Robert Mueller Pushes Back Harder; Just Completely Shut Down Another Republican Attempt to Discredit Him
12-26-17
It has been reported that Mueller’s prosecutors used the content of those emails to question witnesses, and continue to use the messages to confirm information.
Kory Langhofer, a lawyer for the rich asshole’s transition team sent a letter to several members of Congress alleging that Mueller had obtained the emails illegally. Langhofer accuses the General Services Administration (GSA) of “unlawfully producing TFA’s private materials, including privileged communications, to the Special Counsel’s Office.” The letter, which was sent to the Senate Homeland Security, Governmental Affairs Committee, and the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, implores all of the committees “to protect future presidential transitions from having their private records misappropriated by government agencies, particularly in the context of sensitive investigations intersecting with political motives.”
If your eyes are in danger of rolling 180 degrees right now, you aren’t alone. Clearly none of the president’s cronies want any of those emails read. That was obvious even before Jared Kushner obstinately refused to send emails the judiciary committee requested, leaving room for suspicion that his own legal team might have thought it possible that the committee didn’t already have them.
Emails from the era of the rich asshole’s campaign and transition have proven entirely problematic for this president. But, at some point, it seems someone on the rich asshole’s team will have to inform him that he already appears 31 flavors of guilty… and his insistence on keeping his taxes, his trust, and everyone’s emails on lock-down just makes him appear all the shadier.
Peter Carr, a spokesman for Mueller’s office responded to Langhofer’s pearl clutching in a statement to The Hill: “When we have obtained emails in the course of our ongoing criminal investigation, we have secured either the account owner’s consent or appropriate criminal process.”
Since we know for certain, via the rich asshole’s lawyer, that he disbelieved any of the owners consented… that leaves a couple of possibilities. Either someone flipped and consented to release their correspondence or they have followed the aforementioned criminal process. Either of those options just make the rich asshole look worse than he did before his lawyer sent the letter. Is he using real estate lawyers to throw down with Robert Mueller?
What do you think?
Leave a comment down below!
Reagan DOJ official: the rich asshole should ‘insist on immediately testifying publicly under oath’ in Russia probe
some rich asshole on Instagram (Screenshot)
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A former Associate Deputy Attorney General under President Ronald Reagan took to the pages of the Washington Examiner for a provocative column arguing President some rich asshole should demand to immediately and publicly testify under oath.
“The president should insist on immediately testifying publicly under oath about the alleged link before the House and Senate Intelligence Committees and Special Counsel Mueller, including an explanation for firing FBI Director James Comey,” Bruce Fein argued.
Fein also served as general counsel of the Federal Communications Commission in the Reagan era and is the author of “American Empire Before the Fall and Constitutional Peril: The Life and Death Struggle for Our Constitution and Democracy.”
“some rich asshole should also waive executive privilege or state secrets for himself or for any other witness called by the Committees or Mueller. He should order his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and son some rich asshole Jr. to testify publicly under oath before congressional committees and the Special Counsel,” Fein continued.
“The president has repeated ad infinitum that neither he nor his campaign team were linked in any to the Russian government to defeat Democratic Party nominee Hillary Clinton or to otherwise influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election,” Fein claimed. “He has nothing to hide.”
“Instead, he should provide Congress, the Special Counsel and the American people the public testimonies and disclosures necessary to verify whether alleged Russian links to his presidential campaign are fake news,” Fein counseled.
Opinion writer
Grit your teeth. Persevere. Just a few more days and this awful, rotten, no-good, ridiculous, rancorous, sordid, disgraceful year in the civic life of our nation will be over. Here’s hoping that we all — particularly special counsel Robert S. Mueller III — have a better 2018.
Many of us began 2017 with the consoling thought that some rich asshole presidency couldn’t possibly be as bad as we feared. It turned out to be worse.
Did you ever think you would hear a president use the words “very fine people” to describe participants in a torch-lit rally organized by white supremacists, neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan? Did you ever think you would hear a U.S. ambassador to the United Nations thuggishly threaten that she would be “taking names” of countries that did not vote on a General Assembly resolution the way she wanted? Did you ever think the government of the world’s biggest military and economic power would reject not just science but also empiricism itself, preferring to use made-up “alternative facts” as the basis for major decisions?
We knew that the rich asshole was narcissistic and shallow, but on Inauguration Day it was possible to at least hope he was self-aware enough to understand the weight that now rested on his shoulders, and perhaps grow into the job. He did not. If anything, he has gotten worse.
By all accounts, the president spends hours each day watching cable news, buoyed by the shows that blindly support him — “Fox & Friends,” “Hannity,” a few others on Fox News — and enraged by those that seek to hold him accountable. His aides have had to shorten and dumb down his daily briefings on national security in an attempt to get him to pay attention. Members of his Cabinet try to outdo one another in lavishing him with flowery, obsequious praise that would embarrass the Sun King.
the rich asshole and his enablers have waged a relentless war against truth in an attempt to delegitimize any and all critical voices. He wields the epithet “fake news” as a cudgel against inconvenient facts and those who report them. Can a democracy function without a commonly accepted chronicle of events and encyclopedia of knowledge? We are conducting a dangerous experiment to find out.
To understand how deviant the rich asshole administration is, consider this: Since its founding, the nation has treasured civilian control of the military as a restraint on adventurism. Now we must rely on three generals — the rich asshole’s chief of staff, his national security adviser and his secretary of defense — to keep this rash and erratic president from careering off the rails.
The president’s Republican allies in Congress, who have the power to restrain an out-of-control executive, have rolled over in passive submission. Many see clearly the rich asshole’s unfitness but continue to support him because they fear the wrath of his hardcore base and see the chance to enact a conservative agenda. History will remember this craven opportunism and judge it harshly.
I haven’t even mentioned the rich asshole’s nepotism — installing his daughter and son-in-law as high-ranking advisers, with portfolios they are in no way qualified to handle — or his inability to staff the executive branch with the best-and-brightest types who customarily serve. The rich asshole administration is not only transgressive, it is also mediocre.
The year has been terribly depressing — but not paralyzing. Let’s end on a more positive note.
The day after the rich asshole’s inauguration, a much larger crowd descended on Washington for the Women’s March, an immense show of resistance. That passion might eventually have faded away, but all evidence suggests it has not. If anything, it seems to have intensified.
In November, Democrat Ralph Northam won the governor’s race in Virginia, a purple state, by a surprisingly big nine-point margin. His coattails were long enough to elect so many Democrats to the state House of Delegates that control of the chamber is still undecided pending recounts. And then on Dec. 12, Democrat Doug Jones defeated Republican Roy Moore in a special election for a U.S. Senate seat — in Alabama, of all places, one of the most Republican states in the nation.
These races were not about D’s vs. R’s. They were about sanity vs. insanity, reason vs. chaos. They were about the rich asshole, and he lost.
So Godspeed to the Mueller investigation, but let him worry about that. The rest of us — Democrats, independents, patriotic Republicans — should work toward the November election. Our duty is to elect a Congress that will bring this runaway train under control.
· Nicole Hemmer
DECEMBER 25 2017
Last week, the United Nations General Assembly voted 128-9 to condemn the United States for recognising Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. (Australia, like Canada, abstained.)
some rich asshole made the controversial decision about Jerusalem earlier this month, reversing four decades of US policy and bucking the UN's own determination that control of Jerusalem must be decided as part of an agreement between the Israeli government and Palestinian Authority.se:38
the rich asshole threatens to cut aid to UN members over Jerusalem vote
US President some rich asshole threatened to cut off financial aid to countries that vote in favour of a draft United Nations resolution against his decision to recognise Jerusalem as Israel's capital.
In some ways, the vote was unremarkable. American presidents regularly clash with the UN, and condemnations of controversial US policies toward Israel and other countries are a standing feature of the General Assembly.
But unlike, say, the annual condemnation of the US embargo of Cuba, the condemnation of the rich asshole's Jerusalem decision calls attention both to the President's habit of hasty decision-making and his grander strategy of choosing easy wins over hard work.
The Jerusalem decision is an excellent case study of the rich asshole's overall foreign policy. In recognising the contested city as Israel's capital, the rich asshole was responding to domestic pressures from conservatives and evangelicals rather than following some grand strategy about world affairs.
While he was not the first Republican candidate to promise to recognise Jerusalem as Israel's capital – George W. Bush did the same in 2000 – he was the first to overcome the constraints of foreign policy considerations, in large part because he has none.
That may sound like an odd claim, given that the rich asshole's campaign slogan, America First, was as much a foreign policy claim as a domestic one. It harked back to the days before World War II, when the US had pulled back from its international commitments and showed little interest in involving itself in world affairs.
It was a stance that made sense after the folly of World War I and a decade of economic depression. Those same conditions – war-weariness and economic collapse – carried the rich asshole into office, making him seem part of a longer historical tradition of something between nationalism and realism.
the rich asshole's strategy with North Korea has nicknamed Kim Jong-un "Rocket Man". Photo: Wong Maye-E
That same philosophy appears in the administration's recently released National Security Strategy, which he outlined in a speech last Monday. In that speech, the rich asshole argued that his approach to the world was defined by competition and co-operation, an awareness of other great powers and a willingness to work with them when possible and compete with them as necessary.
