White House says that Donald Trump believes he has the power to fire Robert Mueller.

Sarah Sanders: Trump “certainly believes he has the power“ to fire Robert Mueller. (via ABC) pic.twitter.com/qtysO8K2pF

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) April 10, 2018

Courtesy of Politico: 

The Trump White House punched back at its own Justice Department Tuesday, with President Donald Trump and senior officials expressing outrage over a law enforcement raid on lawyer Michael Cohen—and making thinly veiled threats to fire special Russia prosecutor Robert Mueller. 

“We’ve been advised the president certainly has the power to make that decision,” White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said when asked whether Trump could fire Mueller, who answers not to the White House but to deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein. 

Trump began the day tweeting in defense of Cohen, a longtime Trump Organization associate. “A TOTAL WITCH HUNT!!!” Trump wrote on Twitter Tuesday morning. He also added: “Attorney-client privilege is dead!” 

A GOP operative close to the White House told POLITICO: “The all caps tweet, that’s the primal scream. That’s the war cry.” 

“He’s losing his shit,” the operative added. “We’re at a different level now.”

That is very similar to what Vanity Fair is reporting as well:

There have been times during Robert Mueller’s investigation—Mueller’s subpoenaing of Trump business records, for instance—when White House advisers worried Trump seemed on the verge of triggering a constitutional crisis by firing Mueller, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, or Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. The stunning Cohen raid is another one of these moments. “He’s sitting there bitching and moaning. He’s brooding and doesn’t have a plan,” a Republican close to the White House said last night. “I could see him having a total meltdown and saying, ‘Fuck it, I’m firing all of them,’” a Trump friend told me. “This is very dry tinder. If someone strikes a match to it, you could see it catching fire,” added a former official.

It was also announced today that Trump has cancelled his planned trip to South America, supposedly to because he wants to monitor the situation in Syria, but of course we all know which situation has his full attention.  

All day today I have been expecting Trump to lose his shit and start firing everybody in the Justice Department, or declare war on Mexico, or set the rest of Trump Tower on fire.

But so far it's like that part of the horror movie before the teenagers go downstairs to figure out why the lights won't work.

You know that somebody is getting an axe in the forehead, you just don't know when, or which one it will be.

Robert Mueller issues subpoena to Trump Organization demanding documents about Russia.

Courtesy of New York Times:  

The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, has subpoenaed the Trump Organization to turn over documents, including some related to Russia, according to two people briefed on the matter. The order is the first known time that the special counsel demanded documents directly related to President Trump’s businesses, bringing the investigation closer to the president. 

The breadth of the subpoena was not clear, nor was it clear why Mr. Mueller issued it instead of simply asking for the documents from the company, an umbrella organization that oversees Mr. Trump’s business ventures. In the subpoena, delivered in recent weeks, Mr. Mueller ordered the Trump Organization to hand over all documents related to Russia and other topics he is investigating, the people said. 

The subpoena is the latest indication that the investigation, which Mr. Trump’s lawyers once regularly assured him would be completed by now, will drag on for at least several more months. Word of the subpoena comes as Mr. Mueller appears to be broadening his investigation to examine the role foreign money may have played in funding Mr. Trump’s political activities.

Keep in mind that this is a subpoena, not a request, for these documents.

That means that Mueller is not giving the Trump Organization any wiggle room.

This of course is REALLY going to piss Trump off, and that might mean that he would pull the trigger on a plan reported by Vanity Fair to replace Jeff Sessions with somebody who could rein Mueller in a little: 

Perhaps most consequential for Robert Mueller’s investigation, sources said Trump has discussed a plan to fire Attorney General Jeff Sessions. According to two Republicans in regular contact with the White House, there have been talks that Trump could replace Sessions with E.P.A. Administrator Scott Pruitt, who would not be recused from overseeing the Russia probe. Also, as an agency head and former state attorney general, Pruitt would presumably have a good shot at passing a Senate confirmation hearing.

If Trump were going to make a move to get rid of Mueller, I would think that this would be the thing that would push him to do it.

 And remember there is virtually NOBODY in the White House anymore to talk him down.

Donald Trump is looking to clean house and replace his senior staff with people who will not try to rein him in. Uh oh!

Courtesy of Vanity Fair:  

With the departures of Hope Hicks and Gary Cohn, the Trump presidency is entering a new phase—one in which Trump is feeling liberated to act on his impulses. “Trump is in command. He’s been in the job more than a year now. He knows how the levers of power work. He doesn’t give a fuck,” the Republican said. Trump’s decision to circumvent the policy process and impose tariffs on imported steel and aluminum reflects his emboldened desire to follow his impulses and defy his advisers. “It was like a fuck-you to Kelly,” a Trump friend said. “Trump is red-hot about Kelly trying to control him.” 

According to five Republicans close to the White House, Trump has diagnosed the problem as having the wrong team around him and is looking to replace his senior staff in the coming weeks. “Trump is going for a clean reset, but he needs to do it in a way that’s systemic so it doesn’t look like it’s chaos,” one Republican said. 

Sources said that the first officials to go will be Chief of Staff John Kelly and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, both of whom Trump has clashed with for months. On Tuesday, Trump met with John Bolton in the Oval Office. When he plans to visit Mar-a-Lago next weekend, Trump is expected to interview more candidates for both positions, according to two sources. “He’s going for a clean slate,” one source said. Cohn had been lobbying to replace Kelly as chief, two sources said, and quit when he didn’t get the job. “Trump laughed at Gary when he brought it up,” one outside adviser to the White House said. 

