Trump 20: Sauron Doesn't Seem So Bad After All

[JMarie]

Highlights from tonight's Hannity:

-- Geraldo Rivera thinks Trump's town halls need "airport-type security" to prevent future tragedies (um,  no)

-- Laura Trump* (Eric's wife) thinks that "the Republican party is becoming the only party of tolerance" (um, no)

-- a preview of an interview between Ivanka and Fox & Friends' Ainsley Earhardt* (to be aired on Monday): "all different viewpoints being at the table is a positive thing" (um, really??)

-- Hannity has finally uncovered the two people responsible for unleashing Fake News in America:  Jeff Zucker, president of CNN, and Andy Lack, chairman of NBC and MSNBC.  While complaining about CNN, he ran a clip of Jeanne Moos talking about Trump's love of ice cream.  Like Watters World is such cutting-edge journalism.  The MSNBC portion bashed Rachel Maddow, of course.

And then there was this lovely commercial

https://www.ispot.tv/ad/wdaj/nra-carry-guard-dose-of-reality

If you look closely, the "thug" appears to have a darker complexion

https://www.thetrace.org/2017/04/nra-insurance-carry-guard-self-defense/

Quote

Through its political messaging and various media platforms, the NRA portrays for its members a world that is overrun with terrorists and violent criminals — a threat always around the next corner, and a gun on the hip the only guarantee of survival. Carry Guard allows the organization to profit from a mindset it actively engineered.

“If you can insure for an event that is very unlikely, but people think is common, you’ll get a ton of money and pay out very little,” Kochenburger said.

 

Quote

Critics of self-defense insurance worry that if more people acquire the sense of security that can comes with coverage, it could incentivize more of them to turn to lethal force.

“It makes people believe they really do have the entitlement to use force in situations where it’s not necessary,” said Mary Anne Franks, a law professor at the University of Miami. “Insurance says you can plan for these situations, and you’ll be covered if you’re in one."

The NRA did not respond to questions about Carry Guard. But the program’s promotional page says that the policy will cover 20 percent of legal defense costs up front when a member faces criminal charges. The remaining 80 percent is reimbursed up to the coverage limit after acquittal or dismissal. A member found guilty is not eligible for further reimbursement, beyond the initial 20 percent.

*both Laura and Ainsley are blond.  I have nothing against blonds, but we all know they're Trump's preferred flavor of woman

[candygirl200413]

I'm realizing the health care issue is causing me to breakout but this time (and the first time in a while) it's been those under the skin painful pimples :(.

Also why does the media still report Trump? and ask him questions?! When you know we aren't going to get the truth.

[fraurosena]

5 hours ago, 47of74 said:

According to Bloomberg, such thinking is petty and risks breaking the American political system by making it dysfunctional.

Uhm, I think this administration is already busy doing that all on its own. 

[K'Z'K]

The New York Times' David Leonhardt and Stuart A. Thompson have cataloged all the major lies that King Leer has told in public since he started ruining the country.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/23/opinion/trumps-lies.html

It must be seen with the graphics and, of course, all the lies. The commentary pulls no punches:

Spoiler

All the President’s Lies

President Trump’s political rise was built on a lie (about Barack Obama's birthplace). His lack of truthfulness has also become central to the Russia investigation, with James Comey, the former director of the F.B.I., testifying under oath about Trump's “lies, plain and simple.”

There is simply no precedent for an American president to spend so much time telling untruths. Every president has shaded the truth or told occasional whoppers. No other president — of either party — has behaved as Trump is behaving. He is trying to create an atmosphere in which reality is irrelevant.

We have set a conservative standard, leaving out many dubious statements (like the claim that his travel ban is “similar” to Obama administration policy). Some people may still take issue with this standard, arguing that the president wasn't speaking literally. But we believe his long pattern of using untruths to serve his purposes, as a businessman and politician, means that his statements are not simply careless errors.

We are using the word “lie” deliberately. Not every falsehood is deliberate on Trump's part. But it would be the height of naïveté to imagine he is merely making honest mistakes. He is lying.

Trump Told Public Lies or Falsehoods Every Day for His First 40 Days

The list above uses the conservative standard of demonstrably false statements. By that standard, Trump told a public lie on at least 20 of his first 40 days as president. But based on a broader standard — one that includes his many misleading statements (like exaggerating military spending in the Middle East) — Trump achieved something remarkable: He said something untrue, in public, every day for the first 40 days of his presidency. The streak didn’t end until March 1.

Since then, he has said something untrue on at least 74 of 113 days. On days without an untrue statement, he is often absent from Twitter, vacationing at Mar-a-Lago in Florida, or busy golfing.

The end of May was another period of relative public veracity — or at least public quiet — for the president. He seems to have been otherwise occupied, dealing with internal discussions about the Russia investigation and then embarking on a trip through the Middle East and Europe.

Trump’s Public Lies Sometimes Changed With Repetition

Sometimes, Trump can’t even keep his untruths straight. After he reversed a campaign pledge and declined to label China a currency manipulator, he kept changing his description of when China had stopped the bad behavior. Initially, he said it stopped once he took office. He then changed the turning point to the election, then to since he started talking about it, and then to some uncertain point in the distant past.

The Public’s Mistrust of Trump Grows

Trump has retained the support of most of his voters as well as the Republican leadership in Congress. But he has still paid some price for his lies. Nearly 60 percent of Americans say the president is not honest, polls show, up from about 53 percent when he took office.

 

 

[formergothardite]

So do people have to pay to go to Trump's rallies? If not, it would be worth it for tons of normal people to show up super early and fill his rallies with non-fans. No protesting or anything. Just silence whenever he talks. Taking away the joy of his rallies would be a wonderful way to get at him. He is barely holding it together now and without the rallies to recharge his batteries he will spend more time self-imploding. 

[GrumpyGran]

10 hours ago, JMarie said:

And then there was this lovely commercial

https://www.ispot.tv/ad/wdaj/nra-carry-guard-dose-of-reality

If you look closely, the "thug" appears to have a darker complexion

https://www.thetrace.org/2017/04/nra-insurance-carry-guard-self-defense/

Hahaha, fabulous! Never underestimate the NRA's ability to make money off the stupidity of their acolytes. So will your Carry Guard card shortcut that investigation at the police department after you blow away four or five people in the grocery store? Probably not. And how will it work when one chuckle-head accidentally kills another one? NRA essentially telling its members that they now have to pay for the post-oops-I-shot-someone support that used to be free.

2 hours ago, formergothardite said:

So do people have to pay to go to Trump's rallies? If not, it would be worth it for tons of normal people to show up super early and fill his rallies with non-fans. No protesting or anything. Just silence whenever he talks. Taking away the joy of his rallies would be a wonderful way to get at him. He is barely holding it together now and without the rallies to recharge his batteries he will spend more time self-imploding. 

@formergothardite,I'm sure you have to pay to get in. Trump isn't going to let you cheer for him for free!

[laPapessaGiovanna]

So that covfefe gem should have been preserved under the PRA. So much for a country where the ars oratoria was so highly regarded. Couple that with putting instruction in DeVos destroying hands, the cuts to research and innovation and you can affirm that nobody could have utterly trashed a country's culture in just a few months. All the while declaring that you're making it great again.

[fraurosena]

Sally Yates has an op-ed in WaPo.

Making America scared again won’t make us safer

Spoiler

In today’s polarized world, there aren’t many issues on which Democrats and Republicans agree. So when they do, we should seize the rare opportunity to move our country forward. One such issue is criminal-justice reform, and specifically the need for sentencing reform for drug offenses.

All across the political spectrum, in red states and blue states, from Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) and the Koch brothers to Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and the American Civil Liberties Union, there is broad consensus that the “lock them all up and throw away the key” approach embodied in mandatory minimum drug sentences is counterproductive, negatively affecting our ability to assure the safety of our communities.

But last month, Attorney General Jeff Sessions rolled back the clock to the 1980s, reinstating the harsh, indiscriminate use of mandatory minimum drug sentences imposed at the height of the crack epidemic. Sessions attempted to justify his directive in a Post op-ed last weekend, stoking fear by claiming that as a result of then-Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.’s Smart on Crime policy, the United States is gripped by a rising epidemic of violent crime that can only be cured by putting more drug offenders in jail for more time.

That argument just isn’t supported by the facts. Not only are violent crime rates still at historic lows — nearly half of what they were when I became a federal prosecutor in 1989 — but there is also no evidence that the increase in violent crime some cities have experienced is the result of drug offenders not serving enough time in prison. In fact, a recent study by the bipartisan U.S. Sentencing Commission found that drug defendants with shorter sentences were actually slightly less likely to commit crimes when released than those sentenced under older, more severe penalties.

Contrary to Sessions’s assertions, Smart on Crime focused our limited federal resources on cases that had the greatest impact on our communities — the most dangerous defendants and most complex cases. As a result, prosecutors charged more defendants with murder, assault, gun crimes and robbery than ever before. And a greater percentage of drug prosecutions targeted kingpins and drug dealers with guns.

During my 27 years at the Justice Department, I prosecuted criminals at the heart of the international drug trade, from high-level narcotics traffickers to violent gang leaders. And I had no hesitation about asking a judge to impose long prison terms in those cases.

But there’s a big difference between a cartel boss and a low-level courier. As the Sentencing Commission found, part of the problem with harsh mandatory-minimum laws passed a generation ago is that they use the weight of the drugs involved in the offense as a proxy for seriousness of the crime — to the exclusion of virtually all other considerations, including the dangerousness of the offender. Looking back, it’s clear that the mandatory-minimum laws cast too broad a net and, as a result, some low-level defendants are serving far longer sentences than are necessary — 20 years, 30 years, even mandatory life sentences, for nonviolent drug offenses.

