Lazy Saturday Reads: The So-Called President
Posted: February 4, 2017 Filed under: Afternoon Reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: Department of Homeland Security, District Court Judge James L. Robart, Donald Trump, John Kelly, muslim ban, Noah Purcell, State Department, Steve Bannon, Vincent Viola 31 Comments
The so-called president.
Good Afternoon!!
Last night a federal judge in Washington state blocked Donald tRump’s executive order on immigration nationwide. The Washington Post reported:
The federal judge’s ruling, which was broader than similar ones before it, set up a high-stakes legal confrontation between the new president and the judicial branch over his temporary ban on entry by citizens of seven majority-Muslim countries as well as refugees. In his opinion, U.S. District Judge James L. Robart wrote that “fundamental” to the court’s work was “a vigilant recognition that it is but one of three equal branches of our federal government.”
“The court concludes that the circumstances brought before it today are such that it must intervene to fulfill its constitutional role in our tripart government,” he wrote.
The ruling is temporary, and the ultimate question of whether Trump’s executive order will pass constitutional muster will fall to higher-level courts. Legal analysts have said the ban could be difficult to permanently undo because the president has broad authority to set immigration policy.
Robart granted a request from the state of Washington who had asked him to stop the government from acting on critical sections of Trump’s order. Justice and State department officials had revealed earlier Friday that about 60,000 — and possibly as many as 100,000 — visas already have been provisionally revoked as a result of Trump’s order. A U.S. official said that because of the court case, officials would examine the revoking of those visas so that people would be allowed to travel, Learn more here.
Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson hailed the case as “the first of its kind” and declared that it “shuts down the executive order immediately.” Robart, a judge appointed by George W. Bush, said in his written order that U.S. officials should stop enforcing the key aspects of the ban: the halting of entry by refugees and citizens from certain countries. He did not specifically address the matter of those whose visas already had been revoked.
U.S. District Judge James L. Robart
Nevertheless the Department of Homeland Security has suspended tRump’s Muslim ban for now. CNN:
The Department of Homeland Security announced it has suspended all actions to implement the immigration order and will resume standard inspections of travelers as it did prior to the signing of the travel ban.
Also, a State Department official tells CNN the department has reversed the cancellation of visas that were provisionally revoked following the President’s executive order last week — so long as those visas were not stamped or marked as canceled.
The State Department has said fewer than 60,000 visas were revoked since the signing of the order. It was not immediately clear how many from that group will continue to be without their visas because their visas were physically canceled.
Following the judge’s ruling — before the government’s announcements Saturday morning — the International Air Transportation Association, a leading airline industry group, wrote to its members to follow procedures “as if the executive order never existed.”
But tRump doesn’t like this one bit. As usual, he broadcast his tantrums on Twitter. Business Insider: Trump blasts ‘so-called judge’ who temporarily blocked immigration ban in morning tweetstorm.
President Donald Trump on Saturday blasted the federal judge who issued a nationwide hold on the executive order temporarily barring immigrants from seven predominately Muslim countries.
“The opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned!” Trump tweeted.
“Interesting that certain Middle-Eastern countries agree with the ban,” the president continued. “They know if certain people are allowed in it’s death & destruction!”
Yes folks, tRump referred to a Republican federal judge appointed by President George W. Bush as a “so-called judge.” Are we having a constitutional crisis yet?
Yesterday we learned that the tRump administration secretly ordered the revocation of as many as 100,000 legally issued visas. For now, that order has been reversed. The Washington Post:
The State Department says previously banned travelers will be allowed to enter the United States after a federal judge in Washington state on Friday temporarily blocked enforcement of President Trump’s controversial immigration ban.
“We have reversed the provisional revocation of visas under” Trump’s executive order, a State Department spokesman said Saturday. “Those individuals with visas that were not physically canceled may now travel if the visa is otherwise valid.”
Department of Homeland Security personnel “will resume inspection of travelers in accordance with standard policy and procedure.”
Immigrant advocates said they were encouraging travelers from the affected countries to get on planes as soon as possible, since the Trump administration has said it plans to appeal the stay on the travel ban.
Solicitor General Noah Purcell (C) and Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson (R) speak at a press conference outside U.S. District Court, Western Washington, on Feb. 3, 2017
Now what? Supposedly the White House plans to fight the judge’s order, but they are going to have to come up with better arguments than what DOJ lawyers argued yesterday–basically that a president’s orders cannot be questioned. From MyNorthwest.com:
The DOJ argued that Washington’s case has no standing, or injury because of case-by-case waivers included in the executive order. The DOJ argued that the president is granted broad powers over immigration. The federal lawyer said that the ban does not target any religion, but favors those facing religious persecution.
Attorney Noah Purcell argued the case for the state.
“I did say at one point the Department of Justice’s argument was frightening,” Purcell said. “And the argument was, essentially, that if the president says, ‘I’m doing this in national security interest,’ then a court cannot review if that was the real reason, or if there is any rational reason for the president’s action. Our view is that’s not the law. That’s a scary view of the law. Luckily, the judge rejected that idea.”
While hearing arguments, Judge Robarts stated that he must decide if Trump’s executive order is “rationally based” in facts. The DOJ, however, disagreed that was necessary.
Wow. We’re way past Watergate at this point, and tRump has only been in office for two weeks. Josh Rogin has some background on the machinations that have been going on between the administration over the Muslim ban: Inside the White House-Cabinet battle over Trump’s immigration order.
On the evening of Saturday, Jan. 28, as airport protests raged over President Trump’s executive order on immigration, the man charged with implementing the order, Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly, had a plan. He would issue a waiver for lawful permanent residents, a.k.a. green-card holders, from the seven majority-Muslim countries whose citizens had been banned from entering the United States.
White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon wanted to stop Kelly in his tracks. Bannon paid a personal and unscheduled visit to Kelly’s Department of Homeland Security office to deliver an order: Don’t issue the waiver. Kelly, according to two administration officials familiar with the confrontation, refused to comply with Bannon’s instruction. That was the beginning of a weekend of negotiations among senior Trump administration staffers that led, on Sunday, to a decision by Trump to temporarily freeze the issuance of executive orders.
The confrontation between Bannon and Kelly pitted a political operator against a military disciplinarian. Respectfully but firmly, the retired general and longtime Marine told Bannon that despite his high position in the White House and close relationship with Trump, the former Breitbart chief was not in Kelly’s chain of command, two administration officials said. If the president wanted Kelly to back off from issuing the waiver, Kelly would have to hear it from the president directly, he told Bannon.
