Trump's First 100 Days

[Belsnickel]

Okay, so I'm right there along with several other people with regards to how things are going. I wanted to have a thread for some of the action in the first 100 days that maybe aren't as big of a discussion. There are going to be a lot of topics, and quite frankly seeing 5000 threads about what Trump is doing this hour gets old, quick.

So, anything that goes on in the first 100 days and you don't necessarily want to start a thread about it if there isn't one already, put it here.

I'll start off with the NSC thing. I was surprised there was no thread already, and I'm not going to hash out all of the concerns initially brought up around Bannon's placement on the principal, but I will say that he may get yanked off, soon. Apparently, according to the USC, for anyone other than those specifically listed in the law to be on the NSC to have a seat, they must be confirmed by the Senate. Bannon's role in the administration was chosen specifically so he wouldn't have to go through confirmation hearings that likely wouldn't go very well. So, it's either send him to a Senate that is not very friendly to him, or pull him off of the NSC.

[GMDino]

(01-31-2017, 10:55 AM)Belsnickel Wrote: Okay, so I'm right there along with several other people with regards to how things are going. I wanted to have a thread for some of the action in the first 100 days that maybe aren't as big of a discussion. There are going to be a lot of topics, and quite frankly seeing 5000 threads about what Trump is doing this hour gets old, quick.

So, anything that goes on in the first 100 days and you don't necessarily want to start a thread about it if there isn't one already, put it here.

I'll start off with the NSC thing. I was surprised there was no thread already, and I'm not going to hash out all of the concerns initially brought up around Bannon's placement on the principal, but I will say that he may get yanked off, soon. Apparently, according to the USC, for anyone other than those specifically listed in the law to be on the NSC to have a seat, they must be confirmed by the Senate. Bannon's role in the administration was chosen specifically so he wouldn't have to go through confirmation hearings that likely wouldn't go very well. So, it's either send him to a Senate that is not very friendly to him, or pull him off of the NSC.

I had friends asking about that (senate confirmation) but I didn't have time to look it up.

Thanks.

[Belsnickel]

(01-31-2017, 11:11 AM)GMDino Wrote: I had friends asking about that (senate confirmation) but I didn't have time to look it up.

Thanks.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/3021

[Bengalzona]

(01-31-2017, 10:55 AM)Belsnickel Wrote: Okay, so I'm right there along with several other people with regards to how things are going. I wanted to have a thread for some of the action in the first 100 days that maybe aren't as big of a discussion. There are going to be a lot of topics, and quite frankly seeing 5000 threads about what Trump is doing this hour gets old, quick.

So, anything that goes on in the first 100 days and you don't necessarily want to start a thread about it if there isn't one already, put it here.

I'll start off with the NSC thing. I was surprised there was no thread already, and I'm not going to hash out all of the concerns initially brought up around Bannon's placement on the principal, but I will say that he may get yanked off, soon. Apparently, according to the USC, for anyone other than those specifically listed in the law to be on the NSC to have a seat, they must be confirmed by the Senate. Bannon's role in the administration was chosen specifically so he wouldn't have to go through confirmation hearings that likely wouldn't go very well. So, it's either send him to a Senate that is not very friendly to him, or pull him off of the NSC.

Frankly, I've been more concerned about the Bannon deal than I have about anything else Trump has done so far. My Senator, McCain, spoke out against this just a couple of days ago. Bannon doesn't have the professional qualifications to be there and to provide input on those decisions. This is besides the point of his personal baggage.

[CKwi88]

(01-31-2017, 12:52 PM)Bengalzona Wrote: Frankly, I've been more concerned about the Bannon deal than I have about anything else Trump has done so far. My Senator, McCain, spoke out against this just a couple of days ago. Bannon doesn't have the professional qualifications to be there and to provide input on those decisions. This is besides the point of his personal baggage.

Unfortunately that is where the bar is set for this administration. Points for consistency I suppose.

[*bfine32*]

Somehow the usual suspects that trip over themselves to start a thread about every move Trump makes missed this one:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-keep-obama-lgbt-workplace-protections-002309956.html

Quote:An executive order signed by then President Barack Obama in 2014, which protects employees "from anti-LGBTQ workplace discrimination while working for federal contractors, will remain intact at the direction of President Donald J. Trump."

Hitler would not approve:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_homosexuals_in_Nazi_Germany_and_the_Holocaust

[GMDino]

(01-31-2017, 09:45 PM)bfine32 Wrote: Somehow the usual suspects that trip over themselves to start a thread about every move Trump makes missed this one:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-keep-obama-lgbt-workplace-protections-002309956.html


Hitler would not approve:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_homosexuals_in_Nazi_Germany_and_the_Holocaust

No surprise.  He wasn't anti gay.

More of a surprise that Pence isn't fuming about it.

