Month: March 2018

He doesn’t do homework. He’s, like, smart. He went to good schools.


by digby

by digby

Trump’s bragging that he is a dumb liar and there’s nothing anyone can do about it at a fundraiser last night raises some important questions about what comes next with North Korea:

This isn’t the first time we’ve got a glimpse behind the curtain. Early in his presidency, The Washington Post obtained transcripts of his calls with the leaders of Australia and Mexico. Trump’s call with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull turned contentious after Trump became enraged by an agreement the Obama administration made with Australia to take some refugees. Trump didn’t seem to have any understanding of the agreement of Australia’s policy of not accepting refugees who arrive by boat

What happens if Trump takes this approach — or the one from the meetings on guns and immigration — to his meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un? Can a guy who can’t be bothered to understand the basics before talking to foreign leaders and lawmakers do the kind of homework required for very sensitive and complicated negotiations involving nuclear programs? And what if he doesn’t even try? What if he decides to wing it, as he did with Trudeau?

He won’t do homework. He can’t. He has no capacity to learn new facts that conflict with the worldview he adopted more than 30 years ago. He operates entirely on a feral instinct for grandiose self-aggrandizement and personal survival.

If we get out of this alive it will be a miracle. And if we do he will brag that he saved us.

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A woman in Trump country

by digby

There are a lot of women running for congress this year but most of them are Democrats. Here’s a Republican woman who “avidly supports the president.”The profile gives a good flavor of what it’s like for women in Trump’s GOP these days. I pick up the story at a fundraiser with Anthony Scaramucci of all people:

Scaramucci returns to the lobby, but rather than coming to sit with her, he’s chauffeured over to a table to meet Rep. James B. Renacci, current occupant of the 16th District seat, now running for the U.S. Senate. Her campaign consultant, Harlan Hill, who is also working for Renacci, and her political director, Allan Betz, join the meeting. They instruct Hagan to stay put, watch their bags and order something to eat.

“I feel so weird just sitting here,” she says, but she keeps sitting. They’re the experts, brought in from New York and Washington. Hill is on the advisory board for Trump 2020. Betz had worked for Trump’s campaign in Stark County. They had helped an underdog win, and that’s what she has hired them to do for her.

They have redesigned her campaign materials, swapping out a photo of Hagan holding her 2-year-old daughter for a large head shot. They remind her when to use fewer “big words” and ask her to carry a “nice wristlet” instead of a purse, which doesn’t look good in pictures. They help her figure out the right thing to say, and sometimes stop her from talking when she isn’t saying it, like during an interview for this story, when she is asked whether she considers herself a feminist.

“I guess, a conservative feminist,” she begins and then pauses, looking at Betz’s expression. “You’re worried about the terminology,” she says to him.

She starts again. “I think that I’ve never really —”

He interrupts: “In the sense that the word feminist, as it is right now? Absolutely not.”

This reporter explains that he cannot answer the question for her.

“No, I’m just saying, when you say feminist, do you mean the Women’s March?” he asks.

“No,” Hagan says, “that’s not — ”

“Well, that’s feminist,” he says.

“No, no,” she says.

“Yes, it is,” he retorts.

“That’s your opinion of what feminism has been portrayed as,” she says. “But I think that modern-day feminism, as culturally perceived, would not be a direct correlation of who I am.”

She begins to explain who she is — a woman who doesn’t expect anyone to vote for her because she’s a woman; who doesn’t believe that her sex is severely disadvantaged; who feels like the Women’s March kept out women like her, “who choose to embrace the fullness of our biological greatness” — and Betz cuts her off again, asking to pause the interview. “Something has come up,” he says.

At least he didn’t grab her by the pussy. That we know of …

Honestly, I can barely understand why any woman would be a Republican. But a Trump supporter? There’s some kind of screw loose.

*Actually, that’s not true. They have their reasons and it has to do with sexism. Basically, Trump dredges up these women’s fears — even of him — then tells them he’ll protect them (as long as they are good girls.) Some women find it easier to believe that than believe the truth.

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So much chaos we don’t even notice the graft and the corruption anymore

by digby

I wrote about the odd way Trump is draining the swamp for Salon today:

After Economic Adviser Gary Cohn’s resignation in the wake of President Trump’s impulsive tariff announcement and the abrupt dismissal of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson this week, it’s assumed that Trump’s apparent decision to throw caution to the wind and follow his gut will lead to more firings, perhaps immediately. It’s not as if he’s being coy about it. Trump keeps saying that he’s “almost” got the administration he wants, every time the press queries him about the massive turnover.

