****
All Times Eastern
3:50AM: President Obama arrives Athens, Greece
6:50AM: President Obama meets with President Prokopis Pavlopoulos; Presidential Mansion
7:30AM: President Obama meets with Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras; Maximos Mansion
8:55AM: President Obama holds a press conference with Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras
12:25PM: President Obama attends a state dinner with President Prokopis Pavlopoulos
****
The Obama Diary 
HEADS UP:
OOOooohhhh, thanks so much for the heads up, NW.
And good morning to you.
GoooooOOOOOOd Morning, Meta.
{{{{sends NW basket of cookies}}}}
Congrats, Meta!
This Greece leader sure is talking and talking and talking. OMG
GM TOD!! Does anyone know if Trump can get his children Top-Secret Clearance? This is unheard of. Especially, if they don’t have a formal role in the Govt. I’m speechless.
I’m reading different views on this, the most recent being is he can give anyone he chooses clearance once he takes office. But he cannot hire them in any official capacity, so it will be interesting to see how the national security apparatus responds when asked to read into our national security process inexperienced people who do not work for the government.
1) Trump is cognitively impaired and unable to process complex information on his own.
2) Trump is unable to function without his children.
3) He is grooming them to be his successors.
Thanks, Meta for the information. I hope the request is declined.
Nepotism is illegal, since none of these spoiled brats have any experience in govt whatsoever.
That being said, it is not hyperbole to admit that this is different than anything we’ve ever seen in America. Because whiny liberals didn’t vote in 2010, 2014 and 2016 there is not one sane GOP with any conscience in Congress to take a principled stand.
I don’t know what to expect. These are dangerous times.
Some more info, very reassuring:
Thank you Meta. I’m feeling a lot better after reading this.
Me, too.
Yes I totally agree with this. I think he is cognitively impaired and literally cannot process complex information especially in written form.
I have noticed an inability to learn through listening due to his limited focus as well as his inability to read well and retain what was read. These qualities are required in order to perform the duties of the presidency. The lack of these abilities would ordinarily mean a person was not eligible to hold the office.
Trump is also asking for clearance for his son-in-law.
POTUS live now.
Excellent intro for our most deserving POTUS. Pay attention Trumpsters, you really have lost.
Michigan is still undecided…..
Why do you say that?
Don’t you mean North Carolina is still counting ballots?
Our Governor race is not decided yet.
❤️
Hilarious….
WOnder if he even realizes that his tweets will be archived….a record of his ignorance and divisiveness
I truly believe that this guy should have had his marbles checked! This is not a grown man of 70 years old, this is a little boy!
good grief. If that doesn’t give ppl pause nothing will.
Luckily, my son has just arrived … with donuts. I shall think about something normal during his visit!
VERY BEST to your son!
❤ I told him and he said "Tell her thanks!" (man of few words while helping me eat the donuts he brought!)
SWEET squared.
Perhaps all 46+ million who didn’t not bother to vote would like one of these ‘souvenirs’, to pass on to their heirs, well, if there is a world left for their heirs.
GM DF.
Think you’ve left for work now, but responding anyway.
JHC. What the HELL is WRONG with our deplorable media???
Are GOP and DJT’s treasonous aides made of kryptonite? Will the MSM melt into a puddle of nothingness if they publish truths about either/both GOP and DJT? Why do/did they give these traitors a frigging pass during the election?
Here’s the tweet @NCBlake refers to:
Posted this last night, but bears repeating in light more buried news, given MSM’s dismal track record:
Good Morning, Everyone 🙂
Good morning Ms. Chips, Danny and TOD family, I hope all is well with everyone this lovely Tuesday morning.
Nerdy, thanks so much for helping Ms. Chips and the sacrifices you are making for us TOD’ers. 💫🙏👌👊❤
To all, I hope that the welcoming look in your eyes, the smile on your face, and the sound of your voice brings joy to others today. ❤ ❤ ❤
Notwithstanding the nightmare of #BuffoonTrump in the Whitehouse, I more than ever Thank God that President Obama is still the President of The United States of America. ⭐🏆 ⭐🏆 ⭐🏆
Do you suppose PBO might be willing to be President of the World?
President of the world, What would Michelle, Malia and Sasha have to say about that.
Anniebella, I reckon they’d have plenty to say! But maybe they would say, Yes. ❤️
I’m just sobbing through this press conference. I’m hit by the depth of dumbing down we will see in this country & worldwide with the loss of this man, this great human being and excellent leader from the world stage. I know he’ll be a most incredible and active private citizen.. but we are going to lose so much without his world leadership, the world’s Advisor.. and with what will take his place.
