May 23, 2017

Trump vs Trudeau

Manchester bombing: Trump calls attacker a ‘loser'

Justin Trudeau: Canadians are shocked by the news of the horrific attack
in Manchester tonight. Please keep the victims and their families in your
thoughts.

May 22, 2017

New York Magazine: Trump's scandals are making his administration impossible to staff

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/05/scandals-are-making-the-white-house-impossible-to-staff.html

Trump did not know that he would have to hire a new staff for all the west wing jobs.


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The Trump administration is falling apart before it even came together. The White House has been infamously slow to fill vacant positions throughout the executive branch, due to the president’s signature combination of ignorance, incompetence, and insecurity.

Trump reportedly went into his post-election meeting with Obama “unaware that the entire presidential staff working in the West Wing had to be replaced.” Among the would-be staffers that his transition team did bother to recruit, several failed to survive into the presidency’s fourth month. And the administration’s attempts to alleviate its staffing crisis have been undermined by the president’s aversion to hiring anyone who ever publicly suggested that making an emotionally volatile reality star our commander-in-chief would be a mistake.

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Who will want to do communications for a president who makes a daily habit of generating a five-alarm public-relations crisis; contradicting the White House’s official strategy for containing that crisis; and then berating his communications team for their incompetence? Who will want to provide national-security advice to a president who can’t be bothered to read a briefing that’s longer than a page; refuses to prepare for high-level diplomatic meetings with foreign powers; shares highly classified information with foreign adversaries on a whim; and then makes you declare his behavior “wholly appropriate?” Who will want to join a team that appears to spend most of its free time either telling employees how miserable they are or how miserably incompetent their co-workers have been?

And with last week’s appointment of a special prosector, working for the Trump White House is no longer merely nightmarish — it’s also, potentially, expensive.

May 21, 2017

? For any lawyers, law professors, or people who pretend to be lawyers on the internets

Please tell me why Donald Trump is not guilty of breaking the following statute 1505,
Obstruction of Justice?

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Obstruction of justice
Obstruction of justice is defined in the omnibus clause of 18 U.S.C. § 1503, which provides that "whoever . . . . corruptly or by threats or force, or by any threatening letter or communication, influences, obstructs, or impedes, or endeavors to influence, obstruct, or impede, the due administration of justice, shall be (guilty of an offense)." Persons are charged under this statute based on allegations that a defendant intended to intefere with an official proceeding, by doing things such as destroying evidence, or intefering with the duties of jurors or court officers.

A person obstructs justice when they have a specific intent to obstruct or interfere with a judicial proceeding. For a person to be convicted of obstructing justice, they must not only have the specific intent to obstruct the proceeding, but the person must know (1) that a proceeding was actually pending at the time; and (2) there must be a nexus between the defendant’s endeavor to obstruct justice and the proceeding, and the defendant must have knowledge of this nexus.

§ 1503 applies only to federal judicial proceedings. Under § 1505, however, a defendant can be convicted of obstruction of justice by obstructing a pending proceeding before Congress or a federal agency. A pending proceeding could include an informal investigation by an executive agency.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/obstruction_of_justice

May 21, 2017

I still can't believe that that asshole is President.

He is a con man, a bigot, a liar, a misogynist, he is owned by Russia and Russian mobsters,
not that bright, a failure in just about every business he was part in and he is bat crap crazy
too.

WTF happened? That election was dirty as hell and both the media and the republicans
know that but stii Trump keeps driving all of us for that cliff. For the love of God can't
something be done?

May 19, 2017

NY Mag. The case for why Paul Ryan really thinks Russia pays Trump.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/05/the-case-for-why-paul-ryan-really-thinks-russia-pays-trump.html

Last night, the Washington Post reported on a 2016 conversation, between members of the House Republican leadership team, concerning Donald Trump’s shady ties to Russia. “There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump,” said Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy. “No leaks … This is how we know we’re a real family here,” replied House Speaker Paul Ryan.

It is possible, as the Post acknowledges, that the comments were made in jest. The transcript records laughter all around. But there are several reasons to suspect that McCarthy and Ryan were speaking honestly about their suspicion that Trump received money from Putin. First, spokesmen for Ryan and McCarthy insisted the comments were a joke only after they forcefully denied the conversation ever took place at all and then were told a recording existed. The fallback explanation has less presumptive credibility when the initial explanation has been debunked.

snip

And fifth, Trump, Ryan, and McCarthy are all cooperating to hide Trump’s financial information. House Democrats have introduced bills to require the president to disclose his tax returns, which could reveal his financial relationship with Moscow. Ryan and McCarthy could approve those if they wanted to. Instead, they are supporting Trump by quashing them. Whether and to what extent Trump has gotten income from Putin cannot be known because Ryan and McCarthy want it not to be known.

“No leaks, all right?” Ryan says to his fellow Republicans in the recording. “This is how we know we’re a real family here … What’s said in the family stays in the family.”

