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Donald Trump 2018


TheFlyingBoat

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Trumpy gonna get all that postal service finances under control:

 

https://www.axios.com/usps-task-force-50264925-de18-426c-a027-03e4974a4d6f.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=organic

 

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President Trump issued an executive order on Thursday, designating a task force for the U.S. Postal Service "to evaluate the operations and finances of the USPS," chaired by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.

The big picture: This isn't the first time Trump has spoken out about USPS — earlier this month he tweeted that he was "right about Amazon costing the United States Post Office massive amounts of money." While he didn't mention Amazon in the order,  Axios' Jonathan Swan reported last month that Trump tells people Amazon has gotten a free ride from taxpayers and cushy treatment from the U.S. Postal Service

 

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https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/984619137304547328

 

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Any pardon of Scooter Libby is a message sent to Trump aides who've pleaded guilty, are facing charges, or may soon face charges in the Russia probe or a related probe that Trump will pardon them if they're convicted. And it's a message to pro-Trump witnesses that they can lie.

 

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23 minutes ago, DixonHur said:

Averaging 10 convictions per year in office is still a noteworthy accomplishment, but records were meant to be broken.

Trump has already far out Clintoned Clinton when it comes to having side pieces and lying about side pieces. Hes gonna put Nixon in his rearview too.

Is there a single Trump appointee that you would take over a Nixon appointee?  Nixon's people knew what they were doing.  

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1 hour ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

C2f4H-gUkAQWMeK.jpg

This about comports with my expectations. Clinton was personally sleazy and was a sexual predator though his administration was relatively clean despite a good number of attempts by Republicans to nail him for something. H.W. was the only honest Republican we elected President since Eisenhower. Carter was a naive, but honest guy of humble origins with his peanut farm (which he divested of, unlike Trump). Ford was there for 2 years and his job was to run out the clock and not make matters worse. Reagan helped bring the Cold War to its end but was also the dirtiest president (other than Nixon) in modern history with huge scandals like Iran-Contra. Bush was probably a fine character himself, though definitely not cut out to be President of the United States, and the gang he brought with him were largely morally bankrupt, terrible human beings. Obama was supremely decent and a good steward of the office. Fox News can whine all they want, but Obama was incredibly clean in the context of American politics.

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Unfortunately now Trump is in his comfort zone, where he's lived most of his adult life.... Cornered, hand in the cookie jar, and ready to battle in the courts. 

I can't fathom anybody still not understanding that this guy is a walking talking piece of shit. 

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10 minutes ago, TornACL said:

Unfortunately now Trump is in his comfort zone, where he's lived most of his adult life.... Cornered, hand in the cookie jar, and ready to battle in the courts. 

I can't fathom anybody still not understanding that this guy is a walking talking piece of shit. 

This guy takes offense to your last sentence.

 

mr-hankey.jpg

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10 hours ago, sachick said:

I’m amazed this many women are willing to sleep with Trump. 130k wouldn’t be enough.

If you’ll sleep with Ron Jeremy for $10K, you’ll sleep with Donald Trump for...  nevermind, you are still right.

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8 hours ago, ndawg said:

This deep state rhetoric is going to keep the base going strong till the bitter end.

Trump in a few weeks: "This is all a deep state plot."

Trumpkins: "I *knew* it. They orchestrated all this negative press, all these indictments, and all these criminal charges. They used the raid to plant evidence. Stormy Daniels is an asset."

If i were not so lazy, I would post a kickstarter campaign to raise money to fund the production of a new movie titled “Deep State” starring Stormy Daniels, a Trump look-alike with large hands and a Russian midget with chronic urinary incontinence.  John Waters would direct and all proceeds would go to the Blacklab Legal Defense Fund.

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7 hours ago, TheFlyingBoat said:

This about comports with my expectations. Clinton was personally sleazy and was a sexual predator though his administration was relatively clean despite a good number of attempts by Republicans to nail him for something. H.W. was the only honest Republican we elected President since Eisenhower. Carter was a naive, but honest guy of humble origins with his peanut farm (which he divested of, unlike Trump). Ford was there for 2 years and his job was to run out the clock and not make matters worse. Reagan helped bring the Cold War to its end but was also the dirtiest president (other than Nixon) in modern history with huge scandals like Iran-Contra. Bush was probably a fine character himself, though definitely not cut out to be President of the United States, and the gang he brought with him were largely morally bankrupt, terrible human beings. Obama was supremely decent and a good steward of the office. Fox News can whine all they want, but Obama was incredibly clean in the context of American politics.