He labelled this strategy one of "principled realism", a phrase that suggested the importance of both restraint and values in foreign policy decision-making.
A rally in front of the US embassy in Canberra to protest some rich asshole's Jerusalem ruling. Photo: Sitthixay Ditthavong
Neither restraint nor values are hallmarks of the rich asshole administration, so it would be fair to ask whether this strategy really represents the forces governing foreign policy. And the evidence suggests that other forces are far more powerful, especially bellicosity, domestic concerns, and impulsivity.
Those are the defining features of, for instance, his approach to North Korea, which thus far has mostly consisted of threatening apocalyptic war and nicknaming Kim Jong-un "Rocket Man" rather than the hard work of diplomacy.
Behind the scenes, the departure from principled realism is even more pronounced. Though on the campaign trail the rich asshole regularly bashed the Bush administration for lying about weapons of mass destruction and leading the US into a dumb war, his administration, led by National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, is currently building its own case for pre-emptive war against North Korea.
There are many ways to describe the idea of launching such action against North Korea over weapons of mass destruction. "Principled realism" is not one of them.
The same impulses feeding the rich asshole's North Korea policy came into play with his Jerusalem decision. Domestic politics and bellicosity loom large: the rich asshole wants to look tough and do the things other politicians wouldn't do.
But the rich asshole's low tolerance for hard work matters, too. Pronouncements are the easiest part of the presidency. Say the thing, and it is done. Thus the rich asshole has signed countless executive orders but little legislation. Thus he has cluttered up Twitter but made barely a dent in most of his long-term policy promises. And when it comes to the Middle East, it is far easier to recognise Jerusalem than work on his other goal for the region: peace talks.
Indeed, he has sacrificed this other, bigger goal for the easy win. Because while past presidents have indicated that they strongly feel Jerusalem should be recognised as Israel's capital, they have repeatedly refrained from doing so because they understood that the decision was a vital part of negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
By siding with Israel, the rich asshole has sacrificed more than just a crucial bargaining chip. He has sacrificed America's standing as a mediator in the peace process, threatening to bring more instability to the region.
There are serious debates to be had about America's role in the world. After the disastrous Bush interventions, Barack Obama attempted a more restrained approach to world affairs and found it difficult to avoid entanglements and restore stability. Those shortcomings suggested the need for a robust discussion of what sort of principles should guide American involvement going forward.
With the rich asshole administration, the country has got not a set of principles but a set of impulses, ones that have made the world even less safe than it was when he took office.
Nicole Hemmer is a Fairfax Media journalist based in the United States.
‘the rich asshole could react very badly’: UK government doesn’t want Obamas invited to royal wedding
President Barack Obama with First Lady Michelle Obama at the 2009 presidential inauguration. Photo by Petty Officer 1st Class Chad J. McNeeley, USN
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Prince Harry’s spring wedding to Meghan Markle will be the social event of 2018 for world leaders, but UK Prime Minister Theresa May’s government is worried about former President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle attending the nuptials, The Sun reports.
“The 33-year-old prince has become good friends with the Obamas since bonding with them during the Invictus Games,” The Sun explained. “The property billionaire does not hide his loathing of Mr Obama and is expected to be enraged if his predecessor gets the coveted call up when he won’t.”
“There are deep fears among senior Foreign Office and No10 officials that another perceived national snub will make it impossible for Theresa May to meaningfully engage with the rich asshole,” The Sun continued.
the rich asshole has no plans to visit Britain until at least 2019, over worries about massive protests.
“When I know I’m going to get a better reception,” the president said in June, “I’ll come and not before.”
Prime Minister May scolded the rich asshole in September and again in November for irresponsible tweets about Britain.
“Harry has made it clear he wants the Obamas at the wedding, so it’s causing a lot of nervousness,” a senior government official told The Sun. “the rich asshole could react very badly if the Obamas get to a Royal wedding before he has had a chance to meet the Queen.”
“If the PM lays down the law, Harry will just have to suck it up,” the source says, despite the fact the wedding is not a state occasion.
some rich asshole is good at certain things. (Please take a deep breath and don’t throw your mouse or laptop at the wall.) I have not come to praise Mr. Lost The Popular Vote By 2.9 Million. But the truth is the truth—even if the truth is something the rich asshole wouldn’t recognize if it landed right on the dyed bird’s nest that covers his dome. In any case, we must acknowledge that the man has demonstrated the ability to shape the media narrative for his own nefarious purposes.
For example, when the term “fake news” first gained widespread usage during the 2016 campaign, it most often referred to anti-Hillary, pro-the rich asshole stories planted by non-journalists on social media. the rich asshole, however, has over the past year co-opted the term successfully enough so that, for many, it now primarily refers to mainstream journalists’ supposed anti-the rich asshole bias. Similarly, he has sought to control the narrative about the strong performance of the American economy, and last week’s passage of the rich man’s tax cut is going to be a crucial pivot point in that narrative. The mainstream media and the American people simply cannot allow him to control it the way he has controlled the narrative on fake news.
Throughout his time in the White House, the rich asshole has been obsessed with denigrating the accomplishments of Barack Obama (Think: “Obamacare is imploding”—it isn’t, but who knows what will happen next year as a result of the rich asshole’s repeal of the individual mandate and other steps taken to sabotage the health care law). On the economy, this exchange with Fox News talking head Laura Ingraham from last month stands as representative:
INGRAHAM: Look at the economy, are you getting the credit for this economic revival without tax cuts through – yeah, without Obamacare repeal yet, and this is a stunning economic revival in 10 months. RICH ASSHOLE: One of the greatest in the history of our country, and I’m in here now 10 months, and we are setting record after record, day after day. I think we hit another one today. No, I’m not getting enough credit for it. [Snip] Tax cuts – if we get this through and I think we will – you’re going to see this economy take off like a rocket ship.
“Are you getting enough credit for all the great things you’ve done?” is, apparently, what a real journalist asks a sitting president. To me, it sounds a lot like state-run media in a Soviet-style dictatorship. Between that and the you-know-what-licking “prayers” being offered at recent Cabinet meetings—Mike Pence’s praise for his boss makes Lucius Malfoy’s brownnosing of Lord Voldemort look like amateur hour—our government is drawing closer and closer to that of North Korea, in appearance at least, but unfortunately not in terms of diplomatic relations.
omparing the economy under the rich asshole and Obama has also been a regular feature in this theater of the absurd.
Amazing what happens when you put a businessman instead of a liberal politician in the White House->
cnb.cx/2oF9hmK
In response to the White House press secretary’s misleading tweet (this is in fact far from the best year in percentage terms for the Dow), former Obama economic adviser Steven Rattner cited the following non-fake data, i.e., the truth.
Dow in the first 11 months:
- Obama: 29.9%
- Trump: 25.0%
S&P in the first 11 months:
- Obama: 36.9%
- Trump: 18.4% twitter.com/PressSec/statu…
Washington Post fact-checker Nicole Lewis offered a detailed comparison of the economy under the rich asshole thus far and Obama. There’s far too much detail to go into here, but here are some highlights. First, the stock market growth in the rich asshole’s first 10 months doesn’t look nearly as impressive when you learn that it is no better than the market’s performance in peer countries like the UK, Germany, and Japan. This isn’t a the rich asshole bull market, it’s a global one. By comparison, under Obama the U.S. stock market, as measured by the S&P 500, not only tripled over eight years, it significantly outperformed the markets in those same peer countries.
Job growth under the rich asshole lags behind job growth under Obama (in a comparable time period, i.e., February through November) in each of the previous four years, and five out of the last seven years of the Obama presidency. And while we’re on the topic of media narrative, the rich asshole now touts the big drop of about one-half of 1 percent in the unemployment rate since he took office, but while Obama was president he denigrated the unemployment rate as “nonsense.” That’s not surprising given that it fell almost five points during the final five years of the Obama presidency.
