monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said on Sunday that she won’t defend President Trump’s “communication style.”

"First of all, he has his communication style," Haley told CBS’s “Sunday Morning.” "But you're not hearing me defend that."

"What I will tell you is if there is anything that he communicates in a way that I'm uncomfortable with, I pick up the phone and call him, and I tell him that. And I think that's something that he deserves from me,” the former South Carolina governor said.

Haley said that she doesn’t believe she needs to publicly detail the private conversations she has with the president but noted that she thinks Trump is receptive to them.

Haley hit back at the White House last month after a top adviser claimed that she was confused when she said the administration would impose new sanctions on Russia.

“With all due respect, I don’t get confused,” Haley said in a statement that was read on Fox News.

“It seems to me that the approach last week of the Trump team plays into the hands of Mueller’s tactic to try at any cost ... to find technical violations against lower-ranking people so that they can be squeezed,” Dershowitz told NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

The remarks from Dershowitz come amid the fallout from comments made last week by Rudy Giuliani, who recently joined Trump’s legal team. He told Fox News that the president reimbursed his personal attorney, Michael Cohen, for the $130,000 payment he made ahead of the 2016 election to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels.

Giuliani has conducted multiple interviews with news outlets in the last few days, seeking to clarify his previous remarks.

Dershowitz, an opinion contributor for The Hill, said during the NBC interview that Trump’s team is “admitting to enough that warrants scrutiny,” adding that the last few days constitute a “bad week for both sides.”

but worms might not always be wrong.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat… The man who does nothing cuts the same sordid figure in the pages of history, whether he be a cynic, or fop, or voluptuary. There is little use for the being whose tepid soul knows nothing of great and generous emotion, of the high pride, the stern belief, the lofty enthusiasm, of the men who quell the storm and ride the thunder.

Does playing golf every other day count?

6 Reasons Why Donald Trump Should Designate the Muslim Brotherhood a Terrorist Organization

1.The Muslim Brotherhood serves as the intellectual, ideological and sometimes operational leader for global jihadist groups.
2.The Muslim Brotherhood is a significant financier of terrorism and provides infrastructure for multiple violent Jihadist groups that conduct the bulk of the terror attacks.
3.Muslim Brotherhood members have carried out bombings, church burnings, and assassinations at the direction of senior Brotherhood figures, according to Egyptian intelligence.
4.The Muslim Brotherhood restated its intent to wage jihad as recently as 2015.
5.Since 1928, the goal of the Muslim Brotherhood has been the imposition of Islamic law and the restoration of the Caliphate.
6.The US should lead, not follow, in the war on terror.

The Muslim Brotherhood is designated as a terrorist organization by Russia, Egypt UAE, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Bahrain.

President Trump is sending a plan to Congress that calls for stripping back more than $15 billion in previously approved spending, with the hope that it will temper conservative angst over ballooning budget deficits.

Almost half of the proposed cuts would come from two accounts within the Children’s Health Insurance Program that White House officials said either expired last year or aren’t expected to be drawn upon. Another $800 million in cuts would come from money created by the Affordable Care Act in 2010 to test innovative payment and service delivery models.

Those are just a handful of the more than 30 programs the White House is proposing to Congress for “rescission,” a process of culling back money that was previously authorized. Once the White House sends the request to Congress, lawmakers have 45 days to vote on the plan or a scaled-back version of it through a simple majority vote.

If approved by Congress, the reductions would represent less than 0.4 percent of total government spending this year.

A senior administration official said Democrats should recognize that much of this package represents untapped accounts, and that cutting the money would create savings without affecting operations.

But Democrats have said they are watching the process with skepticism. Many Democrats have called for expanding programs like CHIP, not cutting them, and they are often fiercely protective of anything related to the Affordable Care Act.

White House officials and GOP leaders believe this package of proposed cuts could begin to signal to conservatives that they are now taking steps to reverse a free-spending fiscal approach they embraced since Trump took office.

Conservatives erupted in March after Trump signed a $1.3 trillion spending package that included a number of budget requests from Democrats, and pushed for a “rescission” package to pare it back by $30 to $60 billion.

But Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and others argued that would amount to going back on a bipartisan deal. The spending bill would not be touched in the package the White House plans to send to Congress this week. Instead, the White House plans to follow up with another request for close to $10 billion in additional spending cuts later this year that would target some of that money.

