Trump Dictated Son’s Lie About Meeting With Russian Lawyer

Two pathological liars

Things are never dull when it comes to Der Trumpenführer insane, out of control Reich chancellery White House.   First we learn this afternoon that Trump has already fired the foul and toxic Anthony Scaramucci, whom he hired less than two weeks ago to be his director of communications.  Now, the Washington Post is reporting that Trump personally drafted his son's lie misleading statement that sought to explain the meeting between Russian operatives and Donald Trump, Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort which had suggested in and email labeled "Private and confidential" that the Russian government had information damaging to Hillary Clinton that it wanted to give to the Trump campaign to foster Trump's electoral victor.  Let's be candid.  It is getting more and more difficult to avoid the conclusion that Trump has actively engaged in the obstruction of justice.  True to form, Trump's mouthpieces are labeling the report as "fake news."  Fake news, of course, being anything that Der Trumpenführer doesn't like or that exposes the falsity of Trump's statements.  Here are highlights from the Washington Post story:

On the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in Germany last month, President Trump’s advisers discussed how to respond to a new revelation that Trump’s oldest son had met with a Russian lawyer during the 2016 campaign — a disclosure the advisers knew carried political and potentially legal peril. 

The strategy, the advisers agreed, should be for Donald Trump Jr. to release a statement to get ahead of the story. They wanted to be truthful, so their account couldn’t be repudiated later if the full details emerged.

But within hours, at the president’s direction, the plan changed.

Flying home from Germany on July 8 aboard Air Force One, Trump personally dictated a statement in which Trump Jr. said that he and the Russian lawyer had “primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children” when they met in June 2016, according to multiple people with knowledge of the deliberations. 

The claims were later shown to be misleading.

Over the next three days, multiple accounts of the meeting were provided to the news media as public pressure mounted, with Trump Jr. ultimately acknowledging that he had accepted the meeting after receiving an email promising damaging information about Hillary Clinton as part of a Russian government effort to help his father’s campaign.

The extent of the president’s personal intervention in his son’s response, the details of which have not previously been reported, adds to a series of actions that Trump has taken that some advisers fear could place him and some members of his inner circle in legal jeopardy.

As special counsel Robert S. Mueller III looks into potential obstruction of justice as part of his broader investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, these advisers worry that the president’s direct involvement leaves him needlessly vulnerable to allegations of a coverup.

“This was . . . unnecessary,” said one of the president’s advisers, who like most other people interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations. “Now someone can claim he’s the one who attempted to mislead. Somebody can argue the president is saying he doesn’t want you to say the whole truth.”

Trump has repeatedly criticized Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from overseeing the FBI’s Russian investigation — a decision that was one factor leading to the appointment of Mueller. And he has privately discussed his power to issue pardons, including for himself, and explored potential avenues for undercutting Mueller’s work.

Although misleading the public or the news media is not a crime, advisers to Trump and his family told The Washington Post that they fear any indication that Trump was seeking to hide information about contacts between his campaign and Russians almost inevitably would draw additional scrutiny from Mueller.

Trump, they say, is increasingly acting as his own lawyer, strategist and publicist, often disregarding the recommendations of the professionals he has hired.

“He refuses to sit still,” the presidential adviser said. “He doesn’t think he’s in any legal jeopardy, so he really views this as a political problem he is going to solve by himself.”
Donald Trump Jr. did not respond to requests for comment. His attorney, Alan Futerfas, told The Post that he and his client “were fully prepared and absolutely prepared to make a fulsome statement” about the meeting, what led up to it and what was discussed.

Peter Zeidenberg, the deputy special prosecutor who investigated the George W. Bush administration’s leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity, said Mueller will have to dig into the crafting of Trump Jr.’s statement aboard Air Force One.

“The thing that really strikes me about this is the stupidity of involving the president,” Zeidenberg said. “They are still treating this like a family-run business and they have a PR problem. . . . What they don’t seem to understand is this is a criminal investigation involving all of them.”

Besides stupidity, let's not overlook Trump's ego and narcissism.  No matter who his chief of staff might be, no one can rein in Trump's lies and efforts to obstruct justice. 