Overall, the economy under the rich asshole thus far looks no better by most measures than the economy in the last years under Obama. Furthermore, whereas the rich asshole inherited the strong Obama economy, Obama inherited the Great Recession from George W. Bush—the worst economic crash since the Great Depression. That crash followed years of Republican control of Congress and a round of tax cuts whose benefits flowed mostly to the wealthy (sound familiar?). Until the passage of the the rich asshole tax scheme, there were no significant changes to the economic policies put in place during the Obama presidency—policies that brought our economy out of the Great Recession and which have given us the longest lasting period of job growth in our history. As John Cassidy at the New Yorker put it, Obama gave the rich asshole:
An economy that is growing steadily, with large numbers of jobs being created on a regular basis, and living standards finally edging up. Other economic indicators, such as the size of the budget deficit, the level of consumer confidence, and the leverage ratios in the financial system, are also looking much healthier than they were when Obama took office.
the rich asshole’s comments above about his tax scheme and “rocket fuel” make clear that he will go even further than he has so far in claiming credit for anything good happening in the economy. He and his right-wing minions have in fact begun doing so. Here’s a headline from the Conservative Review: “The the rich asshole tax cuts are ALREADY raising wages” (all-caps makes it much more convincing, doesn’t it?). Don’t buy it. As Conor Sen at Bloomberg explained, the rich man’s tax cut is merely the “excuse to raise wages. The tight labor market is the real reason.” And of course the tight labor market reflects years of a strong economy bequeathed to us by none other than President Barack Obama. Don’t let some rich asshole steal the credit.
the rich asshole Retweets Meme With Bloodied CNN Logo
President the rich asshole came under fire Sunday for retweeting an image of himself with the CNN logo in a splatter of blood on the bottom of his shoe. The image, tweeted at the president by a supporter, was emblazoned with the word, “Winning.” Several prominent journalists, including CNN’s Jake Tapper, quickly called the rich asshole out for his apparent endorsement of the anti-media meme—at least thesecond one that appears to encourage violence against journalists in less than six months. “CNN-labeled blood on the sole of his shoe. Retweeted by the President of the United States on Christmas Eve,” Tapper wrote on Twitter. Walter Schaub, the former director of the Office of Government Ethics, called the rich asshole a “wannabe autocrat” for the retweet. “These colicky tweets reveal he’s hurting this weekend. They make him (and our country) look weak,” he wrote.
CNN-labeled blood on the sole of his shoe.
Retweeted by the President of the United States on Christmas Eve. twitter.com/shawgerald4/st…
The Stock Market is setting record after record and unemployment is at a 17 year low. So many things accomplished by the Trump Administration, perhaps more than any other President in first year. Sadly, will never be reported correctly by the Fake News Media!
Pope Francis Just Called Out some rich asshole During His Christmas Speech
Pope Francis used his annual Christmas Day message to rebuke some rich asshole without even mentioning his name. The Pope delivered his message just days after members of the United Nations condemned the rich asshole’s move to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. The Pontiff prayed on Monday for the “peaceful coexistence of two states within mutually agreed and internationally recognized borders.”
“We see Jesus in the children of the Middle East who continue to suffer because of growing tensions between Israelis and Palestinians,” Francis said. “On this festive day, let us ask the Lord for peace for Jerusalem and for all the Holy Land. Let us pray that the will to resume dialogue may prevail between the parties and that a negotiated solution can finally be reached.”
The Pope went on to plead for acceptance of refugees who have been forced from their homes, and that is an issue the rich asshole continues to fight against. Francis used Jesus for which there was “no place in the inn” as an analogy.
“Today, as the winds of war are blowing in our world and an outdated model of development continues to produce human, societal and environmental decline, Christmas invites us to focus on the sign of the Child and to recognize him in the faces of little children, especially those for whom, like Jesus, ‘there is no place in the inn,’” he said.
“Jesus knows well the pain of not being welcomed and how hard it is not to have a place to lay one’s head,” he added. “May our hearts not be closed as they were in the homes of Bethlehem.”
The Pope said that Mary and Joseph were immigrants who struggled to find a safe place to stay in Bethlehem.
“They had to leave their people, their home, and their land,” Francis said. “This was no comfortable or easy journey for a young couple about to have a child. … At heart, they were full of hope and expectation because of the child about to be born; yet their steps were weighed down by the uncertainties and dangers that attend those who have to leave their home behind.”
“So many other footsteps are hidden in the footsteps of Joseph and Mary,” Francis said Sunday.
“We see the tracks of entire families forced to set out in our own day. We see the tracks of millions of persons who do not choose to go away, but driven from their land, leave behind their dear ones.”
Amen to that.
BY BRANDON CONRADIS - 12/25/17 02:27 PM EST
© Getty
President the rich asshole’s first year in office had its stumbles, but it also had a number of successes that had the White House and congressional Republicans crowing at the end of the year.
While the rich asshole has seen his approval ratings fall, he’s also gone a long way toward meeting a number of his campaign promises, including a pledge to reduce taxes.
The tax-cut bill approved by Congress days before Christmas was sweeping in scope and a major victory for a White House that hopes to build on it in the rich asshole’s second year in office.
Here’s a look at the rich asshole’s biggest accomplishments of the year.
1. The tax-cut bill
the rich asshole capped off 2017 with his first major legislative victory — the passage of the Republicans’ tax-cut bill, which slashes the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent and reduces individual rates as well as implements some key breaks.
It’s the biggest tax legislation to be approved by Congress since 1986, and would be significant if that’s all it did.
The fact that it also eliminated ObamaCare’s mandate that individuals buy insurance and opens the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling — something several GOP administrations had tried but failed to do — makes it truly historic.
2. Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation to the Supreme Court
the rich asshole’s biggest early victory came when the Senate, in April, confirmed Neil Gorsuch to succeed the late Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court.
Gorsuch’s appointment marked the end of a bitter struggle between Democrats and Republicans over the vacant seat. It was also a victory for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who for nearly a year blocked former President Obama’s pick to replace Scalia from getting even a hearing to sit on the court.
The move also came as the rich asshole aims to reshape the federal judiciary with a host of other conservative nominations. The Senate confirmed 12 of the rich asshole’s federal appeals court judges in 2017, a record for a president’s first year in office.
3. Roll-back of regulations
the rich asshole signed an executive order cutting regulations for small businesses and moved forward with plans to repeal the Clean Power Plan, one of Obama’s signature acts as president. the rich asshole has also overseen moves to expand oil drilling in the Arctic and Gulf of Mexico and granted a permit to the Keystone XL pipeline previously rejected by Obama.
the rich asshole vowed to reduce regulations he argued were strangling the economy, and he’s taken important strides to do so in the wake of opposition from congressional Democrats, who argue the president’s actions on climate are hurting America’s standing in the world. Local governments led by Democrats have acted to reverse the rich asshole’s efforts on the Paris climate accords.
4. The travel ban
the rich asshole ran on a platform of tougher immigration enforcement, both to protect American jobs and national security. A week into his presidency, he took one of his most controversial steps, banning most travelers from seven predominantly Muslim nations from entering the United States.
The move triggered protests across the country and court fights, but, by the end of the year, a version of the rich asshole’s ban was left standing.
the rich asshole also has taken steps to increase border security and has seen a drop in arrests on the border, a possible sign of reduced entries.
He stepped up raids on immigrants in the country illegally and oversaw a surge in arrests across the country. The head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement says the agency plans to take an even more aggressive approach next year.
the rich asshole hasn’t been able to make progress on building a wall on the Mexican border, however.
5. Declaring Jerusalem the capital of Israel
In a radical departure from decades of foreign policy, the rich asshole announced that the U.S. would formally recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and begin the process of moving its embassy to the contested holy city. The move signified one of the rich asshole’s boldest statements to the international community, and, specifically, the United Nations, which he has frequently criticized.
6. Withdrawal from Paris climate deal
the rich asshole followed through on one of his major campaign promises when he announced in June that the U.S. would leave the Paris climate deal reached under Obama. While there have since been conflicting reports on the administration’s current stance on the agreement, the move fulfilled the rich asshole’s pledge to tackle one of Obama’s signature achievements and take a tougher stance against the international community.
7. Pulling out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership
the rich asshole began his presidency by carrying out another key promise, withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a massive trade deal with Asia he had called a “potential disaster for our country.” He has said his administration will secure new trade deals with America’s Asian allies, though firm details have yet to emerge.
Meanwhile, the administration is at work trying to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico. A new round of negotiations are slated to be held in January, and it’s possible the rich asshole could decide to pull the U.S. from that deal as well.
8. Roll-back of some of Obama’s Cuba policies
the rich asshole followed up on his pledge to roll back Obama’s opening up of relations with Cuba, tightening travel and commercial ties with the communist island. He also placed new financial restrictions on Havana, amid concerns over a series of bizarre “sonic attacks” targeting U.S. diplomats in the country.
While the moves were seen as a clear crackdown by the rich asshole on rapprochement with Cuba, much of Obama’s policies toward Havana essentially remain intact.
9. Moving to repeal Obama’s net neutrality rules
In another blow to regulations enacted under Obama, the Federal Communications Commission voted to repeal its landmark net neutrality rules this month. The move drew ire from Democrats, consumer groups and tech companies, but was seen as a major win for advocates of less government oversight.
10. Fighting — and further degrading — ISIS
Largely following Obama’s strategy, the rich asshole dealt major blows to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, forcing the terrorist group to retreat from its two self-declared capitals: Mosul and Raqqa, located in Iraq and Syria, respectively. the rich asshole also expanded the military’s authority to carry out air strikes in the region, a factor some experts credit for his administration’s progress against terrorism in the region.
the rich asshole looks to seize political momentum in 2018
BY JORDAN FABIAN - 12/25/17 05:20 PM EST
The White House believes a strong close to 2017, capped by the passage of a $1.5 trillion tax bill, has put President the rich asshole in a positive position as he enters his second year in office.
