Tag: Trump

Trump wants to claw back the national monuments – claw them back from the people in order to give them to developers and ranchers.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday directing his interior secretary to review the designation of dozens of national monuments on federal lands, as he singled out “a massive federal land grab” by the Obama administration.

It was yet another executive action from a president trying to rack up accomplishments before his first 100 days in office, with Saturday marking that milestone.

The latest move could upend protections put in place in Utah and other states under a 1906 law that authorizes the president to declare federal lands as monuments and restrict their use.

During a signing ceremony at the Interior Department, Trump said the order would end “another egregious abuse of federal power” and “give that power back to the states and to the people where it belongs.”

Trump accused the Obama administration of using the Antiquities Act to “unilaterally put millions of acres of land and water under strict federal control” — a practice Trump derided as “a massive federal land grab.”

It’s not an abuse of federal power. Yellowstone and Yosemite and the Grand Canyon do not represent abuses of federal power. Trump is a grubby philistine.

And it’s certainly not a land grab. The point is to preserve the land, which is the opposite of grabbing it. It’s the people who want to turn it into cash who are grabby.

“Somewhere along the way the Act has become a tool of political advocacy rather than public interest,” Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said.

Advocacy of what? Preservation and perpetual non-destructive public use? Which is in the public interest?

In December, shortly before leaving office, President Barack Obama infuriated Utah Republicans by creating the Bears Ears National Monument on more than 1 million acres of land that’s sacred to Native Americans and home to tens of thousands of archaeological sites, including ancient cliff dwellings.

Republicans in the state asked Trump to take the unusual step of reversing Obama’s decision. They said the designation will stymie growth by closing the area to new commercial and energy development. The Antiquities Act does not give the president explicit power to undo a designation and no president has ever taken such a step.

So it will stymie growth (if that’s true), so what? Not everything has to grow.

Zinke said that over the past 20 years, the designation of tens of millions of acres as national monuments have limited the lands’ use for farming, timber harvesting, mining and oil and gas exploration, and other commercial purposes.

Yes, obviously. That’s the point.

Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., said that if Trump truly wants to make America great again, he should use the law to protect and conserve America’s public lands. In New Mexico, Obama’s designation of Rio Grande del Norte National Monument and Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument have preserved important lands while boosting the economy, Heinrich said, and that story has repeated across the country.

“If this sweeping review is an excuse to cut out the public and scale back protections, I think this president is going to find a very resistant public,” Heinrich said.

Leaders of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition called Trump’s action “extremely troubling.”

“It is offensive for politicians to call the Bears Ears National Monument ‘an abuse,’” said Shaun Chapoose, chairman of the Ute Indian Tribe Business Committee. “To the contrary, it is a fulfillment of our duty to preserve our cultures and our ancestral lands, and its designation was the result of a long, deliberative process to fight for our ancestors as well as access for contemporary use of the lands by our tribal members.”

And that could be the case even if more Utahans wanted to farm and mine and develop that land. If a gang of people come along and grab my wallet, they don’t have a better claim to it than I do. Numbers are not always decisive.

Oh god why do they do this? Why do they parade their rudeness and bad behavior in public?

Brad Jaffy tweets two photos, one of the Prime Minister’s office readout of Trudeau’s phone call with Trump, the other the White House readout of the same call.

Left: Prime Minister's office readout of Trudeau's phone call with Trump

Right: White House readout of the very same call

Um… pic.twitter.com/asAxPMGhMp

— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) April 26, 2017

Or maybe it’s more cowardice than laziness. Business Insider elaborates:

The US and Canada are embroiled in an escalating fight over trade policy, and the tensions between the close allies seemed evident in the readouts both countries released of a phone call on Tuesday between US President Donald Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Trudeau’s office’s readout of the call included several details of the conversation.

“The prime minister and the president reaffirmed the importance of the mutually beneficial Canada-US trade relationship,” Canada’s readout said. “On the issue of softwood lumber, the prime minister refuted the baseless allegations by the US Department of Commerce and the decision to impose unfair duties.”

“Unfair duties” was a reference to Trump’s decision on Tuesday to impose a 20% tariff on Canadian softwood lumber imports.

Who is Trump’s expert on lumber imports? One of his grandchildren perhaps?

The two leaders also discussed the dispute over the Canadian dairy industry that Trump has recently highlighted. He has accused Canada of taking advantage of US dairy farmers.

“The prime minister and the president also discussed Canada-US trade in dairy products, trade which heavily favours the US: Canada imports over $550 million of dairy products from the US, but exports just over $110 million to the US,” Canada’s readout of the call said.

“The prime minister reaffirmed that Canada upholds its international trade obligations, including the North American Free Trade Agreement, under which the US continues to have duty-free and quota-free access for milk protein substances … and that Canada would continue to defend its interests,” the statement continued. “The prime minister and the president agreed to continue their dialogue on these important bilateral issues.”

The White House readout was insultingly shorter and more perfunctory.

President Donald J. Trump and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke today,” the White House’s readout said. “The two leaders discussed the dairy trade in Wisconsin, New York state, and various other places. They also discussed lumber coming into the United States. It was a very amicable call.”