Under Smart on Crime, the Justice Department took a more targeted approach, reserving the harshest of those penalties for the most violent and significant drug traffickers and encouraging prosecutors to use their discretion not to seek mandatory minimum sentences for lower-level, nonviolent offenders. Sessions’s new directive essentially reverses that progress, limiting prosecutors’ ability to use their judgment to ensure the punishment fits the crime.

That’s a problem for several reasons. First, it’s fiscally irresponsible and undermines public safety. Since 1980, the U.S. prison population has exploded from 500,000 to more than 2.2 million, resulting in the highest incarceration rate in the world and costing more than $80 billion a year. The federal prison population has grown 700 percent, with the Federal Bureau of Prisons budget now accounting for more than 25 percent of the entire Justice Department budget. That has serious public safety consequences: Every dollar spent imprisoning a low-level nonviolent drug offender for longer than necessary is a dollar we don’t have to investigate and prosecute serious threats, from child predators to terrorists. It’s a dollar we don’t have to support state and local law enforcement for cops on the street, who are the first lines of defense against violent crime. And it’s a dollar we don’t have for crime prevention or recidivism reduction within our prison system, essential components of building safe communities.

But just as significant are the human costs. More than 2 million children are growing up with a parent behind bars, including 1 in 9 African American children. Huge numbers of Americans are being housed in prisons far from their home communities, creating precisely the sort of community instability where violent crime takes root. Indiscriminate use of mandatory minimum sentencing has caused many Americans to lose faith in the criminal-justice system, undermining the type of police-community relationships that are so crucial to making our streets safer.

While there is always room to debate the most effective approach to criminal justice, that debate should be based on facts, not fear. It’s time to move past the campaign-style rhetoric of being “tough” or “soft” on crime. Justice and the safety of our communities depend on it.

I agree with the last bolded sentence. Alas, America is now living in a state of alternative facts, and where fear-mongering rules.

[47of74]

Conservative porn stars are finding support of Donald J. Putinfluffer to be hazardous to their careers and keeping quiet as a result. 

Pro-Trump Porn Stars Are Scared Silent: ‘The Industry Is Biased and No One Will Admit It’

Spoiler

Being a Trump supporter in the adult industry is dangerous. A mere mention of He Who Must Not Be Named, even to a group of conservative porn stars, will make the entire room go silent. Those who once joyously elected the reality TV star to office now cower in fear, refusing to discuss politics for the sake of their careers. Earlier this year, adult stars candidly chatted about endorsing Trump during Las Vegas’ Adult Entertainment Expo, one of porn’s largest gatherings of the year. But now, a mere six months later, being an outspoken conservative porn star is unheard of. Given the scarcity of work these days, being on the political fringes of a liberal-minded industry just isn’t worth it.

“I haven’t heard a peep from the people who once supported him,” says porn director/performer TarantinoXXX. “People in the industry are afraid of who might speak out against them; they’re afraid of the backlash. Once you get backlash from prominent people in this business you’re out of a job. You’ll stop getting work and it’ll push you down.”

He’s right. Every porn star who’d once been an outspoken Trump supporter—many of whom I’d spoken with during and immediately following the election—refused to go on the record, fearing possible industry backlash.

Porn director Brad Armstrong, who works alongside Jessica Drake at Wicked Pictures, won’t outright say he wouldn’t hire a Trump supporter but makes his distaste for them crystal clear. “To me, most Trump supporters show an incredible lack of character. I’d have a hard time dealing with them on a personal level if they were on set voicing their warped sense of values,” he says, noting that this is his own opinion and not that of Wicked or Drake. “And when you’re naked on set things have a tendency to get kinda personal.”

 

[JMarie]

1 hour ago, 47of74 said:

Conservative porn stars are finding support of Donald J. Putinfluffer to be hazardous to their careers and keeping quiet as a result. 

Pro-Trump Porn Stars Are Scared Silent: ‘The Industry Is Biased and No One Will Admit It’

  Hide contents

Being a Trump supporter in the adult industry is dangerous. A mere mention of He Who Must Not Be Named, even to a group of conservative porn stars, will make the entire room go silent. Those who once joyously elected the reality TV star to office now cower in fear, refusing to discuss politics for the sake of their careers. Earlier this year, adult stars candidly chatted about endorsing Trump during Las Vegas’ Adult Entertainment Expo, one of porn’s largest gatherings of the year. But now, a mere six months later, being an outspoken conservative porn star is unheard of. Given the scarcity of work these days, being on the political fringes of a liberal-minded industry just isn’t worth it.

“I haven’t heard a peep from the people who once supported him,” says porn director/performer TarantinoXXX. “People in the industry are afraid of who might speak out against them; they’re afraid of the backlash. Once you get backlash from prominent people in this business you’re out of a job. You’ll stop getting work and it’ll push you down.”

He’s right. Every porn star who’d once been an outspoken Trump supporter—many of whom I’d spoken with during and immediately following the election—refused to go on the record, fearing possible industry backlash.

Porn director Brad Armstrong, who works alongside Jessica Drake at Wicked Pictures, won’t outright say he wouldn’t hire a Trump supporter but makes his distaste for them crystal clear. “To me, most Trump supporters show an incredible lack of character. I’d have a hard time dealing with them on a personal level if they were on set voicing their warped sense of values,” he says, noting that this is his own opinion and not that of Wicked or Drake. “And when you’re naked on set things have a tendency to get kinda personal.”

 

Conservative porn stars?  is that an oxymoron, like jumbo shrimp?

[47of74]

10 minutes ago, JMarie said:

Conservative porn stars?  is that an oxymoron, like jumbo shrimp?

Yeah.  Much like a compassionate conservative. 

I guess a lot of the conservative porn stars thought he really didn't mean all that anti-porn stuff he said and that pledge he signed, he was just doing that to get votes from the reich wing. 

[GreyhoundFan]

"This is what foreign spies think when they read President Trump’s tweets"

Spoiler

Every time President Trump tweets, journalists and Twitter followers attempt to analyze what he means. Intelligence agencies around the world do, too: They’re trying to determine what vulnerabilities the president of the United States may have. And he’s giving them a lot to work with.

Trump’s Twitter feed is a gold mine for every foreign intelligence agency. Usually, intelligence officers’ efforts to collect information on world leaders are methodical, painstaking and often covert. CIA operatives have risked their lives to learn about foreign leaders so the United States could devise strategies to counter our adversaries. With Trump, though, secret operations are not necessary to understand what’s on his mind: The president’s unfiltered thoughts are available night and day, broadcast to his 32.7 million Twitter followers immediately and without much obvious mediation by diplomats, strategists or handlers. 

Intelligence agencies try to answer these main questions when looking at a rival head of state: Who is he as a person? What type of leader is he? How does that compare to what he strives to be or presents himself as? What can we expect from him? And how can we use this insight to our advantage?

At the CIA, I tracked and analyzed terrorists and other U.S. enemies, including North Korea. But we never had such a rich source of raw intelligence about a world leader, and we certainly never had the opportunity that our adversaries (and our allies) have now — to get a real-time glimpse of a major world leader’s preoccupations, personality quirks and habits of mind. If we had, it would have given us significant advantages in our dealings with them. 

Trump’s tweets offer plenty of material for analysis. His frequent strong statements in reaction to news coverage or events make it appear as if he lacks impulse control. In building a profile of Trump, an analyst would offer suggestions on how foreign nations could instigate stress or deescalate situations, depending on what type of influence they may want to have over the president. For instance, after former FBI director James B. Comey testified about his conversations with Trump, the president was silent on social media — until sending this at 6:10 a.m. the next day: 

...

Followed, two hours later, by this: 

...

Virtually every other world leader — and certainly every past U.S. president — would have had his press office deal with getting his feelings about the testimony out. Indeed, the official @POTUS Twitter account, controlled by aides, mostly posts what a reader would expect from a head of state (though it does occasionally retweet Trump’s personal account). Trump’s own @realDonaldTrump account, however, is much more impulsive. 

While Trump was new to national politics when he started his presidential campaign in 2015, he wasn’t new to Twitter. A review of his old tweets would reveal how well flattery can work to get his attention and admiration.

...

If I were an intelligence analyst for Saudi Arabia, for instance, I might suggest that the authoritarian government there should compel newspapers to write articles friendly to Trump (and, in fact, Saudi papers published articles praising first lady Melania Trump’s fashion choices during the president’s visit there last month). And I would certainly suggest that Saudi officials flatter him in person — perhaps arranging, as the Saudis did during his visit, to post billboards featuring Trump’s words and his image.

As president, Trump has continued to show himself to be quick to anger if he feels personally attacked. And he’s eager to take credit when he thinks he’s been influential. His tweet this month appearing to welcome the rift between Saudi Arabia and Qatar is a classic example: Trump declared that the standoff arose because he had demanded that gulf states stop funding radical ideology. (It did not.)

Trump’s tweets also clearly reveal how sensitive he is about the investigation into Russia’s involvement in last year’s campaign, especially any suggestion that it diminishes his victory.

...

An adversary could devise a plan to exploit that sensitivity: To appeal to Trump personally, they would intentionally disparage the investigators and the investigation. Russian officials and leaders have been doing this consistently — though, of course, that also lines up with their interests more broadly. Russian President Vladimir Putin (a former intelligence chief and longtime spy) has been mocking the investigation since it got started and even sarcastically offered Comey political asylum this month. 

