Yesterday it was hooray god, today it was hooray guns.

President Trump on Friday addressed the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting here in a speech that served as a rallying cry to his base, an attack on his detractors and a signal of his strong support for the gun rights group after suggesting months earlier he was open to some firearm restrictions.

For a few hours after Parkland he pretended to care, then it was back to normal.

But any streak of independence from the NRA was gone Friday, as Trump allied himself with some of the gun group’s biggest priorities in a rambling, 45-minute speech that focused as much on his foreign policy agenda, approval ratings and the latest in the Russia investigation as it did on gun policy.

His speeches are all rambling, because he’s that insufferable guy who thinks every word he utters is fascinating no matter how trivial and self-involved.

“Your Second Amendment rights are under siege,” Trump told the NRA members, whom he referred to as patriots. “But they will never ever be under siege as long as I’m your president.”

That’s “rambling” all right – i.e. a flat contradiction.  Your rights are under siege, but they will never ever be under siege as long as I’m your president, and I’m your president now, but your rights are under siege. QED.

To bolster his case for arming teachers and adding guards, Trump argued “there is no stronger deterrent for a sick individual than the knowledge that their attack will end their life and end in total failure.”

Wrong. Lots of shooters intend the attack to end their lives.

While Trump used the speech to firmly embrace the NRA’s agenda, he also treated it like a campaign rally — urging members to vote in the midterm elections, boasting about the improving unemployment numbers, touting the recent tax cuts, criticizing the media and lambasting the investigation into Russia’s meddling in the election.

The campaign part is secondary really; the reason he loves doing this is because it’s a chance to brag about himself and get cheers and applause in response. It’s his happy place.

What’s that thumping sound? The bus wheels rolling over Rudy Giuliani.

President Trump undercut his attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, on Friday, and said the former New York mayor will eventually get the facts right regarding a payment to a pornographic actress who said she had an affair with Mr. Trump.

Everything “has been said incorrectly,” Mr. Trump said, blaming the media coverage and Mr. Giuliani’s short time on the job.

Oh yes, he was an intern until just the other day, he’s a total novice, he can’t possibly be expected to know all the facts yet, and that’s why it was a great idea for him to talk to Sean Hannity.

Mr. Giuliani, who joined Mr. Trump’s legal team last month, “started a day ago,” Mr. Trump said, speaking to reporters on Friday as he left Washington to attend a National Rifle Association convention in Dallas.

“He’s a great guy,” Mr. Trump said. “He’ll get his facts straight.”

So Trump told a ridiculous boob lie – what, in order to illustrate how unimportant it is to get the facts straight?

And then, note the trip to hang out with the extremely right-wing National Rifle Association, in callous disregard or outright contempt for Parkland and all the other mass shootings since the last NRA convention.

Mr. Giuliani kicked off the confusion with an interview on Fox News on Wednesday, surprising even some of Mr. Trump’s other attorneys.

In a series of Twitter posts the following morning, the president backed up what Mr. Giuliani said. But, on Friday, Mr. Trump said that everything said about the transaction “has been said incorrectly.”

“It’s actually very simple,” the president said, without elaboration.

Presidents don’t elaborate. You’re supposed to listen, and believe. That’s it.

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on Are they objective?

He’s implying that that’s not “objective”…But an objective observer (who hadn’t just popped out of an eggshell fully mature yesterday) has a million reasons to think Comey is more likely to be telling the truth than Trump is. An objective observer can remember that clip on Air Force One when Trump lied about who paid Stormy Daniels and whether he knew about it, to name just one item. Trump lies constantly; Comey not so much.

No, no, that’s not how it works. You can’t go using evidence to reach an uncomfortable conclusion. “Objective” means that you either (1) are “keeping an open mind” and refusing to decide whether you believe the allegations; or (2) have decided, like Giuliani, that the allegations are false. Disagreeing with Rudy is, ipso facto, proof of a lack of objectivity.

