These Guys Could F%$# Up a 2 Car Funeral

And Donald Trump's summit with Kim Jong-un has been canceled:

President Trump on Thursday pulled out of a highly anticipated summit meeting with Kim Jong-un, accusing the North Koreans of bad faith and lamenting that “this missed opportunity is a truly sad moment in history.”

The president made his announcement in a remarkably personal, at times mournful-sounding letter to Mr. Kim, North Korea’s leader, in which he cited the North’s “tremendous anger and open hostility” in recent public statements as the specific reason for canceling the meeting.

Mr. Trump said later that the meeting, which had been scheduled for June 12 in Singapore, could still happen, and North Korea issued a strikingly conciliatory response, saying it hoped Mr. Trump would reconsider.

But Mr. Trump also renewed talk of military action against the North and vowed to keep pressing economic sanctions, guaranteeing that for now, at least, his unlikely courtship of Mr. Kim will give way to a more familiar cycle of threats and tension.

So, now we are back to nuclear chicken.  This is a YUGE screw up.

You Remember the Story of the Boy Who Cried Wolf?

After about a year and a half of a noun, a verb, and Vladimir Putin, we now have some pretty good evidence that Donald Trump and his relatives have been selling foreign policy.

We're talking an explicit quid pro quo, but you'll hear very little about this because it all fades into the miasma that is Trump's ethical lapses.

In the process of pursuing Vladimir Putin as if he were Ernst Stavro Blofeld, people have ignored the fact that Trump is deeply and profoundly corrupt, and always has been:

Today marks the 16-month anniversary of Donald Trump becoming the 45th president of the United States, and nowhere has our unlikeliest commander-in-chief placed a greater stamp on America’s place in the world than his dramatic — and sometimes arbitrary and capricious, or so it seems — shifts in foreign policy. None of these seismic changes seemed more baffling than last spring’s abrupt sellout of the Persian Gulf state of Qatar — a longtime ally where the U.S. Air Force Central Command and its 10,000 American troops are now based.

………

Trump stunned his own foreign policy team — including then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Defense Secretary James Mattis — when he tweeted that Qatar is a sponsor of terrorism and seemingly endorsed an economic and political blockage of the tiny, oil-rich nation organized and led by two powerful neighbors, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, or UAE.

………

How to make sense of a 180-degree shift in policy that seemed so counter to U.S. interests in the region? A few months later, people who suspect the worst about Trump and his minions learned a possible motive that was almost too cynical to comprehend. Not long before Team Trump switched gears on Qatar, key officials from the emirate had met with Charles Kushner — father of Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared, who’s in charge of Trump’s Middle East portfolio — to discuss a massive Qatar-funded bailout of 666 Fifth Ave., the debt-laden Manhattan skyscraper that was threatening to sink the Kushner family real estate empire. But the Qataris rejected the deal — just weeks before the policy about-face. Whatever actually happened, the appearance was simply awful. 

No, the reality is simply awful.

It also seems not to have been the full story. This weekend, the New York Times published a stunning report about a plan floated by a longtime emissary for the Saudis and the UAE in early August 2016, when Trump had just grabbed the GOP nomination but faced an uphill campaign against Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump Jr., aide Stephen Miller and Erik Prince, founder of the notorious mercenary outfit once know as Blackwater, listened intently as the emissary offered Team Trump millions of dollars in assistance, including a covert social-media campaign, to help Trump win that would be run by a former Israeli spy who specializes in psychological warfare, or psywar.

“The emissary, George Nader, told Donald Trump Jr. that the princes who led Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were eager to help his father win election as president,” the Times reported. Some key elements — exactly who was behind the plan, and what parts, if any, were carried out — remain murky.

I should mention here that Nader is a convicted felon, having served multiple sentences for child porn and sexual child abuse.  (As Anna Russel would say, "I'm not making this up, you know.")

And the corruption is pretty explicit:

As long as Trump and Jared Kushner continue to hold onto their business holdings while leading U.S. foreign policy, this cloud will remain. Did Trump voice support last week for ending American sanctions on the Chinese telecom company ZTE Corp. because it would benefit their U.S. subcontractors, or because a Chinese fund is investing $500 million in an Indonesia theme park that should dramatically boost the value of a related Trump Organization development? Then there’s the matter of Qatar, because in recent months it has become clear that the Gulf state is again in the Trump administration’s good graces, and the strategic alliance has been renewed as if last spring’s blowup never happened. Is that because it’s a more sensible policy — or is it because a firm called Brookfield Asset Management that is backed heavily by Qatari funds is near a deal to bail out Kushner’s 666 Fifth Ave? Is it any wonder that so many longtime key allies of the United States wonder if they can trust Trump’s America?

