the rich asshole on Roy Moore: 'We Don't Need a Liberal Democrat' in Seat
Tuesday, 21 Nov 2017 03:38 PM
President some rich asshole on Tuesday appeared to discount allegations of sexual misconduct by GOP Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore — repeatedly saying the former judge "totally denies it — you have to listen to him also."
He also suggested it was more important for voters to ensure a Democrat was not elected in the state's special election Dec. 12.
"I can tell you one thing for sure, we don't need a liberal person in there, a Democrat," he told reporters about Doug Jones, who is running against Moore.
the rich asshole spoke to reporters Tuesday at the White House before leaving for a Thanksgiving break at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida.
"Forty years is a long time, and this has never come up," the rich asshole said of the allegations from multiple women who claimed sexual misconduct by Moore when they were teenagers and he was in his 30s.
"He denies it," the rich asshole repeatedly asserted about Moore. "I mean, if you look at what is really going on, and you look at all the things that have happened over the last 48 hours, he totally denies it."
"He says it didn't happen," the rich asshole continued. "And you know, you have to listen to him also. You are talking about – he said 40 years ago this did not happen."
the rich asshole said he would announce next week if he would campaign for Moore.
"But I can tell you-you don't need somebody who is soft on crime like Jones," he said.
"I've looked at his record," the rich asshole added. "It's terrible on crime. It's terrible on the border. It's terrible on the military. I can tell you for a fact we do not need somebody that's going to be bad on crime, bad on borders, bad with the military, bad for the Second Amendment."
the rich asshole's position is a break from other national Republicans, who have called on Moore to step aside.
Moore's campaign has been in turmoil since The Washington Post published a story detailing the accounts of three women who claim he pursued them while they were teenagers and he was in his 30s. More women have since spoken out with allegations of their own.
Moore, 70, has denied any wrongdoing.
Reuters has been unable to independently confirm any of the accusations.
Before the allegations came to light, Moore was heavily favored to defeat Democrat Doug Jones, a former federal prosecutor, in the special election Dec. 12.
some rich asshole comes out in support of Roy Moore, could campaign next week
some rich asshole finally opened up about the Roy Moore scandal, and is backing the Republican despite the allegations against him.
Over the last month, one of the biggest stories in American politics has involved the campaign of Republican #Roy Moore. As the scandal of alleged sexual assault hovers over the Moore campaign, #some rich aasshole appears to be standing by his side [VIDEO].
the rich asshole on Moore
It was earlier this month when the Washington Post broke their bombshell story [VIDEO] revealing the claims of four women who allege that they were sexually pursued by Roy Moore when they were underage, with the oldest story dating back to 1979. The paper cited 30 sources to back up the story, which has led to even more women coming forward, with at least one claiming sexual assault.
As expected, Moore has denied the allegations, referring to them as a smear job done by the "liberal media" in an attempt to derail his campaign. Moore is scheduled to run in next month's special election to fill the senate seat in Alabama left vacant by current Attorney General Jeff Sessions. While Moore was expected to have an easy victory in the typically red state, recent polls shows Democratic nominee Doug Jones with the edge. Following the news going public, some rich asshole and the #White House attempted to keep their distance but were later put into a difficult position when Presidential Counsel Kellyanne Conway appeared to support Moore during an interview on Fox News over the weekend. As reported by The Hill on November 21, the president looks to be lending his support.
#BREAKING: Trump appears to throw support behind Moore: "We don't need a Democrat in the seat" hill.cm/msWIS1v
Not long after taking part in the traditional Thanksgiving turkey pardon at the White House, some rich asshole spoke to reporters and was questioned on where he stands in regards to the sexual assault and harassment scandal involving Roy Moore.
"We don’t need a liberal Democrat in the seat," the rich asshole said, in apparent support of Moore winning the election.
Trump: “Roy Moore denies it— that’s all I can say.”
"He denies it. He totally denies it," some rich asshole stated. Doubling down, the rich asshole added, "Roy Moore denies it, that's all I can say." In conclusion, the president was asked if he would campaign for Moore, to which he replied, "We’ll have to let you know next week."
Backlash
some rich asshole has come under fire in recent weeks ever since the New York Times revealed their own story about the sexual assault scandal involving film producer Harvey Weinstein. Since then, many high-profiled men have been accused of similar behavior, which appears to be in lockstep with the allegations directed at the rich asshole by a dozen women just one year ago. While the rich asshole has refused to bash Moore, he took time to call out Democratic Sen. Al Franken after a radio host accused him of inappropriate behavior, in what many critics have called hypocritical.
the rich asshole Defends Roy Moore, Citing Candidate’s Denial of Allegations
WASHINGTON — President the rich asshole defended Roy S. Moore, the Alabama Republican Senate candidate accused of sexual misconduct with minors, saying on Tuesday that Mr. Moore “totally denies” the allegations against him.
some rich asshole said that Alabama voters should not support Doug Jones, the Democratic candidate running against Mr. Moore in a special election next month.
“We don’t need a liberal person in there, a Democrat, Jones,” some rich asshole said. “I’ve looked at his record. It’s terrible on crime. It’s terrible on the border. It’s terrible on the military.”
some rich asshole declined to say whether he would campaign for Mr. Moore in the final days before the election, adding that he would let reporters know next week about his plans. Asked by a reporter whether electing an accused child molester is better than electing a Democrat, some rich asshole responded by saying that Mr. Moore denies the charges against him.
“If you look at what is really going on, and you look at all the things that have happened over the last 48 hours, he totally denies it,” some rich asshole said. “He says it didn’t happen. You have to listen to him also.”
some rich asshole had declined to weigh in on the charges against Mr. Moore for more than a week, leaving it to his press secretary to say only that the president believed it was up to Alabama voters to decide.
some rich asshole had issued an earlier statement expressing confidence that Mr. Moore would step aside if the charges against him were true.
In brief comments on Air Force One during his recent trip to Asia, some rich asshole said he had not had time to examine the allegations against Mr. Moore. He added, “I’ll have further comment as we go down the road. I have to get back into the country to see what’s happening.”
Speaking on Tuesday before he left for his Thanksgiving break in Palm Beach, Florida, some rich asshole also responded to a question about what a reporter called “this pivotal moment” regarding sexual assault.
“Women are very special,” the president said. “I think it’s a very special time, a lot of things are coming out, and I think that’s good for our society and I think it’s very very good for women, and I’m very happy these things are coming out.”
But he declined to say whether Senator Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota, who has been accused by two women of inappropriate sexual conduct, should resign from the Senate.
“I don’t want to speak for Al Franken,” he said.
some rich asshole’s defense of Mr. Moore and his rejection of his Democratic opponent in the race were tantamount to an endorsement of Mr. Moore, who has been abandoned by nearly all of the Republican establishment in Washington.
Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, has called on Mr. Moore to step aside as a candidate, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee has severed ties with Mr. Moore, saying it would no longer raise money for his campaign.
some rich asshole took a different stance on Tuesday. After campaigning unsuccessfully against Mr. Moore during the Republican primary earlier this year, the president had appeared uneasy about getting involved in the race again. His decision to defend Mr. Moore appeared likely to please his conservative base, which is frustrated with establishment Republicans like Mr. McConnell.
Hawaii has week to respond to the rich asshole request to reinstate full travel ban: court
BY LYDIA WHEELER - 11/21/17 12:49 PM EST
The Supreme Court is giving the state of Hawaii until next Tuesday to respond to the rich asshole administration’s request that the court allow the full version of President the rich asshole’s travel ban to take effect.
The court’s Public Information Office said a response has been requested and is due by noon on Nov. 28.
A three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled last week the administration could bar the entry of people from Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, and Chad, but only if they lack a connection to the U.S.
The government had asked the 9th Circuit court to stay a district court order that largely blocked the rich asshole’s new targeted restrictions on immigrants from Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Chad and North Korea, as well as certain government officials from Venezuela.
The order from Hawaii District Judge Derrick Watson carved out an exemption for Venezuelan officials and immigrants from North Korea.
He said the latest travel ban suffered from the same maladies as the previous 90-day ban on nationals from six majority-Muslim countries: Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Somalia and Yemen, which the Supreme Court largely reinstated in June.
In appealing to the Supreme Court on Monday, the administration argued the president’s Sept. 24 proclamation is different from the president’s previous travel ban in process and substance.
“The proclamation covers different countries than the prior orders: it removes one majority-Muslim country; adds other countries, some of which are not majority-Muslim; and excludes various nonimmigrant travelers from all but one of the majority-Muslim countries,” Solicitor General Noel Francisco wrote in his request to the court.
“These differences confirm that the Proclamation is based on national-security and foreign-affairs objectives, not religious animus.”
the rich asshole's golf course reimbursed his charity after using funds to settle lawsuit
BY JOHN BOWDEN - 11/21/17 09:41 AM EST
The rich asshole Foundation was paid more than $158,000 by The the rich asshole National Golf Club in Westchester County, N.Y., last year as a reimbursement for a lawsuit settlement against the club, a new tax filing reveals.
The Washington Post reported Tuesday that the New York golf club settled a lawsuit with Martin Greenberg in 2010 over the payout for a golf tournament held at the club. The the rich asshole Foundation sent a $158,000 donation to the Martin Greenberg Foundation the day the case settled, according to the newspaper.
In the 2016 tax filing, the the rich asshole Foundation says that the money was raised largely by auctioning off a membership position in the club, and that the money was wired through the foundation.
The rich asshole Foundation is President the rich asshole's private charity foundation based in New York, and is currently under investigation by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman (D) into how it collects and disburses funds. the rich asshole has said he will shutter the foundation when Schneiderman's investigation is completed.
"The Foundation has done enormous good works over the years in contributing millions of dollars to countless worthy groups, including supporting veterans, law enforcement officers and children," the rich asshole said in December. "However, to avoid even the appearance of any conflict with my role as President I have decided to continue to pursue my strong interest in philanthropy in other ways."
The latest filing obtained by The Washington Post “definitely reflects an effort to get the house in order, so to speak, before shutting down,” former IRS official Marcus Owens told the newspaper.
The move in 2010 raises questions as to whether the charity was involved in "self-dealing," which is the process of using charitable funds to benefit oneself or one's personal business.
The rich asshole Organization told the newspaper in a statement that it is cooperating fully with Schneiderman's investigation.
the rich asshole pardons Thanksgiving turkey, jokes about overturning Obama's
BY JUDY KURTZ - 11/21/17 01:27 PM EST
President the rich asshole says that while he's been "very active" in overturning Obama-era policies, revoking turkey pardons won't be among them.
"As many of you know, I've been very active in overturning a number of executive actions by my predecessor," the rich asshole said as he participated in his first turkey pardoning ceremony on Tuesday in the Rose Garden.
"However, I have been informed by the White House counsel's office that Tater and Tot's pardons cannot, under any circumstances, be revoked," he added, referring to the turkeys pardoned by former President Barack Obama last year.
"So we're not going to revoke them. So Tater and Tot: You can rest easy.”
Introducing the two turkeys picked for this year's ceremony, Wishbone and Drumstick, the rich asshole told the crowd, "Over the past 10 months, Melania and I have had the pleasure of welcoming many, many special visitors to the great White House."
"We've hosted dozens of incredible world leaders, members of Congress, and along the way, a few very strange birds," he continued. "But we have yet to receive any visitors quite like our magnificent guest of honor today, Drumstick."
