Sound The TRUMPets! A Thread for Presidential Pondering 2016-2020(?)

[drogulus]

Lets not lose sight of the root cause of these speculations etc beong Trumps lack of financial transparency and honesty and his obfiscatiob.

     I want the Evil Clown destroyed by what he has actually done and said, not made up stuff.

[drogulus]

     Inspector General Report Reveals Charges Against James Comey To Be Mind-Numbingly Stupid

Ironically, the IG's report offers the news that the FBI had already tacitly accepted that Comey's public disclosure was appropriate. The day before his Senate testimony, the FBI handed Comey the memos in question along with three others "for him to review at home in preparation for the hearing." So, the FBI acknowledged directly to Comey before his testimony that the material that Graham described as an "off-the-rails" leak could be discussed publicly in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the entire country.

    1) The IG performed a real exoneration (now we know what one looks like).

    2) The IG deducts style points from Comey for blowing his whistle the wrong way.

    3) The IG opinion on how Comey chose to inform the public is a worthless straddle unless the worth is giving crumbs to Trumpists.

[SimonNZ]

Trump administration leaves menstruating migrant girls 'bleeding through' underwear at detention centres, lawsuit claims

"Migrant girls being held by the Trump administration are being given only very limited access to items as basic as sanitary pads and tampons, according to a lawsuit that claims to put fresh light on the "appalling" conditions being endured by youngsters.

Earlier this year, it was revealed children being held in facilities in Texas operated by immigration authorities, were being detained in circumstances United Nations (UN) human rights chief Michelle Bachelet said appalled her. Children were denied access to showers, adequate food or bedding, allegedly in breach of a 20-year ruling.

Now, in a lawsuit filed by 19 states, further details have been provided by some of those children, who told investigators they were held in rooms too small to sit down in, were repeatedly woken through the night by "roll calls", and were made to fight for food that guards threw on the floor.

One young woman told lawyers from Washington state, that menstruating youngsters were permitted only one tampon, or sanitary pad, a day. After that, at least one girl "had no choice but to continue to wear her soiled underwear" and clothes.

Bob Ferguson, Washington's attorney general, is among those behind the lawsuit filed in California. He claimed the immigration policies of Donald Trump were "reminiscent of shameful chapters in American history — the internment of Japanese Americans, and the forced separation of Native American families".

Of the interviews with youngsters now living in the Pacific Northwest, Mr Ferguson said they revealed "appalling conditions at federal detention facilities."

He added: "In addition to a lack of toothbrushes, soap or access to showers reported earlier in the media, the children reported extremely cramped cells, younger kids put in cages as punishment and guards throwing food on the ground for children to fight over."

The lawsuit includes testimony by Alma Poletti, an investigator in Mr Ferguson's civil rights division, who said one young woman who was having her period was only permitted to take a shower after 10 days.

"She recalls there was another girl at the facility who was also on her period. They were each given one sanitary pad per day. Although the guards knew they had their periods, they were not offered showers or a change of clothes, even when the other girl visibly bled through her pants," said Ms Poletti. "This girl had no choice but to continue to wear her soiled underwear and [trousers]."

The lawsuit sought to challenge a proposal by the president to indefinitely detain migrant families and ignore a 1997 detention standard for children known as the Flores Agreement.

This calls for young migrants to be held in humane conditions and released after no longer than three weeks.

[Karl Henning]

Will the US ever recover?

[SimonNZ]

Trump's personal assistant fired after comments about Ivanka, Tiffany

"Madeleine Westerhout, who left her White House job suddenly on Thursday as President Trump's personal assistant, was fired after bragging to reporters that she had a better relationship with Trump than his own daughters, Ivanka and Tiffany Trump, and that the president did not like being in pictures with Tiffany because he perceived her as overweight."

(my how that fat slob likes to mock other people's weight - but of course when he looks in the mirror he sees Fabio)


Trump shares potentially revealing image of Iranian missile site on Twitter

"In a tweet Friday, President Trump revealed a detailed aerial image of an Iranian missile launch pad, an unusual disclosure that may have confirmed the United States is violating Iran's airspace in order to spy on its missile program.

Some imagery experts, examining the angle and very-high resolution of the image, said it may have been taken by an aircraft, possibly a drone.

"It looks like it was taken from an airborne platform, not a satellite," said Jeffrey Lewis, an arms control expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, an assessment echoed by several other experts.
[...]

The image Trump tweeted Friday is almost certainly highly classified, experts said, and bears markings that resemble those made by intelligence analysts. They note damage to the facility and vehicles near it, as well as "scorching and damage" on one side of the launch pad.
[...]

