Oh good.

Donald Trump’s Aberdeenshire golf resort must pay the Scottish government’s legal costs following a court battle over a major North Sea wind power development.

Mr Trump battled unsuccessfully in the courts to halt the project before he became US president.

Why?

Mr Trump had argued the development would spoil the view from his golf course at Menie.

Goodness, that takes a lot of nerve. You buy a golf course in a foreign country and then you expect to be able to veto anything that country wants to build within sight of your golf course? Like, you own everything as far as the eye can see?

Good that it didn’t work. Even better that he has to pay … Read the rest

Also threatened were…

Leading up to the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump directed his personal attorney at the time to threaten legal action against the colleges and high school he attended if they publicly released his grades or standardized test scores, the attorney, Michael Cohen, told Congress on Wednesday.

…

“When I say conman, I’m talking about a man who declares himself brilliant but directed me to threaten his high school, his colleges and the College Board to never release his grades or SAT scores,” he said.

Somehow I always kind of suspected the “brilliant” part was shaky.

In support of his testimony, Cohen provided a May 2015 letter he penned to the president of Fordham University, the New

Trump explains why he takes Kim’s word for it that he had no idea anyone was being harsh to Otto Warmbier.

Chris Cillizza has doubts:

Trump said this of Warmbier and North Korea: “He tells me that he didn’t know about it and I will take him at his word.” Trump added that Kim “felt badly about it. He felt very badly.”

Trump is, apparently, taking the word of a brutal dictator who had his half-brother murdered with nerve gas at an airport and who continues to live a posh lifestyle while his country suffers the effects of staggering economic sanctions? The guy who North Korean media says began driving a car at age 3, helped cure Ebola and

Another Elinor Lipman gem:

Oversight’s a cruel committee–
Their chairman’s from an inner city!
Let’s all believe that Cohen lies,
Or I won’t get my Nobel Prize. #thepoetryofdonaldtrump

— Elinor Lipman (@ElinorLipman) February 28, 2019

… Read the rest

Oops. Duck’s off, sorry.

After all that Look At Me Solve North Korea, Trump failed ignominiously because it turns out – who could possibly have guessed? – that Kim isn’t going to roll over just because Trump tells him to.

President Trump and Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s leader, abruptly ended their second summit meeting on Thursday after talks collapsed with the two leaders failing to agree on any steps toward nuclear disarmament or measures to ease tensions on the Korean Peninsula.

“Sometimes you have to walk,” Mr. Trump said at an afternoon news conference in Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam.

He said Mr. Kim had offered to dismantle the North’s most important nuclear facility if the United States lifted the

The story of the portrait is a high point (of lowness) for me. Fake bidder. Hiked up price. Paid for by foundation. Twitter boast. It’s got it all.

Michael Cohen claims that President Donald Trump had him find a fake bidder to buy a portrait of him at a 2013 charity auction in the Hamptons so it would sell higher than everything else, and then paid the buyer back with Trump Foundation funds.

As one does, you know.

“The objective was to ensure that his portrait, which was going to be auctioned last, would go for the highest price of any portrait that afternoon,” Cohen said.

So that people would think he’s a hot item.

Just found out that at

Thieves fall out.

Michael D. Cohen, President Trump’s former personal lawyer and fixer, is planning on portraying his onetime client in starkly negative terms when he testifies Wednesday before a House committee, and on describing what he says was Mr. Trump’s use of racist language, lies about his wealth[,] and possible criminal conduct.

[The Times really needs to ditch its stupid rule against the Oxford comma. I’m pretty sure that list at the end of the sentence is three items, not two, but the lack of the comma makes it distractingly annoyingly disruptively ambiguous.]

Sarah Huckabee Sanders issued a statement.

“Disgraced felon Michael Cohen is going to prison for lying to Congress and making other false statements,” she said.

Trump thinks he invented the 4th of July as a National Event. Is being told otherwise with varying degrees of sarcasm.

HOLD THE DATE! We will be having one of the biggest gatherings in the history of Washington, D.C., on July 4th. It will be called “A Salute To America” and will be held at the Lincoln Memorial. Major fireworks display, entertainment and an address by your favorite President, me!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 24, 2019

People are finding “HOLD THE DATE!” particularly hilarious since it’s a federal holiday and has been ever since none of us are old enough to remember when.

Is he … is he taking credit for inventing the 4th of July? https://t.co/fZRsVF13Oe

—

Trump and co are setting up a panel to “discover” that climate change is no problem.

According to a document obtained by The Washington Post, the Trump administration intends to use an executive order to create a panel tasked with assessing the potential harm of climate change.

Citing a memo dated February 14, The New York Times reported the committee, called the  the Presidential Committee on Climate Security, will consist of 12 individuals, including William Happer, who is slated to head the team. Appointed to the National Security Council as the senior director for emerging technologies, the Princeton physicist is a known climate change denier, who once compared the “demonization of carbon dioxide” to the “demonization of poor

There’s a report from the House Oversight Committee. Paul Waldman at the Post boils it down for us:

We begin with a company called IP3 International, described as “a private company that has assembled a consortium of U.S. companies to build nuclear plants in Saudi Arabia.” IP3, which has an all-star team of former generals and federal officials on its staff and board, was pushing hard on the Trump administration to approve its plan to build these reactors despite the lengthy process required to transfer nuclear technology abroad.