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"real family" =

May 18, 2017

Daily Kos: Majority Leader to colleagues last June: 'Putin is paying Trump.' Paul Ryan: 'Shut up! Sh

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/5/17/1663432/-Majority-Leader-to-colleagues-last-June-Putin-is-paying-Trump-Paul-Ryan-Shut-up-Shut-up?detail=emaildkreCONTROL&link_id=13&can_id=9d9ab9550f6f19d630ddc2d594a7bd47&source=email-majority-leader-to-colleagues-last-june-putin-is-paying-trump-paul-ryan-shut-up-shut-up-2&email_referrer=majority-leader-to-colleagues-last-june-putin-is-paying-trump-paul-ryan-shut-up-shut-up-2&email_subject=trump-goes-off-on-twitter-single-greatest-witch-hunt-in-american-history



A month before Donald Trump clinched the Republican nomination, one of his closest allies in Congress—House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy—made a politically explosive assertion in a private conversation on Capitol Hill with his fellow GOP leaders: that Trump could be the beneficiary of payments from Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump,” McCarthy (R-Calif.) said, according to a recording of the June 15, 2016 exchange, which was listened to and verified by The Washington Post. [...]

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) immediately interjected, stopping the conversation from further exploring McCarthy’s assertion, and swore the Republicans present to secrecy.

Before the conversation, McCarthy and Ryan had emerged from separate talks at the U.S. Capitol with Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman, who had described a Kremlin tactic of financing populist politicians to undercut Eastern European democratic institutions.

May 18, 2017

A must read book The Hidden Life of Trees.

German Forest Ranger Finds That Trees Have Social Networks, Too

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/30/world/europe/german-forest-ranger-finds-that-trees-have-social-networks-too.html

background story.

May 18, 2017

NY Times: The Right Builds an Alternative Narrative About the Crises Around Trump

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/17/us/politics/trump-scandal-conservatives-media.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0

WASHINGTON — Enemies from within have launched a “deep-state” smear campaign, news organizations are acting with ulterior motives, and the worst attacks are yet to come.

snip

As Americans process a dizzying week of damning revelations about the president — his firing of the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey; his disclosure of highly sensitive intelligence to the Russians; and his plea to Mr. Comey to drop the bureau’s investigation of his fired national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn — Mr. Trump has found shelter on the right, where the collective judgment of the conservative media and the Republican Party so far seems to be to dismiss the allegations as “fake news,” shift the blame and change the subject.

With varying degrees of credibility and credulity, conservatives have fed stories that Mr. Trump is the victim of sabotage by an adversarial intelligence community full of Trojan horse holdovers from the Obama administration.

snip

And if there is any criminal wrongdoing, these accounts pin that on the leakers inside the “deep state,” a phrase popularized by Trump administration officials such as the chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, to describe the vast bureaucracy of federal employees seeking to undermine the president.

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Sadly to Trump people the more dirt that comes out on Trump and company the more they
will "see" a vast liberal/media conspiracy to bring down Trump.

May 17, 2017

NY Times op/ed: Free Advice to Trump Aides: Quit While You Can

Free Advice to Trump Aides: Quit While You Can

On Monday night, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, President Trump’s widely admired national security adviser, held a hastily convened news conference to try to knock down reports that Mr. Trump had shared highly classified information with Russia — only to have Mr. Trump appear to confirm the reports in two Tuesday morning tweets.

“General McMaster spent decades defending this nation, earning his integrity and honor. Trump squandered it in less than 12 hours,” responded the Republican strategist John Weaver in a tweet. The journalist and former speechwriter for George W. Bush, David Frum, asked: “How does McMaster not resign today? That thing he said ‘did not happen’ the president has just defended doing.”

snip

Thanks to copious leaks, we already know a lot more about the internal workings of the Trump White House than we do about past administrations, but there is still immense interest in what is really going on and how the major players feel about it. It would be worth the price of a hardcover just to learn how Kellyanne Conway — who, according to the “Morning Joe” hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, said she needed to shower after defending Mr. Trump during the campaign — sleeps at night.

snip

Those who stick around, however, will discover that in politics, being part of a national story can be ruinous. Members of Mr. Clinton’s administration had to shoulder huge legal bills, some running into hundreds of thousands of dollars, after being forced to testify before congressional committees and grand juries. As Mr. Stephanopoulos noted in 1998, “A single trip to the grand jury can cost you $10,000.”



https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/16/opinion/free-advice-to-trump-aides-quit-while-you-can.html?ribbon-ad-idx=5&rref=opinion&module=Ribbon&version=origin®ion=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Opinion&pgtype=article

May 16, 2017

Part of Donny's morning tweet; "airline flight safety"

Yes, Don when I think of Putin and Russia "airline flight safety" is what
comes to my mind right away.

Dutch Inquiry Links Russia to 298 Deaths in Explosion of Jetliner Over Ukraine (NY Times)

A Dutch-led investigation has concluded that the powerful surface-to-air missile system used to shoot down a Malaysia Airlines plane over Ukraine two years ago, killing all 298 on board, was trucked in from Russia at the request of Russian-backed separatists and returned to Russia the same night.

The report largely confirmed the Russian government’s already widely documented role not only in the deployment of the missile system — called a Buk, or SA-11 — but also in the subsequent cover-up, which continues to this day.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/29/world/asia/malaysia-air-flight-mh17-russia-ukraine-missile.html

Donald J. Trump ✔@realDonaldTrump
...to terrorism and airline flight safety. Humanitarian reasons, plus I want Russia to greatly step up their fight against ISIS & terrorism.