CNN offers a little vignette illustrating how routinely horrible Trump is to everyone around him.

President Donald Trump was fuming as he sat in his Phoenix hotel watching news coverage ahead of his rally.

The venue for his first rally in nearly three weeks looked empty.

That’s when George Gigicos, Trump’s longtime advance man, got a call from Keith Schiller, the director of Oval Office operations who is almost always at Trump’s side, asking Gigicos why the crowds were scarce. Gigicos explained that while TV correspondents were live early from the venue, the rally wouldn’t start for several more hours and crowds had just begun to trickle in.

Oddly enough people don’t want to arrive at events hours early so … Read the rest

I thought I remembered seeing a 60 Minutes about Arpaio long ago. Sure enough – in 2001.

While Arpaio has received nationwide attention in the last few years for his hard-line stance against illegal immigration — and for promoting the lie that President Obama was born outside the U.S. — he made a name for himself in Arizona years ago.

60 Minutes profiled Arpaio in 2001, when he was eight years into his tenure as sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona. At the time, correspondent Morley Safer called him a “big-time publicity hound” who had “become famous ’round the world as just about the meanest man in the West.”

His reputation in 2001 was that of a tough-as-nails jailer who

The Independent:

Eight of Donald Trump’s cyber-security advisers have resigned, warning the President had “given insufficient attention to the growing threats” facing the US.

A quarter of the National Infrastructure Advisory Council’s 28 members quit with a joint letter in which they claimed Mr Trump “threatened the security of the homeland”.

They cited his response to white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, the country’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change, and the vulnerability of the US election process.

Well hey, it’s only 8 out of 28. That’s not so bad.

The eight departing members accused Trump’s administration of failing to be “adequately attentive to the pressing national security matters” or “responsive to sound advice received from experts”.

Yet another cringe-inducing Trump press conference with a fellow head of state, in which we’re forced to compare the grown-up on the left with the flailing grimacing aphasic toddler on the right.

A very rough and incomplete transcription of his response to the question about Arpaio – whom he insists on calling “Sheriff Joe” over and over and over and over…

“Well a lot of people think it was the right thing to do, and during a hurricane I thought the ratings would be a lot higher…[he thought it was very very unfair what they did to him] When I mentioned him the other night, you saw what a big crowd we had, the people went crazy…the place went absolutely

Another step on the road to fascism.

The Trump administration plans to reinstate in full a program that provides local police departments with military surplus equipment such as large-caliber weapons and grenade launchers, according to a document obtained by The New York Times.

Sure. Why would we not want a completely militarized police force? We have no history at all of cops abusing their power, so why not trust them with tanks, missiles, machine guns?

Attorney General Jeff Sessions is expected to announce the changes to the program on Monday when he speaks at a Fraternal Order of Police conference in Nashville. It was not immediately clear why Mr. Sessions would announce changes to a Pentagon program, but he

Trump this morning. No tweets of his own yet, but he pointedly retweeted these three items.

Finally, as if by accident, the @washingtonpost breaks down & admits the truth about where the violence is coming from https://t.co/n9L1XclpDg

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) August 28, 2017

DSouza was retweeting the Post:

Black-clad antifa attack peaceful right wing demonstrators in Berkeley https://t.co/M5OxN2vaBR

— Washington Post (@washingtonpost) August 28, 2017

Geddit? It’s not the far-right, it’s not white supremacists, it’s THE LEFT, just as he said at that press conference. There are no white racists, there are only Very Fine People; the bad people are all on the left.

Next.

Your boss pardoned a traitor who gave U.S. enemies state secrets, he also

A few days ago the UN condemned Trump’s racist outbursts since Charlottesville.

Without mentioning Mr. Trump by name, a body of United Nations experts on Wednesday denounced “the failure at the highest political level of the United States of America to unequivocally reject and condemn” racist violence, saying it was “deeply concerned by the example this failure could set for the rest of the world.”

Mr. Trump’s wavering responses to the violence — he has blamed “many sides,” but also singled out the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi groups and white supremacists for condemnation — has roiled his administration, but also unsettled rights advocates around the world.

“We were shocked and horrified by what happened,” the committee’s chairwoman, Anastasia

Elizabeth Williamson at the Times on Pres-i-dent Trump and the babysitters.

The epigraph:

“You treat me like a baby! Am I like a baby to you? I sit there like a little baby and watch TV and you talk to me?”

— Donald Trump to Paul Manafort in “Devil’s Bargain,” by Joshua Green.

Why yes, Don, of course you’re a baby to us. You act like a baby. You talk like a baby, you have no idea how to think, just as a baby does.

He lives in the White House, where he gets two scoops of ice cream instead of one for dessert. He is commander in chief, eating “the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake” with the

Business Insider argues that Trump’s pardon of Arpaio, coupled with his asking Sessions months ago if he could get the case dropped, undercuts the claim by Trump allies that he didn’t actually order Comey to drop the Flynn investigation, he merely expressed a hope.

When Trump allegedly asked Sessions this past spring whether it would be possible to drop the federal criminal investigation into Arpaio, Sessions told Trump such a move would be inappropriate, but that Trump could pardon Arpaio if he was convicted, The Post reported, citing three people familiar with the conversation.

Trump ultimately granted the pardon on Friday evening, sparking fierce backlash from liberals and some conservatives.

But some legal analysts also pointed out that