February 7th-8th, 2017. It's been 452-453 days since the Nov 8, 2016, election of some rich asshole, no.45, and 380-381 days since the Jan 20th inauguration.
The rich asshole administration hired failed reality TV star Omarosa, but now that she's trashing the rich asshole, her TV show failure is being used against her.
Former “Apprentice” star turned top aide to the president of the United States Omarosa Manigault Newman was fired by the White House in December, but now the White House is citing a series of phony “firing” incidents on the TV show to deflect from her recent negative comments about some rich asshole.
“The Apprentice” isn’t real. The “firings” the rich asshole participated in on the program as its host were phonymade-for-television moments in which the rich asshole and the contestants, including Newman, participated in contrived banter for entertainment purposes.
Now Newman is a contestant on the most recent edition of “Celebrity Big Brother,” where she is trashing her time in the administration and talking about how it is “so bad.”
When another contestant on the show asked if the country is going to be OK under the rich asshole, she answered, “It’s going to not be OK. It’s not.”
Asked about her statements argued during the daily press briefing, deputy White House press secretary Raj Shah said Newman’s comments about working in the White House should not be taken seriously because “Omarosa was fired three times on ‘The Apprentice’ and this was the fourth time we let her go.”
But if being “fired” from a reality TV show is disqualifying, why did the White House hire her in the first place?
Newman came in with the the rich asshole administration and served as assistant to the president and director of communications for the Office of Public Liaison. In that capacity, she earned a salary of $179,700 a year — paid by taxpayer dollars.
Shah also said she had “limited contact” with the rich asshole during her time in the White House.
But during a “listening session” for Black History Month in 2017, the rich asshole sat next to her and described her as “my television star.” the rich asshole also said, “She is a very good person and she’s been helpful right from the beginning of the campaign. And I appreciate it. I really do. Very special.”
Her tenure in the White House was a series of public disruptions, feuds, and other embarrassing moments that culminated in her firing. She was reportedly escorted from the White House when she refused to leave.
April Ryan of American Urban Radio Networks reported at the time, “Omarosa is alleged to have acted very vulgar and cursed a lot and said she helped elect President the rich asshole.”
She was in the rich asshole’s orbit because she appeared on his reality TV show several times. She had no business drawing a six-figure salary at public expense, and during her tenure in the White House, she was a constant embarrassment.
The decision to hire her in the first place falls on the rich asshole, who wanted a “yes” woman around him to spew comments like the ones she gave to PBS’ “Frontline.”
“Every critic, every detractor will have to bow down to President the rich asshole,” she said
The entire debacle, like so much else, has blown up in the rich asshole’s face. So now his underlings are covering for him, citing imaginary firings as part of a made-up narrative to explain why they used tax dollars to pay a reality TV villain to do a bad job.
He embarrassed himself boasting about an extra $1.50 a week, but he can't actually offer any better examples.
Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI) humiliated himself last weekend by bragging about a $1.50-per-week paycheck increase as a result of the the rich asshole tax scam, and when faced with that comment this week, couldn’t think of a better example.
Ryan tweeted about a high school secretary who noticed the minuscule uptick in her weekly paycheck, then deleted it amid a blizzard of criticism. Even the secretary, Julia Ketchum, later criticized him.
At a weekly House GOP leadership press conference, Ryan was clearly caught off guard when a reporter asked him about his weekend humiliation.
After trying to laugh off the question, Ryan insisted the “average family” is receiving a $2,000 tax cut, which doesn’t account for other changes in the tax law that raise taxes on many of those families, and doesn’t acknowledge that those tax savings diminish every year.
Ryan tried to give another example, but failed to come up with anything more concrete than his earlier boast.
He said that he and his wife were working the concession stand at a local church “and a friend of mine from our parish, working at Home Depot, came up and said ‘Thank you very much for this raise.'” but rather than give a specific figure, Ryan said the man told him it was “real money.”
After the tax scam passed in December, Ryan wasn’t thanking his friend from Home Depot for his support, he was thanking the billionaire Koch brothers.
We may never know the exact amount of “real money” that Ryan’s “friend” was allegedly thanking him for, but it’s probably nowhere near the trillion dollars that the tax scam gave to billionaires and corporations, or the amount they have saved by laying off thousands of workers in the wake of the bill’s passage, or even the $500,000 donation that Ryan received as thanks for the bill.
Ryan may think that his $1.50 gaffe is funny, but for everyday Americans who will feel the effects of this trillion-dollar giveaway to corporations, it’s no laughing matter.
This year's battleground map is now expanding into red states.
Passing a Republican tax bill late last year has done nothing to improve the GOP’s chances in the upcoming midterm elections. Meanwhile, Democrats continue to raise way more money than their opponents, as the party expands the map of competitive races in the House to 101 contests.
Meanwhile, the bipartisan Cook Political Report just updated the status of 21 House races and moved the needle in all 21 races in the direction of Democrats.
Republicans, with the daunting task of facing voters who will demand accountability for some rich asshole in November, have been trailing Democrats in terms of fundraising for many months. And that trend just keeps getting worse.
“Despite the myriad advantages of incumbency and control of Congress, there are more House members with less cash on hand than their Democratic challengers than the quarter before,” Politico reports.
Indeed, more than 40 House Republican incumbents were outraised in the final quarter of 2017 by their Democratic opponents.
“This is going to be the most challenging political environment since 2006,” warns GOP consultant Mike DuHaime.
Context: In 2006, Republicans lost 31 seats in the House. If Republicans lose 24 seats this November, Democrat will regain control of the chamber.
Feeling emboldened, Democratic strategists will announce this week they are expanding their map of battleground districts to 101. It’s the party’s most ambitious campaign blueprint in a decade.
That’s one reason so many Republicans are opting out this cycle — they just don’t see a way to compete with Democrats. A record number have already announced they will not seek re-election this year.
Note that the GOP is having trouble not only recruiting strong candidates in some districts, but recruiting sane candidates in some districts. In Illinois, an avowed Nazi and white supremacist stands poised to become a GOP congressional nominee simply because he’s the only Republican willing to run.
Meanwhile, “Democrats are now fielding candidates in all but 12 of the 238 districts held by Republicans,” NBC reports, “including in places like Alabama, where Democrats are competing in every single district for the first time in years.”
Election experts continue to see the pendulum swing toward Democrats.
In announcing its new race ratings, the Cook Political Report noted, “If anything, that still understates Democrats’ potential in individual races.”
Van Jones drops truth bomb on the rich asshole’s chief of staff: ‘People’s hearts are breaking over John Kelly’
Van Jones (CNN/screen grab)
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CNN political commentator Van Jones on Tuesday mourned the evolution of some rich asshole’s chief of staff, John Kelly, telling host Brooke Baldwin, “people’s hearts are breaking” over the retired general’s policy positions.
Jones was talking about Kelly’s continued support of former White House aide Rob Porter, who’s been accused of abusing three women—including two of his former wives. Kelly was reportedly aware of allegations against Porter, despite issuing a statement commending the onetime the rich asshole associate’s character. Jones marveled that Porter still did not have security clearance, despite having been in the administration for over a year.
“A year?” Jones asked. “I don’t care what the underlying charges are, if you’ve got somebody in your White House that still does not have the credential, still, and you’re there a year and the credential is visible and you’ve been there for a year? That’s not a red flag. That is a four-alarm fire.
Baldwin asked Jones if he though “Kelly’s head should roll” over Porter.
“I don’t know who is going to replace him,” Jones said if Kelly, “That’s part of the problem. we don’t know who is willing to go into that White House and do anything. I’m going to tell you, people’s hearts are breaking about John Kelly. When he went in there, I heard Republicans and Democrats [breathe a] huge sigh of relief saying, ‘We’ve got an adult in the room, something good is going to happen.’”
Jones then explained that Kelly’s recent statements really reflect the ethos of the rich asshole administration, and don’t seem to have impacted the White House in any positive way.
“He’s out here saying DREAMers are too lazy to get off their asses,” Jones explained. “DREAMers were too afraid to sign up for DACA because it maybe would turn out badly. ‘Too lazy to get off their asses.’ You don’t talk that way. Linking dreamers to a street gang—totally nuts, and then going to be defending [Porter].”
“No chief of staff in this country would have somebody that close to the president who the FBI can’t vouch for a year,” Jones said. “I don’t get that. That’s nuts!”
Watch below:
Watch below:
Senate votes to end government shutdown
Last Updated Feb 9, 2018 2:05 AM EST
At midnight the federal government shut down for the second time in two weeks, after government funding expired, after Sen. Rand Paul held up the vote for as long as he was able to under Senate rules. For a brief period, the moment, the Senate adjourned in the 11 p.m. hour -- just until 12:01 am Friday, February 9.
The Office of Personnel Management issued guidance to federal workers after midnight, noting the "lapse in appropriations."
Soon after 1 a.m. Friday, the Senate began a procedural vote on the continuing resolution (CR) to fund the government and the budget agreement. It passed with bipartisan support, 73 - 26. Sixty votes were necessary for it to advance.
The Senate then passed the final bill, 71-28. Only a simple majority was needed.
The measure now goes to the House of Representatives, where the outcome is less certain. A vote could come in the early morning hours.
The Senate bill would raise the spending caps on defense and domestic spending by $300 billion over the next two years. It also includes $90 billion for disaster relief funds for areas hit by hurricanes and wildfires. The measure provides funds for infrastructure and to fight opioid abuse. The deal also includes an extension of the debt ceiling through March 1, 2019. The agreement doesn't include any language regarding "Dreamers."
In Seoul, just before departing for the Olympics in Pyeongchang, Vice President Pence was optimistic that the shutdown would be short-lived, CBS News' Jacqueline Alemany reports.
"We frankly are grateful for the bipartisan efforts made to reach the two-year budget deal and to separate that from the contentious issues of immigration," Pence said. "And we're very hopeful that in the hours ahead we'll have the budget passed and move forward with the kind of funding for our military and domestic needs in the long term."
On the Senate floor Thursday night, Paul railed against his own party for allowing greater spending, deficits and ultimately debt. Paul railed against government spending on everything from Afghanistan to misspent funds diverted from school lunch programs, saying both parties are "spending us into oblivion."
"How come you were against President Obama's deficits, and then how come you're for Republican deficits? Isn't that the very definition of intellectual dishonesty?" he demanded.
A frustrated Senate Majority Whip, John Cornyn, R-Texas, said at 10 p.m. he didn't understand why his colleague was holding up the vote when it would not change the outcome.
Paul explained in an interview with Fox News Thursday afternoon why he blocked the vote on the measure: he objects to the inclusion of the bipartisan budget deal to lift spending caps. He demanded that GOP leaders allow a 15-minute vote on an amendment he crafted to maintain current spending ceilings, but the Republican leadership did not seem inclined to give him that vote.
"I'm not advocating for shutting down the government. I'm also not advocating for keeping the damn thing open and borrowing a million dollars a minute," Paul said on Fox News.
Paul said that he had spoken to President the rich asshole Thursday afternoon about the situation.
'I talked to him this afternoon," he said. "We had a good conversation. I told him to call up the majority leader, Senator McConnell, tell him that I wanted 15 minutes to have a vote to make a point that conservatives are unhappy with this deal. All they have to do -- I told him this at 11:00 a.m. this morning -- give me 15 minutes to debate, 15 minutes to vote and we could have been done by noon. But nobody wants to have it pointed out what an eye sore this deal is and how obnoxious it is to conservatives to spend good money after bad."
Paul had said he's willing to hold up the vote and shut the government down over his demands.
"We'll see. If they want to stay up until 3:00 a.m., I'm happy to do it for the fiscal solvency," he said.
Congress is aiming to prevent a government shutdown on Friday by passing a new spending bill by Thursday at midnight. The House had already voted on a short-term funding measure, known as a continuing resolution (CR), earlier this week that also expired March 23, but provided a boost in funding to the Pentagon through September.
The measures will not provide a fix for undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children. Nor will they increase border security or provide funding for a southern border wall.
On Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-New York, announced they had reached a bipartisan two-year budget deal that doesn't fund the government, but lifts spending limits imposed on the military and non-defense domestic programs. The deal raises those caps, which were set by a 2011 law, by about $300 billion through fiscal 2019, which ends Sept. 30, 2019.
Meanwhile, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-California, announced on the floor Wednesday that she will oppose the budget deal unless Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin, commits to holding a floor vote on legislation that would protect so-called "Dreamers."
CBS News' John Nolen and Alan He contributed to this report.
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the rich asshole Signs Budget Deal to Raise Spending and Reopen Government
WASHINGTON — President the rich asshole on Friday morning signed into law a far-reaching budget deal that will boost spending by hundreds of billions of dollars and allow the federal government to reopen after a brief shutdown.
In an early morning tweet, some rich asshole said he had signed the bill, adding: “Our Military will now be stronger than ever before. We love and need our Military and gave them everything — and more.”
some rich asshole’s signature came quickly after the House gave final approval early Friday to the deal, hours after a one-man blockade by Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky delayed the votes and forced the government to briefly close.
House Democrats, after threatening to bring the bill down because it did nothing to protect young undocumented immigrants, gave Speaker Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin the votes he did not have in his own party and ensured passage. In the end, 73 House Democrats voted yes to more than offset the 67 Republicans who voted no.
Just before the vote, Mr. Ryan voiced support for bringing a debate on immigration to the House floor — though he did not make a concrete promise, as Democratic leaders had wanted.
With some rich asshole’s signature, the government will reopen before many Americans were aware it had closed, with a deal that includes about $300 billion in additional funds over two years for military and nonmilitary programs, almost $90 billion in disaster relief in response to last year’s hurricanes and wildfires, and a higher statutory debt ceiling.
It should pave the way for a measure of stability through September 2019 after months of lurching from fiscal crisis to fiscal crisis. some rich asshole will get to boast of a huge increase in military spending, long promised, but his desire to more broadly reorder the government with deep cuts to programs like environmental protection, health research and foreign aid are dead for now — as is any semblance of fiscal austerity.
Mr. Paul, a Republican, made that final point. Angered at the huge spending increases at the center of the accord, he delayed passage for hours with a demand to vote on an amendment that would have kept in place the strict caps on spending that the deal raises.
How Rand Paul Exposed a Republican Reversal
It wasn’t long ago that fiscal responsibility was a mainstream Republican rallying cry. This was not lost on Senator Rand Paul who briefly shut the government down Friday morning over spending increases.
By CHRIS CIRILLO and SARAH STEIN KERR on February 9, 2018. Photo by Erin Schaff for The New York Times. Watch in Times Video »
“The reason I’m here tonight is to put people on the spot,” Mr. Paul said Thursday night. “I want people to feel uncomfortable. I want them to have to answer people at home who said, ‘How come you were against President Obama’s deficits and then how come you’re for Republican deficits?’”
The shutdown came on the heels of a three-day closure brought about by Senate Democrats last month. As midnight approached, Mr. Paul did not relent, bemoaning from the Senate floor what he saw as out-of-control government spending and repeatedly rebuffing attempts by his fellow senators to move ahead with a vote.
“I think the country’s worth a debate until 3 in the morning, frankly,” he said.
Senate leaders were left helpless.
“I think it’s irresponsible,” said Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Senate Republican, lamenting what he described as “the act of a single senator who just is trying to make a point but doesn’t really care too much about who he inconveniences.”