While it was the rich asshole's inaugural turkey pardon as commander in chief, the tradition of a president giving the feathered creatures a Thanksgiving reprieve was started by former President George H.W. Bush in 1989, according to the White House Historical Association, though it began as far back as the administration of Abraham Lincoln.
The National Turkey Federation first presented a turkey to President Harry Truman in 1947, making this year the 70th anniversary of the Thanksgiving ritual.
Following their time in the spotlight at the White House, this year’s Minnesota-raised birds will head to the “Gobblers Rest” exhibit at Virginia Tech, where they'll be cared for by students and veterinarians.
Tater and Tot currently reside on the Blacksburg campus.
Although Drumstick was chosen as the 2017 National Thanksgiving Turkey via an online vote, both birds will live out their days in Virginia.
According to the White House, the 47-pound turkey's favorite band is Journey and it has a "tall and proud" strut style.
"Drumstick I think is going to be very, very happy," the rich asshole said, adding the turkey has a "very bright future ahead of him."
the rich asshole continued to smile and pose for photos with wife Melania and their son Barron as someone in the press area was heard shouting, "Will you pardon any people?" following the ceremony.
the rich asshole's 24-year-old daughter, Tiffany, was spotted sitting in the audience at the annual event. Older daughter and White House adviser Ivanka the rich asshole was eyed along with her 6-year-old daughter, Arabella, as they approached the turkeys after the pardoning ceremony.
Federal judge rules the rich asshole defunding sanctuary cities 'unconstitutional on its face'
BY OLIVIA BEAVERS - 11/20/17 09:23 PM EST
A federal court on Monday blocked President the rich asshole's executive order halting certain federal funds for so-called sanctuary cities, calling it "unconstitutional on its face."
"The defendants are permanently enjoined from enforcing Section 9(a) of the Executive Order against jurisdictions they deem as sanctuary jurisdictions. Because Section 9(a) is unconstitutional on its face, and not simply in its application to the plaintiffs here, a nationwide injunction against the defendants other than President the rich asshole is appropriate," U.S. District Judge William Orrick ruled.
The injunction comes after Orrick issued a temporary ruling in late April that blocked the rich asshole’s directive to withhold some federal funding from cities that refuse to comply fully with federal immigration enforcement, siding with San Francisco and Santa Clara County.
The California municipalities had sued over the order, arguing that more than $2 billion in federal funding could be at stake.
Orrick, who was appointed by former President Obama, made his April decision permanent on Monday.
The Department of Justice slammed the decision in a statement, claiming the court overstepped its authority.
“The District Court exceeded its authority today when it barred the President from instructing his cabinet members to enforce existing law. The Justice Department will vindicate the President’s lawful authority to direct the executive branch,” said spokesman Devin O’Malley.
In a statement about his ruling on the case, Orrick dismissed the federal government's argument that the "the Executive Order was meant to be far more narrow than I interpreted it, a mere directive to the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice that does not seek to place any new conditions on federal funds."
"I concluded that the County of Santa Clara and the City and County of San Francisco had pre-enforcement standing to protect hundreds of millions of dollars of federal grants from the unconstitutionally broad sweep of the Executive Order," Orrick wrote.
USA Today reporter Brad Heath first highlighted the court ruling.
Updated at 11:10 p.m.the
11-20-17
A federal judge in California has blocked President the rich asshole’s executive order to cut funding from sanctuary cities that don’t cooperate with U.S. immigration officials.
U.S. District Court Judge William Orrick issued the ruling Monday in lawsuits brought by San Francisco and Santa Clara counties. According to the judge, the rich asshole can’t set new conditions on spending approved by Congress.
The judge had previously put a temporary hold on the executive order.
The rich asshole administration has appealed that decision to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Ex-Fox employee: I was barred from investigating the rich asshole-Russia — and fired for reporting harassment
Former Fox News radio correspondent Jessica Golloher (image via screengrab).
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A former Fox News radio correspondent claims that the network barred her from traveling to Moscow to report on potential connections between President some rich asshole and Russia.
According to Bloomberg, ex-Fox employee Jessica Golloher testified before the British Parliament Monday as they were hearing arguments for and against the network’s acquisition of the European Sky Plc. network, and was one of multiple former employees that discussed the network’s bias.
“Fox didn’t let me go to Moscow to dig into the rich asshole’s Russian connections, even when I offered to pay my own way,” Golloher, who is now baed in Israel but previously worked in Moscow, said in her testimony. “You can’t do in-depth reporting if you’re not there.”
“Fox is just buying what the White House is selling,” she continued.
Earlier in 2017, Golloher filed a lawsuit against the company claiming she was fired for using their harassment hotline. Fox has denied both her claim of gender discrimination and her allegation that they wouldn’t allow her to travel to Moscow.
As Bloomberg noted, this is the second time this year Fox has been accused of shifting attention away from the rich asshole’s links to Russia on the administration’s behest. In August, a lawsuit alleged the administration pushed the network to publish about murdered Democratic National Committee employee Seth Rich to divert attention from the Russia probe.
Incompetence is a feature for the Republican Party — not a flaw
some rich asshole pictured on day three of the Republican National Convention at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio on July 20, 2016 (AFP Photo/Jim Watson)
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It has been said that Newt Gingrich is “a dumb person’s idea of a smart person.” Who coined that phrase is a matter of scholarly dispute, but there is broad agreement that the sentiment is applicable. I will go further and say this characteristic of Newt’s is not just a personal foible; it establishes a model for Republican politicians and operatives since his time in Congress.
Having had the opportunity as a former congressional staffer to experience his speakership up close, it was clear to me that Gingrich had a ready opinion on every subject from aardvarks to Zoroastrianism. He was usually wrong. But through a combination of confident and aggressive assertion, citation of “facts” and “statistics” that, while specious and cherry-picked, the listener was not in any position to immediately refute, and the glibness that masquerades as eloquence, he dominated his colleagues and set the House of Representatives on its path to becoming the extremely unfunny joke it is today.
Consistent with his pose as a public intellectual, Gingrich schmoozed with Alvin Toffler, the author of Future Shock. Yet one of his first acts on assuming the speakership was to abolish the Office of Technology Assessment, an agency solely responsible to Congress and which gave an appraisal of new technologies independent of executive branch puffery.
He also slashed the budgets of the General Accounting Office (GAO), the Congressional Research Service and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), impairing Congress’ ability to receive disinterested evaluation of a vast range of subjects. Who needs CBO (now a favorite whipping boy of congressional Republicans) when you know that tax cuts increase revenue?
What began with Gingrich has culminated in the nightmare of the rich asshole presidency, where wildly incompetent pseudo-experts run riot through the government and endanger the well-being of the general public. America has become a laboratory to test whether its institutions can weather the present flood of Republican expertise.
Republicans: Assuring National Insecurity
The national security functions of government have long been a subject of mystification: the public and the press have a tendency to regard its practitioners as a kind of priesthood possessing an arcane and special knowledge. But long before the rich asshole, the GOP treated it as a political reward for crackpot ideologues whose credentials were thin or nil.
Bill Kristol, whose only qualification for anything was being the offspring of Irving Kristol, somehow blossomed in the late 1990s as a Republican national security expert. His current claim to fame is being wrong about everything; that has not prevented him from making a comfortable living via the “wingnut welfare” provided by right-wing media.
Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense under George W. Bush, caused my jaw to drop in February 2003, when he informed the House Budget Committee on which I served that the invasion of Iraq would probably result in fewer US casualties than the near-negligible number the military suffered in the Balkan intervention, and also that the invasion would pay for itself through Iraq’s oil revenues.
While his testimony immediately aroused concern if not derision in the country, most Republican committee members seemed to eat it up as the wisdom of a latter-day Clausewitz. On leaving the Pentagon, Wolfowitz’s gold watch for confecting such prophecies was the presidency of the World Bank.
The Republican so-called experts’ pronouncements weren’t exactly unplanned. In early 2001, just before George W. Bush’s inauguration, the Heritage Foundation produced a policy document intended to help the incoming administration choose personnel. The authors stated the following:
. . . the Office of Presidential Personnel must make appointment decisions based on loyalty first and expertise second, and the whole governmental apparatus must be managed from this perspective.
A decade and a half later, the rich asshole’s operatives must have been impressed by one of the document’s authors, George Nesterczuk; he was nominated to become director of the Office of Personnel Management, but later withdrew his nomination, complaining about “partisan attacks” (possibly a euphemism for “careful scrutiny”).
the rich asshole has built on Bush’s national security legacy. His first deputy national security adviser was K.T. McFarland, While she held national security positions in previous administrations, what probably commended her to the rich asshole’s handlers was her stint as a national security “expert” on Fox News, a sinecure and career booster for the right-wing nomenklatura. From that perch, she recommended that Vladimir Putin be granted the Nobel Peace Prize. Foreign policy writer Jim Lobe describes her expertise here.
It also must have helped that she ran for the Senate in New York in 2006. Although she was heavily defeated in the GOP primary, she claimed that the campaign of the incumbent Democrat, Hillary Clinton, was spying on her through her bedroom window and flying helicopters over her house in the Hamptons. When called out on it, after denying she was serious, she later told a New York Post gossip columnist that news of her “helicopters” remark had unhinged her: “I sat in a ratty old robe, tears spilling down my face. To ease my anguish, I killed off half a pint of ice cream. Next morning, I was in the fetal position. Still crying.” To GOP talent scouts these days, anyone who spreads conspiracy theories about Clinton is bound to appear highly qualified.
Another early pick for the rich asshole national security team was Sebastian Gorka named deputy assistant to the president for terrorism issues. Although this pompous little martinet insists on being called “Dr.,” his Hungarian Ph.D. sounds suspiciously like the product of a diploma mill. His reputation since then has been “widely disdained within his own field.”
His professional seriousness may be inferred by his proposal to keep Muslims out of Hungary by affixing pigs’ heads to the country’s border fences, and by showing up at the rich asshole’s inaugural ball costumed and bemedalled like the Balkan despot in a Marx Brothers movie.
His garment and insignia pin were seen as a reference to Vitézi Rend, a Hungarian organization that is a legacy of Hungary’s collaboration with Nazi Germany, causing some Senate Democrats to publicly wonder why Gorka’s membership in the group (a charge Gorka has strongly denied) did not make him excludable from the country. It may also account for his never receiving a security clearance high enough to be appropriate to his sensitive White House position.
Gen. Kelly: New Broom or Partisan Hack?
McFarland and Gorka are now gone from the White House. Is this a sign that a new seriousness is prevailing at the White House? Although McFarland landed on her feet (the rich asshole nominated her to be ambassador to Singapore), Gorka’s departure from government was widely attributed to the arrival of Gen. John Kelly as White House chief of staff (predictably, Fox News is now providing Gorka with wingnut welfare).
But as we have seen in the distasteful episode involving Kelly’s public feud with a Florida congresswoman over the rich asshole’s perfunctory condolence call to the widow of a fallen soldier, the usual press and public tendency to genuflect to a high-ranking military officer could be misplaced in his case. At the same White House press briefing in which he insulted the congresswoman, his reputation was further tarnished by his refusal to call on reporters who didn’t have a connection to Gold Star military families, thus suggesting that military members are of a higher social caste, as in Wilhelmine Germany.