The budget strategy for both parties is uncertain heading into the November midterm elections.

Republicans must agree to a new spending deal with Democrats by Sept. 30 or it will trigger a government shutdown, something Trump said last week he would embrace if he doesn’t get additional money to build a wall on the Mexico border.

Congress can “rescind” money it has previously authorized if it secures a majority of votes in the House and then the Senate using powers under the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Act of 1974.

The law hasn’t been used in this way in roughly 20 years. The senior administration official said this is the biggest rescission request that has ever been sent to Congress.

The proposed cuts to CHIP would come in part from cutting $5 billion from an account meant to reimburse states for additional expenses in 2017. Because the money wasn’t used last year, it can’t be used this year, the senior administration official said, but it remains on the government’s balance sheet because it was approved by Congress.

CHIP is a program created and reauthorized by Congress that provides health care to low-income children. Congress extended the program for six years several months ago.

The White House’s other proposed cut to CHIP is a $2 billion reduction that pares back contingency funds set aside in case states see higher than expected enrollment, the senior administration official said. They aren’t expecting to see a jump in enrollment, though, in part because the economy is improving.

Other reductions would come from a range of areas. They include cutting $133 million for a railroad unemployment program that expired in 2012, the senior administration official said.

Successfully pushing these changes through Congress could placate conservatives and put Democrats on the spot about cutting spending. A number of Senate Democrats are running for reelection in states Trump won easily in 2016, and they will likely need support from Trump voters to win reelection.

Republicans control a large majority of votes in the House of Representatives, but their margin in the Senate is razor thin. They might need support from Democrats to approve the spending cuts, depending on the health of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

White House Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney had originally hoped to design a large rescission package, but he was urged by Speaker of the House Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) to start with a narrower set of cuts and then follow up with more requests in a future package.

The March spending bill led to such outrage among Republicans that just hours before signing it into law, Trump said in a Twitter post that he might veto it. He backed down and said the spending agreement was a necessary compromise to secure more money for the Pentagon, but he vowed to never sign a bill like that again.

He has also demanded that Congress give him the power to use a “line-item veto” on spending bills, which would mean he could simply eliminate any part of a spending package he didn’t want. This was ruled to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

But, in his first 14 months in office, Trump has never enforced a veto threat on spending, and Democrats have repeatedly found ways to win spending priorities by holding out during negotiations.

Through a combination of spending increases and tax cuts, the White House and GOP-led Congress have greatly expanded the budget deficit since President Trump was elected.

The government spent $3.98 trillion and brought in $3.32 trillion in revenue last year, leaving a deficit of $665 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The deficit this year is projected to widen to $804 billion, and then hit $981 billion in 2019. In 2020, the government will record deficits that exceed $1 trillion annually unless changes are made.

With rising interest rates, higher debt levels can prove incredibly costly. Republicans railed about government spending during the Obama administration, but they have been torn since Trump took office, as he has largely shown an indifference to spending restraint.

Last week, as aides prepared the package of spending cuts to offer Congress, Trump was demanding more spending, for example, to build a wall along the Mexico border.

Dinesh D’Souza Was Jailed For A Campaign Donation Violation-Why Isn’t Rosie?

Poll: 57% say things going well in U.S., highest since 2007

The President’s improving issue ratings come amid a sharp rise in positive impressions of how the country is doing. Overall, 57% say things are going well in the US today — up from 49% saying the same in February — which is the largest proportion to say so since January of 2007.

US First Lady Melania Trump has been caught up in another plagiarism row, following the launch of her new online safety for children campaign on Monday.

A booklet put out by Mrs Trump bore a striking resemblance to one published under the Obama administration.

The text and graphics of the "Be Best" booklet were nearly identical to those in the previous edition.

In 2016 Mrs Trump was accused of plagiarising parts of a speech from a 2008 address by Michelle Obama.

After commentators picked up on very close similarities between the two speeches, Meredith McIver, a Trump administration staff member who wrote Mrs Trump's speech, admitted borrowing from Mrs Obama.

...So that’s my short course in how the campaign to discredit the American press operates. Let me turn to what is at risk because of it. I have a list of items, some of which belong in an “already happened” category.

