Trump 27: Happy Holidays Orange Menace

[WiseGirl]

2 hours ago, fraurosena said:

shiny they offer up his reflection

Are you sure about that reflection bit? 

[GreyhoundFan]

"New York’s Attorney General in Battle With Trump"

Spoiler

Eric Schneiderman, New York’s attorney general, reached a milestone of sorts recently.

By moving to sue the Federal Communications Commission over net neutrality this month, his office took its 100th legal or administrative action against the Trump administration and congressional Republicans. His lawyers have challenged Mr. Trump’s first, second and third travel bans and sued over such diverse matters as a rollback in birth control coverage and a weakening of pollution standards. They have also unleashed a flurry of amicus briefs and formal letters, often with other Democratic attorneys general, assailing legislation they see as gutting consumer finance protections or civil rights.

“We try and protect New Yorkers from those who would do them harm,” Mr. Schneiderman said during a recent interview in his Manhattan office. “The biggest threat to New Yorkers right now is the federal government, so we’re responding to it.”

In Mr. Schneiderman’s seventh year as attorney general, the office has been transformed into a bulwark of resistance amid an unusually expansive level of confrontation with the federal government. Other Democratic state attorneys general are undertaking similar efforts, often in concert, like Xavier Becerra in California, where extra money was set aside in the budget for the attorney general to battle the Trump administration.

How far Mr. Schneiderman is willing to go in taking on Mr. Trump could define his political career, particularly in a blue state where disapproval of the president is high. The attorney general’s office potential for troublemaking and generating national headlines was redefined in the early 2000s by Eliot Spitzer. Mr. Schneiderman is a less combative man who was often the target of Mr. Trump’s Twitter wrath amid a three-year civil investigation into Trump University. In the end, Mr. Schneiderman’s office extracted a $25 million settlement in the case.

Nonetheless, Mr. Schneiderman is seen by some as a possible backstop should the president exercise his pardon power to help those who might become ensnared in the investigation of possible Russian involvement in the 2016 presidential election being led by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel. Federal pardons do not apply to violations of state law.

In the interview, Mr. Schneiderman would say little about his potential role as a criminal prosecutor in relation to the Trump administration, except that he hoped it would not come to that. Earlier this year, Mr. Schneiderman began a criminal inquiry focused on allegations of money laundering by Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman. But his office stood down, at least temporarily, out of deference to the special counsel’s inquiry; the offices did not work together, his staff said.

“I have a lot of respect for the work the special counsel’s doing,” he said. “They’ve put together a terrific team.”

He added: “Just watching it from the outside, like everybody else, it seems like they’re doing a very thorough and serious job. “I hope there’s not going to be any effort to derail them or shut them down.

“If that happens, we’ll do — as I think would be a genuine sentiment around the country — we’ll do whatever we can do to see that justice is done. But I hope we don’t have to face a problem like that.”

Mr. Trump said recently he was not planning to fire Mr. Mueller, though many of his allies have stepped up their attacks on the special counsel’s investigation.

Regarding Mr. Schneiderman’s myriad legal filings, the White House referred questions to the Justice Department.

“The federal court system is not a substitute for the legislative process,” said Devin M. O’Malley, a spokesman there. “The Department of Justice will continue to defend the president’s constitutional and statutory authority to issue executive orders aimed at securing our borders, protecting U.S. workers, promoting free speech and religious liberty, among many other lawful actions.”

Republican attorneys general targeted President Obama’s policies while he was in office. Scott Pruitt, the head of Mr. Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency, sued the E.P.A. 14 times as Oklahoma attorney general. But if Mr. Schneiderman were to take on a criminal prosecution, it would very likely be met with disdain by conservatives. One columnist at the National Review already called for Mr. Schneiderman to recuse himself from any criminal investigation of Mr. Trump because his comments and civil actions made it “impossible for the public to have confidence that he could be impartial.”

Certainly, Mr. Schneiderman and Mr. Trump have little in common. Mr. Trump watches a lot of TV and craves his McDonald’s. Mr. Schneiderman does yoga. “Other than sports, I really don’t watch TV much anymore,” Mr. Schneiderman said, and paused to think about the last time he had eaten a fast food burger. “That’s a long time ago.”

