Great, Donny! That's just GREAT!
UPDATE: Ha!
Monday, July 31, 2017
The Mooch Lasted Ten Whole Days
Just as we thought - the Mooch was sucking up too much press. He had to go. Ass-kissing doesn't guarantee you a job at the Trump House. Sad!
Apparently General Kelly isn't going to put up with the likes of The Mooch. And The Mooch purportedly answered directly to Trump, and not the Chief of Staff. Well, maybe that was when Priebus was the Chief of Staff, and Trump didn't really want him in the first place. I think the GOP kind of foisted him on Trump in the hopes somebody representing the party would have some influence. They didn't know their man, did they? Perhaps they - unlike the Democrats - will learn something from this fiasco about who you nominate as your party's candidate.
Yeah. Sure. We understand.President Trump on Monday removed Anthony Scaramucci from his position as communications director, the White House announced.
[...]
“Anthony Scaramucci will be leaving his role as White House Communications Director,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said in a statement. “Mr. Scaramucci felt it was best to give Chief of Staff John Kelly a clean slate and the ability to build his own team.
NYT
Ivanka and Jared are surely used to "wisecracking", and since Trump is the lead wisecracker, I'm still inclined to think the problem was that The Mooch was getting too much TV time. This was becoming The Mooch Show instead of The Trump Show.While Mr. Kelly’s objection was the decisive factor in Mr. Scaramucci’s departure, people close to the decision said that Mr. Trump had quickly soured on the wisecracking, Long Island-bred former hedge fund manager, and so had his family.
Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter, and Jared Kushner, her husband, had pushed the president to hire Mr. Scaramucci, seeing him as a way to force out Mr. Priebus, the former national Republican committee chairman, and his allies in the West Wing.
The first part of that is no doubt right. But the last part, no. Nothing embarrasses The Rump and he's his own political liability. Plain and simple - he didn't like having the cameras being on somebody else.Mr. Trump was initially pleased by Mr. Scaramucci’s harsh remarks, directed at Mr. Priebus and Steve Bannon, the chief White House strategist. But over the weekend, after speaking with his family and Mr. Kelly, the president began to see the brash actions of his subordinate as a political liability and potential embarrassment, according to two people familiar with his thinking.
There you go. Less high profile.The president still values Mr. Scaramucci, according to people close Mr. Trump and his family, and is hoping to find another, less high profile, position for him in the White House —
Oh, he would. He would. He's perhaps the biggest suck-up The Rump could ever find anywhere. The question is not whether he would accept a demotion - it's whether he can keep a low profile.— although it is uncertain if Mr. Scaramucci would be willing to accept a demotion.
There've been no tweets from The Mooch since this one yesterday:
I guess @POTUS wasn't looking forward to it himself.
I heard that on NPR, but it's not there now. [Correction: It is indeed there.] General Kelly must be cracking down already.In a Twitter message just before 5:30 on Monday morning, just hours before the announcement about Mr. Scaramucci, Mr. Trump insisted that there has been “No WH chaos!”
But, along with some self-praising tweets, there's this:
Either General Kelly is writing (or at least editing) his twee or he's replaced The Rump with a body double (oh, gee, I'm so sorry that someone might be so cursed)* in the White House.
As regards the General's introduction to his new post...
😁
Reince and Spicer have gone out this afternoon to toss back a few shots and have some schadenfreudic laughs. They may be late for dinner.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
*
UPDATE 9pm:
Sunday, July 30, 2017
Happy Anniversary Medicare & Medicaid
Continue reading.It was 52 years ago this Sunday — July 30, 1965. Two American presidents celebrated the birth of Medicare, the most significant advance toward national health insurance in America’s history.
I was a White House assistant at the time, working for President Lyndon B. Johnson as he coaxed, cajoled, badgered, buttonholed and maneuvered Congress into enacting Medicare for the aging and Medicaid to help low-income people. For all the public displays over the years of his outsized personae and powers of persuasion, this time he had kept a low profile, working behind the scenes as his legislative team and career health care experts practically lived on Capitol Hill, negotiating with members of Congress and their staffs.
From the White House, LBJ worked the phones; invited senators and representatives singly and collectively in for coffee, drinks or dinner; listened attentively in private to opponents and proponents from interests as varied as business, labor, medicine and religion; and kept in his head a running tally of the fluctuating vote count.
As it had been for decades, it was a tough fight down to the wire. A look back is instructive, not only to show how long it can take to move a legislative dream to reality but also to illustrate how a president with a grasp of history and knowledge of how government works is crucial to making success possible.
Bill Moyers
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Like He's Always Said
Very consistent message: Get in there and repeal and replace! Stand back and let Obamacare fail! Get in there and repeal and replace! Stand back and let Obamacare fail! What day is it? - What hour?