 

What Trump doesn’t say can be very revealing, too. For instance, the lapse of time between when the USS Fitzgerald collided with a cargo ship off the coast of Japan (12:30 p.m. on June 16, in Washington) and when the president tweeted about the incident (10:08 a.m. the next day) was nearly 23 hours. The tragedy marked the U.S. Navy’s most significant loss of life aboard a vessel since terrorists bombed the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000.

 Typically, a president would quickly make public remarks about a significant military loss. With Trump, intelligence analysts would note the inconsistency compared with previous administrations and search for similar patterns. Is Trump so hands-off that he waited for his secretary of defense to speak? Did something else capture his attention during those hours that he found to be a higher priority? Between the crash and his first public statement about it, Trump tweeted a video of his remarks on a new Cuba policy, a picture of himself signing the Cuba memorandum and a reference to his campaign promise about Cuba; he also retweeted Sean Hannity, a Fox News personality, promoting an upcoming show on the “Deep State’s allies in the media” working to undermine Trump. 

Of course, it can sometimes be useful for the safety and security of the United States when the president telegraphs his foreign policy vision. That gives allies and adversaries alike a clear sense of what to expect from an administration.

In Trump’s case, though, his Twitter feed doesn’t serve quite that role. The president’s frequent contradiction of his own aides also provides useful intelligence for foreign analysts. Last month, Trump tweeted that it was “not possible ” for administration officials to be perfectly accurate in describing what his White House is doing. Why not? Is the White House not coordinating messaging? Has Trump defined his own course of action, regardless of what his Cabinet or staff has been told? Policy and public diplomacy typically require interagency coordination, but Trump forces the U.S. government to react to his whims instead — which makes his Twitter feed that much more important to analyze and understand.

Analysts can glean information about Trump’s sleep patterns from the time of day or night when he tweets, showing which topics keep him up, his stress level and his state of mind. Twitter also often reveals what Trump is watching on TV and when, as well as what websites he turns to for news and analysis. Knowing this can be useful for foreign governments when they are planning media events or deciding where to try to seek coverage of their version of world events.

Even deleted tweets would be of interest. Trump mostly appears to delete tweets because of spelling errors, later replacing them with a correction. For an intelligence analyst, this would confirm that Trump’s Twitter feed really is a raw insight into his thought process, without much input from aides.

Analysts would also be likely to use technology to perform content analysis on the president’s tweets in the aggregate. Intelligence agencies can employ a more robust version than the open-source projects that news organizations have used, because they can marry Trump’s tweets with information they collect through intercepts and other means. Software could look for patterns in speech or word categories representing confidence related to policy, whether Trump is considering opposing points of view and if he harbors uncertainty toward any subject. Computers can perform metadata analysis to build timelines and compare Trump’s Twitter feed with his known public schedule, creating a database of when and where he tweets and what else he’s doing at the time. Anything that provides a digital footprint adds context to the analysis. 

Trump says it’s the press’s fault that he uses Twitter as much as he does. His aides clearly want him to stop, but the president just as clearly wants and needs to be heard unfiltered. Fortunately for him, the platform lets him speak directly to his supporters whenever he chooses. Unfortunately for the rest of us, they aren’t the only ones listening.

Every day, I am amazed that this menace is ostensibly in charge.

[GreyhoundFan]

Oh, I so hope so: "Could Trump’s White House tapes ruse actually get him in legal trouble?"

Spoiler

...

President Trump and former House speaker Newt Gingrich have both now admitted, for all intents and purposes, that Trump's ruse about possible White House tapes was meant to influence James B. Comey's public comments. In an interview Friday with Fox News, Trump congratulated himself for the ploy.

“Who knows, I think his story may have changed,” Trump said. Asked whether his strategy was smart, Trump said, “It wasn't very stupid; I can tell you that.”

...

Added Gingrich in an interview with AP: “I think he was, in his way, instinctively trying to rattle Comey. … His instinct is: 'I'll outbluff you.'"

But was it just political subterfuge, or was it something that could haunt Trump in his ongoing obstruction of justice investigation? Some have even suggested it could amount to witness tampering.

Norm Eisen, a former counsel to the Obama White House and frequent Trump critic, tweeted this after Trump's initial tweet:

...

Meanwhile, Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, also nodded in the direction of potential witness tampering on Thursday, after Trump revealed he had no tapes.

“If the president had no tapes, why did he suggest otherwise? Did he seek to mislead the public? Was he trying to intimidate or silence James Comey?” Schiff asked. “And if so, did he take other steps to discourage potential witnesses from speaking out?”

Trump isn't going to be brought up on charges for this — whatever punishment comes would be in the hands of Congress — and legal experts doubt he would actually be accused of witness tampering, given the circumstances. But some of them say it could feed into the obstruction of justice case.

“If Gingrich’s analysis of what was going on here is accurate and were to be accepted by a finder-of-fact, then this could definitely raise additional obstruction of justice concerns for Trump,” said Peter Zeidenberg, a former longtime Justice Department prosecutor.

Another longtime former Justice Department lawyer, American University law school professor William Yeomans, said, “I certainly think Trump's tape bluff contributes to the large, accumulating pile of circumstantial evidence that he intended to impede the Russia investigation.”

Ohio State University law professor Joshua Dressler disagreed. He said that Gingrich's explanation that the tapes tweet might have been malicious adds to the “smell of the obstruction claim.” But he said that's probably about it: “I don’t think this takes us much further than we already are.”

As for the specific tampering question: According to U.S. code, witness tampering is defined in part as when someone intimidates, threatens or “corruptly persuades another person, or attempts to do so, or engages in misleading conduct toward another person” with the intent to “influence, delay or prevent” testimony.

David Shapiro, a former FBI special agent and professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said you could make a cause that this amounted to tampering and that Trump was “gaming the expected testimony” of Comey. But he said Trump could easily argue that he merely wanted any such tapes, if they existed, to be released. Trump, after all, never claimed to actually possess or record any tapes himself; he simply suggested they might exist.

“Thus, it seems doubtful whether Trump engaged in misleading conduct,” Shapiro said.

Renato Mariotti, another former federal prosecutor, agreed with Shapiro's conclusion.

“Perhaps someone could argue that the president's tweet could be used to discourage Comey from testifying, because his words would never precisely match a tape; I don't buy it,” Mariotti said. "[Comey] testified carefully from notes he wrote shortly after the conversations. Perjury is not an issue unless you believe you are testifying falsely. People should keep in mind that not every foolish action is a federal crime.”

Zeidenberg agreed that Trump's defense would probably be that he was merely trying to get Comey to tell the truth.

“But my guess is that his lawyers are pulling their hair out because of statements like this,” Zeidenberg said. “He is dancing right up to the line, and just giving more ammunition to Mueller.”

Indeed, I've argued that being Trump's lawyer may be the second most difficult job in Washington, behind being his spokesman. And Dressler says the tapes ruse is problematic on both fronts — the legal one and the PR one.

“If I were making the argument for obstruction or impeachment, I would say that asserting a false statement that there are tapes — or, perhaps more accurately, hinting … that there are tapes that one knows is false — is an odd way to further justice,” Dressler said. “That makes defending Trump as innocent of obstruction more tenuous.”

 

[GreyhoundFan]

This is so true: "‘Trump Is What Happens When a Political Party Abandons Ideas’"

Spoiler

Almost two years ago, I wrote an article for Politico endorsing Donald Trump for president. It was a tongue-in-cheek effort—I “supported” Trump only because I thought he would lose to Hillary Clinton, disastrously, and that his defeat would cleanse the Republican Party of the extremism and nuttiness that drove me out of it. I had hoped that post-2016, what remained of the moderate wing of the GOP would reassert itself as it did after the Goldwater debacle in 1964, and exorcise the crazies.

Trump was a guaranteed loser, I thought. In the Virginia presidential primary, I even voted for him, hoping to hasten the party’s demise. In the weeks before the November election, I predicted a Clinton presidency would fix much of what ails our country. On November 8, I voted for Clinton and left the ballot booth reasonably sure she would win.

Needless to say, I was as dumbfounded by the election results as Max Bialystock was by the success of “Springtime for Hitler.” For two months after Trump won, I couldn’t read any news about the election, and considered abandoning political commentary permanently. It wasn’t just that Trump disgusted me; I was disgusted with myself for being so stupid. I no longer trusted my own powers of observation and analysis.

Almost everything that has happened since November 8 has been the inverse of what I’d imagined. Trump didn’t lose; he won. The Republican Party isn’t undergoing some sort of reckoning over what it believes; his branch of the Republican Party has taken control. Most troubling, perhaps, is that rather than reassert themselves, the moderate Republicans have almost all rolled over entirely.

Trump has turned out to be far, far worse than I imagined. He has instituted policies so right wing they make Ronald Reagan, for whom I worked, look like a liberal Democrat. He has appointed staff people far to the right of the Republican mainstream in many positions, and they are instituting policies that are frighteningly extreme. Environmental Protection Administration Administrator Scott Pruitt proudly denies the existence of climate change, and is doing his best to implement every item Big Oil has had on its wish list since the agency was established by Richard Nixon. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is actively hostile to the very concept of public education and is doing her best to abolish it. Every day, Attorney General Jeff Sessions institutes some new policy to take incarceration and law enforcement back to the Dark Ages. Trump’s proposed budget would eviscerate the social safety net for the sole purpose of giving huge tax cuts to the ultrawealthy.