Mr. Paul’s ideological opponents were not buying his fiscal rectitude either. Senator Brian Schatz, Democrat of Hawaii, posted on Twitter: “Rand Paul voted for a tax bill that blew a $1.5 trillion hole in the budget. Now he is shutting the government down for three hours because of the debt. The chance to demonstrate fiscal discipline was on the tax vote. Delaying a vote isn’t a profile in courage, it’s a cleanup.”
The Senate finally passed the measure, 71 to 28, shortly before 2 a.m. The House followed suit around 5:30 a.m., voting 240 to 186 for the bill.
Before Mr. Paul waged his assault on the budget deal, trouble was already brewing in the House, where angry opposition from the Republicans’ most ardent conservative members, coupled with Democratic dissenters dismayed that the deal did nothing for young undocumented immigrants, created new tension as the clock ticked toward midnight.
Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic leader, told a closed-door meeting of House Democrats that she would oppose the deal, and said that Democrats would have leverage if they held together to demand a debate on immigration legislation. But she suggested that she would not stand in the way of lawmakers who wanted to vote their conscience.
Pressing the issue further, Ms. Pelosi and the next two highest-ranking House Democrats sent a letter to Mr. Ryan noting their desire for the government to remain open and imploring him to make a public statement about the scheduling of a vote on legislation to protect young undocumented immigrants who are now shielded from deportation by the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA.
“Most of our members believe the budget agreement is a reasonable compromise to address America’s military strength and critical domestic priorities, like fighting the opioid crisis, boosting N.I.H., moving forward to resolve the pension crisis, caring for our veterans, making college more affordable and investing in child care for working families,” they wrote. “We are writing to again reiterate our request that you make a public statement regarding the scheduling of a vote on a DACA bill.”
The run-up to the House vote, when passage was no foregone conclusion, highlighted the divisions within the Democratic caucus over how hard to push on the issue of immigration as Congress prepares to turn its focus to that politically volatile subject.
The text of the deal, stretching more than 600 pages, was released late Wednesday night, revealing provisions large and small that would go far beyond the basic budget numbers. The accord would raise strict spending caps on domestic and military spending in this fiscal year and the next one by about $300 billion in total. It would also lift the federal debt limit until March 2019.
Critically, it would also keep the government funded for another six weeks, giving lawmakers time to put together a long-term spending bill that would stretch through the rest of the fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30. The previous temporary funding measure, which was passed to end the last shutdown, expired at midnight on Thursday.
The deal had been expected to sail through the Senate, and the House had planned to vote on it later Thursday, until Mr. Paul took his stand.
The White House Office of Management and Budget instructed federal agencies to prepare for a possible lapse in funding, a spokeswoman said Thursday night. Even with a technical lapse in government funding, the effect of the shutdown was limited because lawmakers gave final approval to the deal only hours after funding expired.
As the midnight deadline approached, Senate leaders from both parties nudged Mr. Paul to stop holding up the vote. And his colleagues had little to do but wait.
“It’s just further example of the dysfunction of this place,” said Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin. “It’s ridiculous, isn’t it?”
Senator Johnny Isakson, Republican of Georgia, offered a succinct account of his evening: “Living the dream.”
GRAPHIC
Budget Deficits Are Projected to Balloon Under the Bipartisan Spending Deal
The two-year budget agreement reached by Senate leaders would contribute hundreds of billions of dollars to federal deficits.
Among the Democratic ranks in the House, the objections were also strenuous, but for reasons very different from Mr. Paul’s.
With the monthslong budget impasse appearing to be on the cusp of a resolution, lawmakers were girding for a fight over the fate of young immigrants who were brought to the country illegally as children, known as Dreamers, as well as some rich asshole’s plan to build a wall along the southern border with Mexico and other possible immigration policy changes.
The uncertain outlook for immigration legislation, and the disagreements on the best strategy to move forward, was starkly apparent as Ms. Pelosi commanded the House floor for more than eight hours on Wednesday in an effort to help the young immigrants. She said she would oppose the budget deal unless Mr. Ryan offered a commitment to hold a vote on legislation in the House that would address the fate of the Dreamers.
On Thursday, Ms. Pelosi herself displayed the conflicting pressures on Democrats. She simultaneously hailed the budget deal while proclaiming she would vote against it. In a letter to colleagues, she explained her opposition to the deal, but also nodded to its virtues and held back from pressuring other Democrats to vote against it.
“I’m pleased with the product,” she told reporters. “I’m not pleased with the process.”
In his own comments to reporters on Thursday, Mr. Ryan stressed his desire to address the fate of the young immigrants. But he did not offer the kind of open-ended commitment that might assuage Ms. Pelosi. Instead, he signaled that whatever bill the House considers would be one that some rich asshole supports.
“To anyone who doubts my intention to solve this problem and bring up a DACA and immigration reform bill, do not,” he said. “We will bring a solution to the floor, one that the president will sign.”
Just before the vote on Friday morning, Mr. Ryan offered a further reassurance about his commitment to addressing DACA. Once the budget deal has been approved, he said, “we will focus on bringing that debate to this floor and finding a solution.”
The fate of the Dreamers has been in question since some rich asshole moved in September to end DACA. The president gave Congress six months to come up with a solution to resolve their fate.
In recent months, Democrats have tried to make use of the leverage they have in fiscal negotiations, and the issue of immigration played a central role in last month’s shutdown. But Democrats have struggled to determine how hard they should push.
In last month’s closure, the vast majority of Senate Democrats voted to block a bill that would have kept the government open, only to retreat a few days later and agree to end the closure after Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, promised a Senate debate on immigration.
This time, House Democrats were clearly split in their calculations about the best way to exert influence over immigration.
Representative Luis V. Gutiérrez, Democrat of Illinois, demanded that Ms. Pelosi use her muscle to “stop the Democrats from folding.”
“Anyone who votes for the Senate budget deal is colluding with this president and this administration to deport Dreamers,” he said. “It is as simple as that.”
Democrats also ran the risk of angering liberal activists who want to see them take a stand. Ben Wikler, the Washington director for MoveOn.org, said House Democrats would be making a strategic mistake by voting for the budget deal.
“If you’re looking at a boulder and you have a choice between a lever or your bare hands, you should use the lever,” he said.
But Democrats secured important victories in the budget pact, obtaining big increases in funding for domestic programs. Voting against those wins to take a stand on DACA — and possibly prolonging the shutdown — carried its own political risks.
Representative John Yarmuth of Kentucky, the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee, noted that the budget deal “meets nearly every one of our priorities.”
“If Democrats cannot support this kind of compromise, Congress will never function,” he said.
The spotlight was on House Democrats in part because it had become apparent that Republican leaders would most likely lack the votes to push the budget deal through the House with only votes from their own party.
A sizable number of House Republicans rebelled against the deal because of its huge increase in spending. The conservative House Freedom Caucus, which has roughly three dozen members, formally opposed the deal.
“It was pretty much a smorgasbord of spending and policy that got added to this,” said Representative Mark Meadows, Republican of North Carolina and the chairman of the Freedom Caucus. “Normally, people who eat at smorgasbords all the time are not the healthiest.”
Gutiérrez: Pelosi's speech was great, but real DACA test comes Thursday
BY MIKE LILLIS - 02/08/18 08:30 AM EST
The Democrats’ leading liberal voice on immigration reform is pouring effusive praise on House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) for her marathon floor speech demanding a vote to protect young undocumented immigrants — with a big asterisk.
Rep. Luis Gutiérrez (D-Ill.) warned that if Pelosi and Democratic leaders don’t push aggressively for rank-and-file members to oppose a sweeping budget deal without a commitment on immigration in a vote expected Thursday, they’ll be “colluding” with Republicans to allow those immigrants to be deported.
“I’m thankful to her for giving that speech, I applaud her for giving the speech, and now tomorrow I want her to use the same kind of tenacity and muscle and perseverance to stop the Democrats from folding,” Gutiérrez told reporters Wednesday evening in the Capitol. “Because what you have is collusion — whether or not the Intelligence Committee agrees — between a group of Democrats and some rich asshole that will lead to the deportation of Dreamers.”
“People in our caucus will do what’s in the best interest of their constituency and of the country. That’s what they’re elected to do,” Rep. Joseph Crowley (N.Y.), chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, said Wednesday.
In the eyes of many immigrant rights advocates, however, that’s not enough.
Gutiérrez said that while Pelosi's speech was great, party leaders must use more aggressive tools to rally member opposition — carrots and sticks related to committee assignments and campaign cash, for instance — or the Dreamers will never get their vote.
“There’s all kinds of ways, I assure you, that leadership exercises its influence, the least of which are floor speeches,” he said.
Pelosi captivated Capitol Hill on Wednesday when she took to the floor for a “one-minute” speech during a mortgage finance debate, and then spent more than eight hours commandeering the chamber to press Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) to guarantee a vote on legislation salvaging the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which President the rich asshole is terminating on March 5.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), pressured by upper-chamber Democrats, has pledged action on DACA in the near future. But Ryan has stopped short of that commitment, saying that he wants to shore up the sunsetting program, but won’t consider legislation that doesn’t have the rich asshole’s support — a requirement that complicates the congressional debate, since the president has rejected a number of bipartisan DACA bills in recent weeks. One conservative proposal, sponsored by Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), appears to have the rich asshole’s blessing, but it likely lacks the support to pass through the House.
Throughout the months-long debate over government spending, Pelosi has come under fire from immigrant rights activists — including those in her own caucus — who say she’s done too little to leverage her influence to protect the roughly 1.8 million Dreamers.
On Wednesday, she sought to reassure those critics, announcing her opposition to the two-year budget agreement — a deal she was central in negotiating — without some certainty that a House vote on DACA is forthcoming.
“Without that commitment from Speaker Ryan, comparable to the commitment from Leader McConnell, this package does not have my support, nor does it have the support of a large number of members of our caucus,” Pelosi said in her speech.
The budget package will require Democratic support to pass the lower chamber, since dozens of conservatives are expected to oppose the legislation over the increase in both the debt ceiling and spending caps governing nondefense domestic programs.
The package is loaded with provisions favored by the Democrats — including spikes in funding for veterans health facilities, children’s health care, the opioid crisis and disaster relief — and dozens of Democratic lawmakers are expected to back the bill, particularly if party leaders decline to whip hard against it.
Gutiérrez accused Pelosi of sending “mixed messages,” at once demanding an immigration vote from Republicans while sending a tacit signal to Democrats that they’re free to back the budget bill, even without a DACA pledge from the Speaker.
“She indicated that the caps were the new leverage. That has been decoupled,” he said. “Once you do that, you basically said, ‘Vote your will.’”
Pelosi and the Democrats will have at least one more bite at the apple: The budget package due for votes Thursday extends government spending just six weeks, until March 23, and Ryan is expected to need Democratic votes once again on a larger omnibus spending bill when that deadline approaches.
Still, DACA expires weeks before then, and the immigrant rights advocates fear the deportations will follow if some immigration deal isn’t struck beforehand.
“When the deportations begin, anybody that voted for that bargain Thursday also voted to collude with Republicans to lead to the deportation of Dreamers,” Gutiérrez said.
“And they will come for them, if we don’t stop them.”
Updated at 10:37 a.m.
Devin Nunes wants to build a literal wall in the Capitol to keep Democrats away from his staff: report
Devin Nunes speaks to Fox News (screen grab)
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Rep. Devin Nunes is spearheading a plan to build a literal wall to separate Republicans and Democrats in the House Intelligence Committee’s secure spaces.
CBS News reports that the wall is expected to be build this spring and is a sign of “increasing partisan hostilities” in the House Intelligence Committee.
Republican members of the committee denied having anything to do with it to CBS News, and they said that any questions about it should be directed toward Nunes.
“I’m not part of that decision,” Rep. Mike Conaway (R-TX) told the network. “You’ve got to talk to Devin. I don’t know what they’re trying to do one way or the other.”
“I swear to God I didn’t know that,” Rep. Tom Rooney (R-FL) said. “The level of trust and the level of everything down there is — it’s poison. It’s absolute poison down there.”
Rep. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-MD), who has served on the House Intelligence Committee for the past 12 years, said the bipartisanship of the committee had severely deteriorated.
“It’s very hurtful to me to see the degradation of this committee and it’s wrong,” he said.
Devin Nunes speaks to Fox News (screen grab)
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Rep. Devin Nunes is spearheading a plan to build a literal wall to separate Republicans and Democrats in the House Intelligence Committee’s secure spaces.
CBS News reports that the wall is expected to be build this spring and is a sign of “increasing partisan hostilities” in the House Intelligence Committee.
Republican members of the committee denied having anything to do with it to CBS News, and they said that any questions about it should be directed toward Nunes.
“I’m not part of that decision,” Rep. Mike Conaway (R-TX) told the network. “You’ve got to talk to Devin. I don’t know what they’re trying to do one way or the other.”
“I swear to God I didn’t know that,” Rep. Tom Rooney (R-FL) said. “The level of trust and the level of everything down there is — it’s poison. It’s absolute poison down there.”
Rep. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-MD), who has served on the House Intelligence Committee for the past 12 years, said the bipartisanship of the committee had severely deteriorated.
“It’s very hurtful to me to see the degradation of this committee and it’s wrong,” he said.
George W. Bush reveals ‘clear evidence’ Russia meddled in 2016 election
Former US President George W. Bush (AFP Photo/Ronald Martinez)
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Former President George W. Bush this week said there was “pretty clear evidence” that Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election.
USA Today reports that Bush made his comments about Russian interference at a conference being held in the United Arab Emirates this week that was sponsored by the Milken Institute think tank.
While Bush said he didn’t know whether Russian meddling actually affected the outcome of the election, he was still troubled by the damage that such meddling can do to American democracy.
“It’s problematic that a foreign nation is involved in our election system,” he said. “Our democracy is only as good as people trust the results.”
President some rich asshole, whom the Russians tried to help get elected, has frequently hedged on whether he thinks Russia interfered on his behalf. Last year, for example, he said that Russian President Vladimir Putin was being completely sincere when he insisted that he didn’t order the hacking of the DNC.
White House domestic violence scandal isn’t being covered by Fox News
For more than 12 hours, Rob Porter's name wasn't mentioned a single time.
Rob Porter, a White House staff secretary who was in charge of the flow of paperwork coming into and out of the Oval Office, resigned from his position on Wednesday after both of his ex-wives accused him of abuse — but not before White House Chief of Staff John Kelly released a statement praising Porter and ignoring the abuse allegations and his alleged victims.
Fox News, however, is pretending the scandal doesn’t exist.
Questions have since been raised about what top White House officials knew and when they knew it. Bloomberg reports that “senior White House aides” had “heard of domestic violence allegations against President some rich asshole’s staff secretary before reports published on Tuesday and Wednesday that led to his resignation.” According to CBS, “the FBI informed the White House in November about the domestic abuse allegations against Porter. It’s unclear how the White House responded to this information.”
These revelations have raised concerns about Porter’s involvement in sensitive White House matters.
“Allegations of domestic violence can be grounds for the government to deny security clearances to aspiring officials,” Bloomberg reports. “Yet Porter had sat in on meetings of the National Security Council where top secret matters were discussed, according to three people familiar with the situation.”
Kelly’s initial statement about Porter was not well received. So late Wednesday, the White House chief of staff released a second one feigning surprise about the Porter accusations, and denouncing domestic violence.
From Wednesday afternoon to Thursday morning, the White House domestic abuse came up dozens of times both on CNN and MSNBC. Kelly’s shifting statements about Porter on Wednesday got “breaking news” treatment on both networks.