Count on a bitchy American media question: Is Trump your fault, Mr. President. Fuck you lady.
who asked that question
I didn’t even catch her name or who she was with.
Somebody Chris Jansing or something like that? Don’t watch cable so I don’t always know who these people are.
and I haven’t watched cable news in 8 yrs, so only know media folks from what I pick up here and on twitter 🙂
It was that worthless azz juvenile-instigator #Presstitute Chris Jansing of MSNBC. I stop watching MSNBC, but I do know of her and that wicked azz women Andrea Mitchell. Just saying.
No Trump is the Republicans, the media, the stupid ass voters fault, those who voted for him and those who did not vote and those who wasted their vote, and Russia and Comey. All their fault. People were warn what kind of person Trump was, but they paid it no attention.
And they will NEVER challenge Trump. This is what infuriates me.
nope they won’t we will always have to be the ones.
Wanda Sykes, appearing before a benefit event in recent days, started to mock Trump and the audience booed her. Believe I read she said “Fuck you” and then left the stage pointing at people, repeating, “And fuck you and you and you.”
That’s where I am.
I’ll let Wanda tell it!
LOL Good on Wanda & good on you too JO’B.. it is exactly where I am also. I know I will get past that part, the hate/fuck you stage just so that I can function again, but for right now, I admit I’m wallowing in it somewhat. Fuck ’em all for right now.
Yes, for right now. 🙂
Good morning TOD ….
Lots of lessons ….
#NEVERmyPresident
#STOPtrump
bbl ….
#FORWARD Together
What a s**t show. The transition team just lost 5 days or nearly 10% of their transition days because Mike Pence has failed to sign the necessary paperwork for the transition to proceed after becoming the new head of the team. This is the reason Friday’s meeting was cancelled with PBO’s team, and the paperwork remains unsigned. The level of incompetence is horrifying. If they fail to see the consequences of something like this, unimaginable how clueless they will be on big decisions. Absolute inability to plan anything.
oh criminy. it’s a mess.
GM FFTX.
Is that necessarily a bad thing? Couldn’t DJT and team implode from infighting and incompetence, and bring the GOP down with them?
Maybe their incompetence will be this country’s saving grace.
Arapaho, what has me scared to death is the thought about what our enemies will do immediately after the inauguration. Every president is tested, and he will have more enemies than most. He cannot even count on our traditional allies for help because of what he is doing with Putin. I am very afraid for American lives. No matter how much we despise this man, and I certainly do despise him, he is going to President on January 20. I don’t think there will be much of an issue of him destroying the Republican party, Republican leaders spoke of that before the election (his winning would do more damage to the party than his losing) but I fear for our country if he does not find at least a couple of competent advisers on foreign policy and security.
Agree with you on foreign policy.
That’s why America is blessed beyond reason to have PBO as our President, while our MSM continues to yuck it up (har-har-har) about DJT.
Skipping the MENA powderkeg (far too complicated and tribal for me to grasp), my apocalyptic vision (at its worse, on the shock of election night), I imagined Putin invading the Balkans to test DJT and NATO. I pray this does not happen.
DJT is as qualified as Dennis Rodman to handle North Korea. And China, sensing a power vacuum, issued this warning yesterday:
I’m collecting info and gathering my thoughts on Europe and DJT. I started a tweetstorm (and just noticed a typo, dang), which you can peruse if you like. Europe is perilous because the 3 major powers all face uncertain futures in 2017. UK with #Brexit referendum, France with April elections (and I see there’s a real possibility of either far-right Marine le Pen or Sarkozy — who is now touting himself as the French Trump), and Germany with summer elections.
Domestically at least, there’s a good possibility of gridlock at the cabinet level — next year will be extremely chaotic and messy for everyone in the developed world. For instance, this (and why I am completely IGNORING all the MSM horns blaring about potential cabinet picks):
omg I am sick to read these things. I knew he would pick the worst of the worst.
David Frum, a conservative, just posted a new article on the damage with Europe.
Honestly, it is hard to predict where this play out first. Europe is obviously a problem, Angela’s stance on immigrants has hurt her badly in Germany.
My guess would be the first place we will see DT and perhaps Russia act is Syria, simply because it already is such a mess and DT will want to tout ISIS destroying credentials. He has indicated he will no longer support the moderates, essentially ceding Syria to Assad and Russia.
Russia may well hold off on taking any military actions (outside of Syria) at the moment, what Putin needs more than anything to restore/shore up his powers is to have sanctions lifted. I don’t know how much it will mean to Russia if DT only tries to do it unilaterally and the remainder of NATO does not go along with him. But it will further weaken NATO which is what Putin wants. So that may be the first break and Putin may work more behind the scenes.
