Paging Deep Throat 2

Jan 12th, 2017 12:31 pm | By

Richard Wolffe has a few observations on Trump’s appalling press conference.

Donald Trump is not what he seems. The supposed master of media manipulation stumbled so often at his first press conference, it is hard to recall why anyone thought the TV star was good at this stuff in the first place.

That one doesn’t make me wince with embarrassment, because I never did think Trump was good at this stuff. I didn’t think about him at all until a few months ago, and when I started I certainly never thought he was good at anything.

Judging from Wednesday’s trainwreck press conference – the first since July – Trump and his handlers have no self-discipline and no strategy

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You may end up having things unravel

Jan 12th, 2017 11:10 am | By

Politico had an interesting conversation with Joe Biden.

Regarding Trump’s campaign against the intelligence community, Biden said, “it’s very damaging to our standing in the world for a president to take one of the crown jewels of our national defense and denigrate it,” Biden said, describing disconcerted leaders telling him, “basically, ‘Say it ain’t so, Joe.’”

Trump’s reaction to the intelligence reports, Biden argued, is perhaps understandable from someone who has never been in government and never been exposed to the kind of work produced. Reaching into his briefcase, he held up an iPad with the seal of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on its black case, explaining that the code word-protected device gives him

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Presidents who have a sense of limited presidential power

Jan 12th, 2017 10:24 am | By

The Times gently points out that Trump isn’t in a position to tell us what hiking gear to buy.

L.L. Bean, the Maine retailer known for its boots, jackets and preppy New England aesthetic, has found itself embroiled in a partisan battle that Donald J. Trump reignited on Thursday with a tweet.

Faced with a boycott over a Bean family member’s contribution to Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign, Shawn Gorman, L.L. Bean’s executive chairman, declared four days ago that “we stay out of politics.”

But then Trump perpetrated that grotesque tweet:

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The dignity of the office

Jan 12th, 2017 7:17 am | By

The morning Donnie.

It’s disgusting that he thinks he gets to say anything at any time about “fake news” when he’s been such a dishonest and determined promoter of actual fake news himself. I know I just said that yesterday, but attention to Donnie from Queens requires a lot of repetition. Birther fake news, the Central Park 5 fake news, “Crooked Hillary” fake news, those jobs at Carrier fake news, to name just a few.

Also – it is beyond inappropriate for a president-elect to … Read the rest



Let it

Jan 11th, 2017 5:51 pm | By

Some Portland Zoo inhabitants are happy with the snow.

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They are paid to cheer

Jan 11th, 2017 5:31 pm | By

Trump provided his own cheering crowd for the press conference.

When Donald Trump gathered the press at Trump Tower 20 months ago to announce his unlikely candidacy for president, he reportedly paid actors to fill the marble lobby and cheer.

I wonder if he has a recording of people cheering him that plays while he sleeps. Poor guy – he’s so needy.

On Wednesday morning, when the president-elect once again faced hundreds of reporters from around the globe gathered in his lobby — this time for his first press conference in seven months — Trump filled the room with paid staffers who clapped and cheered as he blasted members of the media as purveyors of “fake news.”

The Greek

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BillO in his undies

Jan 11th, 2017 5:10 pm | By

Meanwhile, in another part of the vipers’ den

In the weeks after Roger Ailes was ousted as the chairman of Fox News in July amid a sexual harassment scandal, company executives secretly struck an agreement with a longtime broadcast personality who had come forward with similar accusations about the network’s top host, Bill O’Reilly.

The employee, Juliet Huddy, had said that Mr. O’Reilly pursued a sexual relationship with her in 2011, at a time he exerted significant influence over her career. When she rebuffed his advances, he tried to derail her career, according to a draft of a letter from her lawyers to Fox News that was obtained by The New York Times.