And if those policies weren’t enough, conservatives—who, after all, believe in liberty and a system of checks and balances to restrain the government to its proper role—have plenty of reason to be upset by those actions Trump has taken that transcend our traditional right-left ideological divide. He’s voiced not only skepticism of NATO, but outright hostility to it. He’s pulled America back from its role as an international advocate for human rights. He’s attacked the notion of an independent judiciary. He personally intervened to request the FBI to ease up on its investigation of a former adviser of his, then fired FBI Director James Comey and freely admitted he did so to alleviate the pressure he felt from Comey’s investigation. For those conservatives who were tempted to embrace a “wait-and-see” approach to Trump, what they’ve seen, time and again, is almost unimaginable.

And yet as surprising as this all has been, it’s also the natural outgrowth of 30 years of Republican pandering to the lowest common denominator in American politics. Trump is what happens when a political party abandons ideas, demonizes intellectuals, degrades politics and simply pursues power for the sake of power.

***

In the wake of Goldwater’s defeat, many conservatives concluded that their philosophy was insufficiently well-grounded in the social sciences and lacked an empirical foundation. For example, Goldwater talked about privatizing Social Security, but had no plan whatsoever for how to do it. Hearing his rhetoric on the subject, those receiving Social Security assumed, not unreasonably, that they would just be cut off.

Conservative leaders like William F. Buckley, the editor of National Review, the leading conservative publication, took to heart progressive historian Richard Hofstadter’s critique of widespread paranoia on the right. Buckley purged the extreme libertarians like Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard, anti-Semites like Willis Carto of the Liberty Lobby, and the conspiracy-obsessed John Birch Society. And he made peace with the civil rights movement, as historian Al Felzenberg has documented.

In the 1970s, the conservative movement became receptive to moderate conservatives, called “neoconservatives,” such as Irving Kristol (father of Bill, the prominent anti-Trump conservative), who had been turned off by the anti-intellectualism of movement conservatism in the Goldwater era. Irving Kristol established an important journal, The Public Interest, which brought intellectual rigor and sophisticated policy analysis to the conservative table. Politicians like my former boss, Representative Jack Kemp, began reading it religiously. Others, like Rep. Dave Stockman, wrote for it and made names for themselves in the process. Eventually, this crowd found a powerful leader in Reagan, who appointed important neoconservatives like Stockman and Jeane Kirkpatrick to high-level positions.

The Heritage Foundation, established in 1973, was formed in part to provide policy analysis that was conservative, deeply studied and concisely digestible. When I worked there in the mid-1980s, it was a genuine think tank, an intellectual institution that did academic-quality research. We saw our job as putting policy flesh on the bones of Reagan’s conservative rhetoric, helping plow the ground for conservative initiatives too radical to be proposed by the administration just yet. In this era, important work was done at Heritage on reforming the tax system, welfare, Social Security and the health system—work that has stood the test of time.

When I became active in the Republican Party in the mid-1970s, it was the party of thoughtful men and women who were transforming America’s domestic policies while strengthening its moral leadership on the global stage. As Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote in a July 1980 New York Times article, “the GOP has become a party of ideas.”

And then, everything began to change.

Republicans took control of Congress in 1994 after nationalizing the election into broad themes and catchphrases. Newt Gingrich, the marshal of these efforts, even released a list of words Republican candidates should use to glorify themselves (common sense, prosperity, empower) and hammer their opponents (liberal, pathetic, traitors); soon, every Republican in Congress spoke the same language, using words carefully run through focus groups by Republican pollster Frank Luntz. Budgets for House committees were cut, bleeding away policy experts, and GOP committee chairs were selected based on loyalty to the party and how much money they could raise. Gone were the days when members were incentivized to speak with nuance, or hone a policy expertise (especially as committee chairs could now serve for only six years). In power, Republicans decided they didn’t need any more research or analysis; they had their agenda, and just needed to get it enacted. Only a Democratic president stood in their way, and so 100 percent of Republicans’ efforts went into attempting to oust or weaken Bill Clinton and, when that failed, elect a Republican president who would do nothing but sign into law bills passed by the GOP Congress.

President George W. Bush didn’t realize he was supposed to just be a passive bill-signing machine; he kept insisting that Republicans enact his priorities, which, often, were not very conservative—No Child Left Behind Act, steel tariffs, a tax cut with few supply-side elements. His worst transgression, for me, was the budget-busting Medicare Part D legislation, which massively expanded the welfare state and the national debt, yet was enthusiastically supported by a great many House conservatives, including Congressman Paul Ryan, who had claimed to hold office for the purpose of abolishing entitlement programs. Republican hypocrisy on the issue caused me to become estranged from my party.

In the 14 years since then, I have watched from the sidelines as Republican policy analysis and research have virtually disappeared altogether, replaced with sound bites and talking points. The Heritage Foundation morphed into Heritage Action for America, ceasing to do any real research and losing all its best policy experts as it transformed from an august center whose focus was the study and development of public policy into one devoted mainly to amplifying political campaign slogans. Talk radio and Fox News, where no idea too complicated for a mind with a sixth-grade education is ever heard, became the tail wagging the conservative dog. Conservative magazines like National Review, which once boasted world-class intellectuals such as James Burnham and Russell Kirk among its columnists, jumped on the bandwagon, dumbing itself down to appeal to the common man, who is deemed to be the font of all wisdom. (For example, the magazine abandoned the ecumenical approach to immigration of Reagan, who granted amnesty to undocumentedimmigrants in 1986, to a rigid anti-immigrant policy largely indistinguishable from the one Trump ran on.)

One real-world result of the lobotomizing of conservative intellectualism is that when forced to produce a replacement for Obamacare—something Republican leaders had sworn they had in their pocket for eight years—there was nothing. Not just no legislation—no workable concept that adhered to the many promises Republicans had made, like coverage for pre-existing conditions and the assurance that nobody would lose their coverage. You’d think that House Speaker Ryan could have found a staff slot for one person to be working on an actual Obamacare replacement all these years, just in case.

With hindsight, it’s no surprise that the glorification of anti-elitism and anti-intellectualism that has been rampant on the right at least since the election of Barack Obama would give rise to someone like Trump. Anyone who ever read Sinclair Lewis’ “It Can’t Happen Here,” which imagined a fascist dictator taking power in 1930s America, recognizes that Trump is the real-life embodiment of Senator Buzz Windrip—a know-nothing populist who becomes president by promising something for everyone, with no clue or concern for how to actually accomplish it. Windrip was “vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his ‘ideas’ almost idiotic,” Lewis wrote. “Certainly there was nothing exhilarating in the actual words of his speeches, nor anything convincing in his philosophy. His political platforms were only the wings of a windmill.”

Conservatives are starting to accept that Trump is not the leader they had hoped for and is more of a liability for their agenda than an asset. They are also starting to recognize that their intellectual infrastructure is badly damaged, in need of repair, and that the GOP and intellectual conservatism are not interchangeable. The Heritage Foundation recently fired its president, former Senator Jim DeMint, in part because he had allowed its research capabilities to deteriorate. The journal National Affairs aspires to be the serious, conservative policy-oriented journal that The Public Interest was. And some leaders, like Bill Kristol, have courageously stood up against the GOP’s pervasive Trumpism (“I look forward to the day when American conservatism regains its moral health and political sanity, and the David Horowitz center is back on the fringe, where I’m afraid it belongs,” Kristol recently told the Washington Post).

These are small steps, and promising—you have to start somewhere, after all—but what conservative intellectuals really need for a full-blown revival is a crushing Republican defeat—Goldwater plus Watergate rolled into one. A defeat so massive there can be no doubt about the message it sends that Trumpian populism and anti-intellectualism are no path to conservative policy success. In the meantime, there are hopeful signs that the long-dormant moderate wing of the GOP is coming alive again. In Kansas, Trumpian Governor Sam Brownback was recently rebuked when a Republican-controlled Legislature overrode his veto to raise taxes after the cuts previously enacted by Brownback proved disastrous to the state’s finances. And although their efforts have been modest thus far, moderate Republicans in Congress have helped soften Republican initiatives on health, the budget and gays.

The implementation of long-term, successful policy change cannot be short-circuited, it must be built on a solid foundation of thinking, analysis and research by smart, well-educated people. Listening to the common man rant about things he knows nothing about is a dead-end that leads to Trump and failure because there is no “there” there, just mindless rhetoric and frustration.

Having so badly miscalled the 2016 election, I’m not going out on a limb here and predicting a 1974-style defeat for GOP members of Congress next year, and I am fully aware that Democrats are always capable of seizing defeat from the jaws of victory. But the preconditions are falling into place for a political transformation between 2018 and 2020 that could result in the type of defeat that I think is necessary for my old party and the conservative movement to rebuild themselves from the ground up.

Ideally, I’d like to see an intellectual revival on the right such as we saw after the Goldwater defeat and the Watergate debacle. Freed from the stultifying strictures and kowtowing to know-nothing Trumpian populists—perhaps building on new outlets and institutions that celebrate intellectual rigor and reject shallow sound bites—a few conservative thinkers can plow a path toward sane, responsible conservative governance, just as people like Irving Kristol and Jack Kemp did during the Carter years. (Some conservative thinkers, such as the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin, speculate that Mitt Romney may emerge as the leader of a sane, modern, technocratic wing of an intellectually revitalized GOP.) If a leader doesn’t emerge, moderate Republicans—many of whom did not and will not support Trump—could be lost to the Democratic Party for good.

If the Republican Party and the conservative movement abandon populism, mindless appeals to the electorate’s lowest common denominator, and the pursuit of power for the sake of power and instead pursue a fully formed policy agenda based on solid analysis and research, then I don’t think it will take very long for a Republican revival. If it takes a Trump debacle to make that happen, it will have been worth it.

