Tag Archives: NY Times

political news

GOP changes rules for the president

Oh, how the rules have changed for presidential behavior.

The New York Times has published a fascinating list of do’s and don’ts that have been tossed asunder by Donald John Trump and his band of Trumpkins.

I think my favorite item now allowed for the president, but which would have been grounds for impeachment by any predecessor is the shortest one: lie.

Yet that’s what we’re getting from the 45th president of the United States. An endless string of lies.

The GOP changes the playbook

Take a moment to scan them on the link I’ve just posted.

I hope you’re as amazed as I am.

As the Times notes: “It wasn’t so long ago that Republicans in Congress cared about how a president comported himself in office. They cared a lot! The president is, after all, commander in chief of the armed forces, steward of the most powerful nation on earth, role model for America’s children — and he should act at all times with the dignity his station demands. It’s not O.K. to behave in a manner that demeans the office and embarrasses the country.”

But, hey, he “tells it like it is.”

International news

Trump-Putin ‘bromance’ on the rocks

It took a good while — too long, in fact — but it appears the Donald Trump-Vladimir Putin bromance might be on the verge of ending.

The White House has issued a stern statement accusing Russia of covering up the Syrian chemical weapons attack that killed several dozen civilians, including children. The gassing of Syrian civilians prompted the U.S. air strike that wiped out several Russian-made Syrian jet fighters at the base from where the gas attack was launched.

White House talks tough to Russia — finally

The strongly worded statement demands international condemnation of Syria for using the chemical weapons and accuses Russia of “shielding” its Syrian allies.

As the New York Times reported: “It marks a striking shift by President Trump, who entered office praising President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and seeking common ground with him — and now appears to be moving swiftly to isolate him. The charges came as Rex W. Tillerson, the secretary of state, was preparing for meetings in Moscow on Wednesday, and as Congress and the F.B.I. are investigating potential ties between Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia.”

Has the president finally gotten the message that Vladimir Putin is no friend of the United States and shouldn’t be a friend of the man who now governs this country?

As for the investigation that’s under way regarding the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, let it continue full throttle.

The here and now, though, presents a whole new and different set of challenges that must require an end to the strange buddy relationship between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.

national news, political news

This is how Trump defines the word ‘best’

Donald John Trump loves the word “best.”

The president plans to negotiate the best trade deals, create the best job growth programs, surround himself with the best people.

It’s the “best people” boast that caught my attention when I saw this column from my home boy Nicholas Kristof in the Sunday New York Times. (By the way, Kristof grew up in the Willamette Valley, just south of my hometown of Portland, Ore.)

Kristof’s column talks about the president’s “triumph of incompetence” in the wake of the Affordable Health Care  repeal/replace debacle.

The columnist noted: “… Trump’s record of appointments over all suggests a lack of interest in expertise. I’m not sure that this is ‘the worst cabinet in American history,’ as a Washington Post opinion writer put it, but it might be a contender. The last two energy secretaries were renowned scientists, one with a Nobel prize, while Trump appointed (former Texas Gov.) Rick Perry — who once couldn’t remember the department’s name.

“Trump appointed his bankruptcy lawyer, David Friedman, to be ambassador to Israel. He chose Jason Greenblatt, another of his lawyers, to negotiate Mideast peace. He picked Omarosa Manigault, who starred with him on ‘The Apprentice’ and has a record of inflating her rĂ©sumĂ©, to be assistant to the president.

“The director of Oval Office operations is Keith Schiller, a former Trump bodyguard best known for whacking a protester. And the Trump team installed as a minder in the Labor Department a former campaign worker who graduated from high school in 2015, according to ProPublica.”

Here’s the rest of Kristof’s column

This is how Trump defines “the best people”?

Kristof does note that some of the president’s appointments have been top-shelf picks: James Mattis at Defense, Steve Mnuchin at Treasury and Neil Gorsuch for the U.S. Supreme Court, for example.

But he has populated many of his key staff posts with rubes and rascals. Oh, yes, and the “populist” champion who said he would fight for the little guy has surrounded himself with billionaires and multimillionaires associated with Goldman Sachs, the outfit he demonized throughout his presidential campaign.

I don’t mean to sound too familiar with someone I do not know, but … you go, Nick!

national news, political news

Wheeler-dealer has been revealed as a fraud

A big part of what has gotten Donald J. Trump into so much trouble during the past few days has been his own big mouth and penchant for braggadocio.

He boasted many times while winning his campaign for the presidency that he would cut the “best” deals ever. He would renegotiate international trade deals; he would persuade companies to bring jobs back to this country; he would force Mexico to pay for “the wall” across our countries’ shared border … oh, and he would “repeal and replace” Obamacare on “Day One” of his presidency.

