Donald is here to stay, now what? Cursing and swearing OK

[JimC]

Schrondinger's climate change!

[JimC]

82% of Ratz members are above average.

And the 18% don't drink enough gin...

[Tero]

He actually thinks that WE, who did not vote for him, would do better supporting him, because as Trump goes up, USA goes up. Trump goes down, US goes down. Soon he will realize that after the tax cuts the market does not give a shit about Trump. it will go up or down, whatever are the results of the tax cut.

President Donald Trump ended the year with slams on Democrats Sunday, tweeting that the stock market would have gone down if Hillary Clinton was elected and touting his administration’s successes.

In a Sunday morning tweet, Trump wrote, “If the Dems (Crooked Hillary) got elected, your stocks would be down 50% from values on Election Day. Now they have a great future — and just beginning!”

He followed that up by warning that if Democrats take control of Congress in midterm elections next year, it would hurt the market. He tweeted, “Why would smart voters want to put Democrats in Congress in 2018 Election when their policies will totally kill the great wealth created during the months since the Election.”
He also said progress was made in the fight against ISIS, improvement to the Department of Veterans Affairs and passage of tax cuts.

David Axelrod, former President Barack Obama’s strategist, retorted on Twitter that voters would put Democrats in charge, despite the strong stock market, because of Trump’s unpopularity.

“Uh, maybe because of YOU, sir. How do you square all your claims of progress with your record low poll numbers? Think about it,” Axelrod tweeted Sunday.

https://www.newsday.com/news/nation/tru ... 1.15719658

[Tero]

Karl Rove:
"He's not very popular and the way to become more popular is to become less political and more involved in his agenda," said Rove, a former senior aide to President George W. Bush.

Trump is fresh off the first major legislative victory of his presidency after congressional Republicans passed a sweeping rewrite of the nation's tax code this week. The president signed that measure into law on Friday.

For most of his first year in office, Trump has suffered dwindling approval ratings, which Rove attributed to the president's off-the-cuff attacks against critics and political opponents, as well as his bombastic, combative rhetoric.

Trump has relished campaign-style rallies, even after taking office this year. He often uses the events to tout his victory in the 2016 election and boast about his Electoral College win.

[Tero]

Deep state still hard at work
https://twitter.com/funder/status/948214354608041984

[L'Emmerdeur]

Deep state still hard at work
https://twitter.com/funder/status/948214354608041984

Trump just called the Department of Justice the “Deep State Justice Dept.”

So he thinks 113,543 employees at the Justice Dept are all conspiring against him? Basically calling DoJ, FBI, DEA, ATF, US Marshals & all US Attorneys traitors...

Trump’s clearly unwell & should resign.

'Obviously' we're not supposed to take him at his word when he runs his mouth on Twitter. I mean come on, people are trying to hold him to some preexisting standard of gravitas and veracity. That's simply unfair!

President Donald Trump does not believe that the “entire” Department of Justice is part of the “deep state,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters Tuesday, hours after the president suggested he did.

Earlier on Tuesday, Trump had tweeted, “Crooked Hillary Clinton’s top aid, Huma Abedin, has been accused of disregarding basic security protocols. She put Classified Passwords into the hands of foreign agents. Remember sailors pictures on submarine? Jail! Deep State Justice Dept must finally act? Also on Comey & others.”

The president was referring to the December 29 release by the Department of State of emails that were stored on Abedin’s computer.

The “deep state” is part of a theory claiming that a shadow government is trying to control the United States from within. The tweet was criticized by public figures including former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates, who tweeted that such claims are “beyond abnormal; dangerous.”

But speaking about the tweet during the White House daily press briefing on Tuesday, Sanders said, “The president finds some of those actions very disturbing, and he thinks that we need to make sure if there is an issue that it’s looked at. But if there was anything beyond that, I would refer you to the Department of Justice that would look into it.”

When a reporter then asked whether Trump believes all Justice Department employees are part of the “deep state,” Sanders responded, “Obviously, he doesn’t believe the entire Justice Department is part of that.”

[Seabass]

Donald Trump’s Year of Living Dangerously. It’s worse than you think.

