Poltico reminds us of "Things Donald Trump Did as President You Might Have Missed"

Poltico reminds us of "Things Donald Trump Did as President You Might Have Missed

By Hal Brown

I don't have much time to write this morning because I have to leave in an hour to head to the dermatologist for mohs surgery on the tip of my nose. This will be my third such surgery on my face but the others didn't worry me but this one does because of the location. Worry wart that I am I wonder how much of the lesion, and thus of my nose, will be needed to be removed and if I'll need a skin graft. 

I wonder if I'll end up looking like the Lee Marvin character in Cat Balou where he played both Kid Shelleen and Tim Strawn his villainous twin with the metal nose.

Update: My nose is still intact. The entire procedure took two hours as the first sample got all the squamous cancer cells.

Now to my subject. 

You hear Republicans being asked in the media about their opinions of Trump and while many of them lament his style they often praise his policies.

I wondered just what he and his administration actually did while they were in office. A simple web search came up with the Politico article from 2021:

30 Things Donald Trump Did as President You Might Have Missed

Trump’s presidency may be best remembered for its cataclysmic end. But his four years as president also changed real American policy in lasting ways, just more quietly. We asked POLITICO’s best-in-class policy reporters to recap some of the ways Trump changed the country while in office, for better or worse.

I don't have time to read it carefully but thought it was worth sharing. What jumped out at me was that among the anti-democratic and inhumane policies he foisted upon us there were some good things. The good things often happened inadvertently. 

There's an old saying that even Mussolini made the trains run on time though many elements of this have been debunked.

I woke to the nightclub shooting on TV: Thoughts about the MAGA demonization of being woke

I woke to the nightclub shooting on TV: Thoughts about the MAGA demonization of being woke

By Hal Brown

I try to write something every morning but may not post something until later if I post at all today. I have to leave soon to go for mohs surgery on the tip of my nose.

This is how Mirriam-Websters defines being woke:

Woke is now defined in this dictionary as “aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice),” and identified as U.S. slang. It originated in African American English and gained more widespread use beginning in 2014 as part of the Black Lives Matter movement. By the end of that same decade it was also being applied by some as a general pejorative for anyone who is or appears to be politically left-leaning.

By chance they used the image of the clock above. I literally woke to this news as I turned on my bedroom TV. I thought about the new meaning of woke.

I thought about how MAGA politicians campaign against "woke" and how it suits them to play into the hate fueled prejudices of bigots. They can use anti-LGBT code words and dog whistles but Republican governors with Republican legislatures can actually pass laws.

If you are the presumptive alternative to Donald Trump for the Republican presidential nomination everything you say or do will gain national media attention.

More than any other politician, and this includes Trump, Ron DeSantis epitomizes the anti-woke movement. Consider this HUFFPOST story:

This is from June, 2022:

After spending the last year attacking LGBTQ people, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) claimed that the state “will not tolerate hatred towards the LGBTQ” community “of any kind” as part of his proclamation on the anniversary of the Pulse shooting.

On June 12, 2016, 49 people were killed and 53 people were injured when a gunman opened fire on the LGBTQ nightclub in Orlando. June 12 has remained Pulse Remembrance Day in the state. DeSantis ordered flags in the state to be flown at half-mast.

From the LGBTQ Nation story:

DeSantis is the ultimate hypocrite. He happily signed the "Don't Say Gay Law" while saying that “the state of Florida will not tolerate hatred towards the LGBTQ and Hispanic community of any kind, and together we stand united against terrorism and hate of any kind."

This is how DeSantis described his lopsided victory over Charlie Crist in his gerrymandered state:

“We fight the woke in the legislature. We fight the woke in the schools. We fight the woke in the corporations. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die.”

If the Colorado Springs shooting happened in Florida like the Pulse Nightclub shooting, I wonder how DeSantis would have been parsing his words in order to condemn it while sending the message to his anti-LGBT supporters that he didn't mean what he was saying.

I suppose he could dust off what he said after the Pulse Nightclub shootings and order flags to be flown at half-staff.

It is a shame worth crying over that the notion that "woke" has been applied to the political left because I'd like to believe that there are many people who consider themselves to be non-MAGA Republicans who believe in the percepts of being woke.

Feeling people are proud to be woke.

Update:

This was on Fox News:

Fox News expert links gay club shooting to 'elementary school' in wake of GOP 'anti-woke' laws

Excerpt:

"How do we tamp down hate crimes across the board?" Neville wondered. 

"I think it begins in our schools, our educational system," Rogers explained. "We have to do a lot of educating in elementary school with regard to, yeah, people may be different in your eyes but they're people, they're American citizens and they deserve to have the constitutional protections that all of us have."

"So, it begins at the elementary school level and we have to make sure that it continues throughout our entire lives," he added. "We need to stop the hateful rhetoric on the internet, by our politicians, by everyone! And we need to bring the temperature down and understand that, you know, we're all God's children and we have to respect each other."

