February 8th, - February 9th, 2017. It's been 453-454 days since the Nov 8, 2016, election of some rich asshole, no.45, and 381-382 days since the Jan 20th inauguration.
the rich asshole gets called out for once again riding to the side of abusers and ignoring their victims.
Denouncing some rich asshole’s refusal to even acknowledge the women who say they have been beaten by a former top White House staffer, CNN’s Dana Bash condemned some rich asshole's callous comments as “outrageous,” “tone deaf,” and “sad.”
“The fact that he didn’t mention one word, one syllable, about those two women … who are talking in great detail about abuse —physical, verbal abuse — is outrageous,” said Bash. “I’m sorry, it just is. It just is.”
She was hardly alone in calling out the rich asshole’s offensive, one-sided comments Friday, where he offered only praise to Rob Porter, who was forced out of the White House this week after his two ex-wives accused him of verbally and physically abusing them.
Photos also emerged showing bruises that Porter had inflicted.
Yet the rich asshole, in a brief, staged encounter with reporters, refused to acknowledge the victims and instead expressed his sympathies toward Porter who’s “very sad now.”
“It’s tone deaf to the times,” said Bash. “It is tone deaf to this situation.” Stressing that we’ve seen the photographs and have heard directly from the women involved detailing the abuse, “To not even have a nod to that, and instead just profusely, effusively praise the work that Porter did, is sad.”
“It’s outrageous,” CNN’s David Gregory agreed. “It’s part of a pattern about how this White House, and how Republicans rallying around this president, have come to the aid of anyone accused of sexual misconduct and abuse, and not thought about those on the other end of it.”
‘There’s no where to get the money from!’ Stephanie Ruhle hilariously smacks down the rich asshole’s infrastructure plan
MSNBC anchors Katy Tur and Stephanie Ruhle.
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MSNBC anchor Stephanie Ruhle thoroughly debunked the viability President some rich asshole’s infrastructure package, during an appearance with Katy Tur on Friday to discuss the brief overnight government shutdown.
“It is Republicans that never wanted do this and to your point, we’ve already added $1 trillion $2 trillion to our debt because of those corporate tax cuts,” Ruhle noted.
“And to a layman watching, it is a very ambiguous thing. What is the debt? No one feels any relationship to it. Okay, it has gone up, what does it mean for me?” Tur asked.
“If I said it is a trillion — it’s a gazillion — you won’t know the difference. This is abstract and doesn’t affect us, but it does if you think about what will have to get cut. It does if you think about how we’re going to have to borrow as a country,” Ruhle explained.
“I feel like an asteroid crashed and nothing burned and it made me wonder when you look at Republicans, and you look at what they have decided to do a 180 on in the time that some rich asshole has been in office, what else should we expect?” Tur asked Jake Sherman, of Politico.
“They should really go home go home until the election. I don’t think an infrastructure deal will come together. Can you imagine spending another trillion dollars right now?” Sherman asked.
“There’s no where to get the money from. Gary Cohn has told the president, ‘el presidente, no dinero aqui,'” Ruhle explained.
“To say we’ll have states pay for it, states can’t run deficits. And if you think it will come from private funding? they want 15 percent returns,” Ruhle continued.
“We’re no longer the safest haven around. Right now, sure, we are the prettiest girl in the ugly class, whatever those phrases are, but things ain’t looking good,” Ruhle concluded.
Watch:
Fox News executive suggests ‘darker, gayer’ Olympians will be bad at sports
John Moody (Screen Capture)
February 8, 2018
Cody Fenwick
Posted with permission from AlterNet
Fox News occasionally tries to play down its racism and homophobia. This week, Fox News executive editor and executive vice president John Moody took the gloves off.
Even as the U.S. Olympic team remains still overwhelmingly white and straight, Moody attacked the team and said this year's group of "'darker, gayer, different" athletes will let the country down.
"Unless it's changed overnight, the motto of the Olympics, since 1894, has been 'Faster, Higher, Stronger,'" he wrote. "It appears the U.S. Olympic Committee would like to change that to 'Darker, Gayer, Different.' If your goal is to win medals, that won't work."
Is there any way to read that opening paragraph other than as an attack on LGBT people and people of color?
The op-ed was written in response to a Washington Post piece that celebrated a more diverse U.S. Olympic team than ever before.
"USOC officials are pleased the team includes more African Americans and Asian Americans - and even the first two openly gay men - than recent winter squads," wrote reporter Rick Mease for the Post. "But they also realize this year's U.S. Olympic team, not unlike those of most other nations gathering in PyeongChang this week, is still overwhelmingly white."
Moody believes this marginally more diverse team risks losing the U.S. some medals.
When minorities are excluded from participation in an activity, like the Olympics, it limits the candidate pool. Eliminating barriers to people who have historically been excluded, like people of color and members of the LGBT community, can actually raise the quality of potential Olympians, making victory more - not less - likely.
