Inaugural Donors: Phony Numbers and Front Groups.

Pablo Delcan; Jonathan Ernst/Reuters.

President Donald Trump smashed records this month with a reported $107 million dollar worth of donations to the “58th Presidential Inaugural Committee”—doubling the amount received in 2009 by former President Barack Obama. But a deep dive into Trump’s Federal Election Committee filing, spearheaded by the Huffington Post’s Christina Wilkie, presents evidence that a large number of donors used “phony records” or are “front groups.”

“Wow: Scores of donors to Trump’s inauguration are phony records or front groups. Help us did, spreadsheet is open! https://t.co/e7IVvIx8gB”

The look into all this fraud is being crowd-sourced, if you can help dig around a bit, do so!

Via Raw Story.

Paranoid and Delusional.

Jim Cooke/FMG.

Doctors are speaking out, once again, about the Tiny Tyrant’s mental state. I don’t think it has escaped anyone’s notice that Trump is not exactly the most stable of individuals; nor that his ego is a monstrosity truly out of control. I have no doubt that even the Trump Faithful have noticed this, they just find justifications and rationalizations for it. The big problem here is power. The amount of harm Trump could cause outside of the political arena was high, on an individual level, however, the possibility for harm now is past the stratosphere. This is not someone you want in charge of a monstrously over-powered military and weapons. This is not someone who should even be close to knowing the nuclear codes. This is not someone who can pull off a brinksmanship game with nukes, because no sane person would even consider doing such a thing, the potential for catastrophe is simply too high. The other terrifying aspect to all that is that Trump has no resources other than his standby of bullying. He’s not knowledgeable, he’s not in the least shamed by his willful ignorance; he’s a 70something year old white man who relies completely on Fox News for his information. This does not make him different from all those other 70something white men who do the same, but they aren’t sitting in the perch of power, and no one really cares about whatever nutty stuff they might believe, thanks to Fox feeding.

As usual, there’s much talk about violating the Goldwater Rule, but we aren’t talking about someone who is campaigning anymore, we are talking about someone who has secured a position of great power, and someone who is not mentally or emotionally capable of handling such power. We should not be so cowed, as individuals or as a society, to hush everything up based on politeness, a la you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead. There’s a time and place for such courtesies, but this is not one of them. There’s a maniacal, knowledge-deficient bully sitting in the white house, who is swayed by the last person to speak with him. This is not someone who is a thinker, let alone an independent thinker. This is a person who is utterly dependent on the thoughts and feelings of others, and does most things on a whim, much like turning into Mr. Tweet in order to parrot Fox and Friends on Twitter. There should be a discussion of Trump’s overall health, and that most certainly includes his mental health.

Donald Trump has a “dangerous mental illness” and is not fit to lead the US, a group of psychiatrists has warned during a conference at Yale University.

Mental health experts claimed the President was “paranoid and delusional”, and said it was their “ethical responsibility” to warn the American public about the “dangers” Mr Trump’s psychological state poses to the country.

Speaking at the conference at Yale’s School of Medicine on Thursday, one of the mental health professionals, Dr John Gartner, a practising psychotherapist who advised psychiatric residents at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, said: “We have an ethical responsibility to warn the public about Donald Trump’s dangerous mental illness.”

[…]

The doctors have said that even if it is in breach of tradition ethical standards of psychiatry, it was necessary to break their silence on the matter because they feared “too much is at stake”.

It is not the first time Mr Trump’s mental health has been called into question. In February, Duty to Warn, which consists of psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers, signed an open letter warning that his mental state “makes him incapable of serving safely as president”.

The letter warned that the  President’s tendency to “distort reality” to fit his “personal myth of greatness” and attack those who challenge him with facts was likely to increase in a position of power.

The Independent has the full story.

Also see: Narcissist-in-Chief, A Psychological Take on a Political Reality.

The Weekly White House Bible Study.

Photo via AP.

Evangelism everywhere, promoting a theocracy, with a firm footing in the white house.

