2.28 Josh Earnest, to Stephen Colbert: “In terms of lowering the bar, I’m not sure if you can lower the bar any farther than hoping people who are in your party who are in the audience like the speech you’ve just given.”
2.28 Steve Schmidt on MSNBC: “The Democratic Party is at its lowest point of power in this country since the 1920s. And the Democratic response was made by a 72-year-old, retired, two-term governor from Kentucky [Steve Beshear]. Not by Kamala Harris. Not by Kristen Gillibrand. Not by the Castro brothers. Not by anyone who has a future in the actual Democratic Party. Just amazing ineptitude.”
2.28 On CNN< Van Jones said that Trump‘s tribute to Navy SEAL Ryan Owens, who died in a raid in Yemen, was “one of the most extraordinary moments you have ever seen in American politics, period” and that it was the moment Trump “became president of the United States.” He also said it’s the kind of thing that could make Trump a two-term president. During Trump’s remarks, cameras trained on Owens’s widow, Carryn Owens, with tears streaming down her face. Facing her, Trump said her husband’s legacy was “etched into eternity.” She received a standing ovation from Congress.
2.28 Trump speaks to Congress, scales the heights of adequacy. One aide: “”For once, we had the wind at our sails. We decided not to sh*t on ourselves.”
2.28 David Ignatius in the Washington Post: “President Trump boasts that his “America First” trade and economic policies are bringing well-paid manufacturing jobs back to America. That’s probably his biggest “deliverable” to Trump voters. But is this claim true? Trump won the presidency partly because he voiced the anger of American workers about lost jobs and stagnant wages. But in the process, he fundamentally misled the country by claiming that trade is the major cause of job losses, and that renegotiating trade agreements would save the middle class. What Trump is offering is a palliative that has raised false hopes. He implies that a few good trade deals will refurbish the Rust Belt and restore the good old days of manufacturing. It won’t happen, and to pretend otherwise is a hoax. Trump campaigned on a false argument that global trade was taking away American jobs. So he killed the Trans-Pacific Partnership his first week in office and is now demanding changes in NAFTA and other trade agreements. He has dressed up a few announcements from jittery U.S. corporations to argue that doomed manufacturing plants are being saved and that jobs are “already starting to pour back.” Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, has inflated this economic nationalism into a full-blown ideology that posits a battle between workers who are being hurt by globalization and an elite that benefits. Referencing the TPP at last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference, Bannon said that Trump “got us out of a trade deal and let our sovereignty come back to ourselves.”
But the numbers show that Trump and Bannon are fighting the wrong battle. Manufacturing employment has indeed declined in America over the past decade, but the major reason is automation, not trade. Robots, not foreign workers, are taking most of the disappearing American jobs.
2.28 Uber CEO Travis Kalanick rants at a driver: “You know what? Some people don’t like to take responsibility for their own shit. They blame everything in their life on somebody else. Good luck!”
2.27 President Trump will propose a federal budget that would significantly increase defense-related spending by $54 billion while cutting other federal agencies by the same amount, an administration official said. The proposal represents a major increase in federal spending related to national security, while other priorities, especially foreign aid, would face massive reductions.
According to the White House, the defense budget would increase by 10 percent. Trump also will request $30 billion in supplementary military spending for fiscal 2017, an administration official said.
2.27 Colonoscopy
2.27 Edward Luce in the Financial Times: “He was supposed to be leading a revolt against America’s elites. In practice Donald Trump is laying out a banquet for their delectation. The Trump White House is drawing up plans for across-the-board deregulation, tax cuts and a new generation of defence contracts. The only question is at what speed. In contrast, Mr Trump’s middle-class economic plans, such as they were, are already receding. The chances of a big infrastructure bill are rapidly dimming. In marketing they call this bait and switch. The effect of Mr Trump’s economic agenda will be to deepen the conditions that gave rise to his candidacy. The biggest winners will be on Wall Street, in the fossil fuel energy sector and defence. Stephen Bannon, Mr Trump’s most influential adviser, last week described the bonfire of regulations as the “deconstruction of the administrative state”. For every new regulation, two will be scrapped. The first clutch will come this week with executive orders undoing Barack Obama’s “clean power plan” that limits carbon dioxide emissions and a separate one on clean water. Anticipation of this has helped to fuel the boom in energy stocks since Mr Trump was elected. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose more in Mr Trump’s first month than for any president since Franklin Roosevelt. Financial stocks have also over-performed since the election. Many, if not most, of the protections included in the Dodd-Frank law after the collapse of Lehman Brothers are in Mr Trump’s sights. These include the Volcker rule that restricts banks from speculating with other people’s money, and possibly protections designed to shield the consumer — what Mr Trump called the “forgotten American” — from reckless marketing. Such rules have inhibited Mr Trump’s Wall Street friends from lending money, he said earlier this month.”