Assuming that a more diverse Olympic team will be less competitive is lazy, ignorant and patently disrespectful to the athletes who devote their lives to represent the U.S. on the world stage. They deserve better.
Feinstein torches GOP’s attack on Steele: ‘Not a single revelation in the dossier has been refuted’
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (C-SPAN)
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Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) on Friday slammed her Republican colleagues after two top committee members referred former British MI6 agent Christopher Steele to the Justice Department for criminal investigation.
Tuesday, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley (R-IA) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) released a copy of the committee’s referral on Steele accusing the former British spy of lying about his contacts with the media in order to disseminate the “discredited” dossier. The referral raises “concerns about [Steele’s] credibility,” and questions the FBI’s use of the dossier in requesting surveillance warrants on individuals related to some rich asshole’s campaign.
In a statement, Feinstein refuted the committee chairman’s characterization of Steele’s dossier.
“Not a single revelation in the Steele dossier has been refuted,” Feinstein said in a statement. “Unfortunately, the claims in the criminal referral rely on classified information, so it’s difficult to
fully repudiate them here. However, as much as possible using unclassified information, the following points lay out the flaws in the criminal referral.”
fully repudiate them here. However, as much as possible using unclassified information, the following points lay out the flaws in the criminal referral.”
“The criminal referral of Christopher Steele has nothing to do with accountability,” Feinstein’s statement reads. “Clearly its goals included undermining the FBI and Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation, attacking Christopher Steele and deflecting attention from collusion and obstruction of justice investigations.”
In a seven-point rebuttal, Feinstein torched claims made by Grassley and Graham in that referral.
“The criminal referral is not based on any allegation that Steele lied or misrepresented facts about Carter Page or what is included in the Steele dossier,” Feinstein wrote. “In fact, neither provide any evidence that any of the information in Steele’s dossier is wrong. Instead, the referral is limited to a single baseless allegation: that Steele lied about his contacts with the press.”
Feinstein said the referral “omits key facts” about Steele’s interactions with the Justice Department andante “fails to make the case that Steele lied to the FBI.” Noting Steele’s reputation as “a respected and reliable expert on Russia,” Feinstein added the former British MI6 agent “came forward out of concern for U.S. national security. Finally, Feinstein noted “the facts about Carter Page [outlined in Steele’s dossier] are not disputed.”
“Steele’s reporting was deemed reliable by the FBI,” Feinstein said. “The FISA court granted three renewals of the FISA warrant on Carter Page after learning of Mr. Steele’s contacts with the press, a fact that did not cause the FBI to question the reliability of his underlying reporting.”
“This Committee should dedicate its resources and attention to getting to the bottom of exactly what Russia did during the 2016 election and who was involved – not attacking voluntary sources and the nation’s leading law enforcement agencies,” she concluded
A new White House defense fund will help pay for staffers' legal fees, but only if employees stick to the rich asshole's script?
As a parade of the rich asshole administration officials, family members, and allies continue to get caught up in the ongoing Russia and obstruction of justice scandals, their legal bills are mounting. In response, the White House has set up an ethically dubious defense fund that allows it to potentially reward staffers who defend the rich asshole under questioning and withhold defense funds from people who turn on him.
The emerging slush fund, dubbed the Patriot Legal Expense Fund Trust, represents a deep-pocketed tool the White House can use to influence possible witnesses as special counsel Robert Mueller continues his sprawling investigation.
“The name may suggest something more sinister still, that the cash is for ‘patriots’ loyal to the president,” according to Walter Shaub, former director of the Office of Government Ethics who is now senior director for ethics at the Campaign Legal Center in Washington.
The non-stop scandals that have been a hallmark of the rich asshole’s presidency have taken a steep toll on staffers and former campaign associates who have had to lawyer up in response to the many investigations into possible the rich asshole campaign and the rich asshole administration criminality.
Top defense attorneys in Washington, D.C., charge as much as $1,500-per-hour for their legal services.
In response, the White House last November announced it was setting up a fund to help defray some of those costs but insisted money would not be directed to “indictees or current targets.”
As Shaub explains, however, the fund is created in a such a way that it gives the fund’s manager absolute power to decide who receives donations and who does not.
That means a conflict of interest is built right into the fund.
“Other legal defense funds for government workers — for example, those set up for President Clinton’s staffers when he was under investigation — have been structured as trusts for one employee at a time,” Shaub writes. “In such trusts, the money collected can only be disbursed to that single beneficiary. It can’t be used to favor or shun potential recipients based on what they may or may not reveal to investigators.”
Additionally, “No firewall prevents the president from bending the manager’s ear about who should or shouldn’t receive the fund’s largesse,” Schaub writes. “Nor is the manager required to seek any guidance from ethics officials to determine if donations come from prohibited sources.”
the rich asshole’s White House remains an ethical sewer. Now it appears it’s trying to buy the loyalty of aides by offering to cover their mounting legal fees — for a price.
