Maybe someone should ask her about it

What's with his repeating lately that he's in no hurry with regard to Kim and Xi and who is Mercedes Schlapp? 

I can't answer the first part of the question, but I can the second:

This sounds like a very big mistake on the part of the GOP

President Donald Trump's GOP allies in Congress are salivating at the chance to bruise Mueller's reputation and cast doubt on the integrity of his work.

[...]

“He’s done some irreparable damage to some things and he’s got to answer for them,” said Rep. Louie Gohmert, one of 25 Republicans on the House Intelligence and Judiciary Committees who get to grill Mueller during the back-to-back hearings. The Texas congressman added that his reading of the special counsel’s report did little to temper his long history of animosity for the former FBI director: “It reinforced the anal opening that I believe Mueller to be.”

[...]

Mueller will also face a grilling from Trump's top Republican allies in Congress, including Reps. Jim Jordan (Ohio), Matt Gaetz (Fla.), Devin Nunes (Calif.) and Andy Biggs (Ariz.). They intend to press him on long-held articles of Trumpian faith: that Mueller's team was biased against the president from the start and that the Russia investigation was tainted by inappropriate surveillance.

[...]

Mueller’s intensely anticipated July 17 testimony will bring him face to face with the Republican lawmakers who have savaged his reputation and called him the ringleader of a “coup” against Trump. While Democrats attempt to squeeze morsels of new information out of the notoriously tight-lipped investigator, these Trump defenders are signaling that they’ll use the historic moment to try to undercut his credibility and paint him as a political pawn in Democrats’ efforts to undermine the president.

  Politico

What could possibly go wrong?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:



I don't know whether that's a good bet about Mueller if they go too far.  I think he'll defend his team very strongly.  At any rate, it's the clips for Fox News that they're after.  That, and sucking up to Trump.

Help name Sarah Huckabee's inevitable book

Some of these, as you might have guessed, are pretty good.

Ivanka 2024

Set against a tense, eerie silence in the landmine-riddled mountains separating South and North Korea, the Demilitarized Zone may be the highest-stakes negotiation site on earth. It’s not the sort of place for mistakes.

[...]

On Sunday, Ms. Trump, the president’s elder daughter, used an impromptu meeting between her father and Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, to further slip into the role of unofficial spokeswoman and budding stateswoman for the Trump administration. With her husband, fellow senior adviser Jared Kushner, at her side, Ms. Trump delivered news interviews, posed for photos and attended a closed-door meeting between her father and Mr. Kim.

[...]

“We are on the precipice of ushering in potentially a golden era for the Korean Peninsula,” Ms. Trump told Bloomberg News in the hours before her father took the historic step of crossing into the North. But by the time she emerged from the closed-door meeting between the leaders hours later, she only had one word for journalists about her encounter with North Korea.

She called it “surreal.”

[...]

“Ivanka Trump is not on the National Security Council — she is not an adviser on the issues being discussed,” Michael A. McFaul, an ambassador to Russia under President Barack Obama, said of Ms. Trump’s presence. “So her presence undermines the professional look of the Trump delegation, both to other countries and to national security professionals in the Trump administration.”

[...]

But for Ms. Trump, 37, the visit to Asia over the past week represented a prominent step onto a bigger stage.

[...]

She appeared ready to assert herself from the start of the trip. She was the most visible woman from the Trump administration to go. Her stepmother, the first lady Melania Trump, stayed behind in Washington.

[...]

Ms. Trump was repeatedly flanked by her father and a roster of world leaders, including Shinzo Abe, the prime minister of Japan, and Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.

[...]

Observers and critics used a snippet of digital footage as a way to show that she might be out of her depth: A short video posted to Instagram by the office of Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, showed Ms. Trump in conversation with Theresa May, the departing prime minister of Britain, and Christine Lagarde, the International Monetary Fund managing director, as Mr. Macron and Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister, listened.

In the clip, Ms. Trump seemed to be looking to find a place to jump into this diplomatic game of double Dutch. First Mrs. May spoke: “As soon as you charge them with that economic aspect of it, a lot of people start listening who otherwise wouldn’t listen.”

And then Ms. Trump jumped in: “And the same with the defense side of it, in terms of the whole business that’s been, sort of, male-dominated.”

[...]

On Sunday, a White House official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe internal conversations, pushed back at the characterization that Ms. Trump had interjected or annoyed others in the conversation — particularly Ms. Lagarde, who the official said had, like the others, been attending a women’s empowerment event where Ms. Trump had been invited to speak when the interaction was filmed.

That official said Mr. Trump had requested that his daughter accompany him to several G20 events, and even delayed the start of one so he would not miss her giving an introductory speech.

[...]

Gone are the days when Ms. Trump and Mr. Kushner kept relatively low profiles inside the West Wing, grappling with waves of bad press as they sought to establish their profiles behind the scenes. And gone are the days when senior aides, such as John F. Kelly, the former chief of staff, tried to curb their influence.

Ms. Trump’s participation in the G20 trip illustrated just how unchecked her ascent in the White House has been in recent months, and how few people who might have raised doubts remain.

  NYT

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Not concentration camps?

Inside the Secret Border Patrol Facebook Group

UPDATE:

Endless whining

The Trump Foundation was shut down because it was self-dealing.



Endless projection as well.  Using his attorney general as a bludgeoning tool for his own purposes and suing on everything.  Who does that sound like?



Abuse of women?



They are not fleeing New York in any number.

I wonder what's coming down the pike that prompted him to tweet this now.

And speaking of his children...