2.27 George W. Bush: on The Today Show““I consider the media to be indispensable to democracy. We need an independent media to hold people like me to account. Power can be very addictive, and it can be corrosive.” Bush recalled spending time during his presidency attempting to convince other world leaders, specifically Russian President Vladimir Putin, to “accept the notion of a free press.” “It’s kind of hard to tell others to have an independent free press if we’re not willing to have one ourselves,” Bush said.
2.26 Brian Cullinan, a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, which handles the Oscars voting, giddily posted a photo of “La La Land’’ star Emma Stone just three minutes before giving Beatty what was supposed to be the envelope containing the name of the Best Picture.
2.26 Kopin Tan in Streetwise: “Above all, our cyclical rejuvenation hasn’t cured the structural ills of an economy hollowed out by automation and global competition, and stagnant wages for 90% of the population. That may be why there’s anger on the streets, even if our economic enhancement continues to enthrall Wall Street.”
2.26 Warren Buffet: “Many companies, of course, will fall behind, and some will fail. Winnowing of that sort is a product of market dynamism. Moreover, the years ahead will occasionally deliver major market declines—even panics —that will affect virtually all stocks. No one can tell you when these traumas will occur—not me, not Charlie, not economists, not the media. Meg McConnell of the New York Fed aptly described the reality of panics: “We spend a lot of time looking for systemic risk; in truth, however, it tends to find us.”
During such scary periods, you should never forget two things: First, widespread fear is your friend as an investor, because it serves up bargain purchases. Second, personal fear is your enemy. It will also be unwarranted. Investors who avoid high and unnecessary costs and simply sit for an extended period with a collection of large, conservatively-financed American businesses will almost certainly do well.”
2.26 Maureen Dowd in the Times: “Our new president’s most intense, primal, torrid relationship is in full “The War of the Roses” bloom here. And it is not with his beautiful, reserved wife. It’s with the press, the mirror for the First Narcissus. President Trump thinks that the mirror is cracked and the coverage is “fake.” And many in the press, spanning the ideological spectrum, think that he is cracked and that a lot of his pronouncements are fake. Can this strange, symbiotic relationship be saved? Probably not. It is too inflamed and enmeshed, too full of passionate accusations. It’s going to end like all those plays and movies — from “Othello” to “Endless Love” — where the mutual attraction is so powerful, it’s toxic. Trump could not live without the press. It is his crack. He would be adrift and bereft without his sparring partners, lightning rods, scapegoats and amplifiers. And while many in the press may disdain the way Trump uses them to rile up crowds and deflect from transgressions, they know they have a rare story and a tantalizing, antagonizing protagonist.
As the New York Times White House reporter Maggie Haberman tweeted in January: “Trump has frequently complained about my reporting,” yet, “He remains the most accessible politician I’ve ever covered.” The press is everything to Donald Trump, from interior décor — his Trump Tower office was plastered wall to wall with framed magazine covers reflecting his face back at him like an infinity mirror — to daily reading. For decades every morning, he had his assistant print out a sheaf of stories published about him and keep a store of videotapes for ego gratification. Once Trump became a Twitter addict, this morphed into an incestuous, vertiginous spiral, as he got upset and shot back against news reports he did not like. His campaign staff “cracked the code for tamping down his most inflammatory tweets,” Tara Palmeri reported in Politico last week, by ensuring “his personal media consumption includes a steady stream of praise. And when no such praise was to be found, staff would turn to friendly outlets to drum some up — and make sure it made its way to Trump’s desk.” Talk about fake news. He is the biggest story on the planet, “King Lear meets Rodney Dangerfield,” as Lloyd Grove tweeted after Trump’s recent press conference. As our new president is well aware, he’s a rainmaker and a troublemaker for media.”