Tuesday Morning Male Beauty - Pt 1

Monday Morning Male Beauty - Pt 2

The Real Agenda of Critics of "Government Schools"

Another area where Donald Trump is delivering on promises to Christofascists is in the area of public education.  His appointee as Secretary of Education, Betsy De Vos, has a long, long history of working to gut funding for public schools - as well as well documented support for anti-LGBT hate groups - is now striving to divert public education funding to "charter schools" notwithstanding the spotty record of such schools when it comes to actually improving education. If one looks at the history of such schools and especially their largest cheerleaders, one finds that beneath the supposed libertarian is a Christian extremist and/or white supremacist.  In Virginia, the "Massive Resistance" movement was powered by Christian fundamentalists who set up private "Christian academies" rather than have their children attend integrated schools.  Sadly, that mindset is alive and well decades later. In addition, the secular nature of public schools is viewed as a threat by the "godly folk" who view true science and knowledge as a threat to the made up world view.  A piece looks at the agenda of De Vos and those like here who are being abetted by Der Trumpenführer, who wants to divert $9 billion from public schools to charter schools.  Here are excerpts:

When President Trump recently proposed his budget for “school choice,” which would cut more than $9 billion in overall education spending but put more resources into charter schools and voucher programs, he promised to take a sledgehammer to what he has called “failing government schools.”

[I]n certain conservative circles, the phrase “government schools” has become as ubiquitous as it is contemptuous.

What most people probably hear in this is the unmistakable refrain of American libertarianism, for which all government is big and bad. The point of calling public schools “government schools” is to conjure the specter of pathologically inefficient, power-mad bureaucrats.

Accordingly, right-wing think tanks like the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, the Heartland Institute and the Acton Institute have in recent years published screeds denouncing “the command and control mentality” of “government schools” that are “prisons for poor children.” All of these have received major funding from the family of the education secretary, Betsy DeVos, either directly or via a donor group. But the attacks on “government schools” have a much older, darker heritage. They have their roots in American slavery, Jim Crow-era segregation, anti-Catholic sentiment and a particular form of Christian fundamentalism — and those roots are still visible today. Before the Civil War, the South was largely free of public schools. That changed during Reconstruction, and when it did, a former Confederate Army chaplain and a leader of the Southern Presbyterian Church, Robert Lewis Dabney, was not happy about it. An avid defender of the biblical “righteousness” of slavery, Dabney railed against the new public schools. In the 1870s, he inveighed against the unrighteousness of taxing his “oppressed” white brethren to provide “pretended education to the brats of black paupers.” For Dabney, the root of the evil in “the Yankee theory of popular state education” was democratic government itself, which interfered with the liberty of the slaver South. One of the first usages of the phrase “government schools” occurs in the work of an avid admirer of Dabney’s, the Presbyterian theologian A. A. Hodge. Less concerned with black paupers than with immigrant papist hordes, Hodge decided that the problem lay with public schools’ secular culture. In 1887, he published an influential essay painting “government schools” as “the most appalling enginery for the propagation of anti-Christian and atheistic unbelief, and of antisocial nihilistic ethics, individual, social and political, which this sin-rent world has ever seen.” Calvinist theologian Rousas J. Rushdoony. An admirer, too, of both Hodge and Dabney, Rushdoony began to advocate a return to “biblical” law in America, or “theonomy,” in which power would rest only on a spiritual aristocracy with a direct line to God — and a clear understanding of God’s libertarian economic vision.

Rushdoony took the attack on modern democratic government right to the schoolhouse door. His 1963 book, “The Messianic Character of American Education,” argued that the “government school” represented “primitivism” and “chaos.” Public education, he said, “basically trains women to be men” and “has leveled its guns at God and family.”

The critique of “government schools” passed through a defining moment in the aftermath of the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, when orders to desegregate schools in the South encountered heavy resistance from white Americans. Some districts shut down public schools altogether; others promoted private “segregation academies” for whites, often with religious programming, to be subsidized with tuition grants and voucher schemes. Among the supporters of the Trump administration, the rhetoric of “government schools” has less to do with economic libertarianism than with religious fundamentalism. It is about the empowerment of a rearmed Christian right by the election of a man whom the Rev. Jerry Falwell Jr. calls evangelicals’ “dream president.” We owe the new currency of the phrase to the likes of Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council — also bankrolled in its early years by the DeVos family — who, in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling allowing same-sex marriage, accused “government schools” of indoctrinating students “in immoral sexuality.” When these people talk about “government schools,” they want you to think of an alien force, and not an expression of democratic purpose. And when they say “freedom,” they mean freedom from democracy itself.

As I have noted a number of times, about the only area in which Trump is keeping his promises in the area of forwarding the Christian fundamentalist/white supremacist agenda.  Be very afraid.  

Trump's Terrifying Nomination to the Office of International Religious Freedom.

No one talks more about religious freedom more while striving to take it away from others than the Christofascists and evangelical Christians.  Any restriction on their right to mistreat or discriminate against others is shrilly called a threat to their "religious freedom," yet, if allowed to have their way, contraception would be illegal, homosexuality would lead to imprisonment or worse, non-Christians would be greatly restricted in their ability to worship and the separation of church and state envisioned by the Founding Fathers would be eliminated.  Disturbingly, the Christofascists have found a strong ally in the White House.  Der Trumpenführer has delivered on few if any of his campaign promises to rank and file Americans.  But he has delivered on a number made to Christian extremists in New York in June, 2016, which collectively point towards Christofascist supremacy. For example, he's appointed Neil Gorsuch, a man who would reverse that Supreme Court's same sex marriage ruling, to that Court; his appointees, Betsy De Vos and Jeff Sessions are busy reversing Obama era protections for LGBT students; last week Sessions argued in a brief to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals that  the Civil Rights Act of 1964 offers no protections to LGBT Americans; last week Trump said he was banning transgender troops from the U.S. Military.  Continuing this frightening trend, he has now anti-LGBT Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback to lead the State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom.  Religion Dispatches looks at this very disturbing nomination.  Here are excerpts:

After the president’s hastily tweeted ban on transgender Americans serving openly in the military, the Justice Department’s unusual interjection in a federal employment lawsuit to proclaim, contrary to growing precedent, that existing civil rights laws do not protect LGBT people, Trump announced his intent to nominate notorious anti-LGBT Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback to lead the State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom.

As NPR rightly noted (in its opening line, no less), Brownback is “one of the least popular governors in the country,” but he’s been working to elevate his profile as a conservative Catholic culture warrior for more than a decade. The Ambassador-at-Large position is considered a senior advisor to the administration, while the Office of International Religious Freedom states that its mission is to “monitor religious persecution and discrimination worldwide, . . . 

But given Brownback’s history of using “religious freedom” as a sword to discriminate against LGBT people, his nomination offers the strongest evidence yet that, when the Trump administration talks about “religious freedom,” it actually means “Christian supremacy.” Though Brownback an equal-opportunity excluder: the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which Newsweek identified as the nation’s largest Muslim civil liberties group, said Brownback should be “disqualified” from the position due to his history of “rushing to sign anti-Islam legislation designed to vilify Muslims.”

Brownback’s nomination is also the latest sign that Trump is willing to hire even economic “losers” if it appeals to his base, which has been grumbling lately about the president’s attacks on his own attorney general, Jeff Sessions.

If confirmed, Brownback would be the first religious freedom Ambassador-at-Large who did not attend seminary or a pursue a similar denominational education. . . . . it’s much more likely to mean he will continue the Christian supremacist agenda he’s been pushing since he entered public office. New York‘s Ed Kilgore explains:

[Brownback] was a member of the shadowy conservative Christian power-elite group the Fellowship; a disciple of meta-culture-warrior Chuck Colson; and a former evangelical turned Catholic by way of the controversial conservative group Opus Dei. Unsurprisingly, Brownback was dubbed “God’s Senator” in a rather frightening profile by Jeff Sharlet that appeared in 2006. In one prototypical action, in 2004, Brownback traveled to Alabama to be present for the unveiling of a blatantly theocratic Constitution Restoration Act, designed to remove church-state conflicts from the jurisdiction of the federal courts.

Those who haven’t been subjected to Brownback’s regressive tax policies (which have nearly bankrupted his home state) or his right-wing political agenda might be wondering what all the fuss is about. . . . . he is staunchly opposed to abortion, and has signed a host of laws restricting access to any form of pregnancy termination. When it comes to LGBT rights, Brownback distinguished himself early as a fierce opponent to any measure that conferred on LGBT people equal dignity under the law. He pointedly refused to allow Kansas to embrace marriage equality, resisting orders from the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals when it found, in 2014, that same-sex couples in that circuit had a Constitutional right to marry.

After losing that battle, Brownback focused his efforts on excluding LGBT people from as many parts of public life as possible, leaning heavily on a lopsided definition of “religious freedom.” In 2016, he signed a law that allowed student groups at public colleges and universities to engage in discrimination without penalty — as long as the discrimination was rooted in “sincerely held religious beliefs.” When signing the bill, he was surrounded by members of the Kansas Catholic Conference and the anti-LGBT Family Policy Alliance of Kansas. Video of the signing ceremony, tellingly, includes zero non-Christians.

Of course, none of that was unexpected, given Brownback’s voting record during his 14-year tenure in the U.S. Senate. Brownback opposed hate crimes legislation, claiming in 2007 that efforts to prosecute violent bias-based crimes against LGBT people were actually aimed at “not allowing people to speak their beliefs about homosexuality.” He co-sponsored a failed attempted to amend the U.S. Constitution to ban marriage equality . . .

None of that history provides any indication that Brownback has an interest in protecting religious liberty as the bedrock principle it was intended to be, either at home or abroad. Instead, it’s an unavoidable signal to Trump’s right-wing, white evangelical Christian base that he will continue to privilege their delusional claims of “persecution” in dealing with far-flung countries that don’t kowtow to conservative Christian doctrine.

Monday Morning Male Beauty - Pt 1

Sunday Morning Male Beauty - Pt 2

Emmanuel Macron - New Leader of the Free World?

With Donald Trump alienating America's allies right and left and even South Korea saying it's more concerned with Trump's erratic and unhinged behavior than that of the leader of its next door neighbor, one can certainly make the case that America and its toxic president are no longer the leader of the free world.  The United Kingdom, like America through is Brexit vote, has seemingly likewise withdrawn itself from that possible tile.   As a consequence, some have said that mantle now rests with Angela Merkel of Germany.  As a piece in the Washington Post suggests, Emmanuel Macron of France may have his sights on the title.  With so many Americans utterly ignorant of history - most don't know that it was the French fleet that save George Washington's butt at the battle of Yorktown - don't know that France was once a very great power.  If you have doubts, visit Versailles sometime, and call to mind that Canada was once a French possession as was a large part of Africa and the American Mid-West.  But I digress.  Here are article highlights:

Emmanuel Macron is a master of persuasion. In his youth, he seduced his married high school drama teacher, the woman who is now his wife. In middle age — with no government experience — he cajoled a sitting president into giving him a coveted cabinet position. Then — with no support from any established political party — he dazzled a nation, becoming, at 39, the youngest-ever president of France, a country where tradition is a way of life.

Judging from the new president’s calendar, however, the dip in domestic popularity is of little concern, for his roving political eye seems to have identified a new conquest. Macron may be the president of France, but now he seems to be running for a different office altogether: the leader of the free world. Following the election of Donald Trump — who ran on promises of “America First” isolationism — commentators worldwide immediately began referring to German Chancellor Angela Merkel as the de facto defender of the liberal world order. With her famously stoic demeanor, Merkel appeared the natural replacement. Throughout her long career, she has advocated diplomacy and international law, and has defended an embattled European Union.

But in his first three months in office, Macron has dared to tread where Merkel hesitates to go. In keeping with his youthful image, he makes bold statements in defense of global causes such as climate change action, as evidenced in his Twitter campaign to “Make Our Planet Great Again.” And in the style of the “French Obama,” he hosts international celebrities in the Élysée for “conversations” on hot-button issues — including both Bono and Rhianna this week.
 [T]he major plot points of his young presidency have all featured him in the international spotlight, either attempting to charm or stand up to powerful world leaders, often those unpopular in France.

This is not to say that nothing has happened on the domestic level since his election in May. Macron, a relative political outsider even a year ago, ultimately succeed in carrying out an almost unthinkable overhaul of French political life. The new centrist party he founded, République En Marche (Republic on the Move), now has an absolute majority in Parliament.

[H]is principal ambition to date seems to be casting himself as a master negotiator in a new world where all roads somehow lead to Paris.

“To some extent, France is back again,” said Pierre Vimont, a former French ambassador to the United States and the E.U., in an interview. “You have France pushing forward its interest, but doing so in a way that makes it take a central position on the world stage, because France likes to lead and likes to be seen as leading.”

This defense of French interests has taken forms large and small, including a last-minute move to temporarily nationalize France’s largest shipyard on Thursday — to save French jobs from a potential Italian takeover. But so far, it has mostly been the world stage on which Macron has set his sights. Last week, for instance, he hosted Libya’s two rival leaders for talks in a chateau outside Paris. The mission was tentatively successful: the meeting led to a conditional cease-fire agreement between Fayez al-Sarraj, Libya’s U.N.-backed prime minister, and Khalifa Haftar, the military leader who controls much of eastern Libya. Likewise, Vimont said, Macron has positioned himself as a similar mediator between Israel and Palestine and even between the United States and Russia.

Macron has hosted — separately — Russian President Vladimir Putin and President Trump, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

In each of these meetings, Macron has used his considerable charm to play both sides, even while blasting Putin for Russia’s state-owned media being “organs of propaganda.”  But nowhere was Macron’s ability to seduce more on display than in the case of Trump, whom he invited to Paris after the two had a tense first meeting in Brussels in May. For Dominique Moïsi, a French foreign policy expert at the Paris-based Institut Montaigne, a think tank with ties to the Macron campaign, there is potential danger in Macron’s having “put himself in the limelight.”

“At the same time, the devil is in the details,” Moïsi said. “By receiving these leading opposite forces in Paris, he’s taking a risk. What if he fails?”

Macron’s young presidency has not yet experienced a major domestic crisis or attack. Likewise, none of his major policy proposals have yet been implemented — including his controversial push to liberalize France’s highly regulated labor market. Those reforms are due to be introduced in Parliament this fall, and could inspire massive protests. . . . As Moïsi put it, “The hard times are yet to come.”

I wish him luck.  Meanwhile, the husband and will be back in Paris next year - a friend who is retiring is taking us with her and her husband.  She has left us to plan the details. :)

Conservative Christians Look the Other Way as Trump Debases the Presidency

It is Sunday morning and across America fundamentalist and evangelical Christians will be flocking to fill church pews and feign piety, many wearing their professed religiosity on their sleeves.  Many are against drinking alcohol, some won't even engage in dancing, and, of course they view loving same sex couples who are responsible members of their communities as an abomination to be annihilated.  Yet some 81% of them voted for Donald Trump and continue to support him largely because he appealed to their hatred of others and their desire to destroy the religious freedom of other citizens.  If one wants a reason to walk away from the Christian brand, these people are a strong argument that only hate-filled hypocrites call themselves Christian nowadays.  And the Millennials ARE paying attention: nearly one third have disavowed any religious affiliation, largely thanks to these self-anointed "godly folks."  A column in the Washington Post calls these so-called Christians out and ask the question of whether there is any debasement that Trump can do to the presidency or decency in general that might make these people disavow him.   Here are highlights:  

No group has been as blindly loyal to President Trump as Christian conservatives. They have not let religion or values get in the way of their support. Consider the “Access Hollywood” tape, the attack on a Gold Star family, a mass of inexplicable ties between Trump’s campaign and Russian officials (and the president’s open invitation to Russia to continue hacking), the firing of the FBI director, the humiliation of evangelical-favorite Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the politicization of the Boy Scouts, the threats to the special counsel and now an interview with Trump’s out-of-control, potty-mouthed communications director.

What about Trump, exactly, reflects their values? (Taking Medicaid away from millions and separating families to deport law-abiding immigrants?) The Trump administration is a clown show — but it’s the evangelicals who supplied the tent, the red noses and the floppy shoes. Each day presents a new insult to the office of the presidency and a repudiation of civilized behavior.

Cumulatively — let’s not forget the erratic, impulsive declaration that he was throwing transgender military personnel out of the armed services — it is not clear whether Trump has reached a tipping point when Republicans decide he actually has to leave office. Yet if Trump nevertheless proceeds to fire Sessions and then order Justice Department officials to fire Mueller (or fire them if they won’t), Republicans will have no remedy at their disposal other than impeachment; they may very well choose not to use it, but then we have the makings of a constitutional crisis on our hands.

And the religious right, which intones “Judge Gorsuch, Judge Gorsuch!” when confronted with the series of Trump abominations, should do some soul-searching. Was this trashing of the White House, assault on civil language and conduct and contempt for the Constitution (the one the religious right thinks is so important that the new Supreme Court justice must protect it) worth it? And if it gets worse, is there any point at which the religious might put country above tribe, morality above partisanship? No, I don’t think it will do so ever. 

Last evening I was at a small, intimate fundraiser with mostly members of the local Indian community and the contrast between their expectations and what they looked for in a politician could not be a more stark contrast with the evangelical Christian crowd:  they look for the personal honesty, integrity and personal morality of a candidate and whether that candidate will seek to do the best for all citizens and not deliberately harm targeted citizens.  This versus the evangelicals and their support for Trump.  In my experience, these non-Christians time and time again reflect the values of the Gospel message more than the purported Christians of Trump's base. 

Sunday Morning Male Beauty - Pt 1