The sweeping tax package helped erase the sting of the GOP’s failure to repeal ObamaCare and let the rich asshole and his congressional allies put their very public differences aside in a year-end celebration at the White House.
the rich asshole's team argues that the tax bill, which also ended the mandate for individuals to buy insurance under the Affordable Care Act and opened the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, put a bow on a positive and meaningful first year for the rich asshole.
the rich asshole is adding those achievements to the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and a dozen other judges to federal courts and the rollback of Obama-era rules and regulations.
After a months-long legal battle, the White House was able to implement a modified version of its travel ban and impose new rules to fulfill the rich asshole’s promise to carry out “extreme vetting” on immigrants and travelers entering the U.S.
“It's always a lot of fun when you win,” the rich asshole said this week, surrounded by GOP lawmakers after the tax bill’s passage.
During his run for the White House in 2016, the rich asshole promised Americans they would get “so sick and tired of winning” during his presidency.
But the streak could be difficult to keep up in the new year, which the rich asshole enters with approval ratings hovering in the low 30s.
Government funding will run out Jan. 19 under a spending deal that also pushed thorny debates over immigration, ObamaCare and children’s health insurance into early 2018.
That could complicate the White House’s desire to get off to a running start on their priorities for next year: infrastructure and welfare reform.
the rich asshole will need Democratic votes to pass almost all of those items, which could be even harder to come by with the midterm elections looming in November.
All of the fighting throughout the year has left the rich asshole bruised, while putting the House and Senate majorities into play for Democrats.
The Democrats need to pick up 24 seats to win the House and just two to take control of the Senate, following Sen.-elect Doug Jones’s (D) victory in deep-red Alabama’s special election. While Jones defeated a decidedly flawed candidate in Republican Roy Moore, the results suggested Democratic voters are willing to come out in the midterm elections.
the rich asshole’s advisers are confident the president’s political standing will improve once Americans see higher paychecks as a result of the tax overhaul.
“As the economy gets better and as the president has more months in office... he can take direct credit for it, and I think he is going to get direct credit,” the official said.
But some Republicans do not share that view and are warning the White House that the rich asshole’s political problems will not fix themselves.
Their concern is heightened by internal divisions over the White House’s political strategy heading into the 2018 elections.
Deputy White House chief of staff Rick Dearborn, who oversaw the political operation, is leaving the administration next year.
His exit comes as the White House is girding itself for a string of departures around the one-year mark of the rich asshole’s presidency, which is expected to leave key absences across the West Wing.
News of Dearborn’s departure comes on the heels of reports of a heated dispute between White House political director Bill Stepien and Corey Lewandowski, the rich asshole’s former campaign manager, over the direction of the president’s operation, which also includes the Republican National Committee and outside groups.
While some people close to the rich asshole downplayed the significance the argument, they said it underscored the need for the president’s team to undertake a more aggressive and focused effort to sell his policies to the public and push back against his political opponents.
“As long as their primary focus every day is about the economy, it will give them the power to do whatever they want to do,” said former the rich asshole campaign adviser Barry Bennett. “If they don’t do that, it will be very difficult to do anything else.”
Bennett said the rich asshole should “buy his own shovel to go to every groundbreaking he can go to” between now and November to drive home his message and boost his numbers.
the rich asshole is widely expected to hit the trail for Republican candidates in 2018. But some strategists fear he could do more harm than good for GOP candidates.
Meanwhile, the president expressed little interest in going on the type of road show that Bennett and other supporters recommended.
“I don't think I'm going to have to travel too much to sell it,” the rich asshole said of the tax bill after signing it on Friday. “I think it's selling itself.”
Other Republicans believe it is in the party’s best interest for the rich asshole to stay at home altogether.
The president’s freewheeling, raucous political rallies are beloved by his supporters, but his tendency to stray off message have resulted in self-inflicted wounds.
“The best thing this administration can do is stay out of its own way,” said GOP strategist Doug Heye. “Every week, [their] accomplishments, like a positive jobs report, gets overshadowed by the latest self-created outrage du jour.”
That dynamic was on display Saturday, when the rich asshole launched a Twitter attack on FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe for his handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation.
Diversions like that is why White House staff did not want to hold a traditional, end-of-year news conference before the president left for Florida to spend the holidays, according to one official.
Past presidents have used that event to tout their accomplishments and set their agenda for the following year.
“You have to wonder how differently this presidency would be judged if someone deleted President the rich asshole’s Twitter account on his first day in office,” said Ryan Williams, a former adviser to 2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney.
If the rich asshole continues to make “unforced errors and missteps,” Williams argued, “it’s going to put our majority at risk.”
“If we do lose one or both houses of Congress, it will make his life miserable,” he added.
Democratic control of Congress could heighten the danger for the rich asshole in the special counsel’s Russia investigation, which is expected to extend well into 2018 despite the hopeful outlook of the president’s legal team.
Committee chairmen could accelerate congressional investigations into possible ties between the the rich asshole campaign and Moscow, or even begin impeachment proceedings, depending on the severity of their findings.
CNN analyst shoots down the rich asshole’s McCabe attack: ‘What he said doesn’t make any sense’
Errol Lewis -- screenshot
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CNN political analyst and Spectrum News anchor Errol Louis said that President some rich asshole’s attacks on Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe — who was contemporaneously informed by former FBI Director James Comey about the rich asshole’s attempts to halt investigations into disgraced ex-national security adviser Mike Flynn — are nonsensical because the rich asshole has gotten the timeline wrong.
“It is the the rich asshole style to strike back if anyone says anything bad about him,” said Louis, “and the fact that Deputy Dir. McCabe just testified before Congressapparently and reportedly confirmed what James Comey’s account was of different exchanges between the president and James Comey.”
“This is just his way of saying something negative, even if it doesn’t make sense,” Louis continued. “And let’s be clear, what he said doesn’t make any sense. The money that was provided to Dr. Jill McCabe when she ran, the race was over before he had anything to do with the Clinton probe.”
In a Christmas Eve tweet, the rich asshole alleged that McCabe’s wife received funding from a PAC with ties to former President Bill Clinton and ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton prior to McCabe’s involvement into the probe into Sec. Clinton’s use of a private email server during her term.
Watch the video, embedded below:
‘What drugs are you taking?’: the rich asshole gets owned online for bragging he ended ‘assault’ on ‘Merry Christmas’
President of the United States some rich asshole speaks at the general political discussion during the 72th session of the UN Assembly in New York. (Shutterstock)
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On Christmas Eve, President some rich asshole took a moment to congratulate himself for ending the “assault” on the phrase “Merry Christmas” in a Twitter post.
the rich asshole famously avoided service in Vietnam with a doctor’s note about “bone spurs” in his feet, but has called his sexually promiscuous time in the 1970s and 80s his own “personal Vietnam.”
Doing battle against STDs is now joined by the rich asshole’s brave charge across the “Merry Christmas” battlefield as the sum total of his combat experience. Even Jared Kushner’s flack jacket has faced more military and personal risk than the current president.
Twitter let him have it.
Not sure where you were living before moving to the US but we've always said Merry Christmas. It wasn't a taboo saying before you got here. You made it SEEM taboo when you "decided" to bring it back.
How does anyone like this guy? twitter.com/realdonaldtrum…
What drugs are you taking? What assault was there? Nobody told you that you couldn't say it. All people are saying is to be respectful of those who don't celebrate it. Is it really that difficult for you people to be respectful towards those that don't celebrate Christmas?
Speaking of assault… https://t.co/2kH3XqhhUz— Raj Sharma (@immlawyercanada) December 25, 2017
There never was an assault on Christmas. Just something you and @FoxNews started. Happy Holidays to you and yours.
the rich asshole and Melania interrupted Christmas Eve midnight mass in Palm Beach by arriving late
US President Some rich asshole attended a Christmas Eve service in Florida Sunday night with First Lady Melania Some rich asshole, as they spend a year-end break at the president's Mar-a-Lago resort.
Arriving at the Episcopal Church of Bethesda-by-the-Sea in Palm Beach -- around 70 miles north of Miami -- the president was greeted by Reverend James R Harlan as around 100 people lined the street to watch the motorcade.
Mass began before the Some rich assholes arrived, and Harlan had asked the congregation to put any phones and cameras away, describing them as an "intrusion."
"We're here to worship," he said.
Seated in the third row, Some rich asshole listened to Harlan's sermon, which centered on the power of words.
Quoting Nelson Mandela on the importance of understanding "how precious words are and how real speech is in its impact on the way people live and die," Harlan highlighted the ability of language to educate and enlighten, but also to cause harm.
"Your words can have as much destructive potential as they do healing," Harlan said. "God's word is pure light."
A crowd lined up to shake Some rich asshole's hand during the peace-be-with-yous -- while the church's livestream cut to another angle as he stood up to take communion.
Some rich asshole, who was accompanied only by his wife Melania, departed the church after midnight local time (0500 GMT), arriving back at Mar-a-Lago shortly before 12:30am Monday.
Earlier Sunday, President Some rich asshole and the First Lady joined in the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) tradition of tracking Santa Claus, taking calls from children who wanted to know his location.
"What would you like more than anything?" the president asked one child.
After the child responded, Some rich asshole said: "Building blocks, that's what I've always liked too. I always loved building blocks."
