DonViejo
DonViejo's JournalTrump to visit storm-damaged Texas and Louisiana on Saturday
Source: The Hill
BY ALICIA COHN - 09/02/17 07:17 AM EDT
President Trump will meet with victims and tour parts of Texas and Louisiana affected by Hurricane Harvey on Saturday.
Trump will “visit with storm survivors and tell them personally that the federal government is here to help in any way that we can,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said Friday, describing the upcoming trip. This is the president’s second visit to Texas and first to Louisiana following the storm that made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane last week.
Trump was "not able" to visit storm areas or meet victims during his last visit to the area, according to Sanders, but will do so this visit. The president was criticized following his first trip for referring to his visit as seeing storm damage "first hand."
Last week, Trump visited Austin and Corpus Christi. This weekend, Trump and First Lady Melania Trump will visit the hard-hit Houston, Texas, and Lake Charles, Louisiana, areas, according to the White House.
Read more: http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/348960-trump-to-visit-storm-damaged-texas-and-louisiana-on-saturday
Trump to Nominate Fox News Commentator Richard Grenell as Ambassador to Germany
Source: Mediaite
by Joseph A. Wulfsohn | 11:53 pm, September 1st, 2017
President Trump is set to nominate frequent Fox News commentator Richard Grenell as the U.S. ambassador to Germany.
Grenell had previously served as the spokesman of the United Nations under President George W. Bush. The White House praised his years of public service in their announcement, per Politico, noting he is the “longest serving United States spokesman at the United Nations (2001-2008) having served four United States Ambassadors.” He had also served as the national security spokesman for Mitt Romney‘s 2012 presidential campaign.
There had been rumors that Grenell would be tapped to be the ambassador of Germany for weeks, but it wasn’t confirmed until late Friday.
As Politico pointed out, if Grenell is confirmed, he will be the first openly gay appointee of the Trump administration.
Read more: https://www.mediaite.com/online/trump-to-nominate-fox-commentator-richard-grenell-as-ambassador-to-germany/
Trump to tap Rep. Tom Marino as 'drug czar'
Source: Politico
By CRISTIANO LIMA 09/01/2017 09:27 PM EDT
The White House announced Friday that President Donald Trump will nominate Rep. Tom Marino of Pennsylvania, a campaign supporter, to head the Office of National Drug Control Policy, a role commonly known as the “drug czar.”
Marino had previously withdrawn from consideration for the role in May, citing a “critical illness” in the family.
Marino, 65, was appointed by President George W. Bush to serve as an attorney for Middle District in Pennsylvania, a role he held from 2002 to 2005, before returning to private law practice. In 2010 he defeated incumbent Democratic Rep. Chris Carney in Pennsylvania’s 10th Congressional District and is now serving his third term.
Marino declared his support for Trump’s presidential candidacy in February 2016, which at the time made him the fifth Republican congressman to do so.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2017/09/01/trump-tom-marino-drug-czar-242277
Tennessee Attorney General Backs Out Of DACA Lawsuit Threat
Source: Talking Points Memo
By MATT SHUHAM Published SEPTEMBER 1, 2017 4:27 PM
Tennessee’s attorney general sent a remarkable letter Friday, withdrawing his threat to sue the government if President Donald Trump did not rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA) by Sept. 5.
Until Friday afternoon, Herbert Slatery III was one of 10 Republican attorneys general, led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who threatened to include DACA in a larger lawsuit in order to phase out the program, if Trump didn’t do so himself. On Friday, Slatery wrote in a letter to Tennessee’s two senators that “there is a human element to this, however, that is not lost on me and should not be ignored.”
“Many of the DACA recipients, some of whose records I reviewed, have outstanding accomplishments and laudable ambitions, which if achieved, will be of great benefit and service to our country,” he continued. “They have an appreciation for the opportunities afforded to them by our country.”
“At this time, our Office has decided not to challenge DACA in the litigation, because we believe there is a better approach that we outline below,” he wrote.
Read more: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/tennessee-ag-flips-daca-lawsuit-threat
That's all Trump's lawyers have?
By Jennifer Rubin September 1 at 3:00 PM
The Wall Street Journal reported this week on two memos President Trump’s lawyers prepared for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III:
One memo submitted to Mr. Mueller by the president’s legal team in June laid out the case that Mr. Trump has the inherent authority under the constitution to hire and fire as he sees fit and therefore didn’t obstruct justice when he fired Mr. Comey as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in May, these people said.
Another memo submitted the same month outlined why Mr. Comey would make an unsuitable witness, calling him prone to exaggeration, unreliable in congressional testimony and the source of leaks to the news media, these people said.
As legal arguments, these are pathetic. Taking the last one first, arguing to Comey’s long-time colleague Mueller that Comey is a liar won’t win the day, nor does it pass the laugh test. Comey’s testimony will be lined up against written evidence and other witness testimony and actually may come out looking even more credible as a result. This is the sort of weak assertion one would make on Sean Hannity’s show; it’s not worthy of consideration by Mueller or any other serious prosecutor.
