Tag Archives: Donald Trump

national news

What? Now he dumps inaugural parade announcer?

You can’t see me doing it, but I am shaking my head at this very moment.

The president-elect has decided to toss aside a man who’s announced the inaugural parade for the past 60 years.

He goes back to President Eisenhower’s second inaugural in 1957. He’s called them all for Democrats and Republicans alike.

Charles Brotman won’t be announcing this year’s inaugural parade because Donald J. Trump has thrown him over in favor of a freelance announcer named Steve Ray.

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/313240-trump-dumps-inaugural-parade-announcer-who-has-done-them-for-60

Brotman said he was “heartbroken” and “destroyed” when he heard the news. Gentleman that he is, he says he wishes Ray well — but isn’t sure if he’ll attend the inaugural.

To be fair, the Trump team has paid tribute to Brotman, calling him “the voice” of the inaugural.

But this seems — to me, at least — to be one of those changes that is being made just for the sake of change.

Go figure, man.

 

International news, national news

Trump brings his campaign promise to where it started

Donald J. Trump has brought it all home.

The next president of the United States is still insisting that Mexico is going to pay for that big wall he plans to build across our southern border. He pitched the wall during his first day campaigning for the presidency.

It’ll be a repayment, he says. U.S. taxpayers are going to foot the bill initially, but Trump insists that Mexico will pay us back for the billions of dollars we’ll spend. He wants Americans to pay for sealing off the southern border “for the sake of speed.”

Good bleeping luck with that, Mr. President-elect.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-on-border-wall-mexico-will-pay-us-back/ar-BBxXkeO?li=BBnb7Kz

As with virtually all of his proposals, Trump doesn’t specify just how he intends to make Mexico pay. He doesn’t deliver any details on how he will force a sovereign government to fork over the money to this government. Nor does he explain how he is going to persuade Mexican government officials to change their minds after saying quite loudly that in no way would Mexico pay for the wall.

No, the president-elect doesn’t operate that way. He functions with bluster and bravado. He issues threats — even to trusted allies and, in this case, a nation that shares a 2,000-mile-long border with the United States.

It is my belief, too, that Trump has misstated grossly the current U.S. government’s performance as it seeks to stem the tide of illegal immigration. President Obama might go down as the deporter in chief, having overseen record numbers of deportations of undocumented immigrants coming into this country during his eight years as president.

Our borders traditionally have been unguarded. Our immigration enforcement, though, has continued. Have we been able to secure every foot of our borders — both northern and southern? No. That has never — not in the history of our republic — been possible.

Does a wall provide the ultimate solution? No. Desperate people will find a way to sneak through any barrier we erect. Walls don’t necessarily deter the most determined individuals.

As for saddling U.S. taxpayers with the initial bill to pay the wall, Trump will have to explain where he’ll get the money. He’s going to cut taxes, remember? He’s going to spend a trillion bucks on improving our bridges and highways, too. He’s going to shore up our military.

Build a wall? With what, Mr. President-elect.

Be sure, also, to tell us precisely how you intend to force Mexico to foot the bill.

national news, political news

Don’t delay confirmation hearings

Senate Democrats want to delay the confirmation hearings for several of Donald J. Trump’s Cabinet nominees.

Interesting, yes? Sure. Democrats say they need more time to “vet” the nominees, meaning they need more time to find dirt on them.

Do they need that time? I don’t think so.

Trump has had ample opportunity to vet these folks, to learn about possible conflicts of interests or to determine whether they are truly qualified to hold the positions he is seeking for them.

So, let the president-elect submit his nominees to the appropriate Senate committees for the roughing up they can expect to get, particularly from Senate Democrats who are pretty miffed that Trump got elected president over Hillary Rodham Clinton.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/ethics-official-warns-against-confirmations-before-reviews-are-complete/ar-BBy1eW9?li=BBmkt5R&ocid=spartandhp

Ethics officials are issuing warnings about proceeding without conducting thorough reviews of the nominees. Indeed, some of them are serious eyebrow-raisers.