Have you learned nothing from sexual assault and harassment cases?

“I can’t possibly come to any sort of opinion on the allegations against Famous Dude. All I have to go on is detailed eyewitness accounts from the victims and other witnesses, corroborating accounts from people they complained to, documentary evidence, and Famous Dude’s generally skeevy attitude towards women. As a true skeptic, I couldn’t possibly form an opinion until all of these witnesses are brought before me in a courtroom, which I know will never happen.” = OBJECTIVE

“Although I remain open to further evidence, and any actual criminal punishment would have to await a prosecution and conviction, it appears from the detailed eyewitness accounts from the victims and other witnesses, corroborating accounts from people they complained to, documentary evidence, and Famous Dude’s generally skeevy attitude towards women, that Famous Dude has harassed women. And so perhaps that should have some social consequences.” = NOT OBJECTIVE

“I’ve had beers with Famous Dude, and I believe him when he says these women are all lying bitches.” = OBJECTIVE

The Post annotates Giuliani’s chat with Hannity.

GIULIANI: Here’s what it’s all about. It’s real simple. The American people can follow this along with me. Are they objective?

HANNITY: Are they?

GIULIANI: Well, right now, a lot of things point in the direction of, they made up their mind that Comey is telling the truth and not the president.

Ok wait. He’s implying that that’s not “objective”…But an objective observer (who hadn’t just popped out of an eggshell fully mature yesterday) has a million reasons to think Comey is more likely to be telling the truth than Trump is. An objective observer can remember that clip on Air Force One when Trump lied about who paid Stormy Daniels and whether he knew about it, to name just one item. Trump lies constantly; Comey not so much.

GIULIANI: He fired Comey because Comey would not, among other things, say that he wasn’t a target of the investigation. He’s entitled to that. Hillary Clinton got that. And, he couldn’t get that. So, he fired him and he said, I’m free of the guy, and he went on Lester Holt. Lester Holt’s interview was as good as anybody could do, better than I think any of the people around Mueller could have done, and Lester Holt asked him, why did you do it? He said, I did it because I felt that I had to explain to the American people the president was not the target of the investigation.

No he didn’t. That’s not what he said at all. So there’s Giuliani either lying about or failing to remember accurately an important fact. So much for objectively deciding who is telling the truth.

GIULIANI: And even Jake Tapper pushed him, like, really hard, I’m talking about Comey. Comey had no answer for why he didn’t say this, even though he had done the same thing for Hillary.

So, you can’t blame the president for feeling, I am not being treated the same way they were.

But, again, it’s the difference between a closed investigation and an open one. I can grasp that as a random citizen with no legal training, so I’m well convinced former prosecutor Giuliani can…so he’s bullshitting.

GIULIANI: I know James Comey. I know the president.

Sorry, Jim, you’re a liar. A disgraceful liar. Every FBI agent in America has his head down because of you. It would have been good for God if God had kept you out of being head of the FBI.

HANNITY: Explain where he lied.

GIULIANI: Well, he lied about his conversation with McCabe. He knew all of McCabe’s conflicts. McCabe should testify against him. He lied about his conversations with the president. He only told the truth when the president said, I made — we know Donald — I’m sorry, Mr. President, he was Donald before.

He lied about the fact that they talked about whether the president was a subject or target, then he immediately changed it. It’s one lie after another.

How does Giuliani know Comey lied about his conversations with the president? Was he in the room? Did he have a wiretap on Comey? Where does he get his certainty?

HANNITY: Rod Rosenstein — everyone forgets when he wrote that recommendation to fire Comey. He said the FBI cannot be reestablished if he stayed at the helm.

GIULIANI: Yeah, why? Because he’s a liar. His conduct of the Hillary Clinton investigation was a total disgrace. If Hillary Clinton had been elected president, he wouldn’t have lasted past day one. We know she would have fired him.