Over the course of the year, I have often heard top foreign officials express their alarm in hair-raising terms rarely used in international diplomacy—let alone about the president of the United States. Seasoned diplomats who have seen Trump up close throw around words like “catastrophic,” “terrifying,” “incompetent” and “dangerous.” In Berlin this spring, I listened to a group of sober policy wonks debate whether Trump was merely a “laughingstock” or something more dangerous. Virtually all of those from whom I’ve heard this kind of ranting are leaders from close allies and partners of the United States. That experience is no anomaly. “If only I had a nickel for every time a foreign leader has asked me what the hell is going on in Washington this year … ” says Richard Haass, a Republican who served in senior roles for both Presidents Bush and is now president of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Over their year of living dangerously with Trump, foreign leaders and diplomats have learned this much: The U.S. president was ignorant, at times massively so, about the rudiments of the international system and America’s place in it, and in general about other countries. He seemed to respond well to flattery and the lavish laying out of red carpets; he was averse to conflict in person but more or less immovable from strongly held preconceptions. And given the chance, he would respond well to anything that seemed to offer him the opportunity to flout or overturn the policies endorsed by his predecessors Barack Obama and George W. Bush.

“The bigger miscalculation on the part of the allies was this sense that, however off base Trump might be on some of our policy positions, the ‘axis of adults’ will always see us through,” says Julianne Smith, the former deputy national security adviser to Vice President Joe Biden who now heads the transatlantic program at the Center for a New American Security. Summing up a year of contacts with worried European allies, she adds, “The axis of adults, it turns out, are mere mortals, and no, they don’t have superpowers. And that I think has been a rude awakening for a lot of our allies around the world.”

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story ... ous-216202

[Tero]

Who knew diplomacy was so complicated?

Or maybe it is just about who has a bigger nuclear button?

[L'Emmerdeur]

There was a little something for the US nursing home industry on Christmas Eve. No need to guess: More Winning!!

'Trump Administration Rolls Back Regulations for Nursing Homes'

The Trump administration has rolled back regulations at nursing homes nationwide, meaning nursing homes that injure residents or place them at grave risk will face fewer and less costly fines. The nursing home industry lobbied for the deregulation. Advocates for nursing home residents say the deregulation threatens to roll back years of hard-fought progress in improving care and deterring neglect and mistreatment of elderly residents.

All praise Il Douche for relentlessly rolling back all those terrible terrible regulations that have been stopping America from being Great Again!

[Tero]

Bannon and Trump, best enemies. And Russia!
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way ... treasonous

[Tero]

There was a little something for the US nursing home industry on Christmas Eve. No need to guess: More Winning!!

'Trump Administration Rolls Back Regulations for Nursing Homes'

The Trump administration has rolled back regulations at nursing homes nationwide, meaning nursing homes that injure residents or place them at grave risk will face fewer and less costly fines. The nursing home industry lobbied for the deregulation. Advocates for nursing home residents say the deregulation threatens to roll back years of hard-fought progress in improving care and deterring neglect and mistreatment of elderly residents.

All praise Il Douche for relentlessly rolling back all those terrible terrible regulations that have been stopping America from being Great Again!

Predictably, always on the side of the bigger player. That way his guy is the winner.

[Tero]

Conpiracy theorist-in-chief:
Trump prefers McDonald's — because he's afraid of being poisoned
Trump’s propensity for fast food is apparently not solely due to taste: Wolff reported it's also connected to his fear of being poisoned. The president in particular enjoys food from McDonald’s, Wolff wrote, because “nobody knew he was coming and the food was safely premade.”

Trump’s preference for McDonald’s has not abated since his inauguration, POLITICO reported last month. Keith Schiller, Trump’s longtime aide who worked in the White House as head of Oval Office operations until September, was sometimes sent to the McDonald’s on New York Avenue a few blocks away to satisfy the president’s fast-food hankering when the White House kitchen couldn’t satisfy it.

[pErvinalia]

Imagine eating McDonalds when you've got the option to eat almost anything else you want. What a fat mess.

[Seabass]

Donald Trump Didn’t Want to Be President — One year ago: the plan to lose, and the administration’s shocked first days.

On the afternoon of November 8, 2016, Kellyanne Conway settled into her glass office at Trump Tower. Right up until the last weeks of the race, the campaign headquarters had remained a listless place. All that seemed to distinguish it from a corporate back office were a few posters with right-wing slogans.

