monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

A suicide attack on a convoy belonging to the Nato mission in Afghanistan has killed at least eight people in Kabul, officials say.

The victims were all civilians, a government spokesman said. About 25 other people were injured, including three US service members.

The attack on the group of military vehicles happened next to the US embassy during the morning rush hour.

So-called Islamic State (IS) said it was behind the attack.

Representative Tom Rooney, Republican of Florida, said he was “leaning yes” on the repeal bill, but agonizing over how to explain his vote to constituents.

“I have a lot of people who call my office on a daily basis who are extremely angry,” he said. “It’s not just because I’m a Republican, but because they are sincerely scared.”

Many people with pre-existing conditions fear that they may lose coverage and “are going to die because of a vote we might be taking,” Mr. Rooney said.

Trump and Putin Agree to Seek Syria Cease-Fire

Investors looking to buy a condo at Trump Tower in the Philippines would have found, until this week, some high-powered video testimonials on the project’s official website.

There was Donald Trump, in a message filmed several years before he was elected president of the United States, declaring that the skyscraper bearing his name near the Philippine capital would be “something very, very special, like nobody’s seen before.” Then there was his daughter Ivanka Trump, now a senior White House adviser, lavishing praise on the project as a “milestone in Philippine real estate history.”

Four months into President Trump’s tenure, his business relationship with a developer who is one of the Philippines’ richest and most powerful men has emerged as a prime example of the collision between the private interests of a businessman in the White House and his public responsibility to shape U.S. foreign policy.

The potential conflict first came into focus shortly before Trump was elected, when the Philippines’ iron-fisted president, Rodrigo Duterte, named the Trump Organization’s partner on the Manila real estate venture his top trade envoy.

..After The Washington Post inquired Monday about the use of the Trumps in promoting the Manila project, the links and videos on the corporate website could no longer be accessed. .

This poll number might be the worst one yet for President Trump

Throughout the 2016 campaign, there was one mainstay when it came to reasons to vote for Donald Trump: Change. Even as people questioned his temperament and experience and policies, they believed he would change Washington. It was his central appeal, according to exit polls.

No longer.

A new Gallup poll on Tuesday showed just 40 percent of people said Trump has made progress after 100 days when it comes to changing the way Washington works; 54 percent said he hasn’t.

Response moderated: Personal attack. See more info.

Thus sprach Ollie!

What we didn't appreciate, though in retrospect we should have expected it, was how complicit the Republican party would be in covering up this corruption in order to achieve truly extremist political ends. I did not think they were that rotten. But they are.

How much did the Koch brothers pay you to spread their lies, Finn?

Senators likely to press FBI Director James Comey on Russian collusion

WASHINGTON – FBI Director James Comey returns to Capitol Hill on Wednesday, where questions about possible ties between Russian officials and associates of President Trump's campaign are likely to dominate a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.

It is Comey's first public testimony in more than a month. In March, Comey made headlines for confirming to another congressional panel that the FBI was in the midst of months-long inquiry into possible collusion between associates of the Trump campaign and Russian operatives.

The U.S. intelligence community has blamed Moscow for orchestrating a campaign to hack Democratic political organizations and release stolen information to undermine faith in the democratic process and candidate Hillary Clinton's campaign. The FBI's investigation of the hack subsequently expanded to included possible "coordination" involving Trump associates, but Comey has declined to elaborate on whether any such evidence has been uncovered.

Comey did acknowledge, however, that the Russians appeared to use a third party — what he called a "cutout" — in its communications with WikiLeaks, which published internal communications obtained in the hack of the DNC. The identity of the third party was not disclosed.

Also in his last Capitol Hill appearance, before the House Intelligence Committee, Comey also delivered a definitive repudiation of Trump's claims that the Obama administration had wiretapped the president's New York offices in advance of the 2016 elections. "The FBI and the Justice Department have no information to support'' the president's assertions, Comey said during the more than five-hour session.

Since then, at least two former Trump advisers – Michael Flynn and Carter Page – have been the subjects of fresh scrutiny about their Russian ties.

Flynn, who was fired as Trump’s national security adviser, is now under investigation by the Pentagon Inspector General for failing to inform Defense Department officials about seeking payments from foreign governments.

In February, Flynn registered retroactively as a foreign agent. He disclosed that he had earned $530,000 from a Dutch firm with ties to Turkey’s government. Documents released by Rep. Elijah Cummings, the Maryland Democrat and ranking member of the Oversight Committee, also show that Flynn took more than $33,000 from the Kremlin-backed RT television network for a 2015 speech in Moscow. Russian President Vladimir Putin also attended the event.

Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, last week called on the Army to determine if Flynn had violated the law and should be required to repay the government. Flynn, "by all appearances," violated federal law by accepting payments from foreign governments without obtaining prior approval, Chaffetz said.

Last month, the Washington Post also disclosed that the FBI had obtained a secret court order last summer to monitor the communications of Page, an adviser to then-candidate Trump, because the government had reason to believe Page was acting as a Russian agent.

Page has denied any wrongdoing and Flynn has sought immunity from any possible prosecution. Both the House and Senate Intelligence committees, in the midst of continuing Russia probes, have indicated that it is too early in their investigations to cut a deal for Flynn's testimony. Separately, preliminary discussions about Flynn's prospects for immunity in the FBI investigation also have yielded no agreement.

Russia’s efforts to interfere with last year’s U.S. presidential election were “wildly successful,” former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers said Tuesday, and are still bearing fruit today in the form of continued infighting at the highest levels in Washington.

"Their purpose was to sow discontent and mistrust in our elections they wanted us to be at each others' throat when it was over," Rogers said, according to Reuters, at a panel discussion hosted by Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "It's influencing, I would say, legislative process today. That's wildly successful."

...Most prominently, the Kremlin’s efforts at influencing the presidential race took the form of cyberattacks launched against the Democratic National Committee and other prominent Democrats, leaking embarrassing email conversations through third-party websites like WikiLeaks and others. As early as October, the intelligence community identified the Russian government as the culprit behind the attacks.

..."This is the most assertive, most aggressive and most directly impactful of any engagement that they have had in our elections," Clapper said. "They have to regard what they did as a huge success. They've been doing it in France and they'll do it in Germany."

Much of the world must be astonished -- if they are not collapsing in laughter -- while watching the performances in high places and in media concerning Russian efforts to influence an American election, a familiar US government specialty as far back as we choose to trace the practice. There is, however, merit in the claim that this case is different in character: By US standards, the Russian efforts are so meager as to barely elicit notice.

I wonder what distraction republicans in the senate are going to bring up today? Last time in the House, we all learned a lot about "unmasking."

“I think what you heard this morning was his sense of frustration over how he’s being mistreated by the Democrats on a bipartisan piece of legislation…. What I think you heard the president express this morning was frustration over how he’s been treated as part of the negotiation. And it may be if things don’t get better, we may get to that point [of a shutdown].”