43 thoughts on “Exclamation Point”

  5. craig, int’l bus times  lists him along with 4 others : Kellyanne, Kelly, Mattis and Nikki Haley.

    vegas & the irish bookies must be really enjoying this. 🙂

     

    repeating from last night my theory:

    that mr/ms anonymous wanted his/her words FIRST to be read and digested and understood and then regurgitated over and over to underline the serious danger we (globally) are all in BEFORE he/she steps out of the shadows….

     
    at which time that person — not the deranged dictator wannabe—  will be the story.   he/she will be torn to bits and the mad man will still be there doing more harm
     
    unless those words motivate congress to address them appropriately.

  6. twit tweet “treason?” is comparable to the Iscariot question.  our answer should be the same as was answered then.

    Then Judas, which betrayed him, answered and said, Master, is it I? He said unto him, Thou hast said.

    Matthew 26:25

  7. ny times:
    Best of Late Night

    Trevor Noah Says Woodward Book Isn’t a Bombshell. In Fact, Maybe Nothing Is.

     
    “Trump is such a danger to America that his cabinet thought about using the 25th Amendment to remove him from office — but then they decided not to use it because it would be too messy? The 25th Amendment is there so that you can use it! It’s like there’s a sign that says, ‘In case of emergency, break glass,’ but then these guys are like, ‘I mean, we could break the glass but then there would be glass everywhere. I mean, maybe we can just try to steer the fire in a different direction? It’s less dramatic, yeah, let’s talk to it.’” — TREVOR NOAH

  8. Listening to the Joe and Mika show and heard Brennan going off on how the president’s staff are supposed to follow his orders not matter how much they do not like those orders. That is fine with a president who is not missing a mass of brain cells.  The rest of the discussion about the NY Times anonymous article went in circles with detours to nowhere.

    The issue is that SFB should not be in office for many reasons.  Something I have not seen yet is that the KGB picked him out specifically because they understood early how low intelligence he is, how much he wanted to be the big man, and that dementia and Alzheimer’s was in his future.  I give the KGB a lot of credit, they were/are not stupid.  FSB not so much. It could be that everything fell into place for them to tip the election with voter fraud, campaign finance crimes, and a lot of work with online communications.

    So we have a total incompetent in the WH and a lot of greedy old perverts keeping him there.  It will take work to get him out.

  11. renee, that huffpo piece makes a good point about “lodestar” being peculiar to pence. also their line:

    “…it should also be noted that Scott Roos, a former college classmate of Pence’s, said the future vice president once said that “God told him he would be president,” according to CNN.”

    when mr/ms anonymous called the twit “amoral” pence and haley came to mind as more likely to use that word even though they would be coming from two different meanings.

  12. more quotes from “best of late night” in nyt:
    “Between Woodward and Omarosa’s books, Trump has done something incredible: He’s made America read again.” — JIMMY FALLON
    “Woodward’s book is about working for Trump, and it’s called ‘Fear: Trump in the White House.’ It actually was the second choice for the title, because ‘The Baby-Sitters Club’ was already taken.” — JIMMY FALLON
    “After reading this thing, I don’t know whether to be reassured or even more scared than before. So I think I’ll go with: reassured that I was right to be so scared.” — STEPHEN COLBERT, referring to the Trump administration official’s Op-Ed

  21. kgc, you forget who put pence there as veep – Manafort.   and who put Manafort in as campaign chair?  according to that old olbermann show it was putin.  sooooo maybe this is more of the russkies doings of sowing chaos and maybe trump should be the one worrying that  his bff vlad is replacing him.

  22. more fodder for mueller to munch on from daily beast story “Putin’s ‘Friend’ Had Early Access to Trump’s Infamous Pro-Russia Speech”