BillO, that great stalwart of Conservative … Read the rest



Should have thought of that sooner

Jan 11th, 2017 4:50 pm | By

The chief ethics honcho doesn’t think much of Trump’s plan for how to avoid conflicts of interest during his “presidency.”

The head of the Office of Government Ethics is publicly slamming President-elect Donald Trump’s plans to continue profiting from his international company while he is in the White House.

Walter Shaub took the extraordinary step of saying Trump’s plan to retain a stake in the Trump Organization while his adult sons run the day-to-day operations falls short of what the OGE had advised him to do. The office counseled Trump to sell off his business assets and place the proceeds in a trust overseen by an independent manager.

Did you notice that Trump’s lawyer said, in an aggrieved way, that … Read the rest



A shabby attempt to intimidate and frighten elderly black voters

Jan 11th, 2017 4:02 pm | By

From the Washington Post yesterday:

Coretta Scott King, the widow of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., urged Congress in a letter to block the 1986 nomination of Jeff Sessions for federal judge, saying that allowing him to join the federal bench would “irreparably damage the work of my husband.” The letter, previously unavailable publicly, was obtained on Tuesday by The Washington Post.

“Anyone who has used the power of his office as United States Attorney to intimidate and chill the free exercise of the ballot by citizens should not be elevated to our courts,” King wrote in the cover page of her nine-page letter opposing Sessions’s nomination, which failed. “Mr. Sessions has used the awesome powers of

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What reforms do you recommend?

Jan 11th, 2017 3:48 pm | By

Trump the birther called CNN “fake news” and refused to take a question from the CNN reporter but then took one from Breitbart – yes Breitbart, that haven of non-fake genyoowine news. (What was Breitbart even doing there?)

One of the stranger moments in Wednesday’s deeply strange Donald Trump press conference came when the president-elect got into a shouting match with CNN’s Jim Acosta, who was trying to ask him a question.

Earlier in the presser — his first one since July — Trump had attacked CNN for disseminating “fake news” because it broke the story that both the sitting president and the president-elect had been briefed on allegations that Russia has “compromising personal and financial information” regarding Trump.

“Since

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Several peculiar comments

Jan 11th, 2017 11:35 am | By

The Atlantic has the best summary of the press conference I’ve seen.

Trump insisted, despite copious reporting to the contrary as well as his own son’s statements, that he did not and never had business dealings in Russia. When a reporter asked him if he would release his taxes to prove that, he once again demurred, claiming they are under audit. (He has not proven that claim, the IRS says there’s nothing to prevent him from releasing taxes that are under audit.) Yet he also seemed to suggest that having won the election, he no longer had any incentive to release the returns. “The only ones that care about my tax returns are the reporters,” he said. “I mean, I

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Trump says “Don’t be rude”

Jan 11th, 2017 11:19 am | By

Trump’s exchange with Jim Acosta of CNN:

 … Read the rest



Lived experience

Jan 11th, 2017 10:28 am | By

That was an awful experience. Painfully, squirmingly, let me out of here awful.

I hate watching the way he bares his lower lip so that you see his teeth – it’s so ugly and hostile and wolfish.

I hate, as always, watching his dreadful stunted clumsy gestures.

I hate hearing him say CHInah over and over again. He says “China” the normal way when it’s “the China sea” but when he names the country it’s CHInah every time. He also says – less often – JaPAN, with the same dopy aggressive emphasis.

I hate his word salad.

I hate his stunted vocabulary. I hate all the “very very” this and “he’s a fantastic guy” that.

I hate how dim he … Read the rest



Russia said

Jan 11th, 2017 9:44 am | By

Trump has issued a public statement disputing the claims in yesterday’s news with his usual dignity and taste, as well as his usual epistemic caution. He chose Twitter as the best venue for this well-reasoned official statement.

Russia just said it’s not true, Donnie tells us. Ah well then – case closed. There is no possible way Russia could be lying about it, so we have no choice but to take their word for it and move on.

