Apparently some people made the mistake of thinking that when Trump made noises about homeless people he was actually worrying about the homeless people. Pause for raucous mirth. Come on now – we all know better than that.

Maybe he‘d even realized that his own actions, like making immigrants fearful of accessing federal assistance or aiming to slash health care for low-income Americans or pushing for cuts to public housing, had contributed to the problem.

Stop, stop, it’s too much.

Curious to know more, reporters asked the president about his sudden interest in addressing homelessness on Tuesday in California, where he told them that…yeah, he just doesn‘t like the sight of homeless people or what they’re doing to the

Speaking of John McWhorter, this is a good watch:

… Read the rest

Daniel Dale fact-checks Trumps “we love our Hispanics” rally:

“We’re independent. We’re independent as we want. And we are now a net exporter of energy,” Trump says, none of which is true. (The Energy Information Administration predicts the US will become a net exporter next year.)

Trump repeats his usual highly inaccurate description of the Green New Deal, saying, among other baseless things, that people will be limited to one car and not allowed to drive more than 162 miles.

Sir Alert: Trump says foreign leaders always come in and say, “Sir, I’d like to congratulate you on what you’ve done with the economy…a model for the entire world. They all say it.”

The Sir thing makes me cringe every… Read the rest

Trump is wooing “the Hispanics.”

The president’s pitch to Hispanic voters seemed to silo them off from the rest of the electorate, including the rally crowd (“We love our Hispanics”).

Yes that’s clever. We – the normal people – love “our Hispanics” – those other weird people who are not part of the “we.” They’re ours, kind of like pets, or appliances.

It featured an assertion that they had a greater understanding of the source of the drug problem than other Americans. And it included a section in which Trump wondered how CNN contributor Steve Cortes could be Hispanic even though, the president said, he appeared to be of Northern European descent.

“He happens to be Hispanic, but I never

Meanwhile Trump is handing out medals of freedom to sports stars, because they won’t go near him any other way.

The New England Patriots are reportedly too busy this fall for the Super Bowl champions’ traditional visit to the White House. The World Cup-winning U.S. women’s soccer team made clear this summer it was not interested in meeting President Trump.

But on Monday, Trump, whose tenure has marked a new high — or low — in the politicization of White House sports ceremonies, basked in the reflected glow of a sporting legend nonetheless. In a 20-minute ceremony in the East Room, Trump presented the presidential Medal of Freedom to Mariano Rivera, the Hall of Fame relief pitcher for Trump’s

Trump wants to be Saudi Arabia’s besty. Even some of his buddies aren’t especially happy about that.

In a series of tweets this weekend, Trump indicated that Iran is behind the recent attack on Saudi oil facilities and that the United States will respond after hearing from the Saudi government “under what terms we would proceed.”

Saudi Arabia is telling us what to do now? When did we sign up for that?

His implication — that the royal family in Riyadh will dictate U.S. actions — prompted fury in Washington, where the Saudis have faced an increasingly hostile climate in recent years, especially in Congress and even among some of Trump’s fellow Republicans.

…

Michigan Rep. Justin Amash, a

Simon Tisdall at the Guardian starts off analyzing Trump’s current frolics as if they were a product of thought and planning.

The US president is now saying he is also open to a repeat meeting with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, to reboot stalled nuclear disarmament talks. On another front, he has offered an olive branch to China, delaying a planned tariff increase on $250bn of Chinese goods pending renewed trade negotiations next month. Meanwhile, he says, new tariffs on European car imports could be dropped, too.

Is a genuine dove-ish shift under way? It seems improbable. Since taking office in January 2017, Trump has not merely broken with diplomatic and geopolitical convention. He has taken a wrecking ball to

Don TinyShoes is mad at Bolton. Of course he is – whose idea was it to hire him anyway?!

President Trump addressed the reasons behind John Bolton’s removal as national security adviser on Wednesday, telling reporters that Bolton “made some very big mistakes” and was “not getting along with people in the administration.”

