User-Supported News Commentary Hosted by Craig Crawford
Baby It’s Cold Outside, But …
There’s a meltdown at the White House.
Happy New Year America!
Author: craigcrawford
Trail Mix Host. Lapsed journalist, author & retired pundit happily promoting nothing but the truth for Social Security checks.
View all posts by craigcrawford
One winter we below zero for 30 days. That winter we didn’t get above freezing for 90 consecutive days. I think it was the winter of ’97-’98. The record low for the Twin Cities was -41F in 1888. The record for the TCs when I’ve been here is a paltry -37F, I believe that was in ’70. We’re damned lucky that we don’t also get Mr Jack’s Kansas winds, or Ms NY’s Great Lakes snows. The state record low is -64F set in Tower, MN, a few years back. It may have been worse across the lake in Embarrass, MN, but their measuring device froze and broke at a mere -60F.
Obviously, trump isn’t putting out all the hot air we expected when we accepted him as the Usurper-in-Chief.
cnn:. Manafort sues DOJ, Mueller over Russia probe authority
CNN)Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman indicted on money laundering and other charges, filed a lawsuit challenging the broad authority of special counsel Robert Mueller and alleging the Justice Department violated the law in appointing Mueller. The suit brought Wednesday in US District Court in Washington where Manafort and another former Trump campaign aide are charged, challenges Mueller’s decision to charge Manafort with alleged crimes that they say have nothing to do with the 2016 campaign, but rather relate to lucrative lobbying work Manafort and his deputy did for a former Russia-friendly government in Ukraine. That work ended in 2014, the suit says. Manafort and his deputy Rick Gates deny the allegations in the charges.
The legal action represents a new tack in a broader effort by supporters of the President to push back on the special counsel. Some Republicans have begun publicly calling for Mueller’s probe to be shut down. Manafort’s attorneys have echoed the President’s criticism that Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election is pursuing crimes that never happened. The Manafort lawsuit alleges Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Mueller have unlawfully exceeded the authorities allowed under the law governing special counsel appointments. The lawsuit contends that the order Rosenstein signed to appoint Mueller “exceeds the scope of Mr. Rosenstein’s authority to appoint special counsel as well as specific restrictions on the scope of such appointments.”
A DOJ spokesperson responded with a statement, saying: “The lawsuit is frivolous but the defendant is entitled to file whatever he wants.”
politicususa:Trump’s Day Gets Even Worse As Adam Schiff Obliterates All Of The President’s Russia Denials
The man who in less than a year could be leading the House Russia investigation, Rep. Adam Schiff, just destroyed all of Trump’s efforts to distance himself from the players in the Russia scandal.
My senior policy advisor? I had nothing to do with him.
My campaign chairman? Only with me for a short time.
My national security advisor? A liar.
My foreign policy advisor? He was just a coffee boy.
Rep. Schiff was right. Trump’s first move when anyone involved in the Russia scandal turns on him is to deny that he had anything to do with the person, or that they had any influence. Well all else fails, Trump shouts fake news and runs away.
Schiff tweet shows that if he takes over the House Russia investigation next year, he is not going to be snowed by Trump’s denials. The President wants the American people to believe that everyone around him is either lying or crazy when they talk about money laundering and potential Trump/Russia crimes.
Adam Schiff is on to Trump, and his tweet was a preview of what is waiting for the President if Democrats take back the House.
If Bob Mueller doesn’t get Trump, it’s likely that Adam Schiff will.
from the guardian’s story “Ivanka seeks the presidency – and other big claims from explosive new book “
The publication on Wednesday of excerpts from a new book on the Trump administration, first by the Guardian and then by New York magazine, brought to light a host of explosive reports of internecine fighting and organisational chaos at the heart of the US presidency.
Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, by the former Guardian columnist and Rupert Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff, will be published in full next Tuesday. In December he told the Guardian that in his approach to researching the book he had been “not particularly hostile”.
“That allowed me to get them to be relatively open,” he said.
[….]
Here are some other highlights:
The president’s daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, reportedly made a deal about which of them would one day run for president. Wolff writes: “The first woman president, Ivanka entertained, would not be Hillary Clinton; it would be Ivanka Trump.” Of Bannon’s activities after leaving the White House, Wolff writes: “Bannon was telling people something else: he, Steve Bannon, was going to run for president. The locution, ‘If I were president …’ was turning into, ‘When I am president …’” Wolff also writes that Bannon has courted top Republican donors, “doing his best, as he put it, to ‘kiss the ass and pay homage to all the gray-beards’”. Infighting among staff reportedly often featured a group including Kushner, Ivanka and the economics adviser Gary Cohn against a faction led by Bannon. Wolff quotes Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, as saying: “It is a war between the Jews and the non-Jews.” Wolff writes that Thomas Barrack Jr, a billionaire who is one of the president’s oldest associates and was reportedly wanted by Trump to be his chief of staff, allegedly told a friend: “He’s not only crazy, he’s stupid.” On Wednesday, Barrack denied saying that. […] Trump reportedly argued with the Secret Service over whether he could have a lock on his bedroom – “the first time since the Kennedy White House that a presidential couple had maintained separate rooms”, Wolff writes – and told housekeeping he would strip his own bed and leave his shirts on the floor. Wolff also says the president, who is known to fear being poisoned, told no one to touch his toothbrush.
