told himself, “Wait a minute, there’s a lot of wiretapping being talked about.’”

“I’ve been reading about things.” That was in response to Tucker Carlson’s question about where he was getting his fixed idea that Obama wiretapped him. “I’ve been reading about things.”

In the interview Wednesday with Fox host Tucker Carlson, Trump maintained that information would soon be revealed that could prove him right, but he would not explain what that information might be. He said he would be “submitting certain things” to a congressional committee investigating the matter and that he was considering speaking about the topic next week.

“I think you’re going to find some very interesting items coming to the forefront over the next two weeks,” Trump said.

Things. Items. “Coming to the forefront” in a wild stab at trying to sound less like a toddler.

Carlson pointed out that, as president, Trump had the ability to “gather all the evidence you want.” Trump acknowledged, “I do,” but proceeded to explain that he fired off his tweets because he had seen Baier use the word “wiretap” on his broadcast a day earlier.

“What he was saying and what he was talking about and how he mentioned the word ‘wiretap,’ you would feel very confident that you could mention the name,” Trump said. “He mentioned it. And other people have mentioned it.”

See what I mean? That’s not even an adult, let alone a head of state.

Asked whether he “devalues his own currency” by tweeting things that are not true, Trump defended himself.

“Let’s see whether or not I proved it,” Trump said. “You looked at some proof. I mean, let’s see whether or not I prove it. I just don’t choose to do it right now. … I think we have some very good stuff, and we’re in the process of putting it together, and I think it’s going to be very demonstrative.”

That’s not what “demonstrative” means.

“Don’t forget, when I say ‘wiretapping,’ those words were in quotes,” Trump told Carlson. “That really covers, because wiretapping is pretty old-fashioned stuff. But that really covers surveillance and many other things. And nobody ever talks about the fact that it was in quotes, but that’s a very important thing.”

He’s shedding vocabulary at a rapid rate. That’s not a good sign.



Trump’s evening out

Mar 15th, 2017 5:25 pm | By

Trump’s rally in Nashville tonight – how I hope it’s ruined for him by the ruling on his travel ban – is a chance for him to learn a little about Andrew Jackson. One could wish he’d done some of that learning before he decided to run for president.

Trump is coming to town to celebrate the 250th birthday of Andrew Jackson, the controversial seventh president who embraced populism and has been compared to the current president.

The Hermitage — as Jackson’s mansion is called — has shut down for the day and canceled plans for an event that was expected to attract thousands of visitors. Trump plans to visit late in the afternoon, lay a wreath on Jackson’s tomb, take a tour and learn more about Jackson.

I think he should learn more before laying any wreath, not after. He should learn more and realize Jackson doesn’t merit any wreaths.

Although a portrait of Jackson now hangs in the Oval Office, Trump’s comments on the former president have been vague at best. During a town hall in April, Trump said that “Andrew Jackson had a great history.” While giving the hosts of “Fox & Friends” a tour of the Oval Office late last month, Trump explained why he selected the portrait of Jackson: “They say that his campaign and his whole thing was most like mine. That was interesting. … That’s the great Andrew Jackson, who actually was a great general, and he was a great president — but a controversial president.”

Martin Luther King was a great guy who did wonderful things, and so was Jackson. Give this man an A for the course.

Jackson, the son of Irish immigrants, was considered “the people’s president,” and he approached the presidency in a dramatically different way than presidents before him, acting on his own beliefs and using the full power of the office to take swift action. He cracked down on corruption, replaced many federal officials and paid off the national debt. Jackson also forced Native American nations to move west of the Mississippi River, a ruthless relocation that became known as the “Trail of Tears.” For this reason, along with Jackson’s support of slavery, the administration of former president Barack Obama called for Jackson to be removed from the $20 bill, a decision that Trump at the time called “pure political correctness.”

Yeah right. How dare we not want to honor a guy like that.



Trump finds a fellow racist to suck up to

Mar 15th, 2017 4:47 pm | By

Meanwhile, Trump is busy being his usual vomitous racist self.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/842154802058543105

Speak for yourself, Trump. We don’t thank Jackson for his service. We don’t honor his memory. We don’t build on his legacy. And we do not thank god for the US.