I don’t think she’d deny that today. She was right. We should have fired him. When I say we, I mean the collective we here, day one.

That’s seven times so far he’s called Comey a liar.

HANNITY: Well, wait a minute. And you have a guy who hates Hillary and loves Donald Trump during the interview. That would be the Hillary standard. That’s not going to happen with Robert Mueller.

GIULIANI: We’re not going to get that. Could we accept something less than that? Yes. Could we accept a situation in which they are telling us basically we believe Comey, who is now a pathological liar, as opposed to Donald Trump? Then the answer to that is no.

Eight times.

GIULIANI: Also Comey and McCabe contradicting each other. One of them has to be lying. I mean, I actually think Comey is lying. I think Comey is a big liar than McCabe. McCabe isn’t a situational liar. He’s a much big liar.

So, if this were equal system of justice, they’d all be prosecuted.

Nine ten.

Meanwhile, Jupiter.

NASA has released new images of Jupiter, taken by the Juno Spacecraft. pic.twitter.com/rf9hCLNlcJ

— Blue sign (@BluesignV) May 1, 2018

Mike Pence fancies himself the Voice of Morality in the Trump administration – which is odd since you can’t work for Trump without stepping deliberately into a moral sewer, but anyway he does fancy himself that.

So it is worth noting what Pence, the Trump administration’s righteous man, did in Arizona on Tuesday. According to the Hill’s Jacqueline Thomsen:

Vice President Pence praised former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was convicted of contempt of court, as a “tireless champion of … the rule of law” during an event in Arizona on Tuesday.

Pence said at the tax event that he was “honored” by the former sheriff’s attendance, and called Arpaio a “great friend of this president and tireless champion of strong borders and the rule of law,” to cheers from the crowd.

A tireless champion of the rule of law who was convicted of violating a federal court order to stop arresting and detaining people for no reason other than his own whim (and the fact that they looked “Mexican” of course). He was convicted of violating a federal court order. That’s not a tireless champion of the rule of law. In Arpaio’s case it’s also a mean racist shit.

Daniel Drezner quotes the National Review:

Arpaio was convicted of criminal contempt last summer for willfully violating a federal court order. Specifically, he was convicted of violating an order that he cease arresting and detaining people for whom there was no plausible criminal charge — i.e., the court asked him, pretty please, to stop detaining Mexicans for publicity purposes. Arpaio says he was arresting illegal immigrants, and he may well have been, but it is not a criminal offense simply to be illegally present in the United States. (That is a civil matter.) Until such a time as Congress passes a law making such presence a crime (and delegates enforcement of that federal statute to the sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz.), arresting people under color of law for that non-crime isn’t law enforcement — it’s lawlessness.

But Sheriff Joe has a thing for arresting people who haven’t committed any crime. He arrested a Republican critic — the county supervisor — on trumped-up charges in 2008 and ended up handing over $3.5 million of taxpayers’ money in a wrongful-arrest settlement. He tried to bully the mayor of Phoenix in much the same way, demanding phone logs and other records as part of a nonsensical “investigation” designed to silence a critic. In another spectacular abuse of power, Arpaio teamed up with a friendly county attorney and filed a federal lawsuit seeking the federal prosecution of several judges and lawyers — his political enemies — under the RICO organized-crime statute. Arpaio, being Arpaio, held a press conference announcing the investigation, which the federal courts immediately threw out as “patently frivolous.” Millions more taxpayers’ dollars were paid out in settlements.

That’s not The Nation or Mother Jones or American Prospect, it’s National Review. Like Trump, Arpaio is a bad man who does bad things. It’s not political or “partisan”; it’s just the truth.

Originally a comment by Claire on It’s not optional.

My husband and I have been talking about what an interview between Mueller and Trump would look like. If this were literally any other politician, they would answer carefully, with narrow answers, resist the urge to elaborate, and if possible, try to answer the question they want to answer rather than the one they were asked. And if needed, plead the fifth.