And do these sound like a threat to you?
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
UPDATE 8/1:
Saturday, July 29, 2017
Friday, July 28, 2017
Fired and Still Sucking Up
Most of these people have no pride. But then, I guess if they did, they wouldn't accept a position in the Trump Cabal in the first place.
Pathetic.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Like the guy who apologized for having been shot in the face by Dick Cheney."The President wanted to go a different direction," Priebus told CNN's Wolf Blitzer on "The Situation Room" Friday evening. "A president has a right to hit a reset button. I think it's a good time to hit the reset button. I think he was right to hit the reset button."
"I'm always going to be a Trump fan," Priebus said.
CNN
Pathetic.
Hard to save face when you don't have any.In his interview with CNN, Priebus repeatedly said he submitted his resignation to the President privately on Thursday. Yet throughout the day on Friday, sources close to him insisted that he was not resigning.
[...]
Priebus, who had traveled with Trump to Long Island for an event on gang violence, was seated inside a Secret Service van on the tarmac when the message came down. His vehicle split away from the motorcade and departed for Washington before Trump himself got off the plane.
New York Rep. Peter King, who traveled with Priebus and Trump to Long Island, said there was no hint of the impending shake-up during the flight.
[...]
It wasn't until after the President named Kelly as his new chief of staff on Friday afternoon that sources close to Priebus reached out to reporters to say that he had resigned the day before.
Left-handed compliment."John Kelly will do a fantastic job," Trump told reporters. "General Kelly has been a star, done an incredible job thus far, respected by everybody. He's a great great American. Reince is a good man."
Bannon better stop sucking his own and go to work on Trump's if he wants to keep his job, eh Mooch?The President has sounded out people recently about whether to keep Bannon.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Getting Out in Front of It
Let's see, in the last two days:
1) Judiciary Committee rebuke for threats to Mueller & Rosenstein;
2) Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff rebuttal of transgender tweet;
3) Head of Boy Scouts apology for inappropriate speech;
4) Denouncing by the Gainesville, FL, police dept:
I get that both of these police departments are lying, but they are distancing themselves from a president who talks like a thug.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
UPDATE 8/1: The DEA has joined the list condemning Trump's remarks.
1) Judiciary Committee rebuke for threats to Mueller & Rosenstein;
2) Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff rebuttal of transgender tweet;
3) Head of Boy Scouts apology for inappropriate speech;
4) Denouncing by the Gainesville, FL, police dept:
I get that both of these police departments are lying, but they are distancing themselves from a president who talks like a thug.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
UPDATE 8/1: The DEA has joined the list condemning Trump's remarks.
Whoomp! There It Is
I wonder if he had the courtesy to tell Priebus before he tweeted.*
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
UPDATE:
Not His Concern
I have to go with Laura's assessment. The "loss" is on his mind and he can't pay attention to anything else. The missing fourteen minutes is when somebody was directly addressing him.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
The Lies from This White House Flow Freely
The guy at the top sets the tone. It's no wonder we have Scaramucci - the acme of ignorance, mendacity and lack of class. He kept hiring sleazeballs until he found one that mirrors himself.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
The White House must be a jumble of nerves at this point.White House staffers aren’t supposed to just call up the Justice Department or FBI and complain about a personal grievance. Yet that is exactly what newly-minted Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci claimed to have done during a combative Thursday morning CNN interview.
[...]
“You know why I like bringing up the Department of Justice and the FBI?” Scaramucci said. “Because people who’ve done something wrong, it makes ‘em nervous.”
Which we already know is total and complete bullshit.These comments came hours after Scaramucci offered an expletive-filled rant to New Yorker reporter Ryan Lizza about how he believed his rival, Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, was behind the latest leak, and that he’d “called the FBI and the Department of Justice” about this “felony.”
Bingo.Setting aside that his concerns were sparked by misplaced anger over reporting on his financial disclosure form, which is a publicly available document, the Scaramucci kerfuffle marked just the latest example of a member of the Trump administration attempting to use the Justice Department as something of a personal enforcement arm.
The Mooch didn't speak to anyone in the FBI, I'm sure. The only problem here is that the Trump DOJ is part of the crooked, sleazeball Trump administration, whether they are "supposed to be" or not. It's not likely that Scaramucci spoke with Sessions or Rosenstein, since they're on Trump's blacklist, but he could well have spoken to a subordinate.Contacts like Scaramucci’s run up again longstanding, binding regulations that strictly limit contact between the White House and Justice Department. Since the Watergate era, each new attorney general and each White House general counsel has laid out an updated version of their contact policy, dictating that only senior members of each body may be in contact with each other about investigations, and even then only in very specific instances.