White House aides say John Kelly is trying to push a bogus story about Rob Porter leaving: report
White House chief of staff John Kelly (Screenshot)
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White House Chief of Staff John Kelly is being accused by some of his fellow White House officials of asking them to give an account about the Rob Porter scandal that they says is not accurate.
Two senior White House officials tell the Washington Post that Kelly told members present at a staff meeting Friday to tell reporters that “he took action to remove Porter within 40 minutes of learning that abuse allegations from two ex-wives were credible.”
One official tells the Post that many people at the meeting could not believe he was telling them to put out what they believed was a false story about his actions after the Porter scandal first broke.
“That version of events contradicts both the public record and accounts from numerous other White House officials in recent days as the Porter drama unfolded,” The Post notes. “Kelly — who first learned of the domestic violence allegations against Porter months ago — issued a glowing statement of support for Porter’s personal character after the allegations first surfaced publicly Tuesday and privately urged him to remain on the job until the next day when his resignation was announced.”
Kelly has been taking a lot of heat for his handling of the Porter scandal, which reportedly even has President some rich asshole contemplating possible replacements for him as chief of staff.
READ: White House letter objecting to release of Dem memo
BY THE HILL STAFF - 02/09/18 08:44 PM EST
President the rich asshole on Friday declined to approve the release of a Democratic-drafted memo aimed at rebutting a document released by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee earlier this month.
White House counsel Don McGahn wrote a letter to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) explaining the rich asshole's decision not to declassify the memo drafted by Rep. Adam Schiff (Calif.), the top Democrat on the intel committee.
"Although the President is inclined to declassify the February 5th Memorandum, because the Memorandum contains numerous properly classified and especially sensitive passages, he is unable to do so at this time," McGahn wrote.
Read the full letter here:
‘Mexican’ Judge Repeatedly Attacked By the rich asshole To Hear Border Wall Case
Remember that “Mexican” California judge the rich asshole accused of bias in a case against the rich asshole University? Well, he’s not Mexican — District Court Judge Gonzalo Curiel was born in Indiana — and he’s now set to hear another case near and dear to the rich asshole’s heart.
CNN reports:
District Court Judge Gonzalo Curiel is scheduled to hear the case on Friday in his San Diego courtroom.
The plaintiffs argue that the the rich asshole administration is violating the Constitution and state laws because it is not “conducting any environmental review or complying with any environmental protection laws.” But the federal government, citing a 1996 immigration law, says it has the authority to waive environmental laws in order to build the wall, a top campaign promise of the rich asshole’s.
“We are building a wall. He’s a Mexican. We’re building a wall between here and Mexico,” the rich asshole famously said of Curiel, who was at the time overseeing the case brought by former “students” of the rich asshole University, who had the chance to recoup about 90% of the money they paid The rich asshole.
the rich asshole University closed its doors in 2010, the same year the New York Department of Education told The rich asshole to stop operating his fake school without a license.
the rich asshole ultimately settled the rich asshole U lawsuit for $25 million, which Curiel called” fair, adequate, and reasonable.”
the rich asshole’s previous attacks against Curiel were so bad that even Speaker Paul Ryan was forced to admit they are “the textbook definition of a racist comment.”
“Based on the rulings that I have received in the rich asshole University civil case, I feel justified in questioning whether I am receiving a fair trial,” the rich asshole said at the time, adding that “the core issues of my campaign that focus on illegal immigration, jobs and unfair trade” perfectly excuse his attack on Curiel’s heritage.
We can almost certainly expect those attacks to return if things don’t go the rich asshole’s way.
Immigrants appear to be better vetted than some of the rich asshole’s staff
Rob Porter never would have been hired if the rich asshole applied "extreme vetting" to his staff.
The rich asshole administration has repeatedly insisted on extreme vetting for people coming into the country on national security grounds — but failed to apply the same requirements to a man with direct access to the president and his family.
Wednesday was the last day Rob Porter worked as the White House staff secretary, after physical abuse allegations against him by his ex-wives years ago became public.
It’s since come to light that Porter stayed in his high-level position for more than a year with a temporary security clearance, despite an incomplete background check. Porter’s first ex-wife, Colbie Holderness, told CNN she told the FBI about the alleged abuses in January 2017, including one incident where he punched her face and gave her a black eye. She said she shared photos with the FBI, and warned the bureau that his history of abuse could make him susceptible to blackmail. Holderness’ husband also told the FBI last January that a close friend of Porters was “actively working to quell” background check issues, CNN reported. Porter’s second ex-wife, Jennifer Willoughby, said she filed a restraining order against Porter.
Porter still got the White House job, though his security clearance check was never completed because of the allegations.
Porter operated on a temporary security clearance. The various kinds of immigrants that the White House has been calling out, on the other hand, appear to be better vetted than him.
