monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Maggie Haberman‏Verified account
@maggieNYT
Trump visibly frustrated last night over travel ban rejection in Hawaii, staff had assured him this one would hold up.

Quote:

Border wall: Texans receiving letters about their land

Even before Donald Trump was inaugurated, U.S. citizens who own land along the border reportedly began receiving letters from the Justice Department informing them that the federal government wants their land to build a fence (i.e. the president’s border wall), that it intends to acquire their land, and the amount of compensation the government is offering.

Yvette Salinas, a Texan whose ailing mother owns a small parcel of land with her siblings near the Rio Grande was informed by the “Declaration of Taking” letter sent by DOJ that her 1.2 acres was worth $2,900, according to a story in the Texas Observer. She told the Observer that the family’s 16 acres has been in her family for five generations. The government’s letter asks recipients to sign in order to receive compensation, acknowledge that they “do not have an interest” in the case or do not intend to make a claim. It doesn’t really say what landowners should do if, like Salinas, they don’t want to sell their land.

Salinas called the letter “scary” and said “you feel you have to sign.” Her family is consulting a lawyer about its next steps. If other border landowners have the same reluctance to sell as Salinas, the government may have a long battle ahead to secure all the land necessary for the wall, given that the federal government doesn’t own most of it. The nearly 2,000-mile southern border is composed of federal, state, tribal and private lands.

There are 632 miles of federal or tribal land -- 33 percent -- and the other 67 percent, most of which is in Texas, is private or state-owned, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO). The Washington Post points out that the president would need Congress to pass a bill to acquire the tribal lands for his wall.

CBS

Big money to the Pentagon and slashes to State. I don't have a grasp of why this is happening.

From Howard Kurtz (and others he quotes):

Quote:

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.

video here: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/03/16/hype-watch-rachel-maddows-titanic-trump-tax-touting-ends-badly.html

What else is new, eh? These fake news outlets specialize in serving up breathlessly delivered speculation and hateful commentary, not in presenting the news in straight-forward fashion.

Nice try, cheese-eaters

Colbert fans will like this.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXWVpquveac[/youtube]

The powers that be at NBC probably told her to do anything to increase her ratings otherwise she was gone.

Maddcow looks more masculine than Colbert!

There's no way he could spend even half of what he has that would make any significant difference in the life of luxury he is accustomed to.

I saw that, Walter. This administration certainly runs a disciplined and coherent messaging campaign. I guess that incoherence might be unavoidable given who's at the top.

Real leaders are focused on results and outcomes as opposed to "messaging" and stock phrases.

Trump don't lie. He just exaggerates like a ************, that's all.

No cheese-eater has made a single comment about what Trump said in the interview I posted here for their convenience.

Par for the course. I don't think any of them ever listen to what Trump actually says. If he's giving an interview on TV, they turn the channel. They don't want to know what he says, or the manner in which he says it. It would create too much cognitive dissonance for them.

They just want the media to tell them what he "meant," when they present a chopped-up, out-of-context phrase or two, and they just want to hear the demonizing denouncements the media is sure to give them when they say it.

Trump is a 70 year old mult-billionaire, who, along with his children, is "set for life." He says he doesn't need or want more money, which makes perfect sense. There's no way he could spend even half of what he has that would make any significant difference in the life of luxury he is accustomed to.

He says his only concern now is with helping the American people, not constructing more buildings, as he used to enjoy so much, which is one reason he has no qualms about wanting to reform the tax code to eliminate artificial tax deductions, etc.

But the cheese-eaters will just continue to chant their ridiculous "Trump is merely greedy and self-serving crook who only wanted to become president in order to line his own pockets" mantra

It doesn't occur to them that their bullshit makes no sense. They don't even think about it. They just dutifully recite the day's "talking points" as directed by MoveOn, without giving it any thought whatsoever.