Next on the departure list are Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. Trump remains fiercely loyal to his family, but various distractions have eroded their efficacy within the administration. Both have been sidelined without top-secret security clearances by Kelly, and sources expect them to be leaving at some point in the near future.

"He doesn't give a fuck."

Okay this article legitimately made my legs shake.

I think it is safe to say that Donald Trump is clinically insane.

And the only hope for this nation is that the people around him exert some control over his impulses.

If he simply fires those that are doing that, and replaces them with sycophants afraid to correct him or raise objections to his lunatic ravings, we are seriously fucked here.

Robert Mueller better put his investigation on the fast track because as long as Trump is in office this whole country, if not the entire world, remain in serious danger.

Sources say that Trump chief of staff John Kelly may be headed to the chopping block, and that Ivanka is actively searching for his successor.

Courtesy of Vanity Fair:  

Donald Trump’s relationship with John Kelly, his chief of staff, fraught from the beginning, may finally have gone past the point of no return. Two prominent Republicans in frequent contact with the White House told me that Trump has discussed choosing Kelly’s successor in recent days, asking a close friend what he thought about David Urban, a veteran Washington lobbyist and political operative who helped engineer Trump’s victory in Pennsylvania. Ivanka is also playing a central role in the search, quietly field-testing ideas with people. “Ivanka is the most worried about it. She’s trying to figure who replaces Kelly,” a person who’s spoken with her said. 

Kelly’s departure likely isn’t imminent, sources said. “He wants to stay longer than Reince [Priebus],” an outside adviser said. Trump can also hardly afford another high-level staff departure, which would trigger days of negative news cycles. “This could be like [Jeff] Sessions,” one of the Republicans explained, referring to Trump’s festering frustration about not being able to replace his attorney general. 

But the prospect of a Trump-Kelly rupture became more probable as news of their clashes over immigration leaked. Last week, Kelly reportedly infuriated Trump when he told Fox News that Trump had “evolved” on his position to build a southern border wall. Kelly further catalyzed Trump’s ire when he told Democratic lawmakers that Trump was “uninformed” when he made his campaign promise to build the wall. The next morning Trump rebutted his chief of staff with a tweet: “The Wall is the Wall, it has never changed or evolved from the first day I conceived of it.”

No way this should come as a surprise to anybody, Trump simply does not like to be controlled.

And Kelly has been trying to get the White House to run with military like efficiency which has some staffers referring to him as "the Church Lady."

Of course as we have discussed in the past, once someone like Kelly is removed that leaves Trump unsupervised, and like the over grown toddler that he is his impulsivity will be left unchecked and the unraveling of his presidency will only accelerate.

I guess Ivanka better get on the stick.

Roger Stone is currently writing book under the assumption that Trump will soon be removed from office.

Courtesy of Vanity Fair:  

One Trump ally is making plans to commercialize Trump’s downfall. Longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone told me he is working on a book titled The Unmaking of the President as part of a multi-book deal with Skyhorse Publishing. (Last fall, Skyhorse published Stone’s campaign account, The Making of the President 2016.) “I’ve been writing it as we go along,” he told me. 

Stone said he got the idea to write a book chronicling Trump’s removal from office after watching how the White House responded to the Robert Mueller investigation. “It’s painfully obvious Mueller will bring charges,” Stone said. “The theory is Mueller will indict him on some process-related matter” such as obstruction of justice. “The only people who don’t seem to know it are Ty Cobb, [John] Dowd, and the president.” 

Stone also believes Trump could be removed from office because he has surrounded himself with disloyal Cabinet members and other top officials. “Nikki Haley stuck a knife in his back,” Stone said, referring to her comments about Trump’s accusers. According to Stone’s back-of-the-napkin tally, only two Cabinet members would vote against invoking the 25th Amendment, the provision by which the president can be deemed unable to serve (Congress would have to vote by a two-thirds majority to remove him permanently). 

Stone made it clear he’s not writing the book because he wants to, he’s just planning ahead. “I hope it’s a book I don’t have to publish,” he said, expressing dismay at Trump’s political prospects. “I just don’t think Trump is being told the truth about how bad things are.”

Typically Trump supporters argue that all of the investigations are "fake news" and that Trump is going to be the most successful president in history.

But if one that has been with him since the 80's is now writing a book about the premature end of his presidency, it would appear that the writing is definitely on the wall, and even loyal Trump supporters can read it for themselves.

Donald Trump's lawyers appear to be "handling" him so that he remains calm and does not overreact and try to fire Robert Mueller which would dramatically escalate the investigations.

Courtesy of Vanity Fair:  

With Donald Trump predisposed to self-sabotage in what may ultimately become an obstruction of justice case, the president’s lawyers have assured him that he has nothing to fear from Robert Mueller. It’s a tricky balancing act, given Trump’s past history of criticism for the special counsel. The president’s natural impulse for obstructive, combative behavior is also, in this case, a potential legal risk. So while F.B.I. investigators appear to have zeroed in on critical events that transpired before and after the real-estate mogul’s unexpected victory last fall, including Jeff Sessions’s recusal and the ouster of James Comey, Trump’s lawyers are taking pains to project calm, telling the president that he has nothing to fear and that the investigation, which some posit is just getting started, will wind down soon. 

“The people who have been interviewed generally feel they were treated fairly by the special counsel, and adequately prepared to assist them in understanding the relevant material,” White House lawyer Ty Cobb, who has urged the president to cooperate with Mueller and his team, told The Washington Post. “They came back feeling relieved that it was over, but nobody I know of was shaken or scared.” Cobb added that the idea that Mueller was looking beyond the election into Trump’s personal finances and business dealings—something Trump has said would be “out of bounds”—was incorrect. 