Mr. Schneiderman also says “it’s better to have opponents and not enemies,” a statement that would seem to run counter to Trump doctrine.

During the Trump University inquiry, Mr. Trump called Mr. Schneiderman “a lightweight,” a “total loser,” the “nation’s worst AG,” and “dopey.” He has tweeted that Mr. Schneiderman wears “Revlon eyeliner” — his dark eyelashes have been attributed to the side effect of a glaucoma medication — and said he needed to take a drug test because the attorney general “cannot be a cokehead,” without presenting evidence that he was. In 2014, the front page of The New York Observer, which was owned by Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, depicted him as Clockwork Eric, a takeoff on the Malcolm McDowell character from “A Clockwork Orange.”

Mr. Schneiderman continued to be an irritant, reaching the settlement last year in the Trump University case, and also barring Mr. Trump’s foundation from raising funds.

After Mr. Trump became president, Mr. Schneiderman was not expecting him to become “presidential.”

“I probably had more realistic expectations,” he said. “I saw the scorched-earth approach. He sued me for $100 million. He filed phony ethics complaints. He set up a website to attack me.”

“Before Lyin’ Ted and Little Marco, I had my nickname,” Mr. Schneiderman said, though Mr. Trump never appeared to settle on a single epithet. “I didn’t have any reason to believe he would change.”

The day after Mr. Trump’s victory, Mr. Schneiderman convened his staff in Manhattan and began the process of reorienting the mission of the office.

“The election was so traumatizing that my first step was to try and, essentially, pick everyone up off the canvas,” he said. “I had people who were too depressed to go into work.”

His staff soon began compiling something of a virtual war room, a Trump database to track federal actions and plan their responses. In some areas, Mr. Schneiderman said, they were “filling in” as the federal government rolled back enforcement of civil rights protections, wage rules and consumer protections.

“Then there’s the second category where they’re actually doing something to try and hurt New Yorkers,” he said. “And that’s not filling in, it’s more like fighting back. A galvanizing experience for that was the first travel ban.”

The pace of the confrontations with the administration has hardly abated. Recent actions have included joining 14 other states suing the E.P.A. “for failing to meet the Clean Air Act’s statutory deadline” related to unhealthy levels of smog, and challenging the administration’s move to bar a 17-year-old immigrant from getting an abortion.

“I did anticipate that the administration was going to be aggressively regressive,” Mr. Schneiderman said, adding: “I did not anticipate the volume that he was going to start pumping out so quickly. These guys were generating lots of trouble very quickly.”

That has led to a tighter relationship among Democratic attorneys general. “We don’t have a stronger or smarter ally,” Maura Healey, the Massachusetts attorney general, said of Mr. Schneiderman in a statement. He has also stayed in touch with Mr. Spitzer, who said in an interview that “Eric has done a good job” and "stepped into a chasm where today’s ideological divisions create a lot of room for litigation.”

Mr. Schneiderman’s office continues to undertake prosaic work, like a recent settlement with an upstate landlord who returned $43,000 worth of security deposits. There are weightier matters as well; a special investigations unit has been reviewing cases in which unarmed New Yorkers were killed by the police, a process that led to the recent indictment of an upstate district attorney on a perjury charge.

But the Trump administration remains a central focus.

“I was a little worried after the first few weeks about burnout,” Mr. Schneiderman said, but he added that lawyers in his office have resisted being moved off topics taking on the administration and felt that they were making a difference.

“On the one hand, it feels like this year has been a hundred years long,” he said. “On the other, it feels like it shot by.”

I'm grateful to read how on the ball the Dem AGs are, especially Schneiderman.

[GreyhoundFan]

I love Dana Milbank: "Trump rams greatness down our throats"

Spoiler

In this holiday season, a familiar question arises: Is President Trump trying to undermine democracy, or is he just irredeemably vain?

It’s a toss of the coin — specifically, Trump’s commemorative “Challenge Coin,” which just had its public debut.