John Kelly and Steve Bannon in the foreground
Bannon left Kelly’s office without getting satisfaction. Trump didn’t call Kelly to tell him to hold off. Kelly issued the waiver late Saturday night, although it wasn’t officially announced until the following day.
That did not end the dispute. At approximately 2 a.m. Sunday morning, according to the two officials, a conference call of several top officials was convened to discuss the ongoing confusion over the executive order and the anger from Cabinet officials over their lack of inclusion in the process in advance.
On the call were Bannon, White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, White House Counsel Donald McGahn, national security adviser Michael Flynn, Kelly, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Secretary of State designee Rex Tillerson, who had not yet been confirmed.
Read the rest at the WaPo.
I’ll wrap this up with some corruption news.
The New York Times: Trust Records Show Trump Is Still Closely Tied to His Empire.
While the president says he has walked away from the day-to-day operations of his business, two people close to him are the named trustees and have broad legal authority over his assets: his eldest son, Donald Jr., and Allen H. Weisselberg, the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer. Mr. Trump, who will receive reports on any profit, or loss, on his company as a whole, can revoke their authority at any time.
What’s more, the purpose of the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust is to hold assets for the “exclusive benefit” of the president. This trust remains under Mr. Trump’s Social Security number, at least as far as federal taxes are concerned….
While the trust structure, outlined in documents made public through a Freedom of Information Act request by ProPublica, may give the president the appearance of distance from his business, it drew sharp criticism from experts in government ethics.
“I don’t see how this in the slightest bit avoids a conflict of interest,” said Frederick J. Tansill, a trust and estates lawyer from Virginia who examined the documents at the request of The New York Times. “First it is revocable at any time, and it is his son and his chief financial officer who are running it.”
Click on the link to read the rest.
Vincent Viola
Again from The New York Times: Vincent Viola, Nominee for Army Secretary, Drops Out.
Vincent Viola, a billionaire Wall Street trader and President Trump’s nominee for secretary of the Army, abruptly withdrew his name for the post on Friday night after concluding it would be too difficult to untangle himself from his business ties, two government officials said.
Mr. Viola is an owner of the Florida Panthers hockey club and a majority shareholder in Virtu Financial and Eastern Air Lines, among a number of other business interests. This week The New York Times reported that Mr. Viola had been negotiating to swap his stake in Eastern Air Lines for a stake in Swift Air, an airline with government subcontracts.
If his nomination had continued, he would have faced certain scrutiny for potentially becoming a government official who benefits from federal contracts.
The Trump administration did not announce his withdrawal, which was first reported Friday by The Military Times, but a senior administration official and a Pentagon official separately confirmed his decision, which the White House accepted Friday. Both officials spoke on the condition of anonymity.
That’s all I have for you today. Now I’m going back to bed to nurse my ongoing terrible cold. Please post your thoughts and links in the comment thread below, and have a nice weekend.
Friday Reads: The Great Pretenders
Posted: February 3, 2017 Filed under: Afternoon Reads, Andrew Breitbart 53 Comments
Good Afternoon!
It’s just another day in upside down world. Among the strange things going on today are a bizarre terror attack made up from whole cloth by White House Mommy who seems to be losing grip on reality. Conway has been telling serious whoppers for some time. Is the pressure to create a narrative that fits the insanity finally getting to her already slim grasp on reality?
Senior Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway made a statement during a TV interview Thursday that pricked the ears of fact-checkers everywhere.
She told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews:”I bet it’s brand new information to people that President Obama had a six-month ban on the Iraqi refugee program after two Iraqis came here to this country, were radicalized and they were the masterminds behind the Bowling Green massacre. It didn’t get covered.”
First of all, Obama didn’t ban the Iraqi refugee program.
Second, there’s no such thing as the Bowling Green massacre.
Conway later clarified that she was referencing the case of two Iraqis — Waad Ramadan Alwan and Mohanad Shareef Hammadi — who lived in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Both were granted refugee status and entered the United States in 2009.
“On @hardball@NBCNews@MSNBC I meant to say ‘Bowling Green terrorists’ as reported here,” she said, before linking to an ABC news story on the case.
They were arrested in May 2011 on a series of terrorism charges and were sentenced two years later after pleading guilty.
The two men were never planning on committing an act of terrorism on US soil. Instead, they were trying to help get weapons to al Qaeda in Iraq. They were terrorists who should not have been allowed in the country, but they weren’t planning an attack in the United States. And they didn’t kill anyone in Bowling Green (or anywhere else in the US).
It’s amazing to me that we basically have an administration that says anything and everything and does anything it wants to without any shame. I’m not even sure any of them know how to feel shame or when it’s appropriate!
The most disturbing thing the narrative that ignores the role that young white ‘radicalized’ –and Christian–men play in acts of terrorism in this country. Abi Wilkinson–writing for the UK Guardian–explains the role of the “manosphere” and its horrible connection to misogyny, racism, and Fascist elements in the US. It’s a straight line from this cesspool of angry white men to Bannon and his ilk.
For several years now, I’ve had a dark and fairly unusual hobby. When I’m alone and bored and the mood strikes me, I’ll open up my laptop and head for a particularly unsavoury corner of the internet.
No, not the bit you’re thinking of. Somewhere far worse. That loose network of blogs, forums, subreddits and alternative media publications colloquially known as the “manosphere”. An online subculture centred around hatred, anger and resentment of feminism specifically, and women more broadly. It’s grimly fascinating and now troubling relevant.
In modern parlance, this is part of the phenomenon known as the “alt-right”. More sympathetic commentators portray it as “a backlash to PC culture” and critics call it out as neofascism. Over the past year, it has been strange to see the disturbing internet subculture I’ve followed for so long enter the mainstream. The executive chairman of one of its most popular media outlets, Breitbart, has just been appointed Donald Trump’s chief of strategy, and their UK bureau chief was among the first Brits to have a meeting with the president-elect. Their figurehead – Milo Yiannopoulos – toured the country stumping for him during the campaign on his “Dangerous Faggot” tour. These people are now part of the political landscape.
On their forums I’ve read long, furious manifestos claiming that women are all sluts who “ride the cock carousel” and sleep with a series of “alpha males” until they reach the end of their sexual prime, at which point they seek out a “beta cuck” to settle down with for financial security. I’ve lurked silently on blogs dedicated to “pick-up artistry” as men argue that uppity, opinionated, feminist women – women like myself – need to be put in their place through “corrective rape”.
