The enemies of my enemy...write for Washington's other other newspaper.

First, the least appealing chick in left-fascism today, Dana Milbank:


Trump's poll numbers are bad. Here's when the bottom will drop out ...


A disturbing scene unfolded at the White House on Monday afternoon. A hook-and-ladder firetruck and a utility bucket truck pulled up to the South Portico and extended their rescue arms in the vicinity of the Truman Balcony.

Had the first lady finally decided to make a break for it?

Ha! Good one, bitch. I wonder if Dana The Wonder Cow would have joked about Jackie Kennedy trying to get away from her husband's penis which smelled like Marilyn Monroe's abortion-ridden vagina?

Did President Trump need to be talked off the ledge after his latest poll numbers?

The real reason was every bit as fanciful: The Trump White House had invited the makers of the trucks — and manufacturers of all stripes — to bring their wares to Washington to show that Trump was making good on his promise to revive manufacturing jobs in America.

This from the cow who slobbered all over The Community Organizer From The High-Yellow Lagoon for pouring trillions down the Democrass donor-hole known as "clean energy".

The president admired baseball bats and golf clubs, tried on a Stetson, asserted that the representative from an Omaha beef producer “wanted to kiss me so badly,” gave a thumbs-up from the driver’s seat of the firetruck and admired a Sikorsky helicopter. “I have three of them,” this champion of the little guy reported. Trump, whose businesses fill hotel rooms with mostly imported goods and whose daughter manufactures her clothing line entirely overseas, proclaimed this “Made in America” week.

That Trump would attempt to give the impression that he is leading a manufacturing revival makes sense: In the otherwise dismal new Washington Post-ABC poll, Trump’s handling of the economy is the only area in which he is viewed favorably by the public, by a narrow 43 percent to 41 percent.

But if Americans were to discover Trump can’t make good on his promise to lead a resurgence in manufacturing jobs— then, well, it might be time for him to call in a five-alarm blaze and ride that hook-and-ladder into exile at Mar-a-Lago.

The new poll finds that only 36 percent of the public approves of the job Trump is doing, the lowest at the six-month point in any presidency over the past 70 years, when modern polling began. Only 25 percent support him strongly. But, to paraphrase Trump’s remarks to the first lady of France, he is in such good shape — beautiful! — compared with where he would be if his supporters were to lose faith in his economic policies. Then, the bottom would drop out.

Again, La Milbank believes that anyone who doesn't get invited to the same parties as she does is a dumbass who shouldn't be allowed to vote or answer pollster's questions...

I pray that isn't true, but I haven't seen any AWUG backlash against The Great Orange Dope yet.

I asked The Post’s polling chief, Scott Clement, to run a regression analysis testing how views of the economy shape overall support for Trump when other variables such as party are held constant. The result was powerful: People who approve of his handling of the economy are 40 or 50 percentage points more likely to approve of him overall. While views of the economy closely correlate with partisanship, this means, all things being equal, that Trump’s overall approval rating should drop four or five points for each 10-point drop in views of his economic performance. Because Trump supporters are largely unconcerned with his personal antics, economic woes — not the Russia scandal or zany tweets — are what would doom Trump in public opinion.

The problem for Trump is many of his populist promises are starting to look fraudulent. Remember that Carrier plant in Indiana that Trump claimed to have saved? It’s reportedly beginning to lay off 600 people. The Boeing plant in South Carolina that Trump visited in February to showcase his fight for manufacturing jobs? Layoffs there, too. Trump denounced plans by Ford to move production of the Focus from Michigan to Mexico. Now Ford is moving the work to China instead.

Surprise! Of course, this sort of thing goes unmentioned when the commies are in charge.

As The Post’s Tory Newmyer reported, manufacturing employment hit a record low last month of 8.47 percent of overall employment. It has long been trending that way and is forecast to continue. Manufacturing wages rose less than the overall private sector.

This isn’t primarily because taxes are forcing production overseas. It’s productivity: Manufacturers can produce twice as much in the United States as they did a few decades ago with a third fewer workers. Likewise, coal mining jobs aren’t leaving the country because of regulations, as Trump tells his supporters; the jobs have been lost to market forces in the form of cheap oil and gas.

Golly, she seems to be on the brink of admitting that there are such things as market forces at work! She better be careful, the commies will be back before she knows it.

The Congressional Budget Office, led by a Republican appointee, forecast last week that the economy would grow at just a 1.9 percent clip under Trump’s proposed budget, far less than the 3 percent the White House claims and the higher levels Trump alleges. The CBO also said the Trump budget would leave a $720 billion deficit in a decade, contrary to Trump claims.

So what happens if — and when — Trump’s core backers discover that they’ve been had: They’re losing health-care coverage and other benefits, while manufacturing jobs aren’t coming back and a Trump-ignited trade war is hurting U.S. exports?