The only hope may be McCain. He is as much of a hawk on Russia as anywhere else and has indicated he will fight DT on this. In addition, DT needs him to get his cabinet appointments approved.
That leaves some major move by ISIS. My guess is that they are working on something, hopefully outside the US, but it could provoke DT into sending in forces to some other country.
Bottom line is it is going to be a nightmare.
Obama Is Warning America About Trump’s Presidency. Are You Listening?
BY BRIAN BEUTLER
November 15, 2016
President Barack Obama’s remarks about Donald Trump in his Monday press conference contained some of the most ominous words I’ve heard since news networks began calling the election for Trump early last Wednesday morning. But you may not have heard them.
…………………….
There is a text and a subtext to everything politicians say in public, even ones without more elections to run. It was the subtext of Obama’s press conference that unnerved me.
On the surface, his comments were reassuring. He was chipper. He did not doomsay. He searched for the generous and hopeful things to say about Trump and Trump’s designs on the presidency. But the sum total of his remarks, on close reading, were frightening—a stage-setting, at the very least, for an administration that Obama expects will be hobbled by incompetence and likely to fail.
Obama kept returning to three basic themes: that Trump will be given every opportunity to succeed, thanks to the tutelage Obama and his team will be providing, and the fact Trump won’t be inheriting massive crises—which should give him the kind of running room Obama never enjoyed; that the work of a presidency is ceaseless, and much of it highly detail-oriented; and finally that Trump’s grasp of what he’s been elected to do is at best remedial.
Obama may be subtly trying to communicate to the Trump transition team that they need to make massive strides, and quickly, or they will be, in Obama’s words, “swamped.” But his expectation that Trump and his entourage will get their act together is clearly very low.
“The most important point I made,” Obama told reporters at the White House, referring to his conversation last week with Trump, “was that how you staff—particularly your chief of staff, your national security adviser, your White House counsel, how you set up a process and a system to surface information, generate options for a president, understanding that ultimately the president is gong to be the final decision maker, that that’s something that’s going to have to be attended to right away.”
This was all accurate, but it was a way of saying that Trump is the first president in living memory not to have even passing knowledge of how a White House operation runs.
Obama repeatedly touted the fact that Trump will be inheriting many advantages: low unemployment, rising incomes and wages, a historically low uninsurance rate, stable financial systems, a high stock market, strong international alliances, and cheap gasoline. Given the baseline Trump will inherit, Obama’s reminder that “the American people will judge over the next couple of years whether they like what they see” suggests a suspicion that many of these metrics will worsen once Trump takes over.
When he was stumping for Hillary Clinton, Obama frequently noted the basic aspects of the presidency: that the office wouldn’t change Trump’s temperamental failures, but only magnify them. On Monday, Obama suggested that the only way around this potentially catastrophic problem would be to outsource aspects of the job which don’t suit his temperament to less erratic people.
https://newrepublic.com/article/138757/obama-warning-america-trumps-presidency-listening
He said even more at the Greek press conference. I think he’s being quite clear in his language.
Inform your networks
THIS
Hello, people? Wake up!!!
Doesn’t matter meta. My understanding is that IRS audits the tax returns of the President and VP every year. So his “not while under audit” excuse will work every year of his presidency. Nor is there any requirement for either the President or VP to disclose their returns while in office. Unfortunately, we are about to find out how weak the restrictions are and how they can be abused. Another “norm” versus requirement that is about to fall. We will never see a Trump return. Bet on it.
Yep.
Never gonna happen.
Just curious, is anyone having trouble pulling up The Obama Diary? For the last few days at work the website would not come up.
I had trouble this morning Don. I had to shut my cellphone down a couple of times.
The words in Cohen’s tweet sounds like a perfect formula for failure.
GM/GA LH.
Despite the horrors of DJT et. al. (agree with BobFr and FoxfireTX on the previous overnight thread — global catastrophe not seen since the end of WWII), my greatest hope is that this so-called administration will implode from their own incompetence and that the GOP civil war has yet to begun — may happen if MSM stops pledging allegiance to DJT and the GOP.
So funny! “WE are all in this together” bullshit! I did not vote for this MF’er! He obviously was not talking to the Mexicans immigrants who are here with families, jobs, businesses, homes; women, African Americans, Latins, Asians, Muslims, etc.,
back to work ….
