monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

The military says that the rules of engagement haven't changed.

Only the idiotic California Legislature believe it can rule the laws of physics and "require" the production of motor vehicles with greater than 50 mpg fuel efficiency, and do so without major side effects.

Looks like the California economy might soon start to resemble Venezuela's.

So San Francisco will become a haven for the poor, Silicon Valley a ghost region?

... and get rid of those not supporting the president (photos as of yesterday, Los Angelos)

Liberals are bad news. I wouldn't mind seeing them rounded up and shipped off to Guantanamo.

Dear Donald,

We’ve known each other a long time, so I think I can be blunt.

You know how you said at campaign rallies that you did not like being identified as a politician?

Don’t worry. No one will ever mistake you for a politician.

After this past week, they won’t even mistake you for a top-notch negotiator.

I was born here. The first image in my memory bank is the Capitol, all lit up at night. And my primary observation about Washington is this: Unless you’re careful, you end up turning into what you started out scorning.

And you, Donald, are getting a reputation as a sucker. And worse, a sucker who is a tool of the D.C. establishment.


Your whole campaign was mocking your rivals and the D.C. elite, jawing about how Americans had turned into losers, with our bad deals and open borders and the Obamacare “disaster.”

And you were going to fly in on your gilded plane and fix all that in a snap.

You mused that a good role model would be Ronald Reagan. As you saw it, Reagan was a big, good-looking guy with a famous pompadour; he had also been a Democrat and an entertainer. But Reagan had one key quality that you don’t have: He knew what he didn’t know.

You both resembled Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloons, floating above the nitty-gritty and focusing on a few big thoughts. But President Reagan was confident enough to accept that he needed experts below, deftly maneuvering the strings.

You’re just careering around on your own, crashing into buildings and losing altitude, growling at the cameras and spewing nasty conspiracy theories, instead of offering a sunny smile, bipartisanship, optimism and professionalism.

You promised to get the best people around you in the White House, the best of the best. In fact, “best” is one of your favorite words.

Instead, you dragged that motley skeleton crew into the White House and let them create a feuding, leaking, belligerent, conspiratorial, sycophantic atmosphere. Instead of a smooth, classy operator like James Baker, you have a Manichaean anarchist in Steve Bannon.

You knew the Republicans were full of hot air. They haven’t had to pass anything in a long time, and they have no aptitude for governing. To paraphrase an old Barney Frank line, asking the Republicans to govern is like asking Frank to judge the Miss America contest — “If your heart’s not in it, you don’t do a very good job.”

You knew that Paul Ryan’s vaunted reputation as a policy wonk was fake news. Republicans have been running on repealing and replacing Obamacare for years and they never even bothered to come up with a valid alternative.

And neither did you, despite all your promises to replace Obamacare with “something terrific” because you wanted everyone to be covered.

Instead, you sold the D.O.A. bill the Irish undertaker gave you as though it were a luxury condo, ignoring the fact that it was a cruel flimflam, a huge tax cut for the rich disguised as a health care bill. You were so concerned with the “win” that you forgot your “forgotten” Americans, the older, poorer people in rural areas who would be hurt by the bill.

As The Times’s chief Washington correspondent Carl Hulse put it, the G.O.P. falls into clover with a lock on the White House and both houses of Congress, and what’s the first thing it does? Slip on a banana peel. Incompetence Inc.

“They tried to sweeten the deal at the end by offering a more expensive bill with fewer health benefits, but alas, it wasn’t enough!” former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau slyly tweeted.

Despite the best efforts of Bannon to act as though the whole fiasco was a clever way to bury Ryan — a man he disdains as “the embodiment of the ‘globalist-corporatist’ Republican elite,” as Gabriel Sherman put it in New York magazine — it won’t work.

And you can jump on the phone with The Times’s Maggie Haberman and The Washington Post’s Robert Costa — ignoring that you’ve labeled them the “fake media” — and act like you’re in control. You can say that people should have waited for “Phase 2” and “Phase 3” — whatever they would have been — and that Obamacare is going to explode and that the Democrats are going to get the blame. But it doesn’t work that way. You own it now.