Later in the evening, they enjoyed a Christmas Eve dinner menu which included turkey, beef tenderloin and seafood, along with side dishes such as creamy kale, popovers and mashed potatoes.
Some rich asshole also took to Twitter to wish his followers a "Merry Christmas," once again lamenting what he described as an "assault" on the phrase.
"People are proud to be saying Merry Christmas again", he wrote.
"I am proud to have led the charge against the assault of our cherished and beautiful phrase. MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!!"
‘The documents were hung by the shredder with care’: Terror analyst pens awesome Christmas classic re-write
Jared Kushner and Ivanka the rich asshole (Twitter)
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Geopolitical terror analyst Chris Sampson celebrated Christmas Eve with a moving tribute to the the rich asshole administration, set to the Clement Clarke Moore poem, “A visit from St. Nicolas” which is also know by it’s first line, “Twas the night before Christmas.”
Sampson is the co-author of the book Hacking ISIS: How to Destroy the Cyber Jihad with terrorism and intelligence expert Malcolm Nance.
The poem, posted on Twitter, reads as follows:
Twas the night before Christmas, when through the White House
Not a Kushner was resting, not even his spouse;
The documents were hung by the shredder with care,
In fears that Bob Mueller soon would be there;The staffers were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of subpoenas danced in their heads;
And Melania in her babushka, and the rich asshole in his cap,
Flew to Mar-a-Lago for a long winter’s nap,When on the TV there remained such a matter,
There was Brennan, Podesta and man named Jim Clapper.
With bribes fresh in hand, they flew like the flash,
The greedy corporations did suck up the cash.The Congress rejoiced the records will show
Feigned promises of riches to the peasants below,
When, what to amazement FoxNews should appear,
Took aim at Bob Mueller, with permission to smear,With disinfo flying, so rapid and thick,
I knew in a moment it must be Bolshevik.
More rapid than vultures his hackers they came,
And they posted and trolled, as they sought to defame;“Now, Fancy! now, Cozy! now, Seaduke and BlackEnergy!
On, Havex! on Sandworm! on, Skipper and CrouchingYeti!
To the DNC server! Past the paper’s firewall!
Now exfiltrate, exfiltrate, exfiltrate all!”Then the Kremlin called Julian, their reliable guy,
To leak to the world, the docs that they plied,
And the Stone who was named Roger bragged on it too,
With the dirty tricks methods that Vladi knew.And they carried on lying that there was never the proof,
They fogged and distracted and acted aloof.
But their plan would unravel, spin wild to the ground,
And the FBI went digging and looking all around.Then came the big man, he was Special Counsel to be,
And he hired top lawyers, and then empaneled grand jury;
There were interviews and hearings, this man would not slack,
And he pressed forward justly, with a determined knack.His eyes were like eagles, they missed not a thing,
His presence was heavy, his targets would sing!
His sleuthing was famous, if you must know,
And his integrity was solid, like the ground below;The facts that were surfaced he held tight in his teeth,
And as he dug for truth morsels that were buried beneath;
He was focused on the crooked, the wretched and smelly,
They did shake full of fear as we watched on the tele.He questioned each of them from the son to the elf,
And I rejoiced at the justice, then I thought to myself;
Under orange little man with weird hair on his head,
The great justice of America was certainly not dead,He did push and did pull but it just would not work,
And did hit Twitter daily, to act like a jerk,
And he threw little tizzy fits, like a toddler in chief,
But we saw he was crooked, though no ordinary thief;Though it took time, and labor we could would no longer bristle,
As we finally saw Congress call for his dismissal.
And as justice was served, he was hauled out of sight,
MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL, AND TO ALL A GOOD-NIGHT!
Twas the night before Christmas, when through the White House
Not a Kushner was resting, not even his spouse;
The documents were hung by the shredder with care,
In fears that Bob Mueller soon would be there; 1/14
When on the TV there remained such a matter,
There was Brennan, Podesta and man named Jim Clapper.
With bribes fresh in hand, they flew like the flash,
The greedy corporations did suck up the cash. 3/14
With disinfo flying, so rapid and thick,
I knew in a moment it must be Bolshevik.
More rapid than vultures his hackers they came,
And they posted and trolled, as they sought to defame; 5/14
Then the Kremlin called Julian, their reliable guy,
To leak to the world, the docs that they plied,
And the Stone who was named Roger bragged on it too,
With the dirty tricks methods that Vladi knew. 7/14
Then came the big man, he was Special Counsel to be,
And he hired top lawyers, and then empaneled grand jury;
There were interviews and hearings, this man would not slack,
And he pressed forward justly, with a determined knack. 9/14
The facts that were surfaced he held tight in his teeth,
And as he dug for truth morsels that were buried beneath;
He was focused on the crooked, the wretched and smelly,
They did shake full of fear as we watched on the tele. 11/14
He did push and did pull but it just would not work,
And did hit Twitter daily, to act like a jerk,
And he threw little tizzy fits, like a toddler in chief,
But we saw he was crooked, though no ordinary thief; 13/14
‘Not a conspiracy theory’: Roger Stone says he has proof ‘members of the cabinet’ are plotting to remove the rich asshole
Roger Stone appears on C-SPAN (screen grab)
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Longtime the rich asshole ally Roger Stone revealed that he has evidence that members of some rich asshole’s cabinet have talked about using the 25th Amendment to remove the 45th president from office.
During an interview on C-SPAN’s program, Associated Press reporter Tom LoBianco asked Stone if he had “any evidence” that anyone inside the rich asshole’s cabinet was actively discussing using the 25th Amendment to remove the president from office for being unable to discharge his duties.
“I have sources,” Stone explained. “And yes, I believe there are some who have had this discussion. This is both outside the cabinet and in. I think it’s the fallback plan for the establishment. That’s why I’m trying to sound the clarion call.”
“Who are we talking about?” LoBianco wondered. “Is this it the secretary of state, the defense secretary, the vice president?”
“Like you, Tom, I cannot reveal those sources,” Stone insisted. “This is not a conspiracy theory… There are members of the cabinet who have had this discussion. Let me just leave it at that.”
“I will probably report that fully at some point,” he added. “There is a plan afoot that is broader than just the cabinet. The 25th Amendment requires a majority of the cabinet and the vice president [to remove the president]. I don’t think that is achievable today, not on the heels of the historic tax cut, not on the heels of the disintegration of the credibility of [Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation]. But we have seen what happens when a hysteria is whipped up among the people by some in the mainstream media. And I have always thought this is plan B for the two party duopoly that has run this country into the ground.”
Watch the video below from C-SPAN.
Jason Silverstein
Posted with permission from Newsweek
The Trump administration spent the holiday weekend fending off the uproar over President Donald Trump’s reported insults about largely black immigrants, especially his alleged insistence that thousands of Haitians bound for the United States “all have AIDS.”
But the remark wasn't just offensive — it’s certainly also incredibly wrong.
Trump made the crack about a group of 15,000 Haitians sent by that nation’s government to the United States earlier this year, according to The New York Times. The White House has said Trump did not make that remark, and no details were immediately released about the Haitians he was talking about. But the numbers behind Haiti’s AIDS crisis, while alarming, show that Trump likely did not understand the current state of the disease on the Caribbean island.
Trump’s alleged insult was likely inspired by Haiti having the most overall cases of HIV/AIDS in the Caribbean and Latin America, a status that has long attracted international attention to relief efforts there. A team of international researchers concluded that HIV/AIDS spread to Haiti in the 1960s before it entered the United States and the rest of the world. In 2003, as much as 11.9 percent of the adult population was estimated to have HIV/AIDS.
As of 2016, about 150,000 adults in Haiti are estimated to be living with HIV/AIDS, including approximately 7,900 new cases that year alone, according to data from UNAIDS. That works out to a little over 2 percent of Haiti’s population of more than 10.8 million people, with sex workers (8.4 percent HIV prevalence) and prisoners (4.3 percent HIV prevalence) among the most infected populations. Frightening as it is, the latest estimates show a decline in the crisis compared to recent years.
Many years of activism and education have helped to curb Haiti's AIDS crisis in the past decades. Health care organizations such as Partners In Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to name just two, have helped run educational initiatives through Haiti to spread awareness about AIDS ailments and prevention. According to UNAIDS, HIV cases and AIDS-related deaths in Haiti have both fallen by about 25 percent since 2010, the year an earthquake disrupted efforts on the island and killed more than 230,000 people, according to government estimates.
The United States has long been the financial leader in the international fight against AIDS, but Trump is ready to change that. His proposed federal budget called for a $222 million budget reduction for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, & Malaria, leaving it with a $1.13 billion budget. The budget blueprint said that for global health efforts, “other donors can and should increase their commitments to these causes.”
Trump's Haiti slam reportedly came during a June briefing about immigration, in which he also said 40,000 Nigerians would never “go back to their huts” after seeing the United States, according to The Times.