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The press conference

Jan 11th, 2017 8:53 am | By

I was writing up Trump’s tweets, but now I’m watching the press conference. It’s hair-raising.

They’re transcribing in real time.

I look very much forward to inauguration. It’s going to be a beautiful event. We have great talent, tremendous talent. And we have all of the bands — or most of the bands from the different segments of the military. And I’ve heard some of these bands over the years — they’re incredible. We’re going to have a very, very elegant day. The 20th is going to be something that will be very, very special, very beautiful. And I think we’re going to have massive crowds because we have a movement. It’ s a movement like the world has

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Pee po belly bum drawers

Jan 10th, 2017 6:19 pm | By

Ah, the Daily Mail – surprise! – divulges some actual “salacious” details.

What is believed to be the 35-page document itself was published by Buzzfeed, which pointed out that it contained errors. Little of its contents can be independently verified.

Trump himself already dismissed the claims, tweeting: ‘FAKE NEWS – A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT!’

The document claims Russian sources told the operative that they had extensive material on the now president-elect – including a secret film of him in the suite where President Obama stayed in Moscow, watching prostitutes committing degrading sex acts on the bed where the president slept.

That is, peepee games. Golden showers. Yuge hombre Trump peeing on the women or watching them pee…on a … Read the rest



Compromising and salacious personal information

Jan 10th, 2017 5:58 pm | By

More on the news that reports say Russia has compromising information on Trump.

First from Julian Borger at the Guardian:

Senator John McCain passed documents to the FBI director, James Comey, last month alleging secret contacts between the Trump campaign and Moscow and that Russian intelligence had personally compromising material on the president-elect himself.

The material, which has been seen by the Guardian, is a series of reports on Trump’s relationship with Moscow. They were drawn up by a former western counter-intelligence official, now working as a private consultant.

The Guardian has not been able to confirm the veracity of the documents’ contents, and the Trump team has consistently denied any hidden contacts with the Russian government.

Late on

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Have a carnal hermeneutic

Jan 10th, 2017 5:34 pm | By

From a call for papers on an academic listserv which shall remain nameless:

When considering the flesh as site from which the legibility of citizenship is traced, the body, “by definition, yields to social crafting and force, the body is vulnerable. It is not, however, a mere surface upon which social meanings are inscribed, but that which suffers, enjoys and responds to the exteriority of the world, an exteriority that defines its disposition, its passivity and activity.” With subjectivity that becomes a defiant object of interpretation, queer migrations and global participations in citizenship and refugee statuses evoke destabilization. These subjectivities are *queerly* at times illegible and resulting citizenship(s) precarious as queer identity exceeds, transmutes, or coalesces what we think we

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Compromising personal and financial information about Trump

Jan 10th, 2017 3:51 pm | By

Er. This seems explosive. CNN:

Classified documents presented last week to President Obama and President-elect Trump included allegations that Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump, multiple US officials with direct knowledge of the briefings tell CNN.

The allegations were presented in a two-page synopsis that was appended to a report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. The allegations came, in part, from memos compiled by a former British intelligence operative, whose past work US intelligence officials consider credible. The FBI is investigating the credibility and accuracy of these allegations, which are based primarily on information from Russian sources, but has not confirmed many essential details in the memos about Mr. Trump.

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Mum’s the word

Jan 10th, 2017 2:50 pm | By

Another wrinkle in this story of The Glorious Repeal of the Affordable Care Act: the Republicans have told the Congressional Budget Office not to analyze the cost of proposals for repeal. Keep that shit a secret! Make sure the public can’t find out what a massive fuckup this will be!

Under the House rules, which passed on a party-line vote without any Democrats in favor, the budget office is prohibited from analyzing “any bill or joint resolution” that repeals or modifies Obamacare.

This prohibition probably reflects that Republicans have come to grips with the fact that several provisions within the massive health care law have reduced the federal deficit, thanks to tax increases or payment restrictions on Medicare providers.

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