The “he can fire at will” argument is obviously flawed for at least three reasons. The argument is so bad one wonders if the Trump team is not ready for prime time or is simply trying to provide fodder for his cult-like following to support him if he tries to fire Mueller.
more
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2017/09/01/thats-all-trumps-lawyers-have/?utm_term=.3b5924f6733b&wpisrc=nl_popns&wpmm=1
I ran Congress' 9/11 investigation. The intelligence committees today can't handle Russia.
If they want a real autopsy, they need more resources.
By Bob Graham September 1 at 12:20 PM
Bob Graham?was a U.S. senator from Florida from 1987 to 2005. He served as chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence from 2001 to 2003 and as co-chairman of the Joint Inquiry Into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001.
Since the Justice Department named a special investigator, Robert Mueller, to handle the government’s official inquiry into Russian meddling in the U.S. election, the weight of public expectation has largely fallen on his shoulders. While the two congressional panels, the Senate and House intelligence committees, continue to hold hearings and question witnesses, including Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner, both are led by members of a party that is, with the exception of Charlottesville, skittish about criticizing the president. The greatest hope for an aggressive and impartial inquest seems to lie with Mueller, whose bosses have either recused themselves from the Russia probe (as Attorney General Jeff Sessions did) or volunteered that he would have autonomy to follow the facts wherever they led (as Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein did). The pressure, it seems, is off Congress to act as the primary body holding the president to account.
This is a dangerous sentiment. The two intelligence committees should act as if their investigations will be the final (and possibly the only) ones — because they may be. President Trump has worked hard to undermine Mueller’s effort, not only berating it as beholden to a partisan “hoax” but also belittling Sessions in humiliating terms on Twitter in a transparent attempt to force the attorney general’s resignation. That way, the president could replace him with an appointee who would stymie Mueller’s work. A central role for Congress is the only real way to guarantee a full report, with conclusions and recommendations, for the American people.
I oversaw a similarly complex and politically fraught inquiry as co-chairman of the joint congressional inquiry into 9/11, so I know what it takes — as a matter of resources, time, perseverance and, yes, occasional political courage — to run an investigation of this size and importance. And I know this, too: The congressional intelligence committees, as they are constituted today, are not ready for this burden.
They must tackle three problems.
First, the committees need substantially more capacity. After 9/11, the Senate and House leadership decided to merge the two intelligence committees so they could collaboratively and thoroughly investigate the intelligence issues raised by the attacks. The joint committee had a staff of 24 experienced professionals who were dedicated to the inquiry, independent from the regular professional staff of either the House or the Senate intelligence committee. They’d worked at key intelligence and law enforcement agencies and had knowledge of forensic accounting, investigation and intelligence analysis. Staff director Eleanor Hill had previously prosecuted organized crime for the Justice Department and served as staff director and chief counsel for the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.
Given the number of highly classified documents under review, the joint inquiry also had its own secure office space, separate from each chamber’s committee office. It had its own budget of at least $5 million, dedicated solely to the one-year inquiry. By comparison, the Senate committee had $8.1 million and the House panel $8.6 million to address regular legislative and oversight responsibilities for the two years of the 107th Congress.
more
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/i-ran-congress-911-investigation-the-intelligence-committees-today-cant-handle-russia/2017/09/01/665f0d04-8c31-11e7-91d5-ab4e4bb76a3a_story.html
Trump Calls On A Bunch of Religious Leaders to Thank Him For His Harvey Efforts
by Justin Baragona | 3:05 pm, September 1st, 2017
So, remember that one time when President Donald Trump held a Cabinet meeting and everyone at the table outdid themselves when it came to heaping praise on POTUS? Well, we got a similar situation today during a signing ceremony in the Oval Office in which Trump had a bunch of religious leaders surround him and profusely thank the president for his response to Hurricane Harvey.
With the president proclaiming that this coming Sunday will be a day of prayer for Harvey victims, he began going around the room and calling on different faith leaders to give remarks. And, wouldn’t you know, they all tripped over each other to express their gratitude for all the president had done so far.
After he was finished going around the room to get his praise, Trump turned it over to Pastor (and Fox News contributor) Robert Jeffress to lead the room in prayer, with some placing their hands on the president.
“And we thank you that the president had the wisdom to call our nation right now for a day of prayer this weekend,” Jeffress preached. “This is what we need.” He added in his prayer that Trump wanted to “bring healing to this country” and that he is doing that.
more + video
https://www.mediaite.com/tv/watch-as-trump-calls-on-a-bunch-of-religious-leaders-to-thank-him-for-his-harvey-efforts/
Trump Flaunts His Indifference to the Rule of Law - By Andrew Sullivan
September 1, 2017
9:28 am
Even a week later, the stench of it hangs in the air. The pardon of Sheriff Joe Arpaio is one of the more chilling authoritarian moves that Trump has made so far. I say this not simply because Arpaio treated prisoners in his charge in barbaric ways; not just because the president described this brutality as Arpaio simply “doing his job”; not even because Arpaio proudly and constantly engaged in racial profiling, making Latino citizens and noncitizens alike afraid to leave their own homes. I say it for a simpler reason: because it is Trump’s deepest indication yet that the rule of law means nothing to him.