While his comments about the congresswomen might have been inflammatory (in three decades on the Hill, I never heard an administration staffer insult a member of Congress in a room full of reporters), they might have been attributable to a faulty memory. But when documentary evidence surfaced that his statements were false, he refused to retract them, proving that he was not misinformed, but doubling down on a lie.
Lying and bullying are not necessarily signs of professional incompetence, but what about Kelly’s own expertise? When he was commander of the US Southern Command, he publicly stated that the border area where Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay meet is a training ground for Hezbollah, a wacky belief out of the right-wing paranoia factories. With the existence of very real national security threats and the need to prioritize them, do we really need government officials who fall for such stuff?
Given the ongoing horrific situation in Puerto Rico, it is surprising that the media have not dug further into the state of disaster preparedness at the Department of Homeland Security under Kelly. Could it be that his prioritization of the rich asshole’s border wall caused him to neglect other responsibilities in his portfolio, such as overseeing the Federal Emergency Management Agency? If budgets are statements of priority, that would seem to be the case.
Weird Science
The most visible positions in the rich asshole administration that show the real-world implications of Republicans’ preference for inverted expertise are those requiring credentials in science, as the well-known controversies involving the Environmental Protection Agency and government climate policy already have shown.
My first brush with the GOP mindset about science came during my tenure on the Senate Budget Committee in the mid-2000s. When the issue of Agent Orange toxicity came up at the staff level, the committee analyst for health care issues authoritatively stated to me that the chemical’s adverse health effects were unproven, and that the controversy was the result of whiny Vietnam veterans trying to get on board the government benefits gravy train.
In the real world, exhaustive research has shown the chemical’s powerful carcinogenic effects and the potential triggering of birth defects; Dow Chemical, a producer of the product, had known about these side effects since the 1960s. The analyst in question went on to work his magic on health care policy at Bush’s Office of Management and Budget.
A decade later, Republican science policy has progressed to the point where, as a matter of routine, studies are quashed, scientists purged, and policies resembling a voodoo spell promulgated. To justify ridding its boards of scientists who ever received a grant from the EPA and replacing them with industry-friendly shills, administrator Scott Pruitt referenced the Book of Joshua for support.
Pruitt has named Michael Honeycutt to head the EPA’s Science Advisory Board. Honeycutt decries EPA’s current too-strict standards for exposure to mercury (a neurotoxin causing severe brain damage), and believes ozone pollution levels can be relaxed if people just stay indoors. Another alternative scientist brought on board is Robert Phalen, who has stated that “modern air is a little too clean for optimum health.”
No catalogue of science experts would be complete without Sam Clovis, until lately the rich asshole’s nominee for chief scientist at the Department of Agriculture. He is not a scientist, and his only agricultural expertise comes from having lived in Iowa, albeit in non-agricultural vocations. He has recently withdrawn his nomination, evidently because his real qualifications for an administration job are now being examined by Robert Mueller’s team of investigators.
the rich asshole’s A-Team
the rich asshole’s secretary of education is Betsy DeVos, a billionaire heiress to the Amway fortune, sister of Blackwater murder-squad entrepreneur Erik Prince, and a major Republican contributor. Her only qualifications for education policy expertise, other than those listed in the previous sentence, are her ambition to replace sound science teaching with biblical studies, and her desire that the flow of public money into public education be diverted to for-profit corporations. Her driving pedagogical zeal may be inferred from her statement that historically black colleges are “pioneers” of “school choice” rather than a forced adaptation to Jim Crow policies.
the rich asshole’s other stellar cabinet picks include failed presidential candidate Ben Carson as secretary of housing and urban development. His resume is rather thin on housing policy, but his theory, stated during the Republican primaries, that the Egyptian pyramids were grain storage structures rather than pharaonic tombs, may have clinched him the nomination for a job involving a cutting-edge knowledge of buildings.
Another distinguished public servant is Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, who during the Republican presidential primary debates in 2011 could not remember the name of the federal government department he wanted to abolish and now leads. He also said how surprised he was after being nominated to head DOE when he stumbled onto the fact that it is the entity responsible for America’s nuclear arsenal, an activity which consumes more than half the department’s budget.
This is surely testimony to Perry’s relentless intellectual curiosity, given that DOE’s Pantex Plant, the country’s primary nuclear weapons assembly and disassembly facility, is located in Texas, the state of which he was governor for 15 years.
This glaring lack of qualifications for the job in question, something that would horrify the human resources department of any private company wishing to stay in business, has spread outward and downward through the federal agencies. Despite Sam Clovis’s withdrawal from a position at the Agriculture Department, the hiring of similarly unqualified persons at that agency continues: “a gas-company meter reader, a country-club cabana attendant, a Republican National Committee intern, and the owner of a scented-candle company” are among the department’s new agricultural experts.
The Root Causes of Incompetence
Why has the GOP, the party that championed public land-grant colleges under Lincoln, created the Food and Drug Administration under Theodore Roosevelt, and backed the National Defense Education Act under Eisenhower, become the major political force behind aggressive and self-confident ignorance? The root causes lay both in elite and popular sources.
At the commanding heights of capital, do plutocrats like the Koch brothers want an EPA that forcefully curbs the prerogative of extractive industries to externalize their costs upon society in the form of pollution? Hence the new finding of an EPA adviser that mercury is not really bad for you, despite the common knowledge since the 19th century that the substance, which caused Mad Hatter’s Disease, is a powerful neurotoxin.
Do Robert Mercer or Peter Thiel wish to dispel the confusion about whether tax cuts for the rich create jobs and magically create revenue, but don’t exacerbate income inequality? Is it impossible that Republican politicians and operatives, at least at the higher levels, are so unaware of decades of empirical evidence to the contrary that they do not suspect what the real facts are — or that for-profit charter schools are not a panacea for public education? But they are not about to level with their constituents.
That said, the GOP did not conjure the current national receptivity to alternative facts out of thin air. They are taking advantage of one of the periodic waves of anti-intellectualism that have swept the popular mind since the days of the Salem witch trials. The present wave began with the rise of politicized Christian fundamentalism in the 1970s. Some reckoned that the tide was ebbing with the election of Barack Obama, but that was clearly a false dawn.
It is all very well to wax indignant over Republican politicians who routinely lie about the most elementary facts and denounce scientific consensus as a hoax. But they are routinely re-elected by an American population whose attitudes on evolutionary biologyare closer to those in Turkey than in developed Western democracies, and who also believe in the paranormal, and in angels and the demonic.
The implications of mass ignorance were well known to the framers of the Constitution. In 1822, James Madison wrote, “A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”
Mueller document request puts the rich asshole and Sessions squarely in special counsel’s crosshairs
some rich asshole and Jeff Sessions
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Special counsel Robert Mueller has requested thousands of documents from the Department of Justice related to the firing of FBI director James Comey that could spell trouble for President some rich asshole.
The document request, first reported by ABC News, is part of Mueller’s examination of whether the rich asshole tried to obstruct justice by firing the FBI director overseeing the investigation into his campaign ties to Russia, reported Business Insider.
Mueller’s team asked for emails between the White House and Justice Department related to Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ recusal from the Russia probe after his undisclosed contacts with the Russian ambassador were revealed.
“Earlier reports indicated that the rich asshole exploded when he found out about his recusal,” former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti told Business Insider. “That could be evidence of his state of mind because it is a highly unusual reaction to a recusal decision.”
Mueller has interviewed some of the rich asshole’s closest aides about the Comey firing on May 8, which White House special counsel Ty Cobb said the president decided to do before the FBI director testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee five days earlier.
the rich asshole was reportedly annoyed with Comey for suggesting the election had been tipped by his decision to tell Congress he was re-examining Hillary Clinton’s emails 11 days before the election.
The president and his aides also reportedly believed Comey had committed “an act of insubordination” by not clearing his testimony with the White House.
the rich asshole consulted with senior adviser Stephen Miller on firing Comey before meeting with Sessions and deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, who then wrote memos arguing why the FBI director should be fired.
“The sequence of events in which Sessions and Rosenstein met with the rich asshole and the next day transmitted Rosenstein’s memo to the White House shortly before the rich asshole fired Comey, allegedly for the reasons stated in Rosenstein’s memo, places Sessions and Rosenstein at the core of the obstruction inquiry,” William Yeomans, a former deputy assistant attorney general, told Business Insider.
the rich asshole met in the Oval Office with the Russian foreign minister and ambassador to the U.S. the day after firing Comey, whom he called a “nutjob” and told the dignitaries he relieved “great pressure” on himself.
He also told NBC News’ Lester Holt that “the Russia thing” had been on his mind when firing Comey.
the rich asshole also asked Comey for his loyalty during a private meeting, according to the FBI director, and also asked him to consider dropping the investigation of disgraced national security adviser Mike Flynn.
H.R. McMaster confided the rich asshole is an ‘idiot’ and ‘dope’ during private meeting with tech CEO: report
H.R. McMaster (screenshot)/Photo of some rich asshole by Flicker User Michael Vadon
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According to a report by Buzzfeed, National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster ridiculed President some rich asshole during a private dinner with the CEO of Oracle.
Four sources claim they overheard one of the rich asshole’s most trusted advisers confide to CEO Safra Catz — who was under consideration for a job in the administration — that his boss was both an “idiot” and a dope,” adding that the rich asshole has the smarts of a “kindergartner.”
A separate source also claimed McMaster disparaged the rich asshole in a private conversation, saying he didn’t have the intellectual firepower to understand national security issues.
Spokespersons for both the National Security Council and Oracle deny the claims, with NSC spokesman Michael Anton issuing a statement saying, “Actual participants in the dinner deny that General McMaster made any of the comments attributed to him by anonymous sources. Those false comments represent the diametric opposite of General McMaster’s actual views.”
McMaster’s critical comments would not be the first delivered in private by a the rich asshole cabinet member.
In October, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was reportedly considering quitting, no longer wishing to work for the rich asshole and calling him a “moron.”
You can read the whole Buzzfeed report here.
the rich asshole not proving popular in Time’s Person of the Year poll
Harriet Sinclair
Posted with permission from Newsweek
Donald Trump is unlikely to repeat his 2016 success as Time’s Person of the Year, according to early polling for the accolade – which puts him below Taylor Swift, the #MeToo movement, and the mayor of San Juan.
The reader’s choice poll, which closes on December 3, currently has Trump with 29 percent of the vote, while San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz has 31 percent, #MeToo has 38 percent, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has 11 percent, Robert Mueller 18 percent, and Taylor Swift 33 percent.
Cruz’s popularity in the poll is also a telltale sign that Trump’s popularity is waning – with the San Juan mayor gaining notoriety after a public spat with the president following the hurricane in Puerto Rico.
The president lashed out at the mayor after she publicly asked him to “take charge and save lives,” in a speech that prompted the president to refer to her as “nasty.”
"The Mayor of San Juan, who was very complimentary only a few days ago, has now been told by the Democrats that you must be nasty to Trump," the president said in a tweet following her comments – sparking a war of words between the pair.
And Trump’s 2016 win of the title was not without its critics. Knowing the president’s place as Person of the Year would elicit criticism, the magazine referred to Trump on its cover as the “president of the Divided State of America.”
Although Trump said at the time that he was pleased to have won the title, describing it as a “tremendous honor” that “meant a lot,” he also hit back at the suggestion he had divided the country.
“When you say divided states of America, I didn’t divide them. They’re divided now. I mean, there’s a lot of division,” Politico reported Trump saying.