Judge to Trump: No

Mar 15th, 2017 4:29 pm | By

Breaking:

A federal judge in Hawaii issued a nationwide order Wednesday evening blocking President Trump’s ban on travel from parts of the Muslim world, dealing a political blow to the White House and signaling that proponents of the ban face a long and risky legal battle ahead.

The ruling was the second frustrating defeat for Mr. Trump’s travel ban, after a federal court in Seattle halted an earlier version of the executive order last month. Mr. Trump responded to that setback with fury, lashing out at the judiciary before ultimately abandoning the order.

Well, frustrating for Trump and his poisonous cronies, but not for anyone else.

The new improved ban was supposed to avoid legal challenges, but oops no that didn’t work out.

Democratic states and nonprofit groups that work with immigrants and refugees raced into court to attack the updated order, alleging that it was a thinly veiled version of the ban on Muslim migration that he had pledged to enact last year, as a presidential candidate.

Administration lawyers argued in multiple courts on Wednesday that the president was merely exercising his national security powers and that no element of the executive order, as written, could be construed as a religious test for travelers.

But in the lawsuit brought by Hawaii’s attorney general, Doug Chin, Judge Derrick K. Watson appeared skeptical of the government’s claim that past comments by Mr. Trump and his allies had no bearing on the case.

“Are you saying we close our eyes to the sequence of statements before this?” Judge Watson asked in a hearing Wednesday before he ruled against the administration.

Ahhh that’s interesting. So it turns out that all those dogwhistles and outright racist rants came back to bite him. That’s justice.

The lawsuits have also claimed that the order disrupts the functions of companies, charities, public universities and hospitals that have deep relationships overseas. In the Hawaii case, nearly five dozen technology companies, including Airbnb, Dropbox, Lyft and TripAdvisor, joined in a brief objecting to the travel ban.

Capitalism has its moments.

The judge’s order was not a ruling on the constitutionality of Mr. Trump’s ban, and the administration has consistently expressed confidence that courts will ultimately affirm Mr. Trump’s power to issue the restrictions.

But the legal debate is likely to be a protracted and unusually personal fight for the administration, touching Mr. Trump and a number of his key aides directly and raising the prospect that their public comments and private communications will be scrutinized extensively.

Multiple lawsuits challenging the travel ban have extensively cited Mr. Trump’s comments during the presidential campaign. He first proposed to bar all Muslims from entering the United States, and then offered an alternative plan to ban travel from a number of Muslim countries, which he described as a politically acceptable way of achieving the same goal.

The lawsuits also cited Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who advises Mr. Trump, who said he had been asked to help craft a Muslim ban that would pass legal muster.

And they highlighted comments by Stephen Miller, an adviser to the president, who cast the changes to Mr. Trump’s first travel ban as mere technical adjustments aimed at ushering the same policy past the review of a court.

I find this deeply satisfying. They’ve cut the ground out from under their own feet. They’ve botched their own plans by being such evil shits.

Bob Ferguson, the Washington attorney general, has indicated that in an extended legal fight, his office could seek depositions from administration officials and request documents that would expose the full process by which Trump aides crafted the ban.

Proud to be an immigrant to Washington state.



Gold-painted faucets and a pizza oven in the corner

Mar 15th, 2017 4:05 pm | By

At any rate, whatever the shady or ludicrous reasons for that Palm Beach real estate deal, at least we know the house itself was vulgar as fuck.

The story begins in March 2001, when health care tycoon Abraham Gosman, who had moved from Massachusetts to Palm Beach a few years earlier and reinvented himself as a philanthropist, declared bankruptcy. That financial catastrophe would eventually result in tax fraud convictions for Gosman and his wife.

One of the casualties of the bankruptcy was the 62,000-square-foot mansion Gosman had built and dubbed Maison de l’Amitie, the House of Friendship. A showcase for his charity events just a mile north of the vaunted Breakers hotel, it included a ballroom with a capacity of hundreds, an art gallery, underground parking for scores of cars and a 100-foot swimming pool. It was nested among a slew of outbuildings, including a barn, guest houses and a tennis cottage.

A what? What the fuck is a tennis cottage? What, people go live there when they feel like playing tennis? They play tennis inside the cottage? They need a whole cottage to change into their tennis outfits? The kid who picks up the balls lives there?

