Month: January 2018

Green eggs and hamby digby

I wonder if Cruz would have told fewer lies than Trump in his first year if somehow he’d been elected:

Ted Cruz (R-TX), the senator who had a leading role in the government shutdown in 2013, told reporters Monday he has “consistently opposed shutdowns. In 2013, I said we shouldn’t shut the government.”

Cruz delivered his alternative history during a media scrum Monday afternoon, as senators reached a deal to reopen the government.

“They’re angry,” Cruz said. “They hate the president, and they’re demanding of Senate Democrats: oppose everything, resist everything, shut everything down.”

MSNBC’s Kasie Hunt quickly pointed out that this sounded a little ironic coming from Cruz. Antics such as reading Dr. Seuss’s “Green Eggs and Ham” during a marathon filibuster quickly made him the mascot of the 2013 shutdown.

“This sounds pretty familiar,” Hunt asked him. “Didn’t you say all this back when it happened to you?”

“Now, I recognize this is a media narrative that you love to tell,” Cruz said, “but it’s worth noting in 2013—”

“Green Eggs and Ham?” Hunt interjected.

“In 2013,” Cruz continued, ignoring the question. “I voted repeatedly to fund the government, and in 2013 it was Harry Reid and the Democrats who voted to ‘no’, who vote to shut the government down just like this week.”

Hunt and other reporters continued to challenge Cruz. But the Texas senator did not relent. “We should not be shutting the government down. I have consistently opposed shutdowns, in 2013, I said we shouldn’t shut the government down. Indeed, I went to the Senate floor repeatedly asking unanimous consent to re-open the government.”

“You stood in the way of that,” Hunt pointed out, again.

“That’s factually incorrect,” Cruz said, insisting again that this was just “a wonderful media narrative.”

Ted Cruz’s repeated insistence that he never shut down the government doesn’t change reality. In 2013, Cruz, along with conservatives in the House, demanded that any spending bill also delay the implementation of the Affordable Care Act.

President Barack Obama and Senate Democrats, who still had control of the chamber in 2013, were never going to support such a move. But enough House Republicans wouldn’t go for a funding bill that didn’t defund Obamacare, setting up a showdown that shut down government for more than two weeks. (In the end, Cruz and the conservative House faction did not win policy concessions.)

Republicans were largely blamed for the shutdown. Cruz’s theatrics inspired the ire not just of Democrats, but of his Republican colleagues in the Senate, who felt Cruz knew his self-righteous gambit was doomed to fail, but went ahead with it anyway to raise his own political profile at his party’s expense. And it really, really did not win him any pals.

On Monday, another reporter brought up this issue with Cruz, asking why were his GOP colleagues angry with him if he didn’t help prompt the shutdown. Cruz responded that “Republicans were divided.”

He’s still a monumentally slimy piece of work isn’t he?

But the truth is that all Republicans have learned that they can just lie with impunity because they live in an alternate Fox news universe. It’s a post-modern rabbit hole.

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Why Lindsey’s gambit didn’t workby digby

Josh Marshall on the shutdown strategy:

It’s amazing how quickly conventional wisdom can congeal. It’s even more amazing when it plays to Democrats’ habit of garment-rending and self-flagellation. This morning I read this in the lede of The Washington Post‘s Daily 202.

Seven takeaways from the failed Democratic government shutdown: The Resistance will struggle when it tries to replicate the tactics of the tea party movement. The left learned with its failed shutdown gambit that it cannot beat President Trump by copying the same playbook that the right used against Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

Good Lord, people.

A number of author James Hohmann’s takeaways have merit. The fact that Democrats believe in government and have constituencies who depend on it, both as federal employees and beneficiaries, makes the dynamics of the shutdown waiting game inherently different and more difficult for Democrats. This is certainly a disappointment. Democrats have essentially agreed to punt and come back to the same challenge in three weeks. Democratic self-flagellation gives President Trump an opening for bragging and chortling. None of that is fun.

But the takeaway here is wrong. I don’t think it’s right to see this as Democrats trying to replicate the Tea Party playbook. They could try that. Many Democrats would like to see them try it. But they actually haven’t. The particular dynamics of the Senate mean that Republicans require 60 votes for some budgetary legislation. (The only reason they needed it in this case was because they wanted to pass their tax cut with 50 votes.) But look at the alternative. If your takeaway here is that Democrats were trying to shut down the government what you’re really saying is that Democrats must vote yes on any continuing resolution no matter what is contained in it. That is obviously an untenable position. What we’re losing sight of here is that, yes, Republicans control the entire federal government. This amounted to legislative hostage taking in reverse.