2.26 At the Oscars, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway get the wrong card, announce La La Land as Best Picture instead of Moonlight.
2.25 Dinner with the Schmidts at 10510
2.25 Trump has his first presidential DC dinner. He went to BLT Prime by David Burke, a steakhouse in the Trump Hotel less than one mile from the White House. He ordered a $54 dry-aged steak cooked well done and with ketchup.
2.25 Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal: “This president doesn’t argue [for things], he only announces. He asserts. Previous presidents in their early speeches were always making the case for a certain advancement. Not to do so is a waste of the biggest mic in the world.”
2.25 The Indonesian woman who is one of the suspects in the killing of North Korean ruler Kim Jong Un’s half brother said she was paid $90 for what she believed was a prank, an Indonesian official said Saturday.
2.24 The White House blocked a number of news organizations from attending an informal briefing Friday, a rare and surprising move that came amid President Trump’s escalating war against the media. White House press secretary Sean Spicer banned reporters from CNN, the New York Times, Politico, the Los Angeles Times and BuzzFeed from attending a “gaggle,” a non-televised briefing, but gave access to a number of other reporters, including those representing conservative outlets. The White House said the decision was not made to exclude journalists from organizations that have been the most critical of Trump in their reporting in favor of those who are more favorable. Although the invited included Fox News, Breitbart and the Washington Times — all considered sympathetic to the administration — the approved list also included CBS, NBC, ABC, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Time and the Associated Press.
2.24 Former Admiral William McRaven: “We must challenge this statement and this sentiment that the news media is the enemy of the American people,” McRaven said, according to the Daily Texan. “This sentiment may be the greatest threat to democracy in my lifetime. To be a good leader, you have to be a good communicator,” he added. “As a leader, you have to communicate your intent every chance you get, and if you fail to do that, you will pay the consequences.” In a subsequent blog post, McRaven elaborated on the threats he’s seen over six decades, including the Cold War, the Vietnam War and terrorism. “In my sixty years, most of the serious threats to our nation have come from the outside,” he wrote. “While at times, these external pressures encouraged some within our government to adopt a barricade mentality — hiding information from the public, acting secretly outside the bounds of the law, and encouraging behavior that had an extralegal feel to it — never has the government openly challenged the idea of a free press. The news media have not always been kind to me. However, I can tell you — as someone who has been to 90 countries an spoken to the press in almost all of them — the United States has the finest press corps in the world, bar none. There is nothing more important to a democracy than an active and engaged press. Is it perfect? Far from it. Does the media make mistakes? Far too often. But flaws and all, I believe the free press is our country’s most important institution. One I am more than happy to defend. One I did, in fact, defend for 37 years.”
2.24Tucker Carlson in The Atlantic: “the problem with the meritocracy … [is that it] leeches all the empathy out of your society … The second you think that all your good fortune is a product of your virtue, you become highly judgmental, lacking empathy, totally without self-awareness, arrogant, stupid — I mean all the stuff that our ruling class is.”
2.24 Steve Bannon at CPAC: Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s reclusive chief strategist and the intellectual force behind his nationalist agenda, said Thursday that the new administration is locked in an unending battle against the media and other globalist forces to “deconstruct” an outdated system of governance. “They’re going to continue to fight,” Bannon said of the media, which he repeatedly described as “the opposition party,” and other forces he sees as standing in the president’s way. “If you think they are giving you your country back without a fight, you are sadly mistaken.” Atop Trump’s agenda, Bannon said, was the “deconstruction of the administrative state” — meaning a system of taxes, regulations and trade pacts that the president and his advisers believe stymie economic growth and infringe upon one’s sovereignty.”