The Gosmans managed to hold on to it for a couple of years, but by 2004 it had been seized by the bankruptcy court and put on the auction block. There were several bidders, hoping to scoop up a plutocratic property at a dollar-store price, but Trump — a real estate mogul still more than a decade distant from political ambitions — pounced, grabbing the house for $41.35 million.

“He bought it strictly as an investment to flip,” said Carol Digges, the Palm Beach realestate agent who would eventually resell the house for Trump. “He never intended to live there.”

And he didn’t. After doing some renovation on the house, Trump put it back on the market in 2006 at price that made even jaded Palm Beach eyeballs pop: $125 million. Jose Lambiet, the publisher and columnist of local news source Gossip Extra, was one of a few reporters Trump invited to tour the house in an attempt to drum up buyers. He was even more astonished by the price after he looked around.

“I’d been in the house before, at one of Gosman’s charity parties, and Trump had hardly changed anything, just put on a couple of coats of paint,” Lambiet said. “Even that — well, he told us the fixtures in one of the bathrooms were gold, but as he walked away, I scratched a faucet with my fingernails and it was just gold-covered paint.”

Isn’t that just SO TRUMP? Thinking people want gold faucets in the first place? Then saying they’re gold when they’re just painted goldy color? Not to mention charging $53 million and change for a couple of coats of paint and fake-gold faucets?

Lambiet has visited many homes of wealthy owners with more money than taste, but he considered the Maison de l’Amitie in a class by itself. “It was just terrible looking, really gaudy,” he said. “Nothing fit together  — it was sort of haphazard inside.

“There was a room with a floor made of cobblestones, and in the corner was a real wood oven for pizzas. It looked like an old Italian pizza place. Who does that in their house? … I thought, he’s never gonna sell this. And he didn’t, the house stayed on the market for a couple of years.”

I just hope there’s a built-in espresso machine in the tennis cottage, that’s all I can say.



Apparently cheered by the arrival of newcomers

Mar 15th, 2017 11:48 am | By

George Packer in the New Yorker a couple of weeks ago:

Section 4 of the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution allows for the removal of a President who can no longer discharge his duties but is unable or unwilling to say so. It empowers the Vice-President, along with “a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide,” to declare the President unfit and to install the Vice-President as Acting President. Section 4 has never been invoked. In 1987, when Ronald Reagan appointed Howard Baker to be his new chief of staff, the members of the outgoing chief’s team warned their replacements that Reagan’s mental ineptitude might require them to attempt the removal of the President under Section 4. Baker and his staff, at their first official meeting with Reagan, watched him carefully for signs of incapacity—but the President, apparently cheered by the arrival of newcomers, was alert and lively, and he served out the rest of his second term.

Yiiiiiiiiikes I didn’t know that.

Trump is “alert and lively” – but he’s “alert” to wrong things and he’s lively in wrong and terrible ways. Apathy and lassitude are not the only forms of mental incapacity.

As Packer goes on to say:

After a month in office, Donald Trump has already proved himself unable to discharge his duties. The disability isn’t laziness or inattention. It expresses itself in paranoid rants, non-stop feuds carried out in public, and impulsive acts that can only damage his government and himself. Last week, at a White House press conference, the President behaved like the unhinged leader of an unstable and barely democratic republic. He rambled for nearly an hour and a half, on script and off; he flung insults at reporters; he announced that he was having fun; and he congratulated himself so many times and in such preposterous terms (“this Administration is running like a fine-tuned machine”) that the White House press corps could only stare in amazement.

He’s slightly manic most of the time. In someone with the faults and deficits he has, that’s not a plus.

It won’t get better. The notion that, at some point, Trump would start behaving “Presidential” was always a fantasy that has the truth backward: the pressure of the Presidency is making him worse. He’s insulated by sycophants and by family members, and he can still ride a long way on his popular following. Though the surge of civic opposition, the independence of the courts, and the reinvigoration of the press are heartening, the only real leverage over Trump lies in the hands of Republicans. But Section 4 won’t be invoked. Vice-President Mike Pence is not going to face the truth in the private back room of a Washington restaurant with Secretaries Betsy DeVos, Ben Carson, and Wilbur Ross, or in the offices of Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Republican leaders have opted instead for unconstrained power.

