Tag Archives: Donald Trump

legal news, national news

Ethics head quits amid serious questions about Trump

Walter Shaub isn’t exactly a household name. Until now. Maybe. Perhaps.

Shaub has just quit as the head of the Office of Government Ethics. He is leaving his post six months before the end of his term. Why the early out?

It appears that Shaub has grown tired of battling with the president of the United States over the myriad ethical questions surrounding the president and his business interests around the world.

Shaub has been battling with Donald Trump over the president’s refusal to divest himself of the business interests, handing it all over to his sons while remaining as CEO of the empire.

The Hill reported: “Shaub told CBS News on Thursday evening that he doesn’t know whether Trump is profiting from his businesses, but that’s not the point.

“‘I can’t know what their intention is. I know that the effect is that there’s an appearance that the businesses are profiting from his occupying the presidency,’ he told CBS News correspondent Julianna Goldman during the first televised interview following his resignation.

“‘And appearance matters as much as reality, so even aside from whether or not that’s actually happening, we need to send a message to the world that the United States is going to have the gold standard for an ethics program in government, which is what we’ve always had,’ he continued.

Read the whole Hill article here.

Appearance matters as much as reality. Yes, and that is what Donald Trump doesn’t even begin to comprehend.

Comedians joke that the term “government ethics” has become a major-league oxymoron. The vastness of Donald Trump’s business empire has created an ethical morass for anyone charged with the task of trying to guide a presidential administration down a straight-and-narrow path.

International news, national news, political news

No, Mr. President; Obama did react to Russian hacking

Donald J. Trump keeps harping on a canard, which is that Barack Obama “did nothing” when he learned in the summer of 2016 about Russian efforts to hack into our electoral process.

Wrong, Mr. President.

Trump keeps dodging the question about whether he believes the Russians sought to influence the 2016 presidential election. Today, he once again gave the Russians some political cover by saying that “other countries” are hacking us, too.

My point here, though, is that President Obama did react to reports of Russian hacking.

He imposed economic sanctions against individuals; he tossed Russian diplomats out of the United States; he closed two Russian diplomatic compounds — all of this in reaction to reports of Russian hacking.

Trump is having none of it. He wants to divert attention from the questions and suspicion that continues to swirl around him regarding the Russians and whatever — if any — relationship they had with the Trump presidential campaign.

I get that presidents have blamed their immediate predecessors for real and imagined problems. Obama laid a lot of blame at the feet of his predecessor, George W. Bush — although he did give the Bush administration plenty of credit for the work it had done in helping locate Osama bin Laden prior to the May 2011 commando raid that killed the al-Qaeda leader.

Is there ever going to be a moment when the current president would offer a good word to his immediate predecessor? Don’t hold your breath. I won’t.

As for Trump’s insistence that Obama did “nothing” to respond to Russian hackers, that’s just another lie.

International news, political news

Trump remains in Russia-meddling denial

Donald J. Trump got the question straight up and directly: Does he believe the Russians meddled in the 2016 presidential election?

How did the president respond to the question from NBC News’s Hallie Jackson today on the eve of the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany? Sure, Russia meddled, but so did other nations, according to Trump. He couldn’t say which nations. They’ve all been doing it for a long time, the president said.

Then he sailed off into what’s becoming the classic Trump tactic: diversion, deflection and denial. He then blamed President Barack Obama’s administration for failing to do anything about Russia when it knew in July of 2016 about reports of meddling. He mentioned that the election didn’t occur until November and then asked, rhetorically of course, “Why didn’t the Obama administration do anything about it?”

Good grief, Mr. President. That’s not the question. The reporter asked about what he believes occurred and whether he stands with the U.S. intelligence agencies’ assessment that Russia acted alone in seeking to corrupt the U.S. electoral process.

Oh, I fear this bodes poorly for the president’s meeting Friday with Russian President Vladimir Putin and whether Trump is going to confront Putin directly on what seemingly the rest of the world apparently knows: that Russia got its hands quite dirty while interfering in the election of the president of the United States.

International news, national news

POTUS’s team slow on hotel booking? What the … ?

This one almost defies any kind of comment — but I’ll try anyway.