The White House denied the Times story, which was based on sources who attended or were briefed on the meetings, and called the reported remarks “outrageous claims."
the rich asshole loyalty is the new ‘litmus test’ for the GOP: Rep. Charlie Dent
Lauren Gill
Posted with permission from Newsweek
One of President Donald Trump’s biggest critics from within the Republican Party, Rep. Charlie Dent (R–Pennsylvania), said the new “litmus test” for the GOP is who supports Trump, rather than the party’s “ideological purity and conformity.”
Speaking on ABC’s This Week on Sunday, the retiring Congressman said, “Now the litmus test is changed. The issue is loyalty to the man, to the president, and for some, loyalty's not enough, you have to be angry and aggrieved."
Speaking on ABC’s This Week on Sunday, the retiring Congressman said, “Now the litmus test is changed. The issue is loyalty to the man, to the president, and for some, loyalty's not enough, you have to be angry and aggrieved."
Dent said that Trump was “a factor” in his decision to retire from Congress after the end of his term next year and assessed the state of the country as “paralyzed” by polarity.
“The polarization has reached the point of paralysis. There doesn't seem to be the bipartisan collaboration up front that we need on a lot of big issues,” he said.
Dent — a moderate who has been an advocate of bipartisan solutions — declared that Washington, D.C. is “worse off” than when he arrived in the nation’s capital in 2005.
He also told ABC that his fellow lawmakers should be ready to lose big in the 2018 midterm elections.
"I've told my colleagues, 'Look, we're going to be running into a headwind. You better be prepared for the worst and hope for the best.’ But be prepared for the worst because this could be a really tough year."
He pointed out that legislative victories don’t always mean success at the polls, noting that Democrats passed bills on health care and financial reform early in Obama’s presidency, only to be decimated in 2010.
Dent didn’t know whether this would also be the case for the GOP or if the tax cuts would bolster support.
Still, he said his party will likely rack up some losses next year.
“Clearly, you know, the Republican Party, my party is going [to] experience losses. It remains to be seen whether or not we’ll lose the majority in the House or the Senate,” he told ABC. “But I guess you have to be concerned.”
One of the first indicators that the tides may be shifting was Republican Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore’s loss to Democrat Doug Jones earlier this month. Moore — who had been accused of sexually assaulting teenage girls — was the first Republican to lose to a Democrat in the deep red state in 25 years.
A ‘wannabe autocrat:’ Former government ethics chief blasts the rich asshole after president retweets bloody shoe image targeting CNN
24 DEC 2017 AT 13:06 ET
Lauren Gill
Posted with permission from Newsweek
The former head of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, Walter Shaub, blasted President Donald Trump as a babyish aching tyrant after the commander-in-chief retweeted a picture of himself sporting what appeared to be CNN's blood on the bottom of his shoe on Sunday morning.
“The wannabe autocrat just retweeted an image depicting CNN’s blood on the sole of his shoe. These colicky tweets reveal he’s hurting this weekend. They make him (and our country) look weak,” Shaub wrote.
“The wannabe autocrat just retweeted an image depicting CNN’s blood on the sole of his shoe. These colicky tweets reveal he’s hurting this weekend. They make him (and our country) look weak,” Shaub wrote.
The wannabe autocrat just retweeted an image depicting CNN’s blood on the sole of his shoe. These colicky tweets reveal he’s hurting this weekend. They make him (and our country) look weak.
Trump has frequently been accused of being an autocrat, or absolute ruler who operates outside of the democratic system. Although the Constitution forbids him from acting out on his own, he has displayed numerous autocratic tendencies during his time in office, often shown in his penchant for announcing decisions without consulting officials first. A recent example was his decision to tweet out a ban on transgender people in the military without telling officials.
The Stock Market is setting record after record and unemployment is at a 17 year low. So many things accomplished by the Trump Administration, perhaps more than any other President in first year. Sadly, will never be reported correctly by the Fake News Media!
Shaub has been an outspoken critic of the president since leaving his administration in July out of growing concern that ethics regulations for politicians were inadequate.
And of course Trump has regularly moaned about CNN, which he has referred to as “fake news” on several occasions.
This isn’t his first retweet suggesting violence against the news network — in July he shared a clip of him pummeling a person with a CNN logo for a head.
The image Trump retweeted on Sunday was originally posted by Twitter user @shawgerald4, whose name on the social media platform is “orgeon4TRUMP.”
His biography reads “*Day One Trump Supporter**Political tweets daily* *Here to counter the relentess anti Trump prograganda* #Trump2020 #MAGA
The user tweeted the picture as a response to Trump’s tweet, “FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe is racing the clock to retire with fringe benefits. 90 days to go?!!!” he posted on Saturday. Reports on the same day revealed that McCabe is planning to retire in a few months when he is eligible for a pension.
Trump began his 11-day Christmas break at his Florida Mar-A-Lago estate on Saturday and has tweeted out numerous posts since.
Also on Sunday morning, the commander-in-chief continued whining about “The Fake News.”
“The Fake News refuses to talk about how Big and how Strong our BASE is. They show Fake Polls just like they report Fake News. Despite only negative reporting, we are doing well - nobody is going to beat us. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
the rich asshole cost taxpayers tens of millions visiting his own properties in 2017
Alex Kotch
Posted with permission from International Business Times
Just after signing the Republican tax cut bill on Friday, President Donald Trump returned to a familiar weekend getaway: his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. That night at dinner, he told friends, “You all just got a lot richer,” according toCBS News.
Despite saying in 2016 that if elected president, “I’m not going to have time to go play golf,” Trump has often sought refuge at several properties he owns. According to NBC News, he has visited one of his properties, most of which are golf resorts, on 109 daysthis year — nearly one-third of his presidency so far.
And these visits come with a cost. Trump has used tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to subsidize numerous trips to his properties in 2017. The big price tag covers travel on Air Force One, cargo planes and expenses for White House aides and the fleet of security that accompany him.
One trip to the so-called “Winter White House” may cost taxpayers $3.6 million or more, although exact estimates are difficult to make. An estimate by the websitetrumpgolfcount.com puts the total cost to taxpayers this year at more than $42 million. Local governments have to pitch in, too. The Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office estimates that it costs roughly $60,000 per day in overtime pay for officers when Trump is at Mar-a-Lago.
Mar-a-Lago is a club accessible only to the wealthy; it costs $200,000 to join and $14,000 per year in membership fees. Trump’s statement to friends on Friday describes one of the biggest effects of the tax legislation; the bill primarily advantages those at the top of the income scale while many middle- and low-income Americans will see their tax bills increase by 2027.
Per NBC, Trump has spent 37 days at Mar-a-Lago since becoming president. The only property Trump has visited more often is his Bedminster golf resort, where he’s spent 39 days.
n 2012, Trump criticized then-President Barack Obama for “costing taxpayers millions of dollars” for vacations. In total, Trump tweeted criticism at Barack Obama for golfing27 times. But Trump is far outpacing Obama in terms of travel costs to taxpayers, and it’s “a near certainty” that this will continue, according to Snopes.
At his resorts, Trump has been known to golf with other celebrities and cross paths with wealthy conservatives who are members of his clubs. The president has claimed that the tax bill does not benefit the richest Americans, like many Mar-a-Lago members, saying that he has many rich friends who are “not so happy” with him over the law. But nonpartisan tax analysts have found that the top 20 percent — and, specifically, the top 0.1 percent — will benefit most from the legislation, the first major bill Trump has signed into law since becoming president in January.
Trump’s critics were vocal on Twitter on Sunday, attacking the tax bill and the president’s recent comments at Mar-a-Lago.
Despite saying in 2016 that if elected president, “I’m not going to have time to go play golf,” Trump has often sought refuge at several properties he owns. According to NBC News, he has visited one of his properties, most of which are golf resorts, on 109 daysthis year — nearly one-third of his presidency so far.
And these visits come with a cost. Trump has used tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to subsidize numerous trips to his properties in 2017. The big price tag covers travel on Air Force One, cargo planes and expenses for White House aides and the fleet of security that accompany him.
One trip to the so-called “Winter White House” may cost taxpayers $3.6 million or more, although exact estimates are difficult to make. An estimate by the websitetrumpgolfcount.com puts the total cost to taxpayers this year at more than $42 million. Local governments have to pitch in, too. The Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office estimates that it costs roughly $60,000 per day in overtime pay for officers when Trump is at Mar-a-Lago.
Mar-a-Lago is a club accessible only to the wealthy; it costs $200,000 to join and $14,000 per year in membership fees. Trump’s statement to friends on Friday describes one of the biggest effects of the tax legislation; the bill primarily advantages those at the top of the income scale while many middle- and low-income Americans will see their tax bills increase by 2027.
Per NBC, Trump has spent 37 days at Mar-a-Lago since becoming president. The only property Trump has visited more often is his Bedminster golf resort, where he’s spent 39 days.
President @BarackObama's vacation is costing taxpayers millions of dollars----Unbelievable!
At his resorts, Trump has been known to golf with other celebrities and cross paths with wealthy conservatives who are members of his clubs. The president has claimed that the tax bill does not benefit the richest Americans, like many Mar-a-Lago members, saying that he has many rich friends who are “not so happy” with him over the law. But nonpartisan tax analysts have found that the top 20 percent — and, specifically, the top 0.1 percent — will benefit most from the legislation, the first major bill Trump has signed into law since becoming president in January.