This has all of Washington on a sort of death watch, wondering whether the rumors that National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster is out are true. Then there’s the greatest thorn in Trump’s side, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, as well as Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin, who is in a pitched battle with his own staff.

Axios’ Jonathan Swan quoted a White House staffer summing up the atmosphere these days:

This is the most toxic working environment on the planet. Usually tough times bring people together. But right now this atmosphere is ripping people apart. There’s no leadership, no trust, no direction and [at] this point there’s very little hope. Would you want to go to work every day not knowing whether your future career was going to be destroyed without explanation?

That is in apparent reference to the fact that people are being summarily dismissed and marched out of the White House without even being able to gather their personal items, almost on a daily basis. This is said to often be because of failure to gain security clearance, and then “serious financial crimes,” in the case of Trump’s personal assistant John McEntee — who was fired earlier this week. (He was immediately hired by the 2020 Trump campaign as a “senior adviser,” so his career seems to be on track.)

One thing Trump’s game of musical chairs is accomplishing is that it’s become almost quaint to worry about the massive amount of corruption within the administration. It is now so commonplace that when it becomes public there is a moment of hand-wringing in the press and then . . . nothing happens. For all the turnover in this administration, virtually none of it has been because of the self-dealing and profiteering that’s reported virtually every day.

One cabinet member who was forced to resign over his nearly half-million dollars in travel expenses in the first few months of the administration was former HHS Secretary Tom Price. If anyone thought the president was making an example of him, it didn’t take. Since then, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has also been taken to task for excessive travel costs and EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt racked up huge bills for personal travel, insisting he needed the extra security of first-class travel because someone once shouted something insulting at him in coach. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, a man worth $300 million, requested government planes that cost $25,000 an hour to fly him and his wife to their European honeymoon.

Meanwhile, the office redecorating costs are skyrocketing under the Trump administration. It was reported this week that HUD Secretary Ben Carson fibbed when he said he didn’t know anything about the $31,000 dining room table that he and his wife ordered for his office (even as he is overseeing massive cuts to programs for poor people.) Zinke spent $139,000 to replace three doors, and Pruitt has built a $43,000 “cone of silence” for his office so that nobody overhears his top-secret environmental policy phone calls.

Carson and Zinke are still Trump favorites, and there’s talk of promoting Pruitt to the Department of Justice if Trump finally gets around to firing Jeff Sessions. (What could be better for the country than a deeply paranoid attorney general?)

The wealthiest man in the administration is Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, and, according to this article by David Dayen at the Intercept, his conflicts of interest are massive — even aside from his holdings in Russian, interests that look suspicious under current circumstances. After the release of the Paradise Papers, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., complained that Ross had seriously misled the Congress in his confirmation hearings and compared his financial statements to “Russian nesting dolls.” He’s never been more influential in the cabinet.

Then there are the Trumps and the Kushners. The emoluments issue seems to have disappeared, despite the fact that foreign governments are routinely spending massive sums at Trump hotels to curry favor with the president, and God only knows what they’re doing at his foreign properties. Donald Trump continues to do almost weekly promotional appearances at this resorts and golf properties, charging people big bucks for access to him and pocketing the money. CNN reported on Wednesday that the Defense Department spent nearly $140,000 at Trump properties in the first few months of the administration on meals and lodging. Another $17,000 was spent at the troubled Panama hotel (now no longer under Trump management), for reasons that are obscure.

The Trumps have even tried to use the presidential seal to sell their cheap branded merchandise:

The presidential seal being sold on mugs at Trump Tower.

[breaths]

It’s illegal to use the seal for commercial purposes. https://t.co/HPiEGK83rO— ProPublica (@ProPublica) March 7, 2018

You can say one thing for Trump. He never leaves even one dime on the table.

I wrote about Donald Trump Jr.’s Indian adventure awhile back, selling foreign policy and condos in one whirlwind trip. Now it looks like Ivanka Trump herself is finally coming under scrutiny. She did not divest her holdings in the Trump Organization and is receiving more than a million dollars a year from projects with state-owned companies around the world, even as she works in the White House without proper clearance and travels the globe as a representative of the U.S. government. It’s astonishing that she is getting away with this.