From the Guardian  (Don't worry, Ivanka honey, they're just jealous.):

c

More here

Your president

I didn't see American Psycho, but ...



"Only a collection of emotional states assembled into the illusion of a human being."

A hailstorm swallowed Guadalajara

A freak hail storm has struck Guadalajara, one of Mexico’s most populous cities, burying vehicles in a deluge of ice pellets up to two metres deep.

  Guardian

And another thing

A state department office tasked with negotiating and implementing nuclear disarmament treaties has lost more than 70% of its staff over the past two years, as the Trump administration moves towards a world without arms control for the first time in nearly half a century.

The Office of Strategic Stability and Deterrence Affairs, normally a repository of expertise and institutional knowledge that does the heavy lifting of arms control, has been whittled down from 14 staffers at the start of the Trump administration to four, according to the former staffers. The state department declined to comment.

  

Christ, fourteen sounds like a very low number for arms control purposes.

The state department has instead focussed its arms control efforts on “creating the environment for disarmament” (CEND) shifting the onus for disarmament from the nuclear weapons powers to non-weapons states.

What??

An invitation to a 2 July state department conference on the subject invites non-nuclear states to come up with “measures to modify the security environment to reduce incentives for states to retain, acquire, or increase their holdings of nuclear weapons”.

How absurd! That's like a gun-toting gang of thieves rounding up a group of neighbors and saying, "You guys figure out how you're going to make us want to stop robbing you."  Oh, hey, wait. That's called a protection racket.

The shift in approach comes as the administration claims to be conducting a review on whether to extend the New Start agreement limiting US and Russian strategic nuclear warheads, or find an alternative to it that would include China and new weapons systems.

Vladimir Putin has said Russia is in favour of a New Start extension, but warned that time is running out.

“If we do not begin talks now, it would be over because there would be no time even for formalities,” Putin told the Financial Times.

[...]

Frank Rose, under-secretary for arms control until 2017, said he had tried to rebuild the strategic stability bureau when he was in office, especially by recruiting a young generation of experts.

“We’ve got a real problem,” Rose said. “Regardless of your views on whether we should extend New Start or negotiate a new agreement, you need to have career expertise to actually do the negotiations.”

[...]

The White House said the leaders agreed to keep talking about a “21st-century model of arms control, which President Trump stated as needing to include China”.

China has ruled out participation in an arms control agreement with US and Russia whose nuclear arsenals are 20 times bigger than the Chinese, estimated at less than 300 warheads. Even if Beijing were willing, a trilateral agreement would require extensive and prolonged negotiation. But former officials and arms control experts in Congress say there have been no serious consideration of what to do when New Start expires in February 2021.

The Trump doctrine.

After an exodus of most of the office’s staffers at the end of last year, [Pranay Vaddi, a former member of the strategic stability office,] said: “The bottom line is that, for a myriad of reasons, the state department isn’t equipped [to pursue arms control negotiations]”

They don't want to.

Few experts believe that the downgrading of the state department’s capacity to negotiate disarmament agreements is a case of negligence. It is more widely seen as a deliberate strategy directed by John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser, and a lifelong opponent of arms control agreements which he sees as unnecessary constraints on US sovereignty.

Over little more than a year on Bolton’s watch, the US has pulled out of the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran, and the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, which will terminate on 2 August.

Bolton is also reportedly pushing for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, signed by President Bill Clinton in 1996 but not ratified by a Republican Senate, to be withdrawn from Senate consideration and “unsigned”, as a possible prelude to a resumption of US nuclear testing.

[...]

Bolton’s previous record suggests that he is much better at knocking non-proliferation accords down than building them up. His earlier scalps include the Agreed Framework with North Korea and the Anti Ballistic Missile treaty. In his memoir, Surrender is not an Option, Bolton boasts of the bureaucratic cunning involved in sinking these agreements, and derides the diplomats in the state department as appeasers.

[...]

Arms control advocates argue Bolton has convinced Trump to insist on Chinese participation fully aware of Beijing’s adamant refusal, as a “poison pill” to kill off prospects of a new arms control treaty.

[...]

The assistant secretary of state for arms control, verification and compliance, Yleem Poblete, resigned in May after clashing with her boss, Andrea Thompson.

Thompson, the under secretary for arms control and non proliferation who does not have a background in arms control, has herself been weakened by a scandal involving undisclosed connections with the boyfriend of [convicted Russian agent Maria Butina, Paul Erickson.] [ed: link added and emphasis mine]

[...]

According to several sources, the NSC tried to stop a meeting between Andrea Thompson [...] and Russian deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov in Geneva in January, according to two sources familiar with the arrangements.

The meeting went ahead but was kept brief, in the face of Bolton’s resistance to setting up a permanent dialogue with the Russians. A second Thompson-Ryabkov meeting in Prague on 12 June wrapped up after two hours and a half-hour lunch, with no timetable for future meetings or a plan for negotiations.

Impeach Trump. Ditch Mitch and send Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer home. The whole world depends on it.

Pathologically careless

Could care less. 



So soon after getting drummed on Twitter and in the press for posting the wrong Twitter address for Megan Rapinoe while denigrating her. The fact that he so often enters the wrong address either demonstrates his carelessness (in which case, this is not the executive you want in the oval office) or he's doing it on purpose now to show he doesn't have to give a shit (in which case, this is not the executive you want in the oval office).  Or both. The latter seems to at least be the case since he doesn't bother to delete the tweet that's in error.  And Dan Scavino - his digital chief - reportedly has acccess to his Twitter account and doesn't delete anything.

Impeach.