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.… Read the rest
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 … Read the rest
George Packer in the New Yorker a couple of weeks ago:
… Read the restSection 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
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.
… Read the restThe 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
Today in TwitterDonnie:
Does anybody really believe that a reporter, who nobody ever heard of, "went to his mailbox" and found my tax returns? @NBCNews FAKE NEWS!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 15, 2017
Can you imagine what the outcry would be if @SnoopDogg, failing career and all, had aimed and fired the gun at President Obama? Jail time!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 15, 2017
Wut?
Looking forward to a big rally in Nashville, Tennessee, tonight. Big crowd of great people expected. Will be fun!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 15, 2017
Ah yes, his favorite thing: adoring attention from a visible crowd of people. He misses the campaign. He would do that all … Read the rest
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.
… Read the restPresident 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,
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.
… Read the restIf President Trump receives any special treatment in securing
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.
… Read the restTwo 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,
Donnie from Queens showing his usual dazzling self-awareness and insight.
It is amazing how rude much of the media is to my very hard working representatives. Be nice, you will do much better!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 13, 2017
Ah yes, he’s such an expert at avoiding rudeness. He’s so good at being nice. Du wut he sez, nott wut he duz.… Read the rest
Poor Angela Merkel. She has to go visit Trump on Tuesday. Yuck. I hope he doesn’t try to hold her hand.
… Read the restGerman officials say the detail-oriented Merkel, 62, has been preparing assiduously for her trip to Washington.
She has watched Trump’s speeches and [pored] over his interviews, including a lengthy Q&A with Playboy magazine from 1990 in which he floats many of the controversial ideas he is now trying to implement as president, they say.
Members of her entourage have also analyzed Trump’s encounters with other leaders – including Britain’s Theresa May, Japan’s Shinzo Abe and Canada’s Justin Trudeau – and have had exchanges with some of their counterparts on how to handle the unpredictable former reality-TV star, the
Saturday Night Live went after Ivanka Trump this time.
Yet again this weekend, “Saturday Night Live” trotted out Alec Baldwin doing a Donald Trump impression for its cold open. And yet again, that wasn’t even close to its harshest political sketch.
That distinction this week was reserved for “Complicit,” a faux Ivanka Trump perfume ad that is liable to really ruffle some feathers.
The basic idea is pretty clear: As an outspoken woman known to be very close to her father, she is complicit in the things Trump does — and for not doing something about them.
Daddy boasts of grabbing women by the pussy, Daddy calls Senator Warren “Pocahontas,” Daddy accuses Obama of a felony based on something somebody … Read the rest
So the Trump people solved the problem by firing Preet Bharara.
… Read the restOn Friday, acting deputy attorney general Dana Boente began making calls to 46 prosecutors asking for their resignations. Such requests are a normal part of a transition of power from one administration to another, and about half of the 94 Obama-era U.S. attorneys had already left their jobs.
But Boente’s call to Bharara, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, appears to have left some confusion in its wake, in large part because President Trump met with Bharara soon after the election and had asked him to stay on.
During Friday’s call, Bharara asked for clarity about whether the requests for resignations applied to him,
So now Fox News is not only the chief source for Trump’s wild assertions, it’s also giving Trump instructions on what to do. Fox News.
… Read the restThe Trump administration moved on Friday to sweep away most of the remaining vestiges of Obama administration prosecutors at the Justice Department, ordering 46 holdover United States attorneys to tender their resignations immediately — including Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan.
…
The abrupt order came after two weeks of increasing calls from Mr. Trump’s allies outside the government to oust appointees from President Barack Obama’s administration. Mr. Trump has been angered by a series of reports based on leaked information from a sprawling bureaucracy, as well as from his own West
Scott Pruitt is hard at working turning the Environmental Protection Agency into the Environmental Destruction Agency.
… Read the restMr. Pruitt, a former Oklahoma attorney general who built a career out of suing the agency he now leads, has moved to stock the top offices of the agency with like-minded conservatives — many of them skeptics of climate change and all of them intent on rolling back environmental regulations that they see as overly intrusive and harmful to business.