This hateful movement is so in with the White House at the moment that Milo Yiannopoulos is attending White House Press Briefings. Just a few days ago he was the source of a series of protests that turned violent at Berkley.
Milo Yiannopoulos, the conservative provocateur and Breitbart News columnist, claims he is going to attend the White House press briefing on Friday.
“I’ll be there,” Yiannopoulos said in an email to Yahoo News.Yiannopoulos said he didn’t know whether he would get to ask White House press secretary Sean Spicer a question at the briefing. He previously attended a briefing last March.
Yiannopoulos asked former White House press secretary Josh Earnest about his belief that Facebook and Twitter are “punishing conservative and libertarian points of view.”The briefing comes at the end of a week when a speech Yiannopoulos planned to deliver at University of California, Berkeley was canceled amid violent protests. President Trump responded to the demonstrations with a tweet on Thursday morning that seemed to suggest he might pull federal funds from the university.
There have been rumors that Trump’s administration is trying to redefine law enforcement efforts to stop mass attacks in this country to just ones perpetrated by those professing faith in Islam. This has not be confirmed yet but the Snopes site has outlined some sources where speculation as to what is meant by “News reports in February 2017 suggested that President Trump may revamp the Countering Violent Extremism program so that it focuses solely on Islamic terror threats.” Follow this link to several articles that are worth reading including the original Reuters piece.
What we do know is that we’re discussing completely made up Terror Threats and the latest which is a knife attack by a solo actor at the Louvre in Paris rather than the White Supremicist Trump Supporter than killed 6 people at a Canadian Mosque. We have yet to hear the White House show any sympathy for those victims.
Meanwhile, we’ve learned that the attack that killed an 8 year old girl, many women, and a US soldier was rejected by the Obama administration as a no go because there wasn’t adequate intelligence. We’re finding out more and the details aren’t pretty at all. The Trump Team owns this mess and as BB reported yesterday, Bannon and Kushner were part of the decision. There’s also been no apology on the death of so many noncombatants. As my friend Joshua Holland put it: “Imagine a Dem launching a raid w/ inadequate prep and not even monitoring it as it went to Hell, killing a seal and women and children.”
Meanwhile, the one shock of the day is that Hair Furor has told the Israelis to knock off the settlements which is sure to make waves with Bibi, et al. Bibi was about the only leader Trump had yet to tick off other than Vladimir Putin. That has changed with this announcement.
The White House warned Israel on Thursday to cease settlement announcements that are “unilateral” and “undermining” of President Donald Trump’s effort to forge Middle East peace, a senior administration official told The Jerusalem Post.
For the first time, the administration confirmed that Trump is committed to a comprehensive two-state solution to the Israeli- Palestinian conflict negotiated between the parties.
I’m still trying to figure this one out. But, I’m not relying on the Media. Only The New Yorker and Vanity Fair have pulled out of The White House Correspondents dinner. I would hope for a rather large boycott of Nerd Prom but I’m not counting on it this year.This year, though, the decision of whether to host a soiree pinned to the April 29 dinner is just a touch more… complicated than in the past. Although the dinner is put on by the White House Correspondents Association and is ostensibly about raising money for scholarships, some media types worry about the appearance of yukking it up with a president who has been openly hostile to the press (make that “failing piles of garbage”) and are thinking harder about their party plans.
“I can understand how the media, which host the dinner — that serves a philanthropic purpose — are struggling,” said one person at a news organization that typically hosts a WHCD-related event.
Vanity Fair and the New Yorker have pulled out of their traditional parties this year, the New York Times reported on Friday. The soirees hosted by those publications are among the most glittery celebrity draws of the weekend — the kind of confabs where you might spot Robert DeNiro chatting with John Kerry or run into Emma Watson at the bar — some dinner observers think their decision to cancel was at least in part influenced by the fact that a WHCD under a Trump administration will attract few Hollywood types. (Bloomberg News, which had co-hosted with Vanity Fair, will reportedly continue to host its afterparty.)
I’m horrified that Dodd Frank is about to be taken apart. This is the worst news to me this week. Hold on to your wallets.
I’m not sure what to even say about that but expected it given how many billionaires and Goldman Sachs execs are way up there in the West Wing chain of command. Maybe this covers it.
The last bit of sad news I have to report is this. Feisty and wonderful Ruline Steininger the Clinton supporter from Iowa died yesterday at 103 never having seen her dream of a Hillary and Woman president.
On a cold February night last year, 102-year-old Ruline Steininger caucused for Hillary Clinton in Iowa, determined to witness history and help elect the country’s first female president.
“I’ve got a big job ahead of me … I’ve got to live,” she said at the time. “After that, OK, I can die if I want to, but I’m going to live until she’s elected.”
Monday Reads: Shocking Times
Posted: January 30, 2017 Filed under: Afternoon Reads | Tags: executive orders, Muslim Band, Protests 76 Comments
Good Afternoon!
It’s difficult to try to make sense of the last 10 days using any normal construct. Just the fact we’ve seen enormous international protests come together across the world nearly spontaneously with more in the works tells me these are not normal times. We’re two Mondays into the Drumpfocracy and this is my second Monday writing about massive protests. Chaos and division are resplendent throughout the Drumpfdom.
A friend and Dharma sister sent me a quote from historian and Boston College Professor Heather Cox Richardson today describing the Muslim Executive Order as a planned “shock event” staged by Steve Bannon. The purpose of this event is to basically “create confusion and chaos so that the administration can present itself as the only entity capable of restoring order” as paraphrased by blogger JohnFEA. Cox Richardson writes:
What Bannon is doing, most dramatically with last night’s ban on immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries– is creating what is known as a “shock event.” Such an event is unexpected and confusing and throws a society into chaos. People scramble to react to the event, usually along some fault line that those responsible for the event can widen by claiming that they alone know how to restore order. When opponents speak out, the authors of the shock event call them enemies. As society reels and tempers run high, those responsible for the shock event perform a sleight of hand to achieve their real goal, a goal they know to be hugely unpopular, but from which everyone has been distracted as they fight over the initial event. There is no longer concerted opposition to the real goal; opposition divides along the partisan lines established by the shock event.
She’s already landed herself on the Fifth Column style website called “The Professor Watchlist”.
Heather Cox Richardson, a history professor at Boston College, has also found herself in the database. In an article on Bill Moyers’s website she objected to the crudeness of the Professor Watchlist project. She said she does not publicly identify with any political party and believes “American democracy is the form of government that comes closest to bringing that principle to reality.”