No, it wasn’t. That’s that Trump nonsense about “chemistry” again. However polite Trudeau was (because he’s an adult and a professional), the substance of the call was obviously not amicable.

Bahahahaha Trump is telling astronauts to hurry up and get to Mars in the next three years.

At a push, he wants people on the planet by the end of his second term, which would come in 2025 if he were to be elected again. The President told the astronauts that they need to speed up to meet his target.

Does Trump think the astronauts do the engineering? Does he think astronauts are the only people there are at NASA?

Nasa’s plan of a mission to Mars by the 2030s was already highly ambitious. It has been funded through a bill that Mr Trump just recently signed into law – which the astronauts had to remind him of during the video.

It wasn’t clear whether or not Mr Trump was joking about the new, highly ambitious target. Putting people on Mars will require technical and specialist equipment far beyond any space mission so far, which astronauts pointed out during the call was only now being invented and built.

It was a huge feat to get the Rover to Mars. But when you add humans you’re on a whole different level of difficulty and expense. I think the ambition to put humans on Mars is bonkers, frankly. Send more Rovers, instead.

The President has actively supported exploration of other planets like Mars, even taking funding away from Nasa’s earth science work to focus instead on missions into our own solar system. And he is being supported by Elon Musk, who also wants humans to move to Mars and is invested in doing so through his SpaceX private spaceflight company.

Sigh. All about the flash and the cowboyism, at the expense of exploration and new knowledge.

Donnie from Queens filled us in on the French election today.

Very interesting election currently taking place in France.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 23, 2017

You get the feeling he’s not sure where France is? And knows nothing whatever about it?

The AP interviewed him on Friday. The transcript is scary.

I think I’ve established amazing relationships that will be used the four or eight years, whatever period of time I’m here. I think for that I would be getting very high marks because I’ve established great relationships with countries, as President el-Sissi has shown and others have shown. Well, if you look at the president of China, people said they’ve never seen anything like what’s going on right now. I really liked him a lot. I think he liked me. We have a great chemistry together.

No, he didn’t “like” you, Donnie. That’s not what this is about. It’s not about chemistry. It’s not about gazing into his eyes. It’s not about any of that. You need to grow up now.

I’ve developed great relationships with all of these leaders. Nobody’s written that. In fact, they said, “Oh, well, he’s not treating them nicely,” because on NATO, I want them to pay up. But I still get along with them great, and they will pay up. In fact, with the Italian prime minister yesterday, you saw, we were joking, “Come on, you have to pay up, you have to pay up.” He’ll pay.

It’s not about personal relationships. Good ones can make discussions easier, yes, but normal sane adult heads of state don’t make decisions for their countries based on their personal relationships with heads of state.

AP: Did he say that? In your meeting? Your private meeting?

TRUMP: He’s going to end up paying. But you know, nobody ever asked the question. Nobody asked. Nobody ever asked him to pay up. So it’s a different kind of a presidency.

And not in a good way.

TRUMP: But things change. There has to be flexibility. Let me give you an example. President Xi, we have a, like, a really great relationship. For me to call him a currency manipulator and then say, “By the way, I’d like you to solve the North Korean problem,” doesn’t work. So you have to have a certain flexibility, Number One. Number Two, from the time I took office till now, you know, it’s a very exact thing. It’s not like generalities. Do you want a Coke or anything?

AP: I’m OK, thank you. No. …

TRUMP: But President Xi, from the time I took office, he has not, they have not been currency manipulators. Because there’s a certain respect because he knew I would do something or whatever. But more importantly than him not being a currency manipulator the bigger picture, bigger than even currency manipulation, if he’s helping us with North Korea, with nuclear and all of the things that go along with it, who would call, what am I going to do, say, “By the way, would you help us with North Korea? And also, you’re a currency manipulator.” It doesn’t work that way.

Ah. It’s nice to have him explaining these things to us clueless mortals. Very sadly, very very sadly, the media don’t all see it that way. They’re stupid.

And the media, some of them get it, in all fairness. But you know some of them either don’t get it, in which case they’re very stupid people, or they just don’t want to say it. You know because of a couple of them said, “He didn’t call them a currency manipulator.” Well, for two reasons. Number One, he’s not, since my time. You know, very specific formula. You would think it’s like generalities, it’s not. They have — they’ve actually — their currency’s gone up. So it’s a very, very specific formula. And I said, “How badly have they been,” [recording inaudible] … they said, “Since you got to office they have not manipulated their currency.” That’s Number One, but much more important, they are working with us on North Korea. Now maybe that’ll work out or maybe it won’t. Can you imagine?

He sure showed them.

He’s surprised it turns out that being president is a big job. I guess he thought it was mostly just waving hello.

AP: Can I ask you, over your first 100 days — you’re not quite there yet — how do you feel like the office has changed you?