It’s their big chance to destroy the environment, make poor people even poorer, make sure health insurance will never be universal and tax-funded, make it harder for minorities to vote, and end public funding of arts and humanities endowments.



It has really nice appliances

Mar 15th, 2017 10:19 am | By

One of the things Rachel Maddow talked about in the segment leading up to the 1040 reveal was the fact that Trump sold a house to a Russian oligarch for way more than it was worth, so what’s that about.

So today I googled for more, and got a Washington Post piece from five days ago.

The front-page centerpiece of Friday’s Palm Beach Post, billed as an “exclusive,” begins with a provocative question: “Why did a Russian oligarch pay now-President Donald Trump $95 million for his Palm Beach mansion?”

The piece offers no clear answer and, despite being a captivating read filled with several new details, it revisits a curious real estate transaction that has previously been probed by the New York Times, CNN and Politico, among others.

$95 million is a LOT of money for one house, even if it is a mansion.

Trump paid $41.35 million for the seaside estate in 2004 and sold it in 2008 for $95 million to Dmitry Rybolovlev, a fertilizer magnate and majority owner of the AS Monaco soccer team.

There was a real estate bubble between 2004 and 2008…but it was deflating in 2008, and it was never so expanded that it could explain a profit of $43 $53 million in four years unless the seller added a few extra houses. $95 million was a record price and before that, the Post says, Trump was struggling to sell it at all.

(Maison de L’Amitie, as the estate is known, languished on the market for two years before fetching what was, at the time, believed to be the highest price ever for a home in the United States.) Rybolovlev, who has never lived in the 62,000-square-foot house, has claimed at various times that it is a corporate investment, an asset for his family trust or perhaps a 6.2-acre playground for his equestrian-loving daughter.

None of that is an explanation for paying a vastly inflated price.

Since Rybolovlev can’t get his story straight, and he keeps bumping into Trump at airports, is it possible that the answer to the Palm Beach Post’s question about the oligarch’s motive is that he was trying to curry favor with the future president?

If so, Rybolovlev had tremendous political foresight. An alternative explanation is that he was just moving money in the midst of a divorce from his wife, Elena, who in a 2009 lawsuit accused him of “secreting and transferring assets in order to avoid his obligations,” according to the Palm Beach Post.

That still doesn’t make any sense. If you overpay for a house in order to withhold the money from someone else, the money is still lost to you, because you overpaid. Why not buy art works, or multiple houses, or startups, or any number of things that wouldn’t be just donating $43 $53 million to Donnie from Queens?

Unless donating $43 $53 million to Donnie from Queens is exactly what you intended to do.



Some Wall Street finance broseph

Mar 15th, 2017 8:31 am | By

On International Women’s Day:

A new bronze statue had New Yorkers stopped in their tracks Tuesday as a “Fearless Girl” statue was strategically placed in front of Wall Street’s iconic bull.

The statue shows a young girl standing straight with her head held high as she stares down the bucking bull that has become synonymous with Wall Street and big business.

The statue was installed by State Street Global Advisors, a branch of Boston-based State Street Corporation, to send a powerful message about gender equality in the workplace.

The defiant girl was placed in the financial epicenter of the Big Apple to encourage more companies to add more women in leadership roles and in the male-dominated Wall Street.

Bull v. Girl

I think the iconography of the bull is revolting, and not really made less so by adding a child for the bull to trample, but anyway. There are always worse things.

Almost as if out of central casting, some Wall Street finance broseph appeared and started humping the statue while his gross date rape-y friends laughed and cheered him on. He pretended to have sex with the image of a little girl. Douchebags like this are why we need feminism.

Image may contain: 1 person, outdoor

The message is: if a female is out in public, she’s there to be fucked. That’s all she’s for. Female=a thing men are supposed to fuck.

You can grab her by the pussy.



Donnie’s off to a rally

Mar 15th, 2017 8:07 am | By

Today in TwitterDonnie:

Wut?

Ah yes, his favorite thing: adoring attention from a visible crowd of people. He misses the campaign. He would do that all day every day if he could.

It’s so healthy for the country, too, whipping up crowds of white people into frothing hatred of Other races and everyone on the left.