She’s written a recent book “To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party”. She was interviewed by WBUR in the fall on the party and its rank and file. There’s a podcast of that interview here. I particularly like her description of the purge of the party in the party that was a direct result of right wing christianists and so-called “movement conservatives”.
…When [Movement conservatives] took over the Republican Party and got rid of the traditional Rockefeller Republicans, if you will, Lincoln Republicans. When they read them out of the party, what they did is they wedded the party’s machinery to this quite extremist idea that most Americans don’t really believe. The moment we’re in now, that movement conservative ideology has led to the Ted Cruzes and the Paul Ryans, yes, but what it’s done is it created the demographic that feeds the white-nationalists — the hatred that most Americans don’t really embrace.”
One of my friends noted that she was called a “Muslim-loving whore” this weekend. The entire debacle is certainly dividing us and creating massive chaos. I pity any one who has got a flight to take. The airports are alive with protests. Town and City Squares are alive with protest. We can’t seem to protest enough these days.
An executive order referred to widely among protesters as a “Muslim ban” on immigration travel has led to thousands of people protesting all over the country. The protests began on Saturday and are continuing today. At the source of the controversy is President Donald Trump’s latest executive order, which temporarily blocks 130 million people from entering the United States. The order itself never explicitly uses the word “Muslim.” What it does is temporarily ban citizens of Iraq and six other Muslim-major countries (Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Sudan, and Yemen) from entering the United States. (Syrian immigration was indefinitely suspended.) Comments from Trump to media about expediting immigration for Christians sparked additional controversy, but those comments weren’t actually in his executive order. Federal judge Ann Donnelly granted an emergency stay of the executive order. Meanwhile, Trump said the ban was put in place to review the vetting process and protect the United States from radical Islamic terrorists. But protesters are disagreeing vehemently with the ban. Some of the people who were were originally detained have since been released.
Merkel took upon herself as the evident new leader of the Free World to explain that the US is a signatory to the Geneva Convention. She also had to tell him about the document and its purpose. What kind of idiot did these people elect? What have these bigoted crazy people done to us?
Donald Trump’s executive order to halt travel from seven Muslim-majority countries – Iraq, Syria, Iran, Yemen, Sudan, Libya and Somalia – has provoked a wave of concern and condemnation from international leaders and politicians.
A spokesman for Angela Merkel said the German chancellor regretted Trump’s decision to ban citizens of certain countries from entering the US, adding that she had “explained” the obligations of the refugee convention to the new president in a phone call on Saturday.
“The chancellor regrets the US government’s entry ban against refugees and the citizens of certain countries,” Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert said in a statement.
“She is convinced that the necessary, decisive battle against terrorism does not justify a general suspicion against people of a certain origin or a certain religion.
“The … refugee convention requires the international community to take in war refugees on humanitarian grounds. All signatory states are obligated to do. The German government explained this policy in their call yesterday.”
We’re an international pariah state like never before. I don’t think it was even worse during the Nixon years when I traveled during the height of the Vietnam War and did everything I could while in Europe to convince people I was not an American.
What appears to be most disturbing is that the Executive Branch has ordered the Department of Homeland Security to enforce the ban regardless of the stays by four separate judges. Many airport security personal have blocked lawyers and congressman from seeing detainees. This has seriously breached rule of law here.
Demonstrators shout slogans during anti-Donald Trump immigration ban protests outside Terminal 4 at San Francisco International Airport in San Francisco, California, U.S., January 28, 2017. REUTERS/Kate Munsch
Here’s Trump’s latest Executive Order: “Trump signs executive order requiring that for every one new regulation, two must be revoked”. How the fuck does that work?
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday morning requiring that for every new federal regulation implemented, two must be rescinded.
“This will be the biggest such act that our country has ever seen,” Trump declared moments before signing it inside the Oval Office. “There will be regulation, there will be control, but it will be a normalized control where you can open your business and expand your business very easily. And that’s what our country has been all about.”
The executive order signing, which fills a campaign pledge, comes after the president held a listening session with small-business leaders.
“If you have a regulation you want, number one, we’re not gonna approve it because it’s already been approved probably in 17 different forms,” Trump said. “But if we do, the only way you have a chance is we have to knock out two regulations for every new regulation. So if there’s a new regulation, they have to knock out two.”
The White House has yet to release text of the executive order, but the president added that “it goes far beyond that.”
“We’re cutting regulations massively for small business — and for large business,” he said. “But they’re different. But for small business, and that’s what this is about today.”
The word “shock” is used a lot in both economic and finance models. It’s best described by Taleb Nassem as a “black swan”. It suddenly disrupts normal market behavior–and depending on how severe it is–can cause problems for some time. It’s like a variety of rocks thrown into water that create ripples. This is like a hail storm of rocks falling on everything around us.
Here’s another ripple that amazes me: “US Diplomats Consider Filing Dissent Over Immigration Ban”. The White House considers the move to be highly successful.
Dozens of foreign service officers and other career diplomats stationed around the world are so concerned about President Donald Trump‘s new executive order restricting Syrian refugees and other immigrants from entering the United States that they are contemplating taking the rare step of sending a formal objection to senior State Department officials in Washington.
In recent days, drafts of a dissent memo have been circulating among diplomats and associates abroad expressing concern that the new restrictions — which Trump said would help “keep America safe” — are un-American and will actually paralyze efforts to stop terrorist attacks inside the U.S. homeland.
“This ban … will not achieve its stated aim to protect the American people from terrorist attacks by foreign nationals admitted to the United States,” warned one early draft reviewed by ABC News.
Instead, the executive order will expand anti-American sentiment and “immediately sour relations” with key allies in the fight against terrorism, particularly many of the countries whose citizens are now blocked from traveling to the United States, according to the early draft.
My friend David Ferguson is writing about the other shocking news that’s disturbing both Republicans and Democrats on the Hill. “Democrats and Republicans can’t believe Trump put ‘Nazi’ Steve Bannon on National Security Council”. The Muslim ban nearly seems a sideshow to this one which could be the purpose of it all.
On Saturday, Pres. Donald Trump announced that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the national director of intelligence will no longer be included in all meetings of the National Security Council (NSC)’s principals committee. However, the president’s order said, former Breitbart.com CEO Stephen K. Bannon will be attending every meeting alongside the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense and some of the highest ranking officers in the nation’s security and intelligence services.