Holy shit all over the wall, Batman…. I need to get back into the popcorn making business!
Craig… unless the Republicans in Congress do something about it, I don’t see any way out except for the mid-term elections. Maybe if trump starts totally melting down in front of tv cameras the gop might finally see how much he’s damaging their brand… but I’m not hold my breath.
RR, my hunch is Republicans understand they’ve got to run away from this president or lose everything. Or maybe they’ve decided there’s no hope at all, just retire. They got their tax giveaway to corporations, can now cash in for lucrative lobby jobs.
Brunch Baked Eggs
8 slices bacon
8 large eggs
1 teaspoon dry mustard, 1/3 palmful
1 teaspoon Herbes de Provence
1 clove minced garlic
Salt and pepper
2 tablespoons grated Parmigiano-Reggiano
1/4 cup grated Gruyère
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 leeks chopped
2 tablespoons butter
PREPARATION
Preheat oven to 375°F.
Bake bacon on a slotted pan to crisp, 12-14 minutes. Coarsely chop and reserve.
Separate eggs, placing the yolks in one bowl and the whites in another. Whisk up whites to medium-firm peaks. Whisk yolks with dry mustard, Herbes de Provence, garlic, salt, pepper, cheeses and chopped bacon.
Heat a 10-inch skillet over medium to medium-high heat with oil, 1 turn of the pan.
When oil is hot, add leeks and lightly brown, 4-5 minutes;
Remove to a plate. Melt butter in skillet, let foam subside.
Fold egg whites into yolks and pour mixture into skillet.
Scatter leeks over eggs as they begin to set and the edges firm up.
Transfer to oven and bake 15-18 minutes until golden and puffed.
2 eggs, beaten to a froth.
Onions, mushrooms, sweet peppers and sausage, sautéed until the onions are soft and the sausage is done. Season with salt & pepper. Remove to a bowl.
Pour eggs into skillet. Let them set a minute or so at medium low heat. Put either pepper jack cheese or, if you prefer, goat cheese (and spinach with the goat cheese) on the eggs.
Add the sautéed stuff.
Cook it like an omelette.
Eat it like it tastes great (it will)
Take the cold spaghetti sauce left over from the night before, fry an italian sausage link, reserve 1/4 cup of the sauce and add the rest to the sausage let simmer a few min. heat up the left over pasta or make new, 2 oz dry.
put the 1/4 cup sauce in a small pan add additional 1/4 cup waster heat to a boil poach 2 eggs cook until you like them, remove and place on pasta with heated sauce & sausage. Serve with sourdough toast
Whatever we do about the deadbeat pussypinching russian, please, please remember that pence goes first :
What did the vice usurper know, and when did that smarmy ferret-eyed sumbidge know it ?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
One Egg : 1. Fry egg on the driveway of Abu Ghraib until brittle. 2. Water board egg until no longer visible – about 48 – 96 hours, depending on water pressure.
The holiday present showed up a little late, sort of like a few of my holiday cards. The impact of the first ‘kiss and tell’ book may be larger than we can see at first. Although the author has had issues with truthiness in the past, this tome maybe similar to the “dossier” mostly solid correct, with a few Jello or cloud solid parts. Mueller’s team is probably going to read this too. Hopefully with a few questions to clarify things, such as why Bannon calls the Trump tower meeting (one we know of) “treasonous”.
This is the first book out. There will be more.
Is SFB losing it? Yes. Are his cognitive abilities failing? Yes. Will the greedy old perverts act to remove him before they lose 2018? A qualified ‘yes’ because they may not want to mess up their gerrymandered districts voters. They packed their districts with their voters and now they cannot count on a mix of voters to save them.
Will Mitch retire? I think he will say ‘adios’ before long. His destruction of the Senate will come back in a year to haunt him. Might as well go home and live high on the hog without having to deal with being in the minority.
“Incompetent … incurious … nearly illiterate” — what Trump’s own staff tell @MichaelWolffNYC in his new book “Fire and Fury”
One winter we below zero for 30 days. That winter we didn’t get above freezing for 90 consecutive days. I think it was the winter of ’97-’98. The record low for the Twin Cities was -41F in 1888. The record for the TCs when I’ve been here is a paltry -37F, I believe that was in ’70. We’re damned lucky that we don’t also get Mr Jack’s Kansas winds, or Ms NY’s Great Lakes snows. The state record low is -64F set in Tower, MN, a few years back. It may have been worse across the lake in Embarrass, MN, but their measuring device froze and broke at a mere -60F.
