Category: Politics

“Hard Working” POTUS #45 …

“I’m going to be working for you. I’m not going to have time to go play golf” Donald J. Trump, August 2016

On the campaign trail Trump worked very hard at conning folks into believe that he was going to be hard at work working for them when he became POTUS. Getting thing done to Make America Great “Again”.

Records show that since becoming POTUS Trump has spent twenty one of the sixty six days he has been our Commander in Chief at one of his properties. Thirteen of these at his own golf courses.

The Washington Post reported a breakdown showing Trump has spent time at his properties as follows:

• Trump International Hotel in Washington.
• Trump National Golf Club in Potomac Falls, Va.
• Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla.
• Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Fla.

Apparently Trump is working so hard for the American people it requires that he be away from his office in Washington DC 31.8% of the time. There are many serious issue facing America and it is possible the stress, combined with his hard work floating conspiracy theories and pushing a failed repeal and replace of the ACA has him near burn out.

Seriously, remember how republicans went bonkers over President Obama’s time on the golf course. Which by the way was MUCH less time than the current occupant of the White House has spent golfing and watching TV at the 19th hole.

Apparently neither Trump or the Goopers see the irony.

Republicans Control Washington, Are Fractured As A Party… Can They Effectively Lead?

As the failed attempt to repeal and replace the ACA made clear to the nation the party controlling Washington DC is nearly as internally divided has as America itself. Something Trump can take at least partial credit for.

Time is short tonight as prior commitments are consuming our time. So, following is an excerpt from The Washington Post that makes the point well.

President Trump and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan made it a binary choice: You’re either for their health-care legislation or you’re for “Obamacare.”

From Reps. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) to Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-N.J.), spanning the party’s ideological spectrum, the answer came back Friday: No, it’s much more complex. It was filled with several different options and possible routes ahead, and dozens of Republicans agreed with their sentiment.

That left Republicans well short of the votes they needed to fulfill a seven-year promise to destroy the 2010 Affordable Care Act once they were fully in charge, delivering a stinging defeat to both Ryan and Trump.

It also suggested a new dynamic in which both the right and left flanks of the Republican conference are emboldened to challenge leadership. And that could make each future negotiation more difficult as the issue matrix gets more complicated and the pockets of internal GOP resistance continue to grow, not shrink, in the new era of Trump’s Republican-controlled Washington.

Some parts of these botched negotiations looked a lot like the recent past. Franks and his House Freedom Caucus cronies played the role of obstructionists who will buck party leaders no matter if it’s John A. Boehner, Ryan’s predecessor, or now Trump. These ideologues gobbled up tons of attention, resulting in much care from Trump, Vice President Pence and top West Wing advisers.

By lunchtime Friday, Franks still would not commit to publicly supporting the bill — even though he admitted it was far better than current law. “Of course it is, yeah, it’s a lot better than Obamacare, of course it is. There’s not even any comparison,” Franks said a few hours before the legislation went down in flames.

Franks remained upset that conservative proposals were left out of the bill because they would have violated Senate budget rules, meaning that the proposal to replace the ACA was nowhere near to his liking.

“That still is like putting dirt in ice cream,” he said.

Other parts of the negotiation, however, were new and quite different from the previous six years of Republican control of the House. Nothing capped this off more than the stunning announcement Friday morning from Frelinghuysen, just three months into his hold on the coveted Appropriations Committee gavel, that bucked leadership.

“Unfortunately, the legislation before the House today is currently unacceptable as it would place significant new costs and barriers to care on my constituents,” he said in a statement.

Skip

Democrats, who have been relied on in the past to backfill those lost conservative votes, have signaled they will not do so this time if the legislation includes funding for controversial measures such as Trump’s request for funding to build a border wall.

That messy task falls to Frelinghuysen’s committee — and it will become much more difficult for the new chairman to ask for loyalty votes on his legislation just a few weeks after he walked away from Ryan on the AHCA.

CONTINUE READING

UPDATE:

Below is a definite must read. With video,

Trump’s path forward only gets tougher after health-care fiasco

On Our Liar In Chief…

You may have heard, Donald Trump had an interview with Time very recently. An interview that earned him four Pinocchios from The Washington Post.

Most of us know full well that Trump has a serious problem with the truth. In fact no one that has been paying any real attention fails to see this.

Trump lies with such regularity that one cannot help but arrive at the consclusion he is a pathological liar. Just as a frame of reference… Pathological lying (also called pseudologia fantastica and mythomania) is a behavior of habitual or compulsive lying. It was first described in the medical literature in 1891 by Anton Delbrueck. … The individual may be aware they are lying, or may believe they are telling the truth.

Trump certainly appears to fit the above description. At least to the non medical layman. Whether Trump understands he is lying or actually believes his lies are the truth is really immaterial. Presidents of the United States of America must earn and maintain the respect of the people of our nation. As well as  that of the entire free world. A pathological liar cannot do that.

Trump has the support of less than 40% of the American people, and, it continues to head south. Little by little. The only real question is, how long before he hits the bottom? The logical next question is,  how will he be able to continue to govern?

Our hope was for Trump to be a successful president. A hope he would put on the presidential cap, begin to tell the truth, and become a unifier rather than the divider he has chooses to be. It now seem almost conclusive that will never happen. We are likely stuck with a pig in a poke for his 4 year term.

Read the list of falsehoods Trump spewed during his Time interview HERE. It is an extensive one..

Peter King Says Trump Wiretap A 99.5% Certainty…

Rep. Peter King (R-NY), another Trump surrogate, told Bill O’Reilly on FOX’s O’Reilly Factor that it is 99.5% certain, and likely 100% certain, that Trump was surveilled. King did say Trump overstated it when he accused President Obama of ordering wiretapping his phones.