2.23 John Boehner on the idea of Republicans fixing Obamacare: “I shouldn’t call it repeal-and-replace, because it’s not going to happen . . . I started laughing. Republicans never ever agree on health care.”
2.23 Farhad Manjoo in the Times: “Coverage of Mr. Trump may eclipse that of any single human being ever. . . .He has taken up semipermanent residence on every outlet of any kind … He is no longer just the message. In many cases, he has become the medium, the ether through which all other stories flow. . . .Even when I found non-Trump news, … much of it was interleaved with Trump news, so the overall effect was something like trying to bite into a fruit-and-nut cake without getting any fruit or nuts. . . .[I]t is likely that no living person in history has ever been as famous as Mr. Trump is right now.”
2.22 In Olathe, Kansas, 51 year old Adam Purinton, shouting “Get out of my country!”, opened fire on two Indian men drinking at a sports bar. One of the Indian men shot during the attack — Srinivas Kuchibhotla, 32 — died in the hospital later from his wounds, the Olathe police said. The other — Alok Madasani, 32, of Overland Park, Kan. — was released from the hospital Thursday. The shooting also injured 24-year-old Ian Grillot, another patron at Austin’s, who apparently tried to intervene.
2.22 The Huffington Post: President Donald Trump’s administration announced on Wednesday that it will no longer bar schools from discriminating against transgender students, rescinding a policy put in place by the previous administration.
2.22 The Huffington Post: It cost New York City about $24 million to provide security at Trump Tower, President Donald Trump’s skyscraper home in Manhattan, from Election Day to Inauguration Day, or $308,000 per day, New York’s police commissioner said on Wednesday.
2.22 Nature: There are not three, but seven rocky planets with Earth-like masses orbiting TRAPPIST-1, the astronomers reported Wednesday in the journal Nature. Even though it’s a star, TRAPPIST-1, located about 40 light-years from Earth, is only slightly bigger than Jupiter. If TRAPPIST-1 were the size of our sun, all seven planets would be well inside the orbit of Mercury. Despite the close quarters, the planets orbit in a part of the system where temperatures could be between 0 and 100 degrees Celsius, allowing liquid water to pool on their surfaces.
2.22 Joe Scarborough on Stephen Colbert: “It got to a point where Kellyanne would keep coming out and everything she said was disproven like five minutes later,” Scarborough said. “And it wasn’t disproven by a fact-checker — it was somebody else in the administration that would come out and actually say well, actually no, that’s not true.”
2.22 On CNN: commentator Kayleigh McEnany posed a simple question to Steven Goldstein, the Anne Frank Center’s executive director, on Tuesday night: “You think the president does not like Jews and is prejudiced against Jews? Goldstein’s response was unequivocal: “You bet.”
2.22 Twenty-two hours into a 24-hour-long marathon video game session, Twitch streamer Brian Vigneault, 35, got up to take a smoke break. He never returned to his computer. His fans, mainly fellow gamers who watched Vigneault play the online skirmisher “World of Tanks,” wondered if Vigneault had fallen asleep. It was around 4:30 a.m. on Sunday, and falling asleep would not have been completely unexpected. Vigneault, under the online nickname Poshybrid, would play “World of Tanks” for extreme lengths of time to raise donations for charity. When a moderator messaged Vigneault a few hours after his abrupt disappearance, a Virginia Beach detective responded via Vigneault’s computer on the chat app Discord, according to a Reddit post. Vigneault was found unresponsive at his Virginia Beach home early Sunday evening. He had died while raising money for the Make-A-Wish charity.
2.21 Milo Yiannopoulos resigned Tuesday from Breitbart News, after his apparent defense of sexual relationships between men and boys as young as 13 during an interview last year on the Drunken Peasants podcast began circulating
2.21 MLB ends the four-pitch intentional walk.
2.20 John Oliver in the Post: Oliver’s take: “Trump is basically the propagandist of Putin’s dreams, and who knows why he’s acting this way.”