Donald Trump’s White House team reportedly damn near couldn’t get the president of the United States a hotel room in Hamburg, Germany, where he’s set to attend the most crucial meetings of his still-brief time as president.

They waited too long.

I’m trying to imagine how the president of the world’s most powerful nation can be denied a room in a hotel as he prepares to be one of the key players in an amazing international geopolitical drama. He is set to meet at the G20 summit with leaders of the world’s 20 largest economic powers. One of them happens to be Russian President Vladimir Putin, who’s been in the news of late regarding his country’s interference in the 2016 presidential election.

How does that happen? How does the White House botch this arrangement … allegedly?

Read Buzzfeed story here.

Is this yet another example of how the president described his White House operation as a “fine-tuned machine”?

If so, then this man needs yet another reality check.

national news, political news

Is the ‘Russia thing’ a scandal? Not just yet

Some of my lefty friends — OK, maybe more than some of them — are going to dislike this blog post.

Too bad.

I’m struggling with a word I keep seeing in print and hearing on TV and radio. It’s the word “scandal” being used to describe what I like to call “the Russia thing.”

My sense is that “Russia” hasn’t yet risen to the level of scandal. It fits a list of potentially pejorative descriptions: controversy, tempest, tumult. Scandal? I’m not yet ready to go there.

The “Russia thing” is what Donald J. Trump called it when he told NBC News anchor Lester Holt about his reasons for firing former FBI director James Comey. It was “the Russia thing” that caused the president to fire Comey.

We have a special counsel assembling a legal team to investigate whether the Trump 2016 presidential campaign colluded with Russian hackers to disrupt and influence the election outcome. At least one former aide, Michael Flynn, has been linked tightly to the Russian government.

The Senate Intelligence Committee is looking, too, at the Russia matter. Not so with the House Intelligence Committee, whose new chairman — Trey Gowdy, R-S.C. — said his panel is keeping its hands off this investigation.

Yes, I’ve seen a whole lot of smoke. There’s even a boatload of circumstantial evidence that appears to be piling up.

Do we have a scandal on our hands? Is the president now been tied up in a “public disgrace,” as the dictionary defines the term “scandal”? Well, I can think of a lot of ways that Trump has disgraced his office; they generally involve his use of Twitter to blast out those idiotic and moronic statements.

Special counsel Robert Mueller, though, is likely going to be the determining factor in whether all this “Russia thing” stuff drags the president and his administration straight into scandal territory.

I’ve sought to avoid using the “s-word” on this blog. I’ll continue to do so — until we all hear from the myriad investigative teams seeking to determine what in the hell happened during the 2016 election.

International news

Does this guy have a death wish?

Now that the North Koreans have demonstrated — apparently — that they have a intercontinental ballistic missile capable of packing a nuclear warhead, it is good to ponder something about the boy with the bad haircut who runs that country.

Does Kim Jong Un have a death wish? Does he really and truly wish for this country to be destroyed in a full retaliatory strike by the world’s most powerful nation? Does the dictator really believe he can bully the United States of America with threats of a nuclear missile strike on major West Coast cities?

I keep coming with “no” on all counts?

Please do not misconstrue me on this. I am not dismissing any threat that this fruitcake dictator poses to South Korea, or Japan, or to the U.S. of A. Any dictator who is capable of allowing his people to starve while building a formidable military apparatus is capable, I suppose, of anything.

There are times, though, when it’s tempting to try to insert oneself into the skull of someone else. I try to do that on occasion with this clown. He blusters, boasts and bellows about how he intends to react whenever the United States conducts military drills with South Korea. But we keep performing these exercises. And nothing happens. We get no response from North Korea.

I suppose this is my of suggesting that a pre-emptive military strike against North Korea is likely the worst of a series of bad options facing the U.S. commander in chief.

Donald Trump once referred to Kim Jong Un as a “smart cookie.” Let’s take the president at his word, then, that this fellow is able to discern political reality when it stares him in the face.

Here’s one of those reality-based factors: Any missile fired at the United States of America or at South Korea is virtually guaranteed to provoke a response from this country that will destroy North Korea.

Does the North Korean tinhorn really and truly want that to happen?

International news

How would Trump react if he had ordered bin Laden hit?