“And we’re going to put it back together, and we’re going to have a country that’s very well healed, and we’re going to be a great economic force, and we’re going to build up our military and safety, and we’re going to do a lot of great things. And it’s going to be something very special,” he added.
Announcing Trump’s 2016 win on NBC, the magazine’s editor Nancy Gibbs described the president as operating in an unconventional way.
“When have we ever seen a single individual who has so defied expectations, broken the rules, violated norms, beaten not one but two political parties on the way to winning an election that he entered with 100-1 odds against him?” she said.
The reader’s choice poll, which closes on December 3, currently has Trump with 29 percent of the vote, while San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz has 31 percent, #MeToo has 38 percent, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has 11 percent, Robert Mueller 18 percent, and Taylor Swift 33 percent.
Cruz’s popularity in the poll is also a telltale sign that Trump’s popularity is waning – with the San Juan mayor gaining notoriety after a public spat with the president following the hurricane in Puerto Rico.
The president lashed out at the mayor after she publicly asked him to “take charge and save lives,” in a speech that prompted the president to refer to her as “nasty.”
"The Mayor of San Juan, who was very complimentary only a few days ago, has now been told by the Democrats that you must be nasty to Trump," the president said in a tweet following her comments – sparking a war of words between the pair.
And Trump’s 2016 win of the title was not without its critics. Knowing the president’s place as Person of the Year would elicit criticism, the magazine referred to Trump on its cover as the “president of the Divided State of America.”
Although Trump said at the time that he was pleased to have won the title, describing it as a “tremendous honor” that “meant a lot,” he also hit back at the suggestion he had divided the country.
“When you say divided states of America, I didn’t divide them. They’re divided now. I mean, there’s a lot of division,” Politico reported Trump saying.
“And we’re going to put it back together, and we’re going to have a country that’s very well healed, and we’re going to be a great economic force, and we’re going to build up our military and safety, and we’re going to do a lot of great things. And it’s going to be something very special,” he added.
Announcing Trump’s 2016 win on NBC, the magazine’s editor Nancy Gibbs described the president as operating in an unconventional way.
“When have we ever seen a single individual who has so defied expectations, broken the rules, violated norms, beaten not one but two political parties on the way to winning an election that he entered with 100-1 odds against him?” she said.
the rich asshole’s Favorite News Channel Tries To Soothe His Battered Ego – Gets Taken To The Cleaners
Yesterday, after the father of one of the UCLA players arrested in China failed to show the rich asshole proper gratitude for getting his kid released, the rich asshole, predictably, went to Twitter to grouse about it. He seems to expect to be worshiped for his help on this matter, but LaVar Ball wouldn’t do it, so the rich asshole tweeted:
Fox News put that tweet into a meme portraying the rich asshole as a strong, decisive leader and the UCLA basketball players as weaklings, because of course they did. Then they asked: “Do you agree with President the rich asshole?”
Yes. Fox News seriously asked people whether they agree that the rich asshole should have left them in jail because the father of one is refusing to show proper gratitude:
And Twitter is just not having this at all:
Nope. He needs adoration- sign of insecurity. That’s why he mocks others. Worthless.
I’ve never seen a Fox tweet critical of the president.
All Fox is does is aid and abet insanity, hate and divisiveness that hurts America.
It's all relative. Shoplifting is a crime but its totally eclipsed by Trump University.
Yeah, POTUS should only do his job if he gets his ass kissed properly. Are you high?
I think he should stop being petty af. I don’t care to hear about this from the President of the United States. He’s so insecure, it’s beyond troubling.
Nope. I personally would be extraordinarily appreciative if this happened to one of my kids, but i think it's shameful that the prez resents not being thanked enough and doesn't view helping Americans as just part of the job.
Well, I'm not convinced that he single-handedly got them out of jail... so the question isn't really valid...
What?! This man is a child in a rumpled suit. In case you haven't noticed, hardly anybody likes him. :"Thus, when you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others."
China should have thrown #Dotard @realDonaldTrump into the slammer, chucked the key into the bog & flushed it away.
No. @realDonaldTrump has no idea what it means to do good for the sake of doing good. He is an empty shell of a man with no moral compass. Also not my favorite president.
Absolutely not. The fact that our narcissistic baby in chief can’t take any criticism without lashing out is disgraceful. We deserve better
Typical trump .. always about himself forgetting America is for all
Typical trump .. always about himself forgetting America is for all
Why would anyone agree with this shit? Remember when we mourned the death of the student who died in NK and now we’re talking about this?
No I do not agree with Donald. As a matter of fact, I wish he was left in the hospital at the time of his birth.
President Man-Baby needs to grow up. And Fox News needs to stop feeding his bullshit.
North Korea: The US will regret 'letting such a depraved and stupid guy occupy the Oval Office'
BY AVERY ANAPOL - 11/20/17 07:37 AM EST
North Korea is calling President the rich asshole an “old lunatic” and slamming his recent visit to South Korea as “nonsense.”
“A load of rubbish spouted by the old lunatic the rich asshole during his recent visit to South Korea was a total of all nonsense and paradox so far,” North Korea’s state-run Minju Joson newspaper said in a commentary on Sunday.
The commentary also said that the U.S. would regret “letting such a depraved and stupid guy occupy the Oval Office.”
the rich asshole visited South Korea earlier this month during his 12-day trip to Asia, addressing the South Korean National Assembly and issuing a warning to North Korea.
"Today, I hope I speak not only for our countries, but for all civilized nations, when I say to the North: Do not underestimate us. And do not try us,” the rich asshole said in South Korea.
The newspaper also warned the rich asshole to stay out of North Korean affairs.
“the rich asshole had better pay heed to the despicable plight of his country, the dark empire of evils under worldwide criticism, before poking his nose into others’ things,” the piece read.
the rich asshole’s relationship with Pyongyang has been fraught with tension, and the two leaders have regularly exchanged insults and threats.
Earlier this month, another North Korean media organization said the rich asshole was "sentenced to death" for his words against Kim.
the rich asshole believes Mueller probe is almost done: report
BY MALLORY SHELBOURNE - 11/20/17 08:49 AM EST
President the rich asshole reportedly believes that special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russia’s election inference and any potential ties between his campaign staff and the Kremlin is nearing the end.
The Washington Post, in a report published Sunday, said White House officials think the investigation’s current emphasis on individuals who were close to the president means the probe will soon come to an end.
But a current law professor who was once a federal prosecutor told the newspaper that there is no sign Mueller’s probe will soon be over.
“I don’t think there’s any reason to believe this is almost over,” Randall Eliason told the Post.
“Based not just on what we’ve seen but also what we know about white-collar investigations generally, this seems to me like it is just getting started.”
A multiple-count indictment that included charges of tax fraud and conspiracy against the United States was unveiled last month against former the rich asshole campaign chairman Paul Manafort and one of his former business associates, Richard Gates.
On the same day that the indictment was revealed, the news also broke that George Papadopoulos, a former the rich asshole campaign aide, had pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI as part of its Russia probe.
the rich asshole has dismissed the probe as politically motivated, arguing it is an “excuse” for the Democrats’ loss in the 2016 presidential election.
Ty Cobb, an attorney for the White House, believes the investigation will end by the close of this year or not long after, according to the Post, which said that the president has also come around to this thinking.
“I’ve done my best, without overstepping, to share my view that the perception of the inquiry — that it involved a decade or more of financial transactions and other alleged issues that were mistakenly reported — just wasn’t true, and that the issues were narrower and wholly consistent with the mandate provided by the Justice Department to the Office of the Special Counsel,” Cobb told the newspaper.
the rich asshole rips NFL’s Marshawn Lynch for standing only during Mexican national anthem
BY MALLORY SHELBOURNE - 11/20/17 07:15 AM EST
President the rich asshole early Monday slammed Oakland Raiders running back Marshawn Lynch, saying the NFL should suspend him the next time he does not stand for the national anthem.
“Marshawn Lynch of the NFL’s Oakland Raiders stands for the Mexican Anthem and sits down to boos for our National Anthem. Great disrespect!” the rich asshole wrote on Twitter.
“Next time NFL should suspend him for remainder of season. Attendance and ratings way down.”
Marshawn Lynch of the NFL’s Oakland Raiders stands for the Mexican Anthem and sits down to boos for our National Anthem. Great disrespect! Next time NFL should suspend him for remainder of season. Attendance and ratings way down.
Lynch, according to multiple reports, sat for "The Star-Spangled Banner" and stood for Mexico’s national anthem during a game against the New England Patriots on Sunday in Mexico City.
He wore a shirt in October to one of his games that read “EVERYBODY VS RICH ASSHOLE.”
the rich asshole has periodically criticized NFL players who choose to kneel during the national anthem, arguing doing so disrespects the United States.
In September, the president suggested the NFL fire players who do not stand for the anthem.
World leaders go to Democrats behind the rich asshole’s back
Carlos Ballesteros
Posted with permission from Newsweek
Global leaders are choosing to deal with Democrat mayors and governors rather than President Donald Trump on issues that the White House ignores, it has been claimed.
The Washington Post reported that six Democratic figures—including four governors and two big-city mayors—are bypassing the Trump administration and reaching out directly to global heads of state on matters such as combating climate change and ending regional disputes.
It comes as Trump narrows the White House focus when dealing with Europe to two main issues, defense spending and trade deficits.
“There is an impression by politicians here that President Trump in person is no longer the voice of the free Western world,” Christian Ehler, head of the European Parliament’s delegation for relations with the United States, told the Post.
Foreign leaders are adisappointed and annoyed with the Trump administration’s incompetence in foreign relations, an eastern European ambassador told the Post on condition of anonymity. The ambassodor said the Trump administration, particularly in the State Department and at the Pentagon, are “quite open” about “[not knowing] anything.”
“It doesn’t matter what level. It is all levels,” the ambassador added.
In the face of this deficiency, Democrats are picking up the slack.
Earlier this month, Governor Jerry Brown of California spent 10 days in Europe striking deals with the international community to cut greenhouse gas emissions and fight climate change. He also reaffirmed California’s commitment to the goals set forth in the Paris climate accords in 2016, regardless of whatever the federal government decides to do.
Joining Brown at the United Nations climate conference in Bonn three other Governors, all Democrats: Kate Brown of Oregon, Jay Inslee of Washington, and Terry McAuliffe of Virginia.
“The engagement against climate change must be global,” said European Parliament President Antonio Tajani at a news conference in Bonn. “In the United States, there are several governors working in the right direction, even if the Trump government decided to change the line.”
The mayors of America’s two largest cities—both of whom are Democrats as well—have also carved out their roles in global politics.
In July, Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York spoke at a protest in Germany on the importance of cities working together against climate change and income inequality independent of national governments.
“While the national governments will probably only make limited progress, the rest of us don’t have that choice. If we make only limited progress we’ll only be going backward,” de Blasio said at the protest, as reported by Bloomberg.
In Los Angeles, Mayor Eric Garcetti created a new deputy mayor position for international affairs earlier this year in order to better serve the city’s large immigrant population.
The value of the position was noticed last week, when Garcetti met with Vigen Sargsyan, the Armenian defense minister, to discuss “his country’s ongoing dispute with Azerbaijan over the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region,” the Post reported.
“We have a big Armenian population in Los Angeles that cares about events in Armenia,” Nina Hachigian, Garcetti’s new deputy mayor and former ambassador under the Obama Administration, said.