He’s correct. The nihilist all-or-nothing Tea Party strategy doesn’t work for Democrats fora variety of reasons and that is not what the Dems were trying. They were trying to divide and conquer by separating Trump (and his base) from the hardliners by getting him to back a deal that would make the Freedom Caucus have to beat him or join him.

Lindsey Graham convinced them that since the one thing Trump has credibility on is his loathing for immigrants, if thy could get Trump on board he could persuade the Tea party right that helping the DACA kids wasn’t really “amnesty.” (I don’t know if Trump really has that kind of juice with the anti-immigrant far right but it was worth a try.)

When Trump said that he’d “take the heat” for making a bipartisan deal, that’s what everyone hoped would happen. If it didn’t, the hardliners would prevail as they have since 2006 and the DREAM kids were going to be out of luck.

As we all know, Trump blew up the bipartisan deal in the shithole meeting and that was the end of that.

The right wing still has veto power over any immigration deal. There was some hope that maybe, if we were lucky, Donald Trump could be cajoled into being a hero and helping out those kids but he’s a hardliner himself and a fucking moron to boot so it was easy for the xenophobes in his circle to convince him to ping pong back and forth. Schumer anted up the wall and even got Luis Gutierrez to gulp hard and go along with it in order to make a deal for DACA. They came back with more untenable demands.

And they will keep making demands because they do not really want a deal. They want to deport as many immigrants as they can, including these kids who have helpfully given the government all the information it needs to round them up when they get the chance.

I don’t know how to fix this as long as these xenophobic wingnuts have veto power and a raging imbecile is in the White House. ( Remember, Obama had to do DACA because he couldn’t get the congress to do anything about it.) Maybe the Republicans will have some kind of “come to Jesus” moment if they lose in November but honestly, that’s not how they usually operate. It’s possible that Trump could be corralled in some way into moving his base but he ran on mass deportation, walls and immigration bans so it’s hard for me to see how that happens. Graham made the effort and it didn’t get him anywhere. Maybe someone else would have more luck but who?

Maybe the Democrats will give them everything they can possibly think of until they run out of demands and have to give up on their desire to deport the DREAM kids. Maybe the GOP will see the light if Democrats shut down the government until the election in November. I hope something happens to shake this all up in a way that will make them do the right thing.

The country is in the hands of a virulent xenophobic and racist political movement. It is a nightmare from which we will not wake up until at least November — and even then the fight will just be beginning.

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We never have to listen to their moralizing againby digby

They are over.

Evangelical leader Tony Perkins in a new interview said President Trump got a “mulligan” on his past behavior, adding that the president is providing the leadership the country needs.

“We kind of gave him — ‘All right, you get a mulligan. You get a do-over here,’” Perkins, the Family Research Council president, told Politico’s “Off Message” podcast.

Perkins said evangelical Christians were “tired of being kicked around by Barack Obama and his leftists.”

“And I think they are finally glad that there’s somebody on the playground that is willing to punch the bully,” he said.

He added that Christianity is not “all about being a welcome mat which people can just stomp their feet on.”

This is what passes for principles and morality by the Christian Right today. They just want a fascist leader to punch out people who don’t agree with them.

I’ve been watching right wingers on TV all day saying that Trump sleeping with porn stars and grabbing women by the pussy is no big deal because Donald Trump is a different man than he was five years ago. Some say that Christian conservatives and “family values” zealots may have lost a little moral authority and they take the measure of each man and decide on a case by case basis if they are worthy of condemnation.

In other words, it’s all ok if you are a Republican.

Surely that is what Jesus would do.

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“She shouldn’t have been allowed to run!”by digby

So, Vladimir Putin declared that his main rival for re-election will not be allowed to run due to a trumped up crime from years ago. Now, his fellow autocrat Abdel Fatah al-Sisi of Egypt has done the same thing:

Egyptian authorities have arrested a retired general after denying him permission to run in presidential elections in March.