What Trump shared on Twitter appears to show a camera flash and a person's shadow, leading to speculation that Trump or one of his aides may have snapped a picture of the image using a cell phone.
[...]

Trump frequently excoriates government officials who he says leak classified information to the press. Hours before posting the image of the Iranian launch pad, he sent several tweets ridiculing former FBI director James Comey for sharing memos about his interactions with Trump, some of which were determined to contain classified information."

[Todd]

Coming back to GMG for the straight scoop: How imminent is impeachment?

[Muzio]

------- Sorry, wrong thread.... 

[SimonNZ]

Trump shares potentially revealing image of Iranian missile site on Twitter

"In a tweet Friday, President Trump revealed a detailed aerial image of an Iranian missile launch pad, an unusual disclosure that may have confirmed the United States is violating Iran's airspace in order to spy on its missile program.

Some imagery experts, examining the angle and very-high resolution of the image, said it may have been taken by an aircraft, possibly a drone.
"It looks like it was taken from an airborne platform, not a satellite," said Jeffrey Lewis, an arms control expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, an assessment echoed by several other experts.
[...]

The image Trump tweeted Friday is almost certainly highly classified, experts said, and bears markings that resemble those made by intelligence analysts. They note damage to the facility and vehicles near it, as well as "scorching and damage" on one side of the launch pad.
[...]

What Trump shared on Twitter appears to show a camera flash and a person's shadow, leading to speculation that Trump or one of his aides may have snapped a picture of the image using a cell phone.
[...]

Trump frequently excoriates government officials who he says leak classified information to the press. Hours before posting the image of the Iranian launch pad, he sent several tweets ridiculing former FBI director James Comey for sharing memos about his interactions with Trump, some of which were determined to contain classified information."

[71 dB]

Coming back to GMG for the straight scoop: How imminent is impeachment?

Not imminent at all because Nancy "master legistlator" Pelosi is the speaker of the House. 

[drogulus]

Not imminent at all because Nancy "master legistlator" Pelosi is the speaker of the House. 

     Pelosi isn't directing the pace of the inquiry. The courts are involved.

     Did Democrats already start an impeachment inquiry? It's complicated.

     Ah, no, it isn't really. Pelosi can prevent a vote by the House to authorize an impeachment inquiry. Such an authorization isn't necessary. The inquiry is what the Judiciary Committee is doing.

"Well, I think it's important not to get hung up on semantics," Nadler answered. "The fact is we are doing an investigation. We are investigating the facts. We're investigating the evidence. We are going into court to get witnesses, all with a view toward deciding and recommending to the House whether to impeach the president. We have the power to vote articles of impeachment. And we are investigating now to get the evidence to decide whether to do so."


     So sayeth Nadler, and so it's being done. IOW there's no need to get tangled up in the metaphysics of whether articles of impeachment the committee forwards to the House without the formality of a prior authorization have a different status from ones forwarded subsequent to an authorization.

     

[SimonNZ]

seen elsewhere:

"All joking aside, Trump, whether it was legal for him to do so or not, just destoyed the usefulness of a $2B keyhole KH-11 or KH-12 spy satellite. These things are launched in secret, their orbits are not publicized, and, while observers can make guesses as to which things up there are spy satellites, they're left uncertain. But, by publishing a photo like that, the Iranians can reconstruct the day, time of day, and viewing angle, and from this make some pretty good deductions as to which "communications satellite" zipping overhead is actually a spy satellite.

I don't know if the Iranians have the capability, but the Russians and the Chinese certainly have the ability to follow a satellite with a low power laser, using real time adaptive optics to keep the beam on it despite atmospheric turbulence, dazzling it and making it effectively blind. China plans to have a high power version, capable of permanently damaging spy satellites, operational by 2020.

There's reasons secret things are kept secret."

[Herman]

Will the US ever recover?

A second term would take a very long time to recover from.

[SimonNZ]

Trump revels in 'chopper talk' as White House press lectern gathers dust

[...]

"Andrew Feinberg, a White House reporter for Breakfast Media, said: "They're structured in such a way that they're almost irrelevant. They keep the engine running, which apparently they don't have to do, and it's set up in a way the president can just wander up and down the role line, picking the reporters he recognizes off TV and the questions and topics he likes while ignoring any question that might call for a little effort to put out a coherent answer."

He went on: "Because it's hard for the audio to pick up the question, people at home often don't hear it, only him rambling. He particularly likes the format because he gets whatever he wants and we frequently don't because of what happens trying to ask questions in front of a running helicopter engine."