But if you think any of that would warrant so much as a mention on Fox News, think again. According to transcripts of the network’s broadcasts, Porter’s name wasn’t mentioned a single time on Fox News’ programming from the 6 o’clock hour on Wednesday until the 9 o’clock hour on Thursday morning.
That means that Porter’s name didn’t come up a single time on Fox News’ primetime programming or on Thursday’s edition of the rich asshole’s favorite show, Fox & Friends. Instead, hosts found to instead discuss allegations that Hillary Clinton colluded with Russia, to chastise anyone opposed to the rich asshole’s plan to have a military parade in D.C., and to criticize Justin Trudeau for correcting “mankind” to “humankind” at a town hall event.
White House counselor Kellyanne Conway joined Fox & Friends for an interview, but wasn’t asked about Porter. Hosts instead teed up a question for her about the Eagles’ Super Bowl win.
Conway also worked with hosts to push a “scandal” about text messages sent between two FBI agents, claiming President Obama exerted influence in the Hillary Clinton email investigation. Despite the fact that the story was debunked on Wednesday, Fox News has continued pushing it.
While Fox News decision to ignore the White House domestic abuse scandal is particularly egregious, the network has routinely downplayed bad news for the rich asshole, while pushing misleading stories that discredit the rich asshole’s opponents and the institutions tasked with overseeing his administration.
In return, the president has effusively praised the network while attacking its competitors.
Thank you for all of the nice compliments and reviews on the State of the Union speech. 45.6 million people watched, the highest number in history. @FoxNews beat every other Network, for the first time ever, with 11.7 million people tuning in. Delivered from the heart!
As of Thursday morning, it remains unclear exactly when Porter will stop working in the White House.
Hundreds of Chaldean Christians live in fear of deportation, despite the rich asshole's promises to protect the religious minority.
DETROIT, MICHIGAN — At U.S. Immigration Court in Detroit’s McNamara Federal Building, the waiting room is full. It’s early January and most of those waiting are squeezed into winter coats, sitting in connected chairs making small talk in Spanish, Arabic, and English. Everyone had rushed to be present by 8:30 a.m. — braving icy roads and a long security line in the lobby downstairs.
When the clerk calls him forward, Attorney Ed Bajoka explains he has three paths to pursue in seeking release of his client, Mukhlis Murad, who’s been detained for nearly six months. Murad is a 59-year-old suburban grandfather with numerous health problems. His adult children and his sister are in the waiting room. When asked how it’s been at home without her dad there, his 23-year-old daughter, Summer, answers swiftly and directly, “He’s our best friend.”
Murad is one of several hundred Iraqi-born U.S. residents now facing detention and deportation. Many are married to U.S. citizens. Most speak English. At least half are Chaldean and speak Aramaic — not necessarily Arabic. They are parents and grandparents, business owners, and taxpayers. Many are churchgoing Catholics.
Late last spring, as President some rich asshole’s Muslim ban was being revised and reissued, Iraq was dropped from the list of countries in a deal Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called an example of “close cooperation” between the two governments. It seems, in return, Iraq would agree to repatriate Iraqi-Americansthat the United States wanted to deport.
The Chaldean Catholic community of Detroit’s suburbs is heavily represented among the would-be deportees. Many believe the Christian Iraqis will be certain targets for torture, and even death, if they return.
Chaldeans are an ethnic and religious minority with indigenous roots in Northern Iraq; there are about 640,000 worldwide. Starting 40 years ago, thousands of Iraqi-born Christians fled religious persecution under Saddam Hussein, and about 120,000 Chaldeans have made homes in Southeast Michigan. In many cases, they settled into jobs operating corner stores as family businesses — as many of them had in Iraq because they were allowed to buy and sell alcohol, unlike Muslims. The Chaldean Chamber of Commerce says that today nine out of 10 food stores in the city of Detroit are owned by Chaldeans.
In Detroit, late night liquor and convenience stores are called party stores, and for decades Chaldeans have been a stalwart part of the local culture. Locals visit their usual party store a few times a week for beer or toiletries and often for a friendly conversation with the store’s Chaldean owner. As newcomers, Chaldeans took jobs others wouldn’t, working late hours in corner stores during perhaps the most dangerous time in Detroit’s history — the 1980s and ‘90s.
In 1997, Murad had jobs at two party stores, one during the day and one at night, at Teddy’s Medicine Chest. Around 9 p.m. one night in October 1997, five intruders entered that store in a robbery attempt. Murad was shot five times. The bullet that went into his jaw remains there, and his mental and emotional health hasn’t been the same since.
At his home in the Detroit suburb of Farmington Hills, Murad, who can’t work much, was cared for by his adult children. His daughter cooked. Every morning, his son shaved him because the left side of his face has been numb since the gunshot wound there 20 years ago. He used a cane to get around and helped look after his twin baby grandsons.
Murad came to the United States on a visitor’s visa in 1977, when he was 19. He got married, which adjusted his status to lawful permanent resident. Since his divorce 13 years ago, he’s been under an order of supervision and has complied, visiting the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office whenever requested, about once per year. When he reported in July, he was interrogated about his immigration status and detained on the spot.
“Warehousing human beings”
In December at Battle Creek’s Calhoun County Jail, 115 miles west of his home in Farmington Hills, Murad was sitting in a wheelchair behind Plexiglass. He said canes aren’t allowed there, nor is Ativan, one of his prescriptions.
Detention is hard for Murad, and tears were rolling down his unshaven cheeks while he spoke. The jail is too far for his son to visit regularly. When Murad’s daughter Summer visits, he often tells the guards to turn her away. It is too upsetting for Murad when Summer leaves, which he avoids by not seeing her at all.
In 1983, Murad passed drugs to someone, for which he served jail time the same year. He said the practice of passing drugs in Detroit party stores in the 1980s was commonplace, and he had no understanding of the law. Making the sign of the cross over his head and heart, he said, “I swear to Jesus I did not know this about the USA.”
In U.S. District court in late December, the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan argued before Judge Mark Goldsmith that detentions like Murad’s are unlawful. They conceded that some of the detainees have a criminal past, for which they’ve made amends appropriately, but say that indefinite detention and possible removal to Iraq is unconstitutional.
On January 2, Goldsmith issued an order declaring, “Our legal tradition rejects warehousing human beings while their legal rights are being determined,” and referenced, “… our nation’s historic commitment to individual human dignity — a core value that the Constitution protects by preserving liberty through the due process of law.”
Murad’s bond hearing on January 9 was the first since this order, with dozens more taking place over the next few weeks.
About 1,400 people are seemingly eligible for deportation since the changes to the Muslim ban, but most of those have not been detained — yet. Their attorneys guard their anonymity fiercely. Not all Iraqis with criminal backgrounds have been detained, while some who have been detained have no criminal background.
A particular betrayal
Jony Jarjiss, 58, is one of those people. He has been at Northeast Ohio Correctional Center in Youngstown, Ohio since July 11. Like Murad, he was scheduled for an ICE check-in and went voluntarily. He was detained for overstaying his visa and hasn’t been back to his home in Saginaw since.
The drive from Saginaw is five hours and $12 in tolls each way. His adult children and grandchildren, all four years old or younger, aren’t able to visit. He hasn’t even met his youngest grandchild, born six months ago, after he was sent away.
After his parents were killed in a 1991 Tikrit bombing, Jarjiss’ Chaldean family members arranged his marriage to an Iraqi woman living in the United States. They met once — in Jordan — and talked on the phone frequently. In 1993, he entered the United States on a so-called fiancé visa. The more he got to know her, the more his doubts expanded. After a big engagement party in Detroit and two in-person dates, he called it off. He was sorry to do it, but he wasn’t in love and couldn’t go through with it to please their families.
All these years later, Jarjiss spoke with tenderness about his family members. Across the partition and over the phone handset in Youngstown, he sang a few songs in Arabic; the lyrics were about God, women, and suffering. Of his four-year old grandson, he said, “I miss him the most of anyone or anything.”
When his engagement fell apart, he applied for, and was denied, asylum. By that point, between the Gulf War’s after effects and his knowledge of the violence in Iraq, he didn’t want to return. He moved to Saginaw, where his brother worked in a grocery store, in hopes of making a plan.
Before long, he was working at the store himself, and he’d fallen in love with a U.S. citizen who was mother to a five-week old daughter. He pledged to raise the girl and, later, became father to another daughter with the same woman. When their relationship ended and she had a third and fourth daughter with another man, Jarjiss pledged again to be the father figure in the lives of all four girls. His daughters are 22, 20, 15, and 13 years old. The relationship between Jarjiss and the woman was complicated and he refused to marry her, though she wanted to and it would have improved the situation of his immigration status.
The facility in Ohio has about 90 Iraqis alongside other criminal and immigration offenders. “It’s the United Nations in here,” Jarjiss said. Two of his fellow Iraqis chose voluntary deportation, rather than waiting this out in Youngstown.
In Iraq, years ago, Jarjiss was successful. He sang and played guitar. He said he was the number two track and field competitor in all of Iraq, and number one at the University of Mosul, where he studied linguistics and became fluent in English, Arabic, Aramaic, and Kurdish. “Iraq is not Iraq now,” he explained. He believes the threats to Chaldean Christians there are much more intense than when he left in the early ‘90s, and he has no family left there.
Torture, kidnapping, and suspicion of American sympathies are the norm for many Christians in Iraq, and deportees face even deeper suspicions and violence based on their American habits, their lack of remaining family in Iraq and because many of the detainees are not conversant in Arabic.
Daniel Wakefield Smith, an American researcher specializing in Iraq who’s lived there since 2007, traveled to Detroit in December 2017 to give testimony in an immigration case, saying “It is highly likely, and certainly more likely than not, that deportees will be tortured after they return to Iraq” either by Iraqi security forces or Iran-backed Shia militias. Smith’s expertise comes from hundreds of in-country interviews and from firsthand observations of arrests, interrogations, and occasions of torture. Aside from even the biases of Americanization and religion people like Jarjiss or Murad might face as deportees, Smith described torture in these situations as routine “because Iraq relies on a confession-based approach to investigation, interrogation, and separately, to prosecution.”
In addition to each individual immigration or criminal case that’s being fought by attorneys like Bajoka, the ACLU is spearheading a class action suit representing hundreds of Iraqi nationals. They say it’s inhumane to keep people in this prolonged state of detention, particularly because they have a good chance of winning their immigration cases eventually.
In the Chaldean community in Detroit, deporting these men feels like a particular betrayal given the the rich asshole campaign’s apparent stance on protecting Middle Eastern Christians — and the Chaldean community’s subsequent support, thought to be a key part of how the rich asshole narrowly won the typically blue state. Just after his inauguration, President the rich asshole tweeted, “Christians in the Middle-East have been executed in large numbers. We cannot allow this horror to continue!”
Ron Kaplovtiz, an attorney representing several Iraqis with pending criminal cases, said there was an initial surge of sympathy for the Chaldeans among U.S. Christians.
“As soon as they found out [some] were criminals, they turned a blind eye,” he said. “I like to think I’m a spiritual person and I believe there should be second chances for people.” But after early enthusiastic support from church leaders, “It waned. And now it’s gone.”
“Everyone I saw was Chaldean”
After an evening in Youngstown, the road north toward Chardon, Ohio is twisting, hilly, and dark. It’s where Michigander, Nadir Jawad, 44, is serving time.
When Jawad came to the United States as a six-year-old in the early 1980s, he was issued a green card and made a lawful permanent resident, though his status was not clear by the time he was an adult. His father was pressured to join the Ba’ath party in Iraq in the late 1970s, resisted, and ultimately fled. As the youngest in his family, Jawad, whose name has been changed to protect his privacy, picked up English and assimilated so quickly that his cousins called him “white boy.”
At the jail in Chardon, Jawad spoke about growing up in the suburbs of Detroit, where he was a spelling bee winner and a high school wrestler. He enlisted in the U.S. Navy in his early twenties, but left a year before he would have been eligible to become a naturalized U.S. citizen. Had he known, he would have stayed.
In the mid-1990s, his sister, mother, and father took citizenship tests. He was young and felt too busy to study for the civics portion. He remembers flubbing the question about the songwriter’s name of The Star-Spangled Banner. He didn’t pass. In any case, the U.S. government hadn’t deported Iraqis for decades.
He may not have been a citizen, but he built a stable life and by 2013 lived in a condo and was working two jobs. There were missteps on his driving record, including more than one DUI. “I was so stupid,” he said.
He admitted he often drove after his license was suspended but felt he had no other choice; he had to keep working, and his job was for a flooring company, measuring people’s homes for linoleum and carpet. He couldn’t do that remotely, so he took his chances driving.
“We’re fighting for you, and we love you!”
In 2013, he was rushing to make it to work on time when his speeding car caught a police officer’s attention. The incident ultimately ended in a fleeing-and-eluding felony, for which he served time. He was released in 2014, and, like Murad and Jarjiss, was complying with the ICE schedule of check-ins.
On the early morning of June 11, 2017 Jawad was sleeping in his girlfriend’s home when he heard a loud knock. His girlfriend opened the door and ICE officers took Jawad to a van where there were other Iraqi men inside. They went to a few more houses and transferred to a larger van that held 15 people. Several such vans converged at the ICE office on Mt. Elliott Street in Detroit, where they were held for about 12 hours.
“I saw my cousin there. Two uncles. Everyone I saw was Chaldean,” Jawad said.
Later in the day, they started loading buses, and Jawad was on the fourth and final bus. Word had spread and there were protesters and family members lining the streets, threatening to lie down in the road to stop the buses. The bus jerked forward and stopped abruptly many times, avoiding people who were blocking it. A woman he’d never seen before was reaching her hand up to hold his hand, saying “We’re fighting for you, and we love you! I love you!” Then he was taken to Ohio.
A second chance
Bajoka said there’s a possibility that Iraqi nationals could be turned away by Iraq if they’re deported, referencing a recent incident in which an ICE-chartered plane left Minneapolis with about 90 Somalis, then turned around when it reached Dakar. His theory — that Somalia didn’t want to take them back — touches on some of the futility of the current situation. ICE chartered a plane in Detroit in the summer but it never took off, thanks to a July decision by Judge Goldsmith.
“No one has said Iraq will even accept them,” Bajoka said. “What’s the U.S. government’s interest in keeping them detained? If they were going to be deported, I get that. I get their goal. If they’re just sitting there, what’s the point?”
On January 31, Judge Alison Brown offered Jarjiss and Jawad a second chance. Jarjiss was released February 1, his 58th birthday, “on his own recognizance” without a bond payment. He said he’d pick up his life in Saginaw where he left off in July, though he’s lost his home and car due to missed payments. For Jawad, his second chance will commence once his family comes up with the $7,500 bond amount he was offered by Judge Brown.
In the small courtroom on the McNamara Building’s fourth floor on January 9, Summer Murad’s eyes were fixed on the video screen. On the other side of the video feed, Mukhlis Murad heard good news. If his family could come up with a $3,000 bond, he’d be released in time for his grandsons’ first birthday. “God bless you,” he told the judge, who explained he must comply with ICE orders of supervision. He answered, “I will. I will.”
The judge reminded Murad, “If you don’t appear, you will be deported.”
“God bless you,” Murad said again.
WATCH: Morning Joe breaks down how Republicans are gaming Facebook to help the rich asshole — and Russia
Joe Scarborough (MSNBC)
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MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough accused President some rich asshole and congressional Republicans of manipulating social media to undermine law enforcement.
The “Morning Joe” host said GOP lawmakers were promoting easily debunked conspiracy theories, but he said the president’s apologists were banking on the fact that most Americans were unable or unwilling to untangle fact from fiction.