I note that Trump was thoroughly corrupt, and deeply mobbed up last year, but, instead of looking at the stuff that blatantly obvious, we have discussions of pee tapes.

It Was Inevitable………

The Trump administration is going balls to the wall to defund Planned Parenthood and reduce access to birth control services by reviving the Reagan gag rule:

The Trump administration is proposing to bar clinics that provide abortion services or referrals from receiving federal family-planning funds, a far-reaching move that would deprive Planned Parenthood and other women’s health centers of millions of dollars a year.

The proposal would require a “bright line” of physical and financial separation between clinics that receive $260 million annually in federal funding and any organization that provides abortions or referrals to abortion clinics.

The move delivers on a long-held objective of abortion opponents, who are staunch supporters of President Trump. In a statement Friday, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that it “would ensure that taxpayers do not indirectly fund abortions” and that Trump “is pleased to support” it.

The president plans to unveil the proposal Tuesday in a speech before the Susan B. Anthony List, a political action committee that opposes abortion, according to two administration officials.

The Republicans look at the Margaret Atwater's book The Handmaiden's Tale, and they think, "I gotta get me some of that."

Even by the Standards of Trump, This is Unbelievably Stupid

Donald Trump has a plan to lower drug prices in the United State.

Basically, he wants to force other countries to pay more, and then big pharma, out of the goodness of its heart, will lower prices in the USA, because the drug companies will only take as much money as they need, and won't waste it on excessive executive compensation or stock buybacks.

I'm not sure if they are being stupid, or if they think that we are this stupid, but in either case, the level of idiocy buggers the mind:

President Trump, poised on Friday to unveil his strategy to lower prescription drug prices, has an idea that may not be so popular abroad: Bring down costs at home by forcing higher prices in foreign countries that use their national health systems to make drugs more affordable.

On Tuesday, Mr. Trump rebuffed his European allies by withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal. Threatened tariffs on steel and aluminum have strained relations with other developed nations. And now the administration is suggesting policies that could hit the pocketbooks of some of America’s strongest allies.

“We’re going to be ending global freeloading,” Mr. Trump declared at a meeting with drug company executives in his first month in office. Foreign price controls, he said, reduce the resources that American drug companies have to finance research and develop new cures.

The White House Council of Economic Advisers fleshed out the idea three months ago in a report that deplored the “underpricing of drugs in foreign countries.”

The council said that profit margins on brand-name drugs in the United States were four times as high as those in the more regulated markets of major European countries and Japan. The United States, it said, needs to “address the root of the problem: foreign, developed nations, that can afford to pay for novel drugs, free-ride by setting drug prices at unfairly low levels, leaving American patients to pay for the innovation that foreign patients enjoy.”

Most of pharma research funding already comes from the governmet and big pharma spends more on advertising and marketing than they do on research, but, according to Trump and his Evil Minions^™, the problem is that they can't rape consumers hard enough.

Great googly moogly.

Oh the Huge Hannity!

It appears that in all the diatribes that Sean Hannity has launched against Robert Mueller for his raid against Trump Lawyer Michael Cohen, he forgot to mention that Cohen was his lawyer as well:

On his prime-time show last week, Fox News host Sean Hannity repeatedly criticized a federal raid on the office and home of Michael Cohen, the embattled personal attorney for President Trump.

He never mentioned anything to his viewers about his own dealings with Cohen.

Hannity’s name unexpectedly came up in court Monday as a judge hearing a motion brought by Cohen’s legal team to exclude some items seized in the raid pressed them to identify Cohen’s clients.

Cohen, who has identified himself as Trump’s “fixer,” had acknowledged representing the president and former Republican National Committee deputy finance chairman Elliott Broidy, but had initially sought to keep a third name private.

Eventually, though, Cohen attorney Todd Harrison submitted Hannity’s name — a claim Hannity almost immediately denied.

Well he would say that, wouldn't he? (MRDA)

On his syndicated radio and Fox TV show, Hannity has torn into special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Russian involvement in the 2016 presidential campaign, calling it a “witch hunt” in an echo of Trump’s rhetoric. He has also played down Cohen’s role in facilitating payments to Daniels.

………

He didn’t mention any business connection or professional relationship with Cohen.