Trump’s critics were vocal on Twitter on Sunday, attacking the tax bill and the president’s recent comments at Mar-a-Lago.
“I have some very wealthy friends -- not so happy with me” - Trump to voters at a Missouri rally
"You all just got a lot richer” - Trump to wealthy friends at Mar-a-Lago
This GOP tax bill was a scam to hoodwink average folks, hook up the wealthiest Americans. This proves it.
"You all just got a lot richer” - Trump to wealthy friends at Mar-a-Lago
This GOP tax bill was a scam to hoodwink average folks, hook up the wealthiest Americans. This proves it.
Published on 24 December 2017
Melaniathe rich asshole destroyed on Twitter for Christmas Eve tweet about Santa Claus
First Lady Melania the rich asshole sent out a tweet about Santa Claus but it quickly backfired after reaction from critics.
Melania on Christmas
For the last two and a half years, some rich asshole has dominated the political headlines [VIDEO] due to his controversial style and reckless rhetoric. Supporters of the former host of "The Apprentice," which polls show is down to just 35 percent of the country," have defended him at every turn, while the majority of the American people have pushed back at his presidency.
With the holidays taking place, the rich asshole has made sure to brag that he has "allowed" others to use the term "Merry Christmas" again, though it never went away in the first place and was routinely used by former presidents. As the rich asshole continues to catch heat for his policies, most notably his controversial tax bill, and his defensive and aggressive use of social media, Melania the rich asshole has taken a more subtle approach, which was seen during a December 24 post on Twitter.
Looking forward to helping kids track Santa today with @NoradSanta! Wishing everyone a very Merry #ChristmasEve!
In a tweet on Saturday afternoon, Melania the rich asshole sent out a message expressing her excitement to help children track #Santa Claus on ChristmasEve. "Looking forward to helping kids track Santa today with @NoradSanta!" Melania tweeted out, before adding, "Wishing everyone a very Merry #Christmas Eve!"
Christmas reaction
After Melania the rich asshole posted her Christmas Eve tweet about Santa Claus, critics of the the rich asshole family and administration made sure to remind the first lady of their opposition.
"The poor won't have a visit from #SantaClaus," one tweet said.
Looking forward to helping kids track Santa today with @NoradSanta! Wishing everyone a very Merry #Christmas Eve!
Looking forward to helping kids track Santa today with @NoradSanta! Wishing everyone a very Merry #Christmas Eve!
Merry Christmas to the president and the First Lady you're doing an awesome job
"They are destroying America big time. The people that have lost medical care because of trump and his greedy hangers on won't b having a Merry Christmas," another tweet read.
"Day #337 of the hostage situation. First Sk*nk (former Slovenian soft p*rn model) continues to revel in the hostage funded holiday festivities," a Twitteruser wrote.
Looking forward to helping kids track Santa today with @NoradSanta! Wishing everyone a very Merry #Christmas Eve!
Look forward to help the 9 millions children that need CHIP, to have a good quality of life. Explain to them how @realDonaldTrump @POTUS GRINCH, stole the funding to pass the #GOPTaxScamBill and leave them without Health insurance. #FundCHIPNow
Looking forward to helping kids track Santa today with @NoradSanta! Wishing everyone a very Merry #Christmas Eve!
How about helping kid’s parents with their childcare?!?!?! #taxcutsfortherichonly
"Look forward to help the 9 millions children that need CHIP, to have a good quality of life. Explain to them how @realDonaldTrump @POTUS GRINCH, stole the funding to pass the #GOPTaxScamBill and leave them without Health insurance," an additional tweet note. The negative reaction continued as the rift between the political left and right showed no signs of slowing down even during the holidays.
Published on 24 December 2017 on NEWS
the rich asshole brags about ending the 'assault' on 'Merry Christmas,' Twitter erupts
some rich asshole has continued to claim that his presidency is the reason that the phrase "Merry #Christmas" is being used by Americans despite it never being banned in the first place. After making comments on the issue once again on Christmas Eve, the opposition was out in full force [VIDEO].
the rich asshole on Christmas
In recent years during the holidays, conservatives and the right-wing media have brought up up the conspiracy that liberals are trying to engage in a "War on Christmas." This agenda stems from many using the phrase "Happy Holidays" as a way to feel more inclusive to those who celebrate in other ways outside of Christmas to end the year.
While there's no proof that the term "#Merry Christmas" was ever under attack or risked being "banned" despite the rhetoric from some on the far right, some rich asshole made it a go-to talking point to his supporters. Since his election win, the rich asshole insisted on bringing up the issue during speeches, interviews and select social media posts, while making sure to use the phrase "Merry Christmas" as often as possible. As seen on his #Twitter account on December 24, the president was back at it again [VIDEO] with his Christmas message.
In a tweet sent out on Christmas Eve, some rich asshole decided to give himself credit for stopping the alleged "assault" on the use of "Merry Christmas." "People are proud to be saying Merry Christmas again," the rich asshole tweeted out.
Doubling down, some rich asshole made it clear that he was going to pat himself on the back over the issue at hand. "I am proud to have led the charge against the assault of our cherished and beautiful phrase," the rich asshole wrote, while adding, "MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!!"
Christmas backlash
Just minutes after some rich asshole sent out his tweet, those who have opposed his presidency made sure to hit back with thoughts of their own. "The only thing you're doing is fostering divisiveness. What a disgusting thing for you to do during a time when we are supposed to be celebrating peace, joy, love & unity," one tweet read.
People are proud to be saying Merry Christmas again. I am proud to have led the charge against the assault of our cherished and beautiful phrase. MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!!
Really Donald? We all said it when we @BarackObama was president. Now he was a president!
Not an expert but pretty sure 5 exclamation points means he yelled this at a Christmas tree in his bedroom alone while watching 5-year-old clips of Fox & Friends interviews with Orly Taitz
People are proud to be saying Merry Christmas again. I am proud to have led the charge against the assault of our cherished and beautiful phrase. MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!!
"Not an expert but pretty sure 5 exclamation points means he yelled this at a Christmas tree in his bedroom alone while watching 5-year-old clips of Fox & Friends interviews with Orly Taitz," a Twitter user wrote.
"Really Donald? We all said it when we @BarackObama was president. Now he was a president!" another tweet added.
People are proud to be saying Merry Christmas again. I am proud to have led the charge against the assault of our cherished and beautiful phrase. MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!!
"Acting like you were born in a manger. Pipe down, OK," a follow-up tweet noted. "People were saying Merry Christmas long before you became President. It is shameful that you would exploit this for your own gain," yet another social media critic pointed out.
The US has reached the last stage before collapse
- In this op-ed, James Traub argues that America has become “decadent and depraved.”
- He explains what decadence means, and how it's tied to corruption.
- “Decadence is usually understood as an irreversible condition — the last stage before collapse,” he writes.
In The History of the Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon luridly evokes the Rome of 408 A.D., when the armies of the Goths prepared to descend upon the city.
The marks of imperial decadence appeared not only in grotesque displays of public opulence and waste, but also in the collapse of faith in reason and science.
The people of Rome, Gibbon writes, fell prey to “a puerile superstition” promoted by astrologers and to soothsayers who claimed “to read in the entrails of victims the signs of future greatness and prosperity.”
Would a latter-day Gibbon describe today’s America as “decadent”? I recently heard a prominent, and pro-American, French thinker (who was speaking off the record) say just that.
He was moved to use the word after watching endless news accounts of U.S. President some rich asshole’s tweets alternate with endless revelations of sexual harassment.
I flinched, perhaps because a Frenchman accusing Americans of decadence seems contrary to the order of nature. And the reaction to Harvey Weinstein et al. is scarcely a sign of hysterical puritanism, as I suppose he was implying.
And yet, the shoe fit. The sensation of creeping rot evoked by that word seems terribly apt.
Perhaps in a democracy the distinctive feature of decadence is not debauchery but terminal self-absorption— the loss of the capacity for collective action, the belief in common purpose, even the acceptance of a common form of reasoning.
We listen to necromancers who prophesy great things while they lead us into disaster. We sneer at the idea of a “public” and hold our fellow citizens in contempt. We think anyone who doesn’t pursue self-interest is a fool.
We cannot blame everything on some rich asshole, much though we might want to. In the decadent stage of the Roman Empire, or of Louis XVI’s France, or the dying days of the Habsburg Empire so brilliantly captured in Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, decadence seeped downward from the rulers to the ruled.
But in a democracy, the process operates reciprocally.
A decadent elite
Jacquelyn Martin/AP
A decadent elite licenses degraded behavior, and a debased public chooses its worst leaders. Then our Nero panders to our worst attributes — and we reward him for doing so.
“Decadence,” in short, describes a cultural, moral, and spiritual disorder — the some rich asshole in us. It is the right, of course, that first introduced the language of civilizational decay to American political discourse. A quarter of a century ago, Patrick Buchanan bellowed at the Republican National Convention that the two parties were fighting “a religious war … for the soul of America.”