2.20 Teryn Norris in The Atlantic: “the general path to victory is clear: the middle and working class was right to feel like the system is rigged and to vote for change. But Trump and the GOP Congress do not represent that change. Instead, they’ve conned their supporters and betrayed everyone but the ultra-rich, prioritizing tax cuts for their wealthiest donors, appointing Goldman Sachs executives and billionaires, and in the case of Trump, using the presidency to personally enrich himself. This hurts average Americans of every political stripe, gender, race, and religion — and the left has a plan to make it stop and build a fair economy that works for everyone.We are living through the most dangerous challenge to the free government of the United States that anyone alive has encountered,” warns David Frum. When historians look back, they’ll see it wasn’t the center that died. What died was a commitment in one of America’s two major parties to basic standards of political decency that have underpinned our stability since Reconstruction. The imperative of resistance now goes far beyond party affiliation or ideology — it has become a civic duty for everyone who still believes in liberal democracy. Resistance is not partisan. It is patriotism.”
2.18 Donald Trump: “We’ve got to keep our country safe. (CHEERS) You look at what’s happening in Germany. You look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden. Who would believe this? Sweden. They took in large numbers. They’re having problems like they never thought possible.”
2.17 JOHN MCCAIN: “I know there is profound concern across Europe and the world that America is laying down the mantle of global leadership. I can only speak for myself, but I do not believe that that is the message you will hear from all of the American leaders who cared enough to travel here to Munich this weekend. That’s not the message you heard today from Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis. That is not the message you will hear from Vice President Mike Pence. That’s not the message you will hear from Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly. And that is certainly not the message you will hear tomorrow from our bipartisan congressional delegation. I refuse to accept that our values are morally equivalent to those of our adversaries.I am a proud, unapologetic believer in the West, and I believe we must always, always stand up for it. For if we do not, who will?”
The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 17, 2017
An earlier version of the tweet ended with the word `SICK!’ In reply: NPR’s Steve Inskeep: “A journalist is a citizen. Who informs other citizens, as free citizens need. Some are killed doing it … NYT’s Maggie Haberman: “He is fighting very low approval ratings. Gonna be interesting to see how congressional Rs respond to this tweet” … Joe Scarborough: “Conservatives, feel free to speak up for the Constitution anytime the mood strikes. It is time” … NBC’s Chuck Todd: “I would hope that our leaders would never believe that any American desires to make another American an enemy. Let’s dial it back.”
2.18 Calvin Baker in Harper’s: “Obama’s legacy, which his Republican successor has promised to erase down to the very last executive order, seems assured. As one of the last black firsts, he bore their special burden, and he bore it with sterling integrity, self-knowledge, and extraordinary grace. He renewed the faith of many in the secular American belief that we are capable of overcoming any limitation, including the flaw of our founding. However unknowable the future, it seems reasonable to think that Obama will ultimately be joined in the historical record with Lincoln, Douglass, Du Bois, Shabazz, King, and Marshall: beacons of the best path forward.”
2.18 Bill Gates: “Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, Social Security tax, all those things,” he said. “If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at a similar level.”
2.18 Time cover illustration by Tim O’Brien
2.16 In a wholly unpredictible press conference, Donald Trump spoke the following lies, exaggerations, and unverifiable boasts: “I don’t think there’s ever been a president elected who in this short period of time has done what we’ve done.” ; “Plants and factories are already starting to move back into the United States, and big league — Ford, General Motors, so many of them.”; “To be honest, I inherited a mess. It’s a mess. At home and abroad, a mess.”; “We got 306 [electoral college votes] because people came out and voted like they’ve never seen before, so that’s the way it goes. I guess it was the biggest electoral college win since Ronald Reagan.”; “We’ve ordered a crackdown on sanctuary cities that refuse to comply with federal law and that harbor criminal aliens, and we have ordered an end to the policy of catch and release on the border. No more release. No matter who you are, release. We have begun a nationwide effort to remove criminal aliens, gang members, drug dealers and others who pose a threat to public safety. We are saving American lives every single day.”; “In fact, we had to go quicker than we thought because of the bad decision we received from a circuit that has been overturned at a record number. I have heard 80 percent. I find that hard to believe. That is just a number I heard, that they are overturned 80 percent of the time. I think that circuit is in chaos and that circuit is frankly in turmoil. But we are appealing that, and we are going further.”; “We have also taken steps to begin construction of the Keystone Pipeline and Dakota Access Pipelines. Thousands and thousands of jobs, and put new buy-American measures in place to require American steel for American pipelines.”; “You [the media] have a lower approval rate than Congress. I think that’s right.” “When WikiLeaks, which I had nothing to do with, comes out and happens to give, they’re not giving classified information.”; “You know, they say I’m close to Russia. Hillary Clinton gave away 20 percent of the uranium in the United States. She’s close to Russia.”; “We had a very smooth rollout of the travel ban. But we had a bad court. Got a bad decision.”