TRUMP: Well the one thing I would say — and I say this to people — I never realized how big it was. Everything’s so (unintelligible) like, you know the orders are so massive. I was talking to —

AP: You mean the responsibility of it, or do you mean —

TRUMP: Number One, there’s great responsibility. When it came time to, as an example, send out the 59 missiles, the Tomahawks in Syria. I’m saying to myself, “You know, this is more than just like, 79 (sic) missiles. This is death that’s involved,” because people could have been killed. This is risk that’s involved, because if the missile goes off and goes in a city or goes in a civilian area — you know, the boats were hundreds of miles away — and if this missile goes off and lands in the middle of a town or a hamlet …. every decision is much harder than you’d normally make. (unintelligible) … This is involving death and life and so many things. … So it’s far more responsibility. (unintelligible) ….The financial cost of everything is so massive, every agency. This is thousands of times bigger, the United States, than the biggest company in the world. The second-largest company in the world is the Defense Department. The third-largest company in the world is Social Security. The fourth-largest — you know, you go down the list.

AP: Right.

TRUMP. It’s massive. And every agency is, like, bigger than any company. So you know, I really just see the bigness of it all, but also the responsibility. And the human responsibility. You know, the human life that’s involved in some of the decisions.

Apparently he hadn’t realized that before.

It’s mind-numbing. He hadn’t realized that before. He’s so stupid and out of it that he’s telling a reporter that he hadn’t realized before that for instance dropping bombs means “people could have been killed.” I guess he thought they just got a headache or something. He’s telling a reporter he’s surprised that the US is bigger than a company.

He’s always worse than you think possible. Every, every time.

I’ll tell you the other thing is (unintelligible). I used to get great press. I get the worst press. I get such dishonest reporting with the media. That’s another thing that really has — I’ve never had anything like it before. It happened during the primaries, and I said, you know, when I won, I said, “Well the one thing good is now I’ll get good press.” And it got worse. (unintelligible) So that was one thing that a little bit of a surprise to me. I thought the press would become better, and it actually, in my opinion, got more nasty.

There’s a reason for that, Donald Trump. It’s because you’re terrible. It’s because you’re the worst president any of us have ever seen. That’s the reason. You’re bad at this thing you feel entitled to do, and we don’t like that, and the press are part of the “we” who don’t like it.

They talk about his address to Congress.

TRUMP: A lot of the people have said that, some people said it was the single best speech ever made in that chamber.

AP: You seem like you enjoyed it.

TRUMP: I did. I did. I believed in it and I enjoyed it. It was a great feeling to introduce the wife of a great young soldier who died getting us very valuable information.

Oh, jesus. He said that. He said it was a great feeling to introduce the wife of a great young soldier who died. He said it was a great feeling.

Then he talks about his chemistry with Xi some more. Then he talks about the election yet again.

AP: … is do you think you have the right team in place for your next 100 days?

TRUMP: Yes. I think my team has been, well, I have different teams. I think my military team has been treated with great respect. As they should be. I think my other team hasn’t been treated with the respect that they should get. We have some very talented people, and very diverse people.

AP: Do you mean your White House team when you say that?

TRUMP: Yeah, my White House team. I think Reince (Priebus) has been doing an excellent job. I think that, you know, this is a very tough environment not caused necessarily by me. Although the election has, you know, look, the Democrats had a tremendous opportunity because the electoral college, as I said, is so skewed to them. You start off by losing in New York and California, no matter who it is. If, if Abe Lincoln came back to life, he would lose New York and he would lose California…

And he’s off on yet another rant about getting to 270 blah blah blah. Clinton spent more, Democrats don’t like him, Elijah Cummings is critical of him, blah blah blah. And then he gets back to the important stuff.

AP: And that’s one of the difficulties I think presidents have had is that you can have these personal relationships with people from the other party, but then it’s hard to actually change how people vote or change how people —

TRUMP: No I have, it’s interesting, I have, seem to get very high ratings. I definitely. You know Chris Wallace had 9.2 million people, it’s the highest in the history of the show. I have all the ratings for all those morning shows. When I go, they go double, triple. Chris Wallace, look back during the Army-Navy football game, I did his show that morning.

AP: I remember, right.

TRUMP: It had 9.2 million people. It’s the highest they’ve ever had. On any, on air, (CBS “Face the Nation” host John) Dickerson had 5.2 million people. It’s the highest for “Face the Nation” or as I call it, “Deface the Nation.” It’s the highest for “Deface the Nation” since the World Trade Center. Since the World Trade Center came down. It’s a tremendous advantage.

I have learned one thing, because I get treated very unfairly, that’s what I call it, the fake media. And the fake media is not all of the media. You know they tried to say that the fake media was all the, no. The fake media is some of you. I could tell you who it is, 100 percent. Sometimes you’re fake, but — but the fake media is some of the media. It bears no relationship to the truth. It’s not that Fox treats me well, it’s that Fox is the most accurate.

And the whole rest of the conversation, a few hundred more words, is about tv. He’s all about the tv.

It’s breathtaking. It’s as if he were literally about 8 years old, but without the curiosity children have at that age.

Trump put out a statement on Earth Day yesterday.

“My Administration is committed to keeping our air and water clean, to preserving our forests, lakes, and open spaces, and to protecting endangered species,” the statement read.

What a shameless liar. He just repealed a regulation protecting streams and other waterways a couple of weeks ago.

