POST FROM ROBERT REICH'S FACEBOOK PAGE:

This morning I phoned my friend, a former Republican member of Congress.
Me: What's going on? Seems like the White House is imploding, and Republicans are going down with the ship.
Him (chuckling): We’re officially a banana republic.
Me: Seriously, what are you hearing from your former colleagues on the Hill?
Him: They’re convinced Trump is out of his gourd.
Me: So what are they going to do about it?
Him: Remember what I told you at the start of this circus? They planned to use Trump’s antics for cover, to get done what they most wanted – big tax cuts, rollbacks of regulations, especially financial. They’d work with Pence behind the scenes and forget the crazy uncle in the attic.
Me: Yeah.
Him: Well, I’m hearing a different story now. Stuff with Sessions is pissing them off. And now Trump's hired that horse’s ass Scaramucci -- a communications director who talks dirty on CNN! Plus Trump’s numbers are in freefall. They think he’s gonna hurt them in ’18 and ’20.
Me: So what’s the plan?
Him: They want him outa there.
Me: Really? Impeachment?
Him: Doubt it, unless Mueller comes up with a smoking gun.
Me: Or if he fires Mueller.
Him: Not gonna happen.
Me: So how do they get him out?
Him: Put someone else up in ’20. Lots of maneuvering already. Pence, obviously. Cruz thinks he has a shot.
Me: But that won’t help them in the midterms. What’s the plan before then?
Him: Lots think he’s fritzing out.
Me: Fritzing out?
Him: Going totally bananas. Paranoia. You want to know why he fired Priebus, wants Sessions out, and is now gunning for Tillerson?
Me: He wants to shake things up?
Him (chuckling): No. The way I hear it, he thinks they’ve been plotting against him.
Me: What do you mean?
Him: Twenty-fifth amendment! Read it! A Cabinet can get rid of a president who’s nuts. Trump thinks they’ve been preparing a palace coup. So one by one, he’s firing them.
Me: I find it hard to believe they’re plotting against him.
Him: Of course not! It’s ludicrous. Sessions is a loyal lapdog. Tillerson doesn't know where the bathroom is. That’s my point. Trump is fritzing out. Having manic delusions. He’s actually going nuts.
Me: And?
Him: Well, it’s downright dangerous.
Me: Yeah, but that still doesn’t tell me what Republicans are planning to do about it.
Him: Look. How long do you think it will be before everyone in Washington knows he’s flipping out? I don’t mean just weird. I mean really off his rocker.
Me: I don’t know.
Him: No all that long.
Me: So what are you telling me?
Him: They don’t have to plot against him. It will be obvious to everyone that he’s got to go. That’s where the twenty-fifth amendment really does comes in.
Me: So you think…
Him: Who knows? But he’s losing it fast. My betting is he’s out of office before the midterms. And Pence is president.

https://www.facebook.com/RBReich/posts/1655037197842203

...This The Best Thing That Ever Happened To Him"



http://www.theonion.com/article/blissed-out-hemp-wearing-sean-spicer-assures-reinc-56524

DELRAY BEACH, FL—Inviting the recently fired White House chief of staff to take a load off and embrace his newfound freedom, a blissed-out, hemp-wearing former press secretary Sean Spicer reportedly assured Reince Priebus on Monday that leaving the White House was the best thing that ever happened to him. “Seriously, man, that place was toxic—after I got out of there, it was like this huge weight had been lifted off my shoulders,” said the serene, baja-hoodie-clad former spokesman, offering Priebus some of his homemade kombucha and his copy of Alan Watts’ Become What You Are while assuring him that leaving the Trump administration would allow him to find a sense of tranquility and spiritual reconnection. “I take long walks now. I read. I meditate. Remember how flustered I used to get? The other day, someone totally screwed up my lunch order, but I didn’t even let it get to me. Trust me, you’re going to look back on this as the day you rediscovered yourself. Welcome back, brother.” At press time, Priebus was attending a silent meditation retreat in Bali, waiting for the echoes of Donald Trump shrieking at him to finally subside.

Nearly all Cabinet officials attend Bible lessons with right-wing pastor who compares Trump to biblical heroes



Christian Broadcast News has suggested President Donald Trump’s cabinet is the most evangelical cabinet in history even more than born again Christian George W. Bush.

“These are godly individuals that God has risen to a position of prominence in our culture,” said Capitol Ministries president and founder Ralph Drollinger. According to CBN, the majority of the cabinet officials attend a frequent Bible study class, that is the first of its kind in at least 100 years.