But that’s nothing compared to her husband Jared Kushner, who secured loans for himself and his family in excess of half a billion dollars after meetings in the White House about possible infrastructure projects. Then there are the suspicions that Kushner pressured the government of Qatar to bail out his family debt and changed American foreign policy to punish the Qataris when they didn’t come across.

This is just the corruption we know about. Some of it is penny-ante and some of it is massive in scale. There’s skimming from the taxpayers and leveraging government policy for personal gain. As in a banana republic or a mob-run kleptocracy, it’s pervasive in every part of the administration, woven into the fabric of everyday business. But because this presidency is such an epic disaster in every way, all of this looks like a third-order scandal.

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He’s proud to be a dumb liar

by digby

He even brags about how stupid and dishonest he is:

President Trump boasted in a fundraising speech Wednesday that he made up information in a meeting with the leader of a top U.S. ally, saying he insisted to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that the United States runs a trade deficit with its neighbor to the north without knowing whether that was the case.

“Trudeau came to see me. He’s a good guy, Justin. He said, ‘No, no, we have no trade deficit with you, we have none. Donald, please,’ ” Trump said, mimicking Trudeau, according to audio obtained by The Washington Post. “Nice guy, good-looking guy, comes in — ‘Donald, we have no trade deficit.’ He’s very proud because everybody else, you know, we’re getting killed.

“… So, he’s proud. I said, ‘Wrong, Justin, you do.’ I didn’t even know. … I had no idea. I just said, ‘You’re wrong.’ You know why? Because we’re so stupid. … And I thought they were smart. I said, ‘You’re wrong, Justin.’ He said, ‘Nope, we have no trade deficit.’ I said, ‘Well, in that case, I feel differently,’ I said, ‘but I don’t believe it.’ I sent one of our guys out, his guy, my guy, they went out, I said, ‘Check, because I can’t believe it.’

‘Well, sir, you’re actually right. We have no deficit, but that doesn’t include energy and timber. … And when you do, we lose $17 billion a year.’ It’s incredible.”

The Office of the United States Trade Representative says the United States has a trade surplus with Canada.

Apparently all the rich Republicans sycophants ate it up. I guess he makes them feel good about themselves by comparison.

Oh God the rest of it was even worse:

He also seemed to threaten to pull U.S. troops stationed in South Korea if he didn’t get what he wanted on trade with Seoul, an ally. He said that the country had gotten rich but that U.S. politicians never negotiated better deals. “We have a very big trade deficit with them, and we protect them,” Trump said. “We lose money on trade, and we lose money on the military. We have right now 32,000 soldiers between North and South Korea. Let’s see what happens.”

“Our allies care about themselves,” he said. “They don’t care about us.”

Trump’s rare comments that laid bare his approach to arguing trade facts with foreign leaders show how he might try to engage with other heads of state in the coming weeks. Trump has said he will impose tariffs on steel and aluminum imports as soon as next week, a steep increase in duties that could impact some of the U.S. government’s biggest trading partners.

Trump said countries can request exemption from these tariffs but only after direct negotiations with him. And the audio from the fundraiser shows how difficult these discussions could prove.

In his 30-minute speech to donors in Missouri, Trump lavished praise on himself while ticking through a list of U.S. allies that he said were actually taking advantage of the United States.
[…]
Trump described his decision to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un through the prism of making history and besting his predecessors while lamenting his media coverage, questioning U.S. allies and labeling his presidency as “virgin territory.”

“They couldn’t have met” with Kim, he said, after mocking former presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush. “Nobody would have done what I did.”

“It’s called appeasement, please don’t do anything,” he said of other presidents.

“They say, ‘Maybe he’s not the one to negotiate,’ ” he said, mocking the voice of a news anchor. “He’s got very little knowledge of the Korean Peninsula. Maybe he’s not the one. … Maybe we should send in the people that have been playing games and didn’t know what the hell they’ve been doing for 25 years.”

The through lines of his meandering speech were simple: Trump was tougher than all the rest, and the United States was not going to be laughed at or taken advantage of.

He accused Japan of using gimmicks to deny U.S. auto companies access to their consumers, said South Korea was taking advantage of outdated trade rules even though its economy was strong and said China had single-handedly rebuilt itself on the back of its trade surplus with the United States.