Conway, the campaign’s manager, was in a remarkably buoyant mood, considering she was about to experience a resounding, if not cataclysmic, defeat. Donald Trump would lose the election — of this she was sure — but he would quite possibly hold the defeat to under six points. That was a substantial victory. As for the looming defeat itself, she shrugged it off: It was Reince Priebus’s fault, not hers.

She had spent a good part of the day calling friends and allies in the political world and blaming Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee. Now she briefed some of the television producers and anchors whom she had been carefully courting since joining the Trump campaign — and with whom she had been actively interviewing in the last few weeks, hoping to land a permanent on-air job after the election.

Even though the numbers in a few key states had appeared to be changing to Trump’s advantage, neither Conway nor Trump himself nor his son-in-law, Jared Kushner — the effective head of the campaign — ­wavered in their certainty: Their unexpected adventure would soon be over. Not only would Trump not be president, almost everyone in the campaign agreed, he should probably not be. Conveniently, the former conviction meant nobody had to deal with the latter issue.

As the campaign came to an end, Trump himself was sanguine. His ultimate goal, after all, had never been to win. “I can be the most famous man in the world,” he had told his aide Sam Nunberg at the outset of the race. His longtime friend Roger Ailes, the former head of Fox News, liked to say that if you want a career in television, first run for president. Now Trump, encouraged by Ailes, was floating rumors about a Trump network. It was a great future. He would come out of this campaign, Trump assured Ailes, with a far more powerful brand and untold opportunities.

“This is bigger than I ever dreamed of,” he told Ailes a week before the election. “I don’t think about losing, because it isn’t losing. We’ve totally won.”

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/20 ... trump.html

[Animavore]

Open letter to Trump.

Dear Fucking Lunatic,

I read with interest your recent interview with The New York Times. I couldn’t get past the bit about your being the most popular visitor in the history of fucking China — a country that’s only 2,238 years old, give or take.

Do you know how fucking insane you sound, you off-brand butt plug? That's like the geopolitical equivalent of “that stripper really likes me” — only 10,000 times crazier and less self aware.

You are fucking exhausting. Every day is a natural experiment in determining how long 300 million people can resist coring out their own assholes with an ice auger. Every time I hear a snippet of your Queens-tinged banshee larynx farts, I want to crawl up my own ass with a Union Jack and claim my sigmoid colon for HRH Queen Elizabeth II.

We are fucking tired. As bad as we all thought your presidency would be when Putin got you elected, it’s been inestimably worse. 

You called a hostile, nuclear-armed head of state “short and fat.” How the fuck does that help?

You accused a woman — a former friend, no less — of showing up at your resort bleeding from the face and begging to get in. You, you, YOU — the guy who looks like a Christmas haggis inexplicably brought to life by Frosty’s magic hat — yes, you of all people said that.

You attempted — with evident fucking glee — to get 24 million people thrown off their health insurance.

You gave billions away to corporations and the already wealthy while simultaneously telling struggling poor people that you were doing exactly the opposite.

You endorsed a pedophile, praised brutal dictators, and defended LITERAL FUCKING NAZIS!

Ninety-nine percent of everything you say is either false, crazy, incoherent, just plain cruel, or a rancid paella of all four.

Oh, by the way, Puerto Rico is still FUBAR. You got yourself and your family billions in tax breaks for Christmas. What do they get? More paper towels?

Enough, enough, enough, enough! For the love of God and all that is holy, good, and pure, would you please, finally and forever, shut your feculent KFC-hole until you have something valuable  — or even marginally civil — to say?

You are a fried dick sandwich with a side of schlongs. If chlamydia and gonorrhea had a son, you’d appoint him HHS secretary. You are a disgraceful, pustulant hot stew full of casuistry, godawful ideas, unintelligible non sequiturs, and malignant rage.

You are the perfect circus orangutan diaper from Plato’s World of Forms.

So happy new year, Mr. Pr*sident. And fuck you forever.

Oh, and Pence, you oleaginous house ferret. Fuck you, too.

Sincerely,

Everyone

No. Not mine.

https://m.dailykos.com/stories/2017/12/ ... nald-Trump