And then there's her expression of feigned sympathy:

Recent blog stories:

• Can the media ignore the nude nuttiness of the Hou...
• How the Hunter Biden probe can backside fire on t...
• House GOP's eeny, meeny, miny, moe, Hunter, Alej...
• New York Post shows how to get under an attention ...
• Quick with a quip Stephanie Rhule ad libed the bes...
• I suggested Trump took documents so he could have ...
• Georgia gave us REM and The B-52s, delicious peach...
• If DeSantis or another wins the GOP primary would ...

Can the media ignore the nude nuttiness of the House GOP and Trump?

 Can the media ignore the nude nuttiness of the House GOP and Trump?

By Hal Brown

I was prompted to make the image above after reading this featured article on the MSNBC website by Noah Rothman:

How media should not cover Donald Trump

Attention alone doesn't keep Trump afloat in politics. Hate does.

It may be asking too much of the American media ecosystem that it approach this abnormal candidacy with dispassion. Trump himself makes that task all but impossible. But answering Trump’s heat with more heat has so far had the opposite of its intended effect. Perhaps it’s time to give coldness a try.

While Rothman writes about media coverage of Trump his points also apply to how much the media is going to cover the antics of the House MAGA Republicans who all aspire to be demigods devoted to Trump. They are slavering to  mount investigations into Beelzebub Biden.

Ancient artists weren't shy about depicting demons and their victims in the nude.

I wrote about the House slavering like rabid dogs to investigate Hunter Biden yesterday...

It will be interesting to see if the GOP decides to use nude photos of Hunter Biden to make their case that he was a dupe of Russian spies trying to steal his laptops, or something equally nonsensical.

We know they have a list of Democrat Demons.

We can expect that Trump will present an irresistible media coverage car wreck, you don't want to look but somehow it is difficult not to when you drive by.

 If Trump is a single car wreck between the Jim Jordans and Marjorie Taylor Greenes it will be the political pile-up to end all political pile-ups.

I think it is not a question of whether or not the media will cover these things. They will. It is how they will frame their reports. Even Fox News may have trouble making Trump, Jordan, Taylor Greene, and the clown crew look rationale and reasonable, let alone likable. 

Below: Best viewed on a high definition large screen TV:

Click above to enlarge.

Recent blog stories:

• How the Hunter Biden probe can backside fire on t...
• House GOP's eeny, meeny, miny, moe, Hunter, Alej...
• New York Post shows how to get under an attention ...
• Quick with a quip Stephanie Rhule ad libed the bes...
• I suggested Trump took documents so he could have ...
• Georgia gave us REM and The B-52s, delicious peach...
• If DeSantis or another wins the GOP primary would ...

. 

 

How the Hunter Biden probe can backside fire on the GOP

In this clip from Fox and Friend's Joe Concha in an Aug. 2021 show asks what if this story involved Donald Trump, Jr. without noting that the junior Trump was very active in the Trump campaign and an official of The Trump Organization.

While the they say they won't show images of a nude Hunter Biden they do include them online:

The Republicans are downright drooling over their plan to investigate Hunter Biden and try to tie him to then vice president Joe Biden and make the case that the vice president somehow colluded with his son in what amounted to treason against the United States.

The fly in this ointment is that all this all comes down to is that like with Benghazi there's no there there.

The more one looks at Hunter Biden's past behavior the more an objective observer with a modicum of empathy who is not blinded by a zealous quest to hurt President Biden the more they will feel sorry for the president.

The saying I am not my brothers keeper, shades of Billy Carter, can be reworded to say I am not my son's keeper.

Joe Biden lost his son Beau to brain cancer in 2015 when he was only 45. Most people don't know that Biden had a daughter with his first wife Neila. Their daughter Naomi passed away in 1972 after being involved in a car crash with their sons Beau and Hunter critically injured. 

To say Hunter had a troubled past fraught with bad decisions and a cavalier disregard for how they might hurt his father personally and politically is an understatement.

Currently there are no plans to call President Biden to testify but I think Hunter will be called. If I had a say in the matter I would make sure he testified without an attorney and answered all the questions candidly. The committee has no power to indict him if he admits to breaking the law, only the Department of Justice can do that. As the New York Times notes, "the Justice Department inquiry into the business dealings of the president’s son has remained active, with a grand jury seeking information about payments from around the world."

Hopefully he will come across as a sympathetic figure, especially compared to his GOP interrogators some of whom are likely to try to intimidate and badger him in their attempts to score points with their MAGA base.

I'd say to the rabid GOP MAGA representatives slavering to get to President Biden through his son "bring it on" because when it comes to a there being there all they have is a president unlucky enough to have a very troubled son. 