More quotes: “I turn on the TV, open the newspapers, and I see stories of chaos. Chaos! Yet, it is the exact opposite. This administration is running like a fine-tuned machine, despite the fact that I can’t get my Cabinet approved, and they’re outstanding people.” “There’s zero chaos. We are running — this is a fine-tuned machine. And [White House Chief of Staff] Reince [Priebus] happens to be doing a good job. But half of his job is putting out lies by the press. I said to him yesterday: This whole Russia scam that you guys are building so that you don’t talk about the real subject, which is illegal leaks. But I watched him yesterday working so hard to try and get that story proper.” “[T]he leaks are absolutely real. The news is fake, because so much of the news is fake.”
2.17 Chris Christie in the Washington Post: “This is what it’s like to be with Trump. He says, ‘There’s the menu, you guys order whatever you want.’ And then he says, ‘Chris, you and I are going to have the meatloaf.… I’m telling you, the meatloaf is fabulous.’”
2.17 Jennifer Rubin in the Post, discussing the decision of Admiral Hayward to decline the job as National Security Advisor. “As CNN’s Jake Tapper tweeted, “A friend of Harward’s says he was reluctant to take NSA job [because] the WH seems so chaotic; says Harward called the offer a ‘s––– sandwich.’ ”
2.16 The Washington Post: “Barely a month into the Trump presidency, the unusually elaborate lifestyle of America’s new first family is straining the Secret Service and security officials, stirring financial and logistical concerns in several local communities, and costing far beyond what has been typical for past presidents — a price tag that, based on past assessments of presidential travel and security costs, could balloon into the hundreds of millions of dollars over the course of a four-year term.”
2.16 Sidney Blumenthal in the London Review of Books: “‘Wa-a-a-a-h! – Little Donald, Unhappy At Last – Trump’s Final Days,’ crowed the cover story in the August 1990 issue of Spy. The illustration depicted him as a wailing toddler. The story inside the magazine, ‘A Casino Too Far’, featured a fictional scrapbook of newspaper clippings carrying ‘the brash tyro’ forward to his miserable future in 1996, bloated, balding and broke, ‘doing a little consulting for the Sultan of Brunei’.”
2.16 The Wall Street Journal: “Intelligence officials have reportedly kept sensitive information from President Donald Trump out of concerns that the White House may be compromised by Russia and the information could fall into the wrong hands.Spies are withholding the information out of a lack of trust in Trump and the new administration.”
2.15 E.J. Dionne Jr. in the Washington Post: “Let’s not mumble or whisper about the central issue facing our country: What is this democratic nation to do when the man serving as president of the United States plainly has no business being president of the United States?”
2.15 Morning Joe bans Kellanne Conway. “She’s in none of the key meetings,” Joe Scarborough said. “She goes out and books herself often. … I don’t even think she’s saying something that she knows to be untrue. She’s just saying things, just to get in front of the TV set and prove her relevance because behind the scenes — behind the scenes, she’s not in these meetings.”