…
To friends and critics, Mr. Pruitt seems intent on building an E.P.A. leadership that is fundamentally at odds with the career officials, scientists and employees who carry out the agency’s missions. That might be a recipe for strife and gridlock at the
Words and meanings. So slippery.
Like, the things that people who work for Trump say when reporters ask about the wiretap tweets.
“I don’t know anything about it,” John F. Kelly, the homeland security secretary, said on CNN on Monday. Mr. Kelly shrugged and added that “if the president of the United States said that, he’s got his reasons to say it.”
Well yes, of course he has his reasons to say it – but are they good reasons? Reasons can be anything. His reasons can be that he’s an angry petulant narcissistic little man who hates and resents Obama because Obama is so much better than he is on pretty much any dimension you can think of. His … Read the rest
Trump told a new defamatory lie about Obama today.
122 vicious prisoners, released by the Obama Administration from Gitmo, have returned to the battlefield. Just another terrible decision!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 7, 2017
The official POTUS account retweeted the lie.
122 vicious prisoners, released by the Obama Administration from Gitmo, have returned to the battlefield. Just another terrible decision!
— President Trump (@POTUS) March 7, 2017
113 of the 122 were released by the Bush administration.
There’s also of course the complicated discussion about legality and rights and preventive detention and the possibility or impossibility of knowing what people are going to do in the future. We could just imprison all human beings because they might do … Read the rest
The White House Monday attempted to defend President Trump’s unfounded claim that former president Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower near the end of the presidential campaign, sending out a series of administration officials — both on and off camera — to reiterate the assertion without providing supporting evidence.
Heh heh – to reiterate the assertion without providing supporting evidence. That’s elegant. Yes, Trumpisters, that is correct: mere repetition does not make a claim true. Donnie’s saying it in the first place didn’t make it true, and neither did endless re-saying it.
… Read the restOn Monday, senior administration officials contorted themselves trying to defend the president’s claims, which seemed to emanate largely in response to a rant on conservative
Trump’s thrown the new version of the Pointlessly Spiteful Travel Ban Targeting Muslims Just for the Fun of It out there. Now it’s no new visa applications from an assortment of random majority-Muslim countries, as opposed to hahaha you have to get right back on the plane and go away from here.
… Read the restPresident Trump signed a new travel ban Monday that administration officials said they hope will end legal challenges over the matter by imposing a 90-day ban on the issuance of new visas for citizens of six majority-Muslim nations.
In addition, the nation’s refugee program will be suspended for 120 days, and the United States will not accept more than 50,000 refugees in a year, down from the 110,000
Ishaan Tharoor on how Trump is like other authoritarian rulers:
Observers such as Russian dissident Garry Kasparov see the grim parallels to overtly authoritarian rulers. Kasparov, a staunch critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, has said that Trump reminds him of the demagogic Russian leader. By targeting Obama, Trump is embracing an old tradition.
The tradition of going after one’s predecessor in power is very familiar to anyone from an authoritarian regime. Purges, scapegoating, etc.
— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) March 5, 2017
One of the fixed contradictions of the strongman ethos is that he and his followers must always play the victim, even when holding power.
— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) March 5, 2017
Trump doesn’t worry about contradictions, … Read the rest
Karen Tumulty at the Post has also noticed Trump’s eccentric methods.
Donald Trump’s presidency has veered onto a road with no centerlines or guardrails.
The president’s accusation Saturday that his predecessor, Barack Obama, had tapped his phone “during the very sacred election process” escalated on Sunday into the White House’s call for a congressional investigation of that evidence-free claim.
The audacious tactic was a familiar one for Trump, who has little regard for norms and conventions. When he wants to change a subject, he often does it by touching a match to the dry tinder of a sketchy conspiracy theory.
This is what I’m saying. His two-step process is “audacious” or just plain bonkers.