There is a risk that one third of the electorate will be isolated in an information loop of its own, where Trump becomes the major source of information about Trump, because independent sources are rejected on principle. That has already happened. An authoritarian system is up and running for a portion of the polity. Another way to say this is that before journalists log on in the morning, one third of their potential public is already gone.

There is a risk that Republican elites will fail to push back against Trump’s attacks on democratic institutions, including the press, even though these same elites start their day by reading The New York Times and The Washington Post. This, too, has already happened. “I think that a continual tearing down of institutions in order to inspire your base and keep yourself protected with your base, to me, is damaging to our nation,” said Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, at a breakfast sponsored by The Christian Science Monitor, April 18. He added: “I do not think tearing down the media is good for our nation.” That statements like these from Republican leaders are vanishingly rare is a striking feature of the political scene, and an enabling condition for the campaign to discredit the press. Corker, of course, is retiring.

There is a risk that journalists could do their job brilliantly, and it won’t really matter, because Trump supporters categorically reject it, Trump opponents already believed it, and the neither-nors aren’t paying close enough attention. In a different way, there is a risk that journalists could succeed at the production of great journalism and fail at its distribution, because the platforms created by the tech industry have so overtaken the task of organizing public attention.

There is an obvious risk that the press will lose touch with the country, fall out of contact with American culture. Newsroom diversity is supposed to prevent that, but the diversity project has itself been undermined by a longer and deeper project in mainstream journalism, which I have called the View from Nowhere, by which I mean the attempt to acquire authority by constructing an artificial impartiality, by “performing objectivity.”

At the same time, the press is at risk of losing its institutional footing. For instance, in the hands of Sean Spicer and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House briefing has gone to ruin. It was always frustrating—now it’s useless, even counterproductive.

Many floors below the surface of journalism there are bedrock attitudes that make the practice possible—and thinkable. For example: the belief in informed consent, or that information sources independent of the state are needed to monitor the state. There is a risk of erosion there. When the president of the United States forcefully rejects the premise of a common world of fact, and behaves like there is no such thing, any practice resting on that premise is in political trouble. This has happened to journalism. No one knows what to do about it.

There is a risk that established forms of journalism will be unable to handle the strain that Trump’s behavior places upon them. For example, the practice we came to call fact-checking has had zero effect in preventing the president from repeating falsehoods. There is a risk that the press will hang onto these forms well past their sell-by date because it’s what they know. They want things to be normal. For instance, access to confusion and disinformation serves no editorial goal, but “access journalism” is alive and well in White House reporting.

It used to be the case that when the American presidency went abroad, the American press came with it. There would be a joint news conference with the foreign head of state. Often, this would be the only time the host country’s press corps got to question their leader. In these moments, the American government and the American press worked together to show the strongmen of the world what a real democracy was like. All that is now at risk. What was once described—yes, with some hyperbole—as a beacon to the rest of the world is flickering. When Donald Trump met the president of China in November of 2017, there was no joint press conference. The Chinese didn’t want it. The State Department didn’t object.

I will conclude with something Steve Bannon put to the author Michael Lewis earlier this year. “The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon said. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with ****.” To this kind of provocation, Marty Baron, editor of The Washington Post, has a succinct reply: “We’re not at war, we’re at work.” I think our top journalists are correct that if they become the political opposition to Trump, they will lose. And yet, they have to go to war against a political style in which power gets to write its own story.

There is a risk that they will fail to make this distinction. In my role as a critic, I have been trying to alert them to that danger. I cannot say it’s working.

After years of opposition, Fox & Friends admits the Iran nuclear deal is working,

Steve Doocy: “If the deal went away, not only would the United States have to worry about the aggression from Iran in the region over there, but then they’d have to worry about the nuke problem as well”

Fox & Friends hosts Brian Kilmeade and Steve Doocy admitted that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), also known as the Iran nuclear deal, has been effective in curbing Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

For years, Fox & Friends has railed against the nuclear deal, provided a platform for hardliners to attack the accord, and misinformed viewers about the deal’s terms.