Here are some of the actions the Trump administration has taken on environmental issues so far:

• Trump signed an executive order rolling back former president Obama’s Clean Power Plan. The Clean Power Plan was aimed at reducing carbon emissions, reducing American reliance on coal and other fossil fuels, and promoting the use of alternative sources of energy to curb global warming
• Trump signed a bill repealing an Obama-era regulation that prevented coal mining companies from dumping debris and toxic waste into streams and rivers
• Trump signed a Congressional Review Act resolution which rolled back a financial disclosure requirement for energy companies
• Trump appointed Scott Pruitt, who said that carbon dioxide is not a primary contributor to climate change, to head up the Environmental Protection Agency

There’s more.

It turns out that Trump didn’t know much about how to be president when he started.

Trump’s ascension to the presidency is an unlikely story. The flashy New York billionaire and former reality TV star cuts a very different image than any American president before him. He’s the first with no government, military or political experience. In an age of frustration with the political establishment on both sides of the aisle, that background had a certain appeal.

Only to people who don’t think.

No one would say that about any other job that relies on skills and knowledge. Why does anyone say it about as skill-heavy a job as being president? Why does anyone encourage this ridiculous idea? Pig-ignorance is not a good qualification for being president. I’m frustrated with the way airlines treat people; that doesn’t mean I want random bypassers assigned to fly the planes.

Trump’s unique background has also brought with it some problems. He’s faced setbacks and turnabouts, from immigration executive orders hung up in the courts and a failed health care overhaul attempt to changing his mind on his approach to Syria, Russia, China and NATO. All of it points to on-the-job training for Trump, who had a resume before taking office that could be considered, for a president, entry-level, experts say.

“This man is without experience, and it’s showing,” said Robert Dallek, the presidential historian and author of multiple books on presidents, from Roosevelt and Truman to Kennedy, Nixon and Reagan. “Particularly in his dealings with Congress, he’s been an utter failure in the sense that he’s gotten nothing passed. He’s issuing all sorts of executive orders, like immigration limits; they’re failing. The attempt to get health care reform failed. I’d give him failing marks for his 100 days.”

Also there’s the little matter of making us an international pariah within a week of taking office.

Here’s the thing: experience is not the same thing as corruption, and the first does not entail the second. The way to deal with corruption is to deal with corruption, not to put incompetent novices in the top job…especially when they’re more corrupt than anyone who has ever sat in that chair before.

Our orange Nazi will be holding another rally next weekend. How many rallies is that now? Four since he took office? Five?

President Donald Trump announced Saturday that he is holding a rally the same night as the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

“Next Saturday night I will be holding a BIG rally in Pennsylvania. Look forward to it,” the president tweeted.

A rally why? He never explains that. Why does he keep throwing rallies?

Well we know the main reason. He’s a narcissist with an unslakable ravenous hunger for attention and applause. It’s the best fun he knows of, standing facing a big crowd of people who all think he’s the coolest Nazi ever. But that’s not a genuine reason for doing it. A genuine reason would be one to do with the public welfare, or national security, or something related to being president. Just saying “I have a bottomless appetite for frenzied public adulation” doesn’t cut the mustard.

Trump tweeted in February that he would not be attending the annual dinner. The business mogul turned politician has had a rocky relationship with the media throughout the presidential campaign and during his presidency, often times calling some organizations, such as the New York Times and CNN, “fake news.”

The correspondents’ dinner benefits a journalism scholarship and recognizes reporters for their coverage of the president and is traditionally attended by major media outlets, celebrity guests and the president.

It is, frankly, a rather creepy and sycophantic institution. On the other hand, when the alternative is a president who calls the press “the enemy of the people,” it’s not so bad.

Updating to add: this will be the fourth rally since he took office…unless I’ve missed one. Google is being cautious about answering my question. The three I turned up were

• Melbourne, Florida February 20
• Nashville March 15
• Louisville March 20

From Vox last week:

President Donald Trump recounted an absolutely astounding detail about one of his conversations with Chinese President Xi Jinping in comments published by the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday afternoon. Apparently, Trump came into his first meeting with the Chinese leader, in early April, convinced that China could simply eliminate the threat posed by North Korea’s nuclear program. Xi then patiently explained Chinese-Korean history to Trump — who then promptly changed his mind.

“After listening for 10 minutes, I realized it’s not so easy,” the president told the Journal. “I felt pretty strongly that they had a tremendous power [over] North Korea. … But it’s not what you would think.”

Typical, innit.

He was telling us the same thing about health insurance. “It turns out to be complicated,” he said wonderingly. Yes we know, Donnie, and since it was your idea to go after this job, you should have known too.

He finds that out about everything. People brief him and he runs around full of astonishment, telling everyone what he just learned and bragging that he’s the only person who knows it.

It’s simply staggering that the US head of state is so abjectly stupid that he feels no need to become informed about the issues he has to deal with. It’s staggering that he has no qualms about admitting that the Chinese president had to tell him some basic facts about China and North Korea – subjects he’d been babbling about on Twitter and in campaign speeches for months or years – and that those facts instantly changed his mind. It’s staggering that he doesn’t realize he should have learned those facts a long time ago.

