Wonder Woman Verdict: Great!

Gal Gadot is Wonder Woman in the awesome movie of the same name. All Images: Warner Bros.

The Wonder Woman Movie Is Even Better Than You Hoped It Would Be.

Also, Wonder Woman scored 97% on the Tomatometer. So, could all those people who just had be asses and insist the movie would totally suck because DC please be quiet now? Thanks.

The Tiny Tyrant’s Intelligence.

Trump. AP News.

It seems the Tiny Tyrant shares Bush Jr.’s love of comic style intelligence. Oh, yay. Not only a fucking idiot, but proud of it.

President Trump consumes classified intelligence like he does most everything else in life: ravenously and impatiently, eager to ingest glinting nuggets but often indifferent to subtleties.

Most mornings, often at 10:30, sometimes earlier, Trump sits behind the historic Resolute desk and, with a fresh Diet Coke fizzing and papers piled high, receives top-secret updates on the world’s hot spots. The president interrupts his briefers with questions but also with random asides. He asks that the top brass of the intelligence community be present, and he demands brevity.

As they huddle around the desk, Trump likes to pore over visuals — maps, charts, pictures and videos, as well as “killer graphics,” as CIA Director Mike Pompeo phrased it.

“That’s our task, right? To deliver the material in a way that he can best understand the information we’re trying to communicate,” said Pompeo, adding that he, too, prefers to “get to the core of the issue quickly.”

The fawning ass kissing of Pompeo and Coats is sickening, to say the least.

Yet there are signs that the president may not be retaining all the intelligence he is presented, fully absorbing its nuance, or respecting the sensitivities of the information and how it was gathered.

Goodness. Perhaps I’ll find time to be shocked after I make every effort to recover from this near-fatal eyeroll.

Intelligence officials were prepared to deliver daily briefings to Trump throughout the transition period, but the president-elect often turned them away, usually agreeing to sit for briefings only once or twice per week.

“You know, I’m, like, a smart person. I don’t have to be told the same thing in the same words every single day for the next eight years,” Trump told Fox News last December.

If you need to, like, tell people you’re smart, like, all the time, you’re a fucking idiot.

Trump prefers free-flowing conversations over listening to his briefers teach lessons. “It’s a very oral, interactive discussion, as opposed to sitting there and reading from a text or a script,” Pompeo said.

I’ll refrain from the easy joke here. I. Will. Refrain. I. Will…

When he took office, Trump signaled to his national security team that he favors concise points boiled down to a single page.

“I like bullets or I like as little as possible,” he said in a pre-inaugural interview with Axios. “I don’t need, you know, 200-page reports on something that can be handled on a page.”

Trump also has encouraged his briefers to include as many visual elements as possible. This is a reflection, aides said, of Trump’s career as a real estate developer who evaluated blueprints and renderings to visualize what a property eventually would look like.

Oh yes, being a sleazy, mobbed up real estate con, why that’s just like presidenting! Golly, there must be an easy peasy blueprint for everything!

The Washington Post has the full story.

Oh lord, that face.

U.S. President Donald Trump, right, speaks to British Prime Minister Theresa May during in a working dinner meeting at the NATO headquarters during a NATO summit of heads of state and government in Brussels on Thursday, May 25, 2017. CREDIT: AP Photo/Matt Dunham, Pool.

Oh, PM May’s face. Definitely in the a picture is worth a thousand words camp. Meanwhile, the Tiny Tyrant looks blissfully oblivious, he must be talking about himself. He certainly seems to be unable to process other people’s expressions, or he simply may not register them because they are, to him, unimportant. According to a report in the Belgian daily Le Soir, what the Tiny Tyrant discussed was … golf courses. Yep. His golf courses, natch, and how awful Ireland and Scotland were, not letting him do whatever the fuck he wanted. Quelle horreur!

Donald Trump is, above all, a businessman, Belgian daily Le Soir concluded after his visit to Brussels, a city Trump derided during the campaign as a “hellhole.”