Former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) accused the Democrats of practicing “multicultural nihilistic hedonism,” of despising the values of ordinary Americans, of corruption, and of illegitimacy. That all-accusing voice became the voice of the Republican Party. Today it is not the nihilistic hedonism of imperial Rome that threatens American civilization but the furies unleashed by Gingrich and his kin.
The 2016 Republican primary was a bidding war in which the relatively calm voices — Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio — dropped out in the early rounds, while the consummately nasty Ted Cruz duked it out with the consummately cynical some rich asshole.
A year’s worth of the rich asshole’s cynicism, selfishness, and rage has only stoked the appetite of his supporters. The nation dodged a bullet last week when a colossal effort pushed Democratic nominee Doug Jones over the top in Alabama’s Senate special election.
Nevertheless, the church-going folk of Alabama were perfectly prepared to choose a racist and a pedophile over a Democrat. Republican nominee Roy Moore almost became a senator by orchestrating a hatred of the other that was practically dehumanizing.
the rich asshole functions as the impudent id of this culture of mass contempt
Donald the rich asshole, accompanied by, from left, some rich asshole Jr., Eric the rich asshole, the rich asshole, Melania the rich asshole, Tiffany the rich asshole and Ivanka the rich asshole, holds up a ribbon during the grand opening ceremony of the the rich asshole International Hotel- Old Post Office, Wednesday, Oct. 26, 2016, in Washington. AP
Of course he has legitimized the language of xenophobia and racial hatred, but he has also legitimized the language of selfishness. During the campaign, the rich asshole barely even made the effort that Mitt Romney did in 2012 to explain his money-making career in terms of public good. He boasted about the gimmicks he had deployed to avoid paying taxes.
Yes, he had piled up debt and walked away from the wreckage he had made in Atlantic City. But it was a great deal for him! At the Democratic convention, then-Vice President Joe Biden recalled that the most terrifying words he heard growing up were, “You’re fired.”
Biden may have thought he had struck a crushing blow. Then Americans elected the man who had uttered those words with demonic glee. Voters saw cruelty and naked self-aggrandizement as signs of steely determination.
Perhaps we can measure democratic decadence by the diminishing relevance of the word “we.” It is, after all, a premise of democratic politics that, while majorities choose, they do so in the name of collective good.
Half a century ago, at the height of the civil rights era and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society, democratic majorities even agreed to spend large sums not on themselves but on excluded minorities. The commitment sounds almost chivalric today. Do any of our leaders have the temerity even to suggest that a tax policy that might hurt one class — at least, one politically potent class — nevertheless benefits the nation?
There is, in fact, no purer example of the politics of decadence than the tax legislation that the president will soon sign. Of course the law favors the rich; Republican supply-side doctrine argues that tax cuts to the investor class promote economic growth.
What distinguishes the current round of cuts from those of either Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush is, first, the way in which they blatantly benefit the president himself through the abolition of the alternative minimum tax and the special treatment of real estate income under new “pass-through” rules.
We Americans are so numb by now that we hardly even take note of the mockery this implies of the public servant’s dedication to public good.
Targeted tax cuts
Second, and no less extraordinary, is the way the tax cuts have been targeted to help Republican voters and hurt Democrats, above all through the abolition or sharp reduction of the deductibility of state and local taxes. I certainly didn’t vote for Ronald Reagan, but I cannot imagine him using tax policy to reward supporters and punish opponents.
He would have thought that grossly unpatriotic. The new tax cuts constitute the economic equivalent of gerrymandering. All parties play that game, it’s true; yet today’s Republicans have carried electoral gerrymandering to such an extreme as to jeopardize the constitutionally protected principle of “one man, one vote.”
Inside much of the party, no stigma attaches to the conscious disenfranchisement of Democratic voters. Democrats are not “us.”
Finally, the tax cut is an exercise in willful blindness. The same no doubt could be said for the 1981 Reagan tax cuts, which predictably led to unprecedented deficits when Republicans as well as Democrats balked at making offsetting budget cuts.
The ancient Colosseum is seen during an heavy snowfalls late in the night in Rome February 4, 2012.Gabriele Forzano/Reuters
Yet at the time a whole band of officials in the White House and the Congress clamored, in some cases desperately, for such reductions. They accepted a realm of objective reality that existed separately from their own wishes. But in 2017, when the Congressional Budget Office and other neutral arbiters concluded that the tax cuts would not begin to pay for themselves, the White House and congressional leaders simply dismissed the forecasts as too gloomy.
Here is something genuinely new about our era: We lack not only a sense of shared citizenry or collective good, but even a shared body of fact or a collective mode of reasoning toward the truth.
A thing that we wish to be true is true; if we wish it not to be true, it isn’t. Global warming is a hoax. Barack Obama was born in Africa. Neutral predictions of the effects of tax cuts on the budget must be wrong, because the effects they foresee are bad ones.
It is, of course, our president who finds in smoking entrails the proof of future greatness and prosperity. The reduction of all disagreeable facts and narratives to “fake news” will stand as one of some rich asshole’s most lasting contributions to American culture, far outliving his own tenure.
He has, in effect, pressed gerrymandering into the cognitive realm. Your story fights my story; if I can enlist more people on the side of my story, I own the truth. And yet the rich asshole is as much symptom as cause of our national disorder.
The Washington Post recently reported that officials at the Center for Disease Control were ordered not to use words like “science-based,” apparently now regarded as disablingly left-leaning. But further reporting in the New York Times appears to show that the order came not from White House flunkies but from officials worried that Congress would reject funding proposals marred by the offensive terms.
One of our two national political parties — and its supporters — now regards “science” as a fighting word. Where is our Robert Musil, our pitiless satirist and moralist, when we need him (or her)?
A democratic society becomes decadent when its politics become moraly and intellectually corrupt
A democratic society becomes decadent when its politics, which is to say its fundamental means of adjudication, becomes morally and intellectually corrupt. But the loss of all regard for common ground is hardly limited to the political right, or for that matter to politics.
We need only think of the ever-unfolding narrative of Harvey Weinstein, which has introduced us not only to one monstrous individual but also to a whole world of well-educated, well-paid, highly regarded professionals who made a very comfortable living protecting that monster. “When you quickly settle, there is no need to get into all the facts,” as one of his lawyers delicately advised.
This is, of course, what lawyers do, just as accountants are paid to help companies move their profits into tax-free havens. What is new and distinctive, however, is the lack of apology or embarrassment, the sheer blitheness of the contempt for the public good.
When Teddy Roosevelt called the monopolists of his day “malefactors of great wealth,” the epithet stung — and stuck. Now the bankers and brokers and private equity barons who helped drive the nation’s economy into a ditch in 2008 react with outrage when they’re singled out for blame.
Being a “wealth creator” means never having to say you’re sorry. Enough voters accept this proposition that some rich asshole paid no political price for unapologetic greed.
The worship of the marketplace, and thus the elevation of selfishness to a public virtue, is a doctrine that we associate with the libertarian right. But it has coursed through the culture as a self-justifying ideology for rich people of all political persuasions — perhaps also for people who merely dream of becoming rich.
'The last stage before collapse'
Decadence is usually understood as an irreversible condition — the last stage before collapse.
Decadence is usually understood as an irreversible condition — the last stage before collapse.
The court of Muhammad Shah, last of the Mughals to control the entirety of their empire, lost itself in music and dance while the Persian army rode toward the Red Fort. But as American decadence is distinctive, perhaps America’s fate may be, too.
Even if it is written in the stars that China will supplant the United States as the world’s greatest power, other empires, Britain being the most obvious example and the one democracy among them, have surrendered the role of global hegemon without sliding into terminal decadence.
Can the United States emulate the stoic example of the country it once surpassed? I wonder.
The British have the gift of ironic realism. When the time came to exit the stage, they shuffled off with a slightly embarrassed shrug. That, of course, is not the American way. When the stage manager beckons us into the wings we look for someone to hit — each other, or immigrants or Muslims or any other kind of not-us.
Finding the reality of our situation inadmissible, like the deluded courtiers of the Shah of Iran, we slide into a malignant fantasy.
But precisely because we are a democracy, because the values and the mental habits that define us move upward from the people as well as downward from their leaders, that process need not be inexorable. The prospect of sending Roy Moore to the Senate forced a good many conservative Republicans into what may have been painful acts of self-reflection.
The revelations of widespread sexual abuse offer an opportunity for a cleansing moment of self-recognition — at least if we stop short of the hysterical overreaction that seems to govern almost everything in our lives.
Our political elite will continue to gratify our worst impulses so long as we continue to be governed by them. The only way back is to reclaim the common ground — political, moral, and even cognitive — that some rich asshole has lit on fire.
Losing to China is hardly the worst thing that could happen to us. Losing ourselves is.
James Traub is a contributing editor at Foreign Policy, a fellow at the Center on International Cooperation, and author of the book "John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit."
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Business Insider.
Read the original article on Foreign Policy. "Real World. Real Time." Follow Foreign Policy on Facebook. Subscribe to Foreign Policy here. Copyright 2017. Follow Foreign Policy on Twitter.
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