Tag Archives: White House

national news

Cliff Sims: from nowhere to center of attention

How do some people manage to emerge suddenly and dramatically from the weeds to the center of the political arena?

I refer to a young man named Cliff Sims, who’s written a book called “Team of Vipers,” in which he chronicles the chaos and confusion that has dictated the flow of events inside the Donald Trump operation at the White House.

I had never heard of Cliff Sims prior to this week. I don’t know what he did in the White House. He is making the TV talk circuit promoting his book. He has said he attended meetings with the president in the Oval Office, in his private office, in the Cabinet room. Trump, to no one’s surprise, denies that Sims had that kind of access.

Do I believe the president’s account of their relationship? Uhh, no. I don’t. I mean, the president lies constantly, even when there’s no need. Do I believe Sims’s account of their relationship? Let me think. I don’t yet know.

He is not the first tell-all author to spill what he considers to be the beans on Donald Trump. He likely won’t be the final one.

However, he becomes the latest social media instant celebrity, someone who reveals himself under the glare of media scrutiny.

I’ll just add that the title of his book, “Team of Vipers,” does seem to ring true. At least it does to my eyes and ears.

national news, political news

Great! Another zillionaire wants to be POTUS!

This is just great, I tell ya . . . just great!

Americans have been subjected to the chaos associated with a real estate mogul turned politician who was elected president of the United States in 2016.

Now we hear that another business tycoon might decide to make a run for the nation’s highest office in 2020.

Please! No! A million times no!

The latest novice pol who wants a shot at playing the role of commander in chief and head of state is Howard Schultz, the former owner of Starbucks. He calls himself a “centrist independent” and a “lifelong Democrat.” Schultz told “60 Minutes” he would run as an independent candidate.

Let’s see. How would that work? He could siphon off votes that would go toward an actual political figure running as a Democrat opponent against Donald J. Trump. Is there a chance a Schultz candidacy could improve the president’s re-election chances? Yeah! Do ya think?

Trump campaigned for president touting (falsely it likely turned out) his past as a “self-made billionaire.” He touted his business acumen, forgetting to mention all those bankruptcies, lawsuits and failed business ventures. He had zero political or government or public service experience before deciding to run for POTUS . . . and oh brother, it shows!

Howard Schultz wants a crack at the world’s toughest job?

Give me a break.

I want someone who actually knows how government works to serve as my president. I want someone who isn’t in love with his own success and who is fully and wholly committed to public service.

Schultz is planning a national tour to pitch his notion of running for president. Good grief. Spare me the platitudes and promises.

I want someone sitting behind the big desk in the Oval Office who has an understanding of what’s at stake. Trump isn’t the guy. Neither is Schultz.

Oh, and check out Trump’s response to Schultz’s possible candidacy. He wrote this on Twitter: Howard Schultz doesn’t have the “guts” to run for President! Watched him on @60Minutes last night and I agree with him that he is not the “smartest person.” Besides, America already has that! I only hope that Starbucks is still paying me their rent in Trump Tower!

Yep. That’s the president of the United States of America.

Isn’t he just so damn dignified?

national news

No chaos in WH? Sure thing, Mr. POTUS

Donald J. Trump denies what’s being reported by media that cover the White House, which is that the place is a den of chaos.

The president says he’s virtually the only person on the job in the West Wing. Everyone else is gone? Really? No (acting) chief of staff? No administrative help? No senior advisers? No national security guru to brief POTUS on existential threats and danger to the nation and the world?

Well, you and I know what’s real here. The White House is a loony bin. The president has acting an defense secretary, an acting attorney general, acting chief of staff, acting interior secretary, acting EPA administrator and no United Nations ambassador.

No chaos? Sure.

And then we have the government shutdown. Members of Congress in both legislative chambers have gone home. No negotiations are scheduled. Federal employees are not being paid while remaining on the job.

But there’s no chaos in the White House. Is that what POTUS is telling us? Of course he is to be believed, truthful and trustworthy fellow that he is.

We are witnessing chaos in action. You are seeing. I know I am seeing it. So is the president. He just cannot bring himself to admitting it, nor will he do anything to end it.

This is not how you make America great again.

national news

The clown show is getting even more bizarre

That astonishing sideshow that commenced today in the Cabinet Room of the White House left me fairly speechless.

Why? Because there is too much on which to comment. Donald Trump’s non-stop riff covering the government shutdown, The Wall, the military, James Mattis’ resignation/firing, and God knows what else has left many of us out here grasping for something on which to analyze.

I’ll go with two items that jumped out at me.

Trump said, “I think I would have been a good general, but who knows?” Well, Mr. President, you had your chance back in the 1960s. While many of us were answering the call to duty during the Vietnam War, young Donald Trump received (cough, cough!) medical deferments associated with, um, bone spurs.