We, the usual suspects, will generally not start a discussion about things that are good for are fellow man versus whatever else Trump does.  

[Bengalzona]

A primetime news conference to announce a Supreme Court nominee?

You would think the admin did something really important... like killing Osama bin Laden.

[Dill]

(01-31-2017, 12:52 PM)Bengalzona Wrote: Frankly, I've been more concerned about the Bannon deal than I have about anything else Trump has done so far. My Senator, McCain, spoke out against this just a couple of days ago. Bannon doesn't have the professional qualifications to be there and to provide input on those decisions. This is besides the point of his personal baggage.

I agree with you on that, B-zona.  Combine that with his pick for national security adviser, and his desire to downgrade the JCS input, and it seems national security issues and intel will be channeled through a Breitbart-style filter.

I have made this analogy before--it seems like Trump is doing with the NSC what Cheney did with his Office of Special Plans, which was spinning out conspiracy as intel product and mixing it with interagency reports to send to Congress. The difference is that Trump's Office of SP will be the NSC itself.

There are so many other Trump distractions now that Congress and the press may pass over this until they have to explain a foreign policy or national security disaster based upon the intel equivalent of fake news.

[Dill]

(01-31-2017, 10:55 AM)Belsnickel Wrote: Okay, so I'm right there along with several other people with regards to how things are going. I wanted to have a thread for some of the action in the first 100 days that maybe aren't as big of a discussion. There are going to be a lot of topics, and quite frankly seeing 5000 threads about what Trump is doing this hour gets old, quick.

So, anything that goes on in the first 100 days and you don't necessarily want to start a thread about it if there isn't one already, put it here.

I'll start off with the NSC thing. I was surprised there was no thread already, and I'm not going to hash out all of the concerns initially brought up around Bannon's placement on the principal, but I will say that he may get yanked off, soon. Apparently, according to the USC, for anyone other than those specifically listed in the law to be on the NSC to have a seat, they must be confirmed by the Senate. Bannon's role in the administration was chosen specifically so he wouldn't have to go through confirmation hearings that likely wouldn't go very well. So, it's either send him to a Senate that is not very friendly to him, or pull him off of the NSC.

I have to thank Trump for forcing so many of us to learn more about the powers of the Executive.

Obama could pull Axelrod in for occasional NSC meetings, though in a non-speaking role. What will happen if Trump just says he is going have Bannon there at meetings no matter what anyone says. He is the Commander in chief. Neither Congress nor the Supreme court can send in a squad of Marines to remove Bannon. How would they enforce a ban on Bannon?

Is it possible that members of the intel agency would resist this? What a crazy problem to be dealing with at the ground zero of national security.

Cheney often invoked the "Unitary Executive" theory to justify Bush's actions, like legitimizing torture and generally pushing back against Congress. Maybe we will be hearing that from Trump's representatives soon.

[Belsnickel]

Word on the street is that Melania may not move in to the White House, and will instead stay in New York. This is estimated to cost more than the NEA/NEH budgets that were cut. Guess we know where those funds are going.

[GMDino]

(02-01-2017, 12:12 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: Word on the street is that Melania may not move in to the White House, and will instead stay in New York. This is estimated to cost more than the NEA/NEH budgets that were cut. Guess we know where those funds are going.

Just a damn shame.

I don't think Trump cares though.  He can "work" later.

[Mike M (the other one)]

(02-01-2017, 12:12 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: Word on the street is that Melania may not move in to the White House, and will instead stay in New York. This is estimated to cost more than the NEA/NEH budgets that were cut. Guess we know where those funds are going.

Did Melania or Trump say that? and do you have it from the horse's mouth?
Otherwise It's probably another rumor.

[Belsnickel]

(02-01-2017, 01:46 PM)Mike M (the other one) Wrote: Did Melania or Trump say that? and do you have it from the horse's mouth?
Otherwise It's probably another rumor.

It's news from back in November, when the NY Post broke it, that they would stay until the summer. That came from the Trumps themselves. Though there are sources saying that they may stay up there beyond that as well.

[GMDino]

Black Alternative Facts Month is off to a booming start...

Note: Parts of this could have gone under the "Do Lies Matter" thread also.  

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/frederick-douglass-trump/515292/

Quote:Donald Trump's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Marking Black History Month, the president made some strange observations about Douglass and Martin Luther King, but mostly talked about himself.




Does Donald Trump actually know who Frederick Douglass was? The president mentioned the great abolitionist, former slave, and suffrage campaigner during a Black History Month event Wednesday morning, but there’s little to indicate that Trump knows anything about his subject, based on the rambling, vacuous commentary he offered:

“I am very proud now that we have a museum on the National Mall where people can learn about Reverend King, so many other things, Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice. Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, and millions more black Americans who made America what it is today. Big impact.” Within moments, he was off-topic, talking about some of his favorite subjects: CNN, himself, and his feud with CNN.


