Lazy Caturday Reads: Crazy is Our Daily Reality Now

Posted: February 9, 2019 | Author: | Filed under: Afternoon Reads, Foreign Affairs, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | 25 Comments

Good Afternoon!!

Paul Newman and his Burmese caat

There are four Democratic women running for president and the media is working overtime to take them all down. Meanwhile, elderly white males Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders get kid glove treatment.

Let me see if I can get this straight: Elizabeth Warren believed her family when they told her she had a Native American ancestor. Kamala Harris was a prosecutor (horrors!), she dated an older black man but married a white man. Amy Klobuchar is mean to her staff. Kirsten Gillibrand is “too transparently opportunistic.”

Each one of these women has now been assigned a “her emails” story that will dominate her campaign if reporters are successful. But two elderly white men with problematic political records and a younger man with few qualifications (Beto O’Rourke) are treated as viable candidates.

Sigh . . . Will I live to see a woman president? I’m still hoping.

In other news, Trump had his physical and surprise! He’s in perfect health!

The Washington Post: Trump’s doctor says he is in ‘very good health’ after exam by 11 specialists.

President Trump is “in very good health” and is expected to remain healthy for “the duration of his Presidency, and beyond,” the president’s doctor reported Friday after a physical exam that lasted nearly four hours and included 11 specialists.

Carole Lombard with black cat

The White House did not release details of the exam at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and did not say whether more details would be released.

Trump was seen by a “panel of 11 different board certified specialists,” Sean P. Conley wrote in a brief memorandum released by the White House.

The memo did not include the disciplines of any of the specialists. Typically, a physical exam includes checks of height, weight, blood pressure and other standard measures. Trump said last year that he takes a statin drug to manage his cholesterol.

Trump did not undergo any procedures requiring sedation or anesthesia, Conley reported.

I wonder if he is still 6’3 and 239 pounds? The doctor doesn’t say. Maybe his height increased again–so rare for a 72 year old man, but possible for a wannabe dictator.

Let’s see, what else is happening?

The New York Times: Trump Defies Congressional Deadline on Khashoggi Report.

President Trump refused to provide Congress a report on Friday determining who killed the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, defying a demand by lawmakers intent on establishing whether the crown prince of Saudi Arabia was behind the grisly assassination.

Steve McQueen and friend

Mr. Trump effectively bypassed a deadline set by law as his administration argued that Congress could not impose its will on the president. Critics charged that he was seeking to cover up Saudi complicity in the death of Mr. Khashoggi, an American resident and a columnist for The Washington Post.

“Consistent with the previous administration’s position and the constitutional separation of powers, the president maintains his discretion to decline to act on congressional committee requests when appropriate,” the Trump administration said in a statement. The statement said the administration had taken action against the killers and would consult with Congress.

But Democrats said Mr. Trump was violating a law known as the Magnitsky Act. It required him to respond 120 days after a request submitted in the fall by committee leaders — including Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee and then the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — a period that expired Friday.

The illegitimate “president” of the U.S. is protecting a foreign despot who ordered the brutal murder of a Washington Post journalist. And there are suggestions that the “president” used Saudi Arabia and his pals at The National Enquirer to get revenge on Jeff Bezos, who owns the Post.

CNN: Bezos flags ‘Saudi angle’ in alleged AMI extortion attempt.

Jeff Bezos’ stunning accusation that the National Enquirer tried to blackmail him mentioned the close ties between the paper’s publisher, David Pecker, and President Donald Trump — and a second, less well-known connection.

Lucille Ball with cat

Bezos flagged the link between the New York tabloid’s parent company, American Media, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, returning to it several times.

While Saudi Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Adel al-Jubeir denied any connection between his country and AMI to CNN, Bezos said in his Thursday statement that the link between the Kingdom and the media company is not yet fully understood. He carefully laid out a web of connections.

The trigger for Bezos’ post was his decision to hire a respected investigator to find out how texts to his girlfriend were obtained and published by the National Enquirer — and to determine why the paper and Pecker, the AMI chairman, had made him a target.

“Several days ago, an AMI leader advised us that Mr. Pecker is ‘apoplectic’ about our investigation,” Bezos wrote. “For reasons still to be better understood, the Saudi angle seems to hit a particularly sensitive nerve,” he continued.

A couple of articles on the National Enquier story to check out:

The Washington Post: Federal prosecutors reviewing Bezos’s extortion claim against National Enquirer, sources say.

The Daily Beast: Private Eyes Detail Inner Workings of National Enquirer ‘Blackmail’ Machine.

Marlon Brando and his cat

The illegitimate “president’s” fake attorney general made an ass of himself in front of the Congressional committee and the world yesterday and the “president” is very pleased. Natasha Bertrand at The Atlantic: Matthew Whitaker Plays to an Audience of One.

It took about five minutes of questioning for the acting attorney general to provoke gasps and jeers in the congressional hearing room. “Your five minutes are up,” Matthew Whitaker, an ex-U.S. Attorney-turned toilet salesman, told the House Judiciary Committee’s Democratic chairman Jerry Nadler. Nadler cracked a smile, but from that point on the rules of engagement seemed clear: Whitaker, just days remaining in his legally dubious role as the interim head of the Justice Department, appeared to be playing to an audience of one…..

Despite the lingering questions about his resume and suspicions about why he was appointed over Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who would have  been Sessions’s natural replacement, Whitaker presented himself to Nadler, a 13-term congressman, with the same aloofness and disdain for tradition that often seems typical of the Trump White House. And that may have been on purpose. Whitaker, whose tenure ends when Bill Barr is confirmed as attorney general next week, will need a new job. He has reportedly been considered for the role of Trump’s chief of staff. And though he testified under oath that he had “not interfered in any way with the special counsel’s investigation,” he repeatedly declined to contradict Trump’s claims that Mueller is on a “witch hunt.”

Marilyn Monroe

Chuck Rosenberg, a former senior Justice Department official who resigned in 2017, said it would have been “easy” for Whitaker to say that Mueller’s investigation is legitimate, as Barr did during his recent confirmation hearings. “I don’t know how somebody could be that cowardly,” he added. But doing so would have undermined what is arguably his boss’s most important talking point—and that would not have been a good move for Whitaker if he was, in fact, auditioning for his next position.