Sami Anan was the last challenger seen as a potential threat to President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, himself a former military chief, whose re-election is considered almost certain.

The arrest of Anan, a former member of Egypt’s supreme military council for armed forces (Scaf), appears to be a calculated move to push him out of the race. Earlier a declaration by the military accused him of election violations and said he would be “summoned for interrogation in front of specialised personnel”.

Mahmoud Refaat, a spokesman for Anan’s campaign abroad, said: “I hold the regime of Abdel Fatah al-Sisi entirely responsible for his wellbeing. Yesterday 30 members of campaign were also arrested as well as some of their family members. It’s not known where any of them are being held.”

Anan is the second former high-ranking official to be prevented from running against Sisi, who declared he would run for a second term late last week.

Here’s how our president views such authoritarian shennanigans:

TRUMP: So I talk about the corrupt media. I talk about the millions of people — tell you one other thing. She shouldn’t be allowed to run. It’s crooked — she’s — she’s guilty of a very, very serious crime. She should not be allowed to run.

And just in that respect, I say it’s rigged, because she should never…

WALLACE: But…

TRUMP: Chris, she should never have been allowed to run for the presidency based on what she did with e-mails and so many other things.

That was in a presidential debate in October 2016. He said that in front of the entire country. He said it dozens on times on the campaign trail. And he won. Nobody even commented on it. People cheered him lustily.

She isn’t going to run against him in 2020. And he’s still trying to have her thrown in jail just as a big piece of meat to throw to his slavering base to distract them from his own problems.

But who knows what a budding, lunatic tyrant and a newly purged Justice Department might want to do in advance of the next election?

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Trump and his “mirror dominance”by digby

My Salon piece today is about Trump and his little dog Stephen Miller:
Surprising absolutely no one, after a weekend of negotiations that went nowhere the Senate voted to kick the DACA can down the road for another three weeks and the government reopened on Tuesday morning. Supposedly, a bipartisan gang of 30 senators have Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s assurance that they’ll get an up or down vote on the issue. History says, however, that Mitch will do what he needs to do. At this point, nobody is exactly sure what that is, not even Mitch.

The shortness of the shutdown was actually a testament to the extent of the impasse. The Republican congressional “leadership” and the few remaining GOP moderates are submissive to the dominatrixes of the hard right who demand total obedience. The only way they were going to get a DACA deal in this round was if the president took charge and brought his followers along. But according to the New York Times, Trump preferred to let his loyal lieutenants stonewall while he sat in front of the TV and “watched old TV clips of him berating President Barack Obama for a lack of leadership during the 2013 government shutdown.”

As I wrote on Monday, Trump wants to deport undocumented immigrants. He campaigned for a year on the promise to mass-deport all 11 million of them, including the Dreamers and American-born children, within two years. His crowds screamed in ecstasy when said it. So the idea that he was going to be the voice of reason on the issue, despite his occasional foray into shallow sentimentality about “kids” and “love,” was always far-fetched. He is as viscerally xenophobic as Stephen Miller, his top immigration lieutenant

Nonetheless, some people, like Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. would have the public believe that Miller mesmerized Trump into going against his better nature, ensuring negotiations would break down by constantly demanding more. But as this article in the Washington Post explains, contrary to popular myth, Miller wasn’t making the president do anything he didn’t already want to do. He was just helping Trump achieve his stated goals:

Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, said Trump has hawkish immigration views on a gut level but doesn’t necessarily understand all of the policy details and implications. He said Miller and Chief of Staff John F. Kelly — who also plays a crucial role in immigration policy — are “not so much yanking the president’s leash” as doing “the proper job of staff” by steering the president to his goals.

The article profiles Miller as an especially shrewd inside operator in Trump’s White House, someone who has figured out how to both flatter and cajole the needy, insecure president while also helping him fulfill the central domestic promise of his campaign: stopping immigrants from nonwhite and non-Christian nations from entering the country, and deporting as many of them that are already here as possible. Miller knows that Trump wants to appear to be big-hearted and also that he focuses his decision-making on whom he can blame when things go wrong. So Miller has worked hard to make sure that Democrats will be blamed for any decision that hurts a sympathetic group like the Dreamers. He’s loyal to Trump even at the expense of his previous mentor, Jeff Sessions. He’s a facilitator and strategist who serves a man he believes in.