President some rich asshole once said that Syrian refugees entering the United States have “no documentation whatsoever.” Yet refugees undergo an 18-to-24-month-long screening process before they can step foot into the country. The process includes background checks, interviews with several federal agencies, and biometrics checks.
The White House has attacked the annual diversity visa lottery program, on concerns of fraudulent applications and allowing the wrong kind of people to enter the country. Yet winners of the lottery, the Immigration Policy Council explained, have to undergo a screening process before their visas are issued. Like refugees, that includes biometrics, criminal and security background checks, cross-checks with watch-lists, and in-person interviews. Any dependents they petition for must undergo the same process.
Immigrants of programs that have been disbanded are similarly vetted. The White House phased out the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program last September, which granted temporary deportation protections and work authorization to certain immigrants who came to the country as children. The program itself has a series of requirements, including that DACA applicants must undergo a criminal and security background check and provide several years of proof of who they are, what names they’ve used in the past, and where they’ve lived.
Immigrants who apply to adjust their status and become green card holders must fill out a very long questionnaire asking about their criminal and security backgrounds, issues that could be grounds for inadmissibility into the country.
The reality is that the president may do well to employ the same standard of extreme vetting process on his staff as he wants for immigrants. As ThinkProgress previously reported, his then-presidential campaign staff included people like political adviser Roger Stone, who once created a fake identity to donate to the opponent of Richard Nixon’s campaign under the Young Socialist Alliance; now-Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, whose foreclosures on thousands of homes was reportedly accomplished through fraud; Corey Lewandowski, who was charged with misdemeanor battery; and Paul Manafort, who co-founded a lobbying firm that has bankrolled on representing dictators like Mobutu Sese Seko, dictator of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo).
Winners and losers from the overnight shutdown
BY SCOTT WONG - 02/09/18 02:50 PM EST
It was a government shutdown that nobody wanted. Except maybe Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.).
Yet because congressional leaders cut a blockbuster budget deal so close to the funding deadline, all lawmakers, aides and reporters could do was watch as Paul repeatedly blocked efforts to speed up the vote in the upper chamber.
Funding for the federal government lapsed at the stroke of midnight Thursday, though it was restored about eight and a half hours later with action from the Senate and House, and President the rich asshole’s signature.
The sweeping, two-year budget deal is an enormous victory for Washington. It boosts military and domestic spending by $300 billion, adds another $90 billion for emergency disaster aid and throws in billions more for infrastructure, the opioid epidemic and health programs
It also hikes the debt ceiling through March 2019 and keeps the government’s lights on for another six weeks.
Still, the dramatic albeit brief shutdown — the second in just three weeks — seemed to underscore the partisan dysfunction and GOP intraparty warfare that has come to define the rich asshole era.
Here’s The Hill’s list of winners and losers of the Bipartisan Budget Act and the brief shutdown of 2018.
WINNERS
Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.)
The Speaker cleaned out most of the barn with this bipartisan deal, busting the 2011 budget caps, securing tens of billions more for the Pentagon and nondefense programs over the next two years, and taking care of a number of other must-pass items.
But unlike his predecessor, Ohio Republican John Boehner, he did not need to relinquish his Speaker’s gavel to strike such a deal. Ryan also didn’t cave to the demands of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and other liberals who demanded he include protections for immigrant “Dreamers” in the budget pact.
Instead, he wants the Senate to tackle the immigration problem first.
In the end, the House easily passed the budget package 240-186, with 73 Democrats joining a majority of the GOP conference in voting “yes.”
Sens. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.)
Schumer, the Democratic leader in the Senate, was a clear loser in the three-day shutdown in January.
Criticism of the New Yorker came from all sides, with Republicans describing it as the Schumer shutdown and Democrats asking why they blocked a funding bill only to agree to a similar deal days later.
This time, Schumer and McConnell emerged as winners, striking the bipartisan blueprint and basking in a bipartisan glow.
McConnell agreed to an immigration floor debate that will start next week, a commitment that helped end last month’s shutdown and was critical to reaching the two-year deal.
The budget pact included two tax provisions that aid McConnell’s Bluegrass State. One extends the three-year tax depreciation for racehorses, a priority of the National Thoroughbred Racing Association based in Kentucky. The other limits the excise tax on investment income at small private universities like Kentucky’s Berea College.
Goodwill gestures apparently smoothed the way for the agreement. Schumer agreed to speak on Monday at the University of Louisville’s McConnell Center, which trains future leaders. And during the budget talks, Schumer reportedly invited McConnell, a University of Louisville basketball fanatic, to New York when his team plays Syracuse University.
The immigration debate will create challenges for McConnell going forward, and some immigration activists will attack Schumer for leaving “Dreamers” out of the deal.
But the two leaders are winners for now.
Defense hawks
A week ago at the GOP policy retreat in West Virginia, Defense Secretary James Mattis warned lawmakers that he simply could not train and protect his soldiers and “maintain the military on CRs,” the short-term stopgap funding measures known as continuing resolutions.