“It’s one conspiracy theory after another after another, churned up by the White House, senators and conservative media people,” Scarborough said. “Do Americans even keep up with this? All the lies that they’re spewing out are easily proven.”
Scarborough said the president seemingly interrupted his daily intelligence briefing to hype the latest FBI conspiracy theory reported by Fox News, and MSNBC’s Mike Barnicle said the rich asshole was manipulating the news cycle to undermine American institutions.
“Every morning we run the chyron at the bottom of the screen — ‘President the rich asshole calls FBI texts bombshells,'” Barnicle said. “What we could be running every single day as a result of what (Sen.) Ron Johnson does, what’s coming out of the White House, what’s coming out of Fox News, what we could run as a chyron at the bottom of the screen is — ‘Russia is winning.’ That’s what’s happening.”
He took aim at Facebook, which he said had not taken enough steps to help social media users sort legitimate information from disinformation — such as the House Intelligence Committee chairman’s claims that a surveillance warrant was improperly granted against the rich asshole campaign adviser Carter Page.
“You get Fox News or the White House or Devin Nunes or Paul Ryan to start a lie, and the president churns it is up, people will do a Facebook posting,” Scarborough said. “It will get millions and millions of shares, and then guess what — when it ends up being a lie, Facebook doesn’t send a message around saying — you know what? you’ve been lied to again. This is 42nd consecutive day you’ve been lied to, and you’ve been told half-truths.”
More than half of Americans get their news from Facebook, and Scarborough said the social media company doesn’t take its role seriously enough as a media provider.
“There should be a threshold, where they have to send out a blast to every Facebook subscriber that got these false stories, that this story they got was a lie,” he said. “Until they do that, they are being irresponsible, and they are actually being the megaphone for all the lies and conspiracy theories that are hurting democracy today by Republicans, and one day it may be democrats doing it. This is a bipartisan issue.”
The folks at Fox News are stooping so low to defend the rich asshole's racist policies, they're mocking a child's empathy for his friend.
Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi made history Wednesday with a powerful 8-hour speech on the floor of the House, pleading with her colleagues to stand up for Dreamers.
So Fox News, always a stalwart defender of some rich asshole’s agenda, is attacking not just Pelosi, but her 6-year-old grandson too.
During her record-breaking address, Pelosi told the story of her grandson and his close friend Antonio, from Guatemala.
When her grandson blew out the candles on his birthday cake, he said he wished to have brown skin and eyes like Antonio.
“So beautiful,” Pelosi said. “The face of the future for our country is all-American. And that has many versions.”
But the hosts of “Fox & Friends” could not even allow for a sweet and empathetic story of a child’s birthday wish.
“Really moved the crowd on that one,” Brian Kilmeade said sarcastically. “I really got emotional. Give me a second to compose myself.”
Kilmeade then lectured the child. “You shouldn’t be ashamed of the color of your skin,” he said, even though Pelosi never said her grandson was ashamed. “I don’t know where the heartwarming moment is in that story.”
Then Ainsley Earhardt chimed in. “That wish is not going to come true,” she said. “His eye color is not changing. Get contacts!”
“If you have a second heartwarming grandchild story,” Kilmeade said, “I’d use that one next time.”
Earhardt concluded the segment by declaring, “Identity politics, some say.”
It’s bad enough for Fox to sneer at Pelosi for sharing the stories of young immigrants who were brought to this country as children and now, thanks to the rich asshole, are facing deportation to countries they don’t even know.
But to attack her young grandchild by mocking and lecturing him — even accusing the little boy of playing “identity politics” with his birthday wish — is a disgraceful and petty attack that proves just how desperate right-wing media is to fight against the desire of the majority of Americans to protect, rather than attack, these young Americans who should be able to stay in the only home they’ve ever known.
Fear, not ‘laziness’, is one reason some immigrants haven’t applied for DACA
FILE PHOTO - Supporter of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, Alex Hernandez, holds a sign during a rally in Los Angeles, California, September 5, 2017. REUTERS/ Kyle Grillot
PRI's The World
Posted with permission from GlobalPost
White House Chief of Staff John Kelly on Tuesday suggested that young immigrants who have not applied for legal status are either afraid or "too lazy to get off their asses."
Mana Yegani, an immigration lawyer in Houston, says there are many reasons young immigrants have not applied for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), but none have to do with laziness.
Fear, however, is one of them, Yegani says.
Yegani remembers encouraging people to apply for DACA when President Barack Obama made it available by executive order.
“But the issue was that when people apply for DACA, they have to fill out this form which gives the federal government their names, their addresses, even really detailed information," she said. "[It asks questions like] what border town did you enter the United States, what date that you crossed the border illegally.”
So many young undocumented people, Yegani says, “were terrified to apply” because they thought it put their parents at risk for deportation.
With Obama as president, she assured them that the information they provided would not be used to deport them or their parents. Now, under Trump, she thinks it might.
Mana Yegani, an immigration lawyer in Houston, says there are many reasons young immigrants have not applied for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), but none have to do with laziness.
Fear, however, is one of them, Yegani says.
Many children and young people were afraid to apply for DACA because they had to put their home address on government forms. Many didn’t apply because they were afraid the government would take their undocumented parents. Not because of LAZINESS. Ignorant comment from Gen Kelly. twitter.com/artacevedo/sta…
Yegani remembers encouraging people to apply for DACA when President Barack Obama made it available by executive order.
“But the issue was that when people apply for DACA, they have to fill out this form which gives the federal government their names, their addresses, even really detailed information," she said. "[It asks questions like] what border town did you enter the United States, what date that you crossed the border illegally.”
So many young undocumented people, Yegani says, “were terrified to apply” because they thought it put their parents at risk for deportation.
With Obama as president, she assured them that the information they provided would not be used to deport them or their parents. Now, under Trump, she thinks it might.
‘Tough it out’: Watch Jeff Sessions recommend aspirin instead of opioids for chronic pain patients
Attorney General Jeff Sessions (YouTube)
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Attorney General Jeff Sessions this week said that the solution for many people who suffer from chronic pain should be to “take aspirin and tough it out.”
The Tampa Bay Times reports Sessions, who has staunchly opposed legalizing medicinal marijuana to help people suffering from chronic pain, gave an address at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Tampa this week where he bashed doctors for giving their patients too many addictive painkillers.
“This company prescribes too many opioids,” Sessions said. “People need to take some aspirin sometimes and tough it out… you can get through these things.”
Bob Twillman, the executive director of the Academy of Integrative Pain Management, told the Tampa Bay Times that Sessions’ aspirin recommendation showed that the rich asshole administration is woefully ignorant about what it’s like to deal with chronic pain.
“That remark reflects a failure to recognize the severity of pain of some patients,” he said. “It’s an unconscionable remark. It further illustrates how out of touch parts of the administration are with opioids and pain management.”
Watch the video of Sessions below.
the rich asshole claimed he got a celebrity discount on Melania’s engagement ring — but that’s a lie
Melania the rich asshole (Shutterstock)
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President some rich asshole apparently lied about how much he paid for his wife’s engagement ring.
The real estate developer and former reality TV star told the New York Times in 2005 that Graff Diamonds gave him a $1 million discount on the engagement ring he gave to Melania Knauss, but the company’s chairman later denied the claim, reported Forbes.
the rich asshole claimed the jeweler gave him a discount due to his fame, but multiple Graff officials said the company did not offer reduced prices in exchange for celebrity endorsements.
“We don’t sell items for publicity value,” said Graff CFO Nicholas Paine.
Laurence Graff told Forbes via email that the rich asshole was “a pleasure to do business with,” but the Swiss billionaire said the future president was given “no favours” on the emerald cut D-flawless diamond weighing more than 10 carats.
the rich asshole paid for the engagement ring, which retailed for $1.5 million, immediately and in full, a source with direct knowledge of the transaction said.
He also paid in full for a second Graff ring he gave to Melania to celebrate their 10th wedding anniversary.
That engagement ring, which weighs 25 carats and cost $3 million, attracted attention after the first lady posed with it for her official White House photo.
Critics noted the ring cost as much as the federal government spends each year on the community development block grant program that funds programs such as Meals on Wheels.
DON'T MISS STORIES. FOLLOW RAW STORY!
President some rich asshole apparently lied about how much he paid for his wife’s engagement ring.
The real estate developer and former reality TV star told the New York Times in 2005 that Graff Diamonds gave him a $1 million discount on the engagement ring he gave to Melania Knauss, but the company’s chairman later denied the claim, reported Forbes.
the rich asshole claimed the jeweler gave him a discount due to his fame, but multiple Graff officials said the company did not offer reduced prices in exchange for celebrity endorsements.
“We don’t sell items for publicity value,” said Graff CFO Nicholas Paine.
Laurence Graff told Forbes via email that the rich asshole was “a pleasure to do business with,” but the Swiss billionaire said the future president was given “no favours” on the emerald cut D-flawless diamond weighing more than 10 carats.
the rich asshole paid for the engagement ring, which retailed for $1.5 million, immediately and in full, a source with direct knowledge of the transaction said.
He also paid in full for a second Graff ring he gave to Melania to celebrate their 10th wedding anniversary.
That engagement ring, which weighs 25 carats and cost $3 million, attracted attention after the first lady posed with it for her official White House photo.
Critics noted the ring cost as much as the federal government spends each year on the community development block grant program that funds programs such as Meals on Wheels.
Senate to vote on two-year budget Thursday
BY ALEXANDER BOLTON - 02/07/18 08:29 PM EST
The Senate is expected to vote Thursday on a two-year budget deal that would substantially increase spending and suspend the debt ceiling for a year.
It is intended to avert a second government shutdown this year and gives lawmakers who wanted more money for the military a big win.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer (N.Y.) hailed it as a breakthrough after months of partisan fighting that stalled spending legislation and caused a three-day shutdown last month.
“This bill is the product of extensive negotiations among congressional leaders and the White House. No one would suggest it is perfect. But we worked hard to find common ground and stay focused on serving the American people,” McConnell said on the Senate floor.
Schumer said it marked the first sign of bipartisanship in months.
“After months of fiscal brinksmanship, this budget deal is the first real sprout of bipartisanship,” he said.
The accord increases defense spending by $80 billion in fiscal year 2018 and by $85 billion in fiscal year 2019, while raising nondefense spending by $63 billion and $68 billion.
It suspends the debt ceiling until March of 2019, ensuring Congress won’t have to deal with the legislative headache again until after this year’s midterm elections.
The Senate is expected to pass the deal on Thursday and send it to the House for final approval, hours before government funding is due to expire at midnight.
The legislation has strong support in the Senate but faces a rockier path in the House, where conservatives don’t like the big spending increases and Democrats want a promise from Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) to debate immigration legislation soon.
House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) held the House floor throughout Wednesday to speak out on the need to protect hundreds of thousands of immigrants brought to the United States illegally as children.
The battle over the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which the rich asshole is phasing out, led to a three-day shutdown in January. The Senate bill includes no language on the issue, despite demands from Democrats.
The Senate is set to debate a bill to protect so-called Dreamers from deportation in exchange for stronger border security, but there’s no guarantee the House will act if it passes the upper chamber.
Pelosi vowed to oppose the spending measure unless Ryan promises to take up immigration legislation, as McConnell promised to do next week.
“Without a commitment from Speaker Ryan, comparable to the commitment from Leader McConnell, this package does not have my support,” Pelosi said in a statement at the start of her marathon floor speech.
House Republicans will likely need Democratic votes to pass the spending deal, as conservative Republicans are voicing objections to the big increases in spending and the lack of reforms attached to the debt-ceiling increase.
Ryan praised the package Wednesday for “breaking the logjam on a number of priorities for the American people” and, in an attempt to mollify his right wing, promised future fiscal reforms.
“More budget reforms are needed, which is why we are laying the groundwork for a better process,” he said.
The deal establishes two committees to work on budget and spending reform, along with pension reform.
In another bid to win over conservatives, it will make some structural reforms to Medicare and repeal ObamaCare’s Independent Payment Advisory Board, a cost-control program that never got off the ground because critics argued it would take medical decisions away from doctors.
Pro-defense Republicans heralded the defense increases as a major victory.
“This budget agreement is indispensable for our national security,” Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) and House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) said in a joint statement.
They argued it would “provide our men and women in uniform with the training, capabilities, and support they need to keep America safe.”
But other GOP lawmakers raised concerns about the impact on the deficit.
Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), an outspoken budget hawk, warned that it might be more money than the Pentagon can digest in one year.
“Military spending and defense spending is far above the president’s request,” he said. “I’m all for supporting our military, and I want to make sure they’re funded properly. It’s very difficult to have that big an increase in one year and then be able to use it wisely.”
Federal deficit concerns weighed on Wall Street as well, where interest rates on treasuries have climbed in recent days, putting the stock markets in turmoil. Bond prices dipped and yields rose after McConnell announced the deal.
The legislation would also provide $90 billion in disaster relief for communities hit by hurricanes and wildfires, more than double the rich asshole administration’s request.
It includes $23.5 billion for the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s disaster relief fund for recovery, repairs and future mitigation, $28 billion for community development block grants and $2 billion to help Puerto Rico rebuild its electric grid.
Senate Republican Whip John Cornyn (Texas) called it “an improvement over the House version.”
It also includes a two-year reauthorization for community health centers, with $7 billion in total funding, and $6 billion to fight opioid addiction.
Other funding priorities are $4 billion to rebuild veterans’ hospitals and clinics, $2 billion for research at the National Institutes of Health and $20 billion for infrastructure programs.
In a big win for Democrats, it extends funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) another four years on top of the six-year extension that Congress approved last month.
“American families with children who benefit with CHIP will now be able to rest easy for the next decade,” Schumer said.
He said that seniors and children would also benefit from the deal’s extension of various expiring tax provisions.
‘He’s basically a good person’: Hatch resumes defending former staffer accused of domestic abuse
"If I could find more people like him I would hire them, I think that's how good he is."
On Tuesday, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) defended a former staffer—Rob Porter, the the rich asshole White House’s staff secretary—accused of domestic abuse. On Wednesday afternoon, he walked back his defense. But on Wednesday night, after Porter resigned, Hatch reversed course again and resumed his defense, saying in part, “He’s basically a good person.”
Porter served as Hatch’s chief of staff before going to work for President some rich asshole. On Tuesday, the Daily Mail published accusations from Porter’s second wife, Jennifer Willoughby, accusing Porter of physically and verbally abusing her.
Porter allegedly pulled her naked out of the shower not long after their first anniversary, and the Mail also published a 2010 police complaint detailing an incident in which Porter allegedly punched a glass door at their home. Willoughby then filed a temporary protective order.
On Wednesday, the Mail reported similar accusations from Porter’s first wife, Colbie Holderness, who said Porter physically abused her on their honeymoon. Holderness provided photos of her facial injuries to the media. The women both also told CNN Wednesday that a third woman, a girlfriend of Porter’s, contacted them for advice about how to deal with Porter’s “repeated abuse.”
On Tuesday, after the Mail published Willoughby’s accusations, The Intercept contacted Hatch for comment on the allegations against his former chief of staff.
“It’s incredibly discouraging to see such a vile attack on such a decent man,” Hatch said. “Shame on any publication that would print this — and shame on the politically motivated, morally bankrupt character assassins that would attempt to sully a man’s good name.”
The senator changed his tune after Holderness’ account came to light Wednesday, after Porter resigned from his role in the White House (despite, reportedly, encouragement from senior White House officials, including Chief of Staff John Kelly that Porter “stay and fight”).