Instead, Whitaker had a boilerplate response prepared for the myriad of questions posed by Democrats about the Mueller probe: “It would be inappropriate for me to talk about an ongoing investigation,” he said. Democrats, though, found that disingenuous—Whitaker had discussed the probe publicly earlier this month, going as far as to speculate that it would be wrapping up soon.

Read the rest at The Atlantic.

Here’s a Trump/Whitaker/Russia scandal that is new to me. Raw Story:

Taking to Twitter on Friday night, Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D) hinted that there will be an investigation into a donor who gifted the Judicial Network with $18 million to steal the Supreme Court seat belonging to Merrick Garland.

As part of his observations on the Matt Whitaker hearing where he was confronted about a mysterious $1.2 million donation that funded his salary, Whitehouse said Democrats shouldn’t stop there.

Meryl Streep

‘Whitaker did political hit work for a front group called FACT that does not reveal its donors. Today he admitted that its donor was Donors Trust, an entity that hides the identity of right-wing donors. That means the unknown real donor hid behind two entities,” Whitehouse tweeted….

Whitehouse then put conservatives on notice that he expects an investigation into the dark money that was used to fund a campaign to keep Judge Merrick Garland from even getting a hearing — only to see his seat go to conservative Neil Gorsuch after Donald Trump was elected.

I found this on Twitter.

Could this be true? I don’t know, but I hope Whitehouse finds out. At this point, nothing about Trump, Republicans, and Russia would surprise me.

I’ll end with something more hopeful from The New York Times: John Dingell: My last words for America.

John D. Dingell, a Michigan Democrat who served in the U.S. House from 1955 to 2015, was the longest-serving member of Congress in American history. He dictated these reflections to his wife, Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.), at their home in Dearborn, on Feb. 7, the day he died.

Mary Tyler Moore

One of the advantages to knowing that your demise is imminent, and that reports of it will not be greatly exaggerated, is that you have a few moments to compose some parting thoughts.

In our modern political age, the presidential bully pulpit seems dedicated to sowing division and denigrating, often in the most irrelevant and infantile personal terms, the political opposition.

And much as I have found Twitter to be a useful means of expression, some occasions merit more than 280 characters.

My personal and political character was formed in a different era that was kinder, if not necessarily gentler. We observed modicums of respect even as we fought, often bitterly and savagely, over issues that were literally life and death to a degree that — fortunately – we see much less of today.

Click on the link to read Dingell’s final thoughts. How amazing that he chose to speak out publicly from his deathbed. He was a true public servant.

That’s all I have for today. I hope you all enjoy the weekend in spite of the insanity that surrounds us.

Thursday Reads: FUBAR in Virginia, Matt Whitaker’s Worst Nightmare, and Other News

Posted: February 7, 2019 | Author: | Filed under: Afternoon Reads, U.S. Politics | 37 Comments

Good Afternoon!!

I’m getting a slow start this morning. Maybe it’s because I spent yesterday in bed with a stomach virus, but I’m feeling particularly hopeless today. I’ve been just sitting here wondering whether there will ever be a day that I get up and find that the news isn’t depressing as hell. Trump is still “president” and it feels like we’ve been cursed as a country. I really think it’s time for men to take a back seat and let women run things; but it’s not going to be easy to get men to sit down and listen to us for a change. We’re going to need to take over the media too, because misogynist “reporters” won’t stop trying to take down women candidates for office.

Is there any man in Virginia who doesn’t have skeletons in his closet? First we learned that Gov. Ralph Northam dressed in blackface when he was in medical school in 1984, then he denied it, but confessed that he wore blackface on a different occasion.

Northam is still refusing to resign, and in the meantime we learned that Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax has been credibly accused of a sexual assault (frankly, it was rape) by Professor Vanessa Tyson of Scripps College in California. The third person in line for the governorship is Attorney General Mark Herring, who came forward and admitted that he too had dressed in blackface in the 1980s. Next in line is Kirk Cox, a Republican.

USA Today:

It took Kirk Cox almost 30 years to rise from a freshman GOP member of the Virginia House of Delegates to the legislative body’s speaker.

Kirk Cox

He could jump to the governorship in a matter of weeks as the state’s top three officials, Democrats all, stagger under the weight of scandals.

First, Gov. Ralph Northam admitted wearing blackface in the 1980s. Then Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax was accused of sexual assault, which he adamantly denies, stemming from a 2004 encounter. Finally, Attorney General Mark Herring admitted he, too, donned blackface in the 1980s.

Shouldn’t someone check to make sure Cox doesn’t have skeletons in his closet too?

Larry Sabato, head of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, says that, if Northam does exit, he would be the state’s first governor since the Civil War not to complete his term.

But Sabato doesn’t see all three Democrats walking away.

“Speculation that all 3 statewide VA Dem officeholders will resign is overwrought,” Sabato said on Twitter. “One or more will survive. VA Dems won in an anti-Trump landslide in 2017. They’re not going to turn government over to a pro-Trump GOP House Speaker.”

Read more at USA Today.

Fairfax, Northam, and Herring

It’s difficult to see how Fairfax survives, but then Kavanaugh got away with attempted rape so who knows?

The New York Times: Vanessa Tyson, Accuser of Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, Describes Assault.

The woman identified herself on Wednesday as Dr. Vanessa C. Tyson, an associate professor of politics and expert in black history at Scripps College in California. She has also spent years advocating for victims of sexual assault and has spoken openly about being molested by her father when she was a child.

“What began as consensual kissing quickly turned into a sexual assault,” Dr. Tyson wrote, describing her encounter in a hotel room with the future lieutenant governor. “Mr. Fairfax put his hand behind my neck and forcefully pushed my head towards his crotch. Only then did I realize that he had unbuckled his belt, unzipped his pants, and taken out his penis.”

The Times didn’t finish the story but they posted the full statement. Here’s the rest:

He then forced his penis into my mouth. Utterly shocked and terrified, I tried to move my head away, but could not because his hand was holding down my neck and he was much stronger than me. As I cried and gagged, Mr. Fairfax forced me to perform oral sex on him. I cannot believe, given my obvious distress, that Mr. Fairfax thought this forced sexual act was consensual. To be very clear, I did not want to engage in oral sex with Mr. Fairfax and I never gave any form of consent. Quite the opposite. I consciously avoided Mr. Fairfax for the remainder of the Convention and I never spoke to him again.

