Category: Politics

Trump is usually an ass, but he really nailed it with “Pocahontas”

Why did they censor her date of birth? That is not a secret, is it?

The New York Times interview

“I lost massive amounts of money doing this job. This is not the money. This is one of the great losers of all time. You know, fortunately, I don’t need money. This is one of the great losers of all time.”

“Trump’s Lawyer Said There Were ‘No Plans’ For Trump Tower Moscow. Here They Are.”

“Hundreds of pages of business documents, emails, text messages, and architectural plans tell a very different story: Trump Tower Moscow was a richly imagined vision of upscale splendor on the banks of the Moscow River.”

Astounding New Yorker interview with Rudy Giuliani

“Because I have been through all the tapes, I have been through all the texts, I have been through all the e-mails.

Wait, what tapes have you gone through?

I shouldn’t have said tapes.”

The President offers a “compromise” to break the stalemate

Trump said he wants to build in 2019 not a full-length wall, but merely 230 miles of wall, costing $5.7 billion dollars in the 2019 budget. That’s about right, about $25 million per mile. A group of MIT engineers estimated a cost of 27 to 40 million per mile, but that was based on his previous prototypes, which were before the new steel slat design.

So Trump is willing to trade DACA and TPS for only 230 miles of wall material which is probably sorely needed (I would have to hear from the DHS experts to change that “probably” to “definitely” or “definitely not.”) Remember the photographer who shot the entire length of the wall found areas where there was nothing at all to prevent people from simply walking in. Trump may well be right in saying we really do need another 230 miles of barriers.

Note that Trump’s proposal is just that – a proposal. An offer. A negotiation. If the Democrats really want to negotiate in good faith, in my opinion, they should submit a counter-proposal to show the American public exactly where the two sides disagree. If I were in their shoes, the first thing I would demand would be a permanent DACA solution, not a delaying action that will create this same crisis again in three years. That is management by procrastination.

The Dems could really declare a win if they agree to Trump’s deal (with DACA made permanent) by taking control of the narrative and saying – “We did not fund a border wall across the southern border. We only funded 230 miles of barriers in areas that are basically unprotected today.” That would be a major victory over Trump, whose base was expecting a shiny new wall from sea to shining sea, all paid for by Mexico.

And, of course, it would also get the government open again, and government families would again be able to pay their bills.

Just call me the Amazing Kreskin. Here is my prediction.

Trump will offer to make some concessions on other matters in order to get his border wall.

They will be meaningful and realistic concessions of a statesmanlike nature, filled with well-researched key details about where a wall is really necessary, and a willingness to take only the amount needed to build that portion of the wall, in exchange for a deal on the Dreamers. He will also offer a sincere apology for having let the stalemate go on long enough to hurt so many American families and the economy in general. He will establish himself as a compassionate man and great leader who considers the welfare of his fellow Americans more important than his own ego, thus shaming the Democrats quietly and subtly, without his usual insults and ad hominem or ad mulierem arguments.

Just kidding.

This will not be a sincere attempt to end the impasse, but will be yet another political ploy to shift blame for the shut-down. He will offer concessions that the Democrats have already rejected. When they reject them again, he will say “See, the shut-down is the Democrats’ fault. I tried.”

Now he might not do that, but that is exactly what Richard Nixon would do, and Trump frequently uses the Nixon playbook. Nixon never stopped playing politics. There was, however, a major difference between Nixon and Trump: given a choice between ruining the country or ruining himself, Nixon finally chose to step aside in disgrace to let the country heal. It happened after many attempts to lie and deflect and defend his way out of it, but ultimately he spared the country when he finally realized that he really was the dead mouse that had to be swept from America’s kitchen floor, as commentator Nicholas von Hoffman had suggested.

I don’t see Trump ever thinking that a mere country is more important than Donald Trump.

No country. Not even Russia.

That’s where America is now. We have a President with less character than Richard Milhous Nixon. How many of you guys who remember Nixon ever thought that to be even a remote possibility?

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Secondary prediction: when the Dems inevitably reject his insincere offer, Trump will first blame the Dems for the stalemate, let that sink in for a day or two, then have no choice but to play the national emergency card “for the good of the country and the safety of all good Americans.”

