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

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.

Boom: https://www.apnews.com/122ae0b5848345faa88108a03de40c5a/Manafort's-plan-to-'greatly-benefit-the-Putin-Government?utm_campaign=SocialFlow&utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=AP_Politics

They found the memo.

This looks a bit more substantial than the other allegations but there are lots of unanswered questions about where the material comes from, how authentic it is and whether the relationship continued beyond Deripaska accusing Manafort of ripping him off for $19m in 2014.

In strategy memos, Manafort proposed that Deripaska and Putin would benefit from lobbying Western governments, especially the U.S., to allow oligarchs to keep possession of formerly state-owned assets in Ukraine. He proposed building "long term relationships" with Western journalists and a variety of measures to improve recruitment, communications and financial planning by pro-Russian parties in the region.

Some questions about this too - was repossessing state-owned assets ever mooted? What would the US have had to do with it? They've generally been more keen on keeping state assets in the privates sector than allowing them back into public control.

If they can verify the documents and offer a bit more substance, it could be interesting though.

Trump no doubt asking Sessions if he can, as president, legally have Manafort thrown out a window.

Ha, he literally moved into Trump Tower the year after signing that $10 mil contract to help the Russians.

What would the US have had to do with it?

Asking the wrong question. What could a con man(afort) convince a mark that the US could have to do with it, for the right price?

So yeah, all those comments about 'when will people realize supporting Trump means going against their interests,' etc.

Will this do?

http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/21/health/opioid-trump-supporter-medicaid-health-care-reform/index.html

good mourning!

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/03/obamacare-repeal-senate-mcconnell-236326

“Maybe the best outcome is for this to fail in the House so we can move on to tax reform. Which is what we should have done anyway,” said one Republican senator, granted anonymity to make a frank assessment of the party’s political predicament.

xps to Tombot,

It's definitely plausible that the US was seen at the time (not long after the Orange Revolution) as potential power-brokers when it all went sideways. They were never going to come in and demand Ukraine nationalised the coal industry but there was a lot of 'reform' money sloshing about and competition for influence - albeit not as much as there is now. Deripaska hired Manafort for something and the biggest asset he brought with him was his extensive network of connections in the US government.

My completely baseless speculation on Manafort is that someone (possibly the Ukrainian government) is orchestrating a smear campaign against him - largely for domestic reasons, that at least some of the evidence is probably fake or selectively edited but that there's basically enough truth in it to make it impossible to convincingly rebut. He's a crook who received secret payments to influence US policy on behalf of criminal oligarchs and should never have been in a position to go back to managing political campaigns. I assume the same could be said of a lot of people though. His partner, Rick Davis, ran McCain's campaign in 2008 and doesn't sound much cleaner.

“Maybe the best outcome is for this to fail in the House so we can move on to tax reform. Which is what we should have done anyway,” said one Republican senator, granted anonymity to make a frank assessment of the party’s political predicament.

like Trump is going to have the power to pull off tax reform if he emerges weakened from this farrago.

how will he possibly muster enough GOP votes for tax cuts for the rich?

seriously, seems much more straightforward when you remove the part about taking away everyone's health insurance from the equation.

meanwhile my alma mater's law school dean gets ready for his hearing admid controversies of his own.

One of my friends just now on FB, commenting on the defenestration story: It's all just coincidence. Notice how many of these things involve real estate to launder money. Hmmmm who do I know who is in real estate and looooooooooves Russia but totally doesn't know any of these people and why do you want to see his tax returns?

Really? Rick Davis? McCain lost, so DGAF.

Is it really necessary to run a "smear campaign" against Manafort? A "smear campaign" is what the FBI and the NYT and Cilizza do to the Clintons. Calling Manafort a crook seems more like "smearing" rain by spreading around stories about how wet it is.

Yeah, it doesn't help to start any sort of agnostic defense with something like "sure, he's a corrupt crook, but there are a lot of corrupt crooks." Don't have to prove motive in a criminal case, just that someone broke the law. And someone like Manafort at the nexus of all this Russia stuff just keeps tightening the noose.

Tax cuts will be tainted by Trump's proposed draconian budget. It's a lot harder to push tax cuts when they literally have a list of everything and everyone that would likely be affected. But bring it on, I say. Dems can run on it. "Trump said he would help you, and that he would drain the swamp. Instead, after his health care proposal - which would have hurt millions of people - failed, he and his Goldman Sachs cronies immediately moved on to rewarding rich people with tax cuts while cutting your services."

Basically, seems impossible to take a position as a man of the people populist, a GOP war hawk, culture war conservative and an anti-tax libertarian all at the same time.

Gov. Matt Bevin of Kentucky was unrestrained in his praise for President Trump: Opening for him at a rally on Monday, Mr. Bevin, a conservative Republican, echoed Mr. Trump’s “America First” slogan and only gently noted the nagging divisions in their party.

“We now have a president and a Congress that are united in party, and yet we still have disagreements among us,” Mr. Bevin said, insisting, “This is healthy and good.”

In private, Mr. Bevin has been blunter about the party’s disagreements. Just days before appearing with Mr. Trump in Louisville, he joined a conference call with the president’s budget director, Mick Mulvaney, to protest a White House proposal to defund the Appalachian Regional Commission, an economic development agency that spans 13 states and steers millions of dollars in federal money to Kentucky.

Mr. Bevin was not alone in his dismay.

As Mr. Trump and his advisers press for bone-deep cuts to the federal budget, Republican governors have rapidly emerged as an influential bloc of opposition. They have complained to the White House about reductions they see as harmful or arbitrary, and they plan to pressure members of Congress from their states to oppose them.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/22/us/eyeing-trumps-budget-plan-republican-governors-say-no-thanks.html

Is it really necessary to run a "smear campaign" against Manafort? A "smear campaign" is what the FBI and the NYT and Cilizza do to the Clintons. Calling Manafort a crook seems more like "smearing" rain by spreading around stories about how wet it is.

Kind of, but it's not just about Manafort any more. It's about who else gets swept along with him and what the consequences of that would be. The Manafort texts suggest that the anti-corruption MP who accused him yesterday of hiding a $750k payment was seeking payoffs himself - which would be hugely detrimental to the current campaign against domestic graft if true. They also suggest that Yanukovich and Manafort premeditated the killing of protesters in Maidan Nezalezhnosti - which is another hugely contentious domestic point. Allegations that Manafort was involved in Ukrainian politics after 2014 could sway future elections. Hints that two main oligarchs in Donbass - Dmytro Firtash and Rinat Akhmetov are part of a Russian-government-controlled network with Deripaska play into the domestic power struggle between them and Poroshenko / Kolomoisky / Pinchuk, etc.

Even if Manafort is a villain, which we all agree with, the evidence - and the people providing it - still matters.

A lot of that 'evidence' is left aside by sites like AP, right? I'd guess they do a lot of proofing right now.

You'd think so. They have been incredibly vague about where it comes from and what it consists of, but that might be expected. What is kind of interesting is how slow Russia-focused journalists have been to comment on this. I'd guess there's a lot of double and triple checking of their own sources going on at the moment.

Well, they got a response from Manafort, and he apparently didn't deny the explosive memo.

Manafort might want to reallocate his crisis management budget to his legal team.

Did you know President Abraham Lincoln was a Republican? President Trump apparently thinks most people don’t.

“Great president,” Trump said Tuesday night at a fundraising dinner for House Republicans. “Most people don’t even know he was a Republican. Right? Does anyone know? A lot of people don’t know that. We have to build that up a little more.”

Trump then suggested using a political action committee to run advertisements letting people know that Lincoln was a member of his party.