     
    In the morning of April 21, 2016, a staffer at the Center for the National Interest, a Washington D.C., think tank, wandered into the office of Dimitri Simes, the group’s president.
    The staffer saw a pile of papers on the desk titled “FOREIGN POLICY AND DEFENSE OUTLINE.” The staffer realized the papers were the detailed outline, in bullet-pointed paragraphs, of a major foreign-policy address that then-candidate Donald Trump was set to deliver six days later as a guest of the center. The staffer used a cellphone to snap pictures of all five pages of the document.
    More than two years later, Maria Butina, who once wrote for the center’s magazine and occasionally emailed with Simes, was arrested as an accused Kremlin agent. Subsequently, the person provided the photos to The Daily Beast. The photos’ metadata confirm they were taken on a cellphone on the morning of April 21, 2016. A second former staffer told The Daily Beast that he saw the same documents on Simes’ desk.
    The pictures provide new insight into the creation of Trump’s historic foreign-policy speech. They also indicate that Simes was closer than previously known to the drafting of that speech. (Jacob Heilbrunn, the editor of the center’s magazine, wrote for Politico shortly after the speech that he didn’t know what was going to be in it. “I was curious as anyone to see what Trump would actually say,” he wrote.)
    It isn’t unusual for a think-tank chief to preview drafts of a speech presented at their invitation. But Simes’ proximity to the speech shows that a person Vladimir Putin once called a “friend and colleague” had an early view into the crafting of a speech that would have historic significance for American foreign policy. Democrats on the House intelligence committee tried to investigate Simes’ relationship to Trump’s campaign, but Republican committee chairman Devin Nunes blocked their efforts.
    Presented with this account and with the pictures of the document, the center’s executive director, Paul Saunders, declined to comment. Heilbrunn emailed that he did not receive any preview of the speech. Simes did not respond to a request for comment but wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Sept. 5, 2018, that his think tank’s interaction with the Trump campaign had a “small scope.” Michael Glassner, the chief operating officer at Donald J. Trump for President, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. J.D. Gordon, a foreign-policy adviser to Trump on the 2016 campaign, told The Daily Beast he was not familiar with the document.
    The pictures demonstrate that significant changes were made from the speech’s detailed outline to its final version—including the removal of lines condemning bigotry, praising legal immigration, and disparaging Russia.
    The speech Trump ultimately delivered—a transcript is available here—had some notable differences from the lengthy outline that found its way to Simes’ desk. The document on Simes’ desk listed four main weaknesses in American foreign policy: overstretched resources, an unclear understanding of foreign-policy goals, allies afraid they cannot trust the U.S., and the disrespect of rivals.
    The speech Trump delivered a week later, on April 27, included one more bullet-pointed weakness: “Our allies are not paying their fair share,” Trump proclaimed. The same concern is detailed in the document from Simes’ desk, but with less prominent billing. It’s a talking point Trump has been hammering for nearly two decades and continues to use in meetings with America’s NATO allies.
    The outline also criticized American intervention in the Balkans under the Clinton administration—a move also criticized by the Kremlin. “Look what happened in the 1990s,” the outline said. “Even after the attacks on the USS Cole and our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, we continued to pursue nation-building in the Balkans. Then we got hit on 9/11, because our leaders were not sufficiently focused on the security of the American people.”
    When Trump delivered his speech a week later, he didn’t mention the Balkans.
    The outline also included a line speaking out against prejudice. “I reject bigotry of all kinds,” the document from Simes’ desk reads. “And I reject Senator Cruz’s proposal to patrol Muslim neighborhoods in our country. That is wrong.” In his final speech, Trump didn’t speak about bigotry in general or Cruz’s proposal to patrol Muslim neighborhoods in particular.
    Trump’s outline also suggested spending $100 billion or more on the military; that number doesn’t appear in his final speech.
    Another line in the outline that didn’t appear in the final version: “I believe we need legal immigrants, who make a huge contribution to our economy. We can protect American workers and their way of life without being protectionist.”
    The outline also included a negative comment about Russia that didn’t appear in the final speech. “Russia is a declining but proud country with a nuclear arsenal that could obliterate our country,” the outline reads.
    Politico later reported that Trump received assistance writing the speech from Richard Burt, a member of the center’s board who was lobbying at the time for a natural-gas project controlled by the Kremlin.
    Simes attracted scrutiny from House Intelligence Committee Democrats when they investigated Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential race. But committee Republicans decided against compelling Simes to answer questions or produce documents. In a minority report released when Republicans ended their Russia probe earlier this year, committee Democrats listed him as a key witness—evidence, in their view, that the investigation was incomplete.
    “The Committee is investigating matters related to the speech and communications that may have occurred at the event, and the Committee has reason to believe that Mr. Simes played a central role in drafting portions of the speech related to Russia,” committee Democrats wrote. “The Committee should also obtain relevant personal correspondence between Mr. Simes and Trump campaign officials and any individuals with direct or assumed links to the Russian government.”
    Simes, who was born in Moscow and served as an adviser to Richard Nixon, has distinguished himself from the largely monolithic Washington think-tank crowd by his working relationships with Kremlin officials—and, as The Daily Beast has reported, his apparent effort in one instance to use those connections to try to assist one of his organization’s most generous benefactors. Under his leadership, the center has argued for more effective cooperation between Washington and Russia on some issues. It also gets notable access to some Russian government officials; in March of last year, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov sat for a lengthy interview with the center’s executive director in Moscow.
    In 2013, Simes participated in the Valdai International Discussion Club, a major Russian international-affairs conference. At that event, according to Politico, Simes praised Russia’s activity in Syria, and Putin called Simes his “American friend and colleague.”
    Both the outline found on Simes’ desk and the speech the future president delivered at the Mayflower Hotel in downtown Washington called for warmer relations with Moscow.
    “I believe an easing of tensions and improved relations with Russia—from a position of strength—is possible,” he said in the speech. “Common sense says this cycle of hostility must end. Some say the Russians won’t be reasonable. I intend to find out.”

