What does a TRUMP presidency look like?

[dps]

Can you imagine being on this doofus's legal staff?

Hmm.  On the one hand, it would be a nightmare of a job.  On the other hand, you'd never lack for work.

[LaCroix]

the lottery trip seems nice. was there something more about that?

[Capetan Mihali]

the lottery trip seems nice. was there something more about that?

Mr. Trump had gone to Public School 70 in the Bronx as Principal for a Day, which in his case was Principal for a Couple of Hours. He set a new land-speed record for oafishness.
At a school assembly, he asked the fifth graders, "First of all, who likes Nike sneakers?" The entire group of 300 students raised their hands.
They should all write their names on slips of papers, he said. "I will pick 15 people and I'll take you to the new Nike store that I just opened at Trump Tower," Mr. Trump said.
P.S. 70 was just south of the Cross Bronx Expressway, so Mr. Trump helpfully explained that Trump Tower was in the "inner city called 57th and Fifth." He found his own comment amusing, but wasn't totally pleased with follow-up questions.
"Why did you offer us sneakers if you could give us scholarships?" Andres Rodriguez, 11, asked.
Mr. Trump demanded to know who told Andres to ask him that. "No one," the boy said.
In a grand finale, Mr. Trump stopped at a bake sale being held by the school's championship chess team, which was short on money to get to a national competition. Mr. Trump pulled out a $1 million bill and dropped it in the basket. Like all $1 million bills, it was a fake. Mr. Trump apparently kept a stash of them handy as hilarious gags. He also gave the team $200 in real money.
The sum of his two-hour visit was: coupons for 15 pairs of sneakers for 300 kids, an apparent joke about Trump Tower being in the "inner city," a suggestion that a boy who asked a smart question must have been put up to it, a fake $1 million bill, and $200.
His principality was covered in The New York Times by Pam Belluck. A few days later, I went to the school and learned that the Trump visit had a boomerang effect: Members of the public were so appalled by his behavior that they sent enough money for the chess team to make its trip. I wrote a column for The Daily News on this turnabout.
Then came Mr. Trump's letter to the editor of The News. "Your one-sided piece written by third-rate columnist, Jim Dwyer," it began with great promise, followed with a quick foray into psychoanalysis: "Mr. Dwyer, because of his own obvious inferiority, does everything he can to demean my visit."

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/02/nyregion/condemned-and-praised-by-trump.html?_r=0

[Admiral Yi]

That's not very fair.  Is there a minimum required donation for principal's for a day?

[Caliga]

I like the fake million dollar bill joke.

[DGuller]

For some reason this story reminds me of the episode where Mr. Burns visited the school and found out he was bankrupt.

[Capetan Mihali]

Whatever you think about different aspects of the school visit, the point was that there's been a pretty consistent general personal and political worldview at the center of the Trump spectacle for a long time before this election, and that he was well-known that way for years, at least in metro NY.

[Caliga]

Yep, and he got killed in the general election in NY, CT and NJ where he is well known.

To all of Murica's mouthbreathers though, he's the funny tough guy who will say 'you're fired' to all of the immigrants, gays, and negroes that they don't like.

[Admiral Yi]

Subject: Please Impeach Donald Trump

Please don't be mislead by my Iowa City address.  I'm not a member of the loony left, but rather a right-of-center fiscal conservative and national security hawk who has voted for you while living in Iowa. Donald Trump is a travesty of a president who at best will bring disgrace to our country and at worst bring it to ruin. History would applaud you and your colleagues action. Thank you for your attention.

Just sent this email to US Senator for Iowa Chuck Grassley's office.

Fuck I forgot an apostrophe.

[DGuller]

I was thinking that as I read it, but then assumed that Yi can't make sucha mistake, and just assumed I was missing some rule.  For shame, Yi, for shame. 

[sbr]

 

[Capetan Mihali]

It doesn't matter, the Iowa City postmark on that email is going to send it straight into the trash can before it even gets opened.

[Syt]

So Trump will direct federal resources to The Wall, brings on Breitbart writers Julia Hahn and Sebastian Gorka as advisers,  had his press secretary confirm that he believes in voter fraud amounting to millions without concrete proof.

And I guess there'll be more gag orders for agencies like the EPA in future which might lead to the Age of the Whistleblower.

[Archy]

Yay, tariff-free maple syrup!   

It's addictive.  And it's good for your health when consumed raw as it's filled with vitamin C.  This is what saved the French accompanying Cartier during their first winter.

Also, you might discover real fine cheese that doesn't explode when you turn on the lights.