Obviously, trump isn’t putting out all the hot air we expected when we accepted him as the Usurper-in-Chief.
cnn:. Manafort sues DOJ, Mueller over Russia probe authority
CNN)Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman indicted on money laundering and other charges, filed a lawsuit challenging the broad authority of special counsel Robert Mueller and alleging the Justice Department violated the law in appointing Mueller.
The suit brought Wednesday in US District Court in Washington where Manafort and another former Trump campaign aide are charged, challenges Mueller’s decision to charge Manafort with alleged crimes that they say have nothing to do with the 2016 campaign, but rather relate to lucrative lobbying work Manafort and his deputy did for a former Russia-friendly government in Ukraine. That work ended in 2014, the suit says. Manafort and his deputy Rick Gates deny the allegations in the charges.
The legal action represents a new tack in a broader effort by supporters of the President to push back on the special counsel. Some Republicans have begun publicly calling for Mueller’s probe to be shut down. Manafort’s attorneys have echoed the President’s criticism that Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election is pursuing crimes that never happened.
The Manafort lawsuit alleges Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Mueller have unlawfully exceeded the authorities allowed under the law governing special counsel appointments. The lawsuit contends that the order Rosenstein signed to appoint Mueller “exceeds the scope of Mr. Rosenstein’s authority to appoint special counsel as well as specific restrictions on the scope of such appointments.”
A DOJ spokesperson responded with a statement, saying: “The lawsuit is frivolous but the defendant is entitled to file whatever he wants.”
politicususa: Trump’s Day Gets Even Worse As Adam Schiff Obliterates All Of The President’s Russia Denials
The man who in less than a year could be leading the House Russia investigation, Rep. Adam Schiff, just destroyed all of Trump’s efforts to distance himself from the players in the Russia scandal.
Schiff responded to Trump’s trashing of Steve Bannon with an insightful tweet:
Adam Schiff
✔
@RepAdamSchiff
Trump condensed:
My senior policy advisor? I had nothing to do with him.
My campaign chairman? Only with me for a short time.
My national security advisor? A liar.
My foreign policy advisor? He was just a coffee boy.
Don Jr? Um … fake news!
2:08 PM – Jan 3, 2018
857 857 Replies
10,312 10,312 Retweets
25,071 25,071 likes
Rep. Schiff was right. Trump’s first move when anyone involved in the Russia scandal turns on him is to deny that he had anything to do with the person, or that they had any influence. Well all else fails, Trump shouts fake news and runs away.
Schiff tweet shows that if he takes over the House Russia investigation next year, he is not going to be snowed by Trump’s denials. The President wants the American people to believe that everyone around him is either lying or crazy when they talk about money laundering and potential Trump/Russia crimes.
Adam Schiff is on to Trump, and his tweet was a preview of what is waiting for the President if Democrats take back the House.
If Bob Mueller doesn’t get Trump, it’s likely that Adam Schiff will.
from the guardian’s story “Ivanka seeks the presidency – and other big claims from explosive new book “
The publication on Wednesday of excerpts from a new book on the Trump administration, first by the Guardian and then by New York magazine, brought to light a host of explosive reports of internecine fighting and organisational chaos at the heart of the US presidency.
Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, by the former Guardian columnist and Rupert Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff, will be published in full next Tuesday. In December he told the Guardian that in his approach to researching the book he had been “not particularly hostile”.
“That allowed me to get them to be relatively open,” he said.
[….]
Here are some other highlights:
The president’s daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, reportedly made a deal about which of them would one day run for president. Wolff writes: “The first woman president, Ivanka entertained, would not be Hillary Clinton; it would be Ivanka Trump.”
Of Bannon’s activities after leaving the White House, Wolff writes: “Bannon was telling people something else: he, Steve Bannon, was going to run for president. The locution, ‘If I were president …’ was turning into, ‘When I am president …’” Wolff also writes that Bannon has courted top Republican donors, “doing his best, as he put it, to ‘kiss the ass and pay homage to all the gray-beards’”.
Infighting among staff reportedly often featured a group including Kushner, Ivanka and the economics adviser Gary Cohn against a faction led by Bannon. Wolff quotes Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, as saying: “It is a war between the Jews and the non-Jews.”
Wolff writes that Thomas Barrack Jr, a billionaire who is one of the president’s oldest associates and was reportedly wanted by Trump to be his chief of staff, allegedly told a friend: “He’s not only crazy, he’s stupid.” On Wednesday, Barrack denied saying that.