…The schedule does not list who attended that session, but Ralph Drollinger, a right-wing pastor with a long history of ties to Perry and other Trump Administration officials, claims on his web site to be running weekly Bible sessions specially for the Trump Cabinet. He has praised the new administration for its power to “change the course of America in ways that are biblical.”

[…]

In a January radio interview, Drollinger praised then-senator Jeff Sessions, who “hungers and thirsts for the Scripture,” for his performance during his confirmation hearing, when he provided a Biblical justification for his draconian views on immigration. “I’ve had the distinct honor of teaching him on this subject, and many others,” Drollinger said. “There’s nothing more exciting, when you’re a Bible teacher, to see one of the guys you’re working with—to see him or her articulate something you’ve taught them when they’re under the gun.”

Vice President Mike Pence, HUD Secretary Ben Carson, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, CIA Director Mike Pompeo, nominee for Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, HHS Secretary Tom Price, and Scott Pruitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, have all sponsored the Capitol Ministries Cabinet Bible study, according to literature put out by Capitol Ministries.

The Cabinet Bible study is the just newest piece of what Drollinger has described as a “para-church ministry” with a “target audience” of political members. In a September 2015 interview, Drollinger described his mission as creating a “factory” to mass-produce politicians like Michele Bachmann, who is on the Capitol Ministries board. “She thinks Biblically,” Drollinger said. “She doesn’t need a whole lot of time to figure out how to vote because she sees the world through a scriptural lens. We need more men and women like her in office.”

[…]

For an outside group to hold an event in a Congressional building, they must be sponsored by a senator or representative; dozens of Members of Congress sponsored Drollinger’s group, including Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, Tom Price, and Sessions while they were all still on Capitol Hill. Rep. Mike Conaway, who recently took over the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election from Devin Nunes, is also a Capitol Ministries sponsor.

Now, Capitol Ministries holds three separate Bible Studies each week which it describes in its literature: one for Cabinet members (“7:00 am Wednesdays Mornings. Location Undisclosed. Light Refreshments Served.”); one for the Senate (“8:00 am Tuesdays, Rotating Offices of Senators. Hot Breakfast Served.”); and one for members of the House (“Capitol H324: Monday or Tuesday Evenings after First Votes Back. Dinner Served.”) In an interview in January, Drollinger described the House study as feeling like a truck stop and the Senate study feeling like a country club.

Everything in the article is highly disturbing and frightening. Recommended Reading. Fusion has the full story.

Oh Great, Another Slogan: Buy American, Hire American.

Noel McKay, left, a program manager and Karen Latina, right, a biotech consultant, hold up signs during a Tech Stands Up rally on Pi Day, Tuesday, March 14, 2017, outside City Hall in Palo Alto, Calif. Subcontracted tech service workers and direct tech employees rallied together to call on their companies and CEOs to stand with their workers against injustice and hate. CREDIT: AP Photo/Eric Risberg.

As a conservative columnist recently pointed out, the Tiny Tyrant is acting the full lame duck by concentrating on Executive Orders very early on. This is usually not seen until much later, usually when congress is busy blocking a president. The Tiny Tyrant has also turned to “foreign policy” in attempt to overshadow investigations and come across as doing something. The latest EO was announced in Wisconsin, at the expense of the Paris Climate Accord meeting. Now we have “Buy American, Hire American”, which, as Jake Tapper pointed out, is the height of hypocrisy when it comes to Trump’s own business dealings, which depend greatly on immigrant workers and the H-1B visa program. Of course, I’m sure he’ll declare all his little cash cows to be exempt. Contrary to the Tiny Tyrant’s constant vow of jobs and greatness and all that other crap, every move he has made so far is damn near custom-tailored to crash the economy, and this move will accelerate that considerably, if congress can be swayed to enforce it. Whether or not that will happen remains to be seen.