Rob Porter was Orrin Hatch's former chief of staff.
Tuesday: Statement from Hatch (via White House) says it was “incredibly discouraging to see such a vile attack on such a decent man”
Today's Hatch statement says he is heartbroken and didn't know about abuse allegations. #utpol
“I do not know the details of Rob’s personal life,” Hatch said in a statement. “Domestic violence in any form is abhorrent and unacceptable. I am praying for Rob and those involved.”
That seemed like that, but, of course, in the the rich asshole era it never is.
On Wednesday night, NBC’s Frank Thorp spoke to Hatch again, who said he would prefer for Porter not to resign, but instead to just “work his way through and do what’s right.”
Just spoke to @senorrinhatch again, he reiterated he "would prefer (Rob Porter) not to resign. Just work his way through and do what's right."
"I encouraged him to keep a stiff upper lip and work on his problems," Hatch said.
Thorp also asked Hatch whether he would employ Porter if the allegations are true, and Hatch refused to answer.
“He worked for me [and] he did a tremendous job,” Hatch said. “If I could find more people like him I would hire them, I think that’s how good he is. And he’s basically a good person.”
The New York Times’ Katie Rogers asked Willoughby what she thought of Hatch’s reinvigorated defense of Porter.
“Rob is in fact charming and intelligent and diligent and extremely good at his job,” Willoughby said. “And, in capital letters, abusive and manipulative and toxic in his personal relationships.”
Hatch has a dicey history navigating the not-so-difficult politics of abuse.
Despite helping craft the Violence Against Women Act in 1994 and leading two successful reauthorization efforts, Hatch decided to vote against the signature bill aiming to protect women from domestic abuse in 2012.
More recently, Hatch defended the rich asshole’s endorsement of Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore, who was accused of sexual abuse by a number of women, some of whom were teenagers when Moore was in his 30’s.
“I don’t think he had any choice but to do that,” Hatch said in December. “That’s the only Republican we can get down there… [and] many of the things [Moore] allegedly did were decades ago.”
Christopher Steele met with Mueller’s team for two days: report
Christopher Steele (Telegraph)
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Former British MI6 agent Christopher Steele spoke with investigators on special counsel Robert Mueller’s team for two days, the Telegraph reports.
Steele, who compiled the dossier alleging ties between some rich asshole and Vladimir Putin, spoke with investigators behind closed doors as Mueller’s team tried to ascertain the veracity of those claims.
The dossier sits at the center of a public battle over the Russia investigation. Republicans have claimed the Steele dossier was used by the FBI to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant on onetime the rich asshole aide Carter Page. In fact, the FBI knew of Page’s ties to Moscow as early as 2014.
the rich asshole Launches An All-Caps Tweet To Lash Out At The FBI While He’s In An Intelligence Briefing
Former reality show star some rich asshole is having quite a meltdown on Twitter today and even interrupted a scheduled intelligence briefing to lash out at the FBI over text messages. the rich asshole tweeted this just after Fox & Friends aired a new report on the texts in order to claim that President Barack Obama wanted to spy on his campaign last year. the rich asshole’s briefing was scheduled at 11:00 and he unleashed an all-caps tweet at 11:10.
“NEW FBI TEXTS ARE BOMBSHELLS!” President Crazy Pants tweeted.
Note the timing of his tweet during the Intelligence briefing.
Trump’s public schedule had him receiving his intelligence briefing at 11AM. He tweeted this at 11:10. twitter.com/realdonaldtrum…
This didn’t go down well on Twitter.
WHAT THE HELL IS CONGRESS DOING?!?!?!?!?!
I get that he thinks this is a reality show. I get that he's mentally ill. What I don't get is how this is allowed to go on and on.
Watching Fox & Friends IS his briefing.
@realDonaldTrump The briefing was the FoxNews 11:00 am segment. First commercial break was at 11:10.
Trump and intelligence in the same sentence?
In January, the Vacationer-in-Chief decided he needs more time off so he started taking ‘executive time’ which affords him the luxury of not having to go to work until 11:00. He did this so that he could spend more time tweeting and watching TV. Apparently, the rich asshole was so worked up after watching his favorite propagandist network that just after getting to work and walking into the meeting, he kept tweeting. Before the meeting, he tweeted about the stock market dive but his message was incoherent. “In the “old days,” when good news was reported, the Stock Market would go up.” President Stable Genius tweeted. “Today, when good news is reported, the Stock Market goes down. Big mistake, and we have so much good (great) news about the economy!”
So, what we have here is a so-called president who does not understand how the stock market works and he interrupts his intelligence meeting to send out an all-caps tweet to attack the FBI and President Barack Obama. Geez, you don’t think he’s trying to distract everyone from something, do you?
Former reality show star some rich asshole is having quite a meltdown on Twitter today and even interrupted a scheduled intelligence briefing to lash out at the FBI over text messages. the rich asshole tweeted this just after Fox & Friends aired a new report on the texts in order to claim that President Barack Obama wanted to spy on his campaign last year. the rich asshole’s briefing was scheduled at 11:00 and he unleashed an all-caps tweet at 11:10.
“NEW FBI TEXTS ARE BOMBSHELLS!” President Crazy Pants tweeted.
Note the timing of his tweet during the Intelligence briefing.
Trump’s public schedule had him receiving his intelligence briefing at 11AM. He tweeted this at 11:10. twitter.com/realdonaldtrum…
This didn’t go down well on Twitter.
WHAT THE HELL IS CONGRESS DOING?!?!?!?!?!
I get that he thinks this is a reality show. I get that he's mentally ill. What I don't get is how this is allowed to go on and on.
Watching Fox & Friends IS his briefing.
@realDonaldTrump The briefing was the FoxNews 11:00 am segment. First commercial break was at 11:10.
Trump and intelligence in the same sentence?
In January, the Vacationer-in-Chief decided he needs more time off so he started taking ‘executive time’ which affords him the luxury of not having to go to work until 11:00. He did this so that he could spend more time tweeting and watching TV. Apparently, the rich asshole was so worked up after watching his favorite propagandist network that just after getting to work and walking into the meeting, he kept tweeting. Before the meeting, he tweeted about the stock market dive but his message was incoherent. “In the “old days,” when good news was reported, the Stock Market would go up.” President Stable Genius tweeted. “Today, when good news is reported, the Stock Market goes down. Big mistake, and we have so much good (great) news about the economy!”
So, what we have here is a so-called president who does not understand how the stock market works and he interrupts his intelligence meeting to send out an all-caps tweet to attack the FBI and President Barack Obama. Geez, you don’t think he’s trying to distract everyone from something, do you?
the rich asshole Jr.: My Racist Daddy Isn’t Racist Because He’s Been In Photos With ‘All The Rappers’
You know how racists normally respond to you pointing out that they’re racists by listing off their single, unnamed black friend? Well, some rich asshole Jr. has a fresh new spin on that — “my daddy’s been in pictures with rappers.”
“I know him (the president), I’ve seen him my whole life. I’ve seen the things he’s done,” the rich asshole Jr. told the Daily Caller over the weekend. You know it’s amazing–all the rappers, all his African American friends, from Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, have pictures with him.”
Not only is it racist to assume that all rappers are black, but Al Sharpton? The boogeyman of the Right almost every time race comes up? The guy who says he met The rich asshole “marching on him about Central Park?” The guy who is definitely not a rapper? That Al Sharpton?
the rich asshole does indeed have photos with some rappers who happen to be black — including Kanye West (if he can reasonably be called a rapper) who, like the rich asshole, greatly admires North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.
the rich asshole has also been photographed with Jay-Z (who hates him and vice versa), Snoop Dogg (who definitely hates him), Lil John (who doesn’t exactly admire the guy who called him “Uncle Tom” on Celebrity Apprentice), Puff Daddy or P. Diddy or whatever he’s called this week (who has “more assault charges than pseudonyms” as the Daily Beast put it), and Odd Future (the group has a collection of merchandise dedicated to mocking The rich asshole).
Jesse Jackson who, like Al Sharpton, is not a rapper, once praised the rich asshole but his opinion has shifted because of President Stable Genius’ actions.
the rich asshole once spent $85,000 on a full-page newspaper ad smearing and calling for the executions of the “Central Park Five” — a group of Latino and black youths who were wrongfully convicted of an assault and rape they did not commit. He also offered to pay the legal fees of his white supporters who violently attacked black protesters at his rallies while he was campaigning and regularly attacks black NFL players for protesting police brutality.
None of that is “real racism” according to the rich asshole Jr.
Watch our idiot President’s idiot son defend him against perfectly reasonable racism allegations below:
You know how racists normally respond to you pointing out that they’re racists by listing off their single, unnamed black friend? Well, some rich asshole Jr. has a fresh new spin on that — “my daddy’s been in pictures with rappers.”
“I know him (the president), I’ve seen him my whole life. I’ve seen the things he’s done,” the rich asshole Jr. told the Daily Caller over the weekend. You know it’s amazing–all the rappers, all his African American friends, from Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, have pictures with him.”
Not only is it racist to assume that all rappers are black, but Al Sharpton? The boogeyman of the Right almost every time race comes up? The guy who says he met The rich asshole “marching on him about Central Park?” The guy who is definitely not a rapper? That Al Sharpton?
the rich asshole does indeed have photos with some rappers who happen to be black — including Kanye West (if he can reasonably be called a rapper) who, like the rich asshole, greatly admires North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.
the rich asshole has also been photographed with Jay-Z (who hates him and vice versa), Snoop Dogg (who definitely hates him), Lil John (who doesn’t exactly admire the guy who called him “Uncle Tom” on Celebrity Apprentice), Puff Daddy or P. Diddy or whatever he’s called this week (who has “more assault charges than pseudonyms” as the Daily Beast put it), and Odd Future (the group has a collection of merchandise dedicated to mocking The rich asshole).
Jesse Jackson who, like Al Sharpton, is not a rapper, once praised the rich asshole but his opinion has shifted because of President Stable Genius’ actions.
the rich asshole once spent $85,000 on a full-page newspaper ad smearing and calling for the executions of the “Central Park Five” — a group of Latino and black youths who were wrongfully convicted of an assault and rape they did not commit. He also offered to pay the legal fees of his white supporters who violently attacked black protesters at his rallies while he was campaigning and regularly attacks black NFL players for protesting police brutality.
None of that is “real racism” according to the rich asshole Jr.
Watch our idiot President’s idiot son defend him against perfectly reasonable racism allegations below:
Right revolts on budget deal
BY SCOTT WONG AND MELANIE ZANONA - 02/07/18 04:54 PM EST
House conservatives on Wednesday revolted against a massive bipartisan deal to raise the debt ceiling and bust spending caps, complaining that the GOP could no longer lay claim to being the party of fiscal responsibility.
“I’m not only a ‘no.’ I’m a ‘hell no,’ ” quipped Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), one of many members of the Tea Party-aligned Freedom Caucus who left a closed-door meeting of Republicans saying they would vote against the deal.
It’s a “Christmas tree on steroids,” lamented one of the Freedom Caucus leaders, Rep. Dave Brat (R-Va.).
“This spending proposal is disgusting and reckless — the biggest spending increase since 2009,” conservative Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) tweeted after the meeting. “I urge every American to speak out against this fiscal insanity.”
The debt hike, in particular, is giving conservatives “heartburn,” said Rep. Dennis Ross (R-Fla.), a member of the GOP vote-counting team.
The swift backlash from fiscal hawks means that Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and his leadership team will need dozens of Democratic votes to help get the caps-and-funding deal through the lower chamber to avert a government shutdown set for midnight Thursday.
At the same time, some Republicans predicted a majority of the majority would back the package.
Former Republican Study Committee (RSC) Chairman Rep. Bill Flores (R-Texas), who said he will probably support the package, estimated that about two-thirds of the lawmakers who spoke at the microphones during the closed-door meeting actually voiced support.
Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), the current Freedom Caucus chairman, predicted that the budget deal will get support from a majority of the majority, but not enough to pass without Democratic votes.
It’s unclear how many Democrats will support the plan without concessions from Ryan, given immigration demands from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).
As Senate leaders announced their bipartisan agreement, Pelosi was on the floor threatening to oppose the emerging budget deal without a commitment to consider legislation in the House to protect young immigrants brought to the United States illegally as children, known as “Dreamers.”
But there are a lot of other items in the package that are attractive to Democrats, including money for the opioid crisis, disaster aid, more Children’s Health Insurance Program funding, community health center funding and the nondefense spending boost.
“We would need votes coming from both ways,” said Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.). “Pelosi I guess won’t vote for it, but … I do think we will have a number of Democrats that would break.”
It’s also possible more Republicans will back the legislation given opposition from Pelosi.
Rep. Mark Walker (R-N.C.), current RSC chairman, acknowledged in a tweet that the deal is “a struggle for any one with fiscal concerns,” but said he was more inclined to support it “the longer Nancy Pelosi bloviates on the House Floor.”
The deal between Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) calls for raising the debt ceiling through March 2019 and busting budget caps imposed by the 2011 Budget Control Act. It would boost funding for the Pentagon and domestic programs by about $300 billion over current levels over the next two fiscal years, but lawmakers said only about $100 billion of that would be offset.
The Bipartisan Budget Act also calls for an additional four years of funding for a popular children’s health program; $90 billion in additional disaster aid for hurricane-ravaged Florida, Puerto Rico and Texas; billions more to fight the opioid epidemic and funding for community health centers that serve the poor and uninsured.
The legislation would keep the government funded for another six weeks, through March 23. That should give lawmakers enough time to write an omnibus spending bill to fund the government for the rest of the fiscal year.
Many fiscal hawks who were complaining the loudest Tuesday were among those lawmakers who rode an anti-spending, anti-debt Tea Party wave to Washington during the 2010 and 2012 cycles.
Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) described the atmosphere inside the GOP conference room as “tense,” while Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) said it was “kind of depressing” to think Republicans could be responsible for adding billions of dollars to the deficit when they control all the levers of power in Washington.
“It’s too much money,” Perry said.
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) quipped that fiscal hawks might now be an “endangered species.”
Meadows and Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) were among the members who stood up during the conference meeting to vent their frustration, lawmakers in the room said.
Retiring House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas), a close Ryan friend, also railed against lifting the debt ceiling, sources said.
Jordan, a former Freedom Caucus chairman, said earlier in the day that he was disappointed by the tentative deal and expressed surprise that Ryan — who has staked his political career on being a fiscal hawk — would go along with the proposal.
“It’s a terrible deal,” Jordan said. “I never thought Speaker Ryan would be supportive of this … I just never thought the Speaker would go here with these high numbers.”
Speaking to reporters after the meeting, Brooks slammed the deal as a “debt junkie’s dream.”
“I don’t know if we have enough votes amongst the members to stop this legislation,” the outspoken Alabama conservative said. “All I know is that unfortunately those who vote for this bill are betraying our country’s future and they are selling out our kids and our grandkids.
“I am baffled why the Republican Party has turned into such a big spending party. It is one thing to spend money; it is another thing to spend money you don’t have,” Brooks went on. “No American family can operate that way; no American business can operate that way, and it is folly to believe that the United States of America can operate that way.”
Some defense hawks were also upset over the proposal because of the inclusion of the debt ceiling.
Rep. Bradley Byrne (R-Ala.), a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said he was prepared to swallow the spending boost for domestic programs in exchange for the military bulk-up, but he was thrown off by raising the debt ceiling as part of the deal.
He declined to take a position on the package until he sees the final details, however.