“It’s the bowling ball test. They take a bowling ball from 20 feet up in the air and drop it on the hood of the car,” Trump said of Japan. “If the hood dents, the car doesn’t qualify. It’s horrible,” he said. It was unclear what he was talking about.

He said he didn’t even want Japan to pay the tariffs but to build more automobiles in the United States, which he said Japan would do if tariffs were imposed. There is no evidence of such a possibility as of now.

His comments were among his most protectionist to date and didn’t identify a single benefit the United States receives from its trading relationships.

The “free-trade globalists,” he said, are against his trade moves because “they’re worldly people, they have stuff on the other side.” Gary Cohn, the president’s top economic adviser, recently quit over the tariffs and was derisively labeled by his critics as a globalist.

Trump mocked other politicians for wanting to keep NAFTA, calling Mexico “spoiled” and saying that Canada had outsmarted the United States. “The best deal is to terminate it and make a new deal,” he said.

Above all, he cast his presidency in historic proportions, saying he was attracting so much media criticism because he was doing so well. He seemed fixated on his media coverage, even talking about a specific CNN segment with Erin Burnett.

He said the news media was criticizing him for “conceding” a meeting with Kim.

“They were afraid of being blown up. Then all of a sudden, they say, let’s not meet,” he said of reporters.

While Trump said some decry his rhetoric and think his bellicose and mercurial tendencies could bring the United States into a war, he explained why he taunted the North Korean president as “Little Rocket Man.” He said the South Koreans told him that Kim was agreeing to meet because of the tough U.S. sanctions and that they promised to not do any nuclear tests or missile launches until a meeting occurred. That comment could not be verified.

“He’s going to get us in a war,” he said, again mocking a news anchor. “You know what’s going to get us in a war? Weakness.

Somebody needs to stop him from drinking so much diet coke (or doing whatever it is that makes him so over-stimulated. )He is on a manic tear and it’s getting really scary.

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Poor, poor Paul
by Tom Sullivan

House Speaker Paul Ryan’s dead-eyed earnestness is ordinarily pretty hard to take seriously. For one thing, the man who would explain to us all how the economy works hasn’t worked in it his whole adult life.

In the aftermath of Democrat Conor Lamb’s special election win in PA-18 on Tuesday, Ryan’s explanations for the GOP loss were comical. Slate‘s Jim Newell made sure readers didn’t miss just how much:

House Speaker Paul Ryan, during a Wednesday morning press conference, gave credit to President Trump, who “helped close this race” by hosting a rally in the district over the weekend. It’s an interesting position to take, that the president could be lauded as a “closer” when the candidate he supported didn’t appear to … win. But Ryan had more where that came from.

“Both of these candidates, the Republican and the Democrat, ran as conservatives,” Ryan argued. “Ran as pro-gun, pro-life, anti–Nancy Pelosi conservatives. And I think that’s the takeaway we see here.”

One can think of other takeaways beyond the race being a great night for conservatism. Let’s look at that litany of issues that Ryan mentioned. On guns, Lamb did not support limits to magazine clips or a new ban on assault weapons, but he did support the sort of expansion of background checks in the Manchin-Toomey proposal, which many conservatives claim would mark the beginning of the end of the Second Amendment. He holds the Tim Kaine position on abortion: He doesn’t personally support abortion but believes it should be legally available—a position known as being “pro-choice.” In the same interview in which he told the Weekly Standard that he does not use the term pro-life to describe himself, Lamb also said that he would have voted against the 20-week abortion ban. It is true that he said he wanted “new leadership” in Congress and would not support Nancy Pelosi. Pelosi’s feelings were likely unhurt.

Not to mention Lamb’s describing Ryan’s signature achievement, last years’s GOP tax bill, as “giveaway” to the rich and large corporations.

As an early test of GOP messaging and recruitment for November, Tara Golshan writes at Vox, “a wave of Democratic enthusiasm” demonstrated their weakness.

Republicans chalking up the loss to Lamb’s looks — his it-factor — came in for a special kind of sarcasm from Newell:

Reader, do yourself a favor: Take a look-see at members of the House Republican Conference. Do you think Glenn Grothman make it to the United States Congress through sheer force of his charisma? Did John Faso charm his way into the hearts and minds of New York’s 19th Congressional District? How was George Holding able to inspire the masses in North Carolina’s 13th? Saccone just didn’t “pop” quite like Peter King or Andy Harris.