I had flat feet in 1968, which I always thought was a disqualifier. The U.S. Army induction center in Portland, Ore., didn’t accept that idea. So . . .  off I went.

The future president got five deferments. The New York Times recently revealed that the circumstances of those deferments were at best questionable, that the doctor who “diagnosed” the bone spurs allegedly did so as a favor to young Donald’s father, Fred. Thus, I won’t buy into his goofy notion about how good a general he would have been.

Then he said this about James Mattis, the now-former secretary of defense. “What did I get out of” his service? “Not much,” Trump said.

OK. Let’s see. The oath that Mattis took was to protect the country, to serve the country, to defend the Constitution. He did not swear an oath to serve the president. He did not declare his adherence to the individual who nominated him to run the Pentagon.

Then the president said he “essentially” fired the defense secretary.

Right there is yet another demonstration from Donald Trump that this individual does not understand the true meaning of public service. He has shown one more time how patently unfit he is to serve as commander in chief of the finest military apparatus the world has ever seen.

media news

Whether to tweet or be ‘presidential’

I’ll concede the obvious, which is that Donald John Trump has redefined the presidency of the United States.

He issues policy pronouncements via Twitter. He tweets his brains out, firing off messages conveyed normally through more, um, diplomatic channels. Part of me still wishes he would cease and desist.

However, another part of me — perhaps it’s the major part — actually wants him to keep it up. Keep using the medium to say things, to outrage us, to fire up your base, to give the rest of us reason to detest you.

A lengthy article in Politico talks about how Trump has overused Twitter. Remember when he promised (imagine that!) to cut off the tweets once he became president? That pledge had as much value as his promise to make Mexico pay for The Wall, that he wouldn’t have time to play golf and his pledge to be the “unity president.”

Read the Politico article here.

Trump has been unleashed on Twitter.

It’s given bloggers such as yours truly plenty of grist on which to comment. Keep it coming, Mr. President.

I’ll just add one caveat: Do not tweet out the nuclear codes or otherwise endanger national security any worse than you already have done through your careless remarks to Russians and other adversaries who visit you in the Oval Office.

The new year promises to be chock full of news, as if the year that just passed wasn’t full enough as it was.

With the “Stable Genius” at the helm, there’s never a dull moment.

economic news, national news

Nice timing on pay freeze, Mr. POTUS

Donald John Trump isn’t exactly the master of impeccable timing.

He helps shut down part of the federal government, forcing the furloughing of thousands of federal employees; thus, they are not getting paid while their agency is shut down because the White House and Congress are arguing over money to build The Wall along our southern border.

What does Trump then decide to do? He signs an executive order freezing wages for federal employees! They were slated to get a 2.1 percent pay increase. No longer will they get it. Trump said the budget cannot support it. Imagine that, will ya?

The budget deficit has exploded since the president and congressional Republicans enacted that tax cut, depriving the government of revenue that might have helped minimize deficit growth.

At least, though, the pay freeze doesn’t have an effect on the 2.6-percent pay increase granted to our men and women in the military.

Still, as the saying goes: Timing is everything.

Nice timing, Mr. President.

International news, national news

Trump stays put, unlike congressional leaders

I have to say it out loud: I disagree mightily with Donald Trump’s reasons for shutting down part of the federal government, but I agree with his decision to stay put in Washington while needling his foes to find a solution to the stalemate.

Meanwhile, congressional leaders — Republican and Democrat alike — are nowhere to be found in D.C. House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi is gone; so is Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer; Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell also are MIA.

I get that the two sides are miles apart. Trump wants money to build The Wall along our southern border. Democrats are having none of it. But the two sides cannot talk to each other face to face if one of the parties is absent, correct?

We don’t need The Wall to shore up our border security. We can accomplish that feat without erecting The Wall, whether it’s an actual wall or an unreasonable facsimile.

At least the president is on scene. I wish those who run the legislative branch of government were there, too.

national news, State news

Democratic excitement causes flashbacks

I must be hallucinating, or having some sort of flashback . . . which I assure you isn’t drug-induced.

Texas Democrats, not Republicans, are all agog over the looming struggle for attention between two rising stars. One of them came so very close to being elected to the U.S. Senate; the other is a former big-city mayor and a former housing secretary for the most recent Democratic president.

Stand tall, Beto O’Rourke and Julian Castro.

O’Rourke almost defeated Republican Sen. Ted Cruz in the midterm election; he might run for president of the United States in 2020. Castro was mayor of San Antonio, the state’s second-largest city and served in the Cabinet of Barack H. Obama; he, too, might run for POTUS.

Of the two of them, Castro seems the surer bet to toss his Stetson into the ring, although O’Rourke keeps tantalizing many around the country with messages that suggest that he, too, is likely to join the Democratic free-for-all.