And then there this news:

It is a well timed shot across the bow of MAGA House zealots thinking they will have clear sailing as they go full-speed in trying to blow up President Biden though their investigations. This comes as the GOP is orgiastic over their being able to shot down the January 6th Committee.

House GOP's eeny, meeny, miny, moe, Hunter, Alejandro, or Joe?

 House GOP's eeny, meeny, miny, moe, Hunter,  Alejandro, or Joe?

By Hal Brown

Archives on right >>

Comments on bottom of page

The speculation about what the Republican's will do now that they control the House of Representatives is rampant. See, for example "What will a Republican House look like? A lot of investigations and maybe impeachment" in USA Today.

There are lots of analogies to describe the job Kevin McCarthy now has from herding cats to being the chief of the Keystone Kops (sans female cops), a circular firing squad, clown car of revenge, and pit of ouroboros snakes . 

The loudest clamor for an investigation is into Hunter Biden. The problem from McCarthy's point of view is that while he will probably have to go along with this to satisfy his fringe members, the general public doesn't really care about this just they way they didn't care about Benghazi. 

According to USA Today "Republicans have questioned whether Hunter Biden has compromised the presidency and national security through his business dealings in China and Ukraine." Obviously this is an indirect way to get at the president both politically and personally.

There's also been talk about impeachments. Merrick Garland has been mentioned but there's been some serious consideration being reported to holding impeachment hearings for Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas because of how he handled the border crisis.

This would be a way to blame President Biden and score political points with their anti-immigrant base.

The problem with this in getting the public to pay attention is that most people never heard of him and couldn't identify him in a lineup. 

Trying to impeach Garland would open them to having Democrats present their defense of him and bring their own witnesses to highlight and make their case for the culpability of Donald Trump in both the J6 coup attempt and the documents theft case.

It is possible that McCarthy will decide for various reasons to succumb to Marjorie Taylor Greene's exhortations to impeach President Biden. She's repeatedly called for his impeachment and said making the case would be easy.

McCarthy could put Greene on the committee handing the impeachment and even make sure she's chairman. Even though the impeachment would never lead to a Senate conviction it would be a way to attack President Biden and his policies and of all the hearings be most likely to gain a television audience. 

I think McCarthy will do anything he possibly can to avoid an impeachment of President Biden because 

more than the other specious investigations and hearings, it could easily backfire and demonstrate to potential swing voters in the 2024 election that the Republican Party has been taken over by a bunch of revengeful clowns and unhinged conspiracy theorists.

If the House GOP does go after President Biden I can see the result being that he becomes more and more popular and this will be reflected in the polls. It will coincide with voters seeing the fruits of his policies. By then it will be too late for the Republicans. The House GOP will have committed itself to his being impeached.

The trial in the Senate not only would be a foregone conclusion, but the Republicans trying to make their case would have flimsy evidence to present that whatever he supposedly did was grounds for conviction.

All the Democrats would vote against conviction but the ultimate humiliation would come if a few daring Republicans with an ounce of integrity, or with nothing to lose, also voted against it. 

Banned for life from post on Daily Kos

 

New York Post shows how to get under an attention seeking narcissist's skin

New York Post shows how to get under an attention seeking narcissist's skin

By Hal Brown

Archives of previous stories on right >>

Here's the cover page of the late edition of The New York Post which is on the stands and online today:

Not only was Trump's announcement relegated to the bottom of the page but he was referred to as a "Florida man"and the stories were on page 26 of the print edition.

The crew on "Morning Joe" was laughing about this this morning as they showed the cover of the New York tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch. 

The paper was shown on MSNBC all day. Below: All In With Chris Hayes.

Inside the paper:

As someone who in a former life lived in Manhattan and took the subway I can attest to the fact that numerous riders read either the New York Post or the other tabloid, The New York Daily News. If I recall the history of these papers, both were planned to be easy to read on subways and buses.

Vintage photo by Stanley Kubrick. https://www.mcny.org/story/riding-subway-stanley-kubrick

When one of them comes out with a compelling cover picture these are seen all over the city Trump always thought he was king of. The papers are also displayed prominently on the few remaining  newsstands (only 330 left) and newspaper boxes all over the city.

It's been reported that the TV addicted Trump sometimes watches the Morning Joe. In fact Joe Scarborough today said that people have told him Trump sometimes "hate watches" the show. (See 

Trump lashes out at media again with personal attacks on ‘Morning Joe’ anchors, from 2017.)

I hope he watched this one. I can see him deriving some pleasure from being depicted in any way on the NY Post cover, even if it mocks him as a cartoon egg about to fall off a wall, but here they don't even use his name. 

Sometimes a picture is worth 1000 words and sometimes an image is so compelling that only two words are needed. This was the case in the notorious New York Post Trumpty Dumpty cover which the media referred to or republished  countless times after it came out. For example a see Google image search below:

Today the NY Post's main website page features Ivanka with this article today on the top of their page.