The “Buy American, Hire American” executive order emphasizes enforcement of “Buy American laws” that will encourage government agencies and Americans to buy and hire American. The main thrust of the order calls on cabinet secretaries to implement administrative changes and produce reports that identify potential abuses of the H-1B visa program, which awarded 85,000 work visas this year to foreign knowledge workers through a lottery system, and look for ways the government can only award contracts to American business owners.

Regarding immigration, the order doesn’t address the administration’s main criticisms of the H-1B program, such as exploitatively low pay and replacing the lottery system to guarantee recipients are the best candidates for the positions. It also carries little weight on its own.

“It doesn’t do anything,” said William Stock, president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) in Philadelphia. That’s because the changes Trump campaigned on need to be approved by Congress.

[…]

The policy proposal sent a chill through the tech industry, which heavily depends on H-1B workers to fill out full-time and contract positions. That tension intensified earlier this year, after Trump signed his first executive order restricting entry of immigrants from or traveling from several Muslim-majority countries and companies such as Google required resident employees abroad to immediately return to the U.S.

The White House’s tenuous relationship with Silicon Valley was strained further as Trump’s policies homed in on issues central to the tech industry’s ethos and economic health. And with cracking down on H-1B visas in his sights, there’s concern Trump could hurt the economy he’s trying to help.

 […]

Besides a potential congressional hurdle, there could still be economic consequences to Trump’s desired changes, especially when it comes to funding existing programs and trade.

For example, further restricting H-1B visas could actually result in taking jobs away from American workers by encouraging companies to relocate, Stock said. That would create more jobs in places like Ireland, India (which is currently the biggest recipient of H-1B visas), China, and countries in South America, where there are growing IT workforces.

“If the workers can’t come here, then companies are going to have to go where the workforce is,” Stock said. “The unintended consequences are going to outweigh what he was trying to achieve.”

[…]

Restricting H-1B visas or prioritizing American businesses also doesn’t replace jobs lost due to the collapse of manufacturing or mining industries.

Dan Ikenson, the director for trade policy at the Cato Institute a libertarian think tank in Washington, D.C., said the order looks tough, especially when it comes to government contract spending. But he worried that Trump’s emphasis on only awarding government contracts to American companies could mean that taxpayers lose out. From a free market perspective, Ikenson said, there should be as many foreign companies as possible bidding for government contracts.

“You need the competition,” Ikenson said, arguing that only contracting with American businesses could result in overspending. “We shouldn’t just assume that it’s good for America if Americans transact with other Americans.”

That economic stance is why Trump’s immigration policies have garnered criticism from economists across the political spectrum.

“We need smart foreign workers to come here and share their ideas,” Ikenson said. “Immigrants are 50 percent more likely than Americans to start new businesses.”

Think Progress has the full story.

That Bill Clinton Sure Messed Up With Kim-Jong Un!

CREDIT: Fox News screengrab.

The King of Idiots has been talking again, and, as usual, the stupid is simply too much to bear. Do his people not know he’s fucking stupid and willfully ignorant? Why do they not have someone adding a strip of masking tape to his tie with correct names on it? Something, some sort of cheat sheet, so that at least thinking Americans do not have to cringe with body contorting embarrassment every time this doofus opens his mouth. As usual, the Tiny Tyrant just had to find a way to disrespect former presidents, as disrespect is all he seems to be good at, as an unpresident and person. What will the Spicer Shit Spin on this one be, “oh, oh, well, those names are hard to tell apart!”?

After referencing Pence’s trip, Earhardt asked Trump whether he has ruled out a military strike against North Korea.

Trump responded by saying he doesn’t “want to telegraph” what he’s “doing or thinking,” but went on to suggest the time for talk is over.

“They’ve been talking with this gentleman for a long time,” Trump said, apparently referencing former American presidents’ negotiations with North Korea. “You read Clinton’s book, he said, ‘Oh, we made such a great peace deal,’ and it was a joke.”