It would be nice if there was an actual thoughtful conservative movement, but I can't see any current Repugs leading the charge.

[GreyhoundFan]

Sigh: "Koch network ramps up political spending while trying to push Trump team"

Spoiler

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — The leadership of the Koch brothers' network is brushing off its occasionally chilly attitude toward President Donald Trump, trying to nudge the administration in its direction as the group's annual summit began Saturday just after Charles Koch met with Vice President Mike Pence.

The network of conservative donors announced Saturday it plans to spend between $300 million and $400 million on politics and policy during the 2018 cycle.

“When we look at our budget for politics and policy, it’s our largest we’ve ever had,” said Tim Phillips, the president of Americans for Prosperity, the network's grassroots organizing arm with chapters in dozens of states.

The Koch network, led by billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, rivals the Republican National Committee in size, scope and budget. The alliance of conservative donors has worked for decades to move both electoral politics and the country at large in a libertarian direction with everything from political ad buys to donations to universities.

The millions from the Koch network and its wealthy allies will boost the Trump administration on some key priorities, especially tax reform and rolling back regulations. It also will help push back against others — especially Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ desire to implement tough-on-crime policies — and working to make Obamacare repeal efforts more conservative. And they could prove critical to Republican efforts to retain the House and expand a majority in the Senate.

“We’ve made tremendous progress on the federal level that we haven’t been able to make in the last ten years,” said James Davis, a top network official.

Pence has longstanding ties to the Koch network, while Charles Koch has been openly critical of the vice president’s boss since the early days of the Republican primary campaign. Through Pence, the group’s allies have established a beachhead in the administration. Pence and Koch spoke Friday night for about 45 minutes about tax reform, legislation Trump signed on Friday to overhaul the Department of Veterans Affairs and other topics.

The meeting included Marc Short, Trump's director of legislative affairs and a former Koch network official, Pence staffer Marty Obst and several current top Koch officials, including Mark Holden and Phillips, the Americans for Prosperity president.

The Koch network’s annual seminar, as the group dubbed it, began Saturday at the Broadmoor Resort here and continues until Monday. Officials said the seminar included more donors than ever, and more new donors than ever.

Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens were set to speak to donors Saturday night, with Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse, a frequent Trump critic, scheduled to deliver a speech Sunday. Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey will discuss education policy on Monday, and another group of lawmakers is set to discuss tax reform.

Tax reform is arguably the area where the network seems most pleased with the Trump administration. Phillips said AFP plans to hold grassroots rallies in 36 states around the country to push for a tax overhaul. Officials also gave sterling reviews to Trump’s judicial appointments and efforts to roll back regulations.

But they were openly disappointed with GOP efforts to repeal Obamacare. “At the end of the day, this bill is not going to fix health care,” Davis said.

Phillips added: “We’ve been disappointed that this has not been more dramatic. We’re seeking to make it better. We’re not walking away. This is too important an issue for too many Americans.”

The officials said the proposal needs to do more roll back Medicaid expansion, arguing the program didn’t do enough to make health care more affordable for poor people or improve health outcomes. The Senate could vote on its Obamacare repeal before the July 4 recess, and it’s unclear whether Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will be able to round up the required 50 votes for the plan.

Phillips acknowledged they discussed the proposal with Pence. “It was a cordial discussion of issues,” he said. “But there was not any kind of ask by either side.”

Of the four conservative senators who announced their opposition to the health care plan, two — Texas’ Ted Cruz and Utah’s Mike Lee — are attending the seminar, as is NRSC Chair Cory Gardner of Colorado, vulnerable Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake and Texas Sen. John Cornyn, the GOP’s number two in the Senate.

A host of House Freedom Caucus members, including Reps. Justin Amash, Dave Brat, Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows, showed up. Two potential contenders for Florida governor — state House Speaker Richard Corcoran and Rep. Ron DeSantis — are in attendance, along with Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt, the likely GOP nominee for Nevada governor.

The network officials were relentlessly critical of Sessions’ directive to return to harsh sentencing guidelines and continue the war on drugs, with Marc Holden, a top network official who has served as the Kochs’ criminal justice guru, calling the order a “failed, big government, top-down approach.”

“We had a war on drugs,” Holden said. “Drugs won.”

Democrats, especially former Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, have turned the Kochs into a liberal boogeyman and frequent star of online fundraising efforts and argue their conservative policy goals serve the billionaires’ business interests. The group spent tens of millions on television ads and other political activities during the 2016 cycle, but stayed out of the presidential race.

The group opened the weekend by announcing a plan to team up with National Football League Hall of Famer Deion Sanders to raise $21 million for non-profit organizations helping low-income families in Dallas.

“We’re going to provoke so much change and put a flashlight on so many things the light needs to shine on,” Sanders said of the new group.

Sanders, at a press conference, went out of his way to defend the Koch family.

“He could be on an island that he owns, but he’s instead thinking of ways to make this country a better place, including the inner city,” said Sanders, who recently traveled to Wichita to meet with Charles Koch.

I shudder thinking about the Koch Brothers possibly influencing Agent Orange.

[fraurosena]

5 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Sigh: "Koch network ramps up political spending while trying to push Trump team"

  Reveal hidden contents

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — The leadership of the Koch brothers' network is brushing off its occasionally chilly attitude toward President Donald Trump, trying to nudge the administration in its direction as the group's annual summit began Saturday just after Charles Koch met with Vice President Mike Pence.

The network of conservative donors announced Saturday it plans to spend between $300 million and $400 million on politics and policy during the 2018 cycle.

“When we look at our budget for politics and policy, it’s our largest we’ve ever had,” said Tim Phillips, the president of Americans for Prosperity, the network's grassroots organizing arm with chapters in dozens of states.

The Koch network, led by billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, rivals the Republican National Committee in size, scope and budget. The alliance of conservative donors has worked for decades to move both electoral politics and the country at large in a libertarian direction with everything from political ad buys to donations to universities.

The millions from the Koch network and its wealthy allies will boost the Trump administration on some key priorities, especially tax reform and rolling back regulations. It also will help push back against others — especially Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ desire to implement tough-on-crime policies — and working to make Obamacare repeal efforts more conservative. And they could prove critical to Republican efforts to retain the House and expand a majority in the Senate.

“We’ve made tremendous progress on the federal level that we haven’t been able to make in the last ten years,” said James Davis, a top network official.

Pence has longstanding ties to the Koch network, while Charles Koch has been openly critical of the vice president’s boss since the early days of the Republican primary campaign. Through Pence, the group’s allies have established a beachhead in the administration. Pence and Koch spoke Friday night for about 45 minutes about tax reform, legislation Trump signed on Friday to overhaul the Department of Veterans Affairs and other topics.

The meeting included Marc Short, Trump's director of legislative affairs and a former Koch network official, Pence staffer Marty Obst and several current top Koch officials, including Mark Holden and Phillips, the Americans for Prosperity president.

The Koch network’s annual seminar, as the group dubbed it, began Saturday at the Broadmoor Resort here and continues until Monday. Officials said the seminar included more donors than ever, and more new donors than ever.

Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens were set to speak to donors Saturday night, with Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse, a frequent Trump critic, scheduled to deliver a speech Sunday. Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey will discuss education policy on Monday, and another group of lawmakers is set to discuss tax reform.

Tax reform is arguably the area where the network seems most pleased with the Trump administration. Phillips said AFP plans to hold grassroots rallies in 36 states around the country to push for a tax overhaul. Officials also gave sterling reviews to Trump’s judicial appointments and efforts to roll back regulations.

But they were openly disappointed with GOP efforts to repeal Obamacare. “At the end of the day, this bill is not going to fix health care,” Davis said.

Phillips added: “We’ve been disappointed that this has not been more dramatic. We’re seeking to make it better. We’re not walking away. This is too important an issue for too many Americans.”

The officials said the proposal needs to do more roll back Medicaid expansion, arguing the program didn’t do enough to make health care more affordable for poor people or improve health outcomes. The Senate could vote on its Obamacare repeal before the July 4 recess, and it’s unclear whether Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will be able to round up the required 50 votes for the plan.

Phillips acknowledged they discussed the proposal with Pence. “It was a cordial discussion of issues,” he said. “But there was not any kind of ask by either side.”

Of the four conservative senators who announced their opposition to the health care plan, two — Texas’ Ted Cruz and Utah’s Mike Lee — are attending the seminar, as is NRSC Chair Cory Gardner of Colorado, vulnerable Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake and Texas Sen. John Cornyn, the GOP’s number two in the Senate.

A host of House Freedom Caucus members, including Reps. Justin Amash, Dave Brat, Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows, showed up. Two potential contenders for Florida governor — state House Speaker Richard Corcoran and Rep. Ron DeSantis — are in attendance, along with Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt, the likely GOP nominee for Nevada governor.

The network officials were relentlessly critical of Sessions’ directive to return to harsh sentencing guidelines and continue the war on drugs, with Marc Holden, a top network official who has served as the Kochs’ criminal justice guru, calling the order a “failed, big government, top-down approach.”

“We had a war on drugs,” Holden said. “Drugs won.”

Democrats, especially former Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, have turned the Kochs into a liberal boogeyman and frequent star of online fundraising efforts and argue their conservative policy goals serve the billionaires’ business interests. The group spent tens of millions on television ads and other political activities during the 2016 cycle, but stayed out of the presidential race.

The group opened the weekend by announcing a plan to team up with National Football League Hall of Famer Deion Sanders to raise $21 million for non-profit organizations helping low-income families in Dallas.

“We’re going to provoke so much change and put a flashlight on so many things the light needs to shine on,” Sanders said of the new group.