Miller is also a total jerk, which is yet another reason that Trump likes him so much. In this fascinating Los Angeles Times op-ed, Virginia Heffernan discusses the strange phenomenon of people around Trump taking on his own obnoxious personality traits. She notes that New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, who covers the White House, tweeted: “Three Trump advisors have commented privately at various points that people around him/close to him begin to act like him.” Heffernan also observes that even foreign leaders like Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and Egypt’s Abdel Fattah al-Sisi have taken to communicating in childish, Trump-like rants. And she makes a connection I haven’t seen anyone make before:

Trump almost certainly counts the rhetorical subordination of these men as a win. After all, he devised his interpersonal strategies in the 1970s, when mentally dominating others was considered a fine art. The manual for “corporate warfare” in those days was “Power!” by Michael Korda, who ran in Trump’s circles.

Korda advised aspirants to power to encroach on other people’s space, keep them waiting on the phone, and force them to mirror you. The mirror tip sticks out: Evidently you can crush your enemies if you can force them to adopt your expressions, intonations, rhythms, gestures. Trump seems to have taken tips like these seriously …

I have no idea whether Trump actually read Korda’s book. But it was very much in vogue during his formative years as a New York celebrity entrepreneur and it’s exactly the type of thing he would find appealing. As the editor in chief of Simon & Schuster and scion of a famous Hollywood family, Korda was a New York icon at the time and surely someone Trump would have seen as a role model.

The problem is that “Power!” was a satire of office politics (to be fair, Trump wouldn’t have been the only one who failed to see that.) It would hardly be surprising if Trump modeled his “leadership” style on such silliness. It was surely written with men such as him in mind.

Heffernan’s observation about “mirroring” as one of Trump’s key tricks applies perfectly to Stephen Miller. Trump certainly appreciates Miller’s hardline immigration stance, but it’s his temperament he loves. According to the Washington Post, the president was thrilled that Miller got up in Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s face when others would not. And Trump loved Miller’s recent combative appearance with CNN’s Jake Tapper, even tweeting out a big “attaboy” to his millions of followers.

Miller isn’t pulling Trump’s strings. Nor is he obsequiously flattering him like a loyal servant, à la Lindsey Graham, which Trump likes but doesn’t respect. Miller is “mirroring” Trump, which to the president is the best sign of respectful submission. The people in the Trump orbit who figure that out will be the ones with the most influence. The only person Trump will ever trust is someone who reminds him of himself.

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The majority isn’t silent. But you’d never know it.
by digby

Susie Madrak at Crooks and Liars caught this smart comment by Rebecca Traister on All In with Chris Hayes last night:

New York Magazine writer Rebecca Traister, in a discussion with Chris Hayes and organizer Linda Sarsour, asked why the women’s marches got so little media coverage.

“What do you want me to tell the crazy women talking about justice? They ignored us again but they will not ignore us at the ballot box,” Sarsour said.

“This is right. This is symptomatic, the marches and the activism is not taken seriously. Why?” Traister asked.

“They are women’s marches. We know last year single biggest one-day demonstration in this country’s history, we heard how afterwards, it was okay but just a march, it’s performance, fun, people get together and wear their cute hats, whatever. No one seems to have connected, still, a year later when there is a spontaneous demonstration almost the same size in some places like Chicago, bigger, without a centralized organization drawing everybody.

“I didn’t know about the marches,” she said. “I write about women and politics. I didn’t know there would be women’s marches until January and they were massive. They don’t just have cute marches with the hats with the fact it’s women clogging congressional phone lines and doing town halls, who have been organizing on the grassroots activist level around state and local office races around the country who have been winning in New Jersey, in Virginia and who are running in unprecedented numbers for the House, for the Senate and primarying Democrats from the left.

“And apparently, the media’s failure to take this seriously as a political movement and not as some social weekend thing that women do once a year, has led Senate Democrats to think it’s not a serious political movement,” she said.

Later in the show, she compared them with the endless coverage sparked by the much smaller Tea Party and how the media helped make them a political force.

Helaine Olen wrote about the same thing for the Plumline:

This Saturday was the second annual Women’s March. You might remember it. Perhaps you read a news story about it.