[…]

But the “gentleman” Trump referred to, Kim Jong-un, has only been in power since the 2011 death of his father, Kim Jong-il, so he certainly never negotiated with President Clinton. In fact, the October 1994 Clinton “peace deal” that Trump referred to in this interview was largely negotiated before the death of Kim Il-sung, Kim Jung-un’s grandfather, in July of that year.

Trump’s ahistorical comments about North Korea’s leadership were reminiscent of his now-infamous remarks about abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass during an event commemorating the start of Black History Month on February 1st.

“Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job that is being recognized more and more, I notice.” Douglass died in 1895.

The president’s apparent confusion about who’s in charge of North Korea also comes just days after he erroneously described missile strikes he approved against the Assad regime in Syria as “heading to Iraq.”

Think Progress has the full story, and a video, if you can stomach it.

Apocalyptic Vision: The Cultured He-Man and Survival Bros.

Valentino says he lives for months at a time in the woods. But he also likes art galleries and classical music. (Joe Riedl).

The doomsday prepper business is booming in Oregon, as well as other places. Willamette Week has a look at some of the apocalyptic entrepreneurs, from Valentino to a professional cuddler Survival Bro, to wealthy conservatives getting even wealthier in the apocalypse business. There’s a great deal of unintentional hilarity in the article, as well as the blatant fearmongering of the wealthier side of this business, so I recommend reading the whole thing.

…This is, after all, his business. For $190, he will take you up on the mountain for an “immersive, advanced survival training” course. His target market: “preppers”—a term commonly used to describe people obsessed with surviving cataclysmic societal collapse.

It’s a booming market.

“This is in vogue,” Valentino says.

[…]

Schlepping his packs on a plastic sled, Valentino leads a photographer and me over the snowy trail away from the parking lot at Barlow Pass Sno Park.

Partway up the trail, he remembers: “Oh! Safety.” He proceeds to explain all that could go wrong.

Mount Hood could explode. There could be an earthquake—he felt several tremors last year. Cougars could pounce from trees and eat our kidneys. We could disappear in a snow-covered pit. We could be impaled by a tree. Assuming good cellular service, help is two hours away.

Later, he remembers another thing. “I forgot,” he says. “Today there is avalanche warning.”

[…]

In the event of a catastrophe, Valentino says, Mount Hood will be no refuge. He expects it will be overrun with poorly trained, overconfident, trigger-happy preppers—more dangerous than in the city, where at least one could still find food and shelter.

“Let’s talk about shit hit the fan,” Valentino says. “People will not survive in the woods. They can’t. Something will happen. The cold will take them down. Or their own brain will take them down. And what if people have children?”

When the big shocks come, you won’t catch this mountain man running for the hills. Instead, he says, he’ll be in the city, helping others.

[…]

From a home base in Clatsop County, Ore., Cameron McKirdy runs a YouTube channel and website, survivalbros.com.

The site bills itself as “more than an emergency preparedness blog”: It’s also a “strong community” and an “alternative news” source (think conspiracy king Alex Jones). With his infotainment brand, McKirdy markets himself to millennials as a high-protein, fluoride-free guide to scraping by in the dystopian chaos.

[…]

McKirdy, 33, grew up in Seaside and attended the University of Oregon. He started taking survivalism seriously after a 2011 tsunami warning.

Like many people his age, he’s juggling multiple gigs. He was an announcer at mixed martial arts fights, but now he’s an on-call professional cuddler with Portland business Cuddle Up to Me, offering platonic embraces for $1 a minute.

McKirdy also works retail at a nutrition store, which confers a discount on the protein powders that compose much of his diet. Sometimes he wins cash prizes in eating competitions, and he makes about $100 a month from ads on his Survival Bros YouTube channel, which has roughly 6,000 subscribers.

[…]

Since McKirdy’s method amounts to small-time grifting, I ask what the difference is between being a Survival Bro and a hobo. “I prioritize self-care and hygiene,” he replies.

[…]

From their $844,000 home in Portland’s West Hills, David and Beth Pruett travel the country selling homemade first-aid kits and teaching informal classes about emergency medicine.