He delivered that same message in phone calls to on-the-fence lawmakers in the hours leading up to the Senate and House votes Thursday night.
The effort paid off for Mattis and defense hawks on Capitol Hill who’ve been infuriated over the past year as Congress hobbled from CR to CR to keep the government open.
Passage of the budget deal means some stability for the Pentagon for the next two years: Defense spending will see an $80 billion boost in fiscal year 2018 and another $85 billion increase in fiscal 2019.
“For too long our troops have been made hostages for other political agendas … This agreement begins to rebuild and restore America’s military,” House Armed Services Chairman Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) said in a statement.
“It passed because Members of both parties made our security and our service members a priority.”
LOSERS
Freedom Caucus and deficit hawks
Fiscal conservatives rode a Tea Party wave into Washington in 2010 and 2012, vowing to drastically cut out-of-control spending and tame the nation’s debt and deficits.
With the 2018 budget agreement, Republicans did the exact opposite. The deal adds hundreds of billions of dollars in spending and hikes the nation’s borrowing limit for one year, yet virtually none of that is paid for.
the rich asshole tweeted Friday morning that, due to a Democratic filibuster in the Senate, Republicans “were forced to increase spending on things we do not like or want in order to finally, after many years of depletion, take care of our Military.”
The deal is anathema to those Tea Party bomb-throwers who went on to found the House Freedom Caucus in 2015. Rep. Dave Brat (R-Va.) ripped the deal as “generational theft,” while GOP Rep. Raúl Labrador, a candidate for Idaho governor, said it “breaks just about every promise House Republicans have made over the last 8 years.”
“I want to fund our military, but at what cost? Should we bankrupt our country in the process? Estimates suggest this bill will likely increase government spending by $1.5 trillion,” said Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows (R-N.C.). “I’m profoundly disappointed.”
Congressional Hispanic Caucus and immigration activists
Pro-immigration groups feel that Democrats lost major political leverage in the latest budget and funding battle.
GOP leaders staved off painful automatic spending cuts known as sequestration, significantly boosted defense money and raised the debt ceiling, while ignoring Democrats’ demands for a firm commitment to bring a bipartisan bill to the floor to protect Dreamers — immigrants brought to the United States illegally as children.
The Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC) formally opposed the budget deal, objecting to the inaction on immigration. But 73 House Democrats went ahead and voted for the package, helping Republicans push it across the finish line.
And while McConnell will allow senators to debate and draft an immigration bill on the floor next week, Hispanic lawmakers argue that Democrats now will be playing with a much weaker hand. Ryan has said he’ll only bring an immigration bill to the floor that has the rich asshole’s support.
“Speaker Ryan and Whip McCarthy have repeatedly shown a basic lack of understanding for the severity of this the rich asshole-created crisis, which demands immediate action,” said CHC Chair Michelle Lujan Grisham (D-N.M.). “If they do not give us a vote on bipartisan legislation that protects Dreamers, then they will be condoning the deportation of Dreamers.”
MIXED
Sen. Rand Paul
As the clock struck midnight last night, Paul became the most despised lawmaker in the Capitol. Democrats already loathe the Tea Party favorite from Kentucky, but on Thursday night it was Republicans giving Paul an earful for delaying a vote.
McConnell sent his top deputy, Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas), to the floor to deliver a message to Paul: If he didn’t relent, Paul “will effectively shut down the federal government for no real reason."
Another GOP leader, Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, called Paul’s stunt a “colossal waste of everyone’s time."
And Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Pa.) told Politico it was “easy to understand why it's difficult to be Rand Paul's next-door neighbor.” Last year, Paul broke several ribs after being allegedly attacked by his next-door neighbor over a landscaping dispute.
But Paul didn’t care if he was shutting down the government and keeping colleagues up past their bedtime. He had a point to make: If Republicans backed this bill, they would become the party of “trillion-dollar deficits.”
“I want people to feel uncomfortable" voting in favor of big deficits, he said, according to USA Today.
Despite the backlash from colleagues, deficit hawks cheered Paul’s speech as the hashtag #StandWithRand began trending on Twitter.
And Paul wasn’t completely alone as he railed against spending and deficits on the Senate floor. His closest friends from the House, Reps. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), crossed the Capitol and sat in the back of the Senate chamber to offer Paul moral support.
“#StandWithRand,” Massie tweeted with a photograph of the conservative trio.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi
The California Democrat won praise from liberals and immigration activists for her record-breaking, eight-hour-plus, filibuster-style speech this week calling on Ryan to address the Dreamers.
It drew attention to the plight of the Dreamers and demonstrated to her fired-up base that she was willing to stand up and fight for them on immigration.
But the praise was short-lived.
Democrats, as well as Republicans, said Pelosi sent mixed signals to her members on Thursday when she came out against the budget package, then called an emergency caucus meeting to tell lawmakers they could vote their conscience.