  23. Lindsay Graham — what an effin’  moron.   He should never utter John McCain’s name again

  24. For a funny, Sanders put out a phone number at the NY Times and asked the unwashed to call and request outing the anonymous writer.  It is the wrong number.

  26. So basically Mr/Ms Annonymous didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know

    And is suggesting everyone just relax because he/she is going to take care of it.

    Sounds like a set up to me

  27. the guardian: Trump inauguration crowd photos were edited after he intervened

     
    A government photographer edited official pictures of Donald Trump’s inauguration to make the crowd appear bigger following a personal intervention from the president, according to newly released documents.
     
    The photographer cropped out empty space “where the crowd ended” for a new set of pictures requested by Trump on the first morning of his presidency, after he was angered by images showing his audience was smaller than Barack Obama’s in 2009.
    The detail was revealed in investigative reports released to the Guardian under the Freedom of Information Act by the inspector general of the US interior department. They shed new light on the first self-inflicted crisis of Trump’s presidency, when his White House falsely claimed he had attracted the biggest ever inauguration audience.
     
    The records detail a scramble within the National Park Service (NPS) on 21 January 2017 after an early-morning phone call between Trump and the acting NPS director, Michael Reynolds. They also state that Sean Spicer, then White House press secretary, called NPS officials repeatedly that day in pursuit of the more flattering photographs.
    […]
    The inspector general’s inquiry was prompted by a February 2017 complaint through the office’s website, alleging NPS officials tried to undermine Trump and leaked details of Trump’s call with Reynolds to the Washington Post, where it was first reported. The inspector general found no evidence to substantiate the allegations.
     
    The Guardian asked in its June 2017 freedom of information request for the identity of the complainant who sparked the inspector general’s inquiry. But this, and the entire complaint, was redacted in the released documents.
     

  28. Susan Collins Wimp-Maine  has said she cannot vote for supreme court nominee who does not see Roe vWade as settled law

    I wonder what her excuse will be this time.

  29. kgc, is this what you’re referring to?  from wapo:

    When asked about the email by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) on Thursday, Kavanaugh said he was not expressing his own views, but rather those of “legal scholars.”

    [….]
    Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh as a White House lawyer in the Bush administration advised against referring to the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade as the “settled law of the land,” according to a 2003 email.
     
    “I am not sure that all legal scholars refer to Roe as the settled law of the land at the Supreme Court level since Court can always overrule its precedent, and three current Justices on the Court would do so,” Kavanaugh wrote after reviewing a draft of what was intended to be an op-ed in favor of a judicial nominee.
     
    The email was first given to the New York Times and has since been made public by the Senate Judiciary Committee. It was among emails deemed “committee confidential” and not made public, although it was unclear what it was about the memo that prevented its earlier release.
     

     

  30. la times:  Republicans threaten Cory Booker over Kavanaugh document release. ‘Bring it,’ he responds

    Senators reviewing President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh clashed bitterly Thursday morning over whether emails and documents related to the candidate’s views on race, affirmative action and abortion have been improperly withheld from public view.

     

    Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) released several of the documents in question, which had been marked “committee confidential,” meaning they were not to be shared publicly.

    Republicans immediately accused Booker of violating Senate rules. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) called Booker’s conduct “unbecoming,” and said that the violations could result in punishment or even removal from the Senate.

     

    “Bring it,” Booker responded.

    He and other Democrats said that the emails should never have been restricted in the first place since they had nothing to do with personal information or national security.

     

    In one 2001 email, Kavanaugh, then working in the George W. Bush White House, refers to some Transportation Department regulations to assist minorities as a “naked racial set-aside.”

