115 thoughts on “Capitol Trump”

  1. Great start to the coverage. I just saw Kelliar and Spliarcer get into the motorcade. If that’s any indication, this can be one fucked up night. Smart money is on “this is going to be a huge crock of bullshit”.

  2. Yum, we just finished a fine pot of Beef Stroganoff stewed all day in our slow cooker, so my night is made no matter what happens.

  3. Another round of predictions Trump will be “presidential” tonight — like expecting a buffalo to shit dandelions.

  4. Since Pussy Grabber wrote this speech the chance of presidential is somewhere between none and zero
    and really 80 minutes – he should keep it under 45 minutes

    What is Ivanka Trump wearing –oy

  5. Watching MSNBC at the moment … Let the normalizing begin … Between Nixon to China and Kornacki missing the point while being lost in the numbers.  It’s pretty bad.

    Justice Ginsburg staying home.

     

  6. 2 Texas Ribeyes off the grill in a minute, baked potato, great salad – bullshitter emeritis!  Twill be an evening.

  8. Son just finished building my adjustable bed.  I plan to get into it.  Talk to you all tomorrow.

     

  9. Even former Prez GWB can admit publicly what certain “media” types couldn’t or wouldn’t (not naming any names): that the foundation of our current “populism” is built on racism.

  13. The Obama/Biden bromance has been replaced by Pence/Ryan.  They’re even wearing matching ties.

  14. Isn’t that cute. Melanoma meets a black woman. And Paul Ryan is acting (?) like a VP of a fraternity who has to take over for the prez without any notice.

  15. Pussy Grabber has a new hair stylist

    the family look like automated figures in a disney exhibit

  16. Just yelled  “show us your titties” as he introduced the wife.  I’m in trouble with the wife.

  21. especially if they keep up the fake applause

    please please please make him mute

    I think we have heard this speech

    the sniff is back

  22. … and our shit will smell like roses.

    “And my haven’t I done a great job?  Don’t you just love me?  I love me. “

  24. Poor Nancy Pelosi looks ready to vomit. Her thought bubble: “Damn you Hillary, even I knew Wisconsin and Michigan actually exist.”

  25. Well, looks like president bumper sticker is holding court. And lying. Jesus this is fucking awful.

  26. The first part of the speech sounded like it was written by an 8th-grader;very stilted language.   Now, it’s starting to sound like him, for the most part.  Is he going off script?

  32. Why does he want that damned Keystone pipeline to create temporary jobs and make money for Canada by transporting their oil for China to use?  Dumb ass.

  39. God, I believe he wrote this “address “. It’s as empty as his goddamn campaign promises. He’s as dumb as I feared.

  41. He is the worst
    Paul Ryan did not applaud let alone stand up for paid family leave

    oh the wild west of drug approvals

  42. Paid family leave? Finally he got a moment of applause from the left. (Of course this won’t see the light of day)  I think Tillerson just shit himself.

  46. Trying to head off a hearing on the Yemen raid oy vey

    the dream that fills my heart is that he is gone and soon

  49. He’s going to deregulate everything, and, it’s magically all going to be safe, clean, and in everyones’ best interest.  OK.  Dream big.  Nite.

  50. Too bad Dems had to go with an ex KY gov for response tonight, considering they couldn’t keep his seat.

  51. 1. The ex KY Gov was terrific. Dems need more of that.

    2. The Deadbeat Message :

    a. BIG insurance is of paramount importance, therefore dt is throwing BIG pharma under the bus.

    b. russian moles in the campaign, the Oval Office, the rnc, and the NSC are of no importance whatsoever.

    c. The Yemen fughup was Hillary’s fault.

  54. From experience fr0m watching these things long ago, I did not bother watching.  I am happy to see he did not going into his drooling loon personna.  What I find more interesting is he stuck to a script.  Remember back to the campaign, the one prior to the stolen election, he did spend some period of days on script.  But, he blew out of it with spectacular results.

    One big question – what about the Soviets KGB er Russians FSB/GRU?

  55. and the plot thickens

    wapo:

    The former British spy who authored a controversial dossier on behalf of Donald Trump’s political opponents alleging ties between Trump and Russia reached an agreement with the FBI a few weeks before the election for the bureau to pay him to continue his work, according to several people familiar with the arrangement.