One of the goals of this effort, it appears, is to prevent Trump from flying into a rage and firing Mueller, as several of his allies have suggested he do if it appears Mueller is expanding the scope of his investigation into the president’s finances. “I’ve done my best, without overstepping, to share my view that the perception of the inquiry—that it involved a decade or more of financial transactions and other alleged issues that were mistakenly reported—just wasn’t true, and that the issues were narrower and wholly consistent with the mandate provided by the Justice Department to the Office of the Special Counsel,” he said, adding that he believes the investigation will be wrapped up by the end of the year, or shortly thereafter. As for further revelations regarding foreign contacts that are reportedly on the horizon, Cobb said he does not expect them to “unduly extend the inquiry.”

That last part is of course bullshit, and Trump's attorneys surely know that. 

So yes what they appear to be doing is trying to keep the orange shitgibbon calm so that the doesn't start throwing his feces all over the place and give the investigators even more to work.

Donald Trump is his own worst enemy, and clearly his lawyers know that he can only make things worse for himself.

I have to assume at this point that Mueller has every intention of issuing a subpoena for Trump's testimony some time in the near future, because that would really be the last nail in this coffin.

Robert Mueller has already questioned top White House aide who supervised cooperating witness George Papadopoulos.

Courtesy of NBC News: 

Sam Clovis, the former top Trump campaign official who supervised a man now cooperating with the FBI's Russia investigation, was questioned last week by special counsel Robert Mueller's team and testified before the investigating grand jury, a person with first-hand knowledge of the matter told NBC News. 

Clovis, who is President Donald Trump's pick to be the Department of Agriculture's chief scientist, could not be reached for comment. His lawyer, Victoria Toensing, would neither confirm nor deny his interactions with the Mueller team.

The court documents unsealed Monday describe emails between Papadopoulos and an unnamed "campaign supervisor." The supervisor responded "Great work" after Papadopoulos discussed his interactions with Russians who wanted to arrange a meeting with Trump and Russian leaders. 

Toensing confirmed that Clovis was the campaign supervisor in the emails. Clovis, a former Air Force officer and Pentagon official who unsuccessfully ran for Iowa State Treasurer in 2014, was the Trump campaign's chief policy adviser and national co-chairman.

Well now isn't THAT interesting?

So here is yet another top level campaign official who not only knew that there were conversations with the Russians, but considered those interactions "great work."

We all learned late yesterday why the FBI has former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort under strict house arrest.

The man has three passports:

Manafort currently has three US passports, each under a different number. He has submitted 10 passport applications in roughly as many years, prosecutors said. 

This year, Manafort traveled to Mexico, China and Ecuador with a phone and email account registered under a fake name. (The name was not disclosed in the filings.)

What's more that guy has either has 28 million or 63 million, depending on which application you go by.

So yeah, he's a flight risk.

So how is all of this going over in the Trump White House?

Not well it seems.

Courtesy of Vanity Fair:  

Although the White House had been anticipating charges in Robert Mueller’s “witch hunt” for months, news that one former adviser, George Papadopoulos, had pleaded guilty, and begun working with the F.B.I., exploded like a bomb. Rising before dawn and gluing himself to his television, Trump at first felt vindicated by the charges against Paul Manafort and Richard Gates, which were seemingly unconnected to Russia. “NO COLLUSION!” he tweeted triumphantly, after he spoke with his lawyers. Others were reportedly relieved that the first batch of indictments did not include Trump’s former national security advisor, Michael Flynn. (Manafort and Gates have pleaded not guilty.) 

But the president’s mood darkened after hearing that Papadopoulos had, apparently, turned state’s witness. “The walls are closing in,” one senior Republican in close contact with top staffers told the Post, echoing other sources who described Trump as angry and agitated. “Everyone is freaking out.” The New York Times reported that White House aides were “stunned and alarmed.”

I swear there is not enough popcorn in the world to cover all of this. 

Former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon suggests his old boss will win the next election with 400 electoral votes.

Courtesy of Newsweek:  

Steve Bannon has a message for “the good folks at Vanity Fair”, stating Donald Trump will “not only finish his term” but gain a landslide 400 electoral votes in the 2020 presidential election. 

Speaking at the controversial Family Research Council’s Values Voter Summit, Bannon hit back at a report from Vanity Fair that suggested he did not have any faith that his former boss would finish out his first term. 

The former White House chief strategist said on Saturday in comments carried by ABC News: “The populist, nationalist, conservative revolt that’s going on, that drove Donald Trump to victory, that drove Judge Moore to victory, that will drive 15 candidates to victory in 2018, and well, I hate to break the news to Graydon Carter and the good folks at Vanity Fair, but yes, President Trump is not only going to finish this term he’s going to win with 400 electoral votes in 2020.”

That is almost a hundred more electoral votes than Trump "won" in 2016. That number was 306.

In order for Trump to achieve something like that he would have to....well he would have to either run as somebody completely different, or the Russians would have to do a much better job of hacking our election.

Of course this statement came in retaliation to the Vanity Fair article which quoted two sources saying that Bannon had only given Trump a 30% of making it through the first term.

This could simply be a case of Bannon attempting to do a little damage control, or he could in fact be this delusional.

As for that last possibility Bannon also said this during his appearance at the Values Voter Summit.

