Tag Archives: POTUS

business news

No photo ID needed … usually

I am 68 years of age. I look my age. I’ve got the gray in my hair to prove it.

I don’t usually have to produce photo identification when I go to the grocery store to purchase, um, some lettuce, a loaf of bread or even something to drink.

Now, if it’s an adult beverage, which I enjoy now and then, I will put the beverage in my shopping cart and roll it to the checkout stand.

Then I might — I repeat, might — ask the checker, “Do you want to see my ID” to prove I am of age to buy the adult beverage? Most of the time, they laugh and say, “No, uh, that’s all right.”

But occasionally, they play along. “Sure thing,” he or she might say. I gleefully pull out my driver’s license to show that I am, indeed, old enough to purchase the beverage. Then I boast about “being carded.”

Unlike what the president of the United States asserted Tuesday at that Florida campaign rally, that’s the only time I’ve ever had to show ID at the grocery store.

So there.

national news

U.S. attorney general: disgusting partisan hack

I’ll just get this off my chest up front: U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions is a sorry excuse for a high-level federal law enforcement official.

The AG stood this week before a crowd of conservative high school students who began chanting “Lock her up!”, referencing the idiotic e-mail controversy that centers on former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Rather than do the right thing, which would have been to silence the crowd and remind them of the “rule of law” and “due process,” the AG chuckled nervously and repeated the chant from the podium. He then said something about “hearing that chant” during the 2016 presidential campaign.

I once was willing to give Sessions the benefit of the doubt, given his decision to recuse himself from the “Russia thing” probe at the Justice Department. No longer.

Sessions had the chance to show some statesmanship, to demonstrate that he lives by the rule of law. Instead, when the students began chanting “Lock her up!” he gravitated back to his partisan roots. He once was a Republican U.S. senator from Alabama who, before he was elected to that body, was rejected by the Senate for a federal judgeship because of racially tinged statements he had made.

Now the nation’s chief law enforcement officer has seen fit to continue the idiocy associated with a failed — and quite lengthy — investigation into a controversy that’s been decided.

The AG has joined the president of the United States in disgracing his high office.

Shameful.

national news

Wanting some old-fashioned decorum from POTUS

Call me old-fashioned. Maybe even a geezer if you’re so inclined.

I get that under our system of government, “anyone” can be elected president. I thought that truism bore the ultimate fruit when we elected and re-elected an African-American to the presidency in 2008 and 2012. Barack Obama’s life story was itself a tale to behold, irrespective of his racial makeup.

Silly me. I was so wrong.

The 2016 election victory by Donald John Trump Sr. provided the most incontrovertible demonstration of that notion. If someone like Trump can win a presidential election, then, by God, anyone can win the big prize.

So, we elect a guy with zero prior public service exposure. His ignorance of government, politics, public policy has been breathtaking in its scope.

His fans applaud his missteps, his goofiness and, oh yes, his dangerous tendencies, including his seeming desire to obtain authoritarian status.

I’m a traditionalist, though, in at least one regard. While I embrace the notion that anyone can be elected president, I still want the president to be better than the average American. I want the president to conduct himself with dignity and decorum.

Trump doesn’t do that. His use of Twitter is the shiniest example that comes to mind. I read those tweets and I shudder at their inarticulateness. The misspelled words, the use of capital letters, the mangled syntax … it all just drives me nuts. I mean, the social medium recently expanded the capacity available for Twitter users. Can’t the president take some time to at least construct a message that makes sense? Or one that at least is readable?

I guess not.

He’s just content to, um, “tell it like it is.”

Meanwhile, the dignity and stature of the highest office in the land — and arguably the most important elected office in the world — continues to suffer.

national news

Looking ahead — already! — to Trump departure

Forgive me for getting ahead of myself, but I cannot help but think about how Donald J. Trump is going to leave the world stage when his time comes.

My gut tells me it won’t be pretty, no matter the terms of the president’s departure.

He’ll either leave after one term in January 2021; or he could get a second term and he’ll leave in January 2025.

Or … he’ll leave before the end of either term. If you get my drift.

The custom is that presidents hand over the keys to the White House to their successor. They get on the helicopter and fly away toward retirement. They then serve their retirement years in relative quiet, pursuing this and/or that cause.

Do you really think Trump will go out with that usual customary class and grace? I don’t. I fear he’ll keep yapping well beyond his years in the White House.

And that’s if he is able to walk away on his own terms, either after one term or — God forbid! — two terms.

If he is forced out by issues that have preoccupied many of us for most of his term to date in office, well, we will need to settle in for an indeterminate siege from the 45th president of the United States.

I’ll need to put these thoughts aside for the time being and concern myself with the issues of the day.

They concern whether the president colluded with Russians who attacked our electoral system. Hey, they’re real. They aren’t a “hoax.”

national news

POTUS won’t take the bait: Yes, Putin lied

CBS News anchor Jeff Glor sat right in front of Donald J. Trump and asked him directly this week: Did Vladimir Putin lie when he denied the Russians meddled in our 2016 election?

The president had just declared in his conversation with Glor that he believed — finally! — the U.S. intelligence assessment that Russia attacked our electoral process.

So, Glor asked the obvious question about the Russian president’s veracity. Trump wouldn’t go there. He wouldn’t call Putin a liar.

Hmm. OK, I’ll do it for him. Yes, Mr. President, Vladimir Putin lied when he denied the Russians’ culpability. Indeed, he has crafted his entire career as a KGB agent and as a politician by lying. He has turned lying into an art form.

Putin is a pro at prevarication.

Indeed, Vladimir Putin is far better at lying than — dare I say it — Donald John Trump.

national news, political news

What do you mean by ‘everybody,’ Mr. President?