Sanders, at a press conference, went out of his way to defend the Koch family.

“He could be on an island that he owns, but he’s instead thinking of ways to make this country a better place, including the inner city,” said Sanders, who recently traveled to Wichita to meet with Charles Koch.

I shudder thinking about the Koch Brothers possibly influencing Agent Orange.

There, @GreyhoundFan, FTFY!
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that all politics are bought and paid for in the current American system. 

 

Here's Al Franken weighing in on the Kill-Bill:

 

[GrumpyGran]

13 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Sigh: "Koch network ramps up political spending while trying to push Trump team"

  Reveal hidden contents

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — The leadership of the Koch brothers' network is brushing off its occasionally chilly attitude toward President Donald Trump, trying to nudge the administration in its direction as the group's annual summit began Saturday just after Charles Koch met with Vice President Mike Pence.

The network of conservative donors announced Saturday it plans to spend between $300 million and $400 million on politics and policy during the 2018 cycle.

“When we look at our budget for politics and policy, it’s our largest we’ve ever had,” said Tim Phillips, the president of Americans for Prosperity, the network's grassroots organizing arm with chapters in dozens of states.

The Koch network, led by billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, rivals the Republican National Committee in size, scope and budget. The alliance of conservative donors has worked for decades to move both electoral politics and the country at large in a libertarian direction with everything from political ad buys to donations to universities.

The millions from the Koch network and its wealthy allies will boost the Trump administration on some key priorities, especially tax reform and rolling back regulations. It also will help push back against others — especially Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ desire to implement tough-on-crime policies — and working to make Obamacare repeal efforts more conservative. And they could prove critical to Republican efforts to retain the House and expand a majority in the Senate.

“We’ve made tremendous progress on the federal level that we haven’t been able to make in the last ten years,” said James Davis, a top network official.

Pence has longstanding ties to the Koch network, while Charles Koch has been openly critical of the vice president’s boss since the early days of the Republican primary campaign. Through Pence, the group’s allies have established a beachhead in the administration. Pence and Koch spoke Friday night for about 45 minutes about tax reform, legislation Trump signed on Friday to overhaul the Department of Veterans Affairs and other topics.

The meeting included Marc Short, Trump's director of legislative affairs and a former Koch network official, Pence staffer Marty Obst and several current top Koch officials, including Mark Holden and Phillips, the Americans for Prosperity president.

The Koch network’s annual seminar, as the group dubbed it, began Saturday at the Broadmoor Resort here and continues until Monday. Officials said the seminar included more donors than ever, and more new donors than ever.

Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens were set to speak to donors Saturday night, with Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse, a frequent Trump critic, scheduled to deliver a speech Sunday. Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey will discuss education policy on Monday, and another group of lawmakers is set to discuss tax reform.

Tax reform is arguably the area where the network seems most pleased with the Trump administration. Phillips said AFP plans to hold grassroots rallies in 36 states around the country to push for a tax overhaul. Officials also gave sterling reviews to Trump’s judicial appointments and efforts to roll back regulations.

But they were openly disappointed with GOP efforts to repeal Obamacare. “At the end of the day, this bill is not going to fix health care,” Davis said.

Phillips added: “We’ve been disappointed that this has not been more dramatic. We’re seeking to make it better. We’re not walking away. This is too important an issue for too many Americans.”

The officials said the proposal needs to do more roll back Medicaid expansion, arguing the program didn’t do enough to make health care more affordable for poor people or improve health outcomes. The Senate could vote on its Obamacare repeal before the July 4 recess, and it’s unclear whether Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will be able to round up the required 50 votes for the plan.

Phillips acknowledged they discussed the proposal with Pence. “It was a cordial discussion of issues,” he said. “But there was not any kind of ask by either side.”

Of the four conservative senators who announced their opposition to the health care plan, two — Texas’ Ted Cruz and Utah’s Mike Lee — are attending the seminar, as is NRSC Chair Cory Gardner of Colorado, vulnerable Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake and Texas Sen. John Cornyn, the GOP’s number two in the Senate.

A host of House Freedom Caucus members, including Reps. Justin Amash, Dave Brat, Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows, showed up. Two potential contenders for Florida governor — state House Speaker Richard Corcoran and Rep. Ron DeSantis — are in attendance, along with Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt, the likely GOP nominee for Nevada governor.

The network officials were relentlessly critical of Sessions’ directive to return to harsh sentencing guidelines and continue the war on drugs, with Marc Holden, a top network official who has served as the Kochs’ criminal justice guru, calling the order a “failed, big government, top-down approach.”

“We had a war on drugs,” Holden said. “Drugs won.”

Democrats, especially former Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, have turned the Kochs into a liberal boogeyman and frequent star of online fundraising efforts and argue their conservative policy goals serve the billionaires’ business interests. The group spent tens of millions on television ads and other political activities during the 2016 cycle, but stayed out of the presidential race.

The group opened the weekend by announcing a plan to team up with National Football League Hall of Famer Deion Sanders to raise $21 million for non-profit organizations helping low-income families in Dallas.

“We’re going to provoke so much change and put a flashlight on so many things the light needs to shine on,” Sanders said of the new group.

Sanders, at a press conference, went out of his way to defend the Koch family.

“He could be on an island that he owns, but he’s instead thinking of ways to make this country a better place, including the inner city,” said Sanders, who recently traveled to Wichita to meet with Charles Koch.

I shudder thinking about the Koch Brothers possibly influencing Agent Orange.

Yep, the Death Star back in the news. "That health care bill doesn't go far enough!" You know, when you have to spend millions of dollars making and airing commercials to tell Americans that you're really good people, you're probably not good people.

[47of74]

I see fuck face is the first President in over 20 years not to host an Iftar Dinner

http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Trump-just-ended-a-long-tradition-of-celebrating-11244746.php

Thomas Jefferson hosted one back in 1805.  President Clinton started hosting Iftar dinners in the mid 90s.  Even Shrub continued hosting these dinners during his time in office.

Fornicate you Orange Doofus.

[GreyhoundFan]

Every time I think the TT can't be more delusional, he gets more delusional: "Trump accuses Clinton of colluding with Democrats to defeat ‘Crazy Bernie Sanders’"

Spoiler

In the wake of a bombshell story about Russia’s meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election — and persistent allegations that President Trump’s campaign may have colluded with Russia to win — Trump took to Twitter Sunday morning to accuse someone else of collusion: his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.

...

Clinton, he charged, had colluded with the Democratic Party to defeat Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in the Democratic primary race.

“Is she allowed to collude? Unfair to Bernie!” Trump tweeted, seemingly defending the senator just characters after calling him “Crazy Bernie Sanders.”

The initial responses to the early morning tweet ranged from baffled to indignant. There was a difference, several Twitter users pointed out, between working with one’s own political party and “working with a foreign enemy.”

...

On Friday and Saturday, Trump turned to Twitter to lash out at Obama administration officials for not taking stronger actions against Russian election meddling — despite for months disputing that such meddling had occurred. He seemed to suggest, without offering proof or explanation, that the Obama administration had withheld action to help Clinton.

“Focus on them, not T!” Trump tweeted Saturday, presumably referring to himself.

...

 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"I Found Trump’s Diary—Hiding in Plain Sight"

Spoiler

Lots of people want President Donald Trump to stop tweeting. Mitch McConnell wants him to stop tweeting. Carly Fiorina wants him to stop tweeting. Lindsey Graham and Susan Collins and other Republican members of Congress and some Democrats in Congress and Jeb Bush and many of Trump’s advisers and attorneys and even some of his supporters (although not all of his supporters) want him to stop tweeting. His wife wants him to stop. A majority of business leaders want him to stop, and a majority of millennials, and a majority of voters, period. His tweeting, they all believe, is unseemly and incendiary, legally risky and chaotic, undiplomatic, demoralizing, destructive, and distracting, too—for everybody, but especially for Trump.

The people, though, who want Trump to keep tweeting are the people who rely on his words to do their jobs—reporters, biographers, political scientists and strategists, and presidential historians. They often are appalled by the content of the tweets, just plain weary like everybody else of the volume and pace of the eruptions and deeply worried about their consequences as well—but still, they say, the more Trump tweets, the better.

Trump’s Twitter timeline is the realest real-time expression of what he thinks, and how he thinks. From his brain to his phone to the world, the “unfiltered” stream of 140-character blurts makes up the written record with which Trump is most identified. “I think Twitter,” one White House official told POLITICO, “is his diary.”

It is, presidential historian Robert Dallek told me, “a kind of presidential diary.”

“A kind of live diary,” Princeton University political scientist Julian Zelizer said.

“His version of a diary,” said Douglas Brinkley, editor of The Reagan Diaries.

Many modern presidents have kept a diary of some sort—that no member of the public sees until long after the author has left the Oval Office. The White House didn’t respond to four requests for comment on whether Trump is following suit, but people who know him well say it’s all but impossible to imagine him sitting down with a pen and paper in a quiet moment. “Absolutely zero chance,” one of them said. In the presumed absence, then, of a more traditional version of the form, Trump’s collected tweets comprise the closest thing to a diary this presidency will produce. And that is what makes the messages from @realDonaldTrump, almost 800 and counting since January 20, 2017, such a prize to those who care the most about lasting insight into the president and this administration. If @realDonaldTrump was to go dark, and Trump stopped tweeting to his more than 32 million followers, humans and bots alike, the loss from a historical standpoint would be acute. What else would there be to memorialize the breathtaking bluntness of the 45th president of the United States? But can the nation weather the daily injury of Trump’s epistolary eye-pokes?