He’ll need more than a hook and ladder to escape that disaster.


Meanwhile, number two on that list, Ruth Marcus, puts Orange Clump's mouthpiece's number in her Rolodex for a rainy, bloody day:

Behind the Trump team's bluster, a dark legal strategy


President Trump’s attorney, Jay Sekulow, seems to be an adherent of the just-yell-louder-school of legal argumentation. Sekulow has employed this tactic for decades, dating at least to his maiden outing before the Supreme Court in 1987, when American Lawyer magazine described Sekulow as “rude and aggressive.”

And so it was on Sunday, when Sekulow completed his second “full Ginsburg,” a reference to William Ginsburg, the hapless lawyer for Monica Lewinsky who did his client no service by making the rounds of all the Sunday shows. Sekulow makes Ginsburg look like Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

He combines bluster and obstreperousness (“I’m going to answer your question, I am, and you’re going to let me answer it,” he lectured/interrupted Fox News’s Chris Wallace”) with obfuscatory legal jargon (“I’m not in privity of contract, as we say, with the party that’s responsible for the actual payment of the bill.”)

Sekulow compulsively redirects (“I wonder why the Secret Service, if this was nefarious, why the Secret Service allowed these people in,” he told ABC’s Jonathan Karl). He is internally inconsistent (“I mean, opposition research in campaigns happens all the time,” he told CBS’s John Dickerson, just after noting that Donald Trump Jr. had said that “if he had to do it all over again, there are things he would do differently.”)

So watching a Sekulow performance, it is tempting simply to ask: Why is this man shouting?

The better question is: What is this man shouting? Because if you turn down the volume and pay attention to what Sekulow is saying, you can deduce the disturbing outlines of where the president’s legal team may be heading. As Sekulow made the rounds Sunday, he signaled the expansion of the Trump team’s assault on former FBI director James B. Comey and, in turn, on the legitimacy of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. This is worrisome, because it lays the foundation for firing Mueller and/or issuing pardons and declaring, “Case closed.”

Thus, when Wallace asked Sekulow whether the Trump team’s repeated denials of dealings with Russia were now “suspect,” it triggered this disquisition:

“I think it’s important to put the framework here. How did we end up with a special counsel? Here’s how. … The FBI director at the time, James Comey, had a series of meetings with the president of the United States. In those meetings, he took notes. He put them on his government computer, put them in his government desk, and when he was terminated from [that] position, which you would acknowledge that the president had the authority to do, he gave them to a friend of his to leak to the press … to get a special counsel, and the special counsel is appointed.”

In this retelling, Mueller is the fruit of the poisonous tree planted by Comey. Therefore, Mueller’s appointment is illegitimate and he should go — and with him the investigation.

“So the basis upon which this entire special counsel investigation is taking place is based on what? Illegally leaked information that was a conversation of the president of the United States with the then-FBI director,” Sekulow told NBC’s Chuck Todd. “And that to me is problematic from the outset. And I think that raises very serious legal issues as to the scope and nature of what really can take place.”

Does it? In his previous round of Sunday shows, Sekulow muddied the waters by claiming that Comey had violated attorney-client privilege in revealing his conversations with Trump. As Wallace explained Sunday, this assertion was incoherent, since Comey was not acting in any way as Trump’s lawyer.

Sekulow’s pivot — to claiming that the conversations were protected by executive privilege — is scarcely more convincing. Perhaps Trump could have asserted privilege to bar Comey from testifying before Congress, especially before the firing. That’s different from asserting that Comey’s decision as a private citizen to reveal information about his conversations with the president was “illegal,” even if Comey proceeded through the distasteful cutout of a memo leaked by a friend. If such disclosures were against the law, every administration veteran who wrote a tell-all book would be in jail.

Another strand of Sekulow’s argument involves the notion that the memo was essentially government property, not Comey’s to decide to convert to his own use, even if the information contained in it is unclassified. Irony alert: This argument requires concluding that Comey took something of value from the U.S. government, while asserting that the Trump campaign did not solicit anything of value from the Russian government. On the Lawfare blog, Timothy Edgar and Susan Hennessey assess the argument that Comey’s action violated the conversion statute as “cutout.”

Even if it weren’t, what would be the relevance? Comey’s alleged crime wouldn’t make Mueller’s appointment void or voidable. A leak of classified information that is intended to trigger a criminal investigation doesn’t make the ensuing investigation improper.

But watch that space. I suspect — and fear — that we haven’t heard the last of this bogus argument.

Ruthie is just kidding, you Clumpskyites. She knows the value of a good shyster when you're in a real pinch. How do think she beat all those solicitation raps in the 1930's?


TheChurchMilitant: Sometimes anti-social, but always anti-fascist since 2005.