But her emails.  QED.  

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13 hours ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Ivanka, Eric and Don Jr. are probably already pissed that they have to cut the pie up to include Barron and Tiffany.  Now, there's the potential that their slices of whatever is leftover are smaller.

Has Dotard done anything to date that makes anyone think he gives even half a shit about Barron or Tiffany?

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John Boehner on the Today Show this morning is tap dancing through this interview. "The President has a different style than me, but his results are positive."

Just claims Ryan "never wanted to be Speaker...I had to beat him to death to take my place. I believe his reason for leaving."

Now on his change of heart on marijuana. "About ten years ago I began to look at this discussion differently." Asked about how he once said he was unalterably against marijuana. Says he's looking at medicinal usage, not talking about recreational use and that it should be a state's rights issue.

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7 hours ago, TornACL said:

Unfortunately now Trump is in his comfort zone, where he's lived most of his adult life.... Cornered, hand in the cookie jar, and ready to battle in the courts. 

I can't fathom anybody still not understanding that this guy is a walking talking piece of shit. 

Going into a legal battle with Mueller is a lot different than suing a single-mom contractor for some shoddy interior decorating.

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33 minutes ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

I’d say the lawyers got to him. No doubt he wants to tweet about Comey.

 

 

Why am I still amazed any time he doubles down on something that has already been proven to be false?  The repairs to the existing wall in San Diego have nothing to do with him, yet his base will eat it up.

I feel like I'm in the Truman Show and the producers are trying to see how far they can push the envelope before I crack.  

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Why am I still amazed any time he doubles down on something that has already been proven to be false?  The repairs to the existing wall in San Diego have nothing to do with him, yet his base will eat it up.
I feel like I'm in the Truman Show and the producers are trying to see how far they can push the envelope before I crack.  


I subscribe to the DixonHur After-Hours channel. Good stuff.
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9 hours ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

 

This is actually a positive step for the US in controlling China. The problem is that many experts and gop politicians could have told this to trump over a year ago if he hadn’t been using the TPP as the boogeyman to all the rubes in the state fair.   Now he will probably face a worse deal in the TPP but call it a victory for the US. 

Reminds me when he got upset that obama renames Alaska’s Mt McKinley to Denali during the campaign.  As soon as he was in office, he was going to name it back.  Luckily for the AK conservatives, murkowski and the other AK senator were in the room and stopped him. Apparently the renaming was extremely popular in AK and would hurt the gop there.  

Trump the type who’s afraid to ask for directions.  That’s cool if you want to add some time to your personal trip.  Not so for the president.  No one expects the president to be a world expert on every topic. Look for advice from credible people. Not diamond and silk.

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10 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

Trump is acting like he walked into Comey’s office with a box, told Comey to fill it up and GTFO. 

That's how we could be pretty sure Rosenstein was safe yesterday when he was seen walking out of the WH. DOTUS is too much of a coward to fire anyone in person. The WH says Shulkin resigned, and he says he didn't. They can't even get that right.

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The former veterans affairs secretary David Shulkin has disputed the White House’s characterisation of his departure earlier this week, stating firmly he was fired and did not resign.

 

18 minutes ago, DixonHur said:

Why am I still amazed any time he doubles down on something that has already been proven to be false?  The repairs to the existing wall in San Diego have nothing to do with him, yet his base will eat it up.

I feel like I'm in the Truman Show and the producers are trying to see how far they can push the envelope before I crack.  

It's sad that things like DOTUS' tweets this morning are red meat for the base.

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10 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

Trump is acting like he walked into Comey’s office with a box, told Comey to fill it up and GTFO. 

Of course he is, when we all know his way to fire someone is to have someone else do it for him while he's halfway across the country or via Twitter when he's announcing the replacement of the person who hasn't yet been notified they've been let go.

He's the bully who talks shit from across the parking lot.

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2 minutes ago, retread said:

That's how we could be pretty sure Rosenstein was safe yesterday when he was seen walking out of the WH. DOTUS is too much of a coward to fire anyone in person. The WH says Shulkin resigned, and he says he didn't. They can't even get that right.