“Chairman of Joint Chiefs and DNI treated as afterthoughts in Cabinet level principals meetings. And where is CIA?? Cut out of everything?” wrote former United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice on Sunday, according to the New York Daily News.
“This is stone cold crazy,” Rice continued. “After a week of crazy. Who needs military advice or intel to make policy on ISIL, Syria, Afghanistan, DPRK?”
“Trump loves and trusts the military so much he just kicked them out of the National Security Council and put a Nazi in their place,” she said.
Press Secretary Sean Spicer responded by complaining about Rice’s tone, which he said was “clearly inappropriate language from a former ambassador.”
These are dangerous, chaotic times and it’s all been brought on by people that are “stone cold crazy.” Democrats on the Hill are planning a rally in front of the SCOTUS building.
Democratic lawmakers will host a rally on Monday evening at the Supreme Court to protest President Donald Trump’s recent executive order imposing a temporary ban on nationals from seven Muslim-majority countries entering the United States.
“Tomorrow at 6:00 p.m., House and Senate Democrats will gather for a press event in front of the steps of the Supreme Court to demand the President withdraw his disreputable executive order. All Members are urged to come to express our solidarity,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said in a letter to her Democratic colleagues in the House.
Trump on Friday signed an order that imposed a 90-day ban on nationals from Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen entering the United States. The order also included a 120-day ban on admitting refugees and an indefinite halt on admitting refugees from Syria, which has been embattled in a civil war since 2011.
“We are witnessing an historic injustice unfold, and we must keep the pressure on,” Pelosi said in the letter.
Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Sunday saidDemocrats are considering legislation to overturn Trump’s order, but will need Republicans to be on board.
“If we get a few more Republicans, I think we might be able to pass legislation to overturn it,” Schumer said Sunday at press conference in his home state. “It will be up to getting more Republicans.”
Pelosi, in the letter, echoes several of her colleagues by saying the order constitutes “a Muslim ban.”
“As Members of Congress, we take a solemn oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. Democrats intend to honor that oath by fighting the unconstitutional injustice of the President’s Muslim ban.”
Now let’s hear how they are going to stop this mess. They better get a few republicans besides Lindsay Graham and John McCain to go rogue and stick with the Constitution over the mad king too.
What would Mary Richards do? Given that most of the lawyers do pro bono work at the airports are women, I say she’d take to the air waves and stand up for what’s right!!! The Boston Judge who issued the first stay is a woman too!
What’s on your reading and blogging list?
Friday: Will the US ever be the US again?
Posted: January 27, 2017 Filed under: Afternoon Reads, just because 59 Comments
Good Afternoon!
It’s just one devastating hit to the constitution, civil rights, global stability, science, women, our allies, our citizens of color, our GLBT citizens, journalists, National Parks, Federal Scientists and agencies … well, the list goes on and on.
We’re lucky if less than five horrifying policy offerings happen a day. It’s at the point that we’re going to be lucky to survive this chaos. This happened yesterday and then there was a certain amount of backing off from it by Spicer. It’s hard to know what’s actual and what’s just swamp fever.
As an economist, all I can say is this is a very bad idea. Mexico and Canada are number 2 and 1 importers of US goods. Mexico imports nearly twice as much as China does from us. China is #3. Altogether, Mexico is our third largest trade partner if you do not include the EU as a bloc.
We have had a net negative immigration status with Mexico and the number of Mexicans living here illegally has declined. The primary source of undocumented visitors is your local airport where people land and overstay their tourist VISAS. All of this information is quite verifiable simply by checking the sites of the World Bank and US immigration services.
Already, Mexican border towns are boycotting US goods, services and their daily shopping trips to US owned stores. Please remember Smoot Hawley and also that the WTO will allow Mexico to reciprocate. This is called a Trade War that has been known to start real wars. Our balance of trade with Mexico shows we run a trade deficit. This is one of our most equal and big trade partners!! This will seriously cripple US exporters and cost lots of jobs!
The digital image shows a clenched fist bathed in the red, white and green of Mexico’s flag and decorated with the nation’s emblematic eagle. “Consumers, to the Shout of War,” it says in Spanish above the fist. “Consume products made in country…Use your buying power to punish the companies that favor the politics of the new U.S. government.”
Created by a Mexican food-activist group, the image is part of a slew of messages, memes and videos that have been spreading in Mexico in recent days as President Donald Trump pushes for a border wall, deportations and punishing new trade rules. Others messages call for specific boycotts of U.S. companies in Mexico, including McDonalds, Walmart and Coca-Cola. One of the most heavily trending hashtags is #AdiosStarbucks, or “Goodbye Starbucks,” referring to the Seattle company which has opened hundreds of coffee houses here.
The Mexican President bailed on a meeting with Kremlin Caligula.
Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto announced on Twitter around midday on Thursday that he was scrapping a planned trip to meet with U.S. President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly demanded that Mexico pay for a wall on the U.S. border.
Later in the day, White House spokesman Sean Spicer sent the Mexican peso falling to its low for the day when he told reporters that Trump wanted a 20 percent tax on Mexican imports to pay for construction of the wall.
Spicer gave few details, but his comments resembled an existing idea, known as a border adjustment tax, that the Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives is considering as part of a broad tax overhaul.
The White House said later its proposal was in the early stages. Asked if Trump favored a border adjustment tax, White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus said such a tax would be “one way” of paying for the border wall.
“It’s a buffet of options,” he said.
The plan being weighed by House Republicans would exempt export revenues from taxation but impose a 20 percent tax on imported goods, a significant change from current U.S. policy.
So, here’s the recession clenching bit of news for who ever came up with that awful policy. We’re export heavy with Mexico because WE BUY THEIR SWEET MEXICAN CRUDE OIL. Demand for gas is price inelastic which means any taxes will be passed straight on down to the final consumer.
Less than a week after assuming office, the Trump administration indicated it may impose the levy on imports from Mexico to finance construction of a barrier along the southern U.S. border. American companies imported about $14 billion in oil and related products in 2015, government data show. White House press secretary Sean Spicer noted that the tax was only one idea being mulled to pay for the wall, a cornerstone of Trump’s campaign.
The tax, which Spicer characterized in a briefing Thursday as “theoretical,” would apply to countries with which the U.S. has a trade deficit. That would seemingly exempt Canada, with which the U.S. ran a surplus of $11.9 billionin 2015. However it may include Saudi Arabia, the second-largest foreign supplier of crude to the U.S., which sent $31 billion more to the U.S. than it took back in 2012.