Vanessa Tyson

Read the rest of the statement at the link. Tyson never told anyone about the assault until about a year ago. One of the people she told was Virginia Rep. Bobby Scott, who has called for Ralph Northam to resign.

ABC News: Rep. Bobby Scott learned of sexual assault allegation against Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax a year ago from the accuser: Aides.

Virginia Democratic Congressman Bobby Scott was made aware of allegations of sexual assault against now-Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax over a year ago by the alleged victim herself, ABC News has learned.

Scott learned of the allegations directly from Dr. Vanessa Tyson, who on Wednesday released a statement detailing the alleged 2004 assault, which took place at the Democratic National Convention in Boston.

Fairfax vehemently denies the assault claim.

In a statement given to ABC News on Wednesday, Scott wrote, “Allegations of sexual assault need to be taken seriously. I have known Professor Tyson for approximately a decade and she is a friend. She deserves the opportunity to have her story heard.”

Apparently, Scott never confronted Fairfax with the allegation. And there’s this:

Scott himself was previously accused of sexual harassment by a former aide, who said he touched her inappropriately when she was working in his Washington office in 2013. He denied the claim.

Bobby Scott

Sigh . . . can you see why I’m so depressed reading about this?

Tyson has hired the same lawyers who represented Christine Blasey Ford, and Fairfax has hired the ones who worked for Brett Kavanaugh.

One more story from Virginia at The Richmond Times-Dispatch: Va. Capitol Police sergeant placed on leave after antifa group posts allegation about him.

Virginia Capitol Police announced Wednesday that it had placed a sergeant on leave after local activists published allegations that he “has an affinity” for symbols associated with white supremacists.

In a news release, the Virginia Division of Capitol Police said Sgt. Robert A. Stamm is on paid administrative leave pending a review of possible violation of department policy…..

The activists on the blog post said Stamm’s social media activity suggests he follows the Asatru Folk Assembly. The blog says Stamm is friends with people who claim to be associated with the group, which the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as a “hate group” blending Northern European paganism and ethnocentrism….

On its blog Tuesday, Antifascists of the Seven Hills, a leftist self-described “militant” group, posted Stamm’s name, links to social media accounts in his name and a description of his tattoos and interests listed under those accounts.

So, we’ll see what happens with that; but, honestly, I’ve reached the point that I don’t care who becomes Governor of Virginia after all the dust settles. I just wish there were a woman in the line of succession.

Matthew Whitaker

There’s a lot more depressing news out there, but I’d rather focus on tomorrow’s big story: Acting AG Matt Whitaker’s appearance before the House Judiciary Committee.

Just Security: The Whitaker Hearing: Potential Executive Privilege and Subpoena Fireworks.

It appears acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker allowed an important deadline to pass on the eve of his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee. Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), as chair, had directed Whitaker to inform the committee “no later than” 48 hours before Friday’s hearing whether President Donald Trump planned to assert executive privilege over a range of topics. This letter is among a series of somewhat unusual steps — including formal committee consideration of a subpoena authorization — taken by Nadler in advance of the Whitaker hearing to prepare the battlefield and short-circuit potential executive branch efforts to evade testimony about Whitaker’s communications with Trump and other White House officials.

Nadler had to threaten a subpoena in order to obtain Whitaker’s commitment to testify. On Jan. 15, Nadler sent a letter reiterating the committee’s demandfor Whitaker’s Feb. 8 appearance, after Department of Justice handlers suggested that the government shutdown might delay their boss’s testimony. In the letter, Nadler emphasized that the committee expected Whitaker to “provide direct answers to questions posed by members of both parties.” And he planted a seed: “If you plan to invoke executive privilege in an attempt to avoid answering any particular question, I ask that you consult with the White House well in advance of the hearing.”

Jerry Nadler

In its first two years, the Trump administration has avoided having to formally invoke executive privilege, because the Republican-led congressional committees did not issue subpoenas or threaten contempt in the face of stonewalling. I have written about some of those early skirmishes — and the failure to enforce congressional prerogatives – in the cases of Steve Bannon, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and Sally Yates as former acting attorney general. That pattern will change now under a Democratic House majority.

A week after his letter repeating the committee’s demand, Nadler on Jan. 22 sent another, reiterating the committee’s expectation that Whitaker specifically testify about White House contacts with the DoJ. It was an effort by Nadler to preempt fancy footwork over executive privilege at the hearing.

Read the rest at the link.

And from The Daily Beast’s Betsy Woodruff: ‘They Hate This Guy’: Matt Whitaker Braces for Showdown With Dems.

The Justice Department is bracing for impact. Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker is set to testify before Congress on Friday, and in the Department’s sprawling Pennsylvania Avenue headquarters, dozens of officials have been working to get him ready. The hearing will be the first blockbuster showdown between the Trump administration and oversight-antsy Hill Democrats who just recently secured the power to force the president’s allies to testify.

A person familiar with Whitaker’s preparation told The Daily Beast he is gearing up for an intense few hours.

“They hate this guy so much,” the source said.

Whitaker has gone through multiple practice committee hearings––known as moots––where Justice Department officials pepper him with questions that committee Democrats may lob, according to multiple DOJ officials involved in his preparation. They have tried to prepare him for lengthy statements, harsh tones, and leading questions. Dozens of department officials have helped him prepare, those officials told The Daily Beast, working through the government shutdown to brief him and get him ready. And they’re gearing up for questions about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe, according to one source familiar with Whitaker’s preparation, including whether he had input on the investigation’s resources. On top of that, they’re braced for legal sparring if Democrats try to force Whitaker to testify about his conversations with the president.

“We don’t know what we’re up against with the House Judiciary Committee,” that source said. “We have no idea.”

Read the rest at the The Daily Beast.

More reads, links only:

The Washington Post: Sergei Millian, identified as an unwitting source for the Steele dossier, sought proximity to Trump’s world in 2016.

The Daily Beast: Paul Erickson, Russian Agent Maria Butina’s Boyfriend, Indicted for Fraud.

The Washington Post: The Mueller investigation has sprouted. Therein lies the jeopardy for Trump, by Joyce White Vance and Matthew Miller.

Garrett Graff at Wired: What Robert Mueller Knows–and Isn’t Telling Us.

The Washington Post: The Energy 202: Ocasio-Cortez, Markey unveil Green New Deal with backing of four presidential candidates.