A reporter nobody ever heard of

Mar 15th, 2017 7:47 am | By

Someone leaked Trump’s 2005 tax return, minus all the informative attachments, yesterday. I think it was Trump who leaked it, since a hostile party would have included the informative attachments.

President Trump paid $38 million in federal taxes in 2005 on income of $153 million and reported a $105 million write-down in business losses, according to a copy of his tax return first revealed Tuesday night.

Trump paid an effective tax rate of 24 percent and saved millions of dollars in additional taxes by claiming the losses, according to the document, the first two pages of which were obtained by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston and first reported by DC Report, a nonprofit news site he runs, and on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show.”

The document offers a rare snapshot of Trump’s personal finances, considering he has refused to disclose his tax returns to the public. The White House issued a statement chastising MSNBC for reporting on Trump’s taxes — “totally illegal,” read the statement — but also confirming top-line numbers from the return and defending Trump.

Still, Trump tweeted early Wednesday that the report was “FAKE NEWS” and asked: “Does anybody really believe that a reporter, who nobody ever heard of, ‘went to his mailbox’ and found my tax returns?”

That’s so Trump. He’d never heard of the reporter, so he assumes that no one else has either. Pulitzer shmulitzer, am I right?

The newly revealed pages from his 2005 return do not detail his financial ties, but they do seem to disprove the theory that some Democrats advanced in last year’s campaign that Trump avoided paying any federal income taxes during that period.

That’s another reason I think he’s the one who leaked the page. (It’s one page really, one page with two sides.)

Donald Trump Jr., the president’s oldest son, tweeted, “Thank you Rachel Maddow for proving to your #Trump hating followers how successful @realDonaldTrump is& that he paid $40mm in taxes! #Taxes”

See? He leaked it himself. Another reason to think so: a new pretext for shouting at the press.



Brotherhood

Mar 14th, 2017 3:50 pm | By

Ah Saudi Arabia.

They have invented a thing they call a girls’ council, which is apparently a place for men to show off their fashion sense.

There were a total of 13 men (not all pictured) on stage to launch the Qassim Girls Council in Saudi Arabia

See, it says Girls Council right there on the sign, so we can’t blame a faulty translation. There’s the Girls’ Council, and there are all the men, looking manly.

The male-dominated photos have been circulating widely on social media, after the meeting took place on Saturday.

It has been compared to another viral hit – an image of US President Donald Trump, surrounded by men, signing an abortion policy in January.

US President Donald Trump signing executive orders in the Oval Office

It’s a proud tradition, men deciding what women can and can’t do. Trump can barely write his own name, but he gets to tell us what we can and can’t do.



No elected official may benefit from the lease

Mar 14th, 2017 3:26 pm | By

The owners of a popular wine bar in DC are suing Trump and his DC hotel.

Mr. Pitts and Ms. Gross claim that the Trump International Hotel, in the Old Post Office building in Washington, and the restaurants within enjoy an illegal advantage in the city’s restaurant market because of their association with Mr. Trump and that Cork has suffered as a result.

“We’re used to a lot of competition — it makes you better, faster, stronger — but the competition that’s coming from the hotel is not fair,” Ms. Gross said.

The wine bar, which serves more than 50 varieties by the glass, has hosted events for a variety of groups, including White House officials, members of Congress, the World Bank, Naral Pro-Choice America and the Sierra Club, according to the couple.

But Cork is losing business to the Trump hotel, which they say — as others have suggested — may be attracting diplomats and politicians looking to curry favor with Mr. Trump.

We’ve heard from diplomats and politicians saying they are doing just that, so it’s not a very far-fetched claim.

Ms. Gross and Mr. Pitts are not seeking monetary damages. But the suit, filed in District of Columbia Superior Court, offers a few improbable ways to resolve the issue: The hotel can stop operating; Mr. Trump and his family can fully divest from the business; or Mr. Trump can resign from office.

It shouldn’t be all that improbable. He shouldn’t be carrying on the way he is, and someone should be able to make him stop.

The pair is represented by a team of lawyers who are working for free. That team, led by the law offices of Mark S. Zaid and the Veritas Law Firm, includes the George Washington University Law School professors Alan B. Morrison, who co-founded and led a public interest group with Ralph Nader, and Steven L. Schooner.

