No One Wants to be trump's Spokesperson

Trump once said,"Judge me  by the people I hire".
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Nobody wants to be Donald Trump’s new spokesperson: ‘You wind up looking like a liar or a fool’
Being a spokesperson for President Donald Trump’s administration is “the most hazardous job in Washington,” say some insiders as rumors spread of an impending White House staff shakeup.
The New York Times reported Saturday night that after what has been a brutal week for the White House communications office, neither Press Secretary Sean Spicer nor Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders are looking very secure in their jobs. Given Pres. Trump’s tendency to contradict his press team’s statements and leave surrogates hanging out to dry, it may be difficult to recruit replacements.
“Mr. Trump, obsessed with the F.B.I.’s investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election and increasingly frustrated by the hyper-scrutiny of the Washington press corps, is more in need of effective spokesmen than ever, and aides say he is considering a broad shake-up of his team,” wrote Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman.
The trouble is that Trump has a “career-long habit of viewing his public protectors as somewhat disposable.”
The article cited Trump’s run-ins with former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and longtime Trump confidant and ally ex-New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R) as well as this week’s systematic undercutting of Spicer and Huckabee Sanders.
“After the ‘Access Hollywood’ scandal, Mr. Trump raged at Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, for going on TV to defend him, arguing that he wanted to attack Hillary Clinton, not play defense. Corey Lewandowski, Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign manager until he fired him, repeatedly groused to friends that he was forced to absorb all of the criticism for the campaign’s practice of confining reporters at rallies in small pens. Mr. Trump, he told two people close to him, had ordered him to do it — but placed the blame on Mr. Lewandowski when reporters complained about it,” the Times said.
“Trump is putting a lot on the backs of his spokespeople, while simultaneously cutting their legs out from underneath them,” said Alex Conant — a GOP strategist and a former adviser to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL). “There is nothing more discouraging or embarrassing for a spokesman than to have your boss contradict you. In political communications, you’re only as good as your credibility.”

Trump’s spokespeople, including Vice Pres. Mike Pence all dutifully repeated their talking points for days after Comey was fired, only to have the president embarrass them in an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt in which Trump took full credit for the firing and openly admitted that it was about the Russia investigation.
“The most hazardous duty in Washington these days is that of Trump surrogate because the president constantly undercuts the statements of his own people,” said former senior adviser to Pres. Barack Obama David Axelrod. “You wind up looking like a liar or a fool, neither of which is particularly attractive.”
The Times said, “Few of Mr. Trump’s eruptions have had such a destructive effect on his administration or left such deep resentments among his scarred staff, according to Trump aides and surrogates. And the blowback from the Comey decision and the way it was handled have accelerated the discussions about possible changes in the White House.”
Meanwhile, Trump has grown “increasingly isolated and agitated,” since the Comey firing, say staffers, and the White House has an overall “dejected” air.
“In private,” said the Times, Trump is “still raging over what he viewed as Mr. Comey’s ‘witch hunt’ against him — and blaming the bipartisan condemnation of his action on the failures of his embattled and overworked communications team.”
The article said that the president is increasingly dissatisfied with White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and his ally Spicer, both of whom came to the Trump administration from the Republican National Committee (RNC). Communications Director Michael Dubke is said to the in the crosshairs, as well.
Trump has been openly critical of Spicer to his inner circle and is reportedly considering bringing in TV producers from Fox News to make White House briefings into more razzle-dazzle affairs in keeping with the president’s previous job as a reality TV game show host. Furthermore, said the Times, Spicer has “failed to use the self-protective tools that savvier Trump aides have adopted.”
“Campaign aides learned not to lean too much on his accounts of events, steering away from unequivocal public pronouncements unless they could point to his words,” said Thrush and Haberman.
“Mr. Trump’s four-decade career in real estate, casinos and entertainment has given him a sense, associates say, that a tacit agreement exists between him and the people who work for him: In exchange for the wealth, fame and power he conveys to them, they agree to absorb incoming fire directed at him,” they wrote.
“With Mr. Trump, it’s pretty simple: Once he makes up his mind on something, that’s it,” said former Trump adviser Sam Nunberg. “You either work for him” or quit.
DAVID FERGUSON

trump is Never to Blame

ERIC THAYER/REUTERS

June 7, 2017

Frank Bruni

Poor Donald Trump, so late to the lesson that so many plutocrats before him learned: You can’t find good help.

Jeff Sessions? What a bust. True, he was never the nimblest newt in the swamp and had all that racial muck in his past. But he mirrored his master’s irreverence and atavism, with slighter dimensions and a Southern accent: Donald in a Dixie cup. Surely Sessions and his Justice Department could be expected to accomplish something as straightforward as keeping the Muslims at bay.

Hah. More than four months since the inauguration, there’s meager, flickering hope for the travel ban that wasn’t a travel ban until it became a travel ban again. The fault for that cannot possibly lie with its foundation of bigotry, its shoddy conception or the president’s own sloppy and shifting characterizations of it over time. No, there must be a fall guy with less shimmering tresses. The buck stops anywhere but hair.