…

“He sat right in that chair and I told him, ‘John … you’re not getting along with people and a lot of us, including me, disagree with some of your tactics and some of your ideas and I wish you well but I want you to submit your resignation.’ And he did that.”

— Trump today in the Oval Office

What he’s saying: Trump repeatedly

People don’t want to work for Trump – now there’s a surprise.

He says they do though.

“There is a very small recruiting pool of people that are acceptable to President Trump and individuals who have had requisite experience that would want these jobs,” said Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, a researcher who specializes in White House staff turnover at the Brookings Institution. “That, in combination with his impulsive nature and his tendency to fire people more than any other president that I’ve studied, means that there’s going to be vacancies for a long period of time.”

On multiple occasions, Trump has said people are clamoring to work in his administration.

“I have five people that want it very much. I mean,

Trump has a habit of standing as if he’s auditioning for the part of the front of a pantomime horse.

Is weird. Hands dangle at our sides, not out in front of us like that. It’s as if his legs and bum are in one plane and his trunk and hair are in another.

Some people say it’s because he wears lifts in his shoes so that he’ll look Awesomely Tall…which is hilarious because dude, there’s so much that’s more urgent to fix than the height. The hair. Ditch the pretend-hair and get a buzz cut; it would slash the ridiculous buffoon score in half. Then, quit scowling. Scrape off the makeup. Get suits in different colors, that fit. … Read the rest

Whoopsie. Bolton out.

I informed John Bolton last night that his services are no longer needed at the White House. I disagreed strongly with many of his suggestions, as did others in the Administration, and therefore……..I asked John for his resignation, which was given to me this morning. I thank John very much for his service. I will be naming a new National Security Advisor next week.

Courteous, professional, and adult, as always.

 … Read the rest

Great. Wilbur Ross threatened to fire NOAA people if they didn’t lie for Trump.

The Secretary of Commerce threatened to fire top employees at NOAA on Friday after the agency’s Birmingham office contradicted President Trump’s claim that Hurricane Dorian might hit Alabama, according to three people familiar with the discussion.

That threat led to an unusual, unsigned statement later that Friday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration disavowing the office’s own position that Alabama was not at risk. The reversal caused widespread anger within the agency and drew criticism from the scientific community that NOAA, a division of the Commerce Department, had been bent to political purposes.

“Bent to political purposes” is putting it politely. “I’ll fire you … Read the rest

Trump is very chatty today. I guess he doesn’t have any work to do, so he can talk at us on Twitter all day.

When all of the people pushing so hard for Criminal Justice Reform were unable to come even close to getting it done, they came to me as a group and asked for my help. I got it done with a group of Senators & others who would never have gone for it. Obama couldn’t come close……..A man named @VanJones68, and many others, were profusely grateful (at that time!). I SIGNED IT INTO LAW, no one else did, & Republicans deserve much credit. But now that it is passed, people that had virtually nothing to do

Making America Great Again…

In a previously undisclosed secret mission in 2017, the United States successfully extracted from Russia one of its highest-level covert sources inside the Russian government, multiple Trump administration officials with direct knowledge told CNN.

A person directly involved in the discussions said that the removal of the Russian was driven, in part, by concerns that President Donald Trump and his administration repeatedly mishandled classified intelligence and could contribute to exposing the covert source as a spy.

The decision to carry out the extraction occurred soon after a May 2017 meeting in the Oval Office in which Trump discussed highly classified intelligence with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and then-Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak.

Trump is the one who tried to fake the weather map, according to the Post.

President Donald Trump, a fan of Sharpies, used one to edit an official map of Hurricane Dorian’s projected path sometime before displaying it to the public on Wednesday at the White House, according to The Washington Post, which cited a White House official.

“No one else writes like that on a map with a black Sharpie,” the anonymous official told The Post.

If someone else did it it was at his direction, but it seems more likely that he did it himself when no one was watching. He has just barely enough brain cells to grasp that doing it covertly was essential to his … Read the rest