Bloomberg: The Battle Over Trump’s Tax Return Begins.

Slate: Northam’s Yearbook Photo Reveals Medicine’s Broader Biases.

Franklin Foer at The Atlantic: Russian-Style Kleptocracy Is Infiltrating America.

What stories are you following today?

Tuesday Reads: Investigations and Embarrassing Revelations as Trump Prepares SOTU

Posted: February 5, 2019 | Author: | Filed under: Afternoon Reads, U.S. Politics | 46 Comments

FDR delivers 1941 SOTU , the Four Freedoms speech.

Good Afternoon!!

Tonight Trump will give his state of the union address in the midst of multiple criminal and counterintelligence investigations into his campaign, his business, his inaugural fundraising, his violations of the emoluments clause, and his efforts to interfere with and obstruct investigations–have I left anything out?

As he prepares for his big moment, shocking news keeps breaking about his behavior in office and involvement with Russia during the campaign and transition. Here’s the latest.

Buzzfeed News releases Trump Org. documents on the Trump Tower Moscow project: Secret Files Show How Trump Moscow Talks Unfolded While Trump Heaped Praise On Putin.

As a candidate, Donald Trump had a lot of praise for Vladimir Putin — and no business, he kept insisting, in Russia. These documents tell a different story.

When Michael Cohen, the president’s former lawyer and longtime fixer, testifies before Congress this week, one topic that is likely to be front and center is his work on Trump Moscow, the over-the-top luxury real estate venture he helped spearhead leading up to the election.

“The development, which was never built, has already become a focus for special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into potential collusion between Trump and Russia during the 2016 campaign. And when Cohen was convicted last November of lying to Congress, it was over his false testimony that the deal had fizzled in January 2016, well before Trump emerged as the Republican nominee.

Harry Truman SOTU, 1950 says “Our Social Security System should be developed into the main reliance of our people for basic protection against the economic hazards of old-age, unemployment, and illness.”

BuzzFeed News is today publishing a cache of internal Trump Organization documents that lay bare the secret negotiations that continued long after Cohen claimed the deal had been abandoned. The documents, many of which have been exclusively obtained by BuzzFeed News, reveal that — despite Trump’s claim that the development was never more than a passing notion — the effort to get the tower built was long-running, detail-oriented and directly entwined with the ups and downs of his campaign.

As Trump went from rally to rally, vociferously denying any dealings in Russia, his representatives, Michael Cohen and his associate Felix Sater, worked with Trump Organization lawyers and even Ivanka Trump to push forward negotiations to build a 100-story edifice just miles from the Kremlin. The fixers believed they needed Putin’s support to pull off the lucrative deal, and they planned to use Trump’s public praise for him to help secure it. At the same time, they plotted to persuade Putin to openly declare his support for Trump’s candidacy. “If he says it we own this election,” Sater wrote to Cohen….

This large trove of nonbinding business agreements, architectural renderings, texts, emails, and plans for Trump to travel to Russia to meet Putin offer an unprecedented glimpse inside the negotiations to build the tallest tower in Europe — a deal Trump’s fixers hoped would “help world peace and make a lot of money.”

Read the documents at Buzzfeed.

Emptywheel wrote about one exchange between Cohen and Slater: The WaPo Scoop on the DNC Hack (Temporarily) Killed the Trump Tower Deal.

Also from Buzzfeed: A Lobbyist At The Trump Tower Meeting Received Half A Million Dollars In Suspicious Payments.

A Russian-born lobbyist who attended the controversial Trump Tower meeting in June 2016 received a series of suspicious payments totaling half a million dollars before and after the encounter.

Documents reviewed by BuzzFeed News show that Rinat Akhmetshin, a Soviet military officer turned Washington lobbyist, deposited large, round-number amounts of cash in the months preceding and following the meeting, where a Russian lawyer offered senior Trump campaign officials dirt on Hillary Clinton.

Eisenhower, 1960: “We must strive to break the calamitous cycle of frustrations and crises which, if unchecked, could spiral into nuclear disaster; the ultimate insanity.”

The lobbyist also received a large payment that bank investigators deemed suspicious from Denis Katsyv, whose company Prevezon Holdings was accused by the US Justice Department of laundering the proceeds of a $230 million Russian tax fraud.

The Trump Tower meeting and those who attended it have become a focus of special counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiry into whether the president’s campaign colluded with Russia to interfere in the 2016 election. As part of that inquiry, banks were asked to pull financial information on the meeting attendees, and investigators at Wells Fargo handed over documents on Akhmetshin to the US RTreasury in 2017. Those records were passed to Mueller’s team, but Peter Carr, a spokesperson for the special counsel, declined to say whether the transactions are under investigation. Congressional investigators also requested the financial information from the Treasury Department.

Read the rest at the link above.

The Washington Post: Federal prosecutors issue sweeping subpoena for documents from Trump inaugural committee, a sign of a deepening criminal probe.

A wide-ranging subpoena served on the inaugural committee Monday seeks an array of documents, including all information related to inaugural donors, vendors, contractors, bank accounts of the inaugural committee and any information related to foreign contributors to the committee, according to a copy reviewed by The Washington Post.

JFK SOTU 1962, announces NASA project to put a man on the moon

Only U.S. citizens and legal residents can legally donate to a committee established to finance presidential inaugural festivities….

The subpoena — issued by the U.S. attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York — indicates that prosecutors are investigating crimes related to conspiracy to defraud the United States, mail fraud, false statements, wire fraud and money laundering.

The subpoena also specifically seeks all communications with one donor, Los Angeles venture capitalist Imaad Zuberi, as well as the firm with which he is affiliated, Avenue Ventures. The company donated $900,000 to the inaugural committee, records show.

Read more at the WaPo.

https://twitter.com/joshscampbell/status/1092598177272918017

We are getting closer to seeing Trump’s taxes. Paul Waldman at The Washington Post: We may finally see Trump’s tax returns, and Republicans are panicking.

Though they haven’t done it yet, Democrats are planning to utilize a law allowing the House Ways and Means committee to obtain any Americans’ tax returns to demand that the IRS turn them over. Once they have them, the committee can vote to release them to the entire House….

Legal experts make clear that the law is not ambiguous and the president can’t simply order the Treasury Department to keep his returns secret. So the administration’s plan seems to be to wage a PR battle while keeping the matter slogging through the courts for as long as possible — say, past November 2020.