So does the pound, the euro and every last bit of spare change and pocket lint. If Trump is feuding with the London mayor, it’s the mayor who should be abashed. If Trump is at odds with Angela Merkel, she must have something to apologize for. Never mind his baseless tweets and boundless pique. He’s the American president, they’re not, and global hegemony means never having to say you’re sorry.

But back to the Potomac and his principal aides, unprincipled underlings and princeling of a son-in-law, each more incompetent than the next.

The buck stops with Sean Spicer, who kept wandering from the script like a toddler into traffic. All he had to do was stick to his lines: The president’s proposals are the wisest. The president’s ethics are the purest. The president’s crowds are the biggest. The president’s detractors fall into three camps: illegals, commies and Samantha Bee.

He couldn’t manage that much, or rather that little, and so Sarah Huckabee Sanders is claiming ever more podium time. She won’t last. No one will. The relevant sinkhole isn’t the one that opened up just outside Mar-a-Loco last month. It’s the one beneath the feet of anyone dippy, delusional or daring enough to think that Trumplandia is terrain on which to make a positive difference, let alone a career.

The buck stops with Jared Kushner, never mind that his grandiosity and shortcuts were emulations of dear old dad-in-law. He has lumbered onto investigators’ radar and thus teetered ever so slightly from favor — that’s Steve Bannon chortling in the background — though he reportedly tasted Trump’s rancor before, when he hid in Aspen during the health care debacle, skiing while Washington churned.

Where will the buck stop next? With the tiniest Trump, Barron? He has some nerve doing homework while tax reform is still being hammered out and infrastructure is just coming together.

Trump’s quickness to deflect blame, readiness to designate scapegoats, unpredictable tirades and stinginess with the loyalty that he demands from others aren’t just character flaws. They’re serious and quite possibly insurmountable obstacles to governing.

Those who serve him are forever fearful of being undercut, perpetually having to defend behavior from him that’s indefensible, and demoralized as a result. Consider Defense Secretary James Mattis, whose torments were summarized by James Hohmann this week in The Washington Post. How can the country get the best from him when he’s getting the worst from Trump?

Many of the country’s diplomats are in a funk, as my Times colleague Mark Landler just recounted, and the ludicrously large number of unfilled positions throughout the administration partly reflects the limited appeal of such a gloomy club. There was never any overflow of top-tier applicants, given how many Republicans swore off Trump and how many others were spurned by him for not being obsequious enough.

But now that the terms of working for him — ridicule by tweet, potentially stratospheric legal bills — are clear, the pool of available talent is a puddle too shallow to keep a newt afloat. Mike Allen reported in Axios on Tuesday morning that the creation of Trump’s “war room” — a battalion of lawyers and such who would do damage control during the Russia probe — is on hold, because he can’t find the soldiers to staff it.

By many accounts, the atmosphere in the White House is one part high school cafeteria, two parts “Lord of the Flies.” Aides who are jockeying for position and trying to safeguard their reputations ask operatives on the outside to whisper to the media that they’re up while their rivals are down, and so we’re subjected to a daily Dow Jones on the stock of various players, with special note of who has Oval Office “walk-in privileges.”

I suspect that the Trump era will flip that phrase, and the people walking out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue will be seen as — and be — the privileged ones.

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It's just a Matter of Time Before trump is Removed

  ‘I think we’re in impeachment territory,’ says David Gergen, former aide to Nixon and Clinton.

“I think we’re in impeachment territory.”

Those were not the words of a left-wing political blogger with high hopes, nor a hyperactive Twitter maven spouting conspiracy theories. They came from David Gergen, the typically moderate, mild-mannered CNN analyst and former aide to four presidents, both Republican and Democrat.

Gergen appeared on CNN Tuesday night to discuss the controversies that have overwhelmed the Trump administration in the past week.

At the top of the list were reports that President Trump had asked then-FBI Director James B. Comey to drop an investigation into Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser. The revelation has fueled claims that Trump might have obstructed justice, which in the past has been treated as an impeachable offense.

If true, it could mean devastating consequences for the president, said Gergen, who served under Presidents Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, both of whom faced the impeachment process.

“I was in the Nixon administration, as you know, and I thought after watching the Clinton impeachment I’d never see another one,” Gergen told host Anderson Cooper. “But I think we’re in impeachment territory now for the first time.”

Cooper asked: “Really?”

“I think that obstruction of justice was the number one charge against Nixon that brought him down,” Gergen responded. “Obstruction of justice was the number one charge against Bill Clinton, which led to his indictment in the House.

In controversy after controversy, Republican lawmakers have defended President Trump. His disclosure of highly classified information may be too far. (Video: Jenny Starrs/Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
The New York Times first, then The Washington Post and other outlets have reported that Trump had asked Comey in a February meeting not to pursue the Flynn probe and instead go after journalists in leak cases. Comey shared his notes from the conversation with aides, who in turn described the notes to reporters. Legal analysts told The Washington Post Tuesday that a criminal obstruction-of-justice case is possible but would likely require more evidence.