 

It's sad that things like DOTUS' tweets this morning are red meat for the base.

Because a huge portion of his base are olds who've just discovered the euphoric effects that come with being internet tough guys just like their idol. 

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NYT book review [/comeytalknotgoingaway]

 

ETA: He hits trump on his hand size. LOL. 

 

James Comey Has a Story to Tell. It’s Very Persuasive.

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CreditMark Peterson/Redux

A HIGHER LOYALTY 
Truth, Lies, and Leadership 
By James Comey 
290 pages. Flatiron Books. $29.99.

In his absorbing new book, “A Higher Loyalty,” the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey calls the Trump presidency a “forest fire” that is doing serious damage to the country’s norms and traditions.

“This president is unethical, and untethered to truth and institutional values,” Comey writes. “His leadership is transactional, ego driven and about personal loyalty.”

Decades before he led the F.B.I.’s investigation into whether members of Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 election, Comey was a career prosecutor who helped dismantle the Gambino crime family; and he doesn’t hesitate in these pages to draw a direct analogy between the Mafia bosses he helped pack off to prison years ago and the current occupant of the Oval Office.

A February 2017 meeting in the White House with Trump and then chief of staff Reince Priebus left Comey recalling his days as a federal prosecutor facing off against the Mob: “The silent circle of assent. The boss in complete control. The loyalty oaths. The us-versus-them worldview. The lying about all things, large and small, in service to some code of loyalty that put the organization above morality and above the truth.” An earlier visit to Trump Tower in January made Comey think about the New York Mafia social clubs he knew as a Manhattan prosecutor in the 1980s and 1990s — “The Ravenite. The Palma Boys. Café Giardino.”

The central themes that Comey returns to throughout this impassioned book are the toxic consequences of lying; and the corrosive effects of choosing loyalty to an individual over truth and the rule of law. Dishonesty, he writes, was central “to the entire enterprise of organized crime on both sides of the Atlantic,” and so, too, were bullying, peer pressure and groupthink — repellent traits shared by Trump and company, he suggests, and now infecting our culture.

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“We are experiencing a dangerous time in our country,” Comey writes, “with a political environment where basic facts are disputed, fundamental truth is questioned, lying is normalized and unethical behavior is ignored, excused or rewarded.”

“A Higher Loyalty” is the first big memoir by a key player in the alarming melodrama that is the Trump administration. Comey, who was abruptly fired by President Trump on May 9, 2017, has worked in three administrations, and his book underscores just how outside presidential norms Trump’s behavior has been — how ignorant he is about his basic duties as president, and how willfully he has flouted the checks and balances that safeguard our democracy, including the essential independence of the judiciary and law enforcement. Comey’s book fleshes out the testimony he gave before the Senate Intelligence Committee in June 2017 with considerable emotional detail, and it showcases its author’s gift for narrative — a skill he clearly honed during his days as United States attorney for the Southern District of New York.

The volume offers little in the way of hard news revelations about investigations by the F.B.I. or the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III (not unexpectedly, given that such investigations are ongoing and involve classified material), and it lacks the rigorous legal analysis that made Jack Goldsmith’s 2007 book “The Terror Presidency” so incisive about larger dynamics within the Bush administration.

What “A Higher Loyalty” does give readers are some near-cinematic accounts of what Comey was thinking when, as he’s previously said, Trump demanded loyalty from him during a one-on-one dinner at the White House; when Trump pressured him to let go of the investigation into his former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn; and when the president asked what Comey could do to “lift the cloud” of the Russia investigation.

There are some methodical explanations in these pages of the reasoning behind the momentous decisions Comey made regarding Hillary Clinton’s emails during the 2016 campaign — explanations that attest to his nonpartisan and well-intentioned efforts to protect the independence of the F.B.I., but that will leave at least some readers still questioning the judgment calls he made, including the different approaches he took in handling the bureau’s investigation into Clinton (which was made public) and its investigation into the Trump campaign (which was handled with traditional F.B.I. secrecy).