Not to mention the fact that it’s Saudi Arabia. Remember the twin towers? That Saudi Arabia. Remember Jamal Khashoggi? That Saudi Arabia again.

A key proponent of this nuclear effort was

Huh. Word is, Shinzo Abe did indeed nominate Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Because the US asked him to.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe nominated U.S. President Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize last autumn after receiving a request from the U.S. government to do so, the Asahi newspaper reported on Sunday.

The report follows Trump’s claim on Friday that Abe had nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize for opening talks and easing tensions with North Korea.

Trump didn’t say anything about asking him to. He just said Abe nominated him – he said it smugly, as if it were an exciting unsolicited honor, as opposed to a favor done on request from a heavily-armed acquaintance. … Read the rest

The Times (the other one, the New York one) has another one of those big articles, this one on Trump’s moves to obstruct justice. It starts with a bang.

As federal prosecutors in Manhattan gathered evidence late last year about President Trump’s role in silencing women with hush payments during the 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump called Matthew G. Whitaker, his newly installed attorney general, with a question. He asked whether Geoffrey S. Berman, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York and a Trump ally, could be put in charge of the widening investigation, according to several American officials with direct knowledge of the call.

Ho yus, perfectly normal, a president asking an attorney general if … Read the rest

Was Trump really telling a whopper when he said Obama told him he (Obama) was on the edge of war with North Korea? Peter Baker at the Times has collected some “Nope”s from people who worked in Obama’s administration.

President Trump has been telling audiences lately that his predecessor was on the precipice of an all-out confrontation with the nuclear-armed maverick state. The way Mr. Trump tells the story, the jets were practically scrambling in the hangars.

“I believe he would have gone to war with North Korea,” Mr. Trump said in the White House Rose Garden on Friday. “I think he was ready to go to war. In fact, he told me he was so close to starting

Jack Goldsmith at Lawfare explains why much about Trump’s Fake Emergency is not abnormal or weird or even alarming, and then why much about it is one or all of those.

First, in stating that he “didn’t need to do this,” Trump acknowledged what so much of the run-up to his proclamation makes clear: there is no necessity in his action, and thus no “emergency” in the ordinary language sense of the term. As noted above, this is typically true of emergency declarations. But presidents don’t admit it, much less celebrate it. They tend to make emergency declarations in ways that do not highlight that the entire modern law of emergency power rests on the fiction that emergency powers can

What happens when he tries to string sentences together.

Trump says he doesn't have time to talk to Ann Coulter, adding "she's off the reservation." pic.twitter.com/5ntb0ZWCYG

— Josh Campbell (@joshscampbell) February 15, 2019

… Read the rest

Aren’t Republicans supposed to love the military? The Post reports:

House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.) said that Trump’s plan to divert military construction funding to border barriers was “utterly disrespectful” to members of the military.

“This appalling decision by the Trump administration is an egregious example of the President putting his political agenda ahead of the interest of the United States,” Smith said in a statement.

Trump intends to tap $3.6 billion in military construction funds by declaring a national emergency.

What is his political agenda here exactly?

It seems to be to defend and consolidate and underline his image, his “identity,” as a ferocious racist xenophobe. It appears to be to leave no stone unturned … Read the rest

So here we go. Trump, sounding both drunk and brain-dead, says he’s declaring a national emergency, then promptly says he didn’t have to do that, which means it’s not an emergency, so all the lawyers are saying that won’t do him a lot of good in court.

Can’t anybody stop this runaway train?

BREAKING: President Trump confirms that he will declare a national emergency to secure funding to build a wall at the US southern border https://t.co/daF5YvWEDs pic.twitter.com/vcHN4MgUwB

— CNN (@CNN) February 15, 2019

… Read the rest

Mister Populist is again finding a way to make sure workers get cheated out of their pay.

The Associated Press published a good overview, highlighting a variety of elements in the final package, but the Washington Post flagged a point of particular interest.

Lawmakers grappled with a series of last-minute disputes Wednesday as they sought to finalize the deal, including an ultimately unsuccessful push by Democrats to include back pay for thousands of federal contractors who were caught up in the last shutdown, and – unlike the 800,000 affected federal workers – have not been able to recoup their lost wages.

Alas, this isn’t too surprising. Democrats, led by Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.), pushed a provision to include

Well, now we know what Trump is doing with his “executive time,” besides watching Fox & Friends. He’s playing Pretend Golf in a room of the White House.

President Trump has installed a room-sized “golf simulator” game at the White House, which allows him to play virtual rounds at courses all over the world by hitting a ball into a large video screen, according to two people told about the system.

That system replaced an older, less sophisticated golf simulator that had been installed under President Obama, according to two people with knowledge of the previous system.

Trump’s system cost about $50,000, and was put in during the last few weeks in a room in his personal quarters, a White

NPR had more on the BBC camera guy assaulted by a Trumpist at Trump’s “rally” in El Paso. It raises some vexed questions.

The BBC’s Ron Skeans was working in the area of a raised camera platform at Trump’s campaign event when, he says, a “very hard shove” came out of nowhere. At the time, Trump was touting recent economic numbers to a roaring crowd in the El Paso County Coliseum.

Skeans’ colleagues say the apparent attack came after repeated verbal assaults on the media during the event. The BBC says it is “clearly unacceptable for any of our staff to be attacked for doing their job.”

NPR frames it very cautiously, as NPR always does, because hey it’s … Read the rest