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Donald J. Trump sat down with Piers Morgan and made yet another astonishing exaggeration, which compels me to disabuse him of the idiocy he put out there.

Morgan asked the president if there is any doubt he will seek re-election in 2020. Trump said he’s all in for a re-election bid.

“Everybody wants me to run” for a second term, he said.

Huh? Wha … ? Eh? Everybody wants him to run?

Count me out, Mr. President. I am not a member of the Everybody Brigade he is citing.

Not only do I want him to walk away after his term, I want him booted out before the end of his term. Although I must concede that a President Mike Pence gives me pause as well, but for reasons that deal more with public policy than with general incompetence, ignorance, arrogance and rhetorical idiocy.

OK, I get that I’m likely nitpicking what Trump said about “everybody” wanting him to run again. However, if we’re being asked to take the president at his word, then I cannot remain silent when he blathers such absolute nonsense.

national news

Will the SCOTUS announcement center on POTUS?

I believe it’s fair to wonder aloud about how Donald Trump is going to handle his planned announcement of the next person he will nominate for a spot on the U.S. Supreme Court.

I am wondering how much time the president is going to spend talking about the quality of the selection process, about how much time he spent poring over the finalists’ qualifications and about how conscientious he was in selecting the nominee?

In short, will this announcement be at least as much about the president as it is about the person he will nominate?

We’re going to find out soon. Let it be said that I don’t give a rip about the brilliance of Trump’s selection process. I do care about whether this individual is qualified and whether he or she will become a judicial activist.

national news

This is far from a ‘fine-tuned machine’

An often-quoted cliche goes something like this: Change is the only constant in this world.

If you’re a member of the Trump administration’s senior staff, you’re right in the midst of change. It’s constant. It comes in blinding bursts.

The New Yorker magazine offers a fascinating look at what Donald J. Trump once called a “fine-tuned machine.” That would be his administration and the senior staff members who comprise it.

According to The New Yorker: Turnover among the White House staff, already record-setting in Trump’s first year, has spiked recently, now that no one is really in charge. Late last month, Martha Joynt Kumar, a scholar who has tracked White House staff during the past six Presidencies, reported that the Trump White House has an astonishing turnover rate of sixty-one per cent so far among its top-level advisers. No other Administration she has tracked comes close: Trump’s two immediate predecessors were at fourteen per cent (Barack Obama) and five percent (George W. Bush) at this point in their Presidencies. Bill Clinton, the highest after Trump, was at forty-two per cent, and that number was mostly made up of advisers who were reassigned to other senior White House roles, not fired or pushed out, according to Kumar.

There’s more from The New Yorker: The Trump Cabinet has been similarly tumultuous: Pruitt’s departure, on Thursday, adds to a list that already included a fired Secretary of State, a fired Secretary of Health and Human Services, and a fired Veteran Affairs Secretary, as well as a vacancy that was created when Kelly moved from the Department of Homeland Security to replace Trump’s fired first chief of staff, Reince Priebus. All together, Trump’s Cabinet has the fastest turnover rate of any Administration in a hundred years. Tenures are so short that Kumar is now reporting on the turnover among the second and third waves of aides. And it could be that Trump has no problem with this situation, or even with the seemingly untenable situation of having a chief of staff who is regularly reported to be on his way out. 

Read the entire New Yorker article here.

Trump’s delusion has become almost legendary now that he’s been in office for the past 18 months. He keeps boasting about how well everything is going. How much he has accomplished. How he can pick from the crowds of “the best people” who are lining up to work in the West Wing.

It ain’t happening, Mr. President. So quit lying about the “fine-tuned machine” that is misfiring seemingly every hour at the White House.

national news

Connecting some dots inside the White House

I feel like connecting a few dots. So … here goes.

The 2016 Republican Party presidential nominee was revealed in a decade-old recording boasting about how he could grab women by their “pu***” because his status as a “star” gave him license.

The nominee, Donald John Trump, was elected president.

He declares war on media outlets that he finds disagreeable. He calls them “fake news” and then submits to interviews almost exclusively with Fox News, which was run by the late Roger Ailes.

Ailes, meanwhile, gets hit with complaints of sexual harassment by a number of high-profile female journalists; Megyn Kelly and Gretchen Carlson are two of them.

Ailes gets the boot. But his No. 2 man, Bill Shine, stands with him and allegedly covers up for the boss.

Then, just this week, Shine — who left Fox News — has been named deputy White House chief of staff in charge of communications.

So, we have the president — who has a history of sexual harassment complaints leveled against him by many women — hires a guy with a sexual harassment history of his own. The White House underling is now director of communications for the administration.

It’s fair to wonder about Trump’s values. He never rails against accusations of sexual harassment. He defends those against whom these complaints are leveled; he called former Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly — who also faced such accusations — a “good man.”

Trump reportedly takes a dim view of the “Me Too” and “Time’s Up” movements, believing that the women who make accusations against powerful men are off base.

Oh, and then his former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, paid Stormy Daniels $130,000 in hush money to keep quiet about a tryst that Trump says never happened.

What do you suppose is the common denominator here? Let’s see. I think it’s boorish behavior toward women, which appears to have Donald Trump’s fingerprints all over it.

national news

Give pols and their families some space

I have noted many times in this blog that presidents of the United States are “never off the clock.” They become presidents, meaning they have the awesome power of the office at their fingertips even when they’re not sitting in the Oval Office or in the Situation Room.

That said, presidents deserve some time to spend with their families. That courtesy most certainly extends to their staff. To their Cabinet officers. To other politicians. To those who make or administer public policy.

The issue has risen to the level of public discourse in recent days. I maintain that as much as I might criticize a politician’s public policy decisions, I find it offensive to accost them while they are spending time with their family or other loved ones.