The news came within a week of Trump’s dismissal of Comey and a day after reports that Trump had shared classified information with Russia.

The White House denied the version of the conversation described by Comey’s aides, telling The Post “the president has never asked Mr. Comey or anyone else to end an investigation.” Trump has separately defended his firing of Comey and his sharing of information with Russian officials.

On CNN, Gergen said that “from a lay point of view” it appeared Trump was trying to impede the FBI’s investigation.

“He was using his power to do that, and when James Comey didn’t go along with him, when he wasn’t his boy, he fired him, which I think is also relevant to the question of what he was trying to do,” Gergen said. “So from my point of view this is of enormous consequence for his presidency.”

“I think if you look at the three bombshells we’ve had,” Gergen added, “what we see is a presidency that’s starting to come apart.”

Gergen wasn’t the only moderate voice to suggest Tuesday that a plausible case for Trump’s removal was emerging.

Ross Douthat, a conservative columnist for the New York Times and longtime critic of Trump, wrote that while Trump may not be guilty of the “high crimes and misdemeanors” necessary for impeachment, he had shown himself incapable of governing the country. A more appropriate solution, Douthat argued, was to remove Trump under the 25th Amendment, which allows the president’s cabinet to deem him “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”

“It is not squishy New York Times conservatives who regard the president as a child, an intellectual void, a hopeless case, a threat to national security,” Douthat wrote. “It is people who are self-selected loyalists, who supported him in the campaign, who daily go to work for him.”

The 25th Amendment, ratified in 1967 in the wake of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, sets out both a plan of succession for the presidency and a complicated and daunting means of removing a president deemed incapacitated.

The relevant Section 4 reads as follows:

Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.
By Derek Hawkins

You DO NOT need more protein!

I am posting this because I am sick of commercial interests boasting "More protein" .
This is pure and simple a scam.
I lifted weights for years, put on muscle and definition and did not "supplement" my diet with protein.
mfbsr
From diet books to news headlines, protein is in, while carbohydrates and fats are out. Without this very important nutrient, we wouldn’t be able to build, maintain and repair the body’s tissues. Of the 20 amino acids that are used to make protein, nine cannot be produced by the body alone. These nine essential amino acids can only be obtained from the foods we eat. But are we eating too much?

The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey found that the average American male consumes 102 grams of protein per day, while the average female eats about 70 grams. That’s almost twice the daily recommended intake established by the Food and Nutrition Board. For most healthy individuals, it’s recommended that 10-15 percent of our daily calories come from protein (about 56 grams for men and 46 for women). This may sound like a lot, but it’s easier to meet those needs than you think. Consider this: One cup of milk (8 grams), a 3-ounce piece of meat (21 grams), 1 cup of dry beans (16 grams) and an 8-ounce container of yogurt (11 grams) provide 56 grams of protein, according to the CDC. That didn’t take much.

Why can too much protein be a problem? For starters, meat is a major source of protein in the American diet, and animal foods high in protein are often high in saturated fat. According to the American Heart Association (AHA), foods high in saturated fat can increase risk of stroke, coronary heart disease, diabetes and some types of cancer. Additionally, people who have a problem processing excess protein may be at risk for kidney and liver disorders and osteoperosis. The AHA does not recommend high-protein diets for weight loss, stating that high-protein diets can “restrict healthful foods that provide essential nutrients and don’t provide the variety of foods needed to adequately meet nutritional needs.” Additionally, if you consume more calories than you burn, any extra calories will contribute to weight gain.

To calculate individual protein needs, it’s important to factor in body weight, physical activity level and health status. The average person who leads a relatively sedentary lifestyle needs about 0.36 grams of protein per pound of body weight. That means if you are healthy, weigh 140 pounds, and occasionally ride your bike to work, you only need about 50 grams of protein per day.

And exercise doesn’t necessarily increase protein needs. According to the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (AND), if you are working out for an hour a few times a week, you probably don’t need to take in extra protein. For endurance and strength-trained athletes, AND recommends consuming 0.5 to 0.8 grams of protein per pound of body weight daily, which can generally be obtained through the diet without the use of supplements.

So what are the best protein sources? While animal proteins usually contain all of the essential amino acids forming complete proteins, eating a varied, plant-based diet can also meet all of your protein needs. One cup of dry beans, for example, contains about 16 grams of protein per serving, while a cup of brown rice contains 5 grams. Together these foods form a complete protein and also provide a healthy dose of fiber — which helps lower cholesterol, promotes regular bowel movements, regulates our blood sugar and helps us feel full. Plant-based proteins also don’t have any saturated fat, and are usually lower in calories.

The take-home message: Before gulping down that protein shake after a workout, or subbing a large steak for carbs and fats at lunch and dinner, calculate your actual needs to make sure the extra protein is really necessary. It’s probably isn’t.
 Jessica Jones, MS, RD,