King was obviously referencing the information Representative Devin Nunes went public with yesterday. Information that mysteriously surfaced and was provided by an unnamed source.

It seems clear Trump’s congressional supporters are using new information as a means to legitimize rump’s prior allegations.

Breitbart “News”, America’s premier conspiracy theory “news” outlet ran an article this morning.

Wednesday on Fox News Channel’s “The O’Reilly Factor,” Rep. Peter King (R-NY), a member of the House Intelligence Committee, admitted after his committee’s review of President Donald Trump’s claim the Obama administration had wiretapped his transition team, he had a “legitimate case to make,” but said he may have overstepped with his Twitter claim.

“[T]he president had a very legitimate case to make,” King said. “He overstepped it by saying President Obama ordered wiretapping. That we don’t know, but what we do know is to me this is shameful.”

Host Bill O’Reilly pressed King on the seriousness of Trump being “surveilled,” to which King said it was at least 99.5 percent correct he was surveilled.

“I would say, from all I know, you’re at least 99-and-a-half percent accurate, and probably 100 percent,” he replied.

This amounts to trying to put lipstick on a pig.

Trump Exonerated?…

Trump’s allegations that his phones were wiretapped on orders by Obama have been widely considered  bogus by knowledgeable intelligence officials as well as congressional Republicans. This afternoon Representative Devin Nunes, the chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, made public new information from an unnamed source that, on numerous occasions the Intelligence Community incidentally collected information about U.S. citizens involved in the Trump transition.

Nunes decision to immediately announce this new information publicly and then visit the White House, without first sharing this new revelation with Democrats, spreads the dark shadow of Republican politics over the issue.

With every knowledgeable source essentially saying Trump’s allegations are lies for a mysterious unnamed source to suddenly surface with new information which deals with legal collection of information is suspicious in the very least. Especially given the information was channeled to a Nunes, a Trump ally.

The Atlantic – Coming into Wednesday, the Trump administration faced a crisis: Every knowledgeable source, from congressional Republicans to intelligence officials, has said that President Trump’s claim that his predecessor “wiretapped” him was bogus. In the midst of this crisis, a mysterious and unnamed “source” apparently delivered new information to Nunes, a Trump ally, which deals with legal collection of information. Nunes, in turn, quickly went public with the information, despite offering no proof of wrongdoing, in an apparent effort to shift the story in a direction favorable to the administration.

For example, Nunes said that all of the information that was collected legally, as part of “incidental collection” that occurs when U.S. citizens are captured speaking with lawful non-U.S. targets of surveillance under FISA orders. Nunes also reiterated that there had been no “wiretap” on Trump Tower, as the president has alleged and continued to assert, despite disavowals by top Republicans in Congress and the intelligence community.Yet Nunes’s announcement offered Trump a lifeline, presenting him—intentionally or not—with a way to claim he really had been surveilled. Trump quickly seized it, saying he felt “somewhat” vindicated during a brief pool spray at the White House.Nunes charged that while the collection was entirely legal, the fact that Trump team staffers’ names were unmasked and information was shared is “inappropriate.”

“It looks like it was legal, incidental collection that then made its way into intelligence report,” Nunes said. “Nothing criminal at all involved.”

The problem is that there’s no way to assess the truth of Nunes’s claims. He says he has full faith in his source, suggesting it’s someone within the intelligence community, but it’s not clear that anyone besides Nunes has seen the “reports” to which he referred: Adam Schiff, the Democratic ranking member on the committee, has not, and while Nunes briefed both Trump and Speaker Paul Ryan, there’s no indication he showed them the report.

This is troubling because, as my colleague Conor Friedersdorf reported Wednesday morning, Nunes’s statements so far in the investigation make it difficult to give him the benefit of the doubt on truthfulness. The Washington Post also previously reported that the White House had asked Nunes to help tamp down stories about Trump team ties to Russia.

Moreover, Nunes repeatedly said he did not have all the information he needed, raising the question of why he felt it was worthwhile to go public immediately. As Republicans including Nunes complain about unauthorized leaks of classified information to the press, he has come forward to publicize anonymously obtained intelligence community materials.

His choice to take it to the White House is even more perplexing, especially without having discussed the matter with Schiff. Trump accused Obama of having surveilled him despite offering no evidence for the claim. No evidence has appeared since. Pressed to explain why it can’t simply provide the proof, the White House—rather than admit, as appears indisputable, that it has no evidence—has claimed that because of “separation of powers,” Congress should investigate without executive-branch interference. By taking his information to Trump on Wednesday, Nunes has driven a bulldozer through that wall of separation.

In leaving Schiff out of the process, meanwhile, he has blithely poisoned his cooperation with the Democratic member on the committee. Monday’s committee hearings with FBI Director James Comey and NSA Director Mike Rogers showed that there were already effectively two separate House intelligence committees, a Democratic one worried about Russian meddling in the election and a Republican one worried about leaks about Michael Flynn. Nunes’s sidestepping of Schiff, though, could doom any remaining prospects for cooperation on the committee.

Schiff angrily responded during a press conference late Wednesday afternoon.

“The chairman will need to decide whether he is the chairman of an independent investigation into conduct which includes allegations of potential coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russians, or he is going to act as a surrogate of the White House, because he cannot do both,” Schiff said. “Unfortunately I think the actions of today throw great doubt in the ability of the both the chairman and the committee to conduct the investigation the way it ought to be conducted.”

The first hundred days of the Trump administration has not yet passed. Yet his administration is mired in questions about its legitimacy and possible scandal. Largely due to its problems with truth and ethical behavior. It’s only going to et more bizarre and unnerving.

Simply unbelievable is the only way Trump’s ineptitude and that of his administration can be described. As well as that of many republicans in congress.

Story continues HERE.