Bannon slams GOP senators for not denouncing Corker, who "has mocked and ridiculed a commander-in-chief when we have kids in the field." pic.twitter.com/moI5pt0HzH

— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) October 14, 2017

It should be pointed out that there was long line of Republican politicians who were criticizing President Obama while he was the Commander-in-Chief and we had "kids in the field."

In fact didn't Bannon's former boss suggest that Obama was not a legitimate president? 

Donald Trump: “I hate everyone in the White House! There are a few exceptions, but I hate them!”

Courtesy of Vanity Fair: 

At first it sounded like hyperbole, the escalation of a Twitter war. But now it’s clear that Bob Corker’s remarkable New York Times interview—in which the Republican senator described the White House as “adult day care” and warned Trump could start World War III—was an inflection point in the Trump presidency. It brought into the open what several people close to the president have recently told me in private: that Trump is “unstable,” “losing a step,” and “unraveling.”

In recent days, I spoke with a half dozen prominent Republicans and Trump advisers, and they all describe a White House in crisis as advisers struggle to contain a president who seems to be increasingly unfocused and consumed by dark moods. Trump’s ire is being fueled by his stalled legislative agenda and, to a surprising degree, by his decision last month to back the losing candidate Luther Strange in the Alabama Republican primary. “Alabama was a huge blow to his psyche,” a person close to Trump said. “He saw the cult of personality was broken.”

According to two sources familiar with the conversation, Trump vented to his longtime security chief, Keith Schiller, “I hate everyone in the White House! There are a few exceptions, but I hate them!” (A White House official denies this.) Two senior Republican officials said Chief of Staff John Kelly is miserable in his job and is remaining out of a sense of duty to keep Trump from making some sort of disastrous decision. Today, speculation about Kelly’s future increased after Politico reported that Kelly’s deputy Kirstjen Nielsen is likely to be named Homeland Security Secretary—the theory among some Republicans is that Kelly wanted to give her a soft landing before his departure.

I think a lot of us predicted that Trump would end up hating this job, and would ultimately want to find a way out.

In fact even Steve Bannon thinks that Trump has little chance of surviving his first term: 

Several months ago, according to two sources with knowledge of the conversation, former chief strategist Steve Bannon told Trump that the risk to his presidency wasn’t impeachment, but the 25th Amendment—the provision by which a majority of the Cabinet can vote to remove the president. When Bannon mentioned the 25th Amendment, Trump said, “What’s that?” According to a source, Bannon has told people he thinks Trump has only a 30 percent chance of making it the full term.

However until whatever happens happens, we are left with a very volatile commander-in-chief who is becoming less stable as time goes on.

If the Congress does not do its job, and Trump's handlers walk away in frustration, the consequences could be devastating. 

Jill Stein is starting to sound more and more like Donald Trump.

Courtesy of Vanity Fair:

Amid the ever-expanding investigations into the Russian government’s interference in the presidential election, some Democrats have called for Stein to appear before Congress to testify under oath about her Kremlin ties. “We’re certainly interested in any efforts the Russians made to influence our election,” Adam Schiff, the top-ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told Politico. “There have been public reports, I think, that Jill Stein was also in Russia attending the RT function, so we’re going to need to look at any efforts the Russians made through whatever means to influence our elections.” 

But for her part, Stein has no qualms about the role she played in last year’s election. In fact, she has begun to rely on certain defenses similar to those invoked by the man she is accused of helping elect. When asked about Russia during an interview with Politico, Stein was quick to dismiss speculation and leaned on many of the same arguments as the Trump team has in recent months. After rebuking claims that she espoused the merits of Putin as “fake news”, the erstwhile presidential hopeful said, “Putin is an authoritarian and has a very troubled, disturbing record.” On the other hand, she also noted, “It’s important to look at where Putin comes from. . . . It was Larry Summers and the guys from Harvard who basically privatized the public domain [in post-Soviet Russia] and created the oligarchs.” Stein also expressed skepticism toward the United States intelligence community’s conclusion that the Kremlin meddled in the 2016 election. “Most people are saying, ‘Oh it’s the Russians,’ but there is not a lot of evidence,” she said. 

And in terms of whether she blames herself for Trump’s victory, Stein argues that neither candidate was a good choice. “There are differences between Clinton and Trump, no doubt, but they’re not different enough to save your life, to save your job, to save the planet,” she says. “We deserve more than two lethal choices.” 

I have long suspected that Stein was more involved in this Russian interference thing than she has let on.

So it is not at all surprising to hear her continue to spout the Russian troll talking points.

I would not be at all shocked to learn that she has been on Putin's payroll since the beginning. 

Nope, not a bit.

Robert Mueller investigators are very interested in whether Jared Kushner helped the Russians locate and target certain Americans as vulnerable to social media propaganda.

Courtesy of Vanity Fair:

Mapping the full Russian propaganda effort is important. Yet investigators in the House, Senate, and special counsel Robert Mueller’s office are equally focused on a more explosive question: did any Americans help target the memes and fake news to crucial swing districts and wavering voter demographics? “By Americans, you mean, like, the Trump campaign?” a source close to one of the investigations said with a dark laugh. Indeed: probers are intrigued by the role of Jared Kushner, the now-president’s son-in-law, who eagerly took credit for crafting the Trump campaign’s online efforts in a rare interview right after the 2016 election. “I called somebody who works for one of the technology companies that I work with, and I had them give me a tutorial on how to use Facebook micro-targeting,” Kushner told Steven Bertoni of Forbes. “We brought in Cambridge Analytica. I called some of my friends from Silicon Valley who were some of the best digital marketers in the world. And I asked them how to scale this stuff . . . We basically had to build a $400 million operation with 1,500 people operating in 50 states, in five months to then be taken apart. We started really from scratch.” 