Just checked current duty is 8%.VAT in Belgium is 6%. Wonder which European producers they're trying to protect.

[Syt]

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/a-bad-day-for-the-environment-with-many-more-to-come

A BAD DAY FOR THE ENVIRONMENT, WITH MANY MORE TO COME

Tuesday began with news that the Trump Administration had imposed a comprehensive gag order on employees of the Environmental Protection Agency. According to a leaked memo, "no press releases," "no blog messages," and "no social media will be going out," and "no new content can be placed on any website" until further notice—perhaps an attempt to camouflage the other big E.P.A. announcement, which was that the agency's grants and contracts had been temporarily frozen, effectively halting its work. Then, at nine o'clock, the President had breakfast with a group of beaming auto executives. Trump told them that he was "to a large extent an environmentalist," but apparently his long participation in that movement had persuaded him that "environmentalism is out of control." The last time Detroit's C.E.O.s came to the White House, in 2011, President Obama got them to agree, grudgingly, to increase average fuel economy to 54.5 miles per gallon, a pledge they now hope to recant. The day went on. Just before noon—surrounded by his increasingly familiar cast of white guys in suits—Trump signed an executive order expediting approvals for the Keystone and Dakota Access pipelines, thus overturning perhaps the two biggest environmental victories of the Obama years, both of which the advocacy organization I helped found, 350.org, fought for vigorously.

There is, in other words, a new day dawning, and we're sure as hell not going to use any of that sunlight for energy. Instead, it's clear that we're about to witness the steady demolition, or attempted demolition, of the environmental protections that have been put in place over the past five decades. Another leaked memo, released on Monday and attributed to Myron Ebell, the veteran climate-change denier overseeing Trump's E.P.A. transition team, made clear some of the Administration's first priorities: stopping Obama's Clean Power Plan, which uses the Clean Air Act to regulate power plants; revising the rules on development in crucial wetlands; and even such granular tasks as reining in efforts to halt the rampant pollution of Chesapeake Bay. The full list, I imagine, will stretch on and on. The nascent effort to prevent leakage from fracking wells, for instance, will likely be abandoned, meaning that we'll continue to spew methane as well as carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. At the Department of the Interior, they're getting ready to start leasing coal from public lands again; at State, Rex Tillerson says he wants a "seat at the table" in international climate negotiations, but probably won't push them forward. The drive to free up polluters is so strong and ingrained that it overrides even the usual Republican commitment to states' rights: Scott Pruitt, who sued the E.P.A. fourteen times before being named to head it, ominously said at his confirmation hearing that he couldn't promise California would continue to receive the waiver that allows it to set its own vehicle-emissions standards.

"You say you're going to review it?" Senator Ed Markey, of Massachusetts, asked him.

"Yes, senator," Pruitt said.

"When you say 'review,' I hear 'undo,' " Markey said.

There's not the slightest evidence that Americans want laxer environmental laws. A poll released last week showed that nearly two-thirds of Americans would prefer that the E.P.A.'s powers be preserved or strengthened. Solar power, meanwhile, polls somewhere in the neighborhood of ice cream among Democrats, Independents, and Republicans alike. But the survey that counts in the Trump Administration is of plutocrats, and, as Jane Mayer demonstrated in her book "Dark Money," the moguls of the right-wing funding network, whose disciples are now in place across the Cabinet, hate environmental regulation with a passion. We know some of them—the Koch brothers, for instance. But there is a whole league of cartoonish villains, including John Menard, Jr., the richest man in Wisconsin, whose company was once charged with labelling arsenic-tainted mulch as "ideal for playgrounds." Having paid hundreds of millions in fines, these people paid tens of millions in campaign contributions, and now their bill has come due.

Against them stands reality, as a rogue employee of the National Park Service reminded us on Tuesday afternoon, defying another gag order by tweeting out climate data from the official Badlands National Park account. The reason we have environmental regulations is because, when we didn't, the air was filthy and the water sour. Cleaning up our skies and our streams has been an enormous success in every way, including economically: any attempt to tally things like lost work days or visits to the emergency room shows that curbing pollution has huge returns on investment. (Just ask the Chinese, who are desperately trying to cobble together their own system of environmental protections.) As in so many other cases, the returns on deregulation will go to a handful of very wealthy Americans, and the cost will be spread across society, falling particularly hard on those who live near the highways and on the flood plains. Reality gets plainer every day on a planet that just saw the hottest year ever recorded, where sea ice is at an all-time low, and where California's epic drought has suddenly given way to epic flooding. History will judge the timing of Trump's crusade with special harshness—it is, you might say, a last-gasp effort.