Most U.S. refineries reside inside Foreign Trade Zones, including the biggest U.S. importer of Mexican crude, a joint venture owned by Royal Dutch Shell Plc and Mexico’s state-controlled driller Petroleos Mexicanos.
I really hate this man.
Today, religious extremist nuts all over the country join Mike Pence and White House mommy in ignoring real live people and obsessing with fertilized eggs. Then, we have Bannon who seems to be at the center of overthrowing life as we know it in the US. This man may be as insane as Trump but not stupidly so. He appears each day to have just drug himself off the couch after an all night bender. The entire Trump staff looks as though the can barely dress themselves let alone look professional. But then, Trump himself may be the richest most unkept man alive. Nothing about him says success.
White House and Hill GOP leaders are astonished by the unambiguous, far-reaching power of Steve Bannon and policy guru Stephen Miller over, well, just about everything.
- They wrote the Inaugural speech and set in fast motion a series of moves to cement Trump as an America-first Nationalist.
- They maneuvered to get more key allies inside the White House and positioned for top agency jobs.
- They wrote many of the executive orders, sometimes with little input from others helping with the transition.
- They egged on Trump to take a combative approach with the media, China, Mexico and critics.
- And Bannon punctuated the week with a full-throated, Trump-pleasing bashing of the media.
Bannon, in a phone interview with NYT’s Mike Grynbaum, who covers media, TV, and politics (story is on A1): “The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while … I want you to quote this … The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States. … The elite media got it dead wrong, 100 percent dead wrong … The mainstream media has not fired or terminated anyone associated with following our campaign … Look at the Twitter feeds of those people: They were outright activists of the Clinton campaign … That’s why you have no power … You were humiliated.”
Pre-conventional wisdom: A conservative leader told Axios’ Jonathan Swan that Reince Priebus’ people were feeling like they “won November and December,” having filled the White House with so many loyalists. The spin was that Reince was outmaneuvering Bannon and would be the real power source. But now it’s dawning on them, as Trump makes his early moves, that maybe they spoke too soon.
Catherine Rampell writes in WAPO that Trump’s first week looks like the worst run business she’s ever seen.
One week into the presidency, we’ve gotten a taste of Trump’s management style. And so far it’s been plagued by many of the bad habits common to poorly run businesses.
Take, for example, his administration’s clear indifference to — or outright rejection of — good measurement and analytics.
One of the first things you learn from talking to management experts and successful entrepreneurs is the importance of having a clear set of objectives, as well as good, consistent metrics for determining whether those objectives have been met.
Or, as Trump’s commerce secretary nominee, Wilbur Ross, argued not once but twice in his confirmation hearing last week: “I have a very heartfelt saying in management that anything you can’t measure, you can’t manage.”
Ross, arguably the most business-savvy of Trump’s Cabinet picks, has not yet been confirmed. In his absence, the administration has not exactly been taking his “heartfelt saying” to heart.
During a news conference Monday, for instance, White House press secretary Sean Spicer refused to answer a simple measurement question: What is the current unemployment rate?
The answer is not exactly a secret. Three weeks ago, the Labor Department publicly announced its latest reading as 4.7 percent.
But Spicer — whose boss has variously claimed the rate is “a total fiction” and as high as “42 percent” — ducked. Instead of providing the figure, or even citing alternative metrics he thought could be better gauges of economic health (such as measures of underemployment or labor force participation), Spicer pooh-poohed interest in quantitative gauges altogether.
“The president, he’s not focused on statistics as much as he is on whether or not the American people are doing better as a whole,” Spicer said.
He went on to admonish “Washington” for fixating on numbers and forgetting “the faces and the families and the businesses that are behind those numbers.”
I spent my private sector life being the brains for CEOs whose businesses were doing badly because they never once looked at any stats and analytics until they brought my young educated ass into the businesses. It was horrifying. My first big job out of university was basically to figure out that the largest S&L in about a 4 state area was going bankrupt and there was absolutely nothing they were going to be able to do about it. Most of it was because their stupid Marketing VP kept getting them to buy up sinking banks in economically destitute areas to get more market share with no regard to the drain on assets thst would continue. A lot of CEOs are really hopeless and you’d be surprised how many of their compadres in senior management are guys they knew from high school. Trump is beyond that and the devastation left in his wake pretty much proves it. He excels at creating chaos.
He’s also brought Orwell’s bleak “1984” into perspective. This is Adam Gopnik writing for The New Yorker.
There is nothing subtle about Trump’s behavior. He lies, he repeats the lie, and his listeners either cower in fear, stammer in disbelief, or try to see how they can turn the lie to their own benefit. Every continental wiseguy, from Žižek to Baudrillard, insisted that when they pulled the full totalitarian wool over our eyes next time, we wouldn’t even know it was happening. Not a bit of it. Trump’s lies, and his urge to tell them, are pure Big Brother crude, however oafish their articulation. They are not postmodern traps and temptations; they are primitive schoolyard taunts and threats.
The blind, blatant disregard for truth is offered without even the sugar-façade of sweetness of temper or equableness or entertainment—offered not with a sheen of condescending consensus but in an ancient tone of rage, vanity, and vengeance. Trump is pure raging authoritarian id.
And so, rereading Orwell, one is reminded of what Orwell got right about this kind of brute authoritarianism—and that was essentially that it rests on lies told so often, and so repeatedly, that fighting the lie becomes not simply more dangerous but more exhausting than repeating it. Orwell saw, to his credit, that the act of falsifying reality is only secondarily a way of changing perceptions. It is, above all, a way of asserting power.
What we have here is a very unusual set of responses including the Woman’s March and now very mad Scientists. No, not the 50s SciFi kind of mad but angry, activist political nerds. It’s the revenge of the civil servants!
https://twitter.com/jeremydvoss/status/824391571172847616
The National Park System became the first rogue set of federal employees to take on Kremlin Caligula.
Five days into his presidency, Donald Trump has acted swiftly to dismantle Barack Obama’s legacy, issuing executive orders cutting federal funding to women’s health groups abroad if they discuss abortion, green-lighting the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, and scaling back the Affordable Care Act. While his press secretary Sean Spicer has been busy holding daily press briefings and generally evading journalists’ questions about the Trump presidency, Trump himself has been issuing gag orders against various federal agencies. He’s instructed employees at the Environmental Protection Agency—which has had its contracts and grants frozen—and the U.S. Department of Agriculture not to communicate with the press or the public, instituting a media blackout.