Trump’s comments about King were less transparently empty but maybe even stranger. “Last month we celebrated the life Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., whose incredible example is unique in American history,” Trump said, employing a favorite meaningless adjective. But this wasn’t really about King. It was about Trump: “You read all about Martin Luther King when somebody said I took a statue out of my office. And it turned out that that was fake news. The statue is cherished. It’s one of the favorite things—and we have some good ones. We have Lincoln, and we have Jefferson, and we have Dr. Martin Luther King.”

Even beyond the strange aside about Douglass and the digression from King, Trump’s comments point to the superficiality of his engagement with African American culture. He named perhaps the four most famous figures in black history with no meaningful elaboration. (Trump was reading from a sheet, but at least he was able to name Tubman, unlike his vanquished rival Gary Johnson.)


In a way, Trump isn’t totally wrong about Douglass “getting recognized more and more,” though one is left to scratch one’s head at where precisely he noticed that. Douglass’s heyday of influence was in the mid to late 19th century—when he was also among The Atlantic’s biggest-name writers—but he may be better known than ever among the broadest swath of the American public thanks to his ascension into the Pantheon of black history figures taught in schools since the United States established Black History Month in 1976.

It is a real and praiseworthy accomplishment for Douglass’s name to keep spreading. But the frequent, and often valid, critique of Black History Month is that it encourages a tokenist approach to African American culture, leading everyone from national leaders to elementary-school teachers to recite a catechism of well-known figures, producing both shallow engagement and privileging a passé Great Man (and Woman) theory of history. Hardly any politician is immune to this; faced with the necessity of holding an event to mark the month, they too recite the list. But even by that standard, Trump’s comments are laughably vacuous.

George W. Bush, for example, recalled in 2002 how February was “the month in which Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass were born, two men, very different, who together ended slavery.” Bill Clinton exhorted audiences to visit Douglass’s home in Washington’s Anacostia neighborhood, at a time when that was well-off the beaten tourist path. George H.W. Bush admired Jacob Lawrence’s depiction of Douglass. Ronald Reagan repeatedly quoted Douglass in his own remarks, and was fond of boasting that Douglass was a fellow Republican.


The gulf between Trump and his predecessors is particularly poignant, of course, in the wake of the presidency of Barack Obama, a man who by virtue of his own skin color never had to resort to the detached tributes of white presidents. When the museum Trump cited opened, Obama spoke, saying as only he could have:

Quote:Yes, African Americans have felt the cold weight of shackles and the stinging lash of the field whip. But we've also dared to run north and sing songs from Harriet Tubman's hymnal. We've buttoned up our Union Blues to join the fight for our freedom. We've railed against injustice for decade upon decade, a lifetime of struggle and progress and enlightenment that we see etched in Frederick Douglass's mighty, leonine gaze.

Trump, by contrast, has long spoken of the black community in fundamentally instrumental terms, from his business career to his political one. African Americans were a monolithic demographic to be won or lost, depending on the occasion. The young real-estate developer first made headlines when the Trump Organization was accused of working to keep blacks out of its real-estate developments; the company eventually settled with the Justice Department without admitting guilt. The question in that case was not the personal prejudices (absent or present) of Trump and his father Fred. Instead, the company appeared to have decided that blacks were bad for business and would drive out white tenants, so the Trumps allegedly opted to keep them out.


During the campaign, Trump viewed black voters with similarly cool detachment. He spoke about blacks and other minorities in conspicuously distancing terms, as “they” and “them.” His leading black surrogates included Omarosa, most famous for appearing on The Apprentice with Trump, and Don King, a clownish and past-his-prime boxing promoter notable for killing two men; Hillary Clinton’s campaign, meanwhile, called on LeBron James, Beyonce, and Obama. When Trump spotted a black man at a rally in California, he called out, “Oh, look at my African American over here. Look at him. Are you the greatest?”

When Trump decided announced a black-voter outreach operation, he mostly delivered his message to overwhelmingly white audiences in overwhelmingly white locales, and employed a series of racist and outdated stereotypes about inner-city crime, poverty, and lack of education, in what he appeared to believe represented benign patronization. Meanwhile, his own aides told reporters their political goal was to suppress black votes by encouraging African Americans to sit the election out.

In the end, Trump won 8 percent of the black vote, according to exit polling, besting Mitt Romney’s showing against Barack Obama but falling well short of the recent GOP high-water mark of 17 percent in 1976 (to say nothing of his prediction that he’d win 95 percent of African Americans).

Trump continues to indicate he holds a view of black Americans that is instrumental, as he showed on Wednesday at his Black History Month event. “If you remember, I wasn’t going to do well with the African American community, and after they heard me speaking and talking about the inner city and lots of other things, we ended up getting, I won’t get into details, but we ended up getting substantially more than other candidates who have run in the past years,” he said, somewhat misleadingly. “And now we’re going to take that to new levels.” February might be Black History Month, but every month is Trump History Month.