………

Cohen’s attorney argued that it would be “embarrassing” for Cohen’s other clients to be named publicly and had sought to keep their names out of the public record, given the intense media coverage of Cohen’s legal troubles.

Yeah, I guess it is kind of embarrassing, you poor delicate snowflake.

I REALLY don't expect Fox news to do anything meaningful, but then again I NEVER expect Fox News to do anything meaningful.

Still it is amusing to see Hannity twisting in the wind.

Holy Sh%$!

The FBI just raided Michael Cohen's office.

Michael Cohen is Donald Trump's long time consiglieri lawyer, and the fact that they have raided his office, and seized his files, including his communications with clients.

As a non-lawyer, I know that this is a huge deal, because, among other things, it means that Cohen is believed to have actively broken the law, typically by something like actively facilitating fraud, not merely having advised a criminal.

I'll summarize the comments of a lawyer Ken White:

• This warrant was secured by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, the most prominent US Attorney's office in the nation outside of Washington, DC.
• They thought that they had enough evidence to apply for a warrant searching what is normally privileged communications.
• Getting a warrant to raid a lawyer's office involves MANY hoops to jump through.
• The court thought that the evidence was convincing enough to grant the warrant.

I am inclined to believe that this is about some sort of fraud, and not any sort of spy-craft involving the FSB or the GRU, particularly since Mueller has already used the "crime-fraud exception" to get some communications with Manafort's attorney.

This is a big f%$#ing deal.

Tweet of the Day

You know I try not to keep up with the latest happenings of ‘the resistance’ but am I to understand now they are protecting the powerless mom & pop business called *checks notes* Amazon from Trump? 💀

— DarkSkintDostoyevsky (@daniecal) April 4, 2018

Yeah, pretty much.

Amazon got where it was from a huge number of subsidies, like not having to collect sales taxes, and has shown itself to be a toxic workplace. (And that's not considering the tax subsidies that it gets for locating its warehouses, and the spectacle of them shaking down locan and state governments for a satellite headquarters)

If Amazon faces off against Donald Trump, I hope that there is a way that both of them can lose, but if not, I'd have a hard time selecting who I would want to be the victor.

BTW, also read Dave Dayen's take on this.  He does a good job of explaining all of this.

Tweet of the Day

One of the saddest things about this whole Russiagate frenzy to me is that there are bound to be some babies in liberal strongholds stuck with the first name Mueller 👶

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) March 30, 2018

I do remember a decade ago, when "Fitzmas" was coming, and Karl Rove was supposed to be frog marched out of the White House in Handcuffs after Patrick Fitzgerald indicted him.

Didn't happen.

Play it safe expecting parents, name your kid, "Moon Unit."

H/t Naked Capitalism.

This is a Feature, Not a Bug

The New York Times editorial board has strongly condemned the proposal by the Trump administration to add a question about immigration status to the 2020 census:

In a last-minute move that would give Republicans an advantage in maintaining control of the House of Representatives, the Trump administration is reinstating a question about citizenship to the 2020 census. Coming from an administration that has been hostile toward immigrants, the change was not surprising, but it’s galling nonetheless.

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross announced the decision Monday, less than a week before the Census Bureau, which his department oversees, is supposed to send final questions for the 2020 census to Congress. If his decision stands — the attorney general of California has filed a lawsuit to block it, and other elected officials are preparing to do so — it would be the first time in 70 years that the federal government has asked people to specify their citizenship status on the census form sent to every household.

………

Even Mr. Ross acknowledged in an October House hearing that adding questions to the census reduced response rates because “the more things you ask in those forms, the less likely you are to get them in.”

………

By now, many people have come to expect that Mr. Trump will inject politics into every decision. But even by this administration’s low standards, trifling with the census, which is required by the Constitution and is a foundation of American democracy, represents a serious breach of trust. 

Unfortunately, the Times editorial board does not have the guts to say what is really going on:  This is a nakedly partisan attempt to suppress responses to the census in Democratic locations, with the hope that they can juice the numbers to effectively Gerrymander the Congressional map even further.

This is patently and transparently corrupt.

Yeah, This Amuses the Hell out of Me Too

It appears that Donald Trump is having a devil of a time finding counsel willing to represent him,

My guess is because as is clear to even my legal mind, Donald Trump is the client from hell:

Two more high-power attorneys have had to turn down President Donald Trump. Tom Buchanan and Dan Webb confirmed to The Daily Beast that Trump reached out to them about representing him, and that they couldn’t do it.