Texas once was a Democratic bastion, where only Democrats were seen and heard. Then it morphed into a Republican stronghold and the GOP snatched all the headlines, the air time and people’s political attention.

It’s now becoming more of an inter-party competition, instead of an intra-party donnybrook. I like the idea of the two parties fighting hard for the hearts and minds of Texans and other Americans.

As for O’Rourke and Castro, I am beginning to sense a rivalry in the making.

Politico reports that a Texas political strategist, Colin Strother, sees the two men’s disparate upbringing well could produce a unique situation in Texas. They won’t be fighting for the same constituency, Strother guesses. “I see them as two completely different types of candidates,” he said.

Castro sees himself as the underdog, given O’Rourke’s meteoric rise while losing his race to Cruz. He has a twin brother, U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, who’s been helping him raise money to try to bring down the O’Rourke colossus.

O’Rourke, you might recall, campaigned against Cruz without the help of high-powered, top-dollar political consultants and/or pollsters. He just visited every one of Texas’s 254 counties, talked to voters wherever he found them. What astounded me was the amount of time O’Rourke spent in GOP-stronghold counties in rural West Texas, from the Panhandle to the Permian Basin. Didn’t anyone tell him the Panhandle is where the John Birch Society used to give “mainstream politicians” fits?

I don’t know whether both — or either — of these young men are going to vie for the Big Prize in 2020. I’m just delighted to see the excitement they both are generating in a state that has grown quite unaccustomed to hearing noise from Democrats’ side of the fence.

national news

A Christmas wish for our politicians

I am in the spirit of bestowing Christmas wishes. I won’t bore you with what I wish for members of my family . . . besides, it’s personal.

I’ll bore you instead with what I wish for those politicians who work for us, you and me. We are the bosses, folks, not the party leaders, or those who call the shots in Congress or the White House. Every member of Congress — as well as the president — answers to us. We call the shots.

My overarching wish is for our politicians to stop this idiotic game of shutting down the government every few months. They need to approve long-term federal budgets that include money for vital programs upon which we all depend.

This “continuing resolution” nonsense has to end. Now would be a good time to end it.

The federal government is shut down for some undetermined length of time. Some of it is still operating. However, the halls of Capitol Hill are silent. The national parks are quiet.

Sure, members of Congress are surrendering their paychecks while the government is shuttered. Not all of them have signed on to that pledge. The president doesn’t take a paycheck for whatever it is he does in the White House, so he’s already clear of that particular shame.

I realize this Christmas wish of mine is a pipe dream. It won’t happen, more than likely, while all sides seek a way out of the mess they’re in.

However, in the Christmas spirit, I offer this request with the hope that somehow, somewhere, in some fashion our employees — the men and women who do our bidding (supposedly) — can find a way toward a permanent solution to this idiocy.

So, I’m on the record. You work for me, folks. Get the job done!

national news

Trump’s hysteria continues to mount

My astonishment at the presidential hysteria mounting over the Russia probe and related matters is continuing to build.

It presents itself in stark contrast to the stone-cold silence coming from the office of the special counsel that Donald Trump is attacking multiple times daily.

Robert Mueller continues to insist on a veil of silence. He has instructed his team to keep its collective trap shut. No leaks are coming from the special counsel who is examining that “Russia thing” that prompted Trump to fire FBI director James Comey in May 2017.

Yet the president continues his frontal assault on Mueller’s reputation, on the reputation of his former friend Michael Cohen, on Comey, on the Department of Justice, on the FBI. His assault is inflicting some collateral damage, too, such as on the rule of law and on the notion that the U.S. Constitution stands as a bulwark against any abuses of power that might arise from any of the three branches of government.

It is my fervent hope that Mueller concludes his investigation sooner rather than later. I am growing weary of the Twitter tirades coming from the White House. I am tiring of the insistence from the president that Mueller has “no evidence of collusion”; in fact, we don’t know what Mueller has or doesn’t have, which is why I want the probe to reach its finish line.

As for the president, every time he yaps about “no collusion” or “no laws being broken,” he sounds all the more to me as if he’s trying to hide something from public purview. I refer to those tax returns that he has refused to release; or the mountain of documented evidence that Mueller has compiled that is bound to answer a lot of questions.

Donald Trump’s hysteria plays well with the base that is hanging with him to the end. Fine. It isn’t playing well with the rest of the country, the 60-some percent of us who disapprove of the manner that Trump seeks to lead the country.

Please, Mr. Special Counsel, wrap this thing up as soon as possible to spare us the frothing madness that pours out of the White House.

Oh, wait! It just occurs to me that the end of the Russia probe — no matter how it concludes — is going to produce another endless barrage from the president of the United States.

Dang it, man! We can’t win!