[…]
Trump reportedly argued with the Secret Service over whether he could have a lock on his bedroom – “the first time since the Kennedy White House that a presidential couple had maintained separate rooms”, Wolff writes – and told housekeeping he would strip his own bed and leave his shirts on the floor. Wolff also says the president, who is known to fear being poisoned, told no one to touch his toothbrush.
[…continues…]
Never in our relatively short history has such an idiot occupied our highest office. The only question left is what we do about it.
Holy shit all over the wall, Batman…. I need to get back into the popcorn making business!
Craig… unless the Republicans in Congress do something about it, I don’t see any way out except for the mid-term elections. Maybe if trump starts totally melting down in front of tv cameras the gop might finally see how much he’s damaging their brand… but I’m not hold my breath.
Not since our drunkest president, Franklin Pierce, have we had such a fool in the White House.
RR, my hunch is Republicans understand they’ve got to run away from this president or lose everything. Or maybe they’ve decided there’s no hope at all, just retire. They got their tax giveaway to corporations, can now cash in for lucrative lobby jobs.
So, if Donny Jr. (aka Humpty Dumpty ) is gonna be “cracked open like an egg,” let’s hear your favorite omelette or other egg recipes.
Preet Bharara was the first firing that Donny Sr. carried out due to Russia/money laundering, right?
BID
Brunch Baked Eggs
8 slices bacon
8 large eggs
1 teaspoon dry mustard, 1/3 palmful
1 teaspoon Herbes de Provence
1 clove minced garlic
Salt and pepper
2 tablespoons grated Parmigiano-Reggiano
1/4 cup grated Gruyère
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 leeks chopped
2 tablespoons butter
PREPARATION
Preheat oven to 375°F.
Bake bacon on a slotted pan to crisp, 12-14 minutes. Coarsely chop and reserve.
Separate eggs, placing the yolks in one bowl and the whites in another. Whisk up whites to medium-firm peaks. Whisk yolks with dry mustard, Herbes de Provence, garlic, salt, pepper, cheeses and chopped bacon.
Heat a 10-inch skillet over medium to medium-high heat with oil, 1 turn of the pan.
When oil is hot, add leeks and lightly brown, 4-5 minutes;
Remove to a plate. Melt butter in skillet, let foam subside.
Fold egg whites into yolks and pour mixture into skillet.
Scatter leeks over eggs as they begin to set and the edges firm up.
Transfer to oven and bake 15-18 minutes until golden and puffed.
Serve with sour cream and salsa if desired.
Omelette? Now we’re talking.
2 eggs, beaten to a froth.
Onions, mushrooms, sweet peppers and sausage, sautéed until the onions are soft and the sausage is done. Season with salt & pepper. Remove to a bowl.
Pour eggs into skillet. Let them set a minute or so at medium low heat. Put either pepper jack cheese or, if you prefer, goat cheese (and spinach with the goat cheese) on the eggs.
Add the sautéed stuff.
Cook it like an omelette.
Eat it like it tastes great (it will)
Take the cold spaghetti sauce left over from the night before, fry an italian sausage link, reserve 1/4 cup of the sauce and add the rest to the sausage let simmer a few min. heat up the left over pasta or make new, 2 oz dry.
put the 1/4 cup sauce in a small pan add additional 1/4 cup waster heat to a boil poach 2 eggs cook until you like them, remove and place on pasta with heated sauce & sausage. Serve with sourdough toast
Great Sunday morning breakfast.
Jack
BTW, I cook my eggs to where the white is solid but the yolk is runny and let the yolk mingle with the sauce and pasta, Hmmmm.
Jack
Mueller style eggs
drop egg in hot water let it set there until you get around to serve it.
Usually well done.
Whatever we do about the deadbeat pussypinching russian, please, please remember that pence goes first :
What did the vice usurper know, and when did that smarmy ferret-eyed sumbidge know it ?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
One Egg : 1. Fry egg on the driveway of Abu Ghraib until brittle. 2. Water board egg until no longer visible – about 48 – 96 hours, depending on water pressure.
The holiday present showed up a little late, sort of like a few of my holiday cards. The impact of the first ‘kiss and tell’ book may be larger than we can see at first. Although the author has had issues with truthiness in the past, this tome maybe similar to the “dossier” mostly solid correct, with a few Jello or cloud solid parts. Mueller’s team is probably going to read this too. Hopefully with a few questions to clarify things, such as why Bannon calls the Trump tower meeting (one we know of) “treasonous”.
This is the first book out. There will be more.
Is SFB losing it? Yes. Are his cognitive abilities failing? Yes. Will the greedy old perverts act to remove him before they lose 2018? A qualified ‘yes’ because they may not want to mess up their gerrymandered districts voters. They packed their districts with their voters and now they cannot count on a mix of voters to save them.
Will Mitch retire? I think he will say ‘adios’ before long. His destruction of the Senate will come back in a year to haunt him. Might as well go home and live high on the hog without having to deal with being in the minority.