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“A Higher Loyalty” also provides sharp sketches of key players in three presidential administrations. Comey draws a scathing portrait of Vice President Dick Cheney’s legal adviser David S. Addington, who spearheaded the arguments of many hard-liners in the George W. Bush White House; Comey describes their point of view: “The war on terrorism justified stretching, if not breaking, the written law.” He depicts Bush national security adviser and later Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as uninterested in having a detailed policy discussion of interrogation policy and the question of torture. He takes Barack Obama’s attorney general Loretta Lynch to task for asking him to refer to the Clinton email case as a “matter,” not an “investigation.” (Comey tartly notes that “the F.B.I. didn’t do ‘matters.’”) And he compares Trump’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions, to Alberto R. Gonzales, who served in the same position under Bush, writing that both were “overwhelmed and overmatched by the job,” but “Sessions lacked the kindness Gonzales radiated.”

Comey is what Saul Bellow called a “first-class noticer.” He notices, for instance, “the soft white pouches under” Trump’s “expressionless blue eyes”; coyly observes that the president’s hands are smaller than his own “but did not seem unusually so”; and points out that he never saw Trump laugh — a sign, Comey suspects, of his “deep insecurity, his inability to be vulnerable or to risk himself by appreciating the humor of others, which, on reflection, is really very sad in a leader, and a little scary in a president.”

During his Senate testimony last June, Comey was boy-scout polite (“Lordy, I hope there are tapes”) and somewhat elliptical in explaining why he decided to write detailed memos after each of his encounters with Trump (something he did not do with Presidents Obama or Bush), talking gingerly about “the nature of the person I was interacting with.” Here, however, Comey is blunt about what he thinks of the president, comparing Trump’s demand for loyalty over dinner to “Sammy the Bull’s Cosa Nostra induction ceremony — with Trump, in the role of the family boss, asking me if I have what it takes to be a ‘made man.’”

Throughout his tenure in the Bush and Obama administrations (he served as deputy attorney general under Bush, and was selected to lead the F.B.I. by Obama in 2013), Comey was known for his fierce, go-it-alone independence, and Trump’s behavior catalyzed his worst fears — that the president symbolically wanted the leaders of the law enforcement and national security agencies to come “forward and kiss the great man’s ring.” Comey was feeling unnerved from the moment he met Trump. In his recent book “Fire and Fury,” Michael Wolff wrote that Trump “invariably thought people found him irresistible,” and felt sure, early on, that “he could woo and flatter the F.B.I. director into positive feeling for him, if not outright submission” (in what the reader takes as yet another instance of the president’s inability to process reality or step beyond his own narcissistic delusions).

After he failed to get that submission and the Russia cloud continued to hover, Trump fired Comey; the following day he told Russian officials during a meeting in the Oval Office that firing the F.B.I. director — whom he called “a real nut job” — relieved “great pressure” on him. A week later, the Justice Department appointed Robert Mueller as special counsel overseeing the investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.

During Comey’s testimony, one senator observed that the often contradictory accounts that the president and former F.B.I. director gave of their one-on-one interactions came down to “Who should we believe?” As a prosecutor, Comey replied, he used to tell juries trying to evaluate a witness that “you can’t cherry-pick” — “You can’t say, ‘I like these things he said, but on this, he’s a dirty, rotten liar.’ You got to take it all together.”

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Put the two men’s records, their reputations, even their respective books, side by side, and it’s hard to imagine two more polar opposites than Trump and Comey: They are as antipodean as the untethered, sybaritic Al Capone and the square, diligent G-man Eliot Ness in Brian De Palma’s 1987 movie “The Untouchables”; or the vengeful outlaw Frank Miller and Gary Cooper’s stoic, duty-driven marshal Will Kane in Fred Zinnemann’s 1952 classic “High Noon.”

One is an avatar of chaos with autocratic instincts and a resentment of the so-called “deep state” who has waged an assault on the institutions that uphold the Constitution.

The other is a straight-arrow bureaucrat, an apostle of order and the rule of law, whose reputation as a defender of the Constitution was indelibly shaped by his decision, one night in 2004, to rush to the hospital room of his boss, Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, to prevent Bush White House officials from persuading the ailing Ashcroft to reauthorize an N.S.A. surveillance program that members of the Justice Department believed violated the law.

One uses language incoherently on Twitter and in person, emitting a relentless stream of lies, insults, boasts, dog-whistles, divisive appeals to anger and fear, and attacks on institutions, individuals, companies, religions, countries, continents.