“President Trump reached out to Dan Webb and Tom Buchanan to provide legal representation,” they said in a statement. “They were unable to take on the representation due to business conflicts. However they consider the opportunity to represent the President to be the highest honor and they sincerely regret that they cannot do so. They wish the president the best and believe he has excellent representation in Ty Cobb and Jay Sekulow.”

………

Buchanan and Webb’s decision highlights the challenges the president has faced in assembling a legal team to represent him for matters related to the Mueller probe. Over the weekend, Trump tweeted that numerous lawyers were eager to work for him. But so far, his team has been shrinking rather than expanding.

There are good clients, and bad clients, and awful clients, and then there is Donald Trump, and lawyers simply do not want to deal with his crap.

Heh.

Sauce for the Gander, I Guess

At Least, There is Symmetry

It turns out that we may have another dress figuring in a Presidential sex scandal:

I honestly thought Stormy Daniels' friend Alana Evans was just trolling CNN with this, but maybe there's something to it.

During a much longer interview with CNN's Jim Sciutto, Stormy's friend Alana Evans told him she was unaware of any texts, pictures or video but there was one thing. One little thing.

"All I know is that Stormy still has the dress that she wore rom that night," Evans told Sciutto.

Nonplussed, he asked, "And she kept that for what reason?"

As if everyone's mind didn't go to Monica Lewinsky's little blue dress. Please.

Of course, the Republicans are not going to do anything if this whole mess pans out, even if Trump were to, "Put half a dozen children on a spit and toast them at the flame that comes out of his mouth," as playwright Christopher Fry so colo(u)rfully put it many years ago, the Republican base would continue to support him.

Still, watching him squirm on a matter which won't have the effect of f%$#ing up the world for the next few decades amuses me.

They Have Managed to Outrage Me Again

So, Donald Trump has fired Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State (via Twitter, no less) and announced his intent to replace him with current CIA head Mike Pompeo.

This is not a shock, it's been telegraphed for a while, and it is a not an outrage.

What is an outrage is who has been named to replace Pompeo at the CIA, Gina Haspel, the inspiration for the main character in the Leni Riefenstahl Kathryn Bigelow film Zero Dark Thirty, who ran the CIA torture camp in Thialand, and then destroyed evidence to evade Congressional oversight:

Donald Trump’s pick for head of the Central Intelligence Agency, Gina Haspel, reportedly oversaw a black site prison in Thailand where terrorism suspects were tortured. She briefly ran the prison in 2002, anonymous officials told the Associated Press.

Deputy CIA director could face court deposition over post-9/11 role in torture

If the US Senate confirms Haspel, she would be the first female director of the agency, but the historic significance of her nomination was immediately overshadowed by her reported link to the black site, where two suspected al-Qaida members were waterboarded.

“The fact that she’s been able to stay in the agency, rise in the agency and now is in line to be director should be deeply troubling,” Larry Siems, author of the Torture Report, a book analysing government documents relating to Bush-era torture released in 2014, told the Guardian.

Haspel also drafted a cable ordering the destruction of CIA interrogation videos in 2005.

A US justice department investigation into the tapes’ destruction ended without charges, but the event helped spark a landmark investigation into US detentions and interrogations.

Christopher Anders, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Washington legislative office, claimed Haspel “was up to her eyeballs in torture”.

Anders urged the CIA to declassify her torture record before the Senate considers her nomination.

She has been described as having, "Ran a laboratory for torture."

This crap has me agreeing with John Sidney McCain III, who has described her as a representing, "One of the darkest chapters in American history," which is a complete mind f%$# to me.

While we are at it, it should be noted that German prosecutors are considering issuing an arrest warrant against Haspel for her torture.

Once again, the world has exceeded my already blindingly low expectations.

She should be in jail, but Obama decided, in defiance of signed treaties, to prosecute any of the torturers.

Thanks, Obama.

This is like the Trumpest thing ever.

You may have heard that Donald Trump was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Normally, this means that some random person, one without the ability to actually nominate someone for the award.

It appears that some bright fellow, no doubt a graduate of Trump University, added a twist to that process, they engaged in identity theft to make his nomination appear official:

The Norwegian Nobel Committee, which selects winners of the peace prize, says someone using a stolen identity has nominated President Donald Trump for the award.

The Norwegian news agency NTB quoted committee secretary Olav Njolstad as saying it appears the same person was responsible for forging nominations in 2017, as well.

Njolstad declined to identify the person, adding that Norwegian police had been informed.

We Have Reached Peak Trump.

Cowardly Pissant

Last year, Donald Trump signed an executive order repealing an Obama order limiting firearms access to people with psychological issues.