Typically, these coins are simple copper-and-silver designs with the presidential seal and signature. But Trump’s is thicker, bright gold and with a built-in stand. Beyond the garish presentation, it defaces the presidential seal: The eagle looks right instead of left, it no longer holds the 13 arrows representing the original states, and the national motto — “E pluribus unum,” which translates to “ Out of many, one” — is gone. Instead, both sides of the coin display Trump’s campaign motto, “Make America Great Again,” and his name appears four times.

The year-end move follows Trump’s use of Independence Day for self-promotion over national unity. He used Fourth of July celebrations to tout a new song for his campaign-style appearances. It mainly involves singing “Make America Great Again” over and over.

Trump has copyrighted the phrase “Make America Great Again”; imagine the royalties if he can get it added to U.S. currency in place of the boring motto “In God We Trust.” (He might also resolve the debate about whether to put Harriet Tubman on the $20 note instead of Andrew Jackson by putting himself on it.)

Now that he has disposed of “E pluribus unum,” perhaps we can expect him to update the Marines motto from “semper fidelis” to “semper magnus” (always great). My friend Vanessa, a Latin instructor, tells me a simple change to the Justice Department motto — “Qui Pro Domina Justitia Sequitur,” or “he who prosecutes for justice” — would make it “ Qui Pro Domino Sequitur,” or “he who prosecutes for the master.” Take that, Robert S. Mueller III.

While Trump’s at it, he might as well buff out the “equal justice under law” in the marble over the Supreme Court entrance and install big, beautiful gold letters saying “MAGA!”

The flag would be aesthetically more appealing and less cluttered if it only had stars for the 30 states that voted for Trump. And Trump aide Stephen Miller could remove that Emma Lazarus poem he so dislikes that now adorns the Statue of Liberty. Instead, he can add a plaque bearing the words: “Give me only your great.”

Some are born great and some achieve greatness, but all of us are having greatness rammed down our throats now.

Even on Christmas Eve, Trump was attacking the FBI’s deputy director, boasting that he protected the phrase “Merry Christmas” from a supposed “assault,” retweeting a photo of himself with the word “WINNING” superimposed, and tweeting this Christmas message: “The Fake News refuses to talk about how Big and how Strong our BASE is . . . nobody is going to beat us. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

At a Christmas service in Florida that Trump attended, rector James Harlan preached about Nelson Mandela’s advice to “understand how precious words are and how real speech is in its impact on the way people live and die.”

Did Trump think Harlan was talking about him when he said, “Your words can have as much destructive potential as they do healing”? More likely, he thought people were talking about him when they sang “O come let us adore him.”

In a Christmas video, Trump briefly captured the meaning of the day when he spoke of renewing “the bonds of love and goodwill between our citizens.” But even in this message, he managed to find division. He highlighted the belief that the Old Testament prophet Isaiah prophesied that Jesus would be the Messiah. Jews dispute that interpretation.

The holiday wasn’t yet over when Trump tweeted that “tomorrow it’s back to work in order to Make America Great Again (which is happening faster than anyone anticipated)!” The next morning, he resumed attacks on Obamacare and a “Crooked Hillary pile of garbage.”

Contrast that with another head of state’s Christmas message. Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II spoke of the resilience of London and Manchester after terrorist attacks, mentioned the victims of Caribbean hurricanes, hailed charities and volunteers, and delivered a unifying Christmas theme about the baby Jesus, “whose only sanctuary was a stable in Bethlehem. He knew rejection, hardship and persecution, and yet it is Jesus Christ’s generous love and example which has inspired me through good times and bad.”

I write this on Boxing Day, a holiday for many of the Commonwealth nations of the former British empire, with a twinge of envy. I don’t wish that the queen would take us back. But I regret that our head of state, with his jingoistic talk of greatness, squanders American goodness.

It's a good thing that Dumpy doesn't actually read, or he'd get some bad ideas from this piece.