What about that last thing, repealing the Affordable Care Act and replacing it with something better?

He didn’t deliver the goods. Not only did he not make good on that grand campaign promise, he revealed himself to be a fraud, a sucker.

None of this would matter nearly as much were it not for the undeniable fact that Trump bragged so openly — repeatedly and loudly — about how he would transfer his legendary business acumen into running a multitrillion-dollar government operation.

No president can force other politicians to do his bidding. No president can perform a single-handed midcourse correction of the federal government.

He told us at the Republican National Convention that “I, alone” can fix the things that need fixing. Mr. President, good governance — something that is foreign to you — inherently is a team sport. It requires a partnership between two of the three branches of government: the executive and legislative branches. That’s how the founders set it up and that’s how it is intended to function. What’s more, if either of those two branches screw it up, we have the third branch of government — the federal court system — to determine whether they violate the U.S. Constitution.

Can the 70-year-old president who prior to taking office had zero direct experience with government change his ways? Can this guy ever learn how to govern?

I refer to a part of Maureen Dowd’s brilliant column in today’s New York Times. She refers to how Trump likens his ascent to power to when Ronald Reagan became president in 1981. There is an essential difference between the 45th president and President Reagan.

It is that Ronald Reagan “knew what he didn’t know.” So he sought to hire the best minds he could find to teach him. Donald Trump has yet to acknowledge that he knows nothing about the job he now occupies.

Deal maker? Big-time negotiator? The president is a fake.

national news, political news

Back and forth, the political fortunes keep changing

First, it was Democrats who were smiling smugly at Republicans for nominating a TV celebrity/carnival barker/real estate mogul as their presidential nominee.

Then the Republicans had the next laugh as Donald J. Trump actually got elected over the Democrats’ presidential heiress apparent, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

One party is up. The other is down. Then the roles flipped.

What in the world then happened? The “up” party — which now controls Congress and the White House — produced a health care overhaul plan that couldn’t get enough support within its own ranks, let alone from the folks on the “other side of the aisle.”

That’s right, Republicans drove their repeal of the Affordable Care Act straight over the cliff.

Who led the suicide mission? Was it the carnival barker/president? Was it the speaker of the House of Representatives, the so-called “policy wonk”? Both of them appear ready to throw the other one under the proverbial bus.

This much appears certain: The party that sought to govern has been revealed to comprise a bunch of folks who cannot hit their backside with both hands.

As Frank Bruni writes in today’s New York Times: “For the entirety of his campaign, Donald Trump crowed about his peerless ability to make deals, one of which, he assured us, was going to be a replacement for Obamacare that would cut costs without leaving any Americans in the lurch. Last week proved that there was no such swap, that he hadn’t done an iota of work to devise one and that he was spectacularly unprepared to shepherd such legislation through Congress.”

Bruni skewers Trump.

These change of fortunes are giving me a case of vertigo. I can barely remain upright while watching the new Big Men On Campus make a mess of what they promised — repeatedly and with maximum boastfulness — to do once they acquired the keys to the White House.

I won’t take much, if any, of this to the bank just yet. The fickle winds of political fate have this way of changing course in an instant.

Still, Republicans across the land drooled at the prospect of a Trump presidency to go along with GOP control of Capitol Hill. I must wonder today if they regret seeing their wish come true.

International news, media news

Tweets diminish Trump’s ‘moral authority’

Thomas Friedman is a journalist of considerable reputation.

He might, in the words of Donald J. Trump, be an “enemy of the people,” but the New York Times columnist has a well-established base of knowledge of world affairs.

Consider his take on the president’s use of Twitter as a primary form of communication.

Friedman appeared this morning on “Meet the Press” and he asserted that Trump’s “moral authority” is being damaged by his random rants that go out in the wee hours from wherever he happens to be at the moment.

He noted that the president is going to Europe soon to meet with other heads of government and heads of state. They are our allies. Our friends. Our partners.

How will the U.S. president respond to these meetings? What might he say about President So-and-So or about Prime Minister What’s-His-Name?

Does the president’s Twitter fetish diminish the trust that these world leaders have in the head of the greatest nation on Earth?

Friedman believes Trump’s use of this social medium ultimately could cause great damage to this country’s standing among other world leaders who depend on America to be the source of reason, strength and wisdom.

Trump’s demonstrated careless use of Twitter undermines all of it.

The president is playing a dangerous game.

media news

Trump has chosen the wrong ‘enemy’

Donald J. Trump’s war on what he calls the “enemy of the American people” has taken a seriously counterproductive and dangerous turn.

It’s also patently frightening. Outrageous. Un-American. Pick whatever negative description you prefer.

The president has ordered several major media organizations excluded from White House briefings. They include CNN, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Daily News, The Hill, Buzzfeed, Politico and the BBC.