You’re all about flashy marketing so you didn’t notice that the bill was junk, so lame that even Republicans skittered away.

You were humiliated right out of the chute by the establishment guys who hooked you into their agenda — a massive transfer of wealth to rich people — and drew you away from your own.

You sold yourself as the businessman who could shake things up and make Washington work again. Instead, you got worked over by the Republican leadership and the business community, who set you up to do their bidding.

That’s why they’re putting up with all your craziness about Russia and wiretapping and unending lies and rattling our allies.

They’re counting on you being a delusional dupe who didn’t even know what was in the bill because you’re sitting around in a bathrobe getting your information from wackadoodles on Fox News and then, as The Post reported, peppering aides with the query, “Is this really a good bill?”

You got played.

It took W. years to smash everything. You’re way ahead of schedule.

And I can say you’re doing badly, because I’m a columnist, and you’re not. Say hello to everybody, O.K.?

Sincerely, Maureen

Thank the gods the Constitution protects us from people who advocate police state Gestapo tactics like that.

Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump
Watch @JudgeJeanine on @FoxNews tonight at 9:00 P.M.
7:41 AM - 25 Mar 2017

A Fox News personality — whom President Trump had urged his supporters to watch Saturday night — called on House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) to step down, saying he had done a disservice to Trump by failing to pass a high-profile health-care bill this week.

At the top of her show, Jeanine Pirro, host of “Justice With Judge Jeanine,” delivered a scathing commentary on Ryan’s performance in the days leading up to the decision to pull the House Republican bill to overhaul the Affordable Care Act.

“It failed within the first 70 days of President Donald Trump’s administration, a president who made the replacement of Obamacare the hallmark of his campaign and then used valuable political capital to accomplish it,” said Pirro, placing the blame squarely on Ryan

In public statements since the bill’s collapse, both Trump and Vice President Pence have continued to support Ryan as speaker.

The White House did not immediately respond Saturday night to questions about whether Trump knew what Pirro was going to say.

After delivering her commentary, Pirro said that there had been no coordination with Trump in her messaging.

One of the things you guys keep doing is trying to change the subject and discuss something else instead of the topic that you don't have the right answer for. Comparing illegal immigration to other crimes is a red herring. Stop that.

You'll turn your eyes away from rape and murder because then you'd see that your shitty liberal attitude is responsible for thousands upon thousands of deaths, rapes and other violent crimes every year.

Would he be of the millions who quietly stood by and passively accepted the inhuman behavior of the Germans, Italians and Japanese during thw run-up to WWII?

So, from where I sit (a hotel room in Tokyo right now…), I don’t see how President Pence is worse than Annoying Orange.

I know that Pence holds some pretty stupid views and would push an extreme fundamentalist agenda. But here’s the thing: Isn’t that already happening/going to happen under Trump? What would Pence do that’s not already underway now? What radical conservative ideas would be given room to breathe that aren’t already? What cabinet appointee could he make that’s worse than what we have now? What SCOTUS nominee could he make that’s worse than the current list?

Disaffected white working class would lose their champion and defender, you say? Please.

And at least Pence is nominally sane and has some notion of… oh, I don’t know… public service, democracy, decency, younameit. Trump is so bad he makes Mike Pence look good.

Congress is doing an OK job of being an independent branch right now. Would the GOP caucus all get behind some looney toons bill sent up by a Pence White House? Seems unlikely.

And Bannan and the rest of the Breitbart crew would be shown the door. The whole effort to break the government would probably taper off.

And Pence probably couldn’t win in 2020. I’m having trouble seeing the downside.

Pence would make us all want to drink, but I kinda think I’d rather want to drink than worry so much about a moron breaking the global economy or starting a war.

And it would be a lot of fun to watch Trump go through impeachment and have his lying, narcissistic, kleptocratic ass shown the door. So I vote for that.