Since living through the San Francisco earthquake in 1989, the Pruetts have stockpiled supplies, made checklists and practiced for the next disaster. David is a U.S. Navy veteran and an emergency medicine doctor at Oregon Health & Science University.

In 2011, David designed a compact, individual first-aid kit, the iFak, which is short for “individual first-aid kit” and stocked with medicines, bandages, implements and adhesives. Soon the couple turned their hobby into a preparedness business and blog, amp-3.net, which Beth runs from home, selling iFaks, radio gear, books like The Survival Nurse and Modern Weapons Caching, and some self-produced instructional DVDs. In 2015, Beth says, Amp-3 topped $140,000 in sales.

They get a lot of online sales, but it’s more effective to go where the customers are: prepper conventions.

The full story is here.

Trump’s Ties to Organized Crime.

Donald Trump, by Jason Mecier.

Alternet has a breakdown on the well-established ties to organized crime which Trump has had for years on end. This really shouldn’t surprise anyone, but if it helps open some eyes, good.

As President Trump discovers the prerogative of unilaterally making war, the media gaze has turned away from the ongoing FBI, House and Senate investigation of his Russia ties to the simpler dramas of cruise missiles, big bombs and tough but loose talk on North Korea.

Yet even the “mother of all bombs” cannot obliterate the accumulating body of evidence about his relationship with Russian organized crime figures and the not unrelated question about whether he and his entourage colluded with Russian officials in the 2016 presidential election. The story, notes Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall, is “Hiding in plain sight.”

The evidence of pre-election collusion between Trump and the Russians, while growing, is far from definitive. The evidence on Trump’s organized crime ties is stronger. Says Marshall:

“If we’d never heard about Russian intelligence hacking of the 2016 election or Carter Page or Paul Manafort or Sergei Kislyak this [Trump’s organized crime connections] would seem like an extraordinarily big deal. And indeed it is an extraordinarily big deal.”

Chronologically speaking, Trump’s ties to organized crime figures came first. Mutually beneficial transactions dating back to the 1990s led to closer relations in the 2000s and culminated in the contacts during the 2016 campaign. It all began with Russians who wanted to get their money out of the country.

Alternet has the full story.

China, Russia Chasing U.S. Carrier.

USS Carl Vinson. (Jo Jung-ho/Yonhap via AP, File).

China and Russia aren’t too happy with the Tiny Tyrant’s tough toddler obsession with nuclear weapons, nor his increasing instability without a first thought, let alone a second. They have dispatched intelligence gathering ships to dog the U.S. Carrier. I’m grateful for their intervention, such as it is at this time. I have not been this scared of nuclear war since I was a child. As nuclear tensions de-escalated through much of my lifetime, I had hoped to make it through the rest of life without having to worry about being crispy crittered or dying a slow death in nuclear winter. Now we have a maniac in the white house who is nursing a 30 year obsession with nuclear weapons with an itchy trigger finger.

China and Russia have dispatched intelligence-gathering vessels from their navies to chase the USS Carl Vinson nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, which is heading toward waters near the Korean Peninsula, multiple sources of the Japanese government revealed to The Yomiuri Shimbun.

It appears that both countries aim to probe the movements of the United States, which is showing a stance of not excluding military action against North Korea. The Self-Defense Forces are strengthening warning and surveillance activities in the waters and airspace around the area, according to the sources.

The aircraft carrier strike group, composed of the Carl Vinson at its core with guided-missile destroyers and other vessels, is understood to be around the East China Sea and heading north toward waters near the Korean Peninsula.

China and Russia, which prioritize stability in the Korean Peninsula, showed concern over the tough U.S. stance, with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov saying the issue should be resolved peacefully through political and diplomatic efforts.

The dispatch of the intelligence-gathering vessels appears to be partly aimed at sending a warning signal to the United States.

Full story here.

America The Ugly. Ugly, Ugly, Ugly.