I think Trump is constitutionally incapable of all of these things, including pleading the fifth. Because once you plead the fifth, you have to shut up. That requires considerable self-control, because social animals that we are, most people are uncomfortable to sit in silence. Sitting in silence letting suspects fill the room with noise is what good investigators do.

Trump has some of the poorest self-control I’ve ever seen in an adult, and you know he’d be “oh I plead the fifth on that question because you know this a made up story and Comey, what a liar that guy was, he was part of the Deep State… you know the Deep State is working to destroy me because they’re all Democrats and they’re mad because Crooked Hillary should have won, they said I couldn’t get to 270 and boy were they wrong and there’s no collusion because you know, this Russa thing is a hoax and I never pay for hookers I don’t need to do I look like a man who needs hookers…then Putin said I can fix this for you because it’s a rigged system, rigged system that’s what I call it, have you ever heard that term before I came up with it myself I like the sound of it, and you know, this is all a plot by Democrats and your team is full of Democrats…” etc etc ad nauseum.

And Mueller will smile and nod and write everything down.

Fred Wertheimer and Norm Eisen explain very crisply why the two leaders of the House Freedom Caucus have no business trying to impeach Rosenstein.

Throughout our nation’s history, the House has recognized that impeachment power was not intended to be used for political, partisan or ideological purposes.

Yet apparently no one got the word to Republican Reps. Mark Meadows of North Carolina and Jim Jordan of Ohio. The two leaders of the House Freedom Caucus have threatened Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein with impeachment and now, led by Meadows, Freedom Caucus members have actually drafted articles of impeachment against Rosenstein.

His supposed offense? He had the temerity to refuse to throw open Justice Department files related to special counsel Robert Mueller’s ongoing criminal investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Those two guys who got arrested in a Philadelphia Starbucks for doing what white people do all the time? They settled with the city.

Two black men arrested for sitting at a Philadelphia Starbucks without ordering anything settled with the city Wednesday for a symbolic $1 each and a promise from officials to set up a $200,000 program for young entrepreneurs.

The men and their lawyer told The Associated Press the settlement was an effort to make sure something positive came out of the incident.

“We thought long and hard about it and we feel like this is the best way to see that change that we want to see,” said Donte Robinson, one of those arrested. “It’s not a right-now thing that’s good for right now, but I feel like we will see the true change over time.”

They’re young entrepreneurs themselves. I think it’s brilliant jiu-jitsu to turn the degrading treatment they got into opportunities for others. (One hopes Philly won’t focus the program exclusively on young white entrepreneurs.)

Today Trump is basically at war with the Justice Department, so things could probably speed up a good deal now. Maddow was saying that last night, in response to these little explosions that keep coming from the Times at the end of the Times-timezone day. List of questions! Mueller threatens to subpoena! Trump threatens everything in sight!

There was no Collusion (it is a Hoax) and there is no Obstruction of Justice (that is a setup & trap). What there is is Negotiations going on with North Korea over Nuclear War, Negotiations going on with China over Trade Deficits, Negotiations on NAFTA, and much more. Witch Hunt!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 2, 2018

He calls it a setup and a trap that he told Comey to protect Flynn and fired Comey to protect himself and told the Russians he fired Comey to remove the pressure on himself. It’s not a setup and it’s not a trap.

“The questions are an intrusion into the President’s Article 2 powers under the Constitution to fire any Executive Branch Employee…what the President was thinking is an outrageous…..as to the President’s unfettered power to fire anyone…” Joe Digenova, former US Attorney

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 2, 2018

Scavino isn’t very good at excerpting, is he.

NEW BOOK – A MUST READ! “The Russia Hoax – The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump” by the brilliant Fox News Legal Analyst Gregg Jarrett. A sad chapter for law enforcement. A rigged system!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 2, 2018

A Rigged System – They don’t want to turn over Documents to Congress. What are they afraid of? Why so much redacting? Why such unequal “justice?” At some point I will have no choice but to use the powers granted to the Presidency and get involved!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 2, 2018

He’s trashing the legal system and the Congress because they won’t let him be a dictator. It’s an astounding spectacle.