— Rex Tillerson at State is a friend of Russian president Vladimir Putin, who has been accused by the CIA and other intelligence agencies of trying to influence the U.S. presidential election.

— Betsy DeVos is an ardent critic of public education, but she’s now being asked to serve as the secretary of (public) education.

— Ben Carson once declared himself “not qualified” to run a federal agency, but Trump picked him as secretary of housing and urban development; go figure.

— Rick “Oops” Perry, the former Texas governor, once declared his intention to get rid of the energy department. But wait! He’s been picked as the next energy secretary.

— Jeff Sessions was rejected for a federal judgeship because of alleged racist remarks he made; he has been asked to become attorney general. Sheesh!

Hey, let’s proceed with these nomination hearings and see what happens next.

International news

Now, let’s pray diplomatic crises don’t erupt

Donald J. Trump’s unconventional approach to virtually everything presidential has taken yet another bizarre turn.

The president-elect has issued an order for all U.S. diplomats — ambassadors, if you will — turn in their letters of resignation and vacate their posts on Inauguration Day.

All of ’em, I tell ya. They will have to leave diplomacy to the pros on their staffs; all political appointees have to go. Pronto! Immediately!

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/in-break-with-past-obama-ambassadors-are-told-to-quit-posts-by-inauguration-day/ar-BBxWVBm?li=BBmkt5R&ocid=spartandhp

It’s way too early to tell what this means, other than the obvious, which is that Trump is breaking with decades of diplomatic tradition.

But, hey — tradition, shmadition. Who needs it when you’ve got such a successful businessman and dealmaker at the helm?

My concern is this: We’d better not have a diplomatic crisis develop in, say, one of the nuclear-power nations where we now have embassies in the days immediately after Trump takes office as president.

Think it can’t happen? It surely can.

What’s more, the directive has put many of our senior diplomats in a world of major inconvenience. As the New York Times reports: “In Costa Rica, Ambassador Stafford Fitzgerald Haney is hunting for a house or an apartment as his family — which includes four school-age children and his wife, who has been battling breast cancer — struggles to figure out how to avoid a move back to the United States with five months left in the school year, according to the diplomats.”

I know that’s of little direct concern to most Americans. My bigger worry is that in countries on the front lines of, say, open warfare — places such as Jordan, Israel, Turkey — there well could be a crisis explode while we have no one at his or her post standing ready to speak for the United States of America.

Do our allies around the world have reason to be a bit jittery at this news? I believe they do.

media news, national news, political news

Parties suffer/enjoy results of presidential election

Is it me or are the media missing one of the critical backstories of the 2016 presidential election?

It goes like this … I believe.

Right up until Election Day, the media were reporting the pending demise of the once-great Republican Party. The GOP, media types reported, was in need of an extreme makeover. Their presidential candidate was about to get creamed by Democratic nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Batten down the hatches! A storm was a brewin’ within the Republican Party ranks, they said.

Then a funny thing happened on Nov. 8. The GOP presidential nominee won. Donald J. Trump collected enough Electoral College votes to be elected president of the United States of America.

What the … ?

Now it’s the Democratic Party that’s in need of that makeover.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/01/07/what-went-wrong-dem-party-contestants-face-tough-questions/96284286/

The candidates for Democratic National Committee chair are facing searing, probing questions about how they intend to lead a party in near-panic.

Clinton lost the election. Democrats failed to win the U.S. Senate majority they anticipated getting; nor did they make any substantial gains in trimming the Republican majority in the House of Representatives.

This remarkable turnaround occurred within a span of, oh, about seven or eight hours the night they were counting the ballots for president.

Polling now suggests that the next Democratic Party presidential nominee should be someone few of us have heard about … another candidate as unknown as, say, Jimmy Carter needs to take the stage.

It well might turn out that Republicans might regret lining up behind a candidate such as Trump, who seems to lack any fundamental core principles that guide him. He once was pro-choice on abortion; now he’s pro-life. He believes gay marriage is now the law of the land; many within the GOP believe quite differently. He thinks free trade is a scam; Republicans embrace free-trade policies. And, oh yes, we have some conflict-of-interest matters to slog through.