Lyndon Johnson, 1965 SOTU, the “We Shall Overcome” speech

While Trump’s refusal to release his returns — something every party nominee and president has done for the last half century — has been controversial since 2016, once Democrats demand the returns it will become an intense controversy playing out on television and the front pages of newspapers. That means that Republican officeholders will be forced to take a position, which they haven’t really had to do before. And they’ll be expected to defend the president’s refusal to allow the public to know where he’s getting money from, who he owes money to, and how far his financial interests extend.

According to Nancy Cook at Politico, the Trumpists have a plan to keep his tax information secret.

Trump’s Treasury Department is readying plans to drag the expected Democratic request for Trump’s past tax filings, which he has closely guarded, into a quagmire of arcane legal arguments.

At the same time, officials intend to publicly cast the request as a nakedly partisan exercise. The two-pronged scheme was developed by a handful of top political appointees and lawyers inside the department — with the ultimate goal of keeping the president’s past returns private, according to four people familiar with the administration’s approach.

Richard Nixon SOTU 1974. ‘I believe the time has come to bring that investigation and the other investigations of the matter to an end. One year of Watergate is enough.’

The strategy will hinge on an argument that politically motivated Democrats will inevitably leak Trump’s tax information — a felony in and of itself — if the IRS hands over the documents. So because Democrats can’t be trusted to keep the documents private, they shouldn’t get them in the first place, officials will insist. Treasury officials have been waiting since early January for a top Democrat to make the request.

The battle between Treasury and the Democrats could plunge the country into yet another norm-breaking moment for the Trump presidency — with the fight stretching on for months and well into the 2020 campaign.

“What happens if the Treasury secretary just doesn’t answer or sends back a note saying we refuse to do what you are saying?” said George Yin, a former chief of staff on the House Joint Committee on Taxation, one of the three congressional committees involved in major tax issues on Capitol Hill. “To my knowledge, that has never happened. … We are essentially in uncharted territory if he refuses.”

It’s going to get ugly. Will all this take place with the 2020 election as background? That wouldn’t be good for Trump either.

Two more moves by House Democrats:

As for the speech tonight, Trump supposedly plans to call for “comity.” The Washington Post: Trump to call for ‘comity’ in State of the Union, but rivals scoff amid heightened political warfare.

Facing growing political head winds, President Trump on Tuesday will try to convince the nation that his presidency remains strong and viable in a State of the Union address that aides described as a sincere appeal to broaden his governing coalition.

But Trump is also expected to reaffirm his demand for Congress to support his hard-line immigration agenda and offer a robust defense of foreign policy initiatives that have engendered fierce criticism from Democrats who have asserted newfound power to try to blunt his agenda.

The dynamic suggests that any attempt from the usually truculent president to proffer a nod to bipartisanship and cooperation during his prime-time remarks is almost certain to be short-lived and viewed as duplicitous by his critics.

Trump “thrives on inflaming, and when he does otherwise, it seems inauthentic and unpersuasive,” said Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center who served as a speechwriter for President George W. Bush.

Obviously, no one–even Republicans–will buy anything Trump has to say about national unity. I expect the speech to be pathetic and embarrassing, in contrast to many previous presidents’ SOTU speeches.

Now . . . what stories have you been following?

Thursday Reads: Polar Vortex Deep Freeze and Other News

Posted: January 31, 2019 | Author: | Filed under: Afternoon Reads, Foreign Affairs, U.S. Politics | 33 Comments

View of Chicago across a frozen Lake Michigan

Good Afternoon!!

The biggest news this morning is the weather. The Midwest is getting hit hard by the polar vortex. So far it’s not that bad in the Boston area. It’s 12 degrees this morning with a high of 18, and the temperatures will be going up after that, so I feel fortunate.

The New York Times: Polar Vortex Updates: Bitter Cold Weather Spreads East.

As the middle of the nation awoke on Thursday, the deep freeze seemed to have settled in for a long, unwanted visit, disrupting life across an entire region for much of a week, contributing to deaths and injuries, and leaving residents impatient to emerge from their homes and get back to normal.

The grim temperatures and gusty winds lingered in the Midwest, and had spread to the Northeast.

Here are the latest developments:

• Temperatures broke records in some places, and remained low, near record levels, in much of the Midwest on Thursday morning. Minneapolis was minus 23, with a wind chill of minus 38, the National Weather Service said. Chicago was at minus 21, with a wind chill of minus 41. And Milwaukee hit minus 21, with a wind chill of minus 40.

Another shot of frozen Chicago

• At least eight deaths have been connected to the Midwest’s dangerously cold weather system, according to The Associated Press, including that of a University of Iowa student who was found behind an academic hall several hours before dawn on Wednesday.

• The sustained cold taxed energy systems across the Midwest, leading to some outages and urgent calls to customers to reduce the heat in their homes.

• Many schools, businesses and restaurants remained shuttered on Thursday, though some offices were reopening and many more were expected to reopen Friday, when temperatures are expected to rise.

• Airlines have already canceled more than 2,000 flights scheduled for Thursday in the United States, according to FlightAware. On Wednesday, cancellations topped 2,700.

• The East Coast was feeling the bitter cold, too. At 6 a.m. the temperature in New York City hit 2 degrees, but with the wind it felt like 17 below zero.

Yahoo News: Live updates: Deep freeze blasts Northeast as dangerously cold temperatures are unrelenting in Midwest.

A dangerous deep freeze is blasting the Northeast and Midwest, where record-breaking cold temperatures are paralyzing cities and communities.

At least eight people have died in connection with the coldest weather in decades across the Northern Plains and Midwest.

The wind chill in Chicago plunged to minus 52 on Wednesday — the coldest wind chill since 1985. It was minus 55 in Minneapolis, also the coldest wind chill since 1985….

Emergency responders help victims after a pileup near Reading, PA

The bone-chilling temperatures are unrelenting in the Midwest, where the actual temperatures — not wind chills — were in the minus 20s and minus 30s.

Record low temperatures were recorded in Chicago: minus 21 degrees; Madison, Wisconsin: minus 26 degrees; and Milwaukee: minus 23 degrees….

On the East Coast, New York City had a temperature of 2 degrees — the coldest day in three years.