There was a lingering sense among many Democrats that, despite Pelosi’s stated opposition, she actually wanted it passed, leaving her to put on a show of fighting for immigration to appease the party’s activist base while working privately to ensure the government did not shut down and that key priorities such as disaster aid were funded.
Asked if Pelosi and Democratic leaders are privately relieved that the bill passed, Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) did not hesitate.
“Yes,” he said just after the vote, noting that Pelosi was in a “very tight” spot.
Republican leaders tried to exploit what they saw as Pelosi’s waffling on the issue.
“She didn’t have any cohesive message … and in the end her team broke. I see a fractured caucus on the other side,” Chief Deputy Whip Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) said after the House vote.
“To me, it’s a fascinating display of a bipartisan win and at the same time Democrats ripping themselves apart about a bipartisan agreement. It doesn’t make any damn sense.”
Mike Lillis and Melanie Zanona contributed.
Even taking a strong position against domestic violence proves too challenging for this White House.
Mike Pence has been forced to condemn domestic violence in the wake of the scandal surrounding Rob Porter, the senior White House staffer resigned this week after accusations by multiple women of domestic abuse became public.
Pence’s message runs counter to the rich asshole’s effusive praise for Porter, wishing Porter well and expressing sadness at his resignation.
In an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, Pence said “there is no tolerance in this White House” for domestic abuse.
That was not the message communicated by the rich asshole when he summoned reporters to the Oval Office and repeatedly insisted Porter a “good job” and that reporters should remember Porter has said he is innocent.
the rich asshole never mentioned the women Porter is accused of abusing, including one ex-wife who took photos of a black eye, but he did wish Porter “a wonderful career” after he left the administration in disgrace.
The NBC interview showcased Pence in his familiar position of being conveniently out of the loop within the rich asshole administration. Asked about reports that the rich asshole chief of staff John Kelly may have known about the abuse months ago but failed to act on it, Pence replied, “The time that he resigned is when I first became aware of the allegations of domestic abuse.”
When Pence was asked about the Porter scandal earlier this week, he said he had only just learned about the story and tried to avoid addressing it.
“We’ll comment on any issues affecting White House staff when we get back to Washington,” he said. One reporter asked why Pence “often seem[s] a little bit out of the loop of some of this major news.”
“You know, it’s a great honor for me to serve as vice president,” Pence responded.
It is the same sort of self-serving language Pence employed when the rich asshole campaign connections to Russia operatives were verified, and Pence then insisted it had all taken place before he joined the ticket.
Pence also claimed he didn’t know about the rich asshole national security adviser Michael Flynn’s work with foreign governments and connections to Russia, disclosures which led to his firing and which play a role in his recent plea deal.
The rich asshole administration can’t keep its story straight, offering fundamentally different messages on sexual assault within hours of each other. the rich asshole hailed the perpetrator and ignored the victims. Pence criticized domestic violence and claimed the White House doesn’t tolerate it, some of the most senior people in the administration having knowledge of the allegations for a year.
It is not a bold position to condemn domestic violence. Or it shouldn’t be. But clearly, Pence’s comments contradicting the support from the man at the top, show how he’s once again trying to save his own skin.
Congress approves bill ending brief government shutdown
U.S. President some rich asshole sits at his desk before signing tax overhaul legislation in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, U.S., December 22, 2017. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
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The U.S. House of Representatives joined the Senate early on Friday morning in approving a bill to end an overnight federal shutdown, sparing Republicans further embarrassment and averting serious interruption of the government’s business.
The stopgap funding and budget measure, approved by a 240-186 House vote, will go next to President some rich asshole. The White House said in a statement that he will sign it into law, which would extend government funding through March 23.
The shutdown, which started at midnight, was the second this year under the Republican-controlled Congress and the rich asshole, who played little role in attempts by party leaders earlier this week to head it off and end months of fiscal squabbling.
A carefully crafted, bipartisan stopgap funding and budget package was introduced with confidence earlier this week by Senate leaders, who predicted swift passage before the expiration at midnight on Thursday of current funding authority.
But in an unexpected turn of events, the deadline was missed because Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul, objecting to deficit spending in the bill, engaged in a nine-hour, on-again, off-again protest and floor speech that leaders could not stop.
Paul’s dissent dragged the Senate proceedings into the wee hours past the deadline, underscoring the persistent inability of Congress and the rich asshole to deal efficiently with Washington’s most basic fiscal obligation of keeping the government open.
“Republican majorities in the House and Senate have turned the (budget) process into an embarrassing spectacle, running from one crisis directly into the next,” said Democratic Representative Nita Lowey prior to the House vote.
“LOOT THE TREASURY”
After an all-night session of debating and voting, the bill ending the shutdown finally won House passage only after Democrats provided enough votes to offset the opposition of 67 Republicans, a remarkable rebellion in the party’s ranks.
While Paul’s performance in the Senate strained the patience of his colleagues, he focused on the same concern that caused so many House Republicans to oppose the bill – deficit spending.