Diaries, presidential or otherwise, typically are private and contemplative, and Trump’s Twitter feed is on both counts aggressively the opposite. As a document, though, it’s invaluable—chronological, recurrent, instantly archived and intensely revealing. “Donald Trump doesn’t use Twitter to be reflective,” biographer Tim O’Brien said in an interview. “He uses it like a fire hose … like a battering ram. And that’s profoundly who he is.”

Ever since he set up his account with the social media service back in 2009, Trump has used Twitter to divert and to deflect, to frame and to float, according to George Lakoff, the linguist and cognitive scientist, and as a megaphone and as a weapon—a potent tool to promote himself and attack others, this reflexive, lifelong, one-two punch that makes Trump Trump. In this regard, his election and inauguration changed nothing. On vivid, visceral, nearly daily display are his most elemental, most animating character traits, in this most public, most concentrated way. He’s impulsive and undisciplined and obsessed with taking shots and settling scores and with the sustenance of an image of success even when it’s at utter odds with objective reality. He can never back down. He can never let go.

As president, he has used Twitter to pillory the press (“Fake … not Real,” “the enemy of the American People!”), baselessly accuse former President Barack Obama of wiretapping Trump Tower during the campaign and rail away about leaks and “LEAKING” and “low-life leakers.” He has used it to denigrate the Affordable Care Act as “horrible,” “imploding” and “dead,” describe Democrats as “pathetic” “OBSTRUCTIONISTS” in spite of the fact that Republicans control Congress, and assail Chicago, Germany, Nordstrom, the federal judiciary and perceived opponents ranging from “Cryin’ Chuck Schumer” to NBC’s “Sleepy Eyes Chuck Todd” to the mayor of London in the immediate aftermath of the recent terrorist attack in the British capital. And he has done so much of this in frenetic, mostly early-morning torrents replete with exclamation points, jammed-down caps-lock, an apparent indifference to the rules of spelling and grammar and in a by-now-familiar construction, a telling pattern of thought, a certain Trump-tameter—a usually one-sentence declaration, routinely factually shaky, followed by a usually one-word assertion of emotion. “Weak!” “Strong!” “WIN!” “Terrible!” “Sad!” “BAD!”

The Twitter feed is a rolling, thin-skinned, squint-eyed stew of shouted announcements, grudges and grievances, ravaging insecurities and overcompensating bluster. “The Twitter feed,” said Michael D’Antonio, author of Never Enough, in which he wrote of Trump’s “Twitter wars,” “is true Trump.”

He is how he tweets.

“We’re dealing with a psychologically damaged element here—feeling the need to express your anger and bitterness into the public arena without any consideration of the consequences,” Brinkley told me. And yet, even as he rebuked the tweeter, he extolled the merit of the tweets. Trump’s timeline, he said, “is probably the best window into Trump’s presidency.”

Maybe any presidency, argued Russell Riley, co-chair of the oral history program at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center for presidential scholarship. “You’re given a much more up-close look at his innate thought processes than I think you’ve gotten from any other president,” he said.

“I’m in favor of the material, and I’m in favor of the mechanism,” Princeton’s Zelizer added. “This is the era in which we live. Our diaries are public now.”

And that sheer publicness—the lack of discretion and restraint—is what makes this record so attractive to historians but simultaneously so perilous for Trump and the country he leads.

Where his staunchest supporters see evidence of say-anything, establishment-rattling, politically incorrect authenticity, others see reams of ammunition to wield against him. Trump has littered his feed with careless, self-defeating fodder—hyper-public utterances that have been used by judges to block his travel ban and digital pop-offs that constitute “a gold mine” for investigators into his or his campaign’s potential collusion with Russia and his rationale for firing “cowardly” James Comey from his position as the head of the FBI. Trump has suggested he might not have won in November if not for Twitter. “Without the tweets, I wouldn’t be here,” he told the Financial Times in April. But pulsing throughout the diary of @realDonaldTrump are the makings of “the quintessential Greek tragedy,” said Riley of the Miller Center. “Your strongest suit is also your greatest vulnerability.”

***

In the 228-year history of the American presidency, there’s never been anything remotely like Donald Trump’s Twitter timeline. But it’s nonetheless the latest adaptation of a longstanding portion of the records of the activities of the executive branch. President James K. Polk kept a detailed diary in the middle of the 19th century. In the middle of the 20th, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower kept diaries, “sporadically,” said Brinkley. Richard Nixon kept a comprehensive kind of audio diary, recording his conversations in the White House, which came back to bite him, of course. Jimmy Carter kept a diary, “by dictating my thoughts and observations several times each day,” he would write later. Ronald Reagan was a particularly committed keeper of a diary, writing entries in maroon, leather-bound, hardback books every day he was president except when he was in the hospital after getting shot in 1981. Bill Clinton enlisted the clandestine help of the historian Taylor Branch, calling him to the White House regularly to download his thoughts. Both George Bushes kept diaries. So did Obama. “The process of converting a jumble of thoughts into coherent sentences makes you ask tougher questions,” Obama told Time in 2012.

“It’s not unusual for presidents to record their thoughts in real time,” said Rhodes College political scientist Michael Nelson, who teaches a course on the presidency. “Most recent presidents, I think, they were going to write memoirs, knowing that’s a standard part of an ex-president’s playbook, so they realized that it’s a useful thing.”

Beyond that, said Mark Updegrove, an author and historian and the former director of the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, many presidents find keeping a diary “cathartic” as they “wrestle with the enormous burdens that are endemic to the job.”

And Trump? Is he keeping …

“… a diary?” said Trump biographer Gwenda Blair. She snickered. “Get out.”

“I would be surprised, if not shocked,” Davidson College political scientist Susan Roberts said in an interview, “if you were to say to me, ‘Trump is keeping a diary.’”

What Trump is doing, however, and without a doubt, is creating a reliable, contemporaneous record of his telling and volatile thoughts. He is speaking at the same instant to history and to his base.

“It all begins today!” he tweeted at 7:31 the morning of the inauguration. “THE MOVEMENT CONTINUES …”

“We will bring back our jobs. We will bring back our borders. We will bring back our wealth,” he added that afternoon. “… we will bring back our dreams!”

He then boasted about television ratings for the inauguration, vowed “a major investigation into VOTER FRAUD” in an election he had won and wrongly stated that the New York Times and the Washington Post were “failing” and “DISHONEST” and that the Times had apologized to readers for its Trump coverage. He called Chelsea Manning an “Ungrateful TRAITOR.” He called Graham and John McCain “sadly weak on immigration.” He called “what is happening all over Europe and, indeed, the world” “a horrible mess!” He told his followers there were a “lot of bad ‘dudes’ out there!” He encouraged them to watch TV interviews with him on ABC News and the Christian Broadcasting Network. “Enjoy!” “The American dream is back,” he declared. And that was 11 days in January.

In February, Trump tweeted that his proposed initial travel ban of people from seven Muslim-majority countries was about “keeping bad people (with bad intentions) out of the country,” bashed the “so-called judge” who had ruled against it by saying his decision put America in “peril,” called the developing Russia story “made up” “non-sense” and said the “real scandal” was “classified information” being leaked “like candy.” He chastised the “blind hatred” of the “FAKE NEWS media” that he labeled “a great danger to our country.” And he made a pronouncement that really was an admission—that the distinction in his mind between news that’s real and news that’s “fake” hinges on whether or not it makes him look good. On whether it helps him or hurts him. “Any negative polls are fake news,” he proclaimed. “I call my own shots,” he said, ridding everybody of any iota of lingering doubt.

In March, he raged about Obamacare (“complete and total disaster”) and the Russia story (“witch hunt!”), alleged the Obama wiretapping (“McCarthyism!”), cajoled uncooperative lawmakers by calling them out by name, floated the notion of changing libel laws and retweeted a sycophant who had said, “Trump always ends up being right. It’s almost a little freaky.”

And in April, May and so far in June, with the coming and going of his first 100 days in office with few legislative accomplishments, the intensification of the Russia investigation, his stunning firing of Comey, the appointment of a special counsel, continued legal setbacks to his travel ban and record disapproval ratings, Trump’s tweeting has grown even more fevered.

“He’s the Samuel Pepys of incontinent Twitter spewing,” said GOP strategist Rick Wilson, referring to the noted 17th-century English diarist.

“The Twitter feed,” Blair said, “is an absolutely accurate picture of who he is.”

“People have accused him of being a bully,” said Roberts of Davidson, “and you can just look at his Twitter.”

The deluge of tweets from Trump, Princeton’s Zelizer said, “create this window directly to the president.” In his estimation, the timeline shows someone “consumed with his opponents,” “someone who can see victory all the time, even if it contradicts reality,” someone who “doesn’t take loss or challenge very well,” someone who’s “not thinking through necessarily the consequences of what he’s doing,” and “someone who’s not cautious.”

“The image you get,” he continued, “is of a person sitting there just frenetically responding to things.”

Brinkley agrees overall with this assessment of a reckless, agitated Trump on Twitter—“to have a proofreader, in his mind, would be to castrate him,” he told me—but the historian and professor at Rice University also has detected an odd “echo” connecting Reagan’s handwritten entries from the ‘80s and Trump’s finger-punched missives of today. The image-conscious former entertainer focused more on how he was seen than on what he had done (like Trump), and journalists clearly weren’t his favorite people (instead of “FAKE NEWS,” Reagan called them “irresponsible,” “demagogic” and a “lynch mob”); while Reagan smarted from criticism, he didn’t dwell on it, not so Trump-like at all. “Reagan was a much sunnier diarist,” Brinkley explained, whereas “Trump is a dark tweeter”—but Reagan, too, was consistent, made ample use of abbreviations and didn’t always have perfect spelling (“familys,” for instance, instead of families), and he was a proponent of brevity, quick fragments, a few sentences, sometimes no more than a paragraph per day. “If I called a book The Collected Tweets of Donald Trump, it would look very much like The Reagan Diaries,” Brinkley said. “Trump’s tweets are sort of the R-rated version.”