If anything, Lamb’s victory on Tuesday made it clear Democrats running against Paul Ryan’s economic message and Republicans’ attempts to wreck Obamacare might work better for them than Republicans’ perennial demonizing of Nancy Pelosi.

Although Lamb has a point in calling for new leadership. Democrats’ stagnation comes from leadership not knowing when it’s time to pass the baton and move on. Succession planning is not their forte. Democrats are still kicking around the idea of Joe Biden running for president in 2020. For all the Republican booga-booga, the scariest thing about Nancy Pelosi still leading the House Democratic caucus is a stroke leading to her being succeeded by Steny Hoyer.

* * * * * * * *

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

“This is the most toxic working environment on the planet. Usually tough times bring people together. But right now this atmosphere is ripping people apart. There’s no leadership, no trust, no direction and this point there’s very little hope. Would you want to go to work every day not knowing whether your future career was going to be destroyed without explanation?”

Maybe if they weren’t all a bunch of crooks…

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Meanwhile in Bizarroworld

by digby

In the Trump TV universe, this is what you will see:

Tucker Carlson used his prime-time spot on national TV this week to defend a group of white nationalists who believed in the Pizzagate conspiracy theory and who had previously tried to stop humanitarian ships from rescuing drowning migrants.

Noted Twitter troll Brittany Pettibone and her boyfriend, Austrian far-right activist Martin Sellner, were barred from entering the U.K. when they landed at Luton airport on Tuesday. Separately, far-right YouTube personality Lauren Southern was stopped by Border Officials at Calais and barred as well, with authorities saying her presence was “not conducive to the public good.” Immigration authorities removed Pettibone and Sellner based on intelligence that the two were planning to meet with far-right figure Tommy Robinson, and that their visit was designed “to insight [sic] tensions between local communities in the United Kingdom.”

On Tuesday night, Carlson dug in. “American YouTube personality Brittany Pettibone and her Austrian boyfriend were barred from entering the U.K., because they planned to interview Tommy Robinson, an outspoken critic of Islam,” Carlson said. “Then, on Monday, British police halted a visit by Canadian journalist Lauren Southern, on the grounds she was, quote, ‘a radical Christian,’ and therefore, possibly a terrorist.”

He complained, “Meanwhile, radical Muslims, more than 400 former ISIS fighters were welcomed.”

Pettibone previously described herself as “one of the leading authorities on Pizzagate,” a fringe conspiracy theory that claims former Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta is involved in an international child sex ring.

These are among the nuttiest of the nutty. And they are being feted in prime time by the conservative network that is the main source of news for tens of millions of Republicans.

Carlson has always been a snotty little twit and a rank opportunist. He’s all the way out in Alex Jones territory now. He’s a follower, not a leader so I have to assume that’s what his audience is looking for. Good god …

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Devin’s not finished

by digby

The Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee have closed up shop on the Russia investigation, much to their shame. But they aren’t just going to sit back and do nothing. They have plans for the future and they aren’t good.

This op-ed in the NYT gets to at least some of what they undoubtedly have planned:

Every indication is that this is far from the end of the committee majority’s mischief. All signs instead point to this week’s developments as the beginning of a new chapter in the story, in which House Republicans go on the offensive to support President Trump — and fight the special counsel, Robert Mueller.

That likely trajectory emerges from plotting the data points before us. First, the committee’s chairman, Representative Devin Nunes, attempted to provide cover for President Trump’s false allegation that he was wiretapped by his predecessor. Mr. Nunes met with White House officials in secret and then held news conferences in which he claimed that the outgoing national security adviser, Susan Rice, and her colleagues had wrongly sought to “unmask” (i.e., identify by name) certain Trump associates in surveillance reports.

When that effort ran out of steam, Mr. Nunes and the majority shifted their attention to the process by which law enforcement agencies obtained Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act authorization to conduct electronic monitoring of a former Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page. The committee released a highly misleading memo claiming that the F.B.I. and the Department of Justice had abused their powers — claims which turned out to be unfounded.

Now, with their forthcoming report, the Republicans on the committee have turned their focus to attacking the substance of the Mueller investigation.