He has long maintained that changing the hearts of lawmakers to see a Christian worldview could guide them to making good policies. While he doesn’t lobby on behalf of peace or advocate policies that would fit a Jesus-like agenda, he has started a Bible study group in 40 state capitols as well as foreign capitols. He teaches weekly Bible study classes for the U.S. House and Senate and now leads a group of nearly all of Trump’s cabinet officials.

Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, Education Secretary Betsy Devos, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue and CIA Director Mike Pompeo are all regular attendees.

The most notable, however, is Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

http://www.rawstory.com/2017/07/nearly-all-cabinet-officials-attend-bible-lessons-with-right-wing-pastor-who-compares-trump-to-biblical-heroes/

An Eagle Scout reflects on Trump’s Jamboree speech

BENJAMIN PONTZ | Special to LNP Jul 28, 2017



http://lancasteronline.com/opinion/columnists/an-eagle-scout-reflects-on-trump-s-jamboree-speech-opinion/article_654f89fc-7151-11e7-960b-9729b51aec31.html

Trump, whose meandering address contained nuggets of advice cloaked in shameless self-aggrandizement, redoubled his attacks on both Democrats and civil institutions, derided “Obamacare,” and touted economic indicators that have been on the rise for years.

I am disappointed in the president for exploiting a captive audience of young people to engage in flagrant self-promotion and to widen the chasm of division that pollutes our politics. I am disappointed in attendees who applauded the president as he demeaned his predecessor Barack Obama (who, incidentally, was involved in scouting), his former opponent Hillary Clinton, and the media.

On a foggy evening in London more than 100 years ago, a disoriented businessman named William Boyce received directions from a young man who expected nothing in return. He was a Scout doing a good turn. Inspired by this simple act of kindness, Boyce brought an organization to America that has been part of its fabric for 107 years.

In a time when our politics divides us, the Scout Law reminds us of our duty to ourselves, to one another and to our country. It extols the virtues of citizenship; it centers our mind on service; and it reminds us of our fundamental duty to love our neighbors as ourselves.

By George F. Will Opinion writer July 28

Furthermore, today’s president is doing invaluable damage to Americans’ infantilizing assumption that the presidency magically envelops its occupant with a nimbus of seriousness. After the president went to West Virginia to harangue some (probably mystified) Boy Scouts about his magnificence and persecutions, he confessed to Ohioans that Lincoln, but only Lincoln, was more “presidential” than he. So much for the austere and reticent first president who, when the office was soft wax, tried to fashion a style of dignity compatible with republican simplicity.

Fastidious people who worry that the president’s West Virginia and Ohio performances — the alpha male as crybaby — diminished the presidency are missing the point, which is: For now, worse is better. Diminution drains this office of the sacerdotal pomposities that have encrusted it. There will be 42 more months of this president’s increasingly hilarious-beyond-satire apotheosis of himself, leavened by his incessant whining about his tribulations (“What dunce saddled me with this silly attorney general who takes my policy expostulations seriously?”). This protracted learning experience, which the public chose to have and which should not be truncated, might whet the public’s appetite for an adult president confident enough to wince at, and disdain, the adoration of his most comically groveling hirelings.

Speaking of Scaramucci, and in his defense: His love interest, the president, was elected for his persona rather than his principles. Hence there is a vacuum at the center of the person who is at the center of the country’s absurdly president-centric conception of government. Therefore, loyalty inevitably manifests itself as sycophancy. Nevertheless, the smitten Scaramucci is himself evidence of something encouraging: Upward social aspiration is still as American as Jay Gatsby.

When plighting his troth to Trump, Scaramucci repeatedly confessed his “love” for his employer, thereby exceeding Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s comparatively pallid testimonial to the president’s “superhuman” health. Scaramucci grew up in Port Washington, the Long Island community that is East Egg in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.” Gatsby lived in West Egg, yearning to live across the water, where shone the beckoning green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. Scaramucci’s ascent to a glory surpassing even that available in East Egg shows that the light on the lectern in the White House press room is, at last, something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-is-something-the-nation-did-not-know-it-needed/2017/07/28/8dc09ae0-7302-11e7-9eac-d56bd5568db8_story.html?utm_term=.d2711b68ec29&tid=a_inl

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“We’ll see you in the boardroom,” President Trump tells reporters ahead of Cabinet meeting