Kushner’s chat with Forbes has provided a veritable bakery’s worth of investigatory bread crumbs to follow. Brad Parscale, who Kushner hired to run the campaign’s San Antonio-based Internet operation, has agreed to be interviewed by the House Intelligence Committee.

Bigger questions, however, revolve around Cambridge Analytica. It is unclear how Kushner first became aware of the data-mining firm, but one of its major investors is billionaire Trump backer Robert Mercer. Mercer was also a principal patron of Breitbart News and Steve Bannon, who was a vice president of Cambridge Analytica until he joined the Trump campaign. “I think the Russians had help,” said Congresswoman Jackie Speier, a California Democrat who is a member of the House Intelligence Committee. “I’ve always wondered if Cambridge Analytica was part of that.” (Cambridge Analytica did not respond to a request for comment.)

No evidence has emerged to link Kushner, Cambridge Analytica, or Manafort to the Russian election-meddling enterprise; all have denied colluding with foreign agents. (Kushner’s representatives declined to comment for this article. Manafort’s spokesman could not be reached.) Yet analysts scoff at the notion that the Russians figured out how to target African-Americans and women in decisive precincts in Wisconsin and Michigan all by themselves. “Could they have hired a warehouse full of people in Moscow and had them read Nate Silver’s blog every morning and determine what messages to post to what demographics? Sure, theoretically that’s possible,” said Mike Carpenter, an Obama administration assistant defense secretary who specialized in Russia and Eastern Europe. “But that’s not how they do this. And it’s not surprising that it took Facebook this long to figure out the ad buys. The Russians are excellent at covering their tracks. They’ll subcontract people in Macedonia or Albania or Cyprus and pay them via the dark Web. They always use locals to craft the campaign appropriately. My only question about 2016 is who exactly was helping them here.”

Yeah Kushner essentially could not wait to brag about how he had used technology to target likely Trump voters, of course this was before all the talk about Russian interference made the front page.

Now he does not seem quite so anxious to toot his own horn about how he used technology to identify these potential Trump supporters.

If I were a betting man I would bet that Kushner knew all along that his data was being used by the Russians to flood the Facebook pages and Twitter accounts of certain poorly educated Americans in order to influence their vote.

And I really hope that will be proven someday soon.

Trump fans angry at omission of Melania Trump from Vanity Fair's Best Dressed list.

Courtesy of the Daily Mail:

Vanity Fair released its annual International Best Dressed List and one name seems to have noticeably not made the cut. 

First Lady Melania Trump was not among the list, along with no other members of Trump's family, but predecessor Michelle Obama was included with her husband for best dressed couples. 

And legions of conservative fans took offense to Melania's lack of praise, criticizing Michelle's addition on the list and omitting the obvious detail that she was on the list for best dressed couple with Barack Obama. 

One user said: 'Vanity Fair made a big mistake by purposely neglecting to give credit to @FLOTUS Melania in the 2017 Best Dressed List-She's a Fashion Icon!' 

Another added: 'She has won 'The best dressed and beautiful woman' voted on by We The People!! Does anything else matter? First Lady of USA is #1 and loved!'

Oh, that last part made me throw up in my mouth a little.

Look I can understand why the Trump fans are a little butt hurt over this.

After literally the only thing this department store mannequin come to life has going for her is that she looks good in clothes.

I mean it's not like she is smart, or talented, or anything other than arm candy for the guy in charge of the nuclear codes.

Still, you have to admit that you can simply NOT blame for choosing this gorgeous couple over Trump and his tramp.

I mean puh-leeze!

Vanity Fair dives deep into the mindset of the former Mi-6 agent who compiled that infamous Russian dossier.

Okay before I start this I just want to encourage all of you read this entire article yourselves, as it is absolutely loaded with important details.

Having said that let me offer a few of what I thought of as perhaps the most important takeaways.

On Christopher Steele's initial surprise: 

“It started off as a fairly general inquiry,” Steele would recall in an anonymous interview with Mother Jones, his identity at the time still a carefully guarded secret. But over the next seven incredible months, as the retired spy hunted about in an old adversary’s territory, he found himself following a trail marked by, as he then put it, “hair-raising” concerns. The allegations of financial, cyber, and sexual shenanigans would lead to a chilling destination: the Kremlin had not only, he’d boldly assert in his report, “been cultivating, supporting, and assisting” Donald Trump for years but also had compromised the tycoon “sufficiently to be able to blackmail him.”

Steele had at least five sources, A, B, C, D, and E.

"A" was “a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure.”

"B" a "former top level intelligence officer still active in the Kremlin.”

"D" was a "close associate of Trump who had organized and managed his recent trips to Moscow."

"E" an "ethnic Russian” and “close associate of Republican US presidential candidate Donald Trump.” 

And finally "F" who "was a female staffer” at the Moscow Ritz-Carlton hotel, who was co-opted into the network by an Orbis “ethnic Russian operative”  

What he learned: These two sources told quite a lurid story, the now infamous “golden showers” allegation, which, according to the dossier, was corroborated by others in his alphabet list of assets. It was an evening’s entertainment, Steele, the old Russian hand, must have suspected, that had to have been produced by the ever helpful F.S.B. And since it was typical of Moscow Center’s handwriting to have the suite wired up for sound and video (the hotel’s Web site, with unintentional irony, boasts of its “cutting edge technological amenities”), Steele apparently began to suspect that locked in a Kremlin safe was a hell of a video, as well as photographs. 