    The agreement to compensate former MI6 agent Christopher Steele came as U.S. intelligence agencies reached a consensus that the Russians had interfered in the presidential election by orchestrating hacks of Democratic Party email accounts.

    While Trump has derided the dossier as “fake news” compiled by his political opponents, the FBI’s arrangement with Steele shows that the bureau considered him credible and found his information, while unproved, to be worthy of further investigation.

    Ultimately, the FBI did not pay Steele. Communications between the bureau and the former spy were interrupted as Steele’s now-famous dossier became the subject of news stories, congressional inquiries and presidential denials, according to the people familiar with the arrangement, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter.

    […]

    Steele was familiar to the FBI, in part because the bureau had previously hired him to help a U.S. inquiry into alleged corruption in the world soccer organization FIFA. The FBI sometimes pays informants, sources and outside investigators to assist in its work. Steele was known for the quality of his past work and for the knowledge he had developed over nearly 20 years working on Russia-related issues for British intelligence. The Washington Post was not able to determine how much the FBI intended to pay Steele had their relationship remained intact.

     

    [be sure to read the rest of the story. especially the part about comey.  no wonder steele went into hiding]

  56. ahhhhh….  waking up the morning after that magnificent speech….  well…  I’m just thinking of roses, raindrops, and unicorns…

  57. Lots of puffery but still no there there.  At least he maintained the illusion of sanity for an hour.  Felt sorry for the widow being used as political window dressing.

  58. I have to admit that after watching the first 45 or so minutes and walking back and forth between the family room where I was watching PG and the family room where Mrs. P was watching other things, I was so fatigued by my haranguing about the droning vacuous slogans and lies that I was listening to I fell asleep and woke up after the Dem rebuttal and the post mortems were over, and this morning I woke up to a dark house with no power on so I couldn’t even watch live dissection of the lies.  

    I did read a couple of WaPo articles – one from Chris Cillizza giving dtrumpf a better than expected review, and one by Glenn Kessler essentially saying he lied his ass off. I guess I’ll have to read an annotated transcript later to day to see what crap I missed.

    [btw. what the hell did we do before Poobah installed the edit function? Just appear borderline illiterate?]

  59. Jamie, yep, nothing like pitting the grieving widow against the grieving dad.  People who do that are what do we call them? Oh yes, assholes.

  60. pogo, if you’ve seen “the hunger games” sky tributes to the fallen, that’s pretty much what’s being played and replayed in most of the post mortems I’ve seen this morning.  cynic that I am, I can’t help but see as Jamie noted the widow being used as political window dressing.  but then they had to come up with something to offset the dad’s anger and accusations of his son being used.

    they also knew about those kids whose mom was deported (and btw watching from mexico  for their appearance in the audience as guests of congressmen)  and had to top that visual heartbreaker some way.

  61. sample critiques from across the pond:
    Trump’s Address to Congress: Here’s What Foreign Press Made of It
    by NBC News
    A columnist for the left-leaning Guardian newspaper called the speech a “heroic effort in contradiction and cliché.”
    “The president’s first address to Congress was full of inconsistency when compared to his words and deeds in the White House,” Richard Wolffe wrote in a scathing piece on the paper’s website.

    Writing in Britain’s conservative Telegraph newspaper, Rob Crilly declared that Trump found “his presidential voice and manages the unthinkable — a conventional speech.”

    [….]

    German weekly magazine Der Spiegel — which has been scathing of Trump in recent months — declared that he “sounds more presidential, but he is not really leaving his path.”

    [….]

    Trump’s relatively more reserved tone left some in the Italian media scratching their heads about the future direction of his presidency.

    Writing in La Repubblica, Vittorio Zucconi said: “Which of the two Trumps who spoke last night in Washington is the real Trump?”

    “Is he the man who seriously, and without a wit suitable for Reality TV, spoke for the first half hour? … Or is is the rally speaker who fell back into the empty, aggressive nationalistic rhetoric that brought him to the White House?”

    A president with a “split personality” was born Tuesday night, he continued, adding: “Only time will tell which President Trump will be.”