Oh look, another glaring conflict of interest:

Exxon Mobil is pursuing a waiver from Treasury Department sanctions on Russia to drill in the Black Sea in a venture with Rosneft, the Russian state oil company, a former State Department official said on Wednesday. An oil industry official confirmed the account.

The waiver application was made under the Obama administration, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity, and the company has not dropped the proposal.

Exxon applied for the waiver while Obama was in office, so my goodness what a nice stroke of luck for them that when Obama left office the new guy put the CEO of Exxon in as Secretary of State. How touchingly generous of him!

Of course impartial observers might think the whole thing is rather inappropriate, but what do they know – they’re not Insiders.

The appeal did not come up during Senate confirmation hearings for Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson, who was Exxon Mobil’s chief executive before his nomination by President Trump and was known to have a strong working relationship with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

Why? Why did it not come up? It should have come up – that is, someone should have brought it up.

The Exxon Mobil waiver request for the Black Sea was reported Wednesday by The Wall Street Journal.

Asked about the waiver application, Alan Jeffers, an Exxon Mobil spokesman, said, “We don’t comment on ongoing issues.” A Treasury representative said the department would not comment on individual licenses or waiver requests.

In other words, shut up, little people, and go about your business. The Insiders are conducting Insider Dealmaking and it’s not for the peasants to ask questiions.

Hal Eren, a former official in the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, said that such waivers were rarely requested or granted and that in most cases such permission was given only for environmental or safety reasons. The Exxon request is particularly unlikely to succeed, he said, because of the narrow nature of the current sanctions.

“I don’t think they would issue a license, especially given the political context in which this takes place,” Mr. Eren said.

But is he taking Trump into account? Is he taking Tillerson into account?

United States and European sanctions were imposed on Russia in March 2014 in response to Moscow’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine. Even as the Ukraine crisis deepened, Exxon continued pressing for deeper involvement in Russia’s oil industry.

Shareholders. It’s Their Duty to put shareholders first. Don’t talk to them about Ukraine or Crimea, because SHAREHOLDERS.

As Exxon Mobil’s chief executive, Mr. Tillerson took issue with the initial sanctions, before the tightening in late 2014. At Exxon’s 2014 annual meeting, he said, “We do not support sanctions, generally, because we don’t find them to be effective unless they are very well implemented comprehensively, and that’s a very hard thing to do.”

Nonsense. They don’t support them because they’re inconvenient to them (and the shareholders).

Exxon’s waiver request drew criticism Wednesday on several fronts. Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who is a fierce critic of Mr. Putin, asked in a Twitter post, “Are they crazy?”

Michael A. McFaul, who was United States ambassador to Russia under Mr. Obama, said on Twitter that if the Trump administration granted a waiver, “then all that tough talk last week about Russia was just that — talk.”

Watch closely.

Past Donnie on Twitter:

Why does Obama believe he shouldn't comply with record releases that his predecessors did of their own volition? Hiding something?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 30, 2012

My goodness, you lying sack of shit. Tax returns? White House visitor logs? Hiding something?

A lot of undecided and independent voters have had enough with Obama’s lack of transparency. I don't blame them.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 31, 2012

Why is @BarackObama spending millions to try and hide his records? He is the least transparent President–ever–and he ran on transparency.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 6, 2012

All recent Presidents have released their transcripts. What is @BarackObama hiding?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 10, 2012

All recent presidents have released their tax returns. What is Donnie hiding?

Aaron Blake at the Post drew up an annotated list of Donnie’s reversals.

Our authoritarian president congratulated Erdoğan on his winning sweeping new powers in a referendum conducted while most dissenters are languishing in prison. Of course he did.

Trump’s call came as the Turkish government announced late on Monday night that it would be extending the state of emergency in the country by three more months.

International observers monitoring the Turkish referendum concluded in a preliminary report on Monday that the campaign and vote took place in a political environment where the “fundamental freedoms essential to a genuinely democratic process were curtailed”.

And Donnie from Queens is down with that.

Trump’s congratulatory message strikes a starkly different tone from the statement issued by the US state department on Monday, which urged Erdoğan to respect his citizens’ fundamental rights and noted the report’s findings of “irregularities on voting day and an uneven playing field during the difficult campaign period”.

Blah blah blah; hey, the guy knows how to whip people into line.

Trump’s congratulatory call stands in contrast to the cautious response from several European leaders. Some officials appeared wary of further antagonizing Turkey, urging restraint and a commitment to Democratic values. Others were more forthright and declared Sunday’s vote the end to Turkey’s decade-long attempt to join Europe’s 28-member bloc.

But our boy of course had no such scruples. Why would he? Erdoğan is his kind of guy.

(Except for that whole being a Muslim thing. Awkward. I guess they just don’t talk about it.)

Trump is tweeting.

I did what was an almost an impossible thing to do for a Republican-easily won the Electoral College! Now Tax Returns are brought up again?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 16, 2017

Non sequitur, Donnie. Irrelevant. Not the point. We know you won the Electoral vote; that doesn’t make your tax returns no longer of interest. On the contrary: it makes them far more so. You’re not a private individual. We need to know exactly how you’ve been enriching yourself all these years.