Or maybe, perchance, you even attended one. Lots of people did! In Los Angeles, an estimated 500,000 people took to the streets, and in Chicago, 300,000. New York City claimed 200,000. Even red states saw decent-size turnouts. Nashville saw 15,000 and Omaha 8,000.

But after the initial flurry of media attention — crickets. According to an analysis by Media Matters for America, the Sunday morning news shows all but ignored the mass event. “Meet the Press” granted the subject a mere 20-second exchange — and the NBC show was the most generous of the lot.

While it’s common sense to observe that the government shutdown is taking up some of our oxygen, the lack of attention also demonstrates how even with the #MeToo movement, it is ingrained to treat the concerns of women as secondary to, well, bigger things that are deemed more serious. And when opposition to the Trump administration and the Republican Party is framed as a women’s issue, it receives less attention than it should.

I reached out to McDermott to expand on his Twitter comment. He told me he attributed the lack of attention to the Women’s March in part to the media’s conviction, in the wake of Donald Trump’s surprise 2016 victory, that journalists missed the initial surge of populist rage that led to Trump’s victory and are attempting, as he put it, “to course correct,” by diverting media attention to Trump’s angry male supporters. At the same time, he added, the media often prioritizes the issues of concerns of white males. The result?

“There is not coverage of the actual movement building on the left, which is arguably by any measure the greatest political movement we’ve seen in decades in this country,” he said.

It’s hard to disagree.

By all objective standards, the rage of many women against Trump has been big news since the 2017 march, which took almost everyone — including organizers — by surprise.

It set off a never-before-seen wave of women running for office. According to Rebecca Traister, 439 women have announced plans to run for Congress this year, marking an all-time record. The #MeToo movement also owes some of its resonance to the waves of women organizing, registering to vote and making their anger heard.

It’s hard not to compare the attention — and lack thereof — to the Women’s March against the attention given to the tea party, the movement that seemingly garnered all-but-nonstop coverage from the moment it began as a rant by CNBC personality Rick Santelli. Soon enough, there was enormous amount of media attention devoted to tea party rallies and the protesters’ concerns. In 2011, after President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address, CNN not only aired the official Republican response, it also gave time to then-Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), who delivered a tea party response.

Make no mistake — the attention was deserved. Tea party members made major electoral gains, and the tea party is still an influence in our politics.

But the Women’s March and the resistance that engendered it are also having a huge impact on American politics. We saw that impact in the November 2017 elections, in which a surge of female support led to huge Democratic gains in Virginia. We also saw it in Alabama, where it was African American woman who helped Democrat Doug Jones win election to the Senate instead of Republican Roy Moore.

The Tea Party was treated as an exciting new revolutionary force in American politics by the media despite much smaller numbers. Of course the coverage was rewarded by the right which had successfully trolled the media as Obama lapdogs during the 2008 election making the press anxious to prove they were fair and balanced. And once the Tea Party was launched it was heavily financed by big Republican money which got behind candidates early.

Still, it’s depressing that the media doesn’t seem to care much that millions of people have taken to the streets to protest Trump and his policies two years running. And it’s even more depressing that they are consistently failing to cover the Resistance as it organizes across the country to unseat Republicans in the upcoming election.

Luckily, the majority of people taking to the streets are women who are used to doing all the work and getting no credit. They will persist and they will get the job done anyway. But every time I read yet another long article taking the temperature of the most interesting people in the world — the Trump voter (aka the Tea Party)—it makes my blood boil a little bit more.

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Do you feel safer?by digby

I don’t know if pollsters ever asked this question of previous presidents but if they didn’t, that says something too:

Unsurprisingly, views about Trump’s mental fitness are closely tied to concern about his decisions on using nuclear weapons. When asked about Trump’s description of himself as a “very stable genius,” 48 percent said Trump is mentally stable, while 47 percent said he is not. Eighty-four percent of those who say Trump is not mentally stable are at least somewhat concerned that Trump might launch a nuclear attack without justification, while 72 percent of those who say Trump is stable trust him to handle nuclear weapons.

On New Year’s Day, North Korea’s leader warned that “a nuclear button is always on my desk. This is reality, not a threat.” The next day, Trump tweeted that “I too have a nuclear button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my button works.”

It’s important to note that the very stable genius was watching Fox and got all riled up when he tweeted that.