Part of Ryan’s pitch to the conference, according to lawmakers who attended, was that the budget deal not only delivers a long sought-after spending boost for the military, but it also clears the way for an honest debate over immigration if lawmakers don’t have the debt ceiling, the threat of government shutdown and other unresolved issues looming over their heads.
Cristina Marcos contributed
Sasse Rips the rich asshole Nominee As a Conspiracy Nut With A ‘Tin Foil Hat’
some rich asshole is always nominating people to positions in his government who have absolutely no business being anywhere near the levers of power. Then again, he doesn’t belong there either, so it’s no real surprise. His latest nomination is a real doozy, though. Meet Leandro Rizzuto Jr., the rich asshole’s nominee to become the nation’s ambassador to multiple countries in the Caribbean.
This is a man who routinely tweeted conspiracies regarding the rich asshole’s challengers in the 2016 presidential campaign, accusing George Soros of being in the tank for Ted Cruz, and saying that Cruz himself was cheating on his wife (who the rich asshole infamously called ugly during that time). Well, luckily, this guy needs the approval and consent of the United States Senate to be put into that ambassadorship, and it doesn’t look like he’s going to get it – even from fellow Republicans.
Senator Ben Sass (R-NE) released a blistering statement on Rizzuto, calling him a tin-foil hat wearing nut. A spokesperson for Sasse said the nominee needs to “put on his tinfoil hat and visit our office with evidence for his salacious conspiracy theories and cuckoo allegations.” Sasse’s office continued:
“While he’s at it, the Senate probably needs to know his views on the moon landing.”“I’m sure Senator Sasse will be willing to evaluate the specific evidence for his claims — but it’s got to be more than a stack of National Enquirers.”“People who want to serve Americans as our diplomats and spokespeople abroad should know that words and truth matter, even during campaigns. Cynics and nuts are probably going to have a hard time securing Senate confirmation.”
This is incredible, in a moment when loyalty to the rich asshole seems to be the only way the Republicans’ cult of a base will allow them to remain in office. I never thought I’d say this, but Ben Sasse is correct. This is a man who belongs in a rubber room, not representing America on the world stage. Then again, the man-baby so-called “president” belongs there as well, so, again, it’s no surprise this would a nominee for an ambassadorship.
If only more Republicans would be brave enough to say so.
The Party Of Fiscal Responsibility Is Set To Add A MASSIVE Amount To The Deficit This Year
The Treasury Department has recently announced that the federal government is set to borrow almost $1 trillion in its first full fiscal year with the Deal Maker in Chief in charge of the budget, almost doubling the amount borrowed in the previous year and the highest amount borrowed in the past six years. The reason? Despite the Treasury blaming the “fiscal outlook,” the Congressional Budget Office blames the new tax law, saying that tax receipts are going to be lower thanks to the massive tax giveaway in the new law.
According to documents released last Wednesday, the U.S. Treasury expects to borrow $955 billion this fiscal year, a substantial increase from the $519 billion the federal government borrowed last year. This increase in borrowing is just another complication in the debate over whether to spend more money on infrastructure, the military, disaster relief and other domestic programs. The deficit, however, was already set to go up even before money is allocated to any of this. Marc Goldwein, senior policy director at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, probably put it best: “We’re addicted to debt.”
Under Ronald Reagan, there was a spike in borrowing as part of an effort to build up the military, something the rich asshole is advocating again, but that’s not where the similarities end. This is the first non-recession time that borrowing as a share of the GDP has jumped by this much since the Reagan era.
the rich asshole might not have mentioned the debt or the continual budget deficits during his State of the Union address, but that doesn’t mean those issues aren’t on the minds of others.
“It is terrible. Those deficits and the debt that keeps rising is a serious problem, not only in the long run, but right now,” said Harvard economist and former Reagan advisor Martin Feldstein.
On top of the $955 billion this year, the rich asshole’s Treasury also forecasts borrowing more than $1 trillion in 2019 and more than $1.1 trillion in 2020. They’re not great figures for any president, but they are terrible for one who came into office after campaigning that he’d reduce the national debt. But realistically, could we really expect anything else?
FCC chairman Ajit Pai joked with telecom lobbyists that he was a "Verizon puppet" and "Manchurian candidate" right before he killed net neutrality.
Federal Communications Commission chairman Ajit Pai made himself one of the most hated men in America with his decision to wipe out consumer protections that guaranteed internet service providers could not censor, block, or throttle content online.
Now the FCC is withholding records of staff conversations relating to Pai’s “performance” at the annual Federal Communications Bar Association dinner in December, where he joked about being a “Verizon puppet” and a “Manchurian candidate” just days before the vote to end net neutrality.
Gizmodo reporters requested records about the event, but the agency claims they are privileged because “exposing the agency’s decisionmaking process” would cause “injury to the quality of the agency’s decisions.”
But experts think the FCC is abusing its power.
Adam Marshall, an attorney with Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, told Gizmodo, “The idea is that it would be difficult for agency employees to do their job if every off-the-cuff idea they come up with is exposed to public scrutiny.” Marshall called the agency’s reasoning for withholding the documents “absurd.”
A former corporate lawyer for Verizon who vowed to take a “weed whacker” to net neutrality, Pai sparked outrage last year as he steamrollered his fellow commissioners, and ignored hundreds of internet companies and all 83 percent of voters who supported the open internet rules. He even obstructed New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s investigation into millions of fraudulent public comments posted in favor of Pai’s deregulation scheme.
Pai and his loyalists at the FCC are mortified his “joke” got out, because it speaks to his real attitude and principles. Under scrutiny for his lack of regard for public accountability, his agency is responding by once again stifling public accountability, further discrediting him as an honest or good faith public servant.
Sen. Orrin Hatch's response to Rob Porter's resignation in disgrace was to praise him and complain that allegations of domestic violence against him had surfaced.
Utah Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch responded to reports of domestic violence allegations against a top the rich asshole aide who was forced to resign in disgrace Wednesday by complaining about “character assassins” that amounted to “a vile attack on such a decent man.”
A report from the conservative Daily Mail alleged that some rich asshole’s staff secretary Rob Porter was verbally and physically abusive toward his ex-wife, Jennifer Willoughby.
“He pulled me, naked and dripping, from the shower to yell at me,” she recalled of one instance, after their one year anniversary.
The paper also published photos of Willoughby with a black eye, which she said came after Porter punched her.
Porter’s first wife, Colbie Holderness, also told the paper that Porter “was verbally, emotionally and physically abusive and that is why I left.”
Willoughby filed a protective order against Porter, and Politico reports that the order prevented him from getting a full security clearance when the the rich asshole team came into the White House.
Porter previously served as chief of staff for Hatch. He was described by Politico as a “deeply influential aide who spends almost every day by President some rich asshole’s side.”
Hatch responded to the story with a full-throated and indignant defense of Porter. “It’s incredibly discouraging to see such a vile attack on such a decent man.”
And he actually lashed out at the paper for reporting on the disturbing allegations. “Shame on any publication that would print this — and shame on the politically motivated, morally bankrupt character assassins that would attempt to sully a man’s good name,” Hatch complained.
Despite knowing about the protective order, the rich asshole’s chief of staff John Kelly praised Porter as “a man of true integrity and honor and I can’t say enough good things about him” and described him as “a friend, a confidante and a trusted professional.”
After these reports emerged, Porter quit his White House job — though he still insisted that the “outrageous allegations” are false and called them “a coordinated smear campaign.”
The resignation did not have the blessing of the White House, and Kelly reportedly objected to it, showing more support for a man accused of spousal abuse than he did for the friends and family of a soldier killed in combat.
Hatch has been a reliable booster of the rich asshole White House. The Salt Lake Tribune has taken notice of Hatch’s “unquenchable thirst for power,” criticizing him for continually attaching himself to the rich asshole administration.
Recently he told the rich asshole that he could be the greatest president in American history, and slobbered all over the rich asshole after the passage of the Republican tax bill.
At a White House ceremony celebrating the unpopular measure, Hatch called the rich asshole “one heck of a leader” who had passed the bill through his “sheer will.”
He said the rich asshole presidency would be greatest “we’ve seen not only in generations but maybe ever.”
Apparently, all of that praise means that even when there are serious accusations against a member of the rich asshole team, Hatch will go to bat for him alongside everyone else in the White House.
the rich asshole's dictatorial fantasy just blew up in his face.
some rich asshole’s demand for a military parade resulted in a blistering wave of criticism, forcing his chief spokesperson to sharply backpedal on the idea.
Both the Pentagon and the White House confirmed on Tuesday that the rich asshole had asked the Defense Department to begin planning a military parade, which drew immediate comparisons to Soviet Russia and present-day North Korea.
Less than a day later, the White House was forced to retreat from the plan.
Secretary of Defense James Mattis appeared at Wednesday’s press briefing, and when about the parade, said he would send “options” for it up to the White House.
Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders fended off several more tough questions about the parade, including why the rich asshole hasn’t visited troops in Iraq or Afghanistan since taking office.
Sanders downplayed the parade several times, then lost patience when CBS News’ Steven Portnoy asked about the militaristic image such a parade would present to the world.
“Look, as I said, we haven’t made a final decision,” Sanders snapped at Portnoy. “The president is exploring ways he can highlight and show the pride we have in the military.”
“I think it’s way too far speculation to start weighing on whether or not certain things are appropriate when nothing’s been decided, and it’s literally in a brainstorming session,” she continued.
“Is it true that, the report that the president essentially gave a directive to the Defense Department, that this is something that must happen?” Portnoy asked.
“No,” Sanders said. “The president asked them to look at different ways and explore and see what those options look like, as the secretary said.”
Sanders’ denial comes less than 24 hours after the White House and the Pentagon confirmed the story, and in fact seemed quite pleased with the idea.
And if the rich asshole’s prior public statements on the matter are any indication, the only “options” being discussed were about just how over-the-top such a display could be.
But after near-universal revulsion at the idea, the White House has been forced to walk briskly away from what would have likely been an international embarrassment.
White House staff secretary resigns amid abuse allegations
BY JORDAN FABIAN - 02/07/18 01:39 PM EST
Rob Porter, the White House staff secretary, announced Wednesday that he would resign after he was accused of abusing two of his ex-wives.
The decision came one day after the ex-wives, Colbie Holderness and Jennifer Willoughby, told the Daily Mail they experienced physical and emotional abuse during their marriages to Porter.
The tabloid published a 2010 protective order obtained by his second wife and photos later surfaced online of his first wife's bruised and battered face that she said resulted from Porter punching her.
“These outrageous allegations are simply false. I took the photos given to the media nearly 15 years ago and the reality behind them is nowhere close to what is being described. I have been transparent and truthful about these vile claims, but I will not further engage publicly with a coordinated smear campaign,” Porter said in a statement announcing his departure.
“My commitment to public service speaks for itself. I have always put duty to country first and treated others with respect. I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to have served in the rich asshole administration and will seek to ensure a smooth transition when I leave the White House.”
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Porter's exit would not be "immediate" so he could help usher in a replacement. She said Porter "was not pressured" to resign and that he made the decision to leave on his own.
Sanders also faced questions about Porter's security clearance.
CBS News reported Wednesday that the FBI was made aware of a protective order sought by Willoughby and the information was later passed on to the White House.
Contradicting Porter, Holderness told The Intercept that she took the photos of her face after Porter allegedly struck her during a vacation in Florence, Italy. She later reportedly shared the photos with the FBI, which interviewed both wives as part of Porter’s background check.
The allegations against Porter were the main reason why he never obtained a full security clearance, according to CBS, something that could have hampered his ability to do his job.
Sanders declined to comment on the status of Porter's clearance.
"As has always been our policy, we do not comment on security clearances," she said in a statement, reiterating that the rich asshole and White House chief of staff John Kelly have "full confidence in his abilities" to carry out his job.
The incident has renewed questions about how the White House deals with allegations of abuse against top officials.
Kelly and Sanders both issued statements of support for Porter after the initial reports surfaced Tuesday night. The chief of staff called him “a man of true integrity and honor.”
“Rob has been effective in his role as staff secretary, and the president and chief of staff have had full confidence and trust in his abilities and his performance,” Sanders said Wednesday, doubling down on her praise even after he announced his departure.
the rich asshole has faced persistent criticism about his treatment of women ever since a 2005 "Access Hollywood" tape was released during the fall of 2016, in which he boasted about groping women against their will. He has denied allegations of actually engaging in such conduct.
Porter's departure is a major blow to the White House staff.
He was a member of Kelly's inner circle and was responsible for the paper flow to the rich asshole's desk, handling nearly every document the rich asshole signed.
The influential aide frequently traveled with the rich asshole aboard Air Force One and was seen as helping carry out Kelly's efforts to bring order to a chaotic West Wing.
Porter reportedly organized weekly meetings for the various factions in the White House to hash out their differences on trade policy.
His exit will add to a flurry of departures by other top advisers, who are expected to leave the West Wing following the one-year mark of the rich asshole’s presidency.
The abuse allegations became public after the Daily Mail reported that Porter was dating White House communications director Hope Hicks, one of the rich asshole's longest-serving aides.
Holderness and Willoughby both provided graphic accounts of the abuse they say they experienced at Porter’s hands.
In a separate interview with the Daily Mail, Holderness said Porter also choked her during her marriage and that he “would belittle me constantly about my weight, my sexiness, how good I looked to him or didn’t look to him.”
Willoughby filed an emergency protective order against Porter in 2010 after she said he violated a separation agreement by refusing to leave their apartment.
According to Willoughby’s complaint, Porter initially left at her request but then returned several minutes later and “punched in the glass on a door” to gain entry, cutting his hand.
She said she then called the police and Porter apologized.
Willoughby, however, told the tabloid that she did not want Porter fired from the White House.
Porter was one of the most experienced hands in the rich asshole White House, which has been criticized for having a dearth of prior government service.
The Harvard University graduate and Rhodes scholar previously worked for GOP Sens. Rob Portman (Ohio) and Mike Lee (Utah).
He also served as chief of staff to Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch (R), a fellow Mormon.
"I am heartbroken by today's allegations," Hatch said in a statement. "In every interaction I've had with Rob, he has been courteous, professional and respectful."
Hatch said that Porter was "loved" by his staff and that he was a "trusted adviser."
"I don't know the details of Rob's personal life," the senator added. "Domestic violence in any form is abhorrent and unacceptable. I am praying for Rob and those involved."
Updated: 5:28 p.m.
the rich asshole officials want to let restaurant owners pocket their employees' tips. More than a dozen states are fighting back.
The rich asshole administration has been on a crusade to rip up consumer protections in nearly every industry and profession.
The latest gambit is a new Labor Department proposal to cancel President Barack Obama’s 2011 rule forbidding managers from “pooling” the earnings of tipped workers, a practice that has allowed restaurant owners to pocket the tips themselves, or cover the cost of wages for untipped workers to keep pay low for both.
The proposal has drawn widespread protest from foodservice workers. But it also faces criticism from the top legal officials in over a dozen states.
Attorneys general representing California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and the District of Columbia have all signed a letter to Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta condemning the rule change.
“The Department’s proposed rulemaking contradicts centuries-old employee and consumer expectations about tipping and threatens to seriously injure workers and deceive consumers,” the letter states.
“Rescission of the 2011 will lead to decreased overall compensation for at least some currently tipped employees earning at least the federal minimum wage and could result in such employees being deprived of tip income altogether,” the letter continues, noting that the “importance of gratuities to a tipped employee’s income cannot be overstated.”