He talked about governing with the language of business and was receptive only to concrete talking points, getting lost in theoretical discussions, the paper reported based on interviews with Belgian officials and sources involved in the meeting. He seemed to have “no idea” about economic issues facing Belgium and knew “even less” about the importance of Belgian trade to the United States.

And, when he did have an idea about issues facing the European Union — of which Brussels is the de facto capital — those ideas seemed formed entirely on his experience building golf courses, the paper said.

“He made many references to his personal business. He explained, for example, the function of Europe based on his difficulties doing business in Ireland,” the paper reported.

“Every time we talk about a country, he remembered the things he had done. Scotland? He said he had opened a club. Ireland? He said it took him two and a half years to get a license and that did not give him a very good image of the European Union.,” another source added. “One feels that he wants a system where everything can be realized very quickly and without formalities.”

Think Progress has the full story of yet more reports of just how unimpressive and disastrous the Tour of Trump™ happened to be, leaving many a priceless photo in its wake.

From Integrity to Trumpery.

The crest, right, that President Trump displays at his American properties is a coat of arms, left, that British authorities granted to another family. Click for full size.

LONDON — At the Trump National Golf Club outside Washington, which hosted the Senior P.G.A. Championship this weekend, the president’s coat of arms is everywhere — the sign out front, the pro shop, even the exercise room.

The regal emblem, used at President Trump’s golf courses across the United States, sports three lions and two chevrons on a shield, below a gloved hand gripping an arrow.

A different coat of arms flies over Mr. Trump’s two golf resorts in Scotland. The lions on the shield have been replaced by a two-headed eagle, an image the company has said represents the “dual nature and nationality” of Mr. Trump’s Scottish and German roots.

But this emblem was not just about honoring his heritage.

The British are known to take matters of heraldry seriously, and Mr. Trump’s American coat of arms belongs to another family. It was granted by British authorities in 1939 to Joseph Edward Davies, the third husband of Marjorie Merriweather Post, the socialite who built the Mar-a-Lago resort that is now Mr. Trump’s cherished getaway.

[…]

In the United States, the Trump Organization took Mr. Davies’s coat of arms for its own, making one small adjustment — replacing the word “Integritas,” Latin for integrity, with “Trump.”

Joseph D. Tydings, a Democrat and former United States senator from Maryland who is the grandson of Mr. Davies, learned that Mr. Trump was using the emblem, at least at Mar-a-Lago, when he visited the property. Mr. Trump had never asked permission.

“There are members of the family who wanted to sue him,” said Mr. Tydings, a lawyer who wears his family’s coat of arms on a ring. “This is the first I’ve ever heard about it being used anywhere else.”

[…]

The College of Arms, which oversees coats of arms in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, provided more detail. The emblem originally submitted in 2007 by Mr. Trump to Britain’s trademark office matched one that had been granted to Mr. Davies, an American of Welsh descent who once served as ambassador to the Soviet Union.

“It couldn’t be a clearer-cut case, actually,” said Clive Cheesman, one of the college’s heralds, who oversee coats of arms, their design and their use.

“A coat of arms that was originally granted to Joseph Edward Davies in 1939 by the English heraldic authority ended up being used 10 or 15 years ago by the Trump Organization as part of its branding for its golf clubs,” said Mr. Cheesman, a lawyer by training. “This got them into difficulty.”

The White House referred questions to the Trump Organization, which did not respond to requests for comment.

The organization has trademarked the Davies coat of arms in the United States, which has far less attachment to such symbols. It is used on the company’s website and is a prominent branding detail of Mr. Trump’s many American golf courses and resorts — emblazoned on golf balls, shirts and bottles of body lotion.

When the Trump Organization created a Civil War memorial at the golf course near Washington commemorating a battle and a “river of blood” that never occurred, a plaque marking the fictitious event was embossed with the coat of arms.

The NYT has the full, sordid story. There is not one thing which is genuine when it comes to Trump, he’s a cheap plastic shell surrounding a vacuum of screaming ego. #Trake – If It’s Trump, It’s Fake. You can see some of the choice tweets over this matter here. My favourite: