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Thanks, Bmichael. 

Got a clarification on the 1.6 billion...

it's apparently not for a wall, but rather for 65 miles of "pedestrian fencing" in the Rio Grande Valley.

(Rolls eyes)

Couldn't have said it better myself (But I'll keep trying)

This is what we were afraid of

Paul Waldman - The Washington Post - Monday, December 24, 2018

When the new year begins next week, President Trump will have an acting chief of staff, an acting secretary of defense, an acting attorney general, an acting EPA administrator, no interior secretary, and no ambassador to the United Nations. The officials originally in all those positions have either been fired or have quit in various measures of disgust or scandal. His former campaign chairman, deputy campaign chairman, national security adviser and personal lawyer have all pleaded guilty to crimes. His campaign, his transition, his foundation and his business are all under investigation. The United States’ allies are horrified at the chaos Trump has brought to our foreign policy. The stock market is experiencing wild swings as investors are gripped with fear over what might be coming and what Trump might do to make it worse — a situation alarming enough that the treasury secretary felt the need to call up the CEOs of major banks to assure them that everything is under control.


And, oh yeah, the government is shut down.


This, my friends, is exactly what we were afraid of when Trump somehow managed to get elected president two years ago. This is what we warned you about.


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To give you a flavor of the president’s mind-set, here’s what happened over the weekend with regard to the departure of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, widely regarded as the sanest of Trump’s national security team and one of the few original members of Trump’s Cabinet who did not show himself to be incompetent, corrupt, or both. The president’s decision to pull American troops out of Syria because of a single phone call with the president of Turkey was apparently the last straw for Mattis, who has watched in dismay as Trump has set about to degrade the alliances that have shaped U.S. foreign policy for the last seven decades. So Mattis tendered his resignation, saying he’d depart in two months to give the president time to find a replacement.

And then . . .
President Trump, who aides said has been seething about news coverage of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis’s pointed resignation letter, abruptly announced Sunday that he was removing Mattis two months before his planned departure and installing Patrick Shanahan as acting defense secretary. . . .


Trump decided hastily to remove Mattis in reaction to negative news coverage, according to senior administration officials, one of whom said the president was eager to retaliate against Mattis and show up the widely respected former general. Another official said Trump and other advisers suspected Mattis of being part of a campaign to stoke negative coverage about the president.


Nothing says “well-oiled machine” like that distinctly Trumpian combination of paranoia and vindictiveness.
Meanwhile, the government shutdown is expected to last into the new year, a shutdown that is happening because a bunch of Fox News and talk-radio hosts criticized the president for not being tough enough in fighting for his ludicrous border wall. Trump, always deeply insecure and eager to feed his base’s endless rage and desire for conflict, responded quickly to the accusation of weakness. “He spends ever more time in front of a television, often retreating to his residence out of concern that he is being watched too closely,” reports the New York Times.


Two years ago, as we were still trying to wrap our heads around the idea that Trump was actually going to be president of the United States, it was not uncommon to hear the hopeful prediction that things wouldn’t work out as badly as we feared. The weighty responsibilities of the office would turn Trump serious, sober, “presidential.”


That has not occurred. If anything, Trump has shown himself to be even more of a despicable human being than he appeared then, and utterly incapable of growing into the office. He is just as petty, just as impulsive, just as narcissistic, just as dishonest and, perhaps, even more corrupt than we realized. Not only does he seem to be using every available opportunity to exploit the presidency to enrich himself and his family, but a recent, meticulously documented investigation showed that Trump, his father, and his siblings engaged in a years-long scheme to commit tax fraud on an absolutely massive scale, a story that, in the endless waves of White House madness, has been almost forgotten. And he continues to jealously guard his tax returns, to the point where any reasonable person would conclude that the information contained therein must at a minimum shock the conscience, if not providing evidence of outright criminal behavior.