However, Hachigian points out that cities are not attempting to double-cross the federal government.
“We don’t have a separate foreign policy. We have initiatives and city-to-city cooperation,” Hachigian said.
Nevertheless, cities like Los Angeles and New York are advancing their policy objectives—both foreign and domestic—with or without Trump’s help.
“We can create ties that could be useful and some consolation, given the difficulties that our foreign counterparts are having with Washington,” Hachigan concluded.
The Washington Post reported that six Democratic figures—including four governors and two big-city mayors—are bypassing the Trump administration and reaching out directly to global heads of state on matters such as combating climate change and ending regional disputes.
It comes as Trump narrows the White House focus when dealing with Europe to two main issues, defense spending and trade deficits.
“There is an impression by politicians here that President Trump in person is no longer the voice of the free Western world,” Christian Ehler, head of the European Parliament’s delegation for relations with the United States, told the Post.
Foreign leaders are adisappointed and annoyed with the Trump administration’s incompetence in foreign relations, an eastern European ambassador told the Post on condition of anonymity. The ambassodor said the Trump administration, particularly in the State Department and at the Pentagon, are “quite open” about “[not knowing] anything.”
“It doesn’t matter what level. It is all levels,” the ambassador added.
In the face of this deficiency, Democrats are picking up the slack.
Earlier this month, Governor Jerry Brown of California spent 10 days in Europe striking deals with the international community to cut greenhouse gas emissions and fight climate change. He also reaffirmed California’s commitment to the goals set forth in the Paris climate accords in 2016, regardless of whatever the federal government decides to do.
Joining Brown at the United Nations climate conference in Bonn three other Governors, all Democrats: Kate Brown of Oregon, Jay Inslee of Washington, and Terry McAuliffe of Virginia.
“The engagement against climate change must be global,” said European Parliament President Antonio Tajani at a news conference in Bonn. “In the United States, there are several governors working in the right direction, even if the Trump government decided to change the line.”
The mayors of America’s two largest cities—both of whom are Democrats as well—have also carved out their roles in global politics.
In July, Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York spoke at a protest in Germany on the importance of cities working together against climate change and income inequality independent of national governments.
“While the national governments will probably only make limited progress, the rest of us don’t have that choice. If we make only limited progress we’ll only be going backward,” de Blasio said at the protest, as reported by Bloomberg.
In Los Angeles, Mayor Eric Garcetti created a new deputy mayor position for international affairs earlier this year in order to better serve the city’s large immigrant population.
The value of the position was noticed last week, when Garcetti met with Vigen Sargsyan, the Armenian defense minister, to discuss “his country’s ongoing dispute with Azerbaijan over the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region,” the Post reported.
“We have a big Armenian population in Los Angeles that cares about events in Armenia,” Nina Hachigian, Garcetti’s new deputy mayor and former ambassador under the Obama Administration, said.
However, Hachigian points out that cities are not attempting to double-cross the federal government.
“We don’t have a separate foreign policy. We have initiatives and city-to-city cooperation,” Hachigian said.
Nevertheless, cities like Los Angeles and New York are advancing their policy objectives—both foreign and domestic—with or without Trump’s help.
“We can create ties that could be useful and some consolation, given the difficulties that our foreign counterparts are having with Washington,” Hachigan concluded.
At least 20 families have multiple members serving in the rich asshole administration
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and President some rich asshole listen to a student while touring a Florida voucher school in March as Jared Kushner and Ivanka the rich asshole look on (screengrab of Live Satellite News coverage of the photo-op)
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At least 20 families have multiple members serving in the rich asshole administration, including the president’s most prominent campaign supporters.
President some rich asshole’s daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner, who each serve as White House advisers, are the most prominent examples in an administration packed with family members and spouses, reported The Daily Beast.
Other presidents, from John Adams to John F. Kennedy, have included family members in their administration, but the rich asshole’s administration is defined by blood relations.
Eric the rich asshole’s brother-in-law Kyle Yunaska was promoted this month to chief of staff for the department’s Office of Energy Policy and Systems Analysis, despite scant background in energy policy.
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos was rewarded with a Cabinet position after her family donated more than $200 million to Republican campaigns, and her husband Dick DeVos Jr. was given an appointment to the Federal Aviation Administration’s Management Advisory Council.
Her sister-in-law Pamella DeVos was given a spot on the advisory board for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and her brother Erik Prince was an informal adviser to the White House transition team.
White House senior counsel Don McGahn’s wife Sharron McGahn was hired in May as a policy adviser to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, and the husband to McGahn’s chief of staff was nominated to a federal judgeship in Alabama.
That nominee, Brett Talley, failed to disclose that his wife Annie Donaldson worked in the White House, and the recent law school graduate has never tried a case in court.
The son of prominent the rich asshole supporter Rudy Giuliani was hired in March as associate director of the White House Office of Public Liaison, after his pro golfing career ended.
Former White House adviser Sebastian Gorka’s wife, Katharine, remains in a post at the Department of Homeland Security, although her husband was dumped from the administration in August.
Other appointees combine family relations with another the rich asshole administration trend: federal officials overseeing or regulating industries in which they once worked.
Uttah Dhillon, former House Financial Services Committee Oversight Counsel, was appointed as a senior assistant to the president in January, and his wife Janet was named Equal Employment Opportunity commissioner — which regulates two of her former employers that have been accused of discriminatory actions.
the rich asshole’s deputy secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Pamela Patenaude, led a foundation that promotes housing policy reform, and her daughter Meghan serves as deputy assistant for scheduling to Vice President Mike Pence, and another daughter, Caitlin, works as a policy adviser at the Department of Health and Human Services.
Pat Robertson and other the rich asshole allies are lining president’s pockets with trumped-up Mar-A-Lago events: reporter
some rich asshole at Mar-a-Lago (Twitter)
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Washington Post investigative reporter David A. Fahrenthold revealed to CNN’s Chris Cuomo Monday that so many nonpartisan and nonprofit organizations have pulled their balls and galas from the rich asshole’s Mar-a-Lago that conservative groups are stepping in to help.
After groups like the American Red Cross, Susan G. Komen and the American Cancer Society have all changed their event location after criticism. Since all of the groups have pulled their support, right-wing groups that support the rich asshole are moving in.
Fahrenthold explained that the rich asshole can make as much as $275,000 each night from a single gala hosted at Mar-a-Lago.
“Last year while the rich asshole wasn’t president, he basically kept the same schedule,” Fahrenthold said. “The Palm Beach society still came, the way they always had. That changed over the summer. President the rich asshole’s comments about Charlottesville, where he said, ‘There were very fine people among the white supremacists protesting in Charlottesville.’ Those caused a huge exodus of charities. Out of the 25 charities he had booked for this upcoming season, he had 25 events booked, 19 cancelled. Huge clients.”
It wasn’t simply that the rich asshole lost the money, he also lost the exposure to Palm Beach high society, who would flock to his club for the events.
CNN host Chris Cuomo called it “obviously political,” noting that those who have taken place are the groups who are looking for a political attachments. Trumpettes USA, Truth About Israel Gala and the Christian Broadcasting Network have all announced galas at Mar-a-Lago.
“To fill in those empty gala days, you seeing these events that are either the rich asshole’s political allies like Pat Robertson, the televangelist,” Fahrenthold explained. “He didn’t have a gala. He had a charity, but he never had a gala before. He started one this year and purposely put it at Mar-a-Lago.”
The other two, Fahrenthold said, are hard to even call charities because they aren’t there to raise money for a charity, they’re at Mar-a-Lago to help “put money in some rich asshole’s pocket.”
“So they’re just going to pay him money through Mar-a-Lago because they support him,” Fahrenthold explained. “That’s not an event evolution of Mar-a-Lago from basically an apolitical place that sold luxury to a place now selling the rich asshole’s political alliances.”
Watch the full conversation below:
‘Great disrespect!’ the rich asshole responds to Fox News report by attacking another NFL protester
some rich asshole (Michel Temer/Flickr)
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President some rich asshole responded to a Fox News report by attacking a black athlete on Twitter.
“Fox & Friends” hosts spent two minutes Monday morning on Oakland Raiders running back Marshawn Lynch, who took a knee during the “Star-Spangled Banner” but remained standing for the national anthem of Mexico, where his team played Sunday against the New England Patriots.
“Why would were they playing in Mexico City?” asked Ainsley Earhardt, and co-host Brian Kilmeade explained NFL teams played there and London every year. “That’s a question that a lot of people who don’t follow the NFL like you do are asking out there.”
The co-hosts then complained about NFL player protests, and they couldn’t agree whether the league or the players union was more to blame.
“This is an international embarrassment,” Kilmeade said. “When you go overseas and pull this stuff after the league has been urging you not to. A lot of people are blaming the commissioner, I blame the players union. The players union has to crack down because it’s hurting the league.”
Almost 20 minutes later, the president tweeted out a complaint of his own against Lynch.
The day before, the rich asshole attacked the father of one of the UCLA basketball players he asked China to release after they were arrested for shoplifting.
the rich asshole has refused to disavow Roy Moore ever since the child molestation story broke. But according to Kellyanne Conway, he still "wants" Moore in the Senate — to make sure millionaires get their tax cuts.
After the accusations surfaced from multiple women that Alabama GOP Senate candidate Roy Moore is a serial pedophile who was banned from a mall and the YMCA for stalking teenage girls, national Republican leadership has pulled their support, and Moore is sinking in polls against Democratic opponent Doug Jones.
But the one Republican who really matters — some rich asshole — has done his best to skirt the issue.
On Monday, however, counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway gave a peek at the rich asshole’s current feelings on Moore when asked by “Fox & Friends” co-host Brian Kilmeade: Kilmeade:
CONWAY: Doug Jones in Alabama, folks, don’t be fooled. He will be a vote against tax cuts. He is weak on crime. Weak on borders. He is strong on raising your taxes. He is terrible for property owners—
KILMEADE: So, vote Roy Moore?
CONWAY: —Doug Jones is a doctrinaire liberal, which is why he is not saying anything and the media are trying to boost him.
KILMEADE: So, vote Roy Moore?
CONWAY: I’m telling you that we want the votes in the Senate to get this tax bill through.
Put aside the absurdity of Conway calling Jones — a former federal prosecutor who locked up Klansmen for a church bombing in the 1960s — “soft on crime.” Her underlying message is deeply disturbing. She is essentially saying it is OK to molest children as long as you vote for tax cuts for millionaires, a sentiment that has been echoed by Republicans in Alabama, including the state’s governor, Republican Kay Ivey, who said on Friday she’s rather elect a child molester than a Democrat.
Conway’s remarks are the most definitive yet that the rich asshole still stands with Moore.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders has refused to say Moore should drop out, minimized the severity of the scandal, and declined to say whether the rich asshole would not vote for Moore if he could.
Marc Short, the rich asshole’s congressional liaison, likewise spent six whole minutes on ABC’s “This Week” refusing to give his boss’s position on Moore.
It is a bitter irony that the tax scheme on which the rich asshole, Conway, and other Republicans are willing to stake the election of a pedophile is not even popular with the American people.
Conway’s remarks have proved once again that for Republicans, appeasing a tiny circle of mega-wealthy benefactors beats anything else — from justice for abused children, to basic human decency.