[GrumpyGran]

4 hours ago, 47of74 said:

Fuck Face was so amped up this morning while he spewed diarrhea on twitter that he used the wrong twitter handle for Fox and Friends;

 

 

There you have it. Our president now believes that FoxandFriends is the source of all information. They have information available to no one else. It's scary how far down that rabbit hole he has gone. I bet he can't go a day without them now, he has to have his fix before he faces the world. Imagine if we had a crisis occur one morning at 6am and they couldn't drag him out of the private quarters because he would be screaming about not being able to watch that trio of idiots.

[Cartmann99]

5 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

It's a toss of the coin — specifically, Trump’s commemorative “Challenge Coin,” which just had its public debut.

Some things are tacky, some are tacky-ass, and then there's Trump's stupid coin. 

[AmazonGrace]

As much as he tweets @ foxandfriends I'm shocked that his phone doesn't autocomplete it.

Re: E pluribus unum : why are there words in some terrorist language in the national motto anyway? It's America and everyone should speak American.

[AmazonGrace]

And the Shiney Ass Kissing Award goes to:

 

[AmazonGrace]

Aww, Happy New Year, President Trump!

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Why Trump’s Golf Habit Is the Ultimate Metaphor for His Bizarre Presidency"

Spoiler

By Monday evening, all the presents under the hulking tree at Mar-a-Lago had presumably been unwrapped, and hours had gone by since First Lady Melania Trump posted a Santa-themed selfie wishing America a merry Christmas. As the day’s festivities wound down, Donald Trump already had a mind toward the future: “I hope everyone is having a great Christmas, then tomorrow it’s back to work in order to Make America Great Again (which is happening faster than anyone anticipated)!” he tweeted from his private club in Palm Beach, Florida. But when Tuesday morning rolled around the president’s public schedule appeared devoid of events, and a little after 9 o’clock his motorcade pulled into the Trump International Golf Club, where the White House confirmed the president golfed with Georgia Senator David Perdue and professional golfers Bryson DeChambau and Dana Quigley, returning to Mar-a-Lago after 2 p.m.

A round of golf is not “back to work in order to Make America Great Again” in the traditional sense. But the 45th president is nothing if not his own man, reconfiguring the role to suit his tastes rather than the other way around, as many of his predecessors have. Of the 340 days President Trump has been in office, he has spent 85 of them at the golf course, according to NBC News, which has made it a point to track Trump’s movements. And while it’s not unusual for a president to take time off during the holidays, or to take periodic breaks from the White House—George W. Bush spent a great deal of time going back and forth to his ranch in Texas; Barack Obama vacationed in Hawaii for Christmases and golfed throughout his presidency; Bill Clinton golfed too, and spent the dog days of summer biking in Martha’s Vineyard—Trump’s repeated visits to courses bearing his name have sparked renewed debate about the myriad conflicts of interest dredged up by his presidency, highlighting the sheer improbability of his political ascendence in the first place.

As The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday, President Trump has visited one of his company’s properties approximately one out of every three days he has been in office; by NBC’s count, Tuesday marked the 111th day he has done so. Because Trump did not divest from his businesses when he took office, he profits from the endless free publicity they receive as a result of his trips there. More importantly, those visits put Trump into close contact with those who may try to court his favor, a fact that has concerned ethics experts, who’ve pointed out that it may violate the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution. As Jordan Libowitz, a spokesman for the transparency advocacy group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, put it to the Journal, “George W. Bush went to his ranch in Crawford, Texas, a lot, but it’s not like you could rent the bedroom next to his.” (And of course, as a private citizen, Trump repeatedly criticized Barack Obama for taking time to golf while in office.)

For any other president, this level of hypocrisy and self-dealing would be politically devastating. And though Trump’s approval ratings have languished in the mid-30’s for most of his presidency, it’s difficult to say whether it’s scurrying off to self-owned golf courses that’s dinging him, or whether voters take more issue with his failure to repeal Obamacare, his Twitter fights with lawmakers, and his support for an egregiously unpopular tax bill. But such petty scandals seem to have no effect on Trump. And as the White House’s smaller missteps are increasingly overshadowed by Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, it seems even less likely that the mogul president will move to curb his behavior. Meanwhile, the paradigm shift Trump has instigated could very well be permanent, down to even the smallest of details. As journalist Amy Sullivan pointed out on Tuesday, the once-popular “‘what books did POTUS take with him on vacation’ feature” has all but disappeared, “because everyone just accepts that this president doesn’t read.”