The AG’s point to a recent report that “found that tips account for 58.5 percent of wait staff’s earnings, and 54 percent of bartenders’ earnings” and that “restaurant workers, who comprise 62 percent of all tipped workers in the U.S., experience poverty at 2.6 times the rate of the U.S. workforce.”
According to the Economic Policy Institute, the the rich asshole administration’s tip-pooling proposal would result in employers stealing $5.8 billion in wages from low-income workers — and 80 percent of those wages would be stolen from women.
The Labor Department seems to have gotten similarly poor numbers, because officials there suppressed an internal report on the rule from the public, a decision which is now under investigation by the Office of the Inspector General.
the rich asshole’s cronies keep moving to rip up popular and essential safeguards for the American people. But state governments aren’t about to let them get away with it.
A Pro-the rich asshole group took out a Time Square billboard to fight “fake news”
DON'T MISS STORIES. FOLLOW RAW STORY!
Zuri Davis
Posted with permission from Rare
Donald TrumpThe Committee to Defend the President, formerly known as the Stop Hillary PAC, recently placed a digital billboard on two sides of Times Square in New York City, reports CBS New York.
The red billboard lists various news groups, including CNN, The New York Times, NBC News, MSNBC and Time Magazine. The New York Times is in the largest font and is displayed in the middle. Underneath were the words “THE FAKE NEWS…”
The New York Post adds that the sign changes to say:
…Spent more ink on President Trump’s second scoop of ice cream than the ongoing FEC investigation of Hillary’s $84M Campaign Finance money laundering scheme.The ad then indicates that if observers want “the real story,” then they can do so by going to Askcdp.com, which links to a complaint the group filed regarding the financing of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.
The reactions were reportedly mixed.
“I don’t think there’s fake news, I think the news reports the news as they see it,” one man from New Jersey told CBS. A woman from Long Island criticized, “The free media and the free press is another part of our democracy.”
Another person said that some of the news coverage of the president is “a little overboard, but some of it’s on the money.”
The ad will remain in the area for a week.
The people who surround the rich asshole are supposed to be the "adults" and "moderating influences" who keep him in check. But they're no better.
The White House is quite sad to say goodbye to a man accused of domestic violence by three different women.
On Wednesday, some rich asshole’s staff secretary, Rob Porter, resigned in disgrace, after a story by the Daily Mail revealed that he had abused not one but two ex-wives — and included a picture of a black eye to prove it. A third woman, whose identity has not been published, reportedly reached out to Porter’s ex-wives in 2016 for help.
“I have been with Rob off and on now for a little over three years, and don’t know where to turn to discuss my experience or how to escape it,” she wrote.
Rather than immediately denounce and fire Porter when the story broke earlier this week, the rich asshole’s White House stood behind him.
“Rob Porter has been effective in his role as Staff Secretary,” press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement. “The President and Chief of Staff have full confidence in his abilities and his performance.”
Chief of staff John Kelly said Tuesday that Porter was “a man of true integrity and honor and I can’t say enough good things about him. He is a friend, a confidante and a trusted professional. I am proud to serve alongside him.” Kelly reportedly urged Porter to “stay and fight,” in spite of the incredibly serious accusations against him.
Even after Porter’s resignation Wednesday, Kelly was defending Porter, while at the same time in obvious damage control mode over his support for Porter.
“I was shocked by the new allegations released today against Rob Porter,” Kelly said in a statement released late Wednesday night. “There is no place for domestic violence in our society. I stand by my previous comments of the Rob Porter that I have come to know since becoming Chief of Staff, and believe every individual deserves the right to defend their reputation. I accepted his resignation earlier today, and will ensure a swift and orderly transition.”
Since becoming president, the rich asshole has defended serial sexual harassers Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly, who were both forced out at Fox News because of their extensive and expensive records of harassment.
He has defended violent neo-Nazis and white supremacists as “very fine people.”
He enthusiastically supported Roy Moore, the Alabama Senate candidate who was accused of molesting a 14-year-old girl, essentially arguing that he would rather have a child molester in the Senate than a Democrat. (He did not get his way.)
He pardoned his fellow birther, the criminally racist disgraced former sheriff of Maricopa County, Joe Arpaio.
It certainly appears that the rich asshole favors and coddles the most vicious abusers in our country, and his inner circle in the White House — even the people who have fooled the media into portraying them as “moderating influences” and “adults” — shares his heinous views.
None of this, however, should come as a surprise. Because while it has been said so many times that it sounds like a cliche, the president of the United States is an admitted abuser himself.
“I just start kissing them,” he said. “Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. … Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”
More than a dozen women have come forward with stories of him doing exactly that: grabbing them, trying to kiss them, not even waiting for their consent. His first wife, Ivana the rich asshole, described a night toward the end of their marriage when he violently raped her — a story his attorney later said couldn’t be true because “you can’t rape your spouse.”
The people who work with the rich asshole — his press secretary, his chief of staff, everyone — have chosen to ignore the rich asshole’s record of abuse and his support for abusers. And so it makes a sad and twisted kind of sense that they would side with other abusers, rather than their victims.
But that doesn’t make it right. It disgraces the office and the country they serve. The people around the rich asshole, the people who are supposed to at least keep his worst instincts in check, are obviously no better. And that is the biggest disgrace of all.
Pelosi invokes rarely-used ‘magic minute’ to oppose budget deal, elevate Dreamers
She held the floor for a record-breaking eight hours.
UPDATE: House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has set a new record for the longest continuous speech since at least 1909 in the House of Representatives. She held the floor uninterrupted from 10 a.m. this morning until shortly after 6 p.m — more than eight hours.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) delivered a multi-hour address to her congressional colleagues on Wednesday, in an effort to oppose a two-year bipartisan budget deal struck by Senate leaders hours earlier. The bill notably excluded any mention of or protections for hundreds of thousands of “Dreamers,” undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children.
Beginning at 10:04 a.m. Eastern Time, the senior Democratic House leader used a special privilege called the “magic minute,” which is afforded to party leaders in the House of Representatives and allows them to speak at length without having to filibuster. For more than eight hours, Pelosi stood and read the stories of various Dreamers and recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
“We want to be sure that the public record of the Congress of the United States forever more will reflect the stories of their great contribution to America in the hopes that those stories will move the Speaker of the House to give us a vote [on immigration],” Pelosi said.
Pelosi at one point shared the story of Jirayut New Latthivongskorn, an activist and physician-in-training who came to the United States from Thailand at the age of 9. His accomplishments in advocacy and the world of medicine have drawn acclaim and he was included in Forbes magazine’s “30 Under 30” list in 2017.
“Will America be a stronger country if we deport him and others like him?” Pelosi asked. “Will we be a better country if we tear apart American families? Of course not, we all agree on that.”
Pelosi’s decision to take the floor followed a statement earlier in the day by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), announcing a two-year budget deal that increases military spending at the behest of President the rich asshole, at a cost of $160 billion and provides approximately $128 billion in non-defense discretionary spending. It now heads back to the House for another vote, where it will be met with strong pushback. If it passes the House, it will go to the rich asshole’s desk to be signed.
Pelosi opposed the budget deal because it failed to address the underlying issue that sparked last month’s shutdown, longterm protections for DACA recipients. On Wednesday, she announced that she and “a large number” of her Democratic House colleagues would oppose any deal put forward without protections for DACA recipients, including the most recent budget legislation.
“There will be billions in funding to fight opioids, to strengthen our veterans and the (National Institutes of Health), to build job-creating rural infrastructure and broadband, and to fund access to child care and quality higher education,” Pelosi said in a written statement, but without protections for DACA recipients, “this package does not have my support.”
Across social media on Wednesday, users noted the contrast between the actions of Senate Democrats, who appeared to have caved to pressure and abandoned their immigration demands, and Pelosi’s clear strike on behalf of Dreamers:
Some also noted the somewhat unique nature of Pelosi’s action, which she has never undertaken during her lengthy tenure in politics and which is highly unusual in the House:
About a dozen Democrats are sitting in the chamber as Pelosi nears her third hour of speaking about #Dreamers on the House floor. Californians are @RepMaxineWaters, @RepThompson, @RepZoeLofgren, @gracenapolitano, @NormaJTorres, @DorisMatsui and @RepLowenthal
Pelosi has never done something like this before. In fact, no one really has. The House doesn't have a filibuster the way the Senate does. Leaders have used their extended "one minute" privilege to speak for maybe 20-30 minutes before, but Pelosi has spoken for nearly 3 hours
Chances of a government shutdown dimmed this week following the Senate deal, but Pelosi’s public demonstration indicates a fight could be coming in the House. A number of House Democrats are now demanding a debate on immigration and have called on House Speaker Paul Ryan to allow for such a conversation.
“What are you afraid of?” Pelosi said. “Give us a vote. Let the House work its will.”
A spokesperson for Ryan, AshLee Strong, said the speaker does not intend to open up a debate on immigration in the House.
“Speaker Ryan has already repeatedly stated we intend to do a DACA and immigration reform bill — one that the president supports,” Strong said.
Democrats aren’t the only source of opposition Ryan may have to worry about. The far-right House Freedom Caucus has also indicated several members may move against the deal.
“I’m afraid the numbers will get so high and the debt ceiling will be added and it will be a Christmas tree of spending — that a lot of votes will be bought,” said Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) in an interview with MSNBC.
“This is a bad, bad, bad, bad — you could say ‘bad’ a hundred times — deal,” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) added. “When you put it all together, a quarter-of-a-trillion-dollar increase in discretionary spending — not what we’re supposed to be doing.”
The government is set to shut down again once funding runs out on February 8, if no budget deal is reached in the House.
Open in Incognito mode to avoid paywall
A senior White House official said Wednesday that he would resign after his two ex-wives accused him of physical and emotional abuse, with one presenting pictures of her blackened eye.
The official, Rob Porter, served as the staff secretary, a title that belies the role’s importance in any White House — but especially in President the rich asshole’s. Porter functioned as Chief of Staff John F. Kelly’s top enforcer in their shared mission to instill discipline and order in what had become an extraordinarily chaotic West Wing. He was the gatekeeper to the Oval Office, determining which articles and policy proposals reached the president’s hands and screening the briefing materials that his visitors shared with him.
Aides had been aware generally of accusations against Porter since late last year, White House advisers said, but learned of the specifics late Tuesday when approached by a reporter from DailyMail.com, which first detailed many of the allegations. Porter’s ex-wives said they informed the FBI in January 2017 of their allegations against him while they were being interviewed by agents as part of Porter’s security clearance review. It was unclear when or whether the FBI informed the White House. The FBI did not respond to a request for comment.
Porter said on Tuesday that he would resign, after the allegations were first published, people close to him say, even as he told White House officials he had never physically abused women. But he was talked out of it by Kelly and others, according to these people, with Kelly saying he believed Porter’s denials and saw him as a valuable ally in the White House. Kelly continued to press him to stay in his job Wednesday, saying he could weather the storm, but Porter decided the controversy had become too much after the photos of his ex-wife’s blackened eye appeared Wednesday morning.
In interviews with The Washington Post and other media outlets, Porter’s ex-wives described him as having a dark side and, at times, a violent streak that White House aides say they did not see.
Colbie Holderness after an alleged incident with her then-husband Rob Porter in 2005. (Photos courtesy of Colbie Holderness)
Porter’s first wife, Colbie Holderness, said in an interview with The Post that he was continually abusive during their marriage. She alleged he punched her in the face during a trip to Florence in 2005 and provided photos showing her with a black eye.
“He threw me down and punched me in the face,” she said. Holderness said she had insisted that he take pictures of her bruised eye after the assault and he agreed. “He was trying to make it up to me, and I said I wanted evidence if this should happen again.”
Porter denied the accusations but said he was stepping down from his job, although it was unclear when he will officially leave the White House.
“These outrageous allegations are simply false. I took the photos given to the media nearly 15 years ago and the reality behind them is nowhere close to what is being described,” he said in a statement. “I have been transparent and truthful about these vile claims, but I will not further engage publicly with a coordinated smear campaign.”
On Wednesday night, Kelly issued a statement condemning Porter’s alleged abuses while still expressing support for his aide.
“I was shocked by the new allegations released today against Rob Porter. There is no place for domestic violence in our society,” Kelly said. “I stand by my previous comments of the Rob Porter that I have come to know since becoming Chief of Staff, and believe every individual deserves the right to defend their reputation. I accepted his resignation earlier today, and will ensure a swift and orderly transition.”
Porter’s second wife, Jennie Willoughby, received a temporary emergency protective order in Arlington in June 2010 after saying he refused to leave her residence, in violation of their separation agreement. She said he broke her window, causing his knuckles to bleed. The document, a copy of which was obtained by The Post, concludes that “reasonable grounds exist to believe that [Porter] has committed family abuse and there is probable danger of a further such offense.”
Jennifer Willoughby, ex-wife of Rob Porter, on Wednesday in Alexandria, Va. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
Kathryn Hughes, a 36-year-old public relations consultant who lives in Kamas, Utah, said that in 2012, Willoughby confided in her about another violent incident, in December 2010, in which Willoughby alleged that Porter grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her from the shower during a fight. Hughes said that she and Willoughby met in 2010 at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Alexandria and that they struck up a close friendship.
“She told me that he had been screaming at her while she was in the shower and yanked her out and bruised her,” Hughes said in an interview with The Post, corroborating Willoughby’s account. “She also told me he was verbally abusive, and I witnessed some of that.”
Willoughby and Holderness said they talked to the FBI about Porter twice last year, once in late January and then again months later. Willoughby provided the contact information for the FBI agent she spoke with, who declined to comment when reached Wednesday.Holderness said that when the FBI asked her whether Porter was vulnerable to blackmail, she answered affirmatively, because of the number of people aware of his abusive behavior.
“I thought by sharing my story with the FBI he wouldn’t be put in that post,” Holderness said. “I’m telling the FBI this is what he’s done, and Jennie Willoughby is telling them what he’s done, and the White House says, sure, this is okay? I was let down by that.”
Willoughby said Porter angrily called her when she wrote a blog post about him in April — without naming him — and asked her to remove it, concerned about his image. She said Porter demanded again in the fall that she take down the blog post, citing delays in his security clearance. In January, he asked her again to take it down, she said, telling her that reporters were looking into his past.
“He has never faced repercussions that forced him to confront his issues,” Willoughby said in an interview Wednesday at an Alexandria restaurant. “I care about him and want what’s best for him, but that doesn’t necessarily mean him keeping his job, because he needs to face these underlying issues.”
White House officials said early Wednesday that Porter could continue working for several weeks, but as the backlash grew Wednesday night, a senior White House official said he was expected to leave within 48 hours. Porter is an ally of Kelly, and in addition to serving as staff secretary, he oversaw and sought to streamline the White House’s policymaking process, working with Cabinet members and other agency officials and leading meetings about issues including immigration and trade. He played an integral role in crafting the rich asshole’s State of the Union address last month.
Kelly saw in Porter a partner in professionalizing the operation. Porter is one of the few senior White House staffers with past government experience, having served as chief of staff to Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah). Though many of his colleagues have eclectic backgrounds, Porter boasts a classic pedigree as a Harvard University-educated Rhodes scholar whose father, Roger B. Porter, held senior positions in the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush White Houses.
In a White House known for its ever-evolving personnel dramas, Porter kept a low profile, only rarely agreeing to be interviewed on the record and never appearing as a surrogate on television.
