Live From the Oval Office

  

Info Wars: The Trump shutdown goes on and with a checkless payday looming at end of the week, its effects are about to become very real for hundreds of thousands of government workers.  It certainly doesn’t help that Trump‘s recent message to unpaid workers that they should just deal with life without money is going over about as well as everyone other than Trump would have expected. Fearing that he is losing the shutdown battle, Trump has decided to supplement twitter and his off the cuff White House lawn remarks with a live but scripted address to the nation from the Oval Office tonight to press the case that the US is facing a migrant crisis on the Mexican border, one that can only be fixed by funding his much coveted wall, the wall that he says can be made out of steel slats rather than concrete as long as he can show his base, Anne Coulter and Rush Limbaugh that it is being built.  Though he may not convince anyone new that his shutdown is justified and that the wall is necessary, he has already accomplished one thing of note, he’s convinced all the networks to grant him valuable air time making it more likely that many people who have until now paid little attention to what’s happening or not happening at the border will be exposed to an amped up version of the narrative that he put forward in the run up to the midterms, that hordes of violent, disease ridden, terrorists are massing in the south readying for an invasion that will permanently alter the American way of life.  The networks’ decision to air Trump’s speech is in and of itself controversial, they don’t always agree to White House requests for prime time slots, in fact they once denied an Obama request deeming the subject of his planned speech too political, so the decision to air Trump’s speech, one that they know will be political and one that will undoubtably be chock full of those alternative facts that Kellyanne Conway loves so much shows that his attacks on the press are working.  The leaders of the fourth estate are cowering when they should be turning a collective back on Trump’s demand. Score one for Trump and his Communications Director ex-Fox employee Bill Shine.  Though it’s not yet clear whether or not all or any of the networks will agree, Democrats have requested equal time to counter Trump’s narrative and call out his lies.  It’s also likely that the networks, or at least the networks not named Fox, will try to point out Trump’s lies in real time and/or immediately after he finishing speaking.  As to those lies, Trump’s team has already been caught propagating a big one.  Their assertion that nearly 4000 terrorists had been stopped trying to cross the southern border was proven demonstrably false yesterday after NBC news obtained official government statistics showing that during the first six months of 2018  Customs and Border Protection encountered only six immigrants on the U.S.-Mexico border whose names were in a federal database of known or suspected terrorists, and to be clear being on that list doesn’t necessarily mean that someone is a terrorist, it could mean that they share a name with one.  One of Trump’s other assertions, that all the other living presidents have confided to him that they are big wall fans has also been debunked, former presidents Obama, Clinton, George W Bush and Carter have all gone on record saying that they never had such discussions with Trump, in fact most of them say that they have had no discussions with Trump. Though no one can confirm that Trump didn’t talk wall with George HW Bush, its fair to assume that he and Trump didn’t kibbutz much in the run up to his death.  To supplement his Oval Office speech, Trump plans to travel to the border later this week to check out his marauding hordes though it’s fair to assume that he won’t site check any of the cages where young children have been and probably are still being held. If all else fails Trump may just call the migrant crisis a national emergency in order to justify glomming money from other parts of the Defense budget, a strategy which would probably lead to a prolonged court fight. Trump’s ramped up activity is partially  due to his fears that he is losing Republican support in the Senate where another Republican Senator, Thom Tilles who is up for reelection in 2020, has joined Senators Collins and Gardner in calling for Senate Majority Leader McConnell to allow voting on legislation to fund the closed government agencies. Trump has also been told that more Republican members of the House, all of whom are up for reelection in 2020, are likely to start voting for Speaker Pelosi’s funding bills. As to the genesis of the whole wall concept, apparently it was a mnemonic device crafted by Trump’s one time adviser, the soon to be indicted Roger Stone, and his then sidekick Sam Nunberg as a way to get the difficult to program Trump to remember to talk about immigration issues during his 2016 campaign stops.  Neither Stone nor Nunberg ever thought the wall thing would take on a life of its own. Although no one in the White House seems to have worked out the mechanics, the administration asserts that early tax filers will get their refunds on time even if the shutdown continues.  Perhaps Trump is detailing sons Eric and Don Jr to the IRS to cut checks?  That ought to work out well.

Court Updates:  US District Court Judge Dabney Friedrich, a Trump appointee, has had it with the shenanigans being committed by the lawyers representing Concord Management, a company controlled by Russian Oligarch and Putin buddy Yevgeny Prigozhin.  Concord is believed to have funded the Internet Research Agency, the Russian troll farm indicted by Special Counsel Mueller for attempting to manipulate public opinion in the 2016 election. The judge has admonished Eric Dubelier, Concord’s lawyer for his “unprofessional, inappropriate and ineffective” filings including one filing that requested the return of a nude selfie, identity of the exhibitionist not disclosed, that he had argued was inappropriately obtained as the result of one of Mueller’s “too broad” subpoenas. Judge Friedrich told Dubelier to knock it off and start acting professionally, or else.  On a substantially less entertaining note, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called in sick yesterday, though she still plans to keep up her work load and rule on cases, at least for now, she is working from home while she recuperates from her recent cancer surgery.  Her absence from court is particularly worrisome because despite her prior bouts of cancer she has never before failed to appear for a scheduled hearing. #RBG #GetWellSoon #Please