Someone should look into who paid for the small organized rallies yesterday. The election is over!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 16, 2017

Duh, we know the election is over, that’s (again) not the point. Oddly enough you become all the more accountable to us once you’re elected, not less so – that is, you do if you follow normal procedures, which because you’re corrupt and dishonest, you don’t. Hence the rallies yesterday: people dislike your corruption and lying and secrecy.

The Guardian adds:

On Saturday, in marches held in Washington DC, Los Angeles and in cities worldwide, thousands demanded a chance to examine Trump’s business ties and determine whether he has links to foreign powers.

Such concerns have been piqued in recent days after Prospect magazine published an interview with Sir Richard Dearlove.

The former chief of Britain’s MI6 intelligence agency said: “What lingers for Trump may be what deals – on what terms – he did after the financial crisis of 2008 to borrow Russian money when others in the west apparently would not lend to him.”

See that’s a red flag right there. If others wouldn’t lend to him after the financial crisis of 2008, that seems to indicate that Russia may have offered some sort of special deal. We’ll lend to you but you have to ______. It would be good to know what goes in the blank space.

But meanwhile we can’t let Trump’s reckless Twitter-threats at North Korea distract us from the less dramatic ongoing corruption and secrecy of his disgustingly sleazy self-interested administration. The NY Times and Pro Publica are collaborating to cover the subject. The Times today:

President Trump is populating the White House and federal agencies with former lobbyists, lawyers and consultants who in many cases are helping to craft new policies for the same industries in which they recently earned a paycheck.

Remember yesterday’s news about how they’ve made the visitor logs secret? Yeah.

The result is potential conflicts of interest not just with Trump but across the whole executive branch.

In at least two cases, the appointments may have already led to violations of the administration’s own ethics rules. But evaluating if and when such violations have occurred has become almost impossible because the Trump administration is secretly issuing waivers to the rules.

Oh is it. Is it really. How is that even legal?

One: Michael Catanzaro, top White House energy adviser.

Until late last year, he was working as a lobbyist for major industry clients such as Devon Energy of Oklahoma, an oil and gas company, and Talen Energy of Pennsylvania, a coal-burning electric utility, as they fought Obama-era environmental regulations, including the landmark Clean Power Plan. Now, he is handling some of the same matters on behalf of the federal government.

That “until late last year” is tactful. What happened late last year? Oh yes, the election.

Another case involves Chad Wolf, who spent the past several years lobbying to secure funding for the Transportation Security Administration to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a new carry-on luggage screening device. He is now chief of staff at that agency — at the same time as the device is being tested and evaluated for possible purchase by agency staff.

Gee, what a coincidence.

At the Labor Department, two officials joined the agency from the K Street lobbying corridor, leaving behind jobs where they fought some of the Obama administration’s signature labor rules, including a policy requiring financial advisers to act in a client’s best interest when providing retirement advice.

Find the most self-serving corrupt thing you can do, and then do it. Those stupid people getting financial advice deserve to be shafted by their advisers because…well because the advisers want to buy another condo in Palm Beach, that’s why.

…the Trump administration is more vulnerable to conflicts than the prior administration, particularly after the president eliminated an ethics provision that prohibits lobbyists from joining agencies they lobbied in the prior two years. The White House also announced on Friday that it would keep its visitors’ logs secret, discontinuing the release of information on corporate executives, lobbyists and others who enter the complex, often to try to influence federal policy. The changes have drawn intense criticism from government ethics advocates across the city.

But it doesn’t matter because Trump does not care. He never will care. He doesn’t have it in him to care. Think of him as, say, a food processor. A food processor can’t fix your roof. Trump can’t care about criticism from government ethics advocates. The parts aren’t there.

A White House spokeswoman, Sarah H. Sanders, declined repeated requests by The Times to speak with Stefan C. Passantino, the White House lawyer in charge of the ethics policy. Instead, the White House provided a written statement that did not address any of the specific questions about potential violations The Times had identified.

See, there again – they have no right to do that. They have no right to refuse to be accountable. They have no right, but it doesn’t matter because there’s no mechanism to force them to. “Checks and balances” don’t check or balance them.

Read the rest.

Jay Willis at GQ says Twitter had oughta shut down Donnie’s Twitter before he sets off the nuclear holocaust.

One of the biggest irritants to North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, apparently, has been Donald Trump’s “provocations” on social media. The country’s vice foreign minister ominously declared that the president “makes trouble” with his “aggressive” tweets, warning that his government is ready for war if Trump wants the same. Here’s the evidence, complete with an inane “U.S.A.” coda, like Trump briefly got caught up in another late-night viewing of that 30 for 30 about the Miracle on Ice:

The “U.S.A.” is a strikingly stupid touch – as if this were a god damn football game, or a plain old unsublimated undisguised dick-waving contest.

Thankfully, there is a hero who could, in theory, help save the world from suffering an ignominious death by tweet: Twitter, which could suspend or [shudders in delight at the mere possibility] ban him altogether. Here, straight from the Twitter Rules, which are incorporated by reference into the Terms of Service:

You may not make threats of violence; it’s right there. I don’t see a clause that says “unless you’re the president of the US.” That’s very sensible, because presidents should especially not make threats of violence, because they have the means to carry them out. If presidents are going to make threats of violence they need to do that through the proper channels, which do not include Twitter.