I’ll stop there. You get the point.

But, hey. The guy won! Elections have consequences, eh? Oh, brother, do they ever!

International news, national news, political news

Cruz is proving a point about topsy-turvy politics

Oh, that junior U.S. senator of ours.

He is dismissing concerns about possible Russian hacking of the U.S. election process, claiming it’s an effort to “discredit” Donald J. Trump’s election as president.

What might Ted Cruz of Texas say, though, if Hillary Clinton had won amid concerns that the Russians sought to influence her victory? My strong hunch is that the Cruz Missile would be screeching a different set of gripes.

https://www.texastribune.org/2017/01/05/cruz-dismisses-concerns-over-russian-role-election/

This is more or less a point I sought to make in an earlier blog post about how the political world has gone all topsy-turvy on us. Republicans historically have stood foursquare behind our intelligence-gathering professionals. Not this time.

https://highplainsblogger.com/2017/01/tables-have-been-turned-upside-down/

They’re standing against their conclusions that Russian hackers sought to tilt the election in Trump’s favor, apparently at the behest of the former head of the KGB who now is Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin.

I get the politics of it all. The GOP’s guy won. They want his election to stand as a “mandate” to do things as president.

For the record — yet again — I don’t believe the Russians’ activities actually tilted the election toward Trump. That’s not the point. The point is that our election system is supposed to be immune from anyone seeking to do some skullduggery, to use our sacred voting process for nefarious purposes.

I don’t believe our election system is as bullet-proof as it should be. It’s also shocking to me that Ted Cruz would be so dismissive of what the CIA spooks have concluded.

national news, political news

Trying to decide whether to watch inauguration

Some friends and a couple of family members have asked: Are you going to watch Donald Trump’s inaugural?

I don’t yet know.

I have made no secret of my disappointment in the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. Sure, my candidates have lost before. This one, though, feels different in a way I cannot yet define clearly and concisely.

It might be that I do not consider Trump fit or qualified at any level to become president of the United States. That’s not how it turned out at the ballot box. He collected enough electoral votes to win the election. That’s that.

Inaugural speeches usually are filled with high-minded, soaring rhetoric. A few of them over the years have produced phrases for the ages: President Lincoln’s “with malice toward none and charity for all” at his second inaugural in 1865; President Franklin Roosevelt’s “We have nothing to fear but fear itself” at his first inaugural in 1933; President Kennedy’s “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country” in 1961; President Reagan’s “government is the problem” at his first inaugural in 1981.

The rest of them? Well, I don’t remember certain phrases, although I do recall all the presidents spoke of high ideals and grand goals.

I’m trying to imagine Donald Trump expressing himself in such a fashion. I’m also trying to speculate as to whether the 45th president will even be able to maintain his focus long enough to read the text on his Teleprompter; or will he spin off on one of those tangents, one of those stream-of-consciousness riffs.

My tendency has been to watch these speeches. I try to soak it all in. I seek to glean some sense of hope from the president.

With this guy Trump, though, such optimism remains a distant dream for me. His campaign was too steeped in anger, bigotry and exclusion for me to feel any sense that he ever can appeal to what’s best in Americans.

Inaugurals are meant to set a tone for the presidency. They are intended to give us hope. How in the world is Donald Trump going to deliver such a message after running the kind of campaign that propelled him to the highest office in the land?

Decisions, decisions …

local news, military news, national news, political news

Still waiting on Thornberry’s take on this hacking matter

I’m thinking that we need to send out an all-points-bulletin for Mac Thornberry, the Republican member of Congress who represents the 13th Congressional District.

All this talk, all this chatter, all this debate over Russian hackers trying to influence the 2016 presidential election is missing a key voice.

That would be Thornberry.

John Boehner was speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives when he charged Thornberry with coming up with ways to secure our national computer grid. Thornberry chaired a special House committee to formulate a plan, a strategy, a defense against the kind of thing that appears to have been going on.