Not everyone within the federal government is staying quiet, however. On Tuesday, the Twitter account for South Dakota’s Badlands National Park—a subsidiary of the National Park Service—began tweeting out climate change facts, in apparent defiance of the gag order. Someone working for the national park’s social media team went rogue and started posting climate change facts from the National Wildlife Federation’s Web site in 140-character bursts. (Trump, who can generously be described as a climate change skeptic, has previously called called climate change a “hoax” engineered by the Chinese.)
The National Park’s tweets were retweeted thousands of times before they were suddenly deleted later Tuesday afternoon.
So, now I feel like this.
Trump is obsessed with so many things it’s not even funny. And, it’s all about him and size.
He appears to have pressured our heroes at the NPS to provide alternative facts for the size of his installation crowd. What a small little man with a small mind!
On the morning after Donald Trump’s inauguration, acting National Park Service director Michael T. Reynolds received an extraordinary summons: The new president wanted to talk to him.
In a Saturday phone call, Trump personally ordered Reynolds to produce additional photographs of the previous day’s crowds on the Mall, according to three individuals who have knowledge of the conversation. The president believed that the photos might prove that the media had lied in reporting that attendance had been no better than average.
Trump also expressed anger over a retweet sent from the agency’s account, in which side-by-side photographs showed far fewer people at his swearing-in than had shown up to see Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009.
According to one account, Reynolds had been contacted by the White House and given a phone number to call. When he dialed it, he was told to hold for the president.
For Trump, who sees himself and his achievements in superlative terms, the inauguration’s crowd size has been a source of grievance that he appears unable to put behind him. It is a measure of his fixation on the issue that he would devote part of his first morning in office to it — and that he would take out his frustrations on an acting Park Service director.
I’m now trying to stay off the internet which Trump wants to ‘close up’.
On Monday, Trump spoke at the U.S.S. Yorktown in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, and suggested that he would meet with Bill Gates to discuss closing down parts of the internet to curtail its use by ISIS as a recruitment tool.
“We’re losing a lot of people because of the Internet,” Trump said. “We have to go see Bill Gates and a lot of different people that really understand what’s happening. We have to talk to them about, maybe in certain areas, closing that Internet up in some way. Somebody will say, ‘Oh freedom of speech, freedom of speech.’ These are foolish people. We have a lot of foolish people.”
How long can the mania last? How long can the Republicans let it go? Are they all just suicide pilots throwing what they can at us to survive politically? This is Brian Beutler from TNR.
To the contrary, if they believed their lack of consensus and popular support were fatal to their agenda, they would have no reason not to jettison Trump before he did irrevocable damage to their party, the country, and the international order. Instead, they will embrace the current arrangement, in all of its recklessness, at least until their agenda is complete—or in ruins.
The alternative—to take a principled stand against Trumpism, at the expense of the platform they’ve waited patiently to enact—would provide them little political protection in the long run. They’d still be members of Trump’s party, but on his enemies’ list and with no substantive gains to show for it. Though Trump promises to be a disastrous president, they ironically have little incentive not to go down with him.
In a perverse and amoral way, the logic of the political suicide mission is self-reinforcing, even if it ultimately fails to meet all of its objectives. Those who carry it out will have gone down for a cause, rather than for for their own sense of moral purity. And they know they won’t have to live with the unintended consequences—but everyday Americans will.
I just am seriously trying to step away from media right now. I thought I could stay on line and read but the more I read, the more the anxiety returns. Will we ever feel like a civilized nation again? What fresh hell will we awake to on Monday?
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Tuesday Reads
Posted: January 24, 2017 Filed under: Afternoon Reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: Dakota Access pipeline, Donald Trump, Keystone XL pipeline, narcissim 48 Comments
Girl reading on a rainy day, Dominique Amendola
Good Morning!!
Sorry I’m so late this morning. I have no excuse other than my mental block against reading about the tRump horror show. Every day I wake up expecting to find that this narcissistic, unstable man has blown something up. One interesting thing is that the White House is leaking like a sieve every time tRump has one of his tantrums. The Washington Post got some doozies yesterday.
The first days inside Trump’s White House: Fury, tumult and a reboot.
President Trump had just returned to the White House on Saturday from his final inauguration event, a tranquil interfaith prayer service, when the flashes of anger began to build.
Trump turned on the television to see a jarring juxtaposition — massive demonstrations around the globe protesting his day-old presidency and footage of the sparser crowd at his inauguration, with large patches of white empty space on the Mall….Trump grew increasingly and visibly enraged.
Pundits were dissing his turnout. The National Park Service had retweeted a photo unfavorably comparing the size of his inauguration crowd with the one that attended Barack Obama’s swearing-in ceremony in 2009. A journalist had misreported that Trump had removed the bust of Martin Luther King Jr. from the Oval Office. And celebrities at the protests were denouncing the new commander in chief — Madonna even referenced “blowing up the White House.”
A Student of Art History, Ivanov Sakachev
So he sent Sean Spicer out to claim that his inauguration was the most attended and watched in American history–an easily refuted lie.
Trump has been resentful, even furious, at what he views as the media’s failure to reflect the magnitude of his achievements, and he feels demoralized that the public’s perception of his presidency so far does not necessarily align with his own sense of accomplishment.
On Monday, Spicer returned to the lectern, crisply dressed and appearing more comfortable as he parried questions from the press corps.
“There is this constant theme to undercut the enormous support that he has,” he told reporters. “And I think that it’s just unbelievably frustrating when you’re continually told it’s not big enough, it’s not good enough, you can’t win.”
Be sure to read the whole thing. It’s hilarious. The whining from tRump and his people is getting really old. I hope these folks will get their act together pretty soon, but I’m not holding my breath.
The New York Times finally worked up the courage to call a tRump statement a lie in a headline last night: Trump Repeats Lie About Popular Vote in Meeting With Lawmakers.
President Trump used his first official meeting with congressional leaders on Monday to falsely claim that millions of unauthorized immigrants had robbed him of a popular vote majority, a return to his obsession with the election’s results even as he seeks support for his legislative agenda.
The claim, which he has made before on Twitter, has been judged untrue by numerous fact-checkers. The new president’s willingness to bring it up at a White House reception in the State Dining Room is an indication that he continues to dwell on the implications of his popular vote loss even after assuming power….
As part of that conversation, Mr. Trump asserted that between three million and five million unauthorized immigrants voted for Mrs. Clinton. That is similar to a Twitter message he posted in late November that said he would have won the popular vote “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”
Voting officials across the country have said there is virtually no evidence of people voting illegally, and certainly not millions of them.