(And seriously. There’s a ragey kind of amusement in this but there’s a much profounder disgust. This childish incompetent lunatic is threatening nuclear war on Twitter. That’s where we are. Somehow we elected a childish incompetent lunatic president, and presidents can send nukes, so this is where we are. This narcissistic ignorant bullying bozo could destroy the planet just because he can’t stop running his horrible mouth.)

The president has, ahem, arguably used Twitter to violateseveral of these rules before. But for now, focus on that first bullet point. I realize that when Twitter’s lawyers put this thing together, “global nuclear war” was probably not within the scope of the “violence” that they intended to bar users from promoting. But I’m also going to go out on a limb here and say that that should probably count as violence. If, as here, there is evidence that the president is using Twitter to provoke a dangerous, war-happy nut job into putting millions of lives in jeopardy, it’s fair to ask whether the service should respond—for the good of humankind—by locking him down for a while.

It sounds jokey but…it isn’t. If only it were.

What could possibly go wrong?

The Trump Administration will not disclose logs of those who visit the White House complex, breaking with his predecessor, the White House announced Friday.

The decision, after nearly three months of speculation about the fate of the records, marks a dramatic from the Obama Administration’s voluntary disclosure of more than 6 million records during his presidency. The U.S. Secret Service maintains the logs, formally known as the Workers and Visitors Entry System, for the purpose of determining who can access to the 18-acre complex.

White House communications director Michael Dubke said the decision to reverse the Obama-era policy was due to “the grave national security risks and privacy concerns of the hundreds of thousands of visitors annually.”

Right. Sure. Nothing at all to do with Trump’s wanting to conceal his many ongoing conflicts of interest and the people who help him perpetuate them.

Trump officials are quick to point out that the Obama Administration fought in federal court to preserve the right to redact and withhold records, successfully appealing a lower court ruling requiring their release to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. But seeking to live up to Obama’s promise to run “the most transparent administration in history,” his Administration voluntarily disclosed the logs.

But those logs were incomplete—often obviously so. The Obama-era process allowed the White House Counsel’s office to unilaterally redact records of those visiting the complex for any reason. The Obama Administration, for instance, took a wide-ranging view of what were considered personal events hosted by the Obamas, leaving off celebrity sightings and meetings with top donors.

They considered meetings with top donors “personal”?

So we’re going from bad to worse. Spiffy.

The news outlets are excited that Bannon may be on his way out. I can’t get all that excited about it, myself – he’s loathsome and he doesn’t belong there times a billion, but it’s not as if his departure will make anything better. It’s all too clear that nothing will make anything better, because Trump is Trump and isn’t going to morph into a reasonable adult devoted to the general welfare.

But anyway, Bannon may be on the We Don’t Like Him Any More list.

In an interview with the New York Post’s Michael Goodwin, Trump seems to push away Bannon.

“I like Steve, but you have to remember, he was not involved in my campaign until very late,” Trump said. “I had already beaten all the senators and all the governors, and I didn’t know Steve. I’m my own strategist, and it wasn’t like I was going to change strategies because I was facing crooked Hillary.”

Forget the Bannon part for a second. This is what I mean. This is the president, and he still says things like “crooked Hillary” in public – indeed, to the press. He’s mentally a toddler, and nothing will make anything better.

Bannon has always been a controversial figure, having touted Breitbart as “the platform for the alt-right,” which is closely aligned with white nationalism.

The Trump campaign had difficulty balancing the fact that white nationalism, and white supremacists, were supportive of Trump and the need to push back against them publicly. Trump’s campaign team, even after the election, angrily denied that it had given a boost to racists. But Trump’s campaign and he himself repeatedly (his team says unwittingly) retweeted or used alt-right memes.

It’s interesting – and not in a good way – how the media always call him a white nationalist and almost never mention that he’s also a male nationalist. He hates women at least as much as he hates brown people. It’s interesting how that’s never seen as all that important.

But anyway – whatever. It’s going to go on being horrific with or without Bannon.

Jenna Johnson at the Post shows how completely random Trump’s thinking is and how frivolously he expresses it in an interview on Fox Business Network this morning.

Soon after the strike, Trump delivered a statement Thursday night from his private club in Palm Beach, Fla., saying that he was moved to act after reports that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons to kill “helpless men, women and children,” including “beautiful babies.” After delivering those scripted remarks, the president retreated from public discussion of the attack, while his aides tried to explain how this strike fits with Trump’s “America First” doctrine and campaign pledge not to get involved with conflicts in other countries.

It doesn’t, of course. Either he didn’t know anything about what Bashar al-Assad was up to before last week, or he didn’t care, or he didn’t think it through.

In the Fox Business interview, Trump promised that “we’re not going into Syria,” but he also made clear that he’s willing to take action when fellow world leaders use “horrible, horrible chemical weapons.” Trump expressed alarm at the Syrian regime’s use of barrel bombs, oil drums packed with explosives and nails or other shrapnel that are rolled out of helicopters. These crude, imprecise munitions are dropped on Syria nearly daily and have killed thousands of people, according to activists tracking the deaths.