That last statement is so true, and so sad.

[GrumpyGran]

6 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

And the Shiney Ass Kissing Award goes to:

 

Well...trainwreck, so...

[fraurosena]

This op-ed in the Observer by John Schindler sent shivers down my spine.

Warning: Donald Trump Is America’s Slobodan Milošević

Quote

It’s a popular parlor and social media game these days to compare Donald Trump to various dictators. This is tempting, given our 45th president’s indulging in authoritarian habits like rage-tweeting at Federal agencies he dislikes, or showing disregard for the rule of law when it gets in his way. Americans are unaccustomed to casual flirtations with dictatorial-sounding memes like crushing CNN bloodily with Trump’s shoe, and many of them never want to normalize such conduct.

More hysterical anti-Trumpers jump immediately to Adolf Hitler, a ridiculous comparison as well as a violation of Godwin’s Law that says more about them than President Trump. Some prefer Benito Mussolini, who like Trump had a pronounced absurdist side as a dictator manqué who never accomplished much of substance. A more recent Italian leader, Silvio Berlusconi, seems a better comparison, since like Trump he boasted luridly of his sexual conquests and acted like the louche, ineffectual billionaire he was. However, Berlusconi never really set out to do much of anything except gain power, whereas Trump preaches nonstop about his alleged desire to Make America Great Again.

The best comparison is one that won’t be too familiar to many Americans and is frankly disturbing. The dictator whom Donald Trump most closely resembles is Slobodan Milošević, the Serbian strongman who pushed Yugoslavia off the cliff over a quarter-century ago, unleashing wars and genocide, then died in The Hague in 2006 while on trial for war crimes. Although Milošević was front-page news throughout the 1990s, since his death he has faded from Western consciousness. Therefore, it’s worthwhile briefly revisiting Milošević, since his similarities to Trump are startling.

First, let’s get out of the way how Milošević and Trump were dissimilar. While the latter is a much-married reality TV showman who lives for the camera and can’t shut up or stay off social media, the former was a colorless Communist functionary, a private man devoted to his wife and possessing a somewhat dour demeanor. As social personalities they could not be more different.

Yet a cursory look at their political personalities reveals troubling likenesses. Like Trump, Milošević made his name in finance, playing shady games with other people’s money, and got ahead in the Yugoslav system due to personal connections more than professional acumen. Milošević, like Trump, casually used people, even his closest friends, and discarded them when they were no longer needed (at the end of his regime, Milošević had his former best friend and mentor assassinated); loyalty with both is a one-way street.

Milošević’s sudden, unexpected rise in the mid-1980s would be eerily replicated by Trump three decades later. After the death of the longtime Yugoslav party boss Marshal Tito in 1980, the country entered terminal decline. Yugoslavia was deeply in hock to foreign banks, its ailing economy having grown dependent on infusions of Western cash to keep running, and by the mid-1980s Tito’s Ponzi scheme was collapsing. As a result, unemployment spiked and average Yugoslavs, who had grown accustomed to near-Western levels of consumer comfort, saw it all evaporate before their eyes. Fury followed.

Given such economic turmoil, political ferment burst forth, and in multiethnic Yugoslavia, that inevitably took on nationalist coloration. Serbian nationalism, taboo for decades under Communism, emerged from under the ice in the mid-1980s with dangerous passion. It’s difficult to rationally see why Serbs felt aggrieved. They were by far Yugoslavia’s biggest ethnic group and by any accounting they dominated the country. Despite far-reaching Communist efforts at what we would term Affirmative Action (they called it the “ethnic key”), ensuring that minorities got proportional representation in jobs and sinecures, Serbs still held most of the big jobs in the Communist hierarchy and its institutions, and they dominated Yugoslavia’s military and security structures.