Conway on Moore: We want the votes to pass tax reform
BY BRETT SAMUELS - 11/20/17 08:30 AM EST
White House aide Kellyanne Conway on Monday suggested Alabama voters should support embattled Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore because he would vote for the GOP's tax reform legislation making its way through Congress.
“Doug Jones in Alabama, folks, don’t be fooled. He will be a vote against tax cuts. He is weak on crime, weak on borders. He is strong on raising your taxes. He is terrible for property owners," Conway said on "Fox & Friends."
“So, vote Roy Moore?” host Brian Kilmeade interjected.
“I’m telling you that we want the votes in the Senate to get this tax bill through,” Conway said, calling Jones a “doctrinaire liberal.”
SMASH CUT TO FOUR DAYS EARLIER:
Kellyanne Conway on Fox & Friends: "Whatever the facts end up being, the premise, of course, the principle, the incontrovertible principle, is that there is no Senate seat worth more than a child. And we all want to put that forward." twitter.com/DavidWright_CN…
Kellyanne Conway on Fox & Friends: "Whatever the facts end up being, the premise, of course, the principle, the incontrovertible principle, is that there is no Senate seat worth more than a child. And we all want to put that forward." twitter.com/DavidWright_CN…
Moore has been under growing pressure from numerous Republican lawmakers to drop out of the race in the face of sexual misconduct allegations.
President the rich asshole has not condemned the allegations. White House aides have called the accusations troubling.
“If he did not believe that the women’s accusations were credible, he would be down campaigning for Roy Moore. He has not done that,” White House legislative affairs director Marc Short said Sunday.
The Washington Post first reported this month that Leigh Cofrman, now 53, recalled Moore initiated a sexual encounter with her in 1979, when she was 14 and he was 32.
Beverly Young Nelson later came forward and alleged that Moore sexually assaulted her in 1977, when she was 16 and he was 30.
Several other women have accused Moore in recent weeks of making advances on them when they were teenagers.
Moore has denied the allegations and called them a plot by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to steal the election from Alabama voters.
the rich asshole: I should have left UCLA basketball players in jail
BY BRETT SAMUELS - 11/19/17 12:57 PM EST
President the rich asshole on Sunday lashed out at the father of a UCLA basketball player who downplayed the rich asshole’s importance in getting his son released from shoplifting charges in China.
“Now that the three basketball players are out of China and saved from years in jail, LaVar Ball, the father of LiAngelo, is unaccepting of what I did for his son and that shoplifting is no big deal. I should have left them in jail!” the rich asshole tweeted.
LaVar Ball's son LiAngelo Ball and two other players were arrested and accused of shoplifting from a Louis Vuitton store while the UCLA basketball team was on a trip to China for its season-opening game.
The players faced potential jail sentences for the charge, but the rich asshole reportedly spoke to Chinese President Xi Jinping about resolving the situation. The players were released, and landed in the United States last week.
the rich asshole took credit for their release, and questioned in a tweet whether the players would thank him.
The players subsequently held a press conference last week in which they apologized for the incident and thanked the rich asshole.
ESPN on Friday asked LaVar Ball about the rich asshole’s role in bringing his son back to the United States.
"Who?" Ball responded. "What was he over there for? Don't tell me nothing. Everybody wants to make it seem like he helped me out."
the rich asshole’s Mar-A-Lago is a loser: report
Lauren Gill
Posted with permission from Newsweek
Who’s the loser now?
People are ditching Donald Trump’s Palm Beach resort for a competitor he once ridiculed for getting “the leftovers.”
After Trump refused to condemn the white supremacists who rallied in Charlottesville this summer, 19 charities such as the Red Cross and Bethesda Hospital Foundation, canceled their events at the resort, with some taking their business to one of his adversaries, The Breakers, the Washington Post reported on Saturday.
Mar-A-Lago was once thought of as the peak of the Palm Beach social scene, but now members reportedly can’t convince their friends to step foot in it, forcing them to go elsewhere.
“People will still put on their dancing shoes, and pay big money for their tickets, and go out for the night. [But] instead of going to Mar-a-Lago, they’ll be going to the Breakers,”Shannon Donnelly, the society editor for the Palm Beach Daily News, told the Washington Post.
But Mar-A-Lago officials claim the Trump backlash hasn’t hurt his business, “We are doing really fine. It will be a good season,” its manager told the Palm Beach Post last month.
As the Palm Beach elite shifts set its sights on more a-political horizons, Trump defenders have started flocking to the resort as a means of showing support for the commander-in-chief.
Among those who are planning to hold galas at the oceanside retreat this winter season include Televangelist Pat Robertson and a group of high society ladies called “The Trumpettes USA.”
Last week, the private club held a Young Republicans National Federation gala that included a speech from singer and Trump cheerleader Joy Villa, who celebrated conspiracy theorist and Sandy Hook-denier Alex Jones and an America-first ideology.
“I’m watching Alex Jones nonstop!” she said in a video posted of the event. “We are populist. We are nationalist. We put America first and we’re not afraid!”
Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network decided to host its first gala for its Orphan’s Promise charity at Mar-A-Lago and reportedly only planned it just so it could take place there.
The Trumpettes USA, a group of well-to-do ladies led by Toni Holt Kramer, who once said spurning Trump because he wants to “bang a lady” wasn’t in America’s best interest, will hold a dinner at the club in January. Most of the money from the $300-a-pop tickets will go the resort.
And in February, a pro-Israel group will hold a 700-person “Truth About Israel Gala,” where attendees will dish out $600 per ticket. Organizers said they want to hold their event at Trump's estate because of his pro-Israel stance.
The club has become a draw for Trump supporters, who now have the chance of watching the president solve a nuclear dilemma while scarfing down their filet mignon.
They'll get another opportunity when Trump returns to Mar-A-Lago for Thanksgiving for six days starting on Tuesday.
People are ditching Donald Trump’s Palm Beach resort for a competitor he once ridiculed for getting “the leftovers.”
After Trump refused to condemn the white supremacists who rallied in Charlottesville this summer, 19 charities such as the Red Cross and Bethesda Hospital Foundation, canceled their events at the resort, with some taking their business to one of his adversaries, The Breakers, the Washington Post reported on Saturday.
Mar-A-Lago was once thought of as the peak of the Palm Beach social scene, but now members reportedly can’t convince their friends to step foot in it, forcing them to go elsewhere.
“People will still put on their dancing shoes, and pay big money for their tickets, and go out for the night. [But] instead of going to Mar-a-Lago, they’ll be going to the Breakers,”Shannon Donnelly, the society editor for the Palm Beach Daily News, told the Washington Post.
But Mar-A-Lago officials claim the Trump backlash hasn’t hurt his business, “We are doing really fine. It will be a good season,” its manager told the Palm Beach Post last month.
As the Palm Beach elite shifts set its sights on more a-political horizons, Trump defenders have started flocking to the resort as a means of showing support for the commander-in-chief.
Among those who are planning to hold galas at the oceanside retreat this winter season include Televangelist Pat Robertson and a group of high society ladies called “The Trumpettes USA.”
Last week, the private club held a Young Republicans National Federation gala that included a speech from singer and Trump cheerleader Joy Villa, who celebrated conspiracy theorist and Sandy Hook-denier Alex Jones and an America-first ideology.
“I’m watching Alex Jones nonstop!” she said in a video posted of the event. “We are populist. We are nationalist. We put America first and we’re not afraid!”
Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network decided to host its first gala for its Orphan’s Promise charity at Mar-A-Lago and reportedly only planned it just so it could take place there.
The Trumpettes USA, a group of well-to-do ladies led by Toni Holt Kramer, who once said spurning Trump because he wants to “bang a lady” wasn’t in America’s best interest, will hold a dinner at the club in January. Most of the money from the $300-a-pop tickets will go the resort.
And in February, a pro-Israel group will hold a 700-person “Truth About Israel Gala,” where attendees will dish out $600 per ticket. Organizers said they want to hold their event at Trump's estate because of his pro-Israel stance.
The club has become a draw for Trump supporters, who now have the chance of watching the president solve a nuclear dilemma while scarfing down their filet mignon.
They'll get another opportunity when Trump returns to Mar-A-Lago for Thanksgiving for six days starting on Tuesday.
White House driven by fear over Mueller probe: Aides anxiously greet each other, ‘Good morning, are you wired?’
Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller and President some rich asshole (Photos: Screen capture and AFP)
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Some officials in President some rich asshole’s White House believe the president’s attorney Ty Cobb when he says that there’s nothing to fear from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of the administration’s ties to Russia.
According to The Washington Post, however, others are skeptical of these reassurances and are becoming increasingly anxious and frightened over their chances of legal jeopardy as the probe closes in.
“Of course they are worried,” said a Republican with close ties to the White House. “Anybody that ever had the words ‘Russia’ come out of their lips or in an email, they’re going to get talked to. These things are thorough and deep. It’s going to be a long winter.”
Most White House staff who have spoken to Mueller’s investigation say they’ve come away heartened about the state of the investigation, said Cobb to the Post.
“The people who have been interviewed generally feel they were treated fairly by the special counsel, and adequately prepared to assist them in understanding the relevant material,” the attorney said. “They came back feeling relieved that it was over, but nobody I know of was shaken or scared.”
The president has warmed to this view as well as the hope that some in the White House that the investigation is reaching its end stages.
Others — like former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon — are skeptical of Cobb and his reassurances. The Breitbart.com CEO believes that the rich asshole should arm himself with outside counsel with more experience in this type of investigation.
Some are alarmed at the rich asshole’s sanguine attitude toward the probe.
“The president says, ‘This is all just an annoyance. I did nothing,’” said one source close to the administration. “He is somewhat arrogant about it. But this investigation is a classic Gambino-style roll-up. You have to anticipate this roll-up will reach everyone in this administration.”
Among some of the anxious aides, “gallows humor” has crept into their interactions.
“When the staff gather in the morning at the White House now,” a source told the Post, “they jokingly say: ‘Good morning. Are you wired?'”
KGB started watching the rich asshole in 1977 and made first move to recruit him as an asset in 1986: report
some rich asshole speaks to Fox News (screen grab)
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President some rich asshole was first approached by Russian operatives in 1987 when the man who would go on to become Soviet ambassador Yuri Dubinin opened discussions with the rich asshole about a Moscow real estate project.
However, according to a Politico report published Sunday, the rich asshole appeared on Soviet spy agency the KGB’s radar nearly a decade earlier when he married Czech model Ivana Zelnickova.
“During the Cold War, Czech spies were known for their professionalism. Czech and Hungarian officers were typically used in espionage actions abroad, especially in the United States and Latin America. They were less obvious than Soviet operatives sent by Moscow,” wrote Luke Harding.
Because of her country of origin, Soviet and U.S. intelligence agencies would be routinely monitoring the woman who became Ivana the rich asshole and her new husband, but the first attempt to activate the rich asshole as a Russian asset came when Natalia Dubinin brought her father Yuri to the rich asshole Tower.
In the late 1980s, the Soviet Union was moving to cultivate non-traditional assets in the U.S., leaving aside the communist rallies and trade unions of mid-century Cold War spycraft. Recruiters were urged to look for people susceptible to money and flattery and the newly minted Manhattan real estate baron fit the bill.
“Further improvement in operational work with agents calls for fuller and wider utilisation of confidential and special unofficial contacts. These should be acquired chiefly among prominent figures in politics and society, and important representatives of business and science,” said a Soviet spy manual of the era.
