Trump's America, March 2017: Using His Inside VOICE

nbc says there are 26 GOP hard or strong lean nos. 21+ and the bill fails

https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/844255620358443008

seems tight enough that they'll limp over the line by thursday

but obviously if any of these people are yours, give them a call

Novi is deep Republican suburbs of Detroit

Whomp whomp

http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/03/21/jared-kushner-struck-out-in-his-first-foray-into-middle-east-diplomacy/

Roger Stone meets the Daily Mail.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4335084/Trump-friend-Roger-Stone-doubles-British-spy-claim.html?ito=social-twitter_dailymailus

'My civil rights have been violated. My right to privacy has been violated,' Stone told DailyMail.com, specifically mentioning the Times article. 'Leaking that, if indeed it was because I was under a FISA warrant, leaking that information would be a felony.'
He declared: 'I have committed no felonies, but the intelligence services have committed felonies to slur my name.'
Later in the conversation, in the midst of a back and forth about his relationship with the president, Stone also said, 'It does occur to me during the campaign that the FBI was quite clearly monitoring my conversations with Trump, candidate Trump.'
He observed that his talks with Alex Jones, Trump adviser Steve Bannon and others, would have been taped, too.

lol i missed this yesterday

“I hate the New England Patriots,” Comey said. “No matter who they play, I’d like them to lose. And I’m at the same time rooting against the Patriots and hoping their opponent beat them because there’s only two teams on the field.”
“By the way if I’m honest with myself the reason I don’t like the Patriots is they represent sustained excellence, and as a Giants fan that drives me crazy,” said Comey, whose comment was greeted by chuckles from the committee.

ignoring the valid points of leaks being illegal and going through appropriate legal channels, not really a good look for Stone and company to be all like "the problem isn't the things I might have done the problem is HOW YOU FOUND OUT ABOUT THEM"

(not that it's any certainty that protocols weren't followed anyway)

sad lol @ this clown

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), who said last month on Fox News that he did not intend to immediately subpoena Stone or Page to testify, told reporters Monday that he had never heard of either man.

“You haven’t heard of Carter Page and all these other people?” a reporter asked Nunes Monday on Capitol Hill, to which he flatly replied “no.” In response to a follow up question, Nunes again said he had not heard of Page or Stone, but added that “I’ve heard of Manafort.”

“He meant he’d never heard of them before their names appeared in the New York Times story about them allegedly being investigated in connection with Russia,” a Nunes spokesman told POLITICO on Tuesday.

sharivari please interpret https://twitter.com/BBCDanielS/status/844279337620832257

lol @ "Russian natural causes" response

Nunes has been in Republican politics since 2003 and he's never heard of Roger Stone? Yeah, I'm calling massive bullshit on that one.

Not a huge amount to interpret yet - sounds like he was thrown out of a window. He is a witness in a major money laundering case due to start in the US in May so no shortage of suspects if correct.

Xp

Also apparently due to bring a case tomorrow about collusion between Moscow police and organised crime.

nothing says "political intrigue" like a good ol' fashioned defenestration

Has anyone in the Trump camp tried to distance themselves from Roger Stone? Seems weird they let him run around telling people he is an informal sdvisor.

“I haven’t seen a single Democrat … indicate they were prepared to either for cloture or to vote for him,” McConnell told reporters. “If Judge Gorsuch can’t achieve 60 votes in the Senate, could any judge appointed by a Republican president be approved with 60 or more votes in the Senate?”

hmmm makes ya think

Merrick Garland might

Has anyone in the Trump camp tried to distance themselves from Roger Stone? Seems weird they let him run around telling people he is an informal sdvisor.

What, you mean instead of throwing him out of a fourth-floor window?

Of course, if more widely applied...

"Sorry, Sean. Out you go."
"I can flyyyyyy!"

*shortly afterward*

"No, the president never ordered me thrown out of that window. Also I'm not dead, I'm getting better."

Heh.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C7eCBYMVUAArUOB.jpg

lol Ned

OMG @ that McConnell quote. These fuckers possess zero self-awareness.

Or I don't know if it's even that. The tribalism is so entrenched...of course it's okay when we do it to them, but the very idea that they'd do it to us!

yeah the false "oh my stars and garters!"-level shock is v disingenuous. At least Dems have the "well they started it" defense. (I don't really think Reid would have outright refused to give any of Romney's hypothetical nominees a hearing)

xp - it's neither a lack of self-awareness nor a consequence of entrenched tribalism. it's politics. the application of spin.