“Good Americans,” of course, translates as all white Americans, unless they are gay, or Jewish, or young, or have a vagina, or dislike Hannity.

He will make an exception in the vagina case if they are really hot. We do need to ensure the safety of our precious and endangered national reserve of supermodels.

I am not as confident that Trump will do this portion of the prediction, because it would require him to think two moves ahead (I’ll do this, they will respond like that, so then I’ll do this). I am not confident that he can plan that far in advance. On the other hand, he may end up deciding to do that in anger, even if it is not in his current thinking.

The major drop occurred among suburban men, where Trump’s net approval rating slipped from +12 to -6.

The poll offers no explanation for the change.

“Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer and fixer, confirmed on Thursday that he paid a small tech firm to rig online polls,”… “at the direction of and for the sole benefit of” Trump.

This sounds worse than it is. It’s SOP. ALL online polls are invalid, and since the sample is self-selecting, they are all rigged in a sense. Every one I’ve ever seen is “stuffed.”

But you have to love the details of the payoff. The Journal reported: “Cohen gave Gauger a blue Walmart bag containing about $13,000 in cash. Gauger also said that Cohen randomly included a boxing glove Cohen claimed at the time had been worn by a Brazilian mixed-martial arts fighter.”

(Cohen denies those details, thereby refuting the one and only cool thing anyone has ever said about him.)

The other great detail: Trump/Cohen were supposed to pay the guy $50,000 in total. According to the story, Trump did give Cohen the fifty grand, but Cohen only turned over $13K and pocketed the rest.

In a related detail: Cohen also hired that same firm to promote a “Cohen is sexy” campaign on Twitter. Wall Street Journal reports Cohen paid John Gauger to set up WomenForCohen account to promote him as a ‘pit bull’ and ‘sex symbol’

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Boy, if ever a client and a lawyer were meant for each other!

You go, Rudy. Soon you’ll actually fall back on the spurious Onion quote of you saying “Crime is not illegal.”

Perhaps Giuliani is right. It’s hard to keep track of his positions. He has argued that collusion is not a crime, so he obviously thought there might be some. Well, I was assuming he thinks rationally. I figured, “If he thought there was no collusion, he would not bring up the subject of whether it was criminal.” That might be logical on my part if we were talking about a sensible person, but this is Rudy.

The President, however has said many times that the campaign did not collude with Russia, the most recent being his infamous “smocking gun” tweet in December.

Yeah, I can’t imagine

I can understand that some racists would believe that. It’s difficult to believe that they would articulate it outside a trusted group of fellow racists. It’s totally incredible that a U.S. congressman would be the one doing the public articulation. I just can’t imagine anyone that clueless.

For the record:

A supremacist is one who thinks one group is superior to another. Therefore a white supremacist is one who thinks the white race is superior to others.

A racist is one who believes that one race is superior to another.

In other words a white person who is a “racist” is precisely the same as a “white supremacist,” by definition.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that might be why white supremacism is recognized as offensive.

Same old. Same old. Here’s the story.

You’ll remember it was not long ago that the Democrats, then having no control of either house of Congress, offered to let Trump have the wall in exchange for permanent protections for the dreamers. Everyone seemed to think that was a fair deal, even Trump. A bipartisan deal was struck in Congress, but then Trump backed out for reasons and motivations which seemed murky. (Phone call to Hannity?)

So Trump could have had his wall funding a year ago. He completely won that exchange with the then-powerless Democrats in the sense that all he had to do was to “trade” it for something he professed to agree with anyway.

And then he didn’t.

And now 800,000 working people are without paychecks, and about half of them are still expected to work! Not to mention all the other consequences of the shutdown.

Trump claimed that former presidents have told him they should have built the border wall when they were in office. Needless to say, that was a total fabrication. You know that, I know it, Trump knows it, Mulvaney knows it, and everyone in the press knows it. So how does Mulvaney weasel out of it?

Bring back Scaramucci. The Mooch would have said, “Hey, he made that shit up to get you all worked up. Mission accomplished! Psych!” And then he would have done that thing where he pretends to extend his hand to shake yours, but instead just keeps raising the hand to smooth his hair.