It is true that Trump has not yet started World War III. And if you’re a Republican, he has done many things that pleased you, such as cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthy, or slashing regulations that protect workers, consumers, and people who enjoy breathing air and drinking water. If you thrill to the sight of immigrant children being ripped from the arms of their parents, then this presidency has been a joy. Indeed, just about the only fear about Trump that hasn’t come to pass is the conservative worry that he would be ideologically unreliable.


But in so many ways, he has shown himself again and again to be not just as bad as we thought, but worse. As as we look forward to the next two years, we must realize that there will be no stability, no settling down, no period of calm. The best we can hope for are brief moments when the lunacy pouring from the White House are more comical than terrifying. But most of the time, they’ll probably be both.

There is a reason(s) why Donald McRonald backed off on the national emergency thing.

First, and as usual, he most likely failed to understand the implications before he opened his mouth. This was bolstered by pushback from both sides – liberal and conservative.

The argument here is that if there was truly a national emergency, he would have declared it. But by not doing so, he negated his claims and revealed it for what it was – a pathetic attempt to appropriate funding from other government sources to build the wall.

McRonald continues to show his rookie hand by threatening to do things in attempts to frighten people unsuccessfully.

Second, the declaration would be followed by numerous lawsuits, thus freezing it in the courts. And the first response from any competent judge would be “Please provide the facts and figures that prove an emergency exists”. And of course, there aren’t any.

Third, while it certainly is in his best interest to fulfill a major campaign promise, the other reason for all this drama is a smokescreen created by him to draw attention away from his main problem – the Mueller investigation and all that comes with it.

On a lighter side, with the recent discovery of an FBI investigation looking into among other things whether he was actually a Russian agent before and during the campaign, his best response was “Comey is a sleaze”.

Sleaze is as sleaze does.

ROFL.

Two thumbs way up

This is brilliant.  You should be a writer, Bmichael. :-D

In an astounding demonstration of poetic justice, this misogynistic cretin has found himself being led, managed, directed, and dominated by both Pelosi and Coulter.

As one pundit recently suggested, Pelosi should be negotiating with Coulter over the tough issues and ignore the middleman.

Donald McRonald is clearly out of his league (Was there ever any doubt?) and the best he can now hope for in this joke presidency is to lose the next election by the greatest margin in our history.

Cheers!

Cheers, indeed!

“Any crisis on our border is of President Trump’s own making,” declared Xavier Becerra, the attorney general of California and a likely litigant. “Family separations, child detention, turning our backs on asylum seekers, and more. There is no national emergency. If Trump oversteps his authority and abandons negotiations with Congress by declaring a fabricated national emergency, we won’t only call his bluff, we will do what we must to hold him accountable. No one is above the law.”

“The President’s unlawful declaration over a crisis that does not exist does great violence to our Constitution and makes America less safe, stealing from urgently needed defense funds for the security of our military and our nation," the top congressional Democrats wrote in a statement. "This is plainly a power grab by a disappointed President, who has gone outside the bounds of the law to try to get what he failed to achieve in the constitutional legislative process."
“The President is not above the law. The Congress cannot let the President shred the Constitution," they said.


Pelosi and Schumer vowed to use "every remedy available," whether through Congress or the courts, to defend the legislative body's power to control government spending. The pair called on Republican lawmakers to join their efforts.


“This issue transcends partisan politics and goes to the core of the Founders’ conception for America, which commands Congress to limit an overreaching executive," they said. "The President’s emergency declaration, if unchecked, would fundamentally alter the balance of powers, inconsistent with our Founders’ vision."

Thanks. I am following this closely. Any output by McConnel? KY 's senator keeps getting re-elected, no matter what

Trump argued in the Rose Garden that declaring an emergency was necessary because narcotics were pouring across the border. “We’re talking about an invasion of our country with drugs, with human traffickers, with all types of criminals and gangs,” he said. But he also seemed to undercut his own case on the urgency of the problem.


“I could do the wall over a longer period of time, I didn’t need to do this, but I’d rather do it much faster,” he said.


An ACLU lawyer responded on Twitter: “keep talking mr president.”


matt.zapotosky@washpost.com
josh.dawsey@washpost.com

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