He calls them “fake news” outlets. He doesn’t like the tone of their coverage. He is limiting access to, um, more “friendly” media organizations.

So help me, I am running out of ways to express my utter outrage over this treatment of the media by the president of the United States. Not since the late Richard Nixon have we seen anything quite like this — and not even Tricky Dick managed to do what one of his successors has done.

If you think for a moment about this, you have to wonder: What in the world is Trump hoping to accomplish? White House press flack Sean Spicer will deliver his briefings to certain media outlets; meanwhile, those that are left out will be left to write about their being excluded. That reporting, then, might simply anger those Americans who understand the meaning of the First Amendment’s protection of a “free press.”

Trump’s bullying of the media is an outrageous act of a thin-skinned narcissist who doesn’t comprehend — seemingly at any level — what the nation’s founders envisioned when they provided for a press that should be free of government intimidation.

We now are hearing the president of the United States of American declaring that the media are the “enemy of the people.”

Are you kidding me?

The irony of this approach is mind-boggling in the extreme. It can be argued that Trump owes his ascent to the pinnacle of political power to the media, which covered his every utterance for months without ever challenging their veracity.

Now that they have done what they should have done from the beginning, the president has decided he doesn’t like being challenged.

Mr. President, that’s what the media do. It’s their job.

You, sir, do not get it.

military news

Mullen is right about Bannon: He doesn’t belong on NSC

Michael Mullen knows a thing or three about national security.

He’s a retired Navy admiral who served as Joint Chiefs chairman under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

Mullen also believes that Donald Trump’s chief political adviser — Steve Bannon — should not be on the principals committee of the National Security Council.

My reaction? No-o-o-o-o!

Mullen has written his feelings in an op-ed published by the New York Times.

Mullen made his point clear. Bannon is a political hand. He is not a national security expert. Indeed, Trump demoted the current Joint Chiefs chair and the director of national intelligence to make room for the former Brietbart.com editor, and a guy believed to harbor dangerous views about white supremacy.

“Every president has the right and the responsibility to shape the security council as he sees fit,” Mullen added. “But partisan politics has no place at that table. And neither does Mr. Bannon.”

The NSC is a place where experts share their knowledge about imminent national security threats and make recommendations to the president on how to deal with them.

What in the world does Bannon bring to that discussion? Nothing, as far as I can tell.

entertainment news

Bravest man in America gets married

I hereby declare Michael Brown is the bravest man in America … heck, maybe the bravest man on the planet.

Why this highest of praise? Brown has just married Marilu Henner.

So, why is that such a big deal? Henner is a well-known comedic actress who broke onto the national scene on the TV series “Taxi.” But more than that, she possesses what’s called “total recall.” It’s called “autobiographical memory” or “hyperthymesia.”

Henner can recite every single moment of her life. She is now 64 years of age.

“60 Minutes” profiled Henner and some others a few years ago in a feature explaining this rare form of acute memory retention. “I can literally listen to a song on the radio when I’m driving and go to every single time I’ve heard it, like a flash montage,” she told The New York Times.

I saw the story on the NYT’s Style section this morning and couldn’t get over the courage Henner’s new husband is demonstrating by marrying a woman with that kind of recall.

All I have to say is that … Michael Brown, you’d better be on your best behavior — for the rest of your life! Mind all your Ps and Qs, sir. Take it from me, as I’ve been at this marriage gig for 45 years: Your wife will remember every single detail of when you mess up.

And you — in particular — would be a damn fool to challenge her.

I salute you, sir, the bravest man in the world.

entertainment news, media news, national news, political news

Yes, Donald, you ‘mocked’ the NY Times reporter

I awoke this morning to news that the great actor Meryl Streep tore Donald J. Trump a new one at the Golden Globes awards ceremony.

She called him a bully and some other fitting epithets. I don’t want to comment specifically on the totality of her comments, but I do want to offer a brief critique of part of the president-elect’s tweet-storm response.

He said “for the 100th time” he didn’t mock a New York Times reporter’s physical disability while delivering a campaign-rally speech en route to his election as president.

Actually, Mr. President-elect, you did mock Serge Kovaleski, who suffers from a debilitating muscular disease that inhibits his arm movements. It was a disgusting and disgraceful exhibition of childish petulance the likes of which many of us never have seen coming from a major-party presidential nominee.

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/09/movies/trump-meryl-streep-golden-globes-speech.html?partner=msft_msn&_r=0

For Trump to suggest — as if we’re all a bunch of rubes — that he merely was showing how the reporter was ” … ‘groveling’ when he totally changed a 16 year old story that he had written in order to make me look bad. Just more very dishonest media!”

Trump said he “would never do that,” meaning mock someone in such a hideous manner.

Actually, I believe he would. And I also believe he did!