Well at least this mess is good for business at Trump’s hotel in Manhattan.

The general manager of the Trump International Hotel in Manhattan had a rare bit of good news to report to investors this spring: After two years of decline, revenue from room rentals went up 13 percent in the first three months of 2018.

What caused the uptick at President Trump’s flagship hotel in New York? One major factor: “a last-minute visit to New York by the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia,” wrote general manager Prince A. Sanders in a May 15 letter, which was obtained by The Washington Post.

The royals didn’t stay at Trump’s hotel because well, frankly, it’s crap, isn’t it, but they … Read the rest

On the one hand CNN and the Post and the Times are The Enemy, and on the other hand…

Thank you to Chairman Kim Jong Un for keeping your word & starting the process of sending home the remains of our great and beloved missing fallen! I am not at all surprised that you took this kind action. Also, thank you for your nice letter – l look forward to seeing you soon!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 2, 2018

… Read the rest

Meanwhile Trump attacked the press again at his rally last night.

President Donald Trump is renewing his campaign against the media, claiming at a Pennsylvania rally that the media is the “fake, fake disgusting news” and casting journalists as his true political opponent.

Is he enough of a Hitler-clone yet?

Trump barnstormed Thursday night in a state that he swiped from the Democrats in 2016 and that is home to a Senate seat he is trying to place in the Republicans’ column this fall. But the race between GOP U.S. Rep. Lou Barletta and two-term incumbent Democratic Sen. Bob Casey took a back seat to Trump’s invectives against the media, which came amid a backdrop of antagonism to journalists

The UN comments on Trump’s rhetoric attacking the press:

UN and Inter-American experts on freedom of expression have condemned U.S. President Donald Trump’s repeated attacks on the free press and urged him and his administration to cease efforts to undermine the media’s role of holding government accountable, honest and transparent.

“His attacks are strategic, designed to undermine confidence in reporting and raise doubts about verifiable facts,” said David Kaye and Edison Lanza, the Special Rapporteurs on freedom of expression for the United Nations and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, respectively.

The President has labelled the media as being the “enemy of the American people” “very dishonest” or “fake news,” and accused the press of “distorting democracy” or spreading

Another nice little angle for Trump, it appears – selling tours of Air Force One. Nothing at all tacky about that, no indeed.

Four Democratic senators are calling for an investigation into who has received Air Force One tours under the Trump administration, following reporting by BuzzFeed News that found that some members of the president’s private Florida clubs appeared to have received those tours.

In a letter to the inspectors general of the Air Force and Department of Defense, Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Tom Carper of Delaware, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island cite the BuzzFeed News report as “particularly troubling.”

“If true, these reports could mean that the President or his family

From the New Yorker:

For the past decade, an uptown mortgage broker named George Pakenham has been predicting that the scourge of engine exhaust caused by needless automobile idling will soon become as socially unacceptable as secondhand smoke. After years of rapping on the windows of passenger cars and delivery vans, reminding drivers that the law prohibits idling for longer than three minutes within the city limits, and only occasionally being rebuffed with remarks like “Go move to China” and “You are not human,” he felt like he had reason to be optimistic. He has produced a children’s book devoted to the subject, “Big Nose, Big City,” and also a documentary, “Idle Threat,” which has

Welllllll, this is appalling.

Here's the video. Sarah Sanders is asked multiple times if she believes the media is the enemy of the people. She refuses each time to respond. (via Yahoo) pic.twitter.com/q9jvKSzl3u

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) August 2, 2018

Jim Acosta apparently walked out at that point.

I walked out of the end of that briefing because I am totally saddened by what just happened. Sarah Sanders was repeatedly given a chance to say the press is not the enemy and she wouldn't do it. Shameful.

— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) August 2, 2018

… Read the rest

Skeletor told us “At least she’s meeting with local school kids and doing her best to garden with them” – she being Melania Trump.

No, she’s not. The Post this past April:

Thus far, the Trump administration has erred on the side of silence regarding the vegetable garden, mirroring the silence in Congress around the impending farm bill deadline. In February 2017, a news release from the Office of the First Lady confirmed the White House vegetable garden would not be removed. Come April, however, there was no spring planting event such as Michelle Obama had held; instead, the secretary of agriculture announced that he would “Make School Lunches Great Again” by relaxing Obama-era HHFKA nutrition and sourcing regulations.

The Trump admin has been working hard for a long time on a plan to make sure we have dirtier more climate-damaging fuel economy standards. Thanks, Trump admin.

The Trump administration Thursday pushed ahead with plans to unravel the federal government’s most effective action to fight climate change — aggressive fuel economy standards aimed at getting the nation’s cars and trucks to average more than 50 miles per gallon by 2025.

After months of discussion and drafts, the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration formally unveiled their plan to rewrite those rules and replace them with ones so lax even automakers are wary.

More dirt please, more smog, more carbon, more global warming.

The administration’s

Lawrence Tribe got my attention.

Every study of how democracies die and dictatorships rise finds the leader’s mobilization of mob fury against press critics to be at the center of the transformation. Trump’s war on the media is thus an extremely dangerous sign of things to come. https://t.co/J2QIi7AK8a

— Laurence Tribe 🇺🇦 ⚖️ (@tribelaw) August 2, 2018

So let’s read that Times article:

In the back of a fairground auditorium in Tampa, Fla., on Tuesday night, as President Trump presided over a rally dedicated to denigrating his enemies, the journalists dispatched to cover the proceedings attracted their own raucous crowd.

“Stop lying!” shouted a man in an American flag T-shirt, one of dozens of Trump supporters who hurled invective

There’s this picture from last September of Queen Melania pretending to garden, kind of like Marie Antoninette at le Petit Trianon.

Gee, that basket is awfully clean. So are her gloves, so are her sneakers, so are her pruners.

Heather Schwedel at Slate compares her to her predecessor in the gardening thing:

She doesn’t bother to put up her hair or exchange her designer sunglasses for a more practical wide-brimmed hat. In one hand, she holds a pair of pruning shears uneasily, as if ready not to trim an overgrowth but to snip off the ponytail of an invisible rival or a Barbie doll she is jealous of. Her other hand poses beatifically over an empty basket, providing gestural