Feinberg added: "It's a way for the president and administration to cloak themselves in the mantle of transparency while providing little useful information."

Trump's defenders argue the encounters show that he is more accessible than any of his predecessors. Critics, however, argue his answers are so full of lies and contradictions that they are next to useless. A stark example came last week when Trump delivered a bizarre 35-minute word salad about gun control, Russia, taxes, a recession, Greenland, disloyalty to Israel and the trade war with China ("I am the chosen one").

It is all yet another way in which Trump has rewritten rules of the presidency.

Chris Whipple, author of The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency, said: "I don't think it serves anybody to have the president go out to deliver 35-minute rants on 20 different subjects. It looks as though they've completely abandoned any pretence of trying to keep the president focused or on message. That's chief of staff malpractice. Is there anybody on the staff who can tell the president when he's unhinged?"

Whipple noted that when Ronald Reagan was president, helicopter noise was a useful way of keeping him on message: he would make remarks but not be able to hear questions that could lead him into gaffes.

"The chief of staff got the helicopter to rev up the engine so Reagan couldn't hear questions," he said. "Otherwise there was the danger he would answer questions they didn't want answered that day. If Mick Mulvaney [now acting chief of staff] had any sense, he would signal to the air force pilot to rev up the engine to drain Trump out."

Mike McCurry, who was press secretary to former president Bill Clinton in the 1990s, said: "The job doesn't exist any more in the conventional way it did in the past because they don't have a briefing. The title doesn't really mean anything any more."

Trump's chopper talk is no substitute, McCurry added. "When you just go out and make shit up, that doesn't really count."

[JBS]

Let's be honest. It's the job of every WH press secretary to make s--- up whenever necessary.  Under the SSs [Sean Spicer and Sarah Sanders], the innovation was to make making s--- up the basic, daily, routine of the job.
This new development is simply Trump taking that job directly into his own hands.

[Karl Henning]

A second term would take a very long time to recover from.

Indeed

[drogulus]

     Trump expresses surprise, again, that Category 5 exists

     In the ongoing saga of mental deterioration that is Trump, this stands out. How many times can he be surprised by the existence of Category 5 hurricanes? How many more times can he never have heard of them and know about them?

"I'm not sure I've ever even heard of a Category 5. I knew it existed. And I've seen some Category 4s. You don't even see them that much. But a Category 5 is something that, uh, I don't know that I've never even heard the term, other than I know it's there. That's the ultimate. And that's what we have, unfortunately."

     Indeed we do have unfortunately that. Also do most people not know about it?

[71 dB]

Category 5 dementia... 

[SimonNZ]

Trump's Wacky, Angry, and Extreme August

"esident Trump ended August as he began it, with a blast of angry tweets, ad-hominem insults, and bizarre fulminations that have become so standard that they no longer receive the attention they deserve—emanating, as they do, from the world's most powerful leader. In between retweeting hurricane-preparation warnings, Trump spent the final day of the month attacking the "Disgusting and foul mouthed Omarosa" Manigault, his former adviser, who wrote a tell-all book about her short time in the Administration; the "Crooked Cop" James Comey, the former F.B.I. director, whom he fired; and the "even dumber" former C.I.A. director John Brennan. He bragged about low Labor Day gas prices, although they were actually lower on the Labor Day before he became President. He congratulated his friend Sean Hannity for the ratings on his Fox News "shoe." A day earlier, he had tweeted what appeared to be a classified image from his intelligence briefing of "a catastrophic accident" at an Iranian missile-launch site, a Presidential leak of secret information on social media that would have been, needless to say, unthinkable in another Presidency.

All of this took place when Trump was supposed to be in Poland, for a sombre commemoration of the beginning of the Second World War. He cancelled the trip, however, citing the need to monitor the progress of Hurricane Dorian, which was threatening Florida. Instead, he watched Fox News; tweeted nearly two dozen times before noon on Saturday, August 31st; and then motorcaded to a Trump-branded golf course for his two hundred and twenty-sixth day on the links at one of his own properties since becoming President. (That statistic came from Kyle Griffin, an MSNBC producer who keeps track of this particular niche Trump metric.) The Poland trip wasn't even the first foreign visit that Trump cancelled last month. He was supposed to have gone to Denmark earlier in August, but he refused, in a fit of pique, after the Danish government mocked his efforts to buy Greenland—which was, of course, another Oval Office antic that, had it occurred a few years ago, no one would have believed.