Philadelphia reached a temperature of 5 degrees with a wind chill of minus 11 — the coldest so far this winter.

Boston also fell to 5 degrees 5 with a wind chill of minus 16 — the worst so far for the year.

I’m not sure about that. We had below zero real temperatures a couple of weeks ago. Anyway, it’s cold and I don’t plan to go outside until tomorrow, when it’s supposed to go back into the 20s.

My Mom lives in an assisted living community in the Indianapolis area, and it has been really cold there. Last night her apartment was so cold that they had to giver her a space heater. They’re not prepared for temperatures like that in that part of Indiana.

You probably heard about this yesterday: Russians have been trying to spread disinformation about the Mueller investigation using discovery materials from the Concord Management case.

NBC News: Mueller says Russians are using his discovery materials in disinformation effort.

Russians are using materials obtained from special counsel Robert Mueller’s office in a disinformation campaign apparently aimed at discrediting the investigation into Moscow’s election interference, federal prosecutors said on Wednesday.

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Ice is seen on the side of the Great Falls National Historic Park in Patterson, NJ yesterday

One or more people associated with the special counsel’s case against Russian hackers made statements last October claiming to have stolen discovery materials that were originally provided by Mueller to Concord Management, Mueller’s team said in court documents filed on Wednesday in the Russian troll farm case.

That discovery — evidence and documents traded between both sides of a lawsuit — appears to have been altered and disseminated as part of a disinformation campaign apparently aimed at discrediting the ongoing investigations in Russian interference in the U.S. political system, according to the documents.

Concord Management, a company owned by a Russian oligarch known as President Vladimir Putin’s “chef,” is one of three Russian entities that were accused by the special counsel last February of helping to mastermind the social media meddling into the 2016 election. Thirteen Russian citizens were also indicted and accused of taking part in the widespread effort.

According to the documents filed Wednesday, a Twitter account called @HackingRedstone tweeted: “We’ve got access to the Special Counsel Mueller’s probe database as we hacked Russian server with info from the Russian troll case Concord LLC v. Mueller. You can view all the files Mueller had about the IRA and Russian collusion. Enjoy the reading!”

Click on the link to read the rest.

Trump is infuriated because his own intelligence chiefs disagree with his ignorant, information-free pronouncements about foreign countries. The heads of intelligence agencies testified to Congress on Tuesday.

CNN: Trump singled out Dan Coats in morning rant about intelligence community.

Icicles form on a railing in Port Washington, WI yesterday

President Donald Trump seethed Wednesday morning as he watched the highlights of his intelligence chiefs testifying on Capitol Hill and singled out Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats by name during his morning rant, two people with knowledge of the outburst tell CNN.

The President didn’t see Coats’ full testimony in front of lawmakers that took place on Tuesday, but he was furious Wednesday as he watched television chyrons blare that the officials had contradicted him. The snippets of Coats saying that North Korea had “halted its provocative behavior related to its WMD program” but was unlikely to “completely give up its nuclear weapons and production capabilities” angered him, CNN has learned.

Trump made his displeasure with the intelligence team clear on Twitter just after 6 a.m. Wednesday, but he didn’t single Coats out in his tweets like he did verbally. The President was more frustrated with the coverage than the assessments of the intelligence chiefs, who brief him on national security matters regularly.

The White House says Trump isn’t yet going to fire Coats for telling the truth.

At The Washington Post, Tim Weiner, author of books on the histories of the CIA and FBI, writes: When Trump savages his intelligence chiefs, the ‘deep state’ has reason to worry.

President Trump has compared the CIA to Nazis. Now he is attacking the sentinels of American national security as “extremely … naive” on Iran, and much else. “They are wrong!” he tweeted on Wednesday. “Perhaps Intelligence should go back to school!”

The chiefs of U.S. intelligence, an enterprise costing well north of $80 billion a year, report that Iran isn’t building nuclear weapons, North Korea isn’t dismantling them, and the Islamic State is undefeated in Syria and Iraq. Trump batted back their conclusions on ISIS and North Korea in tweets delivered before dawn, in who knows what dark night of the soul.

The Sheboygan lighthouse glows at sunrise in Wisconsin.

“The President has a dangerous habit of undermining the intelligence community to fit his alternate reality,” tweeted Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. “People risk their lives for the intelligence he just tosses aside on Twitter.”

The CIA’s spies and analysts are the lead reporters on these issues. All their work contradicts the president’s assumptions. And they are almost assuredly correct. Trump says they don’t know what they’re talking about. Why is he savaging American intelligence and its leaders? He may be playing deaf, dumb and blind to their work, fending it all off as fake news, because he thinks they have something on him. He certainly sees the CIA (and the FBI) as an instrument of a “deep state” conspiring to undo his presidency. And so he denigrates their work and dismisses their leaders as fools and naifs.

Sure, the CIA has been tragically wrong in the past. The United States went to war in Iraq 15 years ago, in part, because of its supposition that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. But it’s just as great a tragedy when it gets it right and the president won’t listen. We are living through that kind of tragedy right now. If Trump trashes whatever the CIA tells him — just as he ignored its solid reporting that a certain Saudi prince had a contributing Washington Post journalist murdered four months ago — who knows what will happen if we have an actual crisis.

Read the rest at the WaPo.

The Polar Vortex from space

The media has worked hard this weeks to make former Starbucks boss and billionaire Howard Schwartz into a viable presidential candidate. I don’t think it’s working, because Schultz is an unattractive man with zero charisma and no understanding of politics or government. Yesterday Schultz really stepped in it.

CNN: Howard Schultz deletes tweet about column that contained smears on Warren, Harris.

Schultz, who is weighing an independent centrist bid for president, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper he was unaware the column on PJMedia.com called Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts “Fauxcahontas” — a reference to her claim of Native American heritage — and Sen. Kamala Harris of California a “shrill … quasi-socialist.”

Asked on “Anderson Cooper 360” why he deleted the tweet, Schultz said it was “because I don’t want to get into the mud with anybody.”

“I don’t want to get into revenge politics, which has been obviously been the problem that I’m identifying,” he said. “I don’t want to be part of mudslinging. I want to speak aspirationally and positively and do everything I can to elevate the national conversation. That is what’s necessary.”

Schultz’s tweet Wednesday morning had thanked the column’s author for a “thoughtful analysis of what’s possible” as it argued the former CEO could win the White House.