Nevertheless, many average Serbs were angry by the mid-1980s, watching their economic security disappear as they faced demographic decline. This came to a head over Kosovo, an autonomous province of Serbia that between the 1950s and the 1980s went from being two-thirds Albanian and a quarter Serbian to 80 percent Albanian and barely 10 percent Serbian. Since much of Serbia’s history was tied up with Kosovo, this demographic decline was met with horror in Belgrade, where many Serbs portrayed it as an Albanian conspiracy to drive them out.

By 1987, the Kosovo issue dominated Serbian politics, and out of nowhere Slobodan Milošević, a rising party boss, jumped on the nationalist bandwagon. He had never shown the slightest interest in nationalism, personally or politically, and seemed devoid of ethnic ressentiment himself, yet he realized that the issue was his ticket to power. Suddenly Milošević made himself the public champion of the beleaguered Serbs of Kosovo, promising them he would defend their rights. Overnight, Milošević became a sensation—the first politician to break official party taboos about embracing nationalism—and a hero to angry Serbs everywhere.

He cleverly employed nationalism to take power over Serbia and eventually even Yugoslavia. By late 1989, Milošević was the master of the country, the powerbroker of a state in terminal decline. Institutions that stood in his way—Yugoslavia’s Federal political system, the military and the security services—were attacked, then purged of opponents, then re-staffed with Milošević pawns and cronies.

What the novice strongman didn’t plan on, however, was the rise of competing nationalisms against Serbia. The threat of Serbian chauvinism terrified Albanians, and soon Croats and Slovenians too. Old enmities returned. In the summer of 1991, Slovenia and Croatia declared independence from Milošević-dominated Yugoslavia, dooming the federation and birthing a series of ugly ethnic wars that plagued the region until the end of the decade. Today, most of the former Yugoslavia remains poorer, more corrupt, more ethnically divided, and more crime-ridden than it was then Milošević grabbed the axe of Serbian nationalism and used it to chop down the country.

Milošević ruined Serbia just like he ruined most of Yugoslavia, inflicting political, social, and economic wounds that show few signs of healing even now. In truth, he never cared about Serbs, he merely wanted power. Cynically donning the cloak of nationalism, he fooled Serbs by telling them what they wanted to hear: I will protect you. I will defend Serbdom. I will restore prosperity. None of it was true. His plan to Make Serbia Great Again was nothing but a charade. Once he achieved power, Milošević really didn’t know what to do; he was better at fiery rhetoric than reality. As a result, Milošević improvised crisis after crisis and left behind a broken and impoverished Serbia, smaller and weaker than it was before the First World War.

By the time Serbs figured out they had been conned, it was too late; the country was already wrecked, and Milošević managed to hold on until the fall of 2000, thanks to his control of the media and the police, enriching his family and his hangers-on every step of the way. That he was eventually extradited to The Hague to face justice seems inadequate compared to the devastation which Slobodan Milošević left in his wake.

You can understand the remarkable rise of Donald Trump in 2015-16 by simply exchanging “Serbian nationalism” for “white nationalism”: the parallels are eerie and disturbing. Trump, who never had shown the slightest interest in the plight of the white working class while he built his flimflam empire of gauche condos and casinos, suddenly reinvented himself as their champion. By telling angry and alienated people just what they wanted to hear, Trump created a political movement overnight and mysteriously rode it right to the White House.

Now that’s he’s there, President Trump has failed to deliver on his grandiose promises to his base. Chants of “Build the Wall” to preserve America’s current demographics have gone silent, while Trumpian populism turns out in practice to mean a cabinet packed with Goldman Sachs alumni and tax cuts for the rich. At this point, Trump’s manipulation of white nationalism seems every bit as cynically dishonest as Milošević’s Serbian patriot act.

So far, of course, America has avoided the fate of Yugoslavia. We’re a much bigger and richer country, and our economy, for all its structural problems, is a lot less troubled than Yugoslavia’s was in the 1980s. That’s the good news. The bad news is that Donald Trump has opened the same can of ethno-nationalist worms that Slobodan Milošević did, and if he keeps stoking those fires while doing nothing for his angry and alienated base, America could yet wind up resembling Yugoslavia a lot more than anybody sane should want.