I have watched a fascinating interview with Donald J. Trump. CNN broadcast it before Trump became president.

Wolf Blitzer asked Trump to identify something positive about Barack Obama’s presidency. Trump said it was “very hard” to find one to say positive about the 44th president of the United States.

Blitzer then blurted out that he “got (Osama) bin Laden.” Trump responded that Obama was taking “too much credit” for authorizing the commando raid that killed the al-Qaeda leader in May 2011.

Here’s the video:

Trump offered a seriously stupid response.

I am struck by this notion: How do you think Donald John Trump would have responded publicly had he been the commander in chief and had he ordered the raid that killed bin Laden?

Something tells me he might have declared that he flew one of the helicopters into bin Laden’s compound himself, rushed the building where the terrorist was holed up and put a bullet into him.

Just sayin’, man. Just sayin’.

media news

NPR sought to pay tribute, and then …

National Public Radio has this tradition of delivering the words of the Declaration of Independence to its listeners.

Its intent is to pay tribute to the very foundation of this great nation. Ol’ Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration to inform King George III of the many grievances the colonies had against his ham-fisted rule.

Well, this year, NPR’s tweeting of the Declaration met some angry response. Some fans of Donald J. Trump thought NPR was calling for insurrection against the government led by the 45th president of the United States.

Seriously, I do not know whether to laugh, cry, scream, slap the side of my noggin, just throw up my hands in disgust … or just, well, throw up.

Check out the reaction

Some supporters of the president flipped out. They didn’t recognize the words of Declaration of Independence.

You’ve heard the saying about how “No good deed goes unpunished”?

Well. There you go, NPR.

 

national news

If only Buzz Aldrin would tell us

Oh, how I wish I could read minds.

This video is making the Internet rounds. Donald Trump is talking about space travel. The fellow on the right is none other than Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, one of two men who walked on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission in July 1969.

A lot of would-be mind readers are conjecturing about what Aldrin might be thinking. He looks alternately bemused, confused, aghast and flabbergasted at what he’s hearing from the president of the United States.

Oh well. I just wanted to share it here. You be the judge on what is going through Buzz Aldrin’s mind.

Might there be someone who can ask the space hero what he was thinking? Would he tell us the truth? Hey, it’s worth asking.

International news, national news, political news

Trump and Putin: hoping for confrontation

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin will be among the 20 world leaders gathering this week for an economic summit.

The two of them are going to meet for a full-blown bilateral summit in Hamburg, Germany. Do you know what that means? It means that the president of the United States will have a chance to confront the Russian president over the issue that has dominated the U.S. political discussion since the presidential inaugural.

No one has asked me for my opinion on this, but given that I write this blog and am entitled to offer it unsolicited, I’ll offer this bit of advice.

Mr. President, you need to cease this nicey-nicey talk about the Russians. They interfered in our 2016 electoral process and you need lay down the law much like your immediate predecessor did when he met with Putin in 2016.

I am not filled with supreme confidence that Trump will do that. He’s still a rookie on the world political stage. Sure, he’s been a “public figure” for decades, but this is quite unlike anything he’s ever experienced.

Trump has exhibited for months a maddening and outrageous reluctance to condemn the Russians for doing what U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded: that the Russians hacked into our electoral system and sought to influence the 2016 election; they intended to help Trump defeat Hillary Rodham Clinton. I get that the success of that effort remains under intense debate. What’s not in question is that the Russians did something.

Trump’s reaction has been to give the Russians cover by suggesting that other nations could have meddled as well in our election. He even mentioned some “400-pound guy” lying on his bed … good grief!

This will be the first Trump-Putin meeting ever. These men have never been in the same room together — even though Trump once suggested he had met Putin once. Oh well, what’s another lie?

The planned sit-down meeting between these men also means it will get the worldwide attention it deserves. It will be “on the record.” It won’t be just one of those handshake pass-by events. These men will have an agenda from which to build their discussion.

My strong hope is that the Trump team will make damn sure the president brings up the Russian involvement in the 2016 election. If it remains an unmentionable, my strong hunch is that the president’s many critics here at home are going to reach some scathing conclusions about where this story goes from here.