  62. Some of these speech reviews are cracking me up. Just because he didn’t go off script and call Pelosi a bony bitch they’re saying he was “presidential”

  63. When PG talks I do not even recognize the country he talks about

     

  64. A few thought about the speech.

    From what I’ve read he…

    …used a teleprompter (or appeared to)

    …read the speech (or appeared to)

    …didn’t go off on tangents

    …didn’t insult anyone

    …sounded mostly coherent

    …might have delivered his first legitimate sounding speech

    Having him sounding almost like a president might be more worrisome than his usual lunatic rantings. A lying lunatic with a horrible agenda can be brought down. Someone who lies and has a horrible agenda, but starts to sound like a normal person, would be much more problematic.

    I’m guessing that for once he actually memorized a speech written by someone else. He had a few day to work on it and I’m sure someone helped him do it. I’m also sure that all the stories referring to his near illiteracy have been a subject of concern in his circle of managers. Perhaps they will try and curtail his off the cuff speaking in the future so he can leave (some) people with the perception that he’s not an illiterate moron!

  65. The speech would have been much more effective if he had said words to the effect, ‘Please, please hold any applause, except at the introduction of our honored guests, until the end of my speech.’

  66. Oh please same old recycled campaign garbage,lies to support strawman arguments

    and it would be more effective if he weren’t contradicting himself

    earlier in the day he said the Jewish community might have engineered the attacks to generate sympathy and on the Yemeni mission he blamed the generals

  67. Trump Blames Jewish People For Threats And Attacks On Jewish Community Centers


    The Pennsylvania Attorney General claims that Donald Trump said to him that Jewish people might be behind the threats and attacks on Jewish Community Centers to “make others look bad.”
    The criticism came quickly from The Anti-Defamation League. ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said, “It is incumbent upon the White House to immediately clarify these remarks. In light of the ongoing attacks on the Jewish community, it is also incumbent upon the President to lay out in his speech tonight his plans for what the federal government will do to address this rash of anti-Semitic incidents.”
    There have been more than 100 bomb threats made against Jewish Community Centers, and President Trump’s comments will only serve to add fuel to the fire. The Trump White House has played footsie with Anti-Semites, and the President’s comments today, if true, represent a continuation of the dog whistle politics that appeal to the many bigots and racists who supported his presidential campaign.

  69. hey guys, sound familiar?

    ….when faced with the combination of pressure and interference, a “perfectly thriving state can, in a matter of months, and even days, be transformed into an arena of fierce armed conflict, become a victim of foreign intervention, and sink into a web of chaos, humanitarian catastrophe, and civil war.”

    above from the russian chief of general staff as quoted in the new Yorker’s Trump, Putin, and the New Cold War
    What lay behind Russia’s interference in the 2016 election—and what lies ahead?

    By Evan Osnos, David Remnick, and Joshua Yaffa

    hope you have the time to read it…. chilling.

     

  70. On the cemetery and mosque attacks, the spiel from the Neo-Nazi sites have been along the lines of “they are doing it to themselves so they can be “victims” and sympathetic”.  We know Dumpf is getting that from Bannon et al.

     

  73. Cute comment on CNN from Michael Moor (Former U.S. Attorney not the famous one)

    “If Donald Trump built a sand castle on the Rio Grand, he would claim that he just started THE WALL.”

     

  74. If there were such threats and attacks on Episcopalian schools, churches, and cemeteries, the fbi would cover the case with agents as thick as the russkie spies on the Oval Office carpet.

  78. I would be perfectly willing to stand guard duty at any of our local Jewish facilities just as I would at any of the countryside black churches. South Carolina has a State Guard, separate from the National Guard, that should jump in for problems such as this.

  79. What will preserve the gains in this market will be a wholehearted outflow of dollars into infrastructure projects. These dollars should come from reserves, petrol taxes, and borrowings. These projects must be started now

  80. The State Department’s job is to preserve the peace–give them every advantage that we can.

  81. Goopers  craven assholes made a deal with the devil

    think about this Paul Ryan you will be spending eternity with Mitch McConnell

  82. The Jewish War Veterans Org could supply guards also – at their own expense. Governors, mayors, and police chiefs would only have to deputize them.

  85. That it may be construed by some as being a possible outcome……….abalone……the jig is up.

  86. Went to the fancy restaurant in QuiNhon and ordered abalone soup in French; they ruined it. Now, whose revenge was that? Were they offended because i was in fatigues dragging an m-14?

  88. I stood outside Quinn’s one time…….it was a blast……..

    I bought me a little god on the way back to the boat…..he (or she) has been a pretty good little god.