“That’s the worst thing — I’ve never seen anything like it,” Trump said.

He says that as if it’s meaningful. It’s not. He’s never seen anything like it because he hasn’t been looking. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, and he doesn’t even know that he doesn’t know. He thinks his own surprise is evidence of novelty, but he couldn’t be more wrong.

Trump called Assad “an animal” and “truly an evil person” and said it is now up to Russian President Vladimir Putin to withdraw his support of the Syrian regime.

“I really think that there’s going to be a lot of pressure on Russia to make sure that peace happens, because, frankly, if Russia didn’t go in and back this animal, you wouldn’t have a problem right now,” Trump said. “[Assad] was going to be overthrown…. And then Russia came in and saved him. And then Obama made one of the worst deals in history with the Iran deal. So you really have Iran, and you have Russia, and you have Assad.”

So there’s our poor confused Donnie, with his access to nukes and all. Just the other week he was telling Sean Hannity what a great guy Putin is and how sucky the US is, and now this. Apparently he’s only just learned that Putin is backing Assad. I don’t think that’s because nobody ever mentioned it to him.

Trump also told the story — with a bit of delight — of how he informed Chinese President Xi Jinping of the Syrian strike. Xi visited the United States last week and was at Mar-a-Lago with the president when the strike occurred.

Trump said that he and Xi had just finished dinner and were eating dessert — “the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you’ve ever seen,” Trump said — and he received a message that the ships carrying the missiles were “locked and loaded.” Trump ordered the strike, then turned to Xi to explain what was happening.

“I said, ‘Mr. President, let me explain something to you’ — this was during dessert — ‘we’ve just fired 59 missiles’ — all of which hit, by the way, unbelievable, from, you know, hundreds of miles away, all of which hit, amazing,” Trump said, breaking into the dialogue of his own story with an aside that ended with accusing Obama of depleting the military.

Which is typical, and again, not what you want in a person who has the responsibilities and powers of the office he holds. You want someone who can sustain a train of thought for more than 20 seconds.

“So what happens is, I said, ‘We’ve just launched 59 missiles heading to Iraq, and I wanted you to know this,’ ” Trump said, accidentally saying Iraq instead of Syria. “And he was eating his cake. And he was silent.”

His cake that was the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you’ve ever seen, which is an important point, so don’t forget it.

Trump said Xi paused for 10 seconds, then asked an interpreter to repeat what Trump had said.

“He said to me, ‘Anybody that uses gases’ — you could almost say ‘or anything else’ — ‘but anybody that was so brutal and uses gases to do that to young children and babies, it’s okay,’ ” said Trump, who has been known to misquote people in recounting conversations. “He was okay with it. He was okay.”

The cake was that good.

Apparently Trump can’t figure out for himself that gassing civilians is not ok. Apparently he needs a baby-mama to tell him – and she has to be his daughter.

President Donald Trump’s decision to launch a missile strike against Syria following a deadly chemical attack in the northwestern part of the country was influenced by his “heartbroken and outraged” daughter Ivanka, according to one of her brothers.

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Eric Trump said Ivanka likely swayed their father. “Ivanka is the mother of three kids and she has influence,” he said. “I’m sure she said, ‘Listen, this is horrible stuff.’ My father will act in times like that.”

Really. He’s that dumb? He’s so dumb that he needs to be told?

But I suspected as much, given that ridiculous press event when he said “babies…babies…little babies” – on the third iteration making an absurd “baby here” gesture with both hands. Clearly his little brain was all flooded with Baby thoughts, and not much else.

Do you get it now? Babies? The kind that can fit between those two little hands? Babies, I tell you!

Maybe we can get Ivanka to have a word with Oscar Munoz.

That evil piece of shit. EVIL.

The Trump administration informed Congress on Monday that it had terminated United States funding for the United Nations Population Fund, the world’s leading provider of family planning services, including contraception, to women in at least 155 countries.

The United States is one of the top donor nations to the United Nations, and the denial of funding was one of President Trump’s biggest moves yet to reduce financing for family planning.

Rich thieving rapist American white guy cuts off funding for contraception so that more poor brown women around the world will be forced to conceive and bear children they don’t want to conceive and bear.

In a letter to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the State Department’s Bureau of Legislative Affairs said it had determined that the Population Fund “supports or participates in the management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization,” a reference to the Kemp-Kasten Amendment, a 1980s-era law enacted in response to evidence of forced abortions and involuntary sterilization in China.

Women’s health advocates contend that evidence has repeatedly shown that the Population Fund’s work in China does not violate the amendment. But opponents of family planning have historically demanded that the United States end its support.

Opponents of the possibility for women to have a choice about getting pregnant. That’s what “opponents of family planning” really means. Opposition to contraception equals advocating the enslavement of women.

The Population Fund is the single largest international provider of contraception, family planning, and other reproductive health services. In 2016, health advocacy groups say, American support for the organization’s work prevented an estimated 320,000 pregnancies and averted 100,000 unsafe abortions, while ensuring 800,000 people had access to contraception.

The Trump regime wants an estimated 320,000 women to be impregnated against their will.