monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Molly Ball‏Verified account @mollyesque 16h16 hours ago
Breitbart editor Pollak on @MSNBC on where he got the Trump wiretap story: "I was washing dishes & listening to Mark Levin."

I wonder how many poor people voted for Trump because of his promise on jobs?

What exactly is he trying to do?

Trump says Obama wiretapping accusations are based on some news reports

Hype Watch: Rachel Maddow's titanic Trump tax touting ends badly

What was touted as a very big night for Rachel Maddow ended up with a massive misfire....Maddow is smart and a talented broadcaster. But she and the people around her botched this one.

It’s not that her disclosure of Donald Trump’s 2005 tax return—the first two pages, at least—was a non-story. It’s that it wasn’t treated as a serious news story. Instead, the MSNBC anchor turned it into a long, arduous, embarrassingly partisan spectacle that was widely mocked, even by some on the left.

Maddow first tweeted that she had the Trump returns on 7:26 p.m. on Tuesday. She began her 9 p.m. show with a rambling, 20-minute monologue about all the questions raised by Trump’s taxes, then teased the big reveal after the next commercial break.

From Slate:

Quote:

“The longer Maddow went on, ever deeper into a conspiratorial thicket,” said Slate, “the clearer it became that whatever tax returns Maddow had, they weren’t as juicy as the ones she was talking about. If she had anything that damning, she would have shared them from the start…

“Maddow even went so far as to hold the tax returns back until after the first commercial break, as if we were watching an episode of The Bachelor and not a matter of national importance ... In positioning it as a grand revelation, a vital step in comprehending Trump’s corruption, MSNBC created an exceedingly cynical spectacle.”

[Her "report"] actually helped the president by showing that he paid substantial taxes, the 25 percent rate being far higher than Mitt Romney’s.

Tensions between congressional Republicans and the Trump administration are rising over Russia, as lawmakers probing alleged ties between the president’s team and the Kremlin accused officials of trying to block their efforts.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), whose committee is one of several where investigations are fully underway, accused Justice Department officials Wednesday of lying when they promised to share information about ongoing department probes with lawmakers conducting oversight.

“It doesn’t matter whether you have a Republican or Democrat president, every time they come up here for their nomination hearing . . . I ask them, ‘Are you going to answer phone calls and our letters, and are you going to give us the documents we want?’ And every time we get a real positive ‘yes’! And then they end up being liars!” Grassley said, screaming into the phone during an interview with The Washington Post. “It’s not if they’re treating us differently than another committee. It’s if they’re responding at all.”

Glenn Thrush‏Verified account @GlennThrush 12m12 minutes ago
Senior aide to Hill GOP leadership on Trump/budget: 'its a joke...we've learned not to listen to anything he says or does. We're on our own'

Second federal judge blocks revised Trump travel ban

A second federal judge issued an injunction Thursday blocking enforcement of one of the critical sections of President Trump’s revised travel ban, using Trump’s own comments against him in deciding that the ban was likely to run afoul of the Constitution.

The decision from U.S. District Judge Theodore D. Chuang in federal court in Maryland marks another win for challengers of the president’s executive order, which had been slated to take effect at 12:01 a.m. Thursday. Earlier, a different federal judge in Hawaii stopped it.

Chuang’s order did not sweep as broadly as the one in Hawaii, but he similarly declared that even the revised travel ban was intended to discriminate against Muslims. He said those wanting evidence of anti-Muslim intent need look no further than what the president himself has said about it.

Chuang’s ruling won’t upend or call into question the decision in Hawaii, instead offering some measure of reinforcement, and a different appeals court through which the government would likely have to pass.

“The history of public statements continues to provide a convincing case that the purpose of the Second Executive Order remains the realization of the long-envisioned Muslim ban,” Chuang wrote.

[...]