[Dill]

(01-31-2017, 10:55 AM)Belsnickel Wrote: So, anything that goes on in the first 100 days and you don't necessarily want to start a thread about it if there isn't one already, put it here.

It's hopeless, Bels.  We just cannot keep up.  https://twitter.com/jeffmueller/status/826920269491085317/photo/1

[GMDino]

(02-01-2017, 10:27 PM)Dill Wrote: It's hopeless, Bels.  We just cannot keep up.  https://twitter.com/jeffmueller/status/826920269491085317/photo/1

Here is the tweet for those who don't do Twitter:

This all happened in ONE DAY. And the day isn’t over yet. pic.twitter.com/tOjEoH3JE6

— Jeff Mueller (@jeffmueller) February 1, 2017

[GMDino]

I'll leave you with this tonight: David Duke celebrating President Donald Trump picking a fight with Australia on Day 12.

God save us all. pic.twitter.com/pp9JTthJk3

— pourmecoffee (@pourmecoffee) February 2, 2017

[*michaelsean*]

(02-01-2017, 10:51 PM)GMDino Wrote: Here is the tweet for those who don't do Twitter:

This all happened in ONE DAY. And the day isn’t over yet. pic.twitter.com/tOjEoH3JE6

— Jeff Mueller (@jeffmueller) February 1, 2017

Tell the Dems to show up to work.
Let's let Biden and Hills know meeting remains is now a photo-op.
Mexico says Trump didn't threaten anything.
An assumption Trump doesn't know who Douglas is.
Going nuclear is now the rule of the Senate passed by Dems.

[GMDino]

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/02/02/us-eases-some-economic-sanctions-against-russia/97399136/

Quote:U.S. eases restrictions on cyber-security sales to Russian spy agency


The U.S. Treasury Department on Thursday eased some economic sanctions against Russia, specifically licensing cyber-security sales to the Russian Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB, according to official documents.


The license, listed by the Office of Foreign Assets Control of the Treasury Department, covers "all transactions and activities" involving the Federal Security Service, known as the FSB, that were prohibited by earlier executive orders.

It notes in particular that  "requesting, receiving, utilizing, paying for, or dealing in licenses, permits, certifications, or notifications issued or registered by the
Federal Security Service (FSB) for the importation, distribution, or use of information technology products in the Russian Federation," is allowed.

The initial sanctions, as imposed by President Obama in April 2015, were titled "Blocking the Property of Certain Persons Engaging in Significant Malicious Cyber-Enabled Activities." That was further strengthened in December in an order entitled, "Taking Additional Steps to Address the national emergency with Respect to Significant Malicious Cyber-enabled Activities."

In Washington, White House press secretary Sean Spicer denied the report.

“We’re not easing,” he said, adding that, “It is, from what I understand, a regular course of action” that Treasury takes when sanctions are imposed.

“It’s a fairly common practice for the Treasury Department, after sanctions are put in place, to go back and look at whether or not there needs to be specific carve-outs for different either industries, or products and services that need to be going back and forth,” he said.

Spicer maintained that it does not represent any shift in policy and referred further questions to the Treasury Department, which did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.

Quote:[/url][url=https://twitter.com/RepSwalwell] Follow
Rep. Eric Swalwell 

@RepSwalwell
#RussianHacking attacked our democracy. They should pay a price. @POTUS rewards them by rolling back sanctions against their team of hackers
11:59 AM - 2 Feb 2017

The December sanctions were put in place after Obama charged that the Russians sought to affect U.S. elections via cyber-espionage.

Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., ranking member of a House CIA subcommittee, accused the Trump administration of “rewarding” the FSB for tampering with the U.S. elections.

“This is the same group (FSB) that, just a month ago, our intelligence community determined was responsible for the attack on our democracy,” Swalwell told USA TODAY. “We just made it easier for the same group to import into Russia the tools they could use to hack us or our allies again.”

Swalwell said he will explore methods for Congress to enact its own sanctions.

“We have French and German elections coming up, and we just made it easier (for the FSB) to go after them,” he said. “They can sharpen the knives and come after us again.”

The Russian news agency TASS, in reporting the easing of sanctions, said Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined to make a statement on the decision.

"First we need to understand what it is all about," Peskov said, according to TASS. "If we turn to the rocket engines matter, we will see that our U.S. counterparts never impose sanctions that could damage their own interests."

The move comes as some members of Congress have proposed adding new sanctions to Russia in connection with the hacking allegations.

Last month, Republican Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham pushed for greater sanctions against Russia for trying to influence the U.S. election and said then President-elect Donald Trump was in danger of being in conflict with congressional Republicans if he didn't get tougher on Russian President Vladimir Putin.