     

    In another 2003 email, Kavanaugh questions whether legal scholars would agree that the landmark abortion ruling in Roe vs. Wade is viewed as “settled law,” noting that the precedent could be overturned with a majority of justices.

     

    The fight over documents related to Kavanaugh’s past record in Washington has been raging for weeks. Democrats say hundreds of thousands of documents have been withheld and that they need more time to review those that have been released.

     

    Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) complained that Trump is withholding 102,000 pages of Kavanuagh’s White House counsel office records. She called Republicans’ frequent designation of documents as “committee confidential” a “crock.”

     

    Hours after the committee debate Thursday morning, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) publicly released 98 pages of the emails.

    [….continues….]

  31. Important moves after Booker was threatened was all the Dems on the committee backed him up and stood by him.  Coryn is going to be in a hurt now that his threat was faced with a solid wall.

  32. People need to stop talking about Democrats and start talking about the Republicans and their on going assualts on American women

  33. Of course Cornyn and the Repugs are pissed at Booker – he disclosed memos that expose the fact that the cherubim lied in 2004 and has lied this week.  His explanations sound like a 13 year old trying to explain away the Penthouse his mom found hidden under his mattress.

  34. Hours after the committee debate Thursday morning, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) publicly released 98 pages of the emails.

    If the 98 pages released by ‘assley raised this much controversy, I would imagine that the remaining 101,902 unreleased pages just might have at least one or two memos, etc. that contradict Judge Kavanaugh’s sworn testimony to Congress and the American people.

  35. two observations on the two big issues today:

    1.  NYT op ed:   if jeff sessions is mr.  anonymous, it is understandable why he will endure the “cowardly” epithets thrown his way for not acknowledging authorship and resigning at this time because that would mean the twit gets to appoint an AG who will immediately shut down mueller.  if he is, I suspect he will admit to it when the blue wave floods critterville in November or when he gets fired (whichever comes earlier).

    2. SCOTUS hearing: obviously prior declarations by Collins and Murkowski not voting for an anti-roe nominee  was the reason grassley tried to suppress the email questioning roe as “settled law”….

  37. Assley doesm’t have to worry both of those stupid ass goopers will vote for Kavanaugh and offer up a lame ass excuse

    Susan Collins has zero moral fiber

  38. If he was quoting legal scholars –it was sloppy work because it looks like he was saying there is a chance to overturn it and on more than one occasion –he’s a liar and loser and a conservative creep

  39. Smokey and the Bandit came out just after we hauled out of Mississippi so it was of interest to us.  Same with Southern Nights by Glenn Campbell.  Both gone.

    It is looking like the Senate Dems found some brass in the young un’s.  This is why I keep saying I do not want to see any Dem old enough to collect Social Security running for president.  They are raising enough hell to make a few r’s consider recommending that someone withdraw his name from the SCotUS nom.

  40. Burt was good about putting a bunch of other people to work…..and in addition :

    [Drumroll, please]

    He was responsible for getting The Great One back for another turn, this one as Sheriff Buford T.Justice.

    Thanks, Burt.

  41. I always kinda liked Burt.  Never really cared much for his non comedic acting, but his comedic roles were a lot of fun.

  42. Farewell Burt.

    Back to this:

    2h2 hours ago

    A different theory: Trump (or more likely a minion of his) wrote that NYTimes op-ed. It was done to distract all of u from the fact that the Senate RIGHT NOW is holding hearings that will lead to the elimination of Roe v Wade. Or he did it to create chaos he needs to clean house.
    Remember, Trump controls his destiny. He is smarter than all of us. Oh, really? You don’t believe that? Right. To quote him: “That’s why I’m President and you’re not!” He won by LOSING by 3 million votes. Would you or I know how to do that? If we can’t respect his evil genius…… then we will never defeat him. He’s the master distracter, the king of the misdirect, &he’s playing us all again so he can get Kavanaugh on the SC. If u cannot accept that he HATES women(except for one use)& plans to take their rights away-beginning w/ CHOICE-then we r doomed.
    He has been trying various things to create a “crisis”, an “emergency” so that he can get rid of people, enact executive orders, start a war. He knows how easy it is to instill fear in Americans and how to manipulate our darkest tendencies (racism). He’s doing it now.
    When he told us last month that what you see and hear is not actually what is happening, he’s telling you the truth – about himself! Remember— he is always lying and he is always telling you the truth. That is his weapon — and we must disarm him ASAP.

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