Meantime, at the Gorsuch hearing…

Sen. Flake Q: Would you rather fight 100 duck-sized horses or 1 horse-sized duck?

https://twitter.com/BraddJaffy/status/844307193591681024

https://youtu.be/DOqb_UzJSUQ?t=1

well well http://www.politico.com/story/2017/03/obamacare-repeal-mark-meadows-freedom-caucus-236314

Trump is watching House of Cards S1 for ideas

Meanwhile in the 'glad it's not me!' camp

https://twitter.com/MittRomney/status/844180725494661120

he calls his kids products

"products are people too, my friend"

he shoulda beta tested some of his kids first IMO

I'm honestly surprised Boehner hasn't posted another photo of him kicking back with a glass of wine.

Him and 'Bama in the Bahamas.

I'll give the freedom caucus credit, they're at least consistent. They can be the permanent party of No.

Fwiw UK on board with partial electronics travel ban.

i'm cool if they ban kids from playing their stupid movies on planes /calstars

They should make you check kids with the luggage.

well obviously the kids would prefer that since that's where all the tablets are

Per previous three posts, future airline accomodations for kids with tablets:

http://www.toughpigs.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/gmc-crate.jpg

Separately, one Mr. Spicer recognizes he has made a mistake re Manafort:

http://money.cnn.com/2017/03/21/media/sean-spicer-credibility/index.html

"I probably should've focused more on the time he was there than the role he played," Spicer told CNN Tuesday.

"Shoulda lied better" Spicer told CNN Tuesday

That statement makes as much sense as "I should've focused more on Lincoln when he was live than when he was dead."

http://ijr.com/2017/03/814687-trumps-diplomat/?utm_content=buffer2d441&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

So why, then, did he want the gig?

“I didn’t want this job. I didn’t seek this job.” He paused to let that sink in.

A beat or two passed before an aide piped up to ask him why he said yes.

“My wife told me I’m supposed to do this.”

After watching the contortions of my face as I tried to figure out what to say next, he humbly explained that he had never met the president before the election. As president-elect, Trump wanted to have a conversation with Tillerson “about the world” given what he gleaned from the complex global issues he dealt with as CEO of Exxon Mobil.

“When he asked me at the end of that conversation to be secretary of state, I was stunned.”

When Tillerson got home and told his wife, Renda St. Clair, she shook her finger in his face and said, “I told you God’s not through with you.”

and Congress isn't through with him yet!

Maybe she just wanted him out of the house.

wow, just when you thought Flynn: the Mike Flynn Story couldn't get any weirder

...One example came in mid-August when campaign chief Paul Manafort went State of the Union with Jake Tapper told a story about how US troops at the NATO base at Incirlik, Turkey had been repeatedly attacked by terrorists. This was part of the campaign message of Obama weakness, which Trump could repair. The only problem was that nothing like this had happened. (This was relatively soon after the failed coup in Turkey.) So where had Manafort gotten this? It turned out that the only other publications which had reported anything remotely like this were RT and Sputnikness.

...That Manafort interview above was on August 14th, 2016. We now know that only five days earlier top Trump foreign policy advisor Mike Flynn had signed a $500,000 deal to advocate for the Turkish government. He was actually retained by a Dutch firm, Inovo, owned by a Turkish-American business man Ekim Alptekin. But his job was to advocate for the Republic of Turkey, particularly its demand that the US extradite a Muslim cleric in exile in the US who the Erdogan government blamed for the coup.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/insider-the-alt-right-all-russia-nexus

Slipping my Kremlin rapid-rebuttal shapka on for a minute, this is basically Marshall being a terrible journalist - something he more or less cops to in the last section where he admits he can't be bothered to check whether a terrorist attack on Incirlik would be a pro-Erdogan talking point or not.

RT did report on a fire near the base and said there were disputed local claims that it could have been "sabotage" but didn't say it was a terrorist attack. The LA Times and other mainstream papers, on the other hand, published claims by ISIS that they had murdered at least one US citizen working at the base in revenge for bombing raids in Syria and Iraq. It would probably make more sense for Manafort to have been referencing this or the report by a US think tank, covered in Newsweek, that the base was vulnerable.

It is true that Russian sites did report on Yankee-go-home protests outside the base, which would be a Russian talking point, but these were also covered by much wider-reaching tabloids from the UK and not reported as attacks.

Or to put it in a more linear way - if Russia's aim is to get the air base shut down as too risky to host nuclear weapons and Manafort is advancing that aim, the main point of leverage Erdogan has over the US to get them to extradite Gulen - the threat to shut down the air base - disappears.