Now we know why he tweeted this — The Justice Department informed Meadows and Jordan *Monday* that it won't turn over the Rosenstein memo detailing the scope of the special counsel’s investigation because it pertains to an ongoing criminal investigation, per @LauraAJarrett. https://t.co/CUaXJhdEym

— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) May 2, 2018

Report civilian casualties in drone strikes? Nah, says the Trump administration, not gonna do that.

The Trump administration has chosen to ignore an executive order that requires the White House to issue an annual report on the number of civilians and enemy fighters killed by American counterterrorism strikes.

The mandate for the report, which was due May 1, was established by former president Barack Obama in 2016 as part of a broader effort to lift the veil of secrecy surrounding drone operations in places such as Yemen, Somalia and Libya. The White House has not formally rescinded the Obama-era executive order but has chosen not to comply with some aspects of it.

It’s part of their broader “be more shit to foreign brown people” strategy.

The decision on the civilian casualty report is part of a broader shift in U.S. counterterrorism policy to withhold more information about U.S. drone strikes and the rules governing them, reversing Obama-era policies dating to 2013.

At the time, Obama sought to impose restrictions on drone strikes that allowed the United States to kill enemy fighters almost anywhere in the world without putting U.S. personnel at risk.

“The same human progress that gives us the technology to strike half a world away also demands the discipline to constrain that power or risk abusing it,” Obama said in 2013 when he announced new rules of engagement governing drone operations.

Obviously that wouldn’t sit well with Trump. He’s all about abusing power, and if there’s anything he can’t be doing with, it’s discipline, let alone the discipline to constrain what he sees as his personal power, especially the power to blow up foreign brown people.

Former U.S. counterterrorism officials expressed surprise at the Trump administration’s failure to deliver either report on time. “It is pretty remarkable that they would simply ignore an executive order that remains on the books and also a statutory requirement passed by Congress,” said Joshua Geltzer, a visiting law professor at Georgetown University and former senior counterterrorism official in the Obama administration. “That is just bad governance.”

They call it draining the swamp.

Rosenstein pushes back.

Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein took aim Tuesday at Republican lawmakers who have drafted articles of impeachment against him, saying that he would not comment on documents “that nobody has the courage to put their name on” and asserting that he will not change his behavior in the face of threats.

“I think they should understand by now that the Department of Justice is not going to be extorted,” Rosenstein said. “We’re going to do what’s required by the rule of law, and any kind of threats that anybody makes are not going to affect the way we do our job.”

This was at an event at the Newseum in DC to celebrate Law Day (I kind of thought every day was law day). Yesterday the Post reported that Republican ratbags had drafted impeachment articles against Rosenstein.

Members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus — led by Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) — have been in a long-running feud with Rosenstein and the Justice Department over what they see as a failure to turn over documents on a number of controversial topics, including the surveillance of former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

So that Republican ratbags could use them to sabotage the special counsel’s investigation; gee, how mean of Rosenstein.

Critics see the move as an effort to pressure the Justice Department to turn over documents it shouldn’t, or detract from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe into whether the Trump campaign coordinated with the Kremlin to influence the 2016 election. Rosenstein supervises that probe, because Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from it. The deputy attorney general has in recent weeks become a particular focus of the president’s rage.

And Republican ratbags want to help him put his rage into action.

Asked about the articles of impeachment, Rosenstein quipped, “they can’t even resist leaking their own drafts,” and then compared the document to one the Justice Department seeks in charging someone with a crime.

“We have to affix our signature to the charging document,” he said, adding later, “I just don’t have anything to say about documents like that, that nobody has the courage to put their name on, and that they leak in that way.”

Gutless Republican ratbags.