Trump not only makes us believe it now but, as we approach the three-year mark of his upset victory, in 2016, his project has succeeded in such a confounding way that it seems as though Americans will now believe anything—and nothing at all. Today there are few things too extreme not to have plausibly come out of the mouth, or the Twitter feed, of the forty-fifth President. In August, Trump called himself the "Chosen One" for his confrontation with China, grinned and flashed a thumbs-up during a photo op with the family of mass-shooting victims, accused Jews who voted for Democrats of "great disloyalty," and called the chairman of the Federal Reserve an "enemy" of the United States. He cheered the robbery of a Democratic congressman's home and labelled various critics "nasty and wrong," "pathetic," "highly unstable," "wacko," "psycho," and "lunatic," among other insults. The daily stream of invective was dizzying to keep track of, and so voluminous as to almost insure that no one could, in fact, do so. [...]"


worth reading the whole thing, but I'll just highlight these:

[...]"The Trump Twitter archive records two hundred and eighty-seven Trump tweets and retweets in August, 2017, compared to six hundred and eighty in August, 2019—and the volume seems to have been turned up along with the frequency. Today's Trump is not just more prone to misspeaking and stumbling, he is also more overtly confrontational more of the time, more immersed in a daily cycle of Presidential punditry, and more casually incendiary with his words and sentiments."

[...]"Two years ago, Trump used his feed to criticize, belittle, or humiliate specific targets fourteen times in the month of August. (Interestingly, many were Republican senators who were still offering him resistance, including "publicity-seeking Lindsey Graham," who is now one of his most faithful public promoters, and the Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, whom Trump disparaged as a "loser.") In August of this year, the number shot up: the President made or shared fifty-two direct insults on his Twitter feed, by my count. Many were aimed at individual members of the media—from "Crazy Lawrence O'Donnell," of MSNBC, to "Lunatic" Chris Cuomo, of CNN, to "Psycho" Mika Brzezinski, of MSNBC, and "pathetic" Juan Williams, of Fox. Other targets who were singled out included "the Three Stooges running against me in the G.O.P. primary"; Denmark; nato; the euro; "car company executives"; "Sleepy Joe Biden" (August 10th: "Does anybody really believe he is mentally fit to be President?"); Beto O'Rourke; liberal Hollywood, "the true racists"; the "anti-Semite" Representative Rashida Tlaib; the "nut job" Anthony Scaramucci, the former Trump White House communications director who finally broke with his former boss last month; and, in a retweet to start off the month, "the nipple-height mayor of Londonistan."

[...]"#crookedjournalism," as he called it on August 18th, was the subject of twenty-six complaining tweets in August, 2017—and eighty this August. This escalation seems to be by design, rather than the result of indiscipline or passing fits of anger, at least in the sense that, as Trump himself said in a tweet last month, he hopes his criticism of the media will be one of the lasting accomplishments of his tenure. "

[...]"We're barely forty-eight hours into September, and the President has already claimed that he's never heard of a Category 5 hurricane; got into a public spat with the star of the sitcom "Will & Grace"; congratulated Poland on the anniversary of the Nazi invasion, in 1939; and played more golf at a Trump resort. The election, if you are counting, is four hundred and twenty-six days away."

[SimonNZ]

The Borowitz Report:

Americans Envious That Tiffany Trump Never Hears from Dad

"Millions of Americans envy Tiffany Trump for never hearing from her father, a new poll reveals.

According to the poll, conducted by the University of Minnesota's Opinion Research Institute, Tiffany Trump's unique placement beyond the reach of her father's voice has made her the most envied woman in America.

Although Donald Trump took the extraordinary step of emitting the word "Tiffany" in remarks to reporters last week, the rarity of that utterance only served to remind Americans of just how fortunate Tiffany was to be off her father's radar.

"In all our years of polling, it's highly unusual to find one person so universally envied," Davis Logsdon, who supervised the poll, said. "People in virtually every demographic group 'strongly agreed' with the statement, 'God, I wish I were Tiffany Trump.' "

The poll finds Tiffany Trump sitting atop a list of the most envied women in America, well ahead of Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, and MacKenzie Bezos, who has a net worth of thirty-five billion dollars."

[Karl Henning]

The dishonest fakers at the Amazon Washington Post and the failing New York Times are again attacking your favorite president, this time for playing golf while a Category 5 hurricane took aim at the United States. Bad people! Everybody knows the best way to prepare for a hurricane is by playing golf.Beating a Category 5 is nothing if you can birdie a par five (the 590-yard 12th hole on Trump National Golf Club's Championship Course is "monstrous"). Though recent hurricanes have been some of "the wettest we've ever seen, from the standpoint of water," they are less intimidating after you've survived the eighth hole of the Riverview Course: not one but two merciless water hazards blocking your approach.