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The other chooses his words carefully to make sure there is “no fuzz” to what he is saying, someone so self-conscious about his reputation as a person of integrity that when he gave his colleague James R. Clapper, then director of national intelligence, a tie decorated with little martini glasses, he made sure to tell him it was a regift from his brother-in-law.

One is an impulsive, utterly transactional narcissist who, so far in office, The Washington Post calculated, has made an average of six false or misleading claims a day; a winner-take-all bully with a nihilistic view of the world. “Be paranoid,” he advises in one of his own books. In another: “When somebody screws you, screw them back in spades.”

The other wrote his college thesis on religion and politics, embracing Reinhold Niebuhr’s argument that “the Christian must enter the political realm in some way” in order to pursue justice, which keeps “the strong from consuming the weak.”

Until his cover was blown, Comey shared nature photographs on Twitter using the name “Reinhold Niebuhr,” and both his 1982 thesis and this memoir highlight how much Niebuhr’s work resonated with him. They also attest to how a harrowing experience he had as a high school senior — when he and his brother were held captive, in their parents’ New Jersey home, by an armed gunman — must have left him with a lasting awareness of justice and mortality.

Long passages in Comey’s thesis are also devoted to explicating the various sorts of pride that Niebuhr argued could afflict human beings — most notably, moral pride and spiritual pride, which can lead to the sin of self-righteousness. And in “A Higher Loyalty,” Comey provides an inventory of his own flaws, writing that he can be “stubborn, prideful, overconfident and driven by ego.”

Those characteristics can sometimes be seen in Comey’s account of his handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation, wherein he seems to have felt a moral imperative to address, in a July 2016 press conference, what he described as her “extremely careless” handling of “very sensitive, highly classified information,” even though he went on to conclude that the bureau recommend no charges be filed against her. His announcement marked a departure from precedent in that it was done without coordination with Department of Justice leadership and offered more detail about the bureau’s evaluation of the case than usual.

As for his controversial disclosure on Oct. 28, 2016, 11 days before the election, that the F.B.I. was reviewing more Clinton emails that might be pertinent to its earlier investigation, Comey notes here that he had assumed from media polling that Clinton was going to win. He has repeatedly asked himself, he writes, whether he was influenced by that assumption: “It is entirely possible that, because I was making decisions in an environment where Hillary Clinton was sure to be the next president, my concern about making her an illegitimate president by concealing the restarted investigation bore greater weight than it would have if the election appeared closer or if Donald Trump were ahead in all polls. But I don’t know.”

He adds that he hopes “very much that what we did — what I did — wasn’t a deciding factor in the election.” In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on May 3, 2017, Comey stated that the very idea that his decisions might have had an impact on the outcome of the presidential race left him feeling “mildly nauseous” — or, as one of his grammatically minded daughters corrected him, “nauseated.”

Trump was reportedly infuriated by Comey’s “nauseous” remark; less than a week later he fired the F.B.I. director — an act regarded by some legal scholars as possible evidence of obstruction of justice, and that quickly led to the appointment of the special counsel Robert Mueller and an even bigger cloud over the White House.

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It’s ironic that Comey, who wanted to shield the F.B.I. from politics, should have ended up putting the bureau in the midst of the 2016 election firestorm; just as it’s ironic (and oddly fitting) that a civil servant who has prided himself on being apolitical and independent should find himself reviled by both Trump and Clinton, and thrust into the center of another tipping point in history.

They are ironies that would have been appreciated by Comey’s hero Niebuhr, who wrote as much about the limits, contingencies and unforeseen consequences of human decision-making as he did about the dangers of moral complacency and about the necessity of entering the political arena to try to make a difference.

Michiko Kakutani, former chief book critic for The New York Times, is the author of the forthcoming book “The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump.” Follow her on Twitter: @michikokakutani

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Who else thinks the housekeeper story was leaked by Trump’s people to distract from everything else?


I would say no, but it works. Everybody keeps saying “Story X would be the biggest story ever in any other administration...” But with the way news currently works, having a new story out every day or two means very few stories ever hang around long enough to gain real traction. For the large percentage of the population that gets their news exclusively from Fox, a story that only hangs around for 48 hours never gets a mention. Presumably, they’d eventually have to address something like getting your maid pregnant if everybody else was covering it for weeks, but if everyone else has moved on, they can just skip it.
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