Steele’s growing file must have left his mind cluttered with new doubts, new suspicions. And now, as he continued his chase, a sense of alarm hovered about the former spy. If Steele’s sources were right, Putin had up his sleeve kompromat—Moscow Center’s gleeful word for compromising material—that would make the Access Hollywood exchange between Trump and Billy Bush seem, as Trump insisted, as banal as “locker-room talk.” Steele could only imagine how and when the Russians might try to use it.

What he initially did with that information:

In the end, Steele found the rationale that is every whistle-blower’s sustaining philosophy: the greater good trumps all other concerns. And so, even while he kept working his sources in the field and continued to shoot new memos to Simpson, he settled on a plan of covert action. 

The F.B.I.’s Eurasian Joint Organized Crime Squad—“Move Over, Mafia,” the bureau’s P.R. machine crowed after the unit had been created—was a particularly gung-ho team with whom Steele had done some heady things in the past. And in the course of their successful collaboration, the hard-driving F.B.I. agents and the former frontline spy evolved into a chummy mutual-admiration society. 

It was only natural, then, that when he began mulling whom to turn to, Steele thought about his tough-minded friends on the Eurasian squad. And fortuitously, he discovered, as his scheme took on a solid operational commitment, that one of the agents was now assigned to the bureau office in Rome. By early August, a copy of his first two memos were shared with the F.B.I.’s man in Rome.

To his dismay the FBI did nothing with the information, and that caused Steele to panic as he realized the enormity of what he had discovered.

So he did what was considered unthinkable for a former spy: 

As his frustration grew, the mysterious trickle from WikiLeaks of the Democratic National Committee’s and John Podesta’s purloined e-mails were continuing in a deliberate, steadily ominous flow. He had little doubt the Kremlin was behind the hacking, and he had shared his evidence with the F.B.I., but as best he could tell, the bureau was focusing on solving the legalistic national-security puzzle surrounding Hillary Clinton’s e-mails. With so much hanging in the balance—the potential president of the United States possibly being under Russia’s thumb—why weren’t the authorities more concerned? He decided it was time for desperate measures. 

“Someone like me stays in the shadows,” Steele would say, as if apologizing for what he did next. It was an action that went against all his training, all his professional instincts. Spies, after all, keep secrets; they don’t disclose them. And now that the F.B.I. had apparently let him down, there was another restraint tugging on his resolve: he didn’t know whom he could trust. It was as if he were back operating in the long shadow of the Kremlin, living by what the professionals call “Moscow Rules,” where security and vigilance are constant occupational obsessions. But when he considered what was at stake, he knew he had no choice. With Simpson now on board, in effect, as co-conspirator and a shrewd facilitator, Steele met with a reporter.

That reporter was David Corn of Mother Jones.  (Here is that article.)

As I said you really need to read the entire Vanity Fair article.

However when you do feel free to come back here to discuss it in our comments section. 

Producer from the Apprentice is astounded that people bought their bullshit and elected their fake reality star to be president.

Here are a few excerpts from this article over at Vanity Fair:  

The Apprentice contributed to that. People lapped up what the producers were putting out, and the danger became real as news directors, desperate to compete with ratings, started putting music under soft news stories. Facebook started pushing altogether fake news. Opinions on Twitter became truths over lies. People were prone to clickbait no matter how salacious or factually questionable it was, and the entire journalism world turned on its head. 

At the very same time, some clever producers were putting forth a manufactured story about a billionaire whose empire was, in actuality, crumbling at the very same time he took the job, the salary, and ownership rights to do a reality show. The Apprentice was a scam put forth to the public in exchange for ratings. We were “entertaining,” and the story about Donald Trump and his stature fell into some bizarre public record as “truth.” This is nothing new, and the impact it’s having on the history of the world is best depicted in the Academy Award-winning film Network, a satire.

So essentially just about everything that people think they know about Trump's "success" was written for the caricature of himself that he played on TV.

The producer, Bill Pruitt, also ads this: 

We are masterful storytellers and we did our job well. What’s shocking to me is how quickly and decisively the world bought it. Did we think this clown, this buffoon with the funny hair, would ever become a world leader? Not once. Ever. Would he and his bombastic nature dominate in prime-time TV? We hoped so. Now that the lines of fiction and reality have blurred to the horrifying extent that they have, those involved in the media must have their day of reckoning. People are buying our crap. 

You have probably all read comments by that insignificant little troll POS who keeps remarking that liberals are "lost in the wilderness." But the ironic part of that statement is that liberals knew that electing Trump would abandon this country in that wilderness and so we fought hard to prevent it. 

And we are not by any stretch of the imagination alone in that wilderness, the conservatives, racists, Islamophobes, and Xenophobes are right there with us, they are just too fucking slow on the uptake to realize it.

In fact the ONLY people who are not soon going to be stumbling around in the darkness looking for a way out are the big business folks who are about to have the best, most financially lucrative, four years of their careers.

And Donald Trump is signaling that truth with every new cabinet member he puts in place.

I mean does anybody REALLY think that the new Secretary of State Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson is going to put the needs of this country ahead of the only company he has ever worked for?

Or that Rick Perry is NOT going to fuck up the Department of Energy?

Or that the WWE's Linda McMahon knows dick about small business?

Or that Betsy DeVos does not believe she is on a mission from God to destroy the public education system?