But, in the lead up to President Trump’s possible withdrawal from the deal, Doocy, co-host of the president’s favorite television program Fox & Friends, said, “If the deal went away, not only would the United States have to worry about the aggression from Iran in the region over there, but then they’d have to worry about the nuke problem as well.” And Kilmeade noted that “at least they’re not spinning centrifuges. There is no proof that they’re building up a nuclear arsenal.” The admissions effectively acknowledge that the inspections regime that is a core part of the deal is in fact working, a position that has been held by proponents of the deal since its inception.

BRIAN KILMEADE (CO-HOST): You have the European allies saying just exactly what Mollie Hemingway is saying, we don’t love the deal either, but my goodness, at least they’re not spinning centrifuges. There is no proof that they’re building up a nuclear arsenal. You want to leave it and try to make it better.

There is another way forward, and I don't think that it would really anger any of the president's base, and that is, look, the European allies came here, the president wants to show he’s listening. “You guys want 60 days. You know my problems with it, I made it clear to you, go improve this deal in 60 days. If it's not done, if you can't get the Iranians to buy, then, in turn” -- by the way the Iranian's complaint about us is we have not opened up our markets and pushed our banks to invest there and we have also told others not to do that, fine. So, let's say we pull back and allow the investment if, of course, they get rid of the ballistic missiles and they do some type of reduction in terror activities. Give them 60 days. Let’s call their bluff.
[...]

STEVE DOOCY (CO-HOST): If the deal went away, not only would the United States have to worry about the aggression from Iran in the region over there, but then they’d have to worry about the nuke problem as well. Don't be surprised if the president pulls out at two o’clock this afternoon. But, then again, don't be surprised if he does exactly what he did with DACA.
[...]

KILMEADE: So you like that idea? Give them 60 days?

DOOCY: Listen, I think that Donald Trump doesn't want to appear as just a guy who goes out and blows things up.

KILMEADE: Like the Paris deal.

DOOCY: He wants to go ahead and he wants to appear to be a negotiator. He will negotiate with Europe. He will negotiate with our Congress, and then he says, “look, I gave them six months, three months, whatever. They didn't do it. We're gone.” That way he could still appeal to his base. I tried to fix it, I gave them a chance. It didn't work out.

WASHINGTON — John Kerry’s bid to save one of his most significant accomplishments as secretary of state took him to New York on a Sunday afternoon two weeks ago, where, more than a year after he left office, he engaged in some unusual shadow diplomacy with a top-ranking Iranian official.

He sat down at the United Nations with Foreign Minister Javad Zarif to discuss ways of preserving the pact limiting Iran’s nuclear weapons program. It was the second time in about two months that the two had met to strategize over salvaging a deal they spent years negotiating during the Obama administration, according to a person briefed on the meetings.

With the Iran deal facing its gravest threat since it was signed in 2015, Kerry has been on an aggressive yet stealthy mission to preserve it, using his deep lists of contacts gleaned during his time as the top US diplomat to try to apply pressure on the Trump administration from the outside. President Trump, who has consistently criticized the pact and campaigned in 2016 on scuttling it, faces a May 12 deadline to decide whether to continue abiding by its terms.

The Logan Act prohibits US citizens from having private correspondence with a foreign government “with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government . . . in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States.”

Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas, said the law is a red herring — since it’s never been used to prosecute anyone — and almost certainly would not apply to anything Kerry is doing.

“The act only applies to conduct that is designed to ‘defeat the measures of the United States’ or influence the conduct of foreign governments,” Vladeck said. “If all Kerry is doing is working to keep in place something that’s still technically a ‘measure of the United States,’ I don’t see how the statute would apply even if someone was crazy enough to try it.”

John Kerry’s bid to save one of his most significant accomplishments as secretary of state

DEVIN NUNES CALLS For Immediate ARREST of John Kerry For Treason

The chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence is calling for former Secretary of State John Kerry to be the very first person ever arrested under a constitutionally dubious 1799 law. Congressman Devin Nunes (R-CA) made his demand to imprison the former Massachusetts Democrat under the Logan Act, which could theoretically result in three years in federal prison. Via: Raw Story

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen aptly describes the insanity:

“If you have an alarm in your home and you catch a burglar and you call the police and the police come, and in fact it is an illegal entry into your home. But the police then tell you that they have absolutely no ability to detain or remove those criminals and the criminals stay in your house, you would not tell me that is home security. That is what we face at the border.”