monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Rasmussen, enough said.

Trump has been bad mouthing Amanda Knox, he claims he was one of the reasons she was released and now he laments ever helping her. Said she isn't loyal enough.
You can google it.

It took Old Buck several years to meet up with his reasons for disdain, Trump has gotten his going at his inauguration.
Im amazed how stupid you folks are for NOT seeing his failings on display.

Hundreds of ex-DOJ officials now urging Congress to ‘forcefully respond’ if Trump fires Mueller

'This is not OK': Comey pushes back against Trump's calls to jail him (WP)

Trump claims it was all because of him.

China has announced a hefty anti-dumping move against US sorghum imports, as a multi-billion dollar tit-for-tat trade spat between the two nations continues.

China said US importers would have to pay a temporary 178.6% deposit on the value of their imports from Wednesday.

China initiated its investigation into US sorghum imports in February.

US growers were "deeply disappointed" with the findings and are considering legal action in response.

Sorghum is a grain used primarily to feed livestock, but it is also used to create ethanol, or drinking alcohol.

The US is the world's leading producer of sorghum, and is the largest supplier of sorghum to China. China uses its sorghum imports to feed its farm animals, and in its spirits industry.

Analysts said the temporary anti-dumping deposit imposed by China, which comes ahead of a possible anti-dumping tariff on the product, was quite high and that some US shipments in the future could be cancelled as a result.

WASHINGTON — President Trump was watching television on Sunday when he saw Nikki R. Haley, his ambassador to the United Nations, announce that he would impose fresh sanctions on Russia. The president grew angry, according to an official informed about the moment. As far as he was concerned, he had decided no such thing.

It was not the first time Mr. Trump has yelled at the television over something he saw Ms. Haley saying. This time, however, the divergence has spilled into public in a remarkable display of discord that stems not just from competing views of Russia but from larger questions of political ambition, jealousy, resentment and loyalty.

The rift erupted into open conflict on Tuesday when a White House official blamed Ms. Haley’s statement about sanctions on “momentary confusion.” That prompted her to fire back, saying that she did not “get confused.” The public disagreement embarrassed Ms. Haley and reinforced questions about Mr. Trump’s foreign policy — and who speaks for his administration.

At the very least, the episode highlighted the crossed circuits over foreign policy in an administration with no secretary of state, an increasingly marginalized White House chief of staff and a national security adviser who has only been on the job for a week and has pushed out many of the senior national security officials in the White House but has yet to bring in his own team.

Since Mr. Trump fired Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson last month, Ms. Haley has been the administration’s leading foreign policy figure. And yet she was not kept in the loop on a major decision involving perhaps America’s most powerful adversary.

According to several officials, the White House did not inform Ms. Haley that it had changed course on sanctions, leaving her to hang out alone.

“It damages her credibility going forward and once again makes everyone, friend and foe alike, wonder that when the United States says something, approves something, calls for something, opposes something, is it for real?” said Representative Gerald E. Connolly, Democrat of Virginia and a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “Should we wait to see what Trump does the next day?”

President Donald Trump’s trade war with China has already sparked promises of retaliatory tariffs on U.S. exports, including soybeans, that will hit such Trump-friendly Midwestern states as Iowa, Indiana, North Dakota, and Nebraska—if they take effect. In March, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said “there is hope” they can be forestalled.

Sorghum growers aren’t so lucky. On Tuesday, China’s Ministry of Commerce announced it would impose a 178.6 percent duty on sorghum imports from the U.S. that will take effect almost immediately. The news puts an additional Trump-friendly state (and Republican leader) squarely in the crosshairs: Kansas is the largest sorghum producer in the U.S., and its senior senator, Pat Roberts, chairs the Senate Agriculture Committee. 

“It’s extremely frustrating and very disappointing,” says Jesse McCurry, executive director of the Kansas Grain Sorghum Commission. “Half of Kansas sorghum or more was going to China, and that probably stops, at least for now.” 

James Fallows
‏Verified account
@JamesFallows
Republican Rep. Charlie Dent, to @NewsHour’s Judy Woodruff, on why he is retiring right now:

“There’s a big wave coming. Sometimes you’ve got to get off the beach.”

What Jennifer Rubin saw while looking at that photo: a Republican Party that “has become the caricature the left always said it was—the party of old white men. And that has become more so in the age of Donald Trump, when he is actively courting and stoking white resentment.”

Trump’s use of identity politics, Rubin told me in an interview for the latest episode of POLITICO’s Off Message podcast, “is a dead end for the party. It’s a dead end because it’s immoral and anti-American to base an entire political movement on one racial group, and it’s a dead end because that’s not America and [what America] is becoming.”

...“Republicans have permanently eliminated themselves from credibility to govern,” Rubin said. “You can’t be willing to sacrifice core American values for the sake of a tax cut and be deemed to be worthy of trust going forward.”

“It damages her credibility going forward” said Representative Gerald E. Connolly, Democrat of Virginia and a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.”

The 28-year-old man who attacked a mosque in a Quebec City suburb in January 2017 spent hours in front of his computer screen reading about mass shooters and scouring the Twitter accounts of right-wing commentators, alt-right figures, conspiracy theorists and President Trump, according to evidence presented at his sentencing hearing this week.

On Monday, prosecutors revealed a 45-page document itemizing the contents of a computer belonging to the shooter, Alexandre Bissonnette, who pleaded guilty last month to six counts of first-degree murder and six counts of attempted murder in an attack that sent shock waves through Canada, a country unaccustomed to mass shootings. Six people were killed and 19 were injured in the attack.

Aren't all the Lincoln haters dead?

I think Mr. Connolly has got it very wrong.

A2k has been blocked by my American employer because of the hate sites which are regularly linked by one of the posters in this thread.

Two days after dismissing Comey, Trump had explained why he did it in a televised interview with NBC News.

“In fact when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story,” he said. “It’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.”