Mr. Schooner, who specializes in government procurement law, has repeatedly warned that Mr. Trump may be in violation of the lease his company signed with the federal government for the post office building.

One clause of the lease, in particular, states that no elected official may benefit from the lease. The clause’s presence, the couple’s lawyers argue, supports Cork’s claim of unfair competition.

It’s a clause in the lease, but apparently that’s still a “far-fetched” reason to make him stop.



38 new Trump trademarks

Mar 14th, 2017 10:19 am | By

China has cleared the way for Trump to provide pimping services there.

China has granted preliminary approval for 38 new Trump trademarks, paving the way for President Donald Trump and his family to develop a host of branded businesses from hotels to insurance to bodyguard and concierge services, public documents show.

Trump’s lawyers in China applied for the marks in April 2016, as Trump railed against China at campaign rallies, accusing it of currency manipulation and stealing US jobs. Critics maintain that Trump’s swelling portfolio of China trademarks raises serious conflict of interest questions.

Oh, sure, but nobody who can do anything about them will do anything about them.

If President Trump receives any special treatment in securing trademark rights, it would violate the U.S. Constitution, which bans public servants from accepting anything of value from foreign governments unless approved by Congress, ethics lawyers from across the political spectrum say. Concerns about potential conflicts of interest are particularly sharp in China, where the courts and bureaucracy are designed to reflect the will of the ruling Communist Party.

Dan Plane, a director at Simone IP Services, a Hong Kong intellectual property consultancy, said he had never seen so many applications approved so quickly. “For all these marks to sail through so quickly and cleanly, with no similar marks, no identical marks, no issues with specifications – boy, it’s weird,” he said.

Well they just want to maintain good relations with the US head of state. Oh wait – you mean that’s the conflict of interest right there. That sounds like the special treatment in securing trademark rights that he’s not allowed to get unless Congress approves it.

The trademarks are for businesses including branded spas, massage parlors, golf clubs, hotels, insurance, finance and real estate companies, retail shops, restaurants, bars, and private bodyguard and escort services.

Nothing undignified or sleazy there, no indeed.



Somebody else’s babies

Mar 14th, 2017 10:10 am | By

The racists are, of course, feeling emboldened.

Senior Republican congressman Steve King has sparked a backlash on social media after tweeting his support for the Dutch anti-Islam politician, Geert Wilders.

“Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny,” Mr King wrote on Twitter.

“We can’t restore our civilisation with somebody else’s babies,” he added.

That’s a pretty choice of phrase, isn’t it? “Somebody else’s babies.” It’s so tidily othering. We are we, and those other people we don’t like are “somebody else.” Who, exactly? Oh, you know. Them. Not-us.

Anthony Zurcher dares to call it white nationalism.

Congressman Steve King has a history of walking on the edge of white nationalist rhetoric, and on Sunday afternoon he once again hit the hornet’s nest, perhaps in his most direct manner yet.

The outrage from Democratic politicians and commentators across the political spectrum was quick, ferocious and entirely expected. The bluntness of Mr King’s message, the talk of “our destiny” and “other people’s babies”, ensured a vigorous response.

Of greater interest will be how Republican officeholders handle the controversy. So far they have remained silent. That may be increasingly difficult, as this is yet another indication of the growing bonds between the Trump wing of the Republican Party and white nationalist movements in Europe.

In spite of Trump’s warm admiration of his dear friend Frederick Douglass.

Mr King’s comments in support of Mr Wilders on Sunday led to accusations that he was “openly peddling white nationalism”.

His post was retweeted by the former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke, with the words “sanity reigns supreme”.

Mr Duke later tweeted: “God bless Steve King.”

God is a huge fan of racists. Huge.



Trumpistanian whispers

Mar 14th, 2017 9:02 am | By

The Times reports from the hall of mirrors where it gets to correct the lies of Trump and Trump’s people about what the Times has reported in the past that Trump and Trump’s people are citing as justification for Trump’s lies about Obama’s dastardly wire tapps [sic] of Trump Tower.

Two senior White House officials suggested on Monday that President Trump’s unsubstantiated claim that President Barack Obama had tapped his telephone was not meant to be taken literally, arguing that Mr. Trump had been referring more broadly to a variety of surveillance efforts during the 2016 campaign when he made the incendiary accusation.