Now that someone has murdered 17 people at a high school, his administration is refusing to release a photo of his signing the order:

The White House has refused to release a photo of President Donald Trump signing a law making it easier for some people with mental illness to buy guns.

Despite repeated requests from CBS News, the White House press office has issued only a one-line response.

Mr Trump last year repealed an Obama-era rule allowing the names of certain people on mental health benefits to be entered into a criminal database.

The controversy follows a shooting by a suspect who had mental health issues.

………

CBS News says it requested a copy of the image - which White House photographers confirm exists - 12 separate times by phone or email.

White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders has only said in a note dated 19 April 2017: "We don't plan to release the picture at this time."

CBS News asked the White House again on Thursday to release the photo, but has not received a response.

He really is a chicken sh%$, isn't he.

I am Updating the Bad Hair Web Page

In the old days of the internet, I quickly realized that I could not create a particularly useful web page, so I deliberately created a useless one, dedicated to bad hair.

Because of an incident as he boarded Air Force One, I have updated my Bad Hair Web Page.

It's my first update since 2001, when I added Jim Trafficant.

This might be the lamest page on the web.

H/t Cthulhu at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

The Bottom Line Is That These Are Evil Hateful Ratf%$#S

Because hurting the chronically ill and infirm sexually arouses them, the Trump administration is looking to add lifetime limits to Medicaid.

This is in addition their proposal to add a work requirement:

After allowing states to impose work requirements for Medicaid enrollees, the Trump administration is now pondering lifetime limits on adults’ access to coverage.

Capping health care benefits — like federal welfare benefits — would be a first for Medicaid, the joint state-and-federal health plan for low-income and disabled Americans.

If approved, the dramatic policy change would recast government-subsidized health coverage as temporary assistance by placing a limit on the number of months adults have access to Medicaid benefits.

The move would continue the Trump administration’s push to inject conservative policies into the Medicaid program through the use of federal waivers, which allow states more flexibility to create policies designed to promote personal and financial responsibility among enrollees.

However, advocates say capping Medicaid benefits would amount to a massive breach of the nation’s social safety net designed to protect children, the elderly and the impoverished.

In January, the Trump administration approved waiver requests from Kentucky and Indiana to terminate Medicaid coverage for able-bodied enrollees who do not meet new program work requirements. Ten other states have asked to do the same.

These folks really should have drowned at birth.

I Am Not Drunk Blogging the State of the Union Speech

I am actually not watching it as all.

Watching it sober would be masochistic, and drunk blogging it would probably leave me in a coma.

Tweet of the Day

Just received my ticket for the State of the Union. Looks like @BetsyDeVosEd was in charge of spell checking... #SOTUniom pic.twitter.com/ZgFTGtTkzv

— Raul M. Grijalva (@RepRaulGrijalva) January 29, 2018

I've verified this on Snopes, it is true.

I swear, the Trump administration couldn't organize a piss-up in a brewery, but this is probably a good thing, because it makes them less effective at prosecuting their agenda.

Signs of the Apocalypse

Jonah f%$#ing Goldberg is the voice of reason (I cannot believe I just said that) on the GOP's demonization of the FBI: (I also cannot believe that I am linking to the National f%$#ing Review)

He's saying that this stuff is overheated, and people should wait until we have more data.

When Jonah Goldberg is the voice of reason on any issue, you have entered the Twilight Zone.

This Is a Truly Sick Burn

Donald Trump contacted the Guggenheim Museum and asked to borrow a Van Goch to hang in the Presidential Residence.

The museum declined his request, but offered a recently closed exhibit:

The emailed response from the Guggenheim’s chief curator to the White House was polite but firm: The museum could not accommodate a request to borrow a painting by Vincent van Gogh for President and Melania Trump’s private living quarters.

Instead, wrote the curator, Nancy Spector, another piece was available, one that was nothing like “Landscape With Snow,” the 1888 van Gogh rendering of a man in a black hat walking along a path in Arles, France, with his dog.

The curator’s alternative: an 18-karat, fully functioning, solid gold toilet — an interactive work titled “America” that critics have described as pointed satire aimed at the excess of wealth in this country.

For a year, the Guggenheim had exhibited “America” — the creation of contemporary artist Maurizio Cattelan — in a public restroom on the museum’s fifth floor for visitors to use.

But the exhibit was over and the toilet was available “should the President and First Lady have any interest in installing it in the White House,” Spector wrote in an email obtained by The Washington Post.

BAM!