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“What — Me Angry?”
by Tom Sullivan

Senate Democrats voted with Republicans yesterday to end the government shutdown and fund the federal government for three more weeks. They seemed to have secured nothing on Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) reform besides a promise to look into it. Senate Democrats were already feeling pressure to cave, the Washington Post reports, and if the standoff was a test of nerves, they lost theirs:

With the shutdown heading into its third day, they were feeling the heat and finding it hard to control the messaging war. Voters in Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin were getting Republican robo-calls saying Democrats had “prioritized illegal immigrants over American citizens.”

So the Democrats decided to take a deal they had turned down only the night before — a less-than-airtight assurance by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) that “it would be my intention” to consider legislation that would address those immigrants in the coming weeks, but only if the government were reopened.

A McConnell promise is one you can take to the political graveyard. Jim Newell observes at Slate that McConnell has yet to make good on assurances he made to Republicans Sen. Susan Collins of Maine and Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake for their votes on tax reform. Why would Senate Democrats expect any better? Not to mention how pissed off the Democrats’ base is already, a factor that still seems to elude the Democratic leadership:

“Today’s cave by Senate Democrats—led by weak-kneed, right-of-center Democrats—is why people don’t believe the Democratic Party stands for anything,” Progressive Change Campaign Committee co-founder Stephanie Taylor said in a statement. “These weak Democrats hurt the party brand for everyone and make it harder to elect Democrats everywhere in 2018.”

“A lot of Democrats are channeling their inner Marco Rubio today,” tweeted MoveOn Washington Director Ben Wikler, referring to the oft-caving Florida senator. Ezra Levin, co-executive director of Indivisible, called it a “betrayal.” CREDO labeled Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer “the worst negotiator in Washington—even worse than Trump.”

On All In last night, MSNBC host Chris Hayes challenged Michigan Democrat Sen. Gary Peters for voting to reopen the government on McConnell’s assurances that there would be a DACA fix. “It’s never going get a vote in the House unless the president puts pressure on Paul Ryan. So [Donald Trump] is just going roll you again in three weeks,” Hayes said.

Even more striking was the appearance last night by Women’s March organizer Linda Sarsour and New York magazine’s Rebecca Traister. Both were on fire, Sarsour told Hayes:

We were standing up for Dreamers. We were standing up for our undocumented families … We are outraged that millions of people went out into the streets in support of Dreamers and Senate Democrats chose to vote against Dreamers in this [continuing resolution] bill … They will not ignore us at the ballot box.

Traister concurred that women and the growing activism of the Democratic base is not being taken seriously by Democrats in leadership:

And they don’t connect these marches — just these cute marches with the hats — with the fact that it’s women who have been clogging Congressional phone lines, who have been doing the town halls, who have been organizing on the grassroots, activist level around state and local office races around the country, who have been winning in New Jersey, in Virginia, and who are running in unprecedented numbers for the House, the Senate, and they are primarying Democrats from the left.

Somebody is “woke,” but it’s not elected Democrats.

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Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

Big mistake Mikey
by digby

Everybody lies to poor Mike Pence who is always in the room but never knows nothin’ about nothin’. This is something he really, really doesn’t want to step into:

Vice President Mike Pence said Monday that porn star Stormy Daniels’ sordid account of a sex romp with President Trump in 2006 was “baseless.”

The denial by Pence was the first time the devout Indiana Republican had addressed the allegations brought by the star of “Sex Door Neighbors” and “When the Boyz Are Away the Girlz Will Play 7.”

He spoke to The Associated Press during a visit to Jerusalem, saying he was “not going to comment on the latest baseless allegations against the President.”

The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s personal lawyer brokered a $130,000 payment to Daniels in October 2016 to prohibit her from publicly discussing the alleged affair before the presidential election.

Stormy’s prepared if necessary to challenge such statements:

“I can definitely describe his junk perfectly, if I ever have to.”

Calling her claims “baseless” could end up with her having to do that as part of some legal case. Please, for the love of all that’s holy, please don’t let anyone say or do anything to make that happen. No, no, no.

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He likes to watch TVby digby

The President largely experiences his own presidency via TV coverage. I don’t know how to convey the insanity of this – Trump is the star in a TV show about himself that he watches all day long.

— Brendan Nyhan

I wonder if he found time to watch the CNN special on The Russia investigation over the week-end …