The budget bill raises military and domestic spending by almost $300 billion over the next two years. With no offsets in the form of other spending cuts or new tax revenues, that additional spending will be financed by borrowed money.
That part of the overall package was a bipartisan attempt by Senate leaders to end for many months, at least beyond November’s midterm congressional elections, the fiscal policy quarrels that increasingly consume Congress.
But the deficit spending in the bill will add more red ink to Washington’s balance sheet and further underscore a shift in Republican thinking that Paul was trying to draw attention to.
Once known as the party of fiscal conservatism, the Republicans and the rich asshole are quickly expanding the nation’s budget deficit and its $20 trillion national debt.
Their sweeping tax overhaul bill approved in December will add over 10 years an estimated $1.5 trillion to the debt, an accumulation of past years of annual budget deficits.
The $300 billion in spending included in the bill just approved will ensure the annual budget deficit will exceed $1 trillion in 2019, said the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a private fiscal policy watchdog group in Washington.
“I ran for office because I was very critical of President Obama’s trillion-dollar deficits,” Paul told fellow senators.
“Now we have Republicans hand in hand with Democrats offering us trillion-dollar deficits. I can’t … in good faith, just look the other way because my party is now complicit in the deficits. Really who is to blame? Both parties,” he said.
Paul voted for the deficit-financed tax bill in December.
(Additional reporting by Eric Beech, Makini Brice, Katanga Johnson and Doina Chiacu; Writing by Kevin Drawbaugh; Editing by Matthew Mpoke Bigg)
the rich asshole on Porter: 'We hope he has a great career ahead of him'
BY BEN KAMISAR - 02/09/18 01:18 PM EST
President the rich asshole praised the work of former White House staff secretary Rob Porter on Friday, saying he hopes Porter — who resigned after reports surfaced that he abused his ex-wives — has a "great career ahead of him."
"Well, we wish him well. He worked very hard," the rich asshole said of Porter when asked by reporters about the staff secretary's resignation this week.
"I found out about it very recently and I was surprised by it. But we certainly wish him well, obviously a tough time for him," the rich asshole said from the Oval Office. "He did a very good job when he was in the White House and we hope he has a wonderful, hopefully, he has a great career ahead of him."
"But it was very sad when we heard about it, and certainly he's also very sad now," he added.
the rich asshole went on to highlight the denials by Porter, who has said the allegations against him are not true.
"He says he's innocent, and I think you have to remember that. He said very strongly yesterday that he's innocent. So you'll have to talk to him about that. But we absolutely wish him well," the rich asshole continued.
Porter's two ex-wives accused him of abusing them during their marriages in media accounts this week. One of the accounts included photos purportedly showing the abuse, with Porter's first wife, Colbie Holderness, telling reporters that she made Porter take those photographs in "contrition."
the rich asshole made no mention of the women specifically and offered no general condemnation of domestic violence.
While Porter acknowledged in a statement that he took the pictures, he's said that "the reality behind them is nowhere close to what is being described."
The White House initially defended Porter amid calls for his resignation,with the administration releasing statements praising Porter and his work.
But officials hardened their tone after Porter resigned on Wednesday — the White House released a subsequent statement from chief of staff John Kelly saying that "there is no place for domestic violence in our society," but that he stood by his "previous comments of the Rob Porter that I have come to know since becoming chief of staff."
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.
Both Hicks and Kelly were in the Oval Office Friday as the rich asshole made his comments.
Pence criticizes North Korea for throwing military parade, praises the rich asshole for doing the same
The vice president called the North Korean showing "an ongoing provocation."
Days after the White House unveiled plans to stage a military parade in the nation’s capital, Vice President Mike Pence blasted North Korea for doing the same.
North Korean leaders staged a large showing in the capital city of Pyongyang on Thursday, one day prior to the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics opening ceremonies, displaying several new short range and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that officials test-launched late last year. The parade was held to mark the military’s 70th anniversary and was broadcast by North Korean state media.
Speaking with reporters on Friday, Pence, who is in South Korea to lead the U.S. delegation, called the parade “an ongoing provocation.”
“What we witnessed in Pyongyang, and what we witnessed again yesterday on the eve of the Olympics — what [South Korean President Moon Jae-in] said last night he hopes would be an Olympics of peace — was once again an effort on the part of the regime in Pyongyang to display their ballistic missiles, to display a military that continues to make menacing threats across the region and across the wider world,” he said.
However, when confronted with the fact that the White House had itself confirmed plans for a similar military display this week, Pence dodged.
“I think any opportunity we have to celebrate the men and women of the armed forces of the United States is a great day,” he said. “I heartily support the president’s call to celebrate our military.”
Pence then hearkened back to President the rich asshole’s visit to Paris, France last year, for the country’s national day celebration. The city hosts an annual Bastille Day military parade, steeped in tradition and, as the Washington Post pointed out, “deeply rooted in the country’s history and values.”