[...]
Trump’s White House counsel, Don McGahn, laid out his own contact policy in a Jan. 27 memo. Sessions has not yet crafted one for his DOJ, meaning former Attorney General Eric Holder’s remains the binding standard.
The communications director is not on either list of individuals approved to contact law enforcement officials.
[...]
“And nobody at the FBI is included in that list.”
Yeah, what is up with that? He's acting like he's the WH Communications Director. That's what everyone is calling him.The DOJ did not respond to TPM’s request for comment on the conversation Scaramucci said he had with Sessions, but issued a statement Wednesday night saying the agency planned to “aggressively purse leak cases wherever they may lead.”
“We agree with Anthony that these staggering number of leaks are undermining the ability of our government to function and to protect this country,” department spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores said in the statement.
[...]
Further complicating the contacts Scaramucci said he had with DOJ is that it appears he’s not even a formal member of the Trump White House yet.
So there's his out right there. Somebody just block the sale and they have an excuse for him "resigning".When he came onboard last week, he announced he would not formally assume his post until Aug. 15, pending the approval of the sale of his investment firm, SkyBridge Capital (Huckabee Sanders said Thursday she doesn’t believe he’s yet taken an oath of office).
Weasley Sessions just might do that. On the other hand, since The Mooch is radioactive right now, and he's taking up too much press coverage and publicity that might otherwise go to The Don, it could be Trump will want to get rid of him after all. Sessions is going to have to read this one right to get back in the good graces of The Don.The DOJ has in recent days signaled that it plans to pursue an intensive criminal investigation of intelligence leaks, as the President has requested.
[...]
[T]hese circumstances are ripe for abuses of power, Matthew Miller, a former director of the DOJ’s Office of Public Affairs under Obama, told TPM.
“You have Sessions probably feeling a little like he wants to curry favor with the President and he can do that by starting leak investigations, or by approving this sale that would put millions of dollars into Scaramucci’s pocket” and allow the communications director to fully move into his White House role, Miller said.
[...]
“The DOJ is not supposed to make assessments based on general complaints from the White House communications director,” Miller said, “but when you have an AG fighting for his job and unwilling to fight for the department’s independence, it brings all this into question.”
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Shocked Junior Hasn't Shut His Trap on Twitter
I take that back. He's a chip off the old blockhead.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Somebody Woke Him Up
Oh, that's what he said from the beginning is it?
One fat assed president didn't do anything to help get that atrocity - whatever it finally was - passed, unless you count alternating cheering and disparaging tweets help. And I'm going to forever call it Trumpcare. Nobody wanted it aside from Trump and the GOP Congress critters who simply wanted to undo what Obama did.
Are we sick of winning yet?
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
They're Going to Drag This Out for Eternity
Must be having some trouble getting all the votes they need.
Thursday, July 27, 2017
SOS USA
Did Fox News cover it?President Trump recorded a remarkable trifecta on Thursday. In fewer than 24 hours, he was rebuked by the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the chief scout executive for the Boy Scouts of America.
[...]
[The fire] didn’t come from the hard left or the Democratic resistance. Instead, it came from people who represent communities or constituencies considered friendly to the president: the Republican Party, the military, and a civic organization known for its promotion of patriotism and traditional values.
[...]
In their own ways, the messages to the president carried a common theme: They were asking him to stop behaving as he has been behaving. Trump has crossed so many lines, as a candidate and as president, that the public often is numbed to what he says and does.
[...]
The critiques may not change the president’s behavior, but as a marker of the rising concern about the president even from allies, they couldn’t have been more obvious.
[...]
The Pentagon will carry out the transgender directive (assuming it arrives from the White House) once it has been reviewed and evaluated. Trump is their commander in chief. The Boy Scouts will retreat quickly now that they have apologized to the president’s critics. They are not a combative or confrontational organization. Republican lawmakers will approach their battles with the president gingerly. They are risk averse about offending Trump’s loyalists.
Still, the triple criticism, on three separate issues, from the Trump-friendly side of the American electorate should be a signal to the president. But is he listening?
WAPo
Nailed It
And this country is in serious trouble.
Not only do we have a president who treats his office like a TV show, but we have a voting public who thought he'd be the man for the job.
You think? Not just international crisis. National crisis. Natural disaster. ANYthing.
Have They Lost Sean Hannity?!
This man is Trump's propagandist on Fox. Is he himself now desperate to turn the Congress in 2018?
Things are bad, folks. Real bad.
Scaramucci Is Not a Good Advertisement for Harvard Law School
Maybe they can revoke his degree?
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
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