7

The only difference between the situation in Yugoslavia at the time and the current one in America is that back then they didn't have a Mueller investigating Milošević. Let's hope that it is enough to avert the Yugoslavian outcome.

[onekidanddone]

5 hours ago, GrumpyGran said:

Well...trainwreck, so...

Didn't read the article, but this has to be BiBi's doing. Trump is his BFF and I can't think the average citizen of Israeli is going to want Trump's name on anything. Who the hell names a train station, airport, park or anything after a leader of another country?

[fraurosena]

The utter childishness is mindblowing. 

 

[onekidanddone]

13 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

The utter childishness is mindblowing. 

 

How about a big blue dancing dot?  Or a camera flash Josh Duggar style? If only he would block out his voice as well.

[fraurosena]

We could quite possibly fill a thread called "Dumpy's Daily Delusions". The self-deception is so strong in this one.

 

[GrumpyGran]

1 hour ago, fraurosena said:

This op-ed in the Observer by John Schindler sent shivers down my spine.

Warning: Donald Trump Is America’s Slobodan Milošević

The only difference between the situation in Yugoslavia at the time and the current one in America is that back then they didn't have a Mueller investigating Milošević. Let's hope that it is enough to avert the Yugoslavian outcome.

Uh, and his wife is from Slovenia? I guess her childhood wasn't that rough. Wasn't her poppy a member of Milosevic's government? Very interesting. Maybe she's not as unhappy as we think.

1 hour ago, fraurosena said:

The utter childishness is mindblowing. 

 

As if we all din't know he was golfing again today. Right, and the sky isn't blue.

[AmazonGrace]

It's just another listicle of general Trumpfulness but I had missed number nine:
 

Quote

 

9) Complimented a brutal military dictator’s shoes

During a whirlwind tour of the Middle East in May, Trump met Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who overthrew his country's democratically elected president in a 2013 coup, killed more than 800 protesters in a single day, and has imprisoned tens of thousands of dissidents since he took power.

Sitting on red velvet chairs in a lavishly appointed room in the Saudi capital of Riyadh, Sisi complimented Trump on his "unique personality that is capable of doing the impossible." As Sisi and the translator spoke, Trump's eyes kept darting down toward the floor by Sisi's feet.

A few minutes later, as reporters began exiting the room, Trump decided to compliment Sisi back: not on his personality — on his shoes.

"Love your shoes. Boy, those shoes. Man..." Trump said.

As CNN's Noah Gray noted at the time, "It's unclear the exact shoe the Egyptian President was wearing, but [they] appeared to be black boots, similar to those Trump was wearing, but shinier."

So it seems that while the Egyptian dictator was praising Trump, Trump himself was literally distracted by shiny objects.

 

 

[AmazonGrace]

The Moron in Chief points out that all editors look alike: 

 @realDonaldTrump

 

Quote

Vanity Fair, which looks like it is on its last legs, is bending over backwards in apologizing for the minor hit they took at Crooked H. Anna Wintour, who was all set to be Amb to Court of St James’s & a big fundraiser for CH, is beside herself in grief & begging for forgiveness!

Vanity Fair did indeed take a bit of online criticism after they posted a video saying that Hillary Clinton should consider a new hobby such as knitting. 

Anna Wintour, however, is the editor of Vogue. 

[AnywhereButHere]

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-white-house-saw-record-number-of-first-year-staff-departures/ar-BBHreeD?li=BBnb7Kz

There you go. He's winning at something and doing much better than both of his nemeses in this area. He must be so proud. Since I don't think he even cares what it is as long as he's the greatest at it, here's a stroke to Caligula's ego. May it keep him from inciting a war for the next little bit.

Quote

According to Kathryn Dunn-Tenpas, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has tracked White House turnover rates over three decades, the Trump administration’s 34% turnover rate—21 of the 61 senior officials she has tracked have resigned, been fired or reassigned—is much higher than that of any other administration in the last 40 years, which is as far back as Ms. Dunn-Tenpas’s analysis goes. The presidency with the next-highest first-year turnover rate was Ronald Reagan’s, with 17% of senior aides leaving the administration in 1981.