But he was a highly visible figure in the rich asshole’s orbit. He was seemingly omnipresent in the Oval Office for key meetings and events, and regularly traveled with the president — often being one of only a handful of aides to accompany him on the Marine One helicopter before joining the larger staff entourage aboard Air Force One. When the rich asshole spent weekends at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida or his Bedminster golf course in New Jersey, Porter often was along for the trip, tending to the president’s needs and briefing him on developments.
When the allegations were published Tuesday, the White House mobilized to defend Porter.
White House communications director Hope Hicks is dating Porter, according to people familiar with the relationship, and was involved in the White House’s defense of Porter on Tuesday evening. “Rob Porter is a man of true integrity and honor and I can’t say enough good things about him,” Kelly said in a statement Tuesday night. “He is a friend, a confidante and a trusted professional. I am proud to serve alongside him.”
The White House also distributed a statement from Hatch defending Porter. “It’s incredibly discouraging to see such a vile attack on such a decent man,” Hatch said in a statement. After the release of the photos of Holderness’s bruised eye, Hatch released a new statement.
“I am heartbroken by today’s allegations. In every interaction I’ve had with Rob, he has been courteous, professional, and respectful,” he said. “My staff loved him and he was a trusted advisor. I do not know the details of Rob’s personal life. Domestic violence in any form is abhorrent. I am praying for Rob and those involved.”
Porter’s most recent ex-girlfriend, who also works in the administration, reached out to the White House last year to express her concerns about him after she discovered his relationship with Hicks, according to a senior administration official. She told the White House counsel’s office about allegations from his ex-wives, this person said. That development was first reported by Politico.
The decision by Kelly and other top White House aides to defend Porter from domestic-violence allegations is in keeping with the rich asshole’s modus operandi. Throughout his life, the rich asshole has refused to apologize for alleged misdeeds, believing any such concession to be an admission of guilt and a sign of weakness.
During the 2016 campaign, more than a dozen women accused the rich asshole of sexual harassment and assault, but the then-candidate denied them all outright. He fought back against the accusers, calling the women liars and even threatening to sue some of them.
the rich asshole’s posture and inclinations have shaped the culture of the West Wing, where aides often hunker down and try to fight back against accusations or scrutiny from the media or other outside forces.
Asked Wednesday whether the rich asshole had any concerns about the allegations against Porter or with the photos of Holderness, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said, “I don’t know.”
Vice President Pence, who is travelling in Asia, said he was unaware of any of the allegations against Porter until he learned of them Wednesday while in Tokyo.
Porter had a reputation in the building for his fastidious work and was liked by the president, who sometimes rages at other aides. His ex-wives said that Porter directed his abusive behavior toward them in private.
“In my experience, his anger and his lashing out is very much limited to intimate, personal romantic relationships,” Willoughby said. “He has the ability to compartmentalize and maintain his integrity and professionalism at work. . . . He is charming and intelligent and fun and chivalrous and — in capital letters — angry and deeply flawed.”
Willoughby, a writer and former high school teacher, said she was unaware of the abuse alleged by Porter’s first wife while she was with him. But Holderness reached out to her through Facebook in late January 2017 after she was contacted by the FBI and anticipating the background-check interview.
The two met for lunch in Arlington in March and shared their stories — months before they were contacted by reporters and shared those stories publicly this week.
Philip Rucker, Tom Jackman and Ashley Parker contributed to this report.
Senate leaders are banging out the final details of a massive budget deal that will prevent another the rich asshole shutdown. But for many Democrats in the House, the deal has a gaping flaw: Republicans refused to include protections for the young immigrants the rich asshole has thrown into legal purgatory.
And one of the most vocal among them is House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who, in her impassioned defense of the Dreamers, just made history.
On Wednesday afternoon, Pelosi took to the House floor to give a “one minute” speech demanding House Speaker Paul Ryan guarantee a vote on legal protection and a path to citizenship for the Dreamers.
But she did not stop at one minute. She kept going. And going. And going. “I have no intention of yielding back, Mr. Speaker,” she said.
When she finally came to an end, after standing for eight hours in stiletto heels with no break, Pelosi had officially given the longest continuous speech on the floor of the House in history. And she finished to thundering applause from House Democrats:
A single House member talking uninterrupted for hours has been an incredibly rare event since filibusters were abolished in the chamber in 1842. Indeed, Pelosi’s speech was arguably a filibuster by any other name. She was only able to do it because of an obscure House rule called the “magic minute” that lets House leaders keep talking.
In October, Alaska Republican Don Young embarrassed himself during Pelosi’s speech on the GOP tax scam, when he shouted, “Time’s up!” Pelosi, certainly aware that such time limits did not apply to her, coolly responded, “I know you don’t want the public to hear this, and I can understand why.”
Pelosi’s Wednesday speech, in which she read aloud letters from Dreamers begging for help, was a powerful argument for the young immigrants facing deportation in less than a month unless Congress takes immediate action to protect them.
“We want to be sure that the public record of the Congress of the United States forever more will reflect the stories of their great contribution to America in the hopes that those stories will move the Speaker of the House to give us a vote,” she said.
Pelosi’s inspirational feat also marked the one-year anniversary of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell silencing Sen. Elizabeth Warren from reading Coretta Scott King’s criticism of Jeff Sessions from the Senate floor, and explaining himself with the now-infamous line: “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”
Pelosi persisted for eight hours — in heels — as she spoke for the 800,000 Dreamers and their families whose fates depend on Republicans’ willingness to put country over party and do the right thing for these young Americans.
The Republican chair of the House Intelligence Committee is trying to dig his way out of his embarrassing failure and somehow is just making things worse for himself.
Republican Rep. Devin Nunes humiliated himself, his party, and some rich asshole last week when his “worse than Watergate” smoking gun memo turned out to be a complete dud.
So now Nunes is fantasizing about how the highest court in the land might fix it for him.
On Wednesday, Nunes explained to right-wing pundit Hugh Hewitt his desire to figure out whether it would be possible to make John Roberts, chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, “testify” to Congress about the concocted fantasies Nunes has been pushing for months about a vast anti-the rich asshole conspiracy within the FBI.
“This is something that we have, like I said, we have thought a lot about this,” Nunes said. “And the answer is we don’t know the correct way to proceed because of the separation of powers issue.”
If that sounds unlikely to happen, that’s because it is. Even Nunes admitted he’s “not aware” of justices testifying before Congress. And Nunes’ entire theory for why Roberts should breach the separation of powers is pinned to the placement of a footnote in an application for a FISA warrant.
“It’s almost like you had to go out of your way to put the footnote in at the end,” Nunes told Hewitt.
Roberts, as chief justice, appoints judges to the FISA court — contrary to another right-wing conspiracy theorythat ricocheted around the internet last week claiming that President Obama had appointed at least one of the FISA court judges, thus calling the entire process into question.
And this fact, it seems, is the basis for Nunes’ hope of finding a way to drag the Supreme Court into his new mission: proving that the entire memo debacle wasn’t the humiliating failure the rest of the country thinks it was.
“Our next step with the courts,” Nunes said, “is to make them aware, if they’re not aware already, that this happened by watching the news, so we will be sending a letter to the court.”
Given the fever-pitch excitement from Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee — and at Fox News, which had also been hyping the memo to its most important viewer, some rich asshole — it seems a safe bet that Roberts has heard something about it from the news. But he has yet to volunteer to go before Nunes’ committee to straighten the whole thing out for him.
“Even if Roberts accepts the invitation (which he will not), he would not discuss anything that could be implicated in a pending case,” constitutional law professor and Federalist Society member Josh Blackman wrote in an email to The Hill.
Nunes months ago established himself as the rich asshole’s eager lapdog, or, as Nunes’ hometown paper called him, the rich asshole’s “stooge.”
But he really disgraced himself when his memo became an instant laughingstock — not to mention a national trending joke on Twitter.
And while the rich asshole crowed that Nunes’ memo “vindicated” him in the various investigations that are closing in on his White House, the rest of the world has been pointing and laughing at every Republican who thought this would somehow make the rich asshole’s FBI problems disappear.
If Nunes is trying to belatedly save face now, openly imagining that the chief justice of the Supreme Court will assist him is not going to help.
the rich asshole also earned himself "a collective eye roll from military leaders" at the Pentagon.
some rich asshole’s demand for a military parade has blown up in his face, as even his own Pentagon leaders are saying the display would reek of despotism.
the rich asshole’s order sparked a blistering backlash, prompting the administration to walk back claims. At Wednesday’s White House daily briefing, the rich asshole Defense Secretary James Mattis unenthusiastically fended off questions about the parade, and press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders took to denying that the rich asshole had made such an order.
But on Fox News, national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin reported that the rich asshole had indeed obsessed about the parade during a Jan. 18 meeting at the Pentagon and on the plane ride home, which is when the planning began.
Griffin also reported that the rich asshole wanted a military display at his inauguration, but was “dissuaded because the tank treads would tear up Pennsylvania avenue.”
Anchor Shep Smith noted, “It’s more than that, isn’t it? You have to get them in there somehow, and don’t the light posts have to come up? How about the bridges? A lot to think about, including D.C. council, this morning, that put a ‘no tanks’ sign up there.”
“And also, there’s the fact that they’d be taken out of training, it would be very costly at a time when defense budgets are a real issue,” Griffin added.
“I would describe, however, the reaction at the Pentagon yesterday, when this story broke, as a collective eye roll from military leaders who I’ve spoken to,” Griffin said. “Most thought it was a joke at first, many fear that the U.S. will look like the dictators they scoff at around the world.”
the rich asshole wants a parade like they had for him in France — which shows he clearly didn’t get the point
some rich asshole and Emmanuel Macron (Twitter / Screengrab)
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Picture this: July 14, Paris. On the Champs-Élysées, the promenade that runs like an aorta through the heart of France’s capital.
An assembly of dignitaries, army commanders and security agents has gathered on stage to watch a grand military parade commemorating an event of profound importance to the history and psyche of the French people: the storming of the Bastille prison, which spurred the country’s 1789 revolution.
As it happens, this July 14 also marks the 100th anniversary of the entry of American troops into the first world war. And so, heading up the party, sit two radically different male figureheads: Emmanuel Macron and some rich asshole.
Though superficially connected by being political outsiders who made unconventional moves to win national elections, the two presidents – one French, one American – are opposites in character.
To the American’s fearful nationalism, his counterpart advances a progressive and proud sense of country, envisioning a France that makes “our planet great again”.
Where one produces a litany of online abuse, the other launched a rollcall of MPs that brings unprecedented diversity to the French parliament. Where the rich asshole is relentlessly outlandish, Macron is unwavering and incisive.
On Bastille Day, the two men were flanked by their wives. While both are in cross-generational partnerships, commentaries on Macron’s marriage have exposed the deep misogyny that still courses through some parts of society, a misogyny that the rich asshole has himself manifested. As a man, the rich asshole is driven by a rampant ego: the self as brand.
Macron, on the other hand, projects a sense of self underpinned by intelligence, that is, a capacity for learning and reason. And it is this intelligence, and the particular boldness that it inspires, that produced this double-take moment: the French military band in full ceremonial attire, standing at attention before the Bastille Day stage and delivering a bravura rendition of the pop anthem Get Lucky by the French electronic duo Daft Punk.
Artful politics
It takes a while for the medley to build. As the tune becomes discernible – with tuba, trumpet, cymbal, snare and bass drum – it is clear that a coup of artful politics is taking place.
The band intones the chords of this global nightclub anthem in an arrangement that splices the usual military moves with strange and wonderful quick-steps on the Elysées. Carefully choreographed camerawork captures their stiff-chic movements, which both reinforce the music and draw out more meaning beneath the surface.
On the stage, as the men witnessed the ceremonial manoeuvres, their demeanour could not have been more different.
Macron, poised and irreverent, embodies the sense of independence that underlies France’s strong intellectual history. Is there in his attitude, perhaps, a fine thread of the very same spirit of revolt that gave rise to républicanisme, the political philosophy that Bastille Day marks?
the rich asshole, by contrast, appears increasingly unnerved as the delight of the people around him grows. He senses something is afoot but cannot grasp the situation. His out-of-place air is just what might be expected of a capitalist hero who traded real-estate notoriety for celebrity status, and then cashed this in for political power.
Describing these men this way may seem to mythologise them. Yet the evolution of myth and its interaction with history is precisely what this event underlined.
Bastille Day medley
The centrality of myth-making in discourses of social life – of which history is one – is highlighted by the French thinker Jacques Rancière’s observation that, “the foundation of the foundation is a story, an aesthetic affair”.
So, too, is politics, with its concepts of democracy and public space, and its practice in the Greek tradition of the agora. Following on from French structuralism, the study of language and culture has examined myth not as falseness in the face of reality, but rather as a very particular way in which symbols combine with ideas to promote specific values in a given era.
Roland Barthes was a leading figure in this field and in his 1957 essay collection Mythologies, he combines storytelling and critique to explore the myths of mass culture.
“Bastille Day Medley” would make a worthy entry to a 21st-century edition of the work, along with updated versions of his original essays on “The World of Wrestling” and “Photography and Electoral Appeal”.
French theorist Jean Baudrillard, too, offers insight into the world of celebrity presidency, fake news hype, social-media reality, and historical amnesia that haunt these times.
In his 1981 treatise Simulacra and Simulation, he argues that in the pre-modern world a clear relationship existed between objects, symbols and their use-value in rituals and social practice. In the industrial era of mass reproduction – as Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle outlined – there ensued a breakdown in the value of real and the represented, as commodification heightened the value of appearances over substance.
Today, thanks to processes of multiplication, imitation and circulation, symbols need not be anchored to anything to have currency: simulacrum is the new real. The rich asshole camp often trades in precisely such simulacra, and its dismissal of reflective thought and critique as “elite” plays into this.
And so the Daft Punk medley is striking because, in its combination of the apparent opposites of military and pop culture, it marks an historic looking back that is also a looking forward. Around the world, viewers witnessed a re-anchoring of the chaotic world of messages – the world of the rich asshole – in a present that has symbolic and political substance.
The significance of this was not lost on many of the dignitaries on stage, as the cameras revealed.
Historical substance
Nor, in this situation, could onlookers fail to appreciate Macron’s sense of timing and keen grasp of the “aesthetics of politics”. In positioning the rich asshole in Paris, on the Bastille stage, Macron artfully revealed with full decorum the hollow figurehead of the rich asshole, an oligarch who radiates the myth of the self-made man.
At an earlier press conference with the two presidents, it was amusing to observe Macron’s raised eyebrows as the rich asshole tried to conjure a sense of historical substance for himself in declaring that “our countries are bound by revolution”.
The rhetoric felt as it was, empty.
This vacuousness was brought to bear on the Bastille stage. During the parade, the rich asshole saluted the troops. In the face of complex national histories that he is unlikely to grasp, and given his habit of aesthetic excess, the gesture looked like a pantomime move: the rich asshole-pomp™.
As the Daft Punk medley unfolded, the rich asshole’s attitude shifted from superiority to confusion and then sulkiness. He resembled nothing so much as Ubu Roi, the infantile king in French surrealist Alfred Jarry’s 1896 play.
Macron did not just get lucky here. This orchestration of an historical moment and a public event was thoroughly considered.
Get Lucky was not an ironic gesture. It did not deflect. It was not superficial. Instead, the medley made several often-conflicting statements at once, offering both entertainment and critique, gravitas and humour. In embodying a progressive vision for France while casting the rich asshole as a bombastic, outmaneuvered onlooker, Macron’s staging of politics was a coup de grâce, as subtle as it was potent.
By Julie Louise Bacon, Lecturer in Art, Curating and Cultural Theory, UNSW
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