Credit: Screenshot, Fox News.

In a disgusting, repellent display, even for those purveyors of disgusting, Fox News thought it would be appropriate to show the Moab bombing of Afghanistan, overlaid with treacly jingoism in the form of country music. As much as I love words, I don’t have enough for this perversion, my gorge is rising. I’ll include one of the videos here, if you can cope with it. I suggest not playing, I did, and it made me want to vomit.

That didn’t stop Fox News, however. President Trump’s favorite television program — Fox and Friends — celebrated the bombing, with a soundtrack to boot.

“The video is black and white. But that is what freedom looks like, that’s the red white and blue,” host Ainsley Earhardt said after the program showed the video of the bomb dropping in Afghanistan.

“One of my favorite things in 16 years at Fox News is watching bombs drop on bad guys,” Geraldo Rivera says.

Oh. In that case, I look forward to someone dropping a bomb on Fox News.

The video was shown overlaid with country star Toby Keith singing the chorus of “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue,” which celebrates the military with jingoistic fervor:

“Hey Uncle Sam, put your name at the top of his list
And the Statue of Liberty started shakin’ her fist
And the eagle will fly man, it’s gonna be hell
When you hear mother freedom start ringin’ her bell
And it feels like the whole wide world is raining down on you
Brought to you courtesy of the red white and blue.”

Later in the program, Fox and Friends showed the video again, again overlaying it with uber-patriotic country music.

“We’ll play a little music, demonstrate the moment of impact there in Afghanistan on the MOAB in Nangarhar province,” host Pete Hegseth says, as the video plays under Kid Rock singing “born free.”

[…]

Fox News, which was the most-watched cable network of 2016 and is a primary source of news for millions of Americans (including, it seems, the President), isn’t overly concerned about those deaths, however.

“I think it is very, very important we kill bad guys but there is no denying that the issue of friendly fire is really egregious,” Rivera said, only to be immediately rebutted by host Pete Hegseth.

“Why go there first, Geraldo?” said Hegseth. “Civilian casualties happen. We’re going against an enemy that cuts off our heads.”

Oh right, seems yours hasn’t been cut off, has it, you fucking moron? Have there been waves of the Mother Of All Swords landing here in the good ol’ U.S. of Amerikka, resulting in thousands of heads rolling? I haven’t noticed anything like that at all. Not that I’d be entirely against certain heads rolling, and I’m looking at Fox News. I’d most likely favour a guillotine though. More efficient. Goddamn disgusting asshole apes, chattering away, ever so excited over dead people. Celebrating. Yeah, why ever go there, ’cause you know, people die, who gives a shit, lookit that bomb go! Of course, when other people fight back against that sort of thing, they are the bad ones. And, they are the bad ones when they become radicalized because bombs keep being dropped on them, killing people. Those people that don’t matter, because hot damn, lookit at that thing go! Fucking barbaric animals.

:Spits:

Think Progress has the story.

Flight Pattern.

A ballet about the plight of refugees, commissioned for the Royal Opera House, has been showered with five star reviews and described with words like potent and sombre. It’s the work of the Canadian Crystal Pite who has built a reputation as one of the most respected choreographers of her generation – and who is the first woman to have created a new work for the Royal Ballet in almost two decades. It’s titled ‘Flight Pattern’ and Kirsty Wark went to speak to her about using dance to engage in a difficult harrowing subject.

Beautiful and so very poignant. I wish I could see this in person.

A Shambolic Adhocracy.

Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast.

Rick Wilson has an incisive and wonderfully caustic take on the current state of … affairs. Just a bit here, the whole column is highly recommended reading.

Trump is faced with terrible options when it comes to rearranging the deck chairs on the SS White House, and those of us who warned you this was inevitable are ordering popcorn. The cancer in the presidency isn’t his staff—though they reflect his shoddy intellect, his shallow impulsiveness, his loose grasp of reality, and Chinese-menu ideology. The problem is Trump himself, and nothing and no one can change that.