The special counsel is examining three core issues: Did Russia attack the 2016 elections to aid Mr. Trump; did Mr. Trump or members of his campaign collude with the Russians to do so; and did Mr. Trump or others obstruct the investigation of these matters? The committee majority report, which has yet to be released but which members of the majority have begun to tease out in recent days, is an attempt to defang the first question, finding against all evidence that the Russian attack was not intended to help Mr. Trump (though a few members of the majority, including Representative Trey Gowdy, have been more equivocal). And the majority report endeavors to gut the second question, declaring the absence of collusion altogether.

It would be a grave error to think the committee will stop here, especially its chairman. There is nothing in Mr. Nunes’s record to suggest that he will let up in the face of opposition, whether from the stray dissenters within his own (still largely compliant) ranks who have emerged, or from the outside. The so-called “Nunes memo,” although widely considered a flop, was just the first in a series that he has said he plans to issue.

Having assailed the first two prongs of the Mueller investigation, we can now expect Mr. Nunes and his colleagues to turn to the third, and the one perhaps most perilous to the president: obstruction of justice. The president and his supporters have argued that his constitutional power to direct the Justice Department and the F.B.I. and to fire their personnel means he cannot as a matter of law be held accountable for obstructing an investigation. That is wrong; the Supreme Court has held that those presidential powers may be curtailed, and American law is replete with examples of obstruction prosecutions of officials for abusing their undoubted official powers.

Mr. Nunes and his committee majority have demonstrated little regard for such niceties, and we fully expect them to weigh in on the side of the president, and against accountability. Should Mr. Mueller move to compel the president to testify by obtaining a grand jury subpoena, for example, look for them to back arguments circulated by Mr. Trump’s lawyers that the special counsel has not met the threshold for such a step. The fact that Mr. Mueller has accumulated compelling evidence of obstruction is unlikely to give the committee majority pause.

We also expect more overt attacks on Mr. Mueller himself, of the kind Representative Nunes has already launched against Obama-era officials for unmasking and the F.B.I. for the warrant against Mr. Page. Mr. Trump and his allies have already floated a long list of spurious assaults on Mr. Mueller and members of his team, smearing them with allegations of conflicts of interest, bias and abuse of their investigative powers. Now that the House Intelligence Committee majority has done its dirty work on the substance of the Mueller investigation, can picking up these themes to attack the special counsel himself be far behind?

We must in addition look for Representative Nunes and his ilk to back the president should he seek to install a crony in one of the positions within the Justice Department that oversees the Mueller investigation. Why should the president fire the special counsel outright, with the attendant fuss? Mr. Trump instead can try to throttle him by replacing Attorney General Jeff Sessions or his deputy, Rod Rosenstein, with a compliant soul who can slowly choke off Mr. Mueller by cutting his budget, trimming his staff or curtailing the scope of his review. In a week in which there has already been a major cabinet reshuffle, with the firings of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and one of his top aides, Steve Goldstein, the possibility of such a move looms larger — and the likelihood of full-throated backing from Mr. Nunes and company, greater.

The damage the House majority can do here goes beyond mere cheerleading. When Mr. Nunes released his first memo, there were ominous rumblings that it was intended to target Mr. Rosenstein for his alleged role in FISA warrant abuses. When the memo fell flat, the rumors faded away. We would hardly be surprised to see a renewed effort against him — and his boss. Since Mr. Rosenstein oversees Mr. Mueller only because Mr. Sessions has a conflict (he worked on the Trump campaign), the replacement of either would serve Mr. Trump and Mr. Nunes’s malign purposes.

We predict that these and other forms of mischief will continue to flow from a committee majority run amok.

The Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee are nothing more than Trump’s thug bodyguards at this point.

I think it’s almost guaranteed that Trump will fire either Sessions, Rosenstein, Mueller or all three quite soon. Nunes likely has about 10 months to do Trump’s dirty work, assuming that the committee chairmanship changes hands in January. He’ll do what it takes.

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He’s going for it

by digby

Yes, it’s what we have all been speculating. Gabriel Sherman at Vanity Fair:

In the span of a few days, Trump launched a global trade war by imposing new steel and aluminum tariffs; stunned the world by making a snap decision to sit down with Kim Jong Un at a nuclear summit this spring; fired his long-suffering secretary of state, Rex Tillerson; and appointed notorious supply-sider Larry Kudlow. “The president is finally realizing he is the president,” a former White House official told me. “He’s just making these decisions on his own.”
[…]
Some of what’s driving Trump is a desire to surround himself with loyalists. But there are also high-stakes policy implications to Trump’s uninhibited management style. Sources said Trump fired Tillerson partly because Tillerson opposed Trump’s oft-stated desire to scuttle the Iran nuclear deal—Trump even mentioned their disagreement when speaking to the press. And three sources told me that the next official likely to go is National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, who, like Tillerson, had advocated for remaining in the deal.