So why did he recommend a column on PJ media then? Here’s what it said about Warren and Harris, from The Hill: Schultz deletes tweet of column calling Warren ‘Fauxcahontas’ and Harris ‘shrill.’

In the now-deleted tweet, Schultz linked to a piece that called Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) “shrill” and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) “Fauxcahontas,” a reference to her claims of Native American heritage.

Melissa Seitz at Higgins Lake, Michigan, caught this sunrise halo on January 30, 2019. Halos like this are caused by ice crystals drifting in the air. She wrote: “I created the heart in the snow a few days ago by walking around in tall boots!

“Thank you @Rogerlsimon for a thoughtful analysis of what’s possible. #ReimagineUS,” Schultz tweeted, along with a link to an article on PJ Media by Roger L. Simon titled “Howard Schultz Could Actually Win the Presidency.”

“Current frontrunner Kamala Harris is far from reassuring,” Simon writes in the column. “She’s a shrill (see the Kavanaugh hearings) quasi-socialist promising pie in the sky — Medicare-for-all, debt-free college, guaranteed pre-K, minimum basic income, confiscatory taxes — and she’s just getting started. Bernie [Sanders] and others will soon be following suit. Fauxcahontas already has, competing in a game of socialist one-upmanship.”

Not a very good start for a man who claims he wants to unite the country. Oh by the way, he also wants to cut Social Security, Medicare, and other social programs and doesn’t think the rich should pay more taxes.

More stories to check out:

New York Law Journal: Hasn’t the Time Come for Rudy Giuliani to be Disciplined?

CNN: Even some Republicans balk as Trump targets US spy chiefs.

Vox: Jerome Corsi’s claims about Roger Stone, WikiLeaks, and the Access Hollywood tape, explained.

The Daily Beast: NRA Heavyweight Wanted Access to Putin: Leaked Email.

Think Progress: Newly emerged photo shows Ben Carso.n with key employee of sanctioned Russian oligarch.

Lawfare: What an Old Watergate Document Can Teach the House Judiciary Committee.

SFGATE: Elephant seals took over a Pt. Reyes beach during shutdown. It won’t reopen a.nytime soon.

APNewsBreak: ICE force-feeding detainees on hunger strike.

Raw Story: How Donald Trump brought about the end of my marriage.

So . . . what stories have you been following?

 

Tuesday Reads: The Doddering Old Man in the White House

Posted: January 29, 2019 | Author: | Filed under: Afternoon Reads, U.S. Politics | 38 Comments

Good Afternoon!!

Folks, the “president” is a bewildered, doddering old man. He’s 72 years old. The last doddering old man we had as president was Ronald Reagan, who was 69 when he took office. Like Trump, Reagan made up stories out of whole cloth; and, especially in his second term, often seemed confused and sometimes couldn’t remember the names of his own cabinet members.

A couple of famous examples of Reagan’s confabulations (actually memory errors) from Dangerous Minds:

12/12/83 Addressing the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, President Reagan tells this heart-warming story: “A B‑17 coming back across the channel from a raid over Europe, badly shot up by anti‑aircraft … The young ball‑turret gunner was wounded, and they couldn’t get him out of the turret there while flying. But over the channel, the plane began to lose altitude, and the commander had to order bail out. And as the men started to leave the plane, the last one to leave – the boy, understandably, knowing he was being left behind to go down with the plane, cried out in terror – the last man to leave the plane saw the commander sit down on the floor. He took the boy’s hand and said, ‘Never mind, son, we’ll ride it down together.’ Congressional Medal of honor posthumously awarded.” [….]

12/16/83 Columnist Lars‑Erik Nelson – after checking the citations on all 434 Congressional Medals of Honor awarded during World War II – reveals that not one of them matches the story President Reagan told the other day. “It’s not true,” writes Nelson. “It didn’t happen. It’s a Reagan story … The President of the United States went before an audience of 300 real Congressional Medal of Honor winners and told them about a make‑believe Medal of Honor winner.” Responds White House spokesman Larry Speakes, “If you tell the same story five times, it’s true.”

12/20/83 At a press conference, President Reagan claims that El Salvador has “a 400‑year history of military dictatorships.” As it happens, though, the first military regime didn’t take power until way back in 1931. Okay, so he was off by a few centuries, so what?

Lars-Erik Nelson continues his quest for the source of the medal of honor story:

12/28/83 Lars‑Erik Nelson reports that a reader saw a scene very similar to President Reagan’s Medal of Honor story in the 1944 movie Wing and a Prayer. “Adding to the confusion,” writes Nelson, “Dana Andrews at one point reprimands a glory‑seeking young pilot with the words: ‘This isn’t Hollywood.’  … You could understand that some in the audience might confuse reality with fiction.”

1/11/84 Lars‑Erik Nelson suggests another source for the Medal of Honor story: an apocryphal item in the April 1944 issue of Reader’s Digest, a magazine known to be a life‑long Reagan favorite. “The bomber had been almost ripped apart by German cannon,” it read. “The ball turret gunner was badly wounded and stuck in the blister on the underside of the fuselage. Crewmen worked frantically to extricate the youngster, but there was nothing they could do. They began to jump. The terror‑stricken lad screamed in fear as he saw what was happening. The last man to jump heard the remaining crewman, a gunner, say, ‘Take it easy, kid. We’ll take this ride together.’”

And then there was the time that Reagan claimed to have been present at the liberation of Auschwitz. From Salon:

During Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s November 1983 visit to the U.S., Reagan told Shamir that during his service in the U.S. Army film corps, he and fellow members of his unit personally shot footage of the Nazis’ concentration camps as they were liberated. Reagan would tell this story again to others, including Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal. But Reagan was never present at the camps’ liberation. Instead, he spent the war in Culver City, California, where he processed footage from the liberation of the camps.

In reality, Reagan never left the U.S. during World War II. And of course there was the famous and oft-repeated “welfare queen” story:

…his campaign-trail tale of a “Chicago welfare queen” with 80 aliases, 30 addresses, and 12 Social Security cards, whom he alleged had claimed “over $150,000” in government benefits. The woman whom Reagan made infamous was convicted of using only two aliases, used to collect $8,000.

These are most likely source-monitoring memory errors, in which people recall events and information but not the the source from which they learned them. Memory errors like this happen to everyone but tend to get more severe in old age.