“These should not only ‘supply valuable information’ but also ‘actively influence’ a country’s foreign policy ‘in a direction of advantage to the USSR.’” Harding said.
In January of 1987, Dubinin invited the rich asshole to Moscow, which intelligence agencies now view as a “classic cultivation exercise.”
In Moscow, the rich asshole was reportedly showered with luxuries and “lavish hospitality,” said Harding.
“Everything is free. There are good parties with nice girls. It could be a sauna and girls and who knows what else,” said former KGB — and its successor the GRU — agent Viktor Suvorov. All premises the rich asshole visited on the trip would have been under “24-hour control” and surveillance.
“The interest is only one,” Suvorov explained. “To collect some information and keep that information about him for the future.”
The KGB cultivated a number of young potential assets this way including students from around the world, Suvorov said. Some would go on to be “nobodies,” but others would eventually rise to positions of power and prominence.
“It’s at this point you say: ‘Knock, knock! Do you remember the marvelous time in Moscow? It was a wonderful evening. You were so drunk. You don’t remember? We just show you something for your good memory,'” said the former spy.
“Nothing came of the trip — at least nothing in terms of business opportunities inside Russia,” wrote Harding. “This pattern of failure would be repeated in the rich asshole’s subsequent trips to Moscow. But the rich asshole flew back to New York with a new sense of strategic direction. For the first time he gave serious indications that he was considering a career in politics. Not as mayor or governor or senator.”
“the rich asshole,” Harding said, “was thinking about running for president.”
the rich asshole’s constant Twitter drama is steadily driving away the voters he needs the most: report
some rich asshole speaking with supporters at a campaign rally at Fountain Park in Fountain Hills, Arizona (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)
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President some rich asshole’s addiction to Twitter spats is costing him with moderate and center-right voters, the very voters he would need the most in upcoming elections, said Politico on Saturday.
the rich asshole has lashed out at the NFL, at former rival for the presidency Hillary Clinton, at U.S. intelligence agencies and politicians from both parties. While some in the president’s base enjoy the back-and-forth and take the rich asshole’s contentiousness as a sign that their president is scrappy and speaks his mind, others aren’t as impressed.
“What the rich asshole may not realize — and what new data shows — is that he may be tweeting his way into losses in 2018 and 2020,” wrote Jim Messina of political analysis firm The Messina Group.
The president’s aides and advisers have reportedly thrown up their hands and surrendered with regards to controlling or even moderating his manic, error-laden Twitter blasts.
the rich asshole has made little effort to ingratiate himself with constituencies outside the 33 percent of the population that unquestioningly supports him. Moderate Republicans and undecided voters are essential for the rich asshole to enlarge upon his coalition enough to be competitive at the voting booth.
A combination of Democratic apathy, Russian interference and media-abetted mistrust of Democratic nominee Clinton may have landed the rich asshole an Electoral College victory, but if anything his base of support has shrunken since Inauguration Day.
“Among the swing voters most critical to his viability, some rich asshole isn’t just vulnerable, he’s harming himself,” wrote Messina, whose firm has closely tracked and analyzed voters who were essential in the rich asshole’s push to victory.
“Even as Wall Street reaches new highs in profitability and the rich asshole endlessly brags about his stock-market numbers, these voters aren’t seeing the improvement in their own lives. And, most worryingly for the rich asshole and Republicans, the president’s outlandish statements cause the voters we spoke with to believe that he’s focused more on his own petty dramas than on improving their families’ lives,” Messina said.
Focus groups said again and again that the rich asshole’s inability to stay out of online spats have led them to see him as “so pre-occupied with picking Twitter fights and the general chaos of his administration that he was not focusing on making the economy better.”
“The real-world application of these findings is clear: Voters might give President the rich asshole a pass for individual outrageous statements, but if Democrats continually tie his pattern of remarks back to the economy, voters will not be forgiving,” Messina said, urging progressives to adopt this mode of attack heading into the 2018 midterms.
the rich asshole — who has never reached 50 percent job approval at all in his first 10 months in office — continues to slip in the polls. For the third month in a row, the rich asshole shed a full percentage point in overall approval.
the rich asshole adds five names to list of possible Supreme Court nominees
U.S. Supreme Court is seen in Washington, U.S., October 3, 2016. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas
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In a move certain to please conservatives, President some rich asshole on Friday added five names to his list of candidates for a prospective U.S. Supreme Court vacancy as he presses ahead with a campaign to move the federal judiciary to the right.
Two of them are appellate judges who were nominated by the rich asshole earlier this year and confirmed by the Senate: Amy Coney Barrett and Kevin Newsom. Another, Brett Kavanaugh, sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, long viewed as a stepping-stone to the high court.
The others were Britt Grant, a Georgia Supreme Court justice, and Patrick Wyrick, a Oklahoma Supreme Court justice.
There is no current vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court but three justices are 79 or older.
During his presidential campaign last year, the rich asshole identified 20 conservative candidates for the Supreme Court. Upon taking office, he named Neil Gorsuch to the court to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia, restoring the Supreme Court’s conservative majority. Gorsuch was confirmed by the Senate in April and has established himself as one of the Supreme Court’s most conservative justices.
Speaking at a Federalist Society conference of conservative legal advocates, White House Counsel Donald McGahn said the rich asshole is “very committed” to appointing judges who are “committed originalists and textualists,” referring to a legal philosophy that relies on the actual wording of laws and the original meaning of the U.S. Constitution.
“They all have paper trails. They all are sitting judges. There is nothing unknown about them. What you see is what you get,” McGahn said.
The five jurists, all with strong conservative credentials, were added to the list with input from conservative leaders, and should another seat on the court open up, the rich asshole will nominate a candidate from the updated list of 25, the White House said.
Leonard Leo, an advisor to the president on Supreme Court nominations, said the rich asshole thought it was time to refresh the original list. “When you’re committed to picking from a list you want to make sure it’s as complete as possible,” Leo said in an interview.
Kavanaugh, who was appointed to the federal bench in 2006 by Republican former President George W. Bush, served as a White House counsel under Bush and worked as an assistant to Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel who investigated Democratic former President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
Grant and Wyrick both joined state challenges to the Affordable Care Act, Democratic former President Barack Obama’s signature healthcare law, and Obama regulations aimed at reducing emissions from coal-burning power plants, said Carrie Severino, chief counsel of the Judicial Crisis Network, a conservative legal advocacy group.
KENNEDY IS PIVOTAL JUSTICE
The court currently consists of five conservatives and four liberals, with conservative Justice Anthony Kennedy sometimes joining with the liberals on high-profile issues such as gay rights and abortion.
At 81, Kennedy is the second-oldest justice on the court behind liberal Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 84, and some former Kennedy clerks have said he is considering retirement. Liberal Justice Stephen Breyer is 79.
Should any of those step down, the rich asshole would get a historic opportunity to shape the court in a more conservative direction for decades to come. Supreme Court appointments are lifetime jobs.
Conservatives criticize the federal judiciary as too liberal, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions at the same conference lashed out at “activist judges.”
the rich asshole already has taken steps to make the federal judiciary more conservative, with 14 judicial appointees already confirmed by the Senate and more in the pipeline.
Catherine Glenn Foster, president of the anti-abortion advocacy group Americans United for Life, said she was pleased with the new selections. “From their known records they tend to be strong on recognizing the protections for life,” she said in an interview.
On Friday, Republican Alabama Governor Kay Ivey said she would support her party’s Senate candidate Roy Moore, who has been accused by several women of unwanted sexual contact, because of the importance of keeping the Senate under Republican control should another Supreme Court vacancy arise.
(Reporting by James Oliphant and Andrew Chung; Additional reporting by Lawrence Hurley and Eric Beech; Editing by Will Dunham)
CNN Tape Released: the rich asshole Brags For Spying on Naked Girls, “Because I’m The Owner of The Pageant”
From the “Just when we thought the rich asshole couldn’t possibly say or do anything sleazier or more disgusting” files comes leaked audio of a some rich asshole appearance on the Howard Stern radio show, admitting that he liked to wonder around backstage of beauty pageants to watch contestants changing clothes.
Here is the rich asshole, in his own (gross) words:
“I’ll tell you the funniest is that I’ll go backstage before a show and everyone’s getting dressed….No men are anywhere, and I’m allowed to go in, because I’m the owner of the pageant and therefore I’m inspecting it…. ‘Is everyone OK’? You know, they’re standing there with no clothes. ‘Is everybody OK?’ And you see these incredible looking women, and so I sort of get away with things like that.”
the rich asshole said all sorts of lewd thing in this interview, which makes you wonder how America could elect a man that kids and young adults can’t possibly look up to as a role model.
the rich asshole claims to respect women, yet what you are about to hear just adds to the evidence that he doesn’t, whatsoever. Have a listen for yourself and you decide if this sounds like a guy who respects women.
Here’s the CNN video of the lewd comments:
Things keep getting worse for the rich asshole by the day. The sad fact is, everyone knew this was the guy they were electing, but they didn’t care. All the rich asshole voters knew was that Hillary Clinton mismanaging her emails was way worse, in their eyes, than some rich asshole, which is laughable at best.
Not only is the rich asshole an illegitimate president, but he’s also a pretty disturbing individual.
the rich asshole's Reaction To Al Franken Is The Beginning Of ThePost-Hypocrisy, Post-Consistency Era
By now, we're all aware of the multitude of ways in which some rich asshole is disrupting and mutating the presidency. Traditional norms of the office are being individually ransacked and the parts fed into the rich asshole's gaping maw where they're potentially disappeared forever. We're talking about the norms of decency and decorum, of centered rationality on the world stage, of behavior that's befitting of the dignity of the office. the rich asshole possesses none of that, yet he desperately craves respect simply because he's "Mr. President."
No. It doesn't work like that. Or at least it shouldn't. Presidents must earn our respect and admiration through deeds that we should all recognize as presidential, beyond our partisan affiliations. By stripping away the dignity of the office through his monstrous behavior, his tweets and his obnoxiously childish blurts -- his meaningless threats and other forms of gibberish -- there's nothing left to respect about the presidency. the rich asshole, the man, is killing the office, leaving an emperor without clothes. Ultimately, he doesn't realize he's also destroying himself, but that's a different story.
In addition to shattering centuries-old norms, and not in a good way, the rich asshole has ushered in the post-hypocrisy era. By shamelessly flaunting his grotesque hypocrisy, he's convincing half of the participants in the American political debate to also abandon consistency as an ideal. If hypocrisy is no longer relevant in politics, the rich asshole and his copycats can get away with literally anything.
the rich asshole's preposterous tweets about Sen. Al Franken were a perfect example.
We don't have to elaborate on why these tweets defied hypocrisy, do we? Suffice to say, the rich asshole is hurling stones while standing in a glass White House. Funny how the rich asshole also seems to know all the tricks of the sexual assault trade. He's like the Hannibal Lecter of sexual predators -- one step ahead of everyone, as if he has a special insight into the minds of boob-honkers, pussy-grabbers and stalkers of underage girls. Oh, and on top of everything else, the nincompoop misspelled "Frankenstein."
Yes, this is trolling. Yes, this is hypocritical. Yes, this calls attention to his own predatory behavior. No, it doesn't matter to his band of merry disciples. Arguing hypocrisy to them on social media is a waste of time.