***

In the wake of Watergate, and especially in the aftermath of the Iran-Contra affair, when a judge granted a request to subpoena portions of Reagan’s private diaries, presidents became more careful about making audio recordings, dictated recollections or written diaries—or at least have refrained from copping to it publicly while they’re still in office. Presidents’ diaries, after all, are private—until they’re not. “It’s a question that you can fight and litigate,” the Miller Center’s Riley told me. “There’s not an absolute privilege to keep stuff out of the public domain. So by the time you get to the post-Reagan presidents, people are afraid to write anything down.” Said Brinkley of the diaries of modern presidents: “If a president is keeping one, it doesn’t make any sense to be billboarding it.” About their diaries, keeping them, definitely talking about them, presidents have gotten “skittish,” Brinkley said.

It’s perhaps the last word one would use to describe Trump’s use of Twitter.

“I love Twitter and tweeting,” he told Fox News in August 2015.

“Don’t worry,” he said in a speech in Rhode Island in April 2016. “I’ll give it up after I’m president. We won’t tweet anymore. I don’t know. Not presidential.”

But after he secured the nomination of the Republican Party, he seemed to be reconsidering. “You know who says don’t use Twitter? Your enemies,” he said in a speech in Ohio last August. “Why wouldn’t I use it? Why wouldn’t I?"

And once he won in November, evidently electorally immune from a campaign-long litany of words and actions that defied political convention and general decorum, peaking with audio of him bragging that he could get away with sexual assault on account of his celebrity, Trump clearly decided against the necessity of such discretion.

“I’ll keep it,” he said to a reporter from the Sunday Times of London the week before his inauguration. “It’s working.”

Or was. Over the past month-plus, though, Trump has created for himself with his tweeting a minefield of problems. His May 12 tweet about Comey and “tapes”—“James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!”—sparked the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Russia’s meddling in the election. And his fuming over the to-this-point courts-stopped travel ban—“Travel Ban,” “TRAVEL BAN,” “TRAVEL BAN!”—has been cited by courts in decisions that have gone against him and his administration. After the horrifying congressional baseball practice shooting prompted a sane, staid, sympathetic tweet about gravely injured Rep. Steve Scalise, Trump slept some, woke up and reverted to mean: “phony collusion,” “phony story,” “single greatest WITCH HUNT in American political history—led by some very bad and conflicted people!” “Sad!” Most politicians, and certainly most presidents, know when to shut up—even when they want to lash out. Not Trump.

“To think he’s as undisciplined as the president of the United States as he was as president of the Trump Organization,” a close former employee told me, “is mind-boggling.”

“He’s creating legal vulnerabilities for himself,” Riley said.

“It’s kind of a double-edged sword for Donald Trump,” Brinkley said. “What made him president might also be his undoing.”

“If he believes Twitter was his springboard to the White House,” biographer O’Brien added, “he’s going to have to come to terms with the fact that it could also be a trapdoor.”

Can a person tweet the way Trump tweets as president and be successful as president? Can a person tweet the way Trump tweets as president and stay president?

“Yes,” said Nelson, the political scientist from Rhodes, admittedly chastened in his predictions by the knowledge that he was, along with many, many others, “wrong about Trump at every stage,” from June 16, 2015 to November 8, 2016. “I think,” Nelson said, “Donald Trump can keep tweeting the way he’s tweeting and stay president …” He paused and considered what to say next. “But he’s playing with fire.” Nelson likened Trump as a politician—Trump as the president—to, “like, the first guy, the first human, to use fire.” So helpful—so dangerous. Did his cave fill with smoke? Did he get burned? How badly?

 

[GreyhoundFan]

A good article about someone who wants to remind us that this administration isn't normal and we can't be complacent: "Trump won, and Amy Siskind started a list of changes. Now it’s a sensation."

Spoiler

Shortly after Donald Trump was elected president, Amy Siskind took one of her occasional trips to Val-Kill, the Upstate New York home of former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

“I needed a Zen moment,” Siskind, who had campaigned for Hillary Clinton, told me. “And that is a place that inspires me.”

Soon afterward, Siskind began keeping what she calls the Weekly List, tracking all the ways in which she saw America’s taken-for-granted governmental norms changing in the Trump era.

The project started small, read by friends and with only a few items a week.

By Week 9, though, the list had gone viral.

“It blew up — I had 2 million views that week,” she said. “People were responding like crazy, saying things like, ‘I’m praying for you.’ ”

As time went on, the list grew much longer and more sophisticated. Here are three of her 85 items from mid-June:

●“Monday, in a bizarre display in front of cameras, Trump’s cabinet members took turns praising him.”

●“AP reported that a company that partners with both Trump and (son-in-law) Jared Kushner is a finalist for a $1.7bn contract to build the new FBI building.

●Vice President Pence hired a big-name “lawyer with Watergate experience to represent him in the Russian probe.”

Now, in Week 32, every item has a source link, and rather than just a few items, there are dozens. (Her weekly audience usually hits hundreds of thousands, she said, on platforms including Medium, Facebook and Twitter.)

The idea, she said, came from her post-election reading about how authoritarian governments take hold — often with incremental changes that seem shocking at first but quickly become normalized. Each post begins with: “Experts in authoritarianism advise to keep a list of things subtly changing around you, so you’ll remember.”

She’s not the only one to have this idea; on Twitter, for example, designer Laura Olin created @_rememberbot, where frequent tweets begin with the words “It is not normal” and catalogue the oddities of TrumpWorld. (“It is not normal for U.S. presidents to criticize federal judges.”)

But Siskind may be the most dogged and systematic. One follower even made a searchable database of her lists.

“It’s scary to look back on the early weeks and see what we’ve already gotten used to,” she said. Examples: a secretary of state who rarely speaks publicly, the failure to fill important positions in many agencies, a president who often eschews intelligence briefings in favor of “Fox & Friends.”

“We forget all the things we should be outraged about,” Siskind said.

Jay Rosen, a New York University journalism professor and author of the PressThink blog, called Siskind’s efforts “a service that is thoroughly journalistic and much needed.”

The lists “help people experience the history that is being made and keeps them alive and alert to the dangers of eroding norms,” Rosen said.

In their user-friendly format, he said, they are “one way of dealing with an overload of significant news, a surplus of eventfulness that allows things to hide in plain sight simply because there are too many of them to care about.”

It’s also, Rosen said, something that journalists can’t — or don’t — do, as they pay attention to the political dust-up of the day and don’t always provide much context or seem to remember what happened last month or last year. (“Since taking office, Trump has been at one of his properties every 3.5 days,” Siskind wrote this month.)

From Siskind’s point of view, an experiment has become a mission — one that sometimes competes for attention with bringing up her two kids and running a pro-women nonprofit organization that she founded.

“It has required stamina that I’ve never had before,” Siskind said.

Her followers appreciate the effort, if not the disturbing content. Kate McCreedy wrote on Twitter: “I read this every week. Absorb it. Get a stomachache.” And Jake Orlowitz, on Medium, called Siskind brilliant for compiling a “terrifying collection of horribles.”

She posts the list on Saturday on Facebook and Twitter, and Sunday on Medium, after working on it for 15 or 20 hours a week.

Siskind, who lives just outside New York City, left Wall Street in 2008. Over a 20-year career, she’d become an expert in distressed-debt trading and, at one point, co-headed the trading department at Morgan Stanley and became the first female managing director at another firm.

She co-founded the New Agenda to focus attention on issues affecting the success of women and girls, including pay discrimination, sexual harassment and sexual assault on college campuses. She is also an LGBT advocate.

How long does she plan to keep up the list-making? “Until he’s out of power,” she said, which she believes — and fervently hopes — will happen before the end of the first presidential term.

“I don’t have a grand plan,” she said. “I just want to be able to trace our way back.”

 

[Howl]

A good reminder that Trump isn't the new normal;  he's a corruption of everything that is normal, decent and good. 

[onekidanddone]

So now the Russian meddling that didn't happen is Obama's fault. Somebody please help me understand this?

[JMarie]

2 hours ago, onekidanddone said:

So now the Russian meddling that didn't happen is Obama's fault. Somebody please help me understand this?

Of course it's Obama's fault!  See, whenever it's discovered that someone in Trump's cabinet did Something With A Russian (met with them, sat next to them, made a deal with them, posed for a picture with them), it. was. during. Obama's. time. in. office.  Therefore, Obama gets blamed by default, even if the Trump cabinet member had nothing to do with Obama.

[Childless]

8 hours ago, onekidanddone said:

So now the Russian meddling that didn't happen is Obama's fault. Somebody please help me understand this?

There has to be a scape goat.  Trump never admits to mistakes, poor judgement, or stupid decisions.  He's everything conservatives and old, white complainers whine about when talking about millenials.  He doesn't take responsibility for anything, he cries like a little baby when someone disagrees with him, and he needs accolades from cheering crowds for doing absolutely nothing. 

It's also worth noting that he's obsessed with Obama and constantly judges himself against the man.  Trump has virtually no self-confidence and low self-esteem.  It's why he needs the adoring crowds all the time.  Someone with confidence wouldn't need the constant ego stroking.  It's reached the point of absurdity now and makes him look weak and pathetic.