Now we have another “president” who is even worse than Reagan at making things up out of whole cloth. Some of his confabulations are outright lies, but some could be the result of memory errors.

In recent weeks, journalists and government officials have been trying to learn the source some very explicit claims Trump has been making about what is happening at the border withe Mexico.

The Hill, 1/25/19: Trump goes on ad-libbed riff on human trafficking.

President Trump on Friday delivered an extended, apparently ad-libbed warning about the consequences of failing to secure the southern border as he announced he would sign a short-term government funding bill that did not include money for a border wall.

At one point during his remarks, the teleprompter in the White House Rose Garden stopped as it read “Talk about Human Trafficking.”

For roughly two minutes, Trump gave a graphic description of people being brought across borders against their will in a modern form of slavery, describing women bound and with duct tape covering their mouths.

“They can’t come through the port because if they come through a port people will see four women sitting in a van with tape around face and around their mouth,” Trump said. “We can’t have it.”

“But they come through areas where they have no protection, where they have no steel barriers, where they have no walls,” he added. “And we can stop almost 100 percent of them.”

This wasn’t the first time Trump told this story. More from Monica Hesse at The Washington Post: Why does the president keep talking about women and duct tape on the border?

“Women are tied up, with duct tape on their faces, put in the backs of vans,” the president said, citing human traffickers who he alleges are the perpetrators of this violence against migrants.

But women are not tied up, experts have said. They do not have tape on their mouths. When Trump repeated this claim a few weeks ago, my colleague Katie Mettler contacted many authorities on trafficking who have spent time at the border, and none of them had seen or heard anything resembling the violence he described.

Nevertheless, there was Trump on Jan. 4, dramatizing the traffickers who “have three or four women with tape on their mouths and tied up, sitting in the back of a van or car.” There he was on Jan. 6: “They nab women, they grab them, they put tape over their mouths.” On Jan. 11: “Taping them up, wrapping tape around their mouths so they can’t shout or scream, tying their hands behind their back and even their legs.”

Sometimes the tape is explicitly duct tape, sometimes it’s electrical. Sometimes it has a specific color, as it did on Jan. 10: “Usually blue tape, as they call it. It’s powerful stuff. Not good.”

Hesse analyzes these Trump-created fantasies in the light of Trump’s history with women and his notions of Mexican men as “bad hombres.”

Vox reports that the Border Control has tried to find out where Trump got these ideas about human trafficking at the border.

It’s become a staple of President Donald Trump’s riffs on the horrors of the US-Mexico border, something he knows so well that he doesn’t even need it scripted on a teleprompter: Human traffickers gag women with tape so they can’t breathe before packing them into vans and driving them across the border illegally.

But two weeks after Trump had started talking about tape-gagged women — when a January 17 Washington Post article had questioned the claim — a top Border Patrol official had to email agents to ask if they had “any information” that the claim was actually true.

The email, shown to Vox by a source within Border Patrol, was sent as a “request for information” by an assistant Border Patrol chief, apparently on behalf of the office of Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan (referred to internally as “C-1”). It asked agents to reply within less than two hours with “any information (in any format)” regarding claims of tape-gagged women — and even linked to the Post article “for further info.”

Vox’s source indicated that they and others in their sector hadn’t heard anything that would back up Trump’s claims, but wasn’t sure if agents in other sectors had provided information. However, no one from the Trump administration has come forward to offer evidence for the claim, either before or after the internal Border Patrol email was sent.

Trump has also claimed that prayer rugs have been found abandoned near the border and that the drug smugglers and traffickers have amazing vehicles the like of which we’ve never seen before. From Charles Pierce at Esquire:

They’re driving in and they’re not coming through checkpoints, because you can’t have three or four people in the back with tape over your mouths and your hands tied and drive past someone who is checking out your van…The fact is if we don’t have barriers, walls, call them what you will, very strong barriers where people can not any longer drive right across. They have unbelievable vehicles. They make a lot of money. They have the best vehicles you can buy. They have stronger, bigger and faster vehicles than our police have and that ICE have and that Border Patrol have. [Ed. Note: And they still have to tie people up, four to a backseat? They really got snookered by some salesman, boy.] They’re pretty good at that. They have areas they go to. It’s like a highway.

If this guy weren’t the “president,” people would be telling his family members to have him evaluated for dementia.

Last night, Rachel Maddow suggested that Trump might have gotten these crazy ideas from a movie called Sicario: Day of the Soldado. Here’s the trailer:

 

Steven Benen writes about Trump’s violent fantasies at MSNBC: Has Trump peddled bogus claims about the border because of a movie?

First, they’re demonstrably false. There’s nothing especially amazing about smugglers’ vehicles; there’s no evidence at all of prayer rugs being found in the dirt by the border (in fact, the whole idea is kind of silly); and experts have marveled at how bizarre Trump’s claims are about women tied up with tape.

Second, each of these appeared in a recent fictional movie.

No, seriously. As Rachel noted on the show last night, there’s a movie called Sicario: 
Day of the Soldado, which was released last summer, and which included a woman being tied up with tape, smugglers driving vast vehicles, and officials finding prayer rugs in the dirt near the border.

Again, just so we’re all clear, the movie is real, but the story is fictional. The script was written by screenwriters, not documentarians. The plot of the film is made up, as are the characters and developments that unfolded on screen.

As Rachel added, “In a normal administration, it would be insane to suggest” the president of the United States saw stuff in a movie and maybe thought it reflected reality. And who knows, maybe it’s just a coincidence.

But let’s not miss the forest for the trees: Donald Trump’s observations about the border are so at odds with reality that there are reasonable questions as to how in the world he even came up with such strange ideas.

I can’t say with any certainty whether the president took a fictional movie a little too seriously, but that’s not really the point. Rather, what matters is that we’re left to wonder how and why Trump comes up with these stories, which he peddles to the public, despite being wrong.

I doubt that Trump watched this movie, but maybe one of his advisers (Stephen Miller?) did and told him about it. But regardless of where Trump got these confabulations, they likely indicate that Trump, like Reagan and his Father Fred Trump, is developing Alzheimer’s disease.

We’re stuck with another dangerous doddering old man and president. This is one reason I’m so opposed to someone as old as Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders running for president. They would both be much older then Reagan or Trump if they took office in 2020.

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