2.15 Thomas Friedman in the Times: We need to rerun the tape. Ladies and gentlemen, we were attacked on Dec. 7, 1941, we were attacked on Sept. 11, 2001, and we were attacked on Nov. 8, 2016. That most recent attack didn’t involve a horrible loss of lives, but it was devastating in its own way. Our entire intelligence community concluded that Russia hacked our election by deliberately breaking into Democratic National Committee computers and then drip-by-drip funneling embarrassing emails through WikiLeaks to undermine Clinton’s campaign. And what have we done about it? Other than a wrist slap against Moscow, we’ve moved on That is not O.K. I am not arguing that Trump is not the legitimate president; he won for many reasons. But I am arguing that he is not behaving like one. Trump presents himself as “Mr. Patriotism,” wrapped in the American flag. And yet he has used his Twitter account to attack BMW for building an auto plant in Mexico, Boeing for over charging for a government airplane, the cast of “Hamilton” for appealing to the vice president to reaffirm American pluralism, American newspapers for undercounting the size of his inauguration crowd and the actress Meryl Streep for calling him out for bullying a handicapped reporter. And yet “Mr. Patriotism” has barely uttered a word of criticism on Twitter or off about a Russian president who has intervened in our democratic process. That’s not O.K.”
2.14 Kate Upton‘s third appearance on the SI swimsuit issue is being marked with three covers.
2.14 The New York Times: “Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former American officials.”
2.14 The New York Times: “Pedro Hernandez, a former bodega stock clerk who confessed to luring 6-year-old Etan Patz into a basement and attacking him on May 25, 1979, was found guilty on Tuesday of murder and kidnapping.”
2.14 Daniel Drezner in the Washington Post: “Trump supporters are clearly less-than-thrilled with some aspects of Trump’s style, but they also don’t see any material downside to anything that’s happened so far. Plus, most voters don’t develop buyer’s remorse so soon after an election. One can understand why Conway would feel secure about her RPI.
Here’s the thing, though. If there is a serious economic slowdown, or a Katrina-level government foul-up, or a national security crisis that could lead to an unpopular war, those numbers will go south real fast. Because that is the point at which all of these minor kerfuffles start to look more like presidential incompetence to his base.”
2.13 Jeremy Weeks, “the hot felon” who was discovered by a modeling agency and signed to a contract when the Stockton Police Department published mug shots of inmates, debuted on the runway of New York’s fashion week. With icy blue eyes, Meeks was jailed on gun charges; he had been described as “one of the most violent criminals in the Stockton area” by police.
2.13 Adele dominated the Grammys, topping Beyoncé to win the album, record, and song of the year
2.13 National Security Advisor Flynn is out.
2.13 At the airport in Kuala Lampur Airport, a team of female assassins— one wearing a T-shirt that read “LOL” — took five seconds to use a toxic spray to kill Kim Jong-nam, the pudgy playboy son of late North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il, and banished step-brother of current North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un.
2.13 The Washington Post: “Joe Scarborough is trying to use whatever influence he has over Donald Trump to change the president’s mind about Stephen Miller. It hasn’t worked so far. The MSNBC host previously blamed Miller for mishandling the rollout of the travel ban and on Monday resumed his campaign against Trump’s senior policy adviser, who made a series of breathtakingly forceful statements on the Sunday political talk shows, including: “Our opponents, the media and the whole world will soon see, as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.” “Sean Spicer, as always, is a hundred percent correct.” “It is a fact, and you will not deny it, that there are massive numbers of noncitizens in this country who are registered to vote.” . . . But what is truly notable about his criticisms of Miller is the extent to which they appear designed to appeal directly to Trump. Observe: “No, no. They are questioned, my young, little Miller. They will be questioned by the court. It’s called judicial review. Alexander Hamilton and James Madison wrote about it in the Federalist Papers. It was enshrined in Madison’s Constitution. Andrew Jackson — you go into your president’s office; you know, that one — and you look on the walls, and there are all these pictures of Andrew Jackson and books of Andrew Jackson. He talked about judicial independence. He talked about the importance of the judiciary. You really need to go back and read the Constitution. And, seriously, the White House has got to stop embarrassing themselves by putting this guy out. … I had people working me: “Oh, wasn’t Miller great?” No. That is the worst performance of anybody — that made Susan Rice [on] the Sunday after Benghazi look smooth. I mean, that was horrendous and an embarrassment.”