Let's face it Trumpsters, you got tricked into watching a nationally broadcast reality show and convincing yourselves it was real.

And now you get to witness what happens when scripted reality crashes head first into actual reality.

Unfortunately the more intelligent of us, the ones who saw this coming from miles away, the ones you derisively label as "libtards," have to experience that reality right along with you.

The Twitter-in-Chief is being all presidential again.

Has anyone looked at the really poor numbers of @VanityFair Magazine. Way down, big trouble, dead! Graydon Carter, no talent, will be out!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 15, 2016

Confused?

Well apparently this is in response to their review of his restaurant in Trump Tower. Calling it "The Worst Restaurant in America."

I especially like this part:As my companions and I contemplated the most painless way to eat our flaccid, gray Szechuan dumplings with their flaccid, gray innards, as a campy version of “Jingle Bells” jackhammered in the background, a giant gold box tied with red ribbon toppled onto us. Trump, it seemed, was already fighting against the War on Christmas.

It should also be noted that there is a long standing feud between Trump and the editor of Vanity Fair,  Graydon Carter, who was famously the person who first described Trump as a "short fingered vulgarian."

Next target, the media.

The media tries so hard to make my move to the White House, as it pertains to my business, so complex - when actually it isn't!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 15, 2016

You know if somebody were to finally release their tax returns we could all see that for ourselves.

I know, not gonna happen.

And finally, for now at least:

If Russia, or some other entity, was hacking, why did the White House wait so long to act? Why did they only complain after Hillary lost?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 15, 2016

Actually the White House announced almost a month before the election that there was evidence that Russia was meddling in the election.

If they had spoken out more aggressively to declare that the election was now tainted, there would have been a huge outcry from the Republicans and Right Wing news outlets saying that the Obama Administration were themselves now interfering with the outcome of the election.

The White House really could not do anything except hope that the media did their jobs, and that the American people were smart enough to see through Trump's bullshit.

Sadly they were disappointed on both fronts.

And that my friends is a preview of the next four years.

Odin help us all.

It looks like Donald Trump and Roger Ailes are no longer besties.

Courtesy of Vanity Fair:  

Roger Ailes. The former Fox News boss had reportedly served as an advisor to Trump throughout the campaign. He was said to have played a particularly important role as of late, helping him prepare for the presidential debates.

That's all changed now, according to Sherman and Vanity Fair contributing editor Sarah Ellison. The reason for the fallout depends on who you ask. 

“Ailes’s camp said Ailes learned that Trump couldn’t focus—surprise, surprise—and that advising him was a waste of time,” Sherman said. “These debate prep sessions weren’t going anywhere.”

On the Trump side, Ellison said the story is different: “Even for the second debate, Ailes kept going off on tangents and talking about his war stories while he was supposed to be prepping Trump.”

Gee, two well known liars with different stories.

May have to flip a coin to decide who to believe in this one, but what does not seem to be in dispute is the fact that these two monstrous egos could not coexist in the same space.

I can only imagine how frustrating it was for Roger Ailes, who is used to holding up hoops for his employees to jump through, to work with a candidate who never listens to anybody and who seems determined to drive his campaign over a cliff.

On the plus side for Ailes (Or perhaps not.) there is talk of making a TV series which chronicles the end of his career at Fox News.

They are talking about getting Anthony Hopkins for the role of Roger Ailes but I think that the actor who pulled this off in the movie Blade would be the better choice.

 Perfect.

I think I may have identified Sarah Palin's next media job. A host on Trump TV.

Courtesy of Vanity Fair: 

Trump is indeed considering creating his own media business, built on the audience that has supported him thus far in his bid to become the next president of the United States. According to several people briefed on the discussions, the presumptive Republican nominee is examining the opportunity presented by the “audience” currently supporting him. He has also discussed the possibility of launching a “mini-media conglomerate” outside of his existing TV-production business, Trump Productions LLC. He has, according to one of these people, enlisted the consultation of his daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who owns the The New York Observer. Trump’s rationale, according to this person, is that, “win or lose, we are onto something here. We’ve triggered a base of the population that hasn’t had a voice in a long time.” For his part, Kushner was heard at a New York dinner party saying that “the people here don’t understand what I’m seeing. You go to these arenas and people go crazy for him.” (Both Kushner and Ivanka Trump did not respond to a request for comment.) 

Trump, this person close to the matter suggests, has become irked by his ability to create revenue for other media organizations without being able to take a cut himself. Such a situation “brings him to the conclusion that he has the business acumen and the ratings for his own network.” Trump has “gotten the bug,” according to this person. “So now he wants to figure out if he can monetize it.”

You know I have been racking my brain to figure out just what payback Palin was going to receive for being an early supporter of Donald Trump.

After all we know for a fact she never does anything for free.

Some have suggested that she wanted to have a cabinet position in a President Trump's administration, but I never thought she wanted to work that hard, or be that responsible.

So this Trump TV idea seems like a perfect fit.

Palin could most likely ask for any show she wanted and Trump would indulge her. At least for a little while until her ratings crashed and burned like every other thing she touches.

So if this article is on the up and up we may soon actually have a Judge Palin show, presented to you by Donald J. Trump so you know it's going to do "bigly," to mock.

According to his ex-wife Donald Trump kept a copy of Adolph Hitler's speeches by his bedside. Well THAT explains a lot.

Courtesy of a twenty five year old edition of Vanity Fair: 

When pressed on awkward topics—such as whether or not he regularly read Adolf Hitler’s speeches—he turns skittish and, perhaps, inventive. 