Last Tuesday, Trump met with ultra-hawkish former U.N. ambassador John Bolton in the Oval Office to discuss a potential job offer. Bolton has for years argued that the United States should pre-emptively attack Tehran. In 2015, he wrote a New York Times op-ed headlined, “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran,” and last month, he wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed outlining the legal case for a pre-emptive strike against North Korea.

According to a person who spoke with Bolton after the meeting, Bolton recalled that Trump said he wanted him to join the administration: “We need you in here, John.” Bolton responded that there were only two jobs he’d consider: secretary of state and national security adviser. Trump said, “O.K, I’ll call you really soon.” Sources added that Trump spent much of the time with Bolton fuming that McMaster was speaking privately with Barack Obama’s former national security adviser Susan Rice. “Trump kept saying, ‘Can you believe it? To Susan Rice? Can you believe it?’”

Perhaps most consequential for Robert Mueller’s investigation, sources said Trump has discussed a plan to fire Attorney General Jeff Sessions. According to two Republicans in regular contact with the White House, there have been talks that Trump could replace Sessions with E.P.A. Administrator Scott Pruitt, who would not be recused from overseeing the Russia probe. Also, as an agency head and former state attorney general, Pruitt would presumably have a good shot at passing a Senate confirmation hearing.

If you thought that all that crazy shit he promised on the campaign trail couldn’t possibly happen well, think again..

Look for some really dangerous foreign policy coming down the pike. He’s just as stupid as he always was but now he’s powerful. And he’s on a roll.

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More blood, more death, more fear = more guns

by digby

Expect more of this in the future:

A teacher who is also a reserve police officer trained in firearm use accidentally discharged a gun Tuesday at Seaside High School in Monterey County, Calif., during a class devoted to public safety. A male student was reported to have sustained non-life-threatening injuries.

The weapon, which was not described, was pointed at the ceiling, according to a statement from the school, and debris fell from the ceiling.

Seaside Police Chief Abdul Pridgen told the Monterey County Weekly that a male student was “struck in the neck by ‘debris or fragmentation’ from something overhead.” Pridgen said whatever hit the student was not a bullet.

However, the student’s father, Fermin Gonzales, told KSBW 8 that it was his understanding that fragments from the bullet ricocheted off the ceiling and lodged in the boy’s neck. The father said the teacher told the class before pointing the gun at the ceiling that he was doing so to make sure his gun wasn’t loaded, something that can be determined visually.

“It’s the craziest thing,” Gonzales told the station. “It could have been very bad.”

Gonzales said he learned about the incident when his 17-year-old son came home with blood on his shirt and bullet fragments in his neck.

“He’s shaken up, but he’s going to be okay. I’m just pretty upset that no one told us anything and we had to call the police ourselves to report it,” the father told the TV station.

The teen was treated at a hospital.

The teacher was identified by police as Dennis Alexander, who teaches math as well as a course in the administration of justice. Alexander is a reserve police officer for Sand City and a Seaside city councilman. He could not immediately be reached for comment but he has reportedly apologized for the incident.

The Monterey County Weekly, quoting Sand City Police Chief Brian Ferrante, reported that Alexander had his last gun safety training less than a year ago. “I have concerns about why he was displaying a loaded firearm in a classroom,” Ferrante told KSBW. “We will be looking into that.”

I’m sure it was an accident. And it’s a lucky thing that no students were killed. But keep in mind that gun accidents happen every single day and toddlers and parents and innocent bystanders are killed all the time. This man was a “trained” firearms expert and it happened to him.

If all these teen-agers stick with this beyond this moment in time they can change things. But it’s not going to happen overnight. Right now, the NRA is still winning. The laws they are “willing” to allow the Republicans to back will do nothing to curb gun violence. They are a cover for what they have been advocating since Sandyhook — arming teachers. And we’ll end up with even more kids shot in schools because of it.

But that’s their winning strategy. More blood, more death, more fear = more guns.

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