  90. But I’ll tell ya, when shit goes south, that little god can kick some ass……..

  95. “First a howling blizzard woke us,
    Then the rain came down to soak us,
    And now before the eye can focus —
    Crocus.”           -L. Rogers

    Bees everywhere this afternoon; trees are in full bloom and it smells lovely.   It sounds like you guys on the east coast are in for more winter tomorrow.

  97. And so now the news breaks that Jeff Sessions had two discussions with a Russian diplomat and lied about it in his paperwork and in response to a direct question in his confirmation hearing. Jesus fucking Christ.

  98. Sessions must go.  Can he get away with lying to Congress?

    Flynn isn’t in trouble?  No intent.

    Kellyarse isn’t in trouble for shilling Ivanka’s wares?  No intent.

    Why aren’t any of them held accountable for anything?

    What’s up with google news?  Only tweets mention Sessions lying; the rest of the stories about him are old.

    No wonder Pence looked so happy last night.  If he keeps his distance,  he’ll be the last man standing very soon.

  99. Simple. Because trump is in charge of the administration. Accountability is for chumps. Congress is full of pugn wusses. It’s what dreams of parliamentary elections in a 2 party system gives us.

    Wapo and NYT have decent coverage of Sessions’s lies.

  102. Always thought there was a hint of Southern Russia in Session’s fake accent.

  103. G!D bless sessions’ perjurous little heart. Another chunk comes out of the deadbeat’s clay feet. sessions deserves free food and lodging for life. Lock Him Up !

  105. My loudmouth senator, Al Franken, on the Morning Joe. Turn on, tune in, drop everything.

  106. My goodness the floater has a bit of a problem keeping his friends on staff.  Seems to point to the weed fight is going to be pushed down the road some.  Sessions can write a book about his non-contacts with Putin’s buddies.

  107. How upset was the GOP when AG Loretta Lynch exchanged words with forner  (U.S.) President Bill Clinton on a tarmac in Arizona? But this little Keebler Elf Shindig in a Russian hollow tree will be “OK” by them, I’ll wager.

    John Mitchell behaved better than this.

  108. Was it only a day ago that 45 and counting successfully read a dreary speech off a TelePrompTer (while wearing a new suit) and received so much praise?

    It was.

  109. sessions hasn’t enough stature to work for Keebler. He isn’t tall enough, either.

  111. Mr. X, Does @MorningJoe attempt to square off with Al? Would he be that dense?

  112. Mr Doodlesdog,

    I’m guessing that joe will take this opportunity to tie sessions around trump’s neck – like the albatross in the Coleridge’s Rhyme. What a stench the rotting sessions shall make.

  113. wapo:
    At his Jan. 10 Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing, Sessions was asked by Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) what he would do if he learned of any evidence that anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government in the course of the 2016 campaign.
    “I’m not aware of any of those activities,” he responded. He added: “I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I did not have communications with the Russians.”
    Officials said Sessions did not consider the conversations relevant to the lawmakers’ questions and did not remember in detail what he discussed with Kislyak.
    “There was absolutely nothing misleading about his answer,” said Sarah Isgur Flores, Sessions’s spokeswoman.
    In January, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) asked Sessions for answers to written questions. “Several of the President-elect’s nominees or senior advisers have Russian ties. Have you been in contact with anyone connected to any part of the Russian government about the 2016 election, either before or after election day?” Leahy wrote.
    Sessions responded with one word: “No.”
    In a statement issued Wednesday night, Sessions said he “never met with any Russian officials to discuss issues of the campaign. I have no idea what this allegation is about. It is false.”
    Justice officials said Sessions met with Kislyak on Sept. 8 in his capacity as a member of the armed services panel rather than in his role as a Trump campaign surrogate.

  114. xr, more of above brouhaha from your guy who I hope really lets it all out on mojo this a.m.:
    When asked to comment on Sessions’s contacts with Kislyak, Franken said in a statement to The Post on Wednesday: “If it’s true that Attorney General Sessions met with the Russian ambassador in the midst of the campaign, then I am very troubled that his response to my questioning during his confirmation hearing was, at best, misleading.”
    Franken added: “It is now clearer than ever that the attorney general cannot, in good faith, oversee an investigation at the Department of Justice and the FBI of the Trump-Russia connection, and he must recuse himself immediately.”

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