One thing we can be sure of: tRump will never get enough affirmation to satisfy his narcissistic needs. He is so psychologically damaged that he very likely can’t find enjoyment in anything other than finding ways to hurt other people–and now he’s in a position to hurt millions of people around the world.
Girl Reading, Coles Phillips
It seems clear that tRump is a control freak, and here’s a creepy story at politico that demonstrates it: Trump assembles a shadow Cabinet.
The White House is installing senior aides atop major federal agencies to shadow the administration’s Cabinet secretaries, creating a direct line with loyalists who can monitor and shape White House goals across the federal bureaucracy.
The aides chosen by the White House — given the title of senior adviser in each agency — have already been responsible for hiring at some departments and crafting the blueprint of Trump policy before the Cabinet members win Senate confirmation to take office. They have worked with congressional aides, lobbyists and others seeking influence in the new administration.
The arrangement, described by four people involved in the transition planning, appears designed to help the White House maintain control over its priorities despite pledging to give Cabinet secretaries unusual autonomy. Having senior advisers reporting to both the agency chiefs and the White House could spur early tensions and create conflicts with that pledge of autonomy.
This morning tRump signed executive orders to resume building the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines, along with five other orders related to the environment. NBC reports:
Trump signed a total of five orders regarding environmental issues in the Oval Office, including a pair addressing the pipeline projects as well as actions to expedite environmental reviews for high priority projects.
“The regulatory process in this country has become a tangled up mess,” Trump said.
Trump added that his actions on the Keystone and Dakota Access projects would be subject to terms and conditions being negotiated by the United States.
He also told reporters gathered in the Oval Office that if a pipeline is built in the United States, the pipe material should also be built domestically.
The decision has angered environmental advocates who say that the projects would have severe negative impacts on the areas where they are built and would encourage more reliance on fossil fuels. The Standing Rock Sioux tribe and its allies have vigorously protested the Dakota Access project, saying it would damage cultural sites.
Standing Rock Sioux Chairman Dave Archambault II told NBC News that the tribe would take immediate legal action to fight the executive order.
“The Trump administration’s politically motivated decision violates the law and the Tribe will take legal action to fight it,” said Archambault. “We are not opposed to energy independence. We are opposed to reckless and politically motivated development projects, like DAPL, that ignore our treaty rights and risk our water. Creating a second Flint does not make America great again.”
Greenpeace also announced that it would continue to fight the pipeline projects.
Woman Reading, Wil Barnet
A couple of recommended long reads you should check out:
Michio Kakutani at Vanity Fair: Donald Trump’s Chilling Language and the Fearsome Power of Words.
The New Yorker: Philip Roth Emails on Trump (Roth wrote the alternate history novel The Plot Against America).
Please read them both if you have the time to spare.
I’ll wrap this up with some gossipy stories, because I just can’t write anymore about tRump’s “American catastrophe.”
Grayden Carter at Vanity Fair:
Trump’s messy birdcage of a mind careens from one random thought to the next. He likes to strut and talk big-league. One of his ongoing observations—in tweets and elsewhere—is that “many people” have been calling him “the Ernest Hemingway of Twitter!” These are presumably people who have never read one of Hemingway’s books. In manner and execution, and in his almost touching desire to be liked, Trump comes across not as larger than life but as one of the smaller people on the world stage. He always had a sort of oafish charisma: as we used to say at Spy, a hustler on his best behavior. In small groups, as many can attest, he has mastered the salesman’s trick of creating faux sincerity and intimacy when answering a question by including the first name of the person who asked it. But no amount of grifter charm can conceal his alarming disregard for facts and truth. It’s this combination of utter ignorance and complete certitude that his detractors find most terrifying. Trump not only doesn’t know the unknowns but appears to have no interest in even knowing the knowns. Fact-checkers can’t keep up. How often does Obama play golf? Who cares—let’s inflate the number by 50 percent. What’s the murder rate in a major American city? What the hell—let’s multiply it by 10. The writer Michael O’Donoghue used to say that the definition of insanity is the length of time it takes for a lie to be uncovered. The shorter the period, the crazier you are. By this standard, our president will be setting a new threshold for that definition.
In temperament, we now have an unbridled man-boy in the highest office in the land, one who will lash out at the most reasoned criticism. The brusque childishness of his response to Meryl Streep’s measured comments at the Golden Globes—about Trump’s mocking gestures in reference to disabled New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski—was enough to be worried about. Then he hurled insults at Georgia Congressman John Lewis, a living icon of the civil-rights movement. Really? John Lewis? If he feels that he can so blithely attack two of the most respected people in the country, who is off limits? Trump was always a bad loser. But in the weeks since his disputed victory in the election we’ve discovered that this preening narcissist is also a very bad winner.
Read the rest at Vanity Fair.
Bridget Reading, Peter Samuelson
Jezabel: Melania Hates Donald: A Theory, by Gabrielle Bluestone.
Donald Trump and his wife, Melania Trump, are now our president and first lady. But for how long?
Donald Trump has made no secret of his admiration for Ronald Reagan, an actor-turned-president who governed our country even in the face of his rumored deteriorating mental state. He even borrowed, and then copyrighted, Reagan’s “Make America Great Again” slogan.
But there’s more—until Trump, Reagan was the only divorcée to ascend to the presidency. But Trump has never been content to merely follow in someone’s footsteps. Could he be the first president to actually get divorced while in the White House?
Either way, the Trumps certainly don’t mind spending time away from each other. In fact, Melania won’t be joining him in the White House until at least the summer, when Baron’s school term and her most convenient excuse for remaining in New York both expire. What will happen then? Only time—and their body language—will tell.
Click on the link to watch the telltale videos and read the commentary.
The New York Daily News: Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway allegedly punched a man in the face at President Trump’s inaugural ball.
Top Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway allegedly punched a tuxedo-clad man at an exclusive inauguration ball just hours after the new commander-in-chief was sworn in, according to a witness.
Conway, who serves as President Trump’s senior counselor, apparently stepped between two men after they got into a scuffle at the invite-only Liberty Ball on Friday evening, an attendee told the Daily News.
But the two men wouldn’t break up the fight and Conway apparently punched one of them in the face with closed fists at least three times, according to the stunned onlooker.
More details at the link.
What else is happening? Please post your thoughts and links in the comment thread, and have a nice Tuesday.
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