“He doesn’t really think that President Obama went up and tapped his phone personally,” said Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary.

In fact, Mr. Spicer said, when Mr. Trump charged in a Twitter post last weekend that Mr. Obama “had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower,” he was referring generally to surveillance activities during the 2016 race — not to an actual telephone wiretap.

“The president was very clear in his tweet that it was, you know, ‘wiretapping,’” Mr. Spicer said, using his fingers to make a gesture suggesting quotation marks. “That spans a whole host of surveillance types of options.”

Hahaha yeah sure Spicey, the president was “very clear” that he wasn’t saying what he was saying. It’s always “very clear” what he means by those random quotation marks he sticks in for unfathomable reasons in apparently arbitrary places. It’s not at all that he has the bad habit shared by many semi-literate people of using quotation marks whose meaning is undetectable. Some people use “them” sort of like pepper “or” hot sauce, to add a bit “of” flavor. It’s not true – it’s a lie – that Trump was “very clear” that the quotation marks on “wiretapping” meant “not really wiretapping.” In fact such a reading would render the tweets gibberish, since they were all about his outrage at that very wiretapping. If he really meant “wiretapping”…then what was the outrage about?

No, Spicey, that won’t fly.

The remarks were the first time the White House sought to explain the accusation Mr. Trump made in a series of posts on Twitter saying Mr. Obama “was tapping my phones” and calling the former president a “bad (or sick) guy.”

The explanations came as the Justice Department asked the leaders of the House Intelligence Committee, who had given a Monday deadline to produce proof of Mr. Trump’s claim, for more time “to determine what if any responsive documents exist.”

How much time? A little under eight years, perhaps?

Then there were Kellyanne Conway’s exciting new claims about spy microwave ovens and stuff.

The unusual and shifting explanations from Mr. Spicer and Ms. Conway reflected the contortions that members of Mr. Trump’s inner circle have employed to explain the president’s explosive accusation, which he has yet to address personally. Neither Mr. Trump nor anyone at the White House has presented any evidence for the claim, instead asking Congress to investigate it as part of its inquiry into Russia’s interference in the presidential election.

Both the House Intelligence Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee have requested that the Department of Justice provide evidence it may have for Mr. Trump’s charge, but Mr. Spicer said on Monday that the president had not instructed the department to furnish any.

He suggested that Mr. Trump had relied on multiple news reports, including in The New York Times, to make his charge.

And there we enter the Hall of Mirrors, where the Times gets to explain that the Times never said what Spicey implied.

“It is interesting how many news outlets reported that this activity was taking place during the 2016 election cycle, and now are wondering where the proof is,” Mr. Spicer said.

The Times and other news outlets have reported extensively on surveillance in the United States during the 2016 presidential campaign, particularly related to Russia’s efforts to influence the election. But The Times has never reported that intelligence or law-enforcement officials were themselves spying on Mr. Trump. What The Times and other news organizations have reported is that American intelligence agencies have communication intercepts that officials believe show contacts between associates of Mr. Trump and Russian officials during the campaign.

Still, several far-right websites, including Infowars, which traffics in conspiracy theories and whose eccentric operator, Alex Jones, has interviewed Mr. Trump, have erroneously asserted that The Times and others had reported that the president was under surveillance.

In a story dated March 6, Infowars cited a Jan. 19 article in The Times detailing how American law enforcement and intelligence agencies were examining intercepted communications as part of a broad investigation into possible links between Russian officials and Trump associates.

“Flashback: NYT admits wiretaps used against Trump,” the headline read. The story noted that The Times “didn’t specifically mention that Trump himself, or Trump Tower, was bugged,” but the caveat has not stopped Mr. Trump’s supporters from insisting that The Times was a source for the president’s tweet.

Of course, there’s a sense in which that can be perfectly true. Trump is thick as a plank, so he could easily have misunderstood something he read, or believed something Alex Jones said, and in that way “sincerely” derived his story from the Times reporting.

The chain could go like this:

The Times reports on surveillance in the United States during the 2016 presidential campaign–>Alex Jones translates that to “the Times reports on wiretaps on Trump by the Obama administration”–>Trump translates that to “the Times reports that Obama wiretapped Trump Tower.”

Trump is the one with the nuclear codes.