While the left is almost universally condemning Franken, the rich asshole voters will relentlessly attack Franken or Louis CK without bothering to acknowledge or condemn the rich asshole's and Roy Moore's far worse behavior. Why? Because hypocrisy is irrelevant. Why? Because the rich asshole made it irrelevant using the might of the bully-good pulpit. This is the influence the office of the presidency retains, and the rich asshole, for all of his ignorance, knows he commands a large army of naive automatons from his perch behind the Resolute Desk. Not only is he exploiting the office to tear down the Obama legacy, but he's also tearing down the meaning of words and the need for basic presidential consistency.
Without consistency. the president is nothing more than a random blurt factory. Nothing he says can be trusted or verified by weighing all of it against previous remarks and policies. Trumpers need to ask themselves: would they allow their doctor to be this mercurial? Or the teachers of their children? I doubt it, so why is the president allowed to exhibit behavior that we'd never allow in other authority figures?
It's not shocking to discover that the rich asshole's inconsistency-fetish reaches back to agreements signed by previous administrations -- agreements that the rich asshole is abandoning because his name isn't at the top of the documents. This telegraphs to allies and other foreign leaders that international agreements are meaningless, left to the whimsy of whomever worms his way into the Oval Office. And this, more than anything else, is a threat to America's standing in the world and, more specifically, our national security.
the rich asshole is all about the rich asshole. The 62 million people who voted for him last year were suckered by a classic con-artist. And now, to save face, they're cheering on the most incompetent and dangerous chief executive in the history of the republic. He won't get better. There's no pivoting to a more presidential attitude. You're either with him or against him, yet the damage and destruction he's manifesting will impact everyone. No one is safe.
The White House Says The Difference Between Franken And the rich asshole On Sexual Misconduct Is Franken “Admitted Wrongdoing”
"In one case specifically, Sen. Franken admitted wrongdoing, and the president hasn't," Sanders said. "I think that's a very clear distinction."
The White House on Friday rejected comparisons between President the rich asshole and Democratic Sen. Al Franken, both of whom have been accused of sexual misconduct, saying the difference between the two is the rich asshole denied the claims made by more than a dozen women and went on to become president.
At the White House press briefing, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders responded to a question posed by a reporter over whether it would be fair to investigate the allegations against the rich asshole after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other Republicans called for an investigation into Franken, who was accused of groping a woman without her consent.
Sanders said the president had already addressed the allegations against him during the campaign.
"The American people, I think, spoke very loud and clear when they elected this president," she said.
Sanders said that the rich asshole should not be investigated because "in one case specifically, Sen. Franken admitted wrongdoing, and the president hasn't."
"I think that's a very clear distinction," she said.
"The American people, I think, spoke very loud and clear when they elected this president," she said.
Sanders said that the rich asshole should not be investigated because "in one case specifically, Sen. Franken admitted wrongdoing, and the president hasn't."
"I think that's a very clear distinction," she said.
Sarah Sanders says she has not asked President Trump why he never sued his sexual assault accusers, as he vowed to do during his campaign cnn.it/2j2CthD
the rich asshole himself has faced allegations from more than a dozen women who have accused him of unwanted sexual advances. Most notably, during a 2005 Access Hollywoodappearance the rich asshole told former host Billy Bush: "When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything," including "grab 'em by the pussy."
the rich asshole, who has not explicitly addressed the allegations of sexual misconduct against Roy Moore, the Republican Senate candidate for Alabama, slammed Franken in tweets Thursday night, calling him "Al Frankenstien."
Franken has apologized for his actions and said he would "gladly cooperate" with an ethics investigation.
Last month, Sanders said the official White House position was that all the women who have accused the rich asshole of sexual harassment are lying.
This is one of the saddest aspects of the rich asshole candidacy and presidency
President some rich asshole takes a moment before taking the stage during a Memorial Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Va., May 29, 2017. (DOD photo by U.S. Air Force Tech. Sgt. Brigitte N. Brantley)
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Looking back at the last tumultuous year, to me, one of the saddest aspects of the rich asshole candidacy and presidency is that both in part were built from one of the basest of human impulses: revenge.
We’re taught that ideally, the desire to run for office should reflect a commitment to public service. And we know that the reality is far too often otherwise, running to slake a thirst for power and money that overpowers the greater good.
Yet to seek elected office for revenge, to use it to get back at someone or inflict harm on them or anyone associated with them seems in some ways even worse; shabby, petty and immoral.
Examine the roots of the rich asshole campaign and you see two men eager to use position to take revenge, to get even for insults, imagined or sometimes real, and to lash out at perceived conspiracies against them:
some rich asshole himself… and Vladimir Putin.
Whether or not there was active, knowing collusion, the two nonetheless joined forces to tap into decades of American fears and resentments not totally dissimilar from their own.
In the rich asshole’s case, you don’t have to go to Vienna to figure out that much of his egotism and vainglory — and those tweets, God help us — seem aimed at getting back for slights that can go back just hours and minutes or sometimes even years. To be specific, remember the story of the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner when President Obama jokingly skewered the rich asshole, who sat at his table in grim-faced, aggrieved silence.
Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker was in the Washington Hilton ballroom that night and wrote four years later:
“[O]ne can’t help but suspect that, on that night, the rich asshole’s own sense of public humiliation became so overwhelming that he decided, perhaps at first unconsciously, that he would, somehow, get his own back — perhaps even pursue the presidency after all, no matter how nihilistically or absurdly, and redeem himself.”
After the election, from each man there was feigned magnanimity toward the other but it didn’t last long. Like an uncontrollable tic, the rich asshole continues to obsess over Obama, blaming any and all problems on his predecessor. Nothing, as we know all too well by now, is ever the rich asshole’s fault.
In Putin’s case, the resentment is more geopolitical in nature and was aimed not so much at President Obama as at Hillary Clinton, particularly her tenure as Obama’s secretary of state. Here’s what Michael Crowley and Julia Ioffe wrote in Politico during the summer of 2016, when not as much was known or had been revealed about the extent of Russian attempts to hijack the American electoral process:
Former US officials who worked on Russia policy with Clinton say that Putin was personally stung by Clinton’s December 2011 condemnation of Russia’s parliamentary elections, and had his anger communicated directly to President Barack Obama. They say Putin and his advisers are also keenly aware that, even as she executed Obama’s “reset” policy with Russia, Clinton took a harder line toward Moscow than others in the administration. And they say Putin sees Clinton as a forceful proponent of “regime change” policies that the Russian leader considers a grave threat to his own survival.
Confirming this in her book, What Happened, Hillary Clinton writes:
Our relationship has been sour for a long time. Putin doesn’t respect women and despises anyone who stands up to him, so I’m a double problem. After I criticized one of his policies, he told the press, “It’s better not to argue with women,” but went on to call me weak. “Maybe weakness is not the worst quality for a woman,” he joked. Hilarious.
Clinton’s call for “fair, free transparent elections” in Russia led Putin to accuse Clinton of “interference in our internal affairs.” In retrospect, both statements are soaked in irony, as Putin’s revenge has taken the form of elaborate hacks and ruses via social media designed to interfere with and subvert free elections in the United States. Not to mention the ever-increasing evidence of the rich asshole campaign team contacts with Russian government officials and apparent “cut-outs” — third party go-betweens used to pass information or to determine the likelihood of recruitment.
Of course, by most reports, Putin takes his revenge more bluntly against enemies at home and throughout much of the former Soviet bloc; political opponents and journalists simply die or disappear. But when it comes to the internet, Russia’s techniques have been infinitely more subtle and ingenious. In many cases, the nation’s troll factories have been pitting sides against other sides with phony social media accounts that take every conceivable position on an issue.
The overall extent of these attacks is mind-blowing. The German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy reported, “While Russian Facebook ads reached up to 146 million Americans, nearly 30,000 Russian Twitter accounts produced 1.4 million tweets around Election Day.” And in early November, NBC News noted that more than 3,000 “global news outlets… inadvertently published articles containing embedded tweets by the confirmed Kremlin-linked troll accounts in over 11,000 news articles in the run-up to the 2016 election, separate exclusive reporting shows.”
Then there’s this: the Alliance for Securing Democracy’s Hamilton 68 dashboard, a web tool designed to monitor Russian disinformation, noted that as special counsel Robert Mueller’s initial indictments went down:
… Kremlin-oriented accounts on Twitter employed the four D’s of disinformation: dismiss, distract, dismay, and distort. Outside of a day of fear mongering surrounding the terror attacks in New York City, the key words of the week (Clinton, Mueller, uranium, dossier, Tony Podesta and Donna Brazile) were all efforts to shift focus to Democratic scandals, both real and imagined. More importantly, over the past three weeks, the coordinated effort of Kremlin accounts to discredit Mueller and craft a narrative of Democrat-Russia collusion has moved from fringe websites to more credible outlets. What was once a conspiracy theory is now a mainstream narrative — and that is how a Russian influence operation works.
And let’s add one more to the mix of those players who are motivated by revenge of one sort or another. Please welcome Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, the organization so beloved and touted by candidate the rich asshole for its leaking of emails on Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee.
As reported by the aforementioned Julia Ioffe, this time in The Atlantic, despite its claims to be a nonpartisan dispenser of leaked documents, WikiLeaks — “a radical transparency organization that the American intelligence community believes was chosen by the Russian government to disseminate the information it had hacked” — was constantly shooting off messages to some rich asshole Jr., offering information and advice and making requests, including that Donald’s dad, by then the president–elect, suggest that Assange be named Australia’s ambassador to the United States. I’m not making this up.
Assange’s record of animus toward Hillary Clinton is well-known. He believed she wanted him indicted for WikiLeaks’ 2010 release of 250,000 diplomatic cables and wrote in February 2016, “She’s a war hawk with bad judgement who gets an unseemly emotional rush out of killing people. She shouldn’t be let near a gun shop, let alone an army. And she certainly should not become president of the United States.”
As per Ioffe, on Oct. 3, 2016, WikiLeaks wrote Donald Jr.:
“Hiya, it’d be great if you guys could comment on/push this story…” attaching a quote from then-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton about wanting to “just drone” WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.“Already did that earlier today,” the rich asshole Jr. responded an hour-and-a-half later. “It’s amazing what she can get away with.”
From such bitter nonsense, revenge unleashed, electors are swayed and empires fall.
Revenge, as the saying goes, is a dish best served cold. Putin the ex-KGB colonel apparently is taking his time, coolly mastering an operation effectively waging a cold cyberwar not only against the United States but Western nations in general.
As for the rich asshole (who refuses to acknowledge that anything is wrong and who for whatever reasons will never criticize Putin) and right-wing media outlets like Fox News and Breitbart (which are further spreading the fake news ginned up by Russian bots), if they think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship, they are — surprise! — deluded.
Revenge is an ugly urge and a foul underlying basis for politics and government. It fogs the mind, disrupts equilibrium, crushes rational thought and too powerfully motivates our worst instincts. Further, at a time when fundamentalists and nativists seek to rule the land, revenge is distinctly, you should excuse the word, unchristian. That it has so infected the body politic, bursting to the surface after years of festering along with its helpmates bigotry, spite and ignorance, is a sad commentary on the state of the nation.
Revenge, another saying goes (or resentment or holding a grudge) is a poison you drink, hoping the other person will die. But in our current political nightmare, the poison affects us all: It envenoms and corrupts those who imbibe and while doing so murders society and democracy.
This is an emergency. We must find an antidote and fast.
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