#STOPtrump
Bob the rape charge was dropped last week due to harassment and fear. Not sure on this, but I believe there is a Supreme Court case that provides that you cannot be sued while in office as the president due to need to govern. DT’s lawyers are seeking a continuation of his fraud trial until after the inauguration, I suspect for this reason. They are due back in court on Friday. I also saw something float by somewhere that Judge Curiel is urging the plaintiffs to settle. This thing will never get tried with his election.
Nothing stopping the Justice Department from offering publicly to provide protection to the plaintiff given that the threats to her life have been transmitted beyond State borders. She is being terrorized and thereby denied her Constitutional rights.
The plaintiffs in the fraud trial have absolutely no reason to settle and if any of them actually understand the scale of the threat to humanity that #KKKtrump represents they will insist on going to trial.
This is not a game.
Bob, DOJ does not get involved in private disputes even if intimidation. Second, these folks are not going to fight on behalf of the rest of us and in any event their lawyers are telling them to settle. Believe me, I did this type of work for years. Every lawyer’s first obligation is to their clients and in this instance that means getting for them what the lawyers can now. These will settle before the inauguration for that reason. They will also be under severe pressure from the Judge to do so, and in the end Judge Curiel will force a fair settlement for them. In the most extreme of cases, I had a federal judge tell me at 11:00 pm at night to have my client from NY personally appear in his courtroom in MN at 8:00 the next morning. That is the way the world works.
I am not trying to shoot you down here, my friend, just being realistic about what is going to happen. This route is a waste of time.
She’s being terrorized across State lines …. here Constitutional rights are being violated … that’s all I’ve got to say ….
Those folk suing Trump U have a much bigger case to win … in court … much bigger …
Kurt Eichenwald did his job in warning us, but the media were to busy covering Hillary’s non scandal emails.
He did a good job, but it was too late and DT’s supporters are not reading Newsweek:-) Many aren’t reading at all, just watching Fox which is a big part of the problem.
#STOPtrump
back to work ….
LIVE NOW: Greece Holds State Dinner in Honor of Pres. Obama – http://abcnews.go.com/live?stream=6
President Barack Obama and his Greek counterpart Prokopis Pavlopoulos (L) review a presidential honour guard during the official welcoming ceremony at the presidential palace in Athens on November 15, 2016.
GM/GA TODville.
Hope DC does what it can to tamp down the deplorable spectacle that must happen in January:
GA, arapho – I must admit when I saw “not erecting parade bleachers,” my mind went to “or just leave some of the nails and screws and bolts out.”
Oops. I think I’ll just leave all that to karma, so I don’t bring any bad luck to nice people.
McCain voted for Trump so he can take a seat.
Exactly. And he has nothing to lose now by issuing a so-called statement.
My President
I expected him to be at 60% by the time of the election. Didn’t quite make it, his rating just before if i remember correctly was 58%, but hopefully will make it by January 20! Looking forward to watching this:-) Need something happy in our days.
Our wonderful First Lady is hosting the 2016 National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Awards right now.
They could elect pretty much anybody to those two roles now, and it won’t make a damn bit of difference.
And the white working class were stupid enough to elect a billionaire who have never gave a dam about working class folks before.
Exactly, Matt.
New York overwhelmingly agreed on his bill in 2014, joining nine other states and Washington, D.C. Together, they have 165 electoral votes. If they gain a total of 270 — the majority needed to elect a president — the nation will move to a popular vote.
President Barack Obama (R) is greeted by Greek Minister of Defence Panagiotis Kommenos (L) upon his arrival at Eleftherios Venizelos International Airport
While Rome burns … get a puppy.
Our young people know what’s up.
Except that they’re dressed better, it’s like baby boomers back in the ’60s and ’70s.
I’m proud of them!
Me, too! So very much.
Once we start to rebuild the infrastructure, what we will do with it is a most important question. If this election’s narrative, the importance of “white working class” as the all-important demographic, takes hold, all the infrastructure in the world will not be able to rescue our party. Our infrastructure must talk to everyone, but it must understand that our future is rebuilding the Obama coalition, not in stoking the white egos of the white working class. If we do not, if we tone down our defense of the marginalized, we will not only have lost an election but our moral bearings.
New post.
https://theobamadiary.com/2016/11/15/mannequinchallenge-a-call-to-action/
NOW: House Democrats Address the Media – http://abcnews.go.com/live?stream=4
If only profiles in courage abounded.
Enough representatives to the Electoral College would switch votes to Clinton.
Enough elected officials in Congress would switch parties to Democrat, or vote every time with Democrats. Republicans putting out individual statements from this point on, that they won’t support this or that, are just covering bases – making no impact whatsoever.
Wake me when this happens, please.
I mean, this is insane. Apparently the only requirement for the highest office of the land is to have ZERO experience.