At this moment, I don’t know (a) whatever became of that committee’s findings and (b) why no one in the media has called on Thornberry to provide some context, perspective and expertise on what’s going on and how the nation can avoid this kind thing from ever happening again.

I have looked on Thornberry’s website and have found nothing from him about the issue that has consumed the national media.

Intelligence officials met with Donald Trump today to brief the president-elect on intelligence evidence that Russian spooks actually hacked into our cyber grid while trying to help Trump get elected president. Trump continues to downplay the allegation that our electoral process may have been compromised.

Didn’t the House speaker, though, commission our congressman to come up with answers to all this?

I’m all ears while I await what my congressman has to say about this issue.

Thornberry has served in the House since 1995. He’s a go-to guy on national defense issues, given that he chairs the House Armed Services Committee.

On this one, though, the chairman is missing in action.

International news, national news, political news

Tables have been turned upside down

Imagine this scenario, say, around 1972.

The Democratic nominee for president, George McGovern, wants Americans troops pulled out of Vietnam immediately. The North Vietnamese’s major benefactor, the Soviet Union, starts deploying spooks to influence the presidential election that year.

KGB agents infiltrate U.S. voting stations, tinker with ballots, perform all kinds of skullduggery to get McGovern elected. They fail. President Nixon wins anyway … in a landslide.

Then the word goes out about the Soviets’ meddling. What do you suppose would be the Republicans’ response? They’d be outraged. They would call for heads to roll. They would insist that the president slap sanctions on the Soviets.

Today, though, is a different era.

Democrats are yammering at possible Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Republicans led by the president-elect are dismissing intelligence experts’ opinion that the Russians — under orders from Vladimir Putin –tried to get Donald J. Trump elected. They cheered when Trump actually was elected.

Why aren’t GOP leaders as incensed now as they historically would have been?

Is it because their guy won? Is it because they don’t want to rile the president-elect, who’s been dismissing and disparaging our intelligence community that Republicans historically have trusted implicitly as behaving honorably?

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/us-intel-report-putin-directed-cyber-campaign-to-help-trump/ar-BBxZbvk?li=BBmkt5R&ocid=spartandhp

Trump got an earful today when he met with CIA, DIA, NSA and Homeland Security officials. They told him the same thing: The Russians tried to influence our election through cyberattacks. Trump’s response has been, well, tepid at best.

If the president-elect is truly interested in protecting the integrity of our electoral process, he needs to stop making excuses for “smart man” Putin and get on board with what his intelligence experts are telling him.

As president, it’s a sure bet that he’ll need their expertise when the time comes.

national news

Ex-CIA boss quits Trump team … mysteriously

It must be the latent spook tendency that resides inside James Woolsey’s gut that prevents him from speaking in more declarative language as to why he’s just done something.

The former CIA director — until just yesterday — served as a senior adviser to Donald J. Trump’s presidential team. Now he’s out. Effective immediately.

You know, of course, about the swirling maelstrom concerning Trump’s dismissal of CIA analysis of Russian hackers and all that stuff, yes?

Woolsey’s spokesman said this about his sudden departure: “Effective immediately, Ambassador Woolsey is no longer a Senior Adviser to President-elect Trump or the transition, He wishes the President-elect and his Administration great success in their time in office.”

Politico reports this: “‘My background in defense and national security and intelligence I think is probably not relevant to more decisions that need to be made in the next couple of weeks,’ Woolsey said. ‘The world starts over again when the candidate now or president-elect becomes president [and] is sworn in on January 20.’

“He added: ‘I don’t want people to get the impression that I’m claiming to be something I’m not. That’s all.'”

Huh? Someone needs to translate that for me.

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/james-woolsey-trump-transition-split-233257

No one has asked me my opinion, but I’ll give it anyway.

I believe Woolsey is angry at Trump’s dismissal of the CIA’s expertise on intelligence-gathering. He quit because he no longer could advise a president-elect who is so dismissive of the pros who swear an oath to protect the United States of America.

There. That’s my thought.