[…]

What about some of the other ideas in play? Might a D.C. Wise Man/Usual Suspect of the old school right this ship? This too is a path where Trump can’t win.

First, it’s an instant way to alienate his base of fervent “burn down da gubbmint and let Trump be King” morons. A swamp veteran is going to smooth down the edges, take away Trump’s tweeting phone, cut deals with Congress, and fire the embarrassing mouth-breathers like Scavino, Gorka, and their like. He’ll work deals, manage expectations, and close the Oval Office to the random calls and visits that send President ADHD’s agenda bouncing wildly as an ideological Pachinko machine.

Some of the people mentioned are smart, competent folks with decades of experience in the folkways and traditions of D.C. Some know how to manage large, complex operations. Here’s the problem; no White House chief of staff can change Trump’s essential character. No White House chief of staff can set up a chain of reporting and accountability for a man who is driven almost entirely by the need to draw every particle of praise and adoration into the event horizon of the black hole of his boundless, hungry ego.

A strong, effective chief of staff would be of enormous benefit to this president, but so would avoiding Kentucky Fried Chicken, early morning tweet frenzies, and 20 hours of Fox News every day.

[…]

The shambolic adhocracy of his White House is a perfect reflection of Trump’s own chaotic, disordered thought process and lack of mental discipline, and that’s not changing any time soon.

Full column here, highly recommended.

100 Days: Re-branding the Regime.

President Donald Trump’s communications team is plotting to divide their first 100 days into three categories of accomplishments, according to people familiar with plans. | Getty.

Oh, that 100 days. It looms, and there’s a desperate effort underway to pull off a magical “re-branding” of the regime. Yep. That’s the caliber of our current government, spending time on trying to come up with catchy phrases and massive spin on all those “great accomplishments” so far. I can’t honestly say this is any sort of competent regime, any more than I can say it’s any form of government at all. It isn’t. We’re the country of failed mail-order steaks, but hey, we’re gonna have a new brand, so everything is greeeeaaaaat, you betcha!

The symbolic 100-day mark by which modern presidents are judged menaces for an image-obsessed chief executive whose opening sprint has been marred by legislative stumbles, legal setbacks, senior staff kneecapping one another, the resignation of his national security adviser and near-daily headlines and headaches about links to Russia.

The date, April 29, hangs over the West Wing like the sword of Damocles as the unofficial deadline to find their footing— or else.

[…]

“One hundred days is the marker, and we’ve got essentially two-and-a-half weeks to turn everything around,” said one White House official. “This is going to be a monumental task.”

For a president who often begins and ends his days imbibing cable news, the burden has fallen heavily on a press team that recognizes how well they sell Trump’s early tenure in the media will likely color the president’s appetite for an internal shake-up.

That was the backdrop for a tense planning session for the 100-day mark last week.

More than 30 Trump staffers piled into a conference room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building adjoining the White House, according to a half-dozen attendees who described the Tuesday meeting.

Mike Dubke, Trump’s communications director, and his deputy, Jessica Ditto, kicked off the discussion of how to package Trump’s tumultuous first 100 days by pitching the need for a “rebranding” to get Trump back on track.

“I think the president’s head would explode if he heard that,” one of the White House officials present said.

Oh, the need to re-brand “Trump”, yes, I imagine that one wouldn’t go over well.

Staffers, including counselor Kellyanne Conway, were broken into three groups, complete with whiteboards, markers and giant butcher-block-type paper to brainstorm lists of early successes. One group worked in the hallway.

“It made me feel like I was back in 5th grade,” complained another White House aide who was there. “That’s the best way I could describe it.”

Dubke, who did not work on the campaign, told the assembled aides that international affairs would present a messaging challenge because the president lacks a coherent foreign policy. Three days later, Trump would order missile strikes in Syria in a reversal of years of previous opposition to such intervention.

“There is no Trump doctrine,” Dubke declared.

Some in the room were stunned by the remark.