“Not only is the percentage double, the seniority of people leaving is extraordinarily high,” said Ms. Dunn-Tenpas. “That’s unprecedented to me. The first year always seems to have some missteps on staffing, often because the skills that worked well running a campaign don’t always align with what it takes to run a government. In this case, it’s a president with no experience in government and people around him who also had no experience,” she continued. “So it’s not surprising that it’s higher than normal, but it’s still surprising it’s this high.”

Mr. Trump’s first-year turnover rate is three times higher than both Barack Obama’s 9% and Bill Clinton’s 11%.

 

[GrumpyGran]

I'm laughing at his pathetic attempt to keep people from taking pictures of him golfing.

1. We all know you're doing it.

2. A panel truck isn't going to block everyone's view.

3.You're a hypocrite, doing the same thing obsessively that you criticized the past president for.

4. You are the President, we pay you, we have a right to know what you're doing. If you feel the need to hide it, that means you know it's not right. What else are you hiding?

[AmazonGrace]

 

Is he getting no briefings? His tweets often come across as if he hears stuff from Fox for the first time. 

[Audrey2]

20 minutes ago, AmazonGrace said:

 

Is he getting no briefings? His tweets often come across as if he hears stuff from Fox for the first time. 

Remember, about a year ago, Trump said he was really smart and didn't need long daily briefings. As I recall, he also said he doesn't like to read, so just basic info would be shared at a briefing.  I'm afraid that he really does get his "briefings" from Fox "news".

[GrumpyGran]

20 minutes ago, Audrey2 said:

Remember, about a year ago, Trump said he was really smart and didn't need long daily briefings. As I recall, he also said he doesn't like to read, so just basic info would be shared at a briefing.  I'm afraid that he really does get his "briefings" from Fox "news".

Or just doesn't pay attention to what he's told in the briefings. He is so dangerous. We should be able to impeach him just based on the fact that he treats Faux News as if it's an actual intelligence report.

[47of74]

I know this was from September, but I just heard about Fuck Face making these creepy statements regarding Princess Diana;

Quote

Donald Trump said he would have slept with Princess Diana in a radio interview recorded just three years after her death, but he joked that he would have had the British royal get an HIV test first. 

According to a transcript of an appearance on The Howard Stern Show in 2000, one of a package of previously unreleased recordings uploaded to the Factbase website and first reported on by Newsweek, Stern asked Trump: “You would have slept with her?”

“Without even hesitation,” came the response.

I wouldn't blame Prince Harry for telling Fuck Face to stay far, far away from his wedding.  And he should not feel the slightest bit of guilt about inviting President Obama.  And he should totally tell the PM what to go do with herself if she tries to force Trump on the wedding.

[JMarie]

I don't know if this was already posted.  Trump has found a new target for his insults.

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/politics/presidential/pet-less-trump-seen-as-class-less-for-saying-pence-is-low-class-for-having-pets-20171218.html

Quote

Vice President Pence and his family live with two cats, a rabbit, and a snake at their official residence on the grounds of the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington.

That makes them “low-class,” according to his boss, who said that he was “embarrassed” by the menagerie, and who labeled the Pences “yokels,” according to the Atlantic. Trump ridiculed the Pence pets to his secretary last January, according to an unnamed long-time adviser quoted in the story, which is in the magazine’s current issue.

So now, President Trump — whose statements have offended immigrants, Muslims, the disabled, women, prisoners of war, and even Arnold Schwarzenegger — has insulted one of the most passionate (and numerous) subsets of Americans there is:

Pet people.

Quote

As for Trump’s reportedly calling his own vice president a yokel for liking animals, Temple University sociologist Matt Wray said the president was simply “projecting his own inferiority onto Pence,” since the Queens-born Trump himself was seen as a yokel by the Manhattan elite “who never took him seriously.”

It’s not as though Trump has gone through life dog-less, of course. He did live for a time with Chappy, his first wife Ivana’s poodle, she wrote in her memoir, Raising Trump.

“Donald was not a dog fan,” she wrote. “And Chappy had an equal dislike of Donald.”