Last April, perhaps in a surge of Czech nationalism, Ivana Trump told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed. Kennedy now guards a copy of My New Order in a closet at his office, as if it were a grenade. Hitler’s speeches, from his earliest days up through the Phony War of 1939, reveal his extraordinary ability as a master propagandist. 

“Did your cousin John give you the Hitler speeches?” I asked Trump. 

Trump hesitated. “Who told you that?” 

“I don’t remember,” I said. 

“Actually, it was my friend Marty Davis from Paramount who gave me a copy of Mein Kampf, and he’s a Jew.” (“I did give him a book about Hitler,” Marty Davis said. “But it was My New Order, Hitler’s speeches, not Mein Kampf. I thought he would find it interesting. I am his friend, but I’m not Jewish.”) 

Later, Trump returned to this subject. “If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them.”

Yeah, right.

You know typically we resist the comparison to Hitler or the Nazis when talking about candidates or their political parties. However in this case perhaps those allegations that Donald Trump is channeling Adolph with his talk of cleansing the country of illegal immigrants is not really so far off the mark.

And it certainly might help to explain why he did not bat and eye when this happened at a rally.

Remember:

"First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Socialist."

"Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Trade Unionist." 

"Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew." 

"Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me."

 Only in this case, "First they came for the undocumented immigrants.......

Vanity Fair sees that Sarah Palin is down, decides to give her a little kick. Update!

Courtesy of Vanity Fair:  

The most notable thing about the news of Sarah Palin sliding off the skillet at Fox News, her contributor’s contract expiring after a long dribble on life support, is how un-newsy it was—barely a pebble splash. Palin’s being let go from Fox News seemed as negligible as the CW canceling a series that viewers had forgotten was still on. There was a time not that long ago in our post 9/11 delirium when every sassy, spangly number Palin performed under the political big top kicked up sawdust and attracted yokel attention in the political media. Her appearances on Fox News were billed in advance as if she were about to lay down another smacking on the liberals and squishy conservatives who were still a-sceered of her grizzly-mama scorn, no matter how much they pretended otherwise behind their cocktail-party smirks. Palin had those millions of Facebook friends and Twitter followers, after all, a mighty army of admirers who could be mobilized at a moment’s notice to rise up in revolt and fire off a tweet or two before collapsing back on the sofa, not wanting to miss too much television. 

The numbers are still there for her on social media, but they might as well be empty eggs and spambots. She has the dubious honor of being just about the only Fox News alumnus who hasn’t announced as a candidate for the Republican nomination, the clown car reaching official overcapacity next week when Chris Christie crams himself into the race. Most tellingly, unlike in years past, there is no fan base or astroturf movement clamoring for Palin to jump into the fray as the Tea Party’s Furiosa—no one claiming that she is the only warrior queen capable of defeating Hillary Clinton in the dusty field of battle that will be converted into a FEMA internment camp, should Hillary prevail. (I take it these folks have not heard of a little slice of hell we like to call the Sea O'Pee.) How fickle our political culture. Palin seduced the party and its pundits—her camera wink during the 2008 vice-presidential debate had National Review editor Rich Lowry seeing “little starbursts”—and now she has been abandoned, a brittle relic of yesteryear. 

The irony is that Palin’s incoherence as a thinker and speaker—her ability to toss a word salad at the slightest prompting—has set the tone and tempo for the Republican contenders that have so far taken the field and are wandering around with their helmets on sideways. Donald Trump, Bobby Jindal, Carly Fiorina, Mike Huckabee, Rick Perry, Rand Paul—their message discipline and mental rigor seems to be held together with old garter belts. Even a supposed pro such as Jeb Bush is betraying a lot of rust that’s accrued from years of not campaigning and enjoying his post-gubernatorial complacency.

The article then goes on to discuss Republican incoherence, Roger Ailes along with the future of Fox News, and their prediction that Palin will ultimately throw her support to Donald Trump as a "gesture of charlatan respect."

As if Palin really respects anyone that is not somehow furthering her career, or helping her to make money.

You know I have always liked Vanity Fair's tale on the Wasilla Wendigo.

They also boldly went where few reporters dare to tread back in 2009 and 2010. And who could forget Levi's contribution also in 2009?

Boy those were the days weren't they?

However these days there is so little meat on the bone I am sure many publications think that it almost a waste of time to send a reporter up here to dig up any dirt on Princess Dumbass of the North.

Of course I still have a few stories left to tell.

And hopefully I will get to tell them soon.

Hey, maybe Vanity Fair would like to hear them?

Update: Oh look here! Vanity Fair weighed in on Bristol's second not so immaculate conception. 

Vanity Fair brings you a day in the life of convicted criminal Dinesh D'Souza. And it is even more pathetic than you imagine.

"The conservative accepts that the world is a dangerous place. I’d rather pull the bandwagon than sit in the bandwagon, and I think that’s probably what distinguishes me from a lot of other people."

Well that and being an unbelievable douche-bag. 

Here's Wonkette's take: 

See Dinesh walk the mean streets of L.A. with nothing but a latte and a camera crew for protection! Watch Dinesh shave! Observe as he ties his shoes! See him flash gang signs while dressed up as a fashion magazine’s version of a cholo!

Damn there is so much to mock here I quite literally do not know where to begin.

Everything about this video screams "I am a pathetic pretentious loser, pity me." While at the same time trying to convince us that he plays an important role in the fight against liberals and their agenda.

Personally I am torn as to what is more pathetic, watching him being dressed as an extra in "The Wire" or watching him shave around where his chin should be.