“It rubbed people the wrong way because on the campaign we were pretty clear about what he wanted to do,” said a third White House official in the room, “He was elected on a vision of America First. America First is the Trump doctrine.”

“America First” is not a doctrine. It’s not anything. It’s a bit of rhetoric tossed out like a barbed net to catch the slowest swimmers. It doesn’t mean jack shit.

As for the rebranding remark, Dubke said that had been misinterpreted. “There is not a need for a rebranding but there is a need to brand the first 100 days,” Dubke said. “Because if we don’t do it the media is going to do it. That’s what our job is.”

Oh, the dishonesty. Yes, you’re trying to re-brand, and you’re in desperate need of something, after all, you can’t be dropping missiles and bombs every day, right? As for the media, it would be nice if the assholes who decided tossing random missiles was presidential would pull their head out of their arses, but you can’t blame media for reporting the facts.

Trump’s communications team is now plotting to divide their first 100 days into three categories of accomplishments, according to people familiar with plans: “prosperity” (such as new manufacturing jobs, reduced regulations and pulling out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal), “accountability” (following through on swamp-draining campaign promises such as lobbying restrictions) and “safety/security” (including the dramatic reduction in border crossing and the strike in Syria).

:Snort: Well, the Pants on Fire teams will be busy. Trump has not done any of that, except to lie his arse off about it all. Everyone already knows the strike in Syria was a meaningless attempt to shore up ratings.

Trump aides are grappling with the reality that they will end this opening period with no significant legislative achievements other than rolling back Obama-era regulations. Even the White House’s most far-reaching success, the confirmation of Justice Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, required the Senate rewriting its own rules to overcome Democratic opposition.

Yes, 45 to 50 years of hard fought for legislation which helped all people, and protected our land and water, all gone. So fuckin’ yay for you, idiots. That’s quite the “accomplishment”, making sure it will take people decades on end to repair all the damage done so far.

Though the White House continues to push for progress on stalled health care legislation, there are only five legislative days remaining once Congress returns from a two-week spring break. Plus, another deadline looms: Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress must still pass a bill before April 28 to keep the government running.

If they fail, a shutdown would begin on Trump’s 100th day in office.

And that would be Trump business as usual, wouldn’t it? I’m sure he’d solve it with a few more $3.5 million trips to Florida to golf. *spits*

Full story at Politico.

Oh look, here’s an “accomplishment”:

Via NYT.

The Golf Course Ratings War.

A U.S. carrier group, including the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson, shown here, departed Singapore on Saturday, April 8, towards the Korean Peninsula, according to a Navy news release. CREDIT: AP Photo/Bullit Marquez.

The Tiny Tyrant is, once again, where else? On a fucking golf course in Florida. For all the mouthing off this idiot did about President Obama golfing, this massive asshole seems to be unable to stay off of one for a whole three days. Poor Little Tyrant, his pointless bluster in the form of an airstrike didn’t work on his ratings. They stay at the bottom of the barrel. What’s a tyrant to do? Oh, well, let’s take a shot at provoking a nuclear war, that should work! FFS, is there no one who will tell this sociopathic idiot that most people, including Americans, really don’t fucking want a nuclear war, because most of us don’t want to fucking die just yet?

We now have two idiotic, sociopathic tyrants facing off in their “my dick is bigger!” contest, Kim Jong-Un and Little Donnie. Yeah, I’m gonna go paint while I can.

Think Progress has the full story.

Oh, there’s also this:

“Xinhua, the state news agency, on Saturday called the strike the act of a weakened politician who needed to flex his muscles,” The New York Times reported. “In an analysis, Xinhua also said Mr. Trump had ordered the strike to distance himself from Syria’s backers in Moscow, to overcome accusations that he was ‘pro-Russia.’”

Not “pro-Russia”. Right. How in the fuckety fuck does that work when he had his little chat with them, warning them about the strike? FFS, no one can take this idiot seriously, which only ups the possibility he will use nukes. Christ.

Via Raw Story.