Yes, the pardon power has been abused before — as any perusal of Bill Clinton’s final days in office will confirm. But it makes a difference, it seems to me, when the president pardons a law-enforcement officer for openly breaking the law, and refusing to abide by a court order to stop doing so. It makes an even bigger difference if the pardon is granted long before the legal process has played itself out. This isn’t a pardon, as is usually the case, for someone who has served time, shows contrition and deserves some kind of mercy. It is a pardon seemingly designed to blow a raspberry at the court system, and tell anyone in law enforcement or border control or ICE or anywhere for that matter that, if you commit brutal or illegal acts, the big man has your back.
This is government as an unaccountable, legally immune thug. Of course Trump telegraphed this in the campaign by backing violence against dissenters in his rallies, championing torture, and when he recently told police officers it was fine to manhandle criminal suspects. I still have a hard time imagining a president of the United States openly showing contempt for due process or basic decency; but here we are. No one could defend this — even National Review and The Wall Street Journal were disgusted. But say what you like about Trump, this attraction to brute force, this reveling in it, is something he has never hidden.
Is it also a signal that the president could pardon — even preemptively — anyone caught up in criminality in the Mueller investigation? I suspect so, even though Mueller subtly responded to that threat last Wednesday, by letting it be known he is working alongside Eric Schneiderman, the attorney general of New York. State crimes, after all, can’t be pardoned by the president. But that Trump is even thinking along these lines is a sign of how deeply our system depends on the honor of the individuals involved. An instinctual despot like Trump can find even the most benign of the president’s constitutional powers — the pardon — and turn it against the rule of law. We really need to remind ourselves of this on a daily basis if we are not to become numb to it: to advance his own interests, there is nothing this president would not do. If we enter, as we well might, a constitutional crisis, we have been warned all too clearly what this man is capable of.
more
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/09/trump-flaunts-his-indifference-to-the-rule-of-law.html
When I Filmed Sheriff Joe Arpaio, He Was Cooperative and Horrifying
BEYOND BELIEF
When I Filmed Sheriff Joe Arpaio, He Was Cooperative and Horrifying
When Marianne Schaefer Trench shot a documentary about Sheriff Joe Arpaio, her crew wanted to quit, and her audience thought they were watching a mockumentary.
MARIANNE SCHAEFER TRENCH
09.01.17 1:00 AM ET
In 2001, I made a documentary film for German TV about the man who called himself “The Toughest Sheriff in America.” Ten years after I witnessed Joe Arpaio in action, a judge ordered him to stop detaining people based solely on racial profiling. Yet Arpaio continued to flout the law, and he faced up to six months in prison for criminal contempt of law. Before Arpaio was sentenced, President Trump pardoned him.
When I proposed the Arpaio documentary to my German clients, they were skeptical. They had trouble believing that his kind of law-enforcement abuse was really happening, and, if so, they weren’t confident I would able to capture it on camera. In the end, my clients were intrigued enough, because deep in the German unconscious there is still the image of the U.S. as the Wild West, a place where the toughest guy with the fastest gun will determine what Law and Order means. Sheriff Joe represented the essence of the evil cliché Germans remember from these fictional old Westerns. In my film, Arpaio even compared himself to these old movies, saying if he would ever have to retire, he would not exactly vanish by riding into the sunset, but he would vanish because he wouldn’t know what to do with himself.
There was no problem getting the man to cooperate. He craved the spotlight and behaved obnoxiously to satisfy the camera. Despite his cooperation, the filming became more difficult by the day because my crew developed such disgust and hatred for the man that I feared they would turn violent. We all started to feel dirty because we realized in some sick way we were feeding his oversized ego.
When I told Arpaio I needed a good beginning for my film, some kind of “bang,” he took it literally. He owned a tank he liked to ride in parades, and while we were filming in the courtyard of the jail, the tank appeared and fired its cannon. It was indeed a very loud “bang.”
Already back then Arpaio was in legal trouble. He had a website with a live feed showing people getting booked. The website came with a warning that one might witness violence or even sexually explicit content, which of course drew many viewers.
Surveillance cameras also captured unruly detainees getting strapped into a chair and then tortured with stun guns. One inmate, Scott Norberg, died in the restraining chair. The Phoenix New Times compared the video material to watching a snuff film.
more
http://www.thedailybeast.com/when-i-filmed-sheriff-joe-arpaio-he-was-cooperative-and-horrifying
Comedian Shelley Berman Dies at 92
Source: The Daily Beast
Legendary comedian Shelley Berman died early Friday morning at his home in California from complications of Alzheimer’s disease. He was 92. Berman got his start in the Chicago comedy scene of the 1950s, alongside comics like Mort Sahl and Bob Newhart. He was known for his extended telephone monologues, performed while seated on a stool. In 2008, at the age of 83, Berman received his first and only Emmy nomination for playing Larry David's father on HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm.
READ IT AT NEW YORK TIMES
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Read more: http://www.thedailybeast.com/comedian-shelley-berman-dies-at-92
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Name: DonGender: Male
Hometown: Massachusetts
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