You can read the articles depicted in my images below from The New York Post. I didn't want to waste time putting links to individual articles here since the titles convey the message that NY Post editors want to convey.

Online, the story, as befits any print edition page 26 stories, is way down the page where, below, you can see the stories editors wanted to declare were more important:

It is noteworthy that the story about Ivanka announcing she won't have anything to do with the campaign is the prominent one related to Trump's announcement.

A few minutes after I took the screen shot shown above this section was changed as below:

Final Update (I have other things I have to do today)

This is how the website orders its stories as of 6:45 AM Pacific Time. (Click image to enlarge)

Related:

Of course this is a "salon" article so there's little chance Trump will read it, but he is certainly aware of the coverage being given to Ivanka not only refusing to go to his speech but then announcing she would have nothing to do with his campaign for the tired reason that she wants to devote more time to her family. In truth she probably wants to be able to defend herself in court cases having to do with her involvement in Trump businesses and to continue her grift.

"Ivanka Trump also gave an exclusive interview to Fox News, which has had a notable turn against Trump after his candidates lost competitive races last week and cut away from his rambling speech on Tuesday."

This was also on "salon" today. Heather "Digby" Parton actually watched Fox News while Trump gave his speech and reports on how their still all-in-for-Trump commentators gushed over how great his speech was.

Then there the news that guests at Mar-a-Lago who tried to leave before the speech was over were stopped from doing so by security.  I do believe this is against the law.

Recent stories 

• Quick with a quip Stephanie Rhule ad libed the bes...
• I suggested Trump took documents so he could have ...
• Georgia gave us REM and The B-52s, delicious peach...
• If DeSantis or another wins the GOP primary would ...

Quick with a quip Stephanie Rhule ad libed the best Kari Lake put-down

Quick with a quip Stephanie Rhule ad libed the best Kari Lake put-down

and has a delightful exchange with Gov-elect Wes Moore from Maryland 

by Hal Brown

One of the benefits of living in Oregon is that I don't have to stay up until 11:00PM to watch Late Night with Stephanie Ruhle which airs at 11:00 PM on the east coast. It is on at 8:00 here.

I was watching in bed last night and I was dozing off so I missed a great ad lib about Kari Lake. It wasn't until I saw the story about it on RAWSTORY this morning that I played the video (here).

The quip comes just before three minutes on the video.

Here's the ad lib in context:

Ruhle wondered if Lake would be flying to Mar-a-Lago to appear at the event with Trump. (guest Tim) Miller recalled that many of the Lake supporters were saying that she was on the VP train and would likely end up in consideration for Trump's running mate. 

"She can be the VP of catering services at Mar-a-Lago," quipped Ruhle.

This begs the question as to whether Lake even would have the chops to be VP of catering at Mar-a-Lago. It may be a job beyond her capabilities.

Now let me praise Stephanie Ruhle who I consider to be the best regular evening MSNBC host since Rachel Maddow left.

Ruhle breaks the stereotype of a financial expert nerd.  She was a drastic personality change from Brian Williams who she replaced at The 11th Hour. 

She is an incisive interviewer who rarely goes through a show without interjecting a witticism. She is not shy about expressing her own opinions.

I've seen her confront an evasive interview subject with one or another version of an eyebrow raised version of "oh come on, you don't really believe what you're saying" which conveys "you've got to be shitting me" quite clearly.

Click above to watch video

Last night she delighted in watching Wes Moore, the amiable governor-elect of Maryland who won an overwhelming victory, masterfully handle her when she wouldn't relent in pressing him on aspirations for higher office when he gave stock answers about only thinking about what he wanted to do for Maryland as governor. I can see her thinking "I'm going to have some fun with this man" who she clearly was impressed with

She knew what he was doing and that he could easily have demurred and said that he was only human and sometimes had thoughts about how his political life would develop long term. Truth is that he would make a great candidate for the Senate, president or vice president as he proves himself as a highly effective governor even a decade from now.

About Stephanie Ruhle from Wikipedia:

•  She is a graduate of Lehigh University where she earned her bachelor’s degree in international business.  
• Prior starting her journalism career at joining Bloomberg News, Ruhle spent 14 years working in the finance industry.  
• She's Senior Business Analyst for NBC News and was one of three Bloomberg reporters who broke the story of the London Whale, identifying the trader behind the 2012 JPMorgan Chase trading loss.
• She founded the Corporate Investment Bank (CIB) Women's Network and co-chaired the Women on Wall Street (WOWS) steering committee.  
• In 2003, Ruhle joined Deutsche Bank as a credit salesperson covering hedge funds. She ended her eight-year career there as a managing director in Global Markets Senior Relationship Management.  
• While at Deutsche Bank, Ruhle founded the Global Market Women's Network to help women move into leadership roles at the company.