“I think in the United States of America, just as in France — where the president was impressed on Bastille Day — we can celebrate our troops, not in any way ever be associated with the provocations of the North,” he said.
The Washington Post first reported the White House’s plans for a military parade on Tuesday, citing several anonymous military officials familiar with the matter.
“The marching orders were: ‘I want a parade like the one in France,'” one source said. “This is being worked at the highest levels of the military.”
The source added that the parade was still in the planning stages. “Right now, there’s really no meat on the bones,” they said.
Shortly after the Post published its report, the White House and Pentagon both confirmed the claims.
“President the rich asshole is incredibly supportive of America’s great service members who risk their lives every day to keep our country safe. He has asked the Department of Defense to explore a celebration at which all Americans can show their appreciation,” press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders stated.
A Defense Department spokesman later explained that it would release more details once plans had been solidified. “We are aware of the request and are in the process of determining specific details. We will share more information throughout the planning process,” they said.
the rich asshole has long expressed a desire for a military parade like that of North Korea and other totalitarian regimes throughout history. In an interview with the Post’s Karen Tumulty shortly before taking office last January, the rich asshole explained that he planned to follow through on his campaign promise to “Make America Great Again” by holding military parades in the streets of Washington, D.C.
“Being a great president has to do with a lot of things, but one of them is being a great cheerleader for the country. And we’re going to show the people as we build up our military, we’re going to display our military,” he said. “That military may come marching down Pennsylvania Avenue. That military may be flying over New York City and Washington, D.C., for parades. I mean, we’re going to be showing our military.”
However, the president’s recent plans for a showy parade honoring the military have gone over poorly, both among the public and within the military itself.
“A military parade is third world bullshit. We prepare. We deter. We fight. Stop this conversation,” former Navy SEAL Robert O’Neill tweeted on Thursday. O’Neill was a member of the team that took out Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in 2011 and claims to have been the one who fired the kill shot.
A Military Times poll published on Thursday also showed that nearly 90 percent of readers believed the parade was unnecessary.
According to the outlet, readers were asked, “Should there be a parade showcasing troops and military equipment in Washington, D.C.?” Eighty-nine percent of those polled — a vast majority — answered, “No, It’s a waste of money and troops are too busy.” The remaining 11 percent responded, “Yes, it’s a great opportunity to show off U.S. military might.”
WTF is going on with Jared Kushner’s security clearance
Nevertheless, he's given access to America's most sensitive intelligence.
The issue of security clearances for White House employees gained prominence after Staff Secretary Rob Porter resigned following revelations that his two ex-wives had made detailed allegations of physical abuse to both the police and FBI. According to senior White House administration officials, White House chief of staff John Kelly had prior knowledge of the abuse, including a protective order filed by Porter’s second wife, and knew he would be denied clearance before the allegations became public.
In spite of this, Porter handled some of the president’s most sensitive communication materials for over a year, without a permanent security clearance.
The Washington Post reports, 13 months into the rich asshole presidency, there still are dozens of White House officials who lack permanent security clearances. The most prominent of which is President the rich asshole’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, who the president has tapped as the administration official who would create peace in the middle east, spearhead criminal justice reform, and solve America’s opioid epidemic among a myriad of other jobs.
The White House has maintained that the delay in Kushner’s clearance is “completely normal,” and that extra scrutiny is involved for advisers like Kushner who require the highest level of security clearance. A White House official told Politico that the process could take 300 or so days — it has now been 385 days. The U.S. Government Accountability Office called the current security clearance system, “high risk” and warned it is in need of reform.
It is entirely abnormal, however, as Kushner has had to amend his SF-86 clearance form dozens of times after he omitted key meetings with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyack, the head of state-run Vnesheconombank Sergey Gorkov, and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, among nearly 100 others. He has amended his financial disclosure form 39 times.
Multiple reports about Kushner’s close relationship with Chinese officials raises more questions about his inability to secure a permanent security clearance. According to the Wall Street Journal, Kushner was warned about Wendi Deng Murdoch using her close friendship to Kushner and Ivanka the rich asshole to advance Chinese interests in the United States. Some government officials have flagged Kushner’s meetings with Cui Tiankai, the Chinese ambassador to the United States as problematic, raising concerns over whether Beijing is using Kushner’s close access to President the rich asshole to influence policy. After a February 2017 meeting between Kushner and Tiankai, Kushner urged persuaded the rich asshole to drop his treats to abandon the “One China” policy, which maintains China’s control over Taiwan.
Kushner’s family is also seeking billions in investment for various real estate projects, including a troubled property on 666 5th Avenue. Kushner personally helped secure financing to rescue that property from a company linked to the Chinese government before negative publicity torpedoed the deal.
Over the summer of 2017, there were multiple attempts by House Democrats to revoke Kushner’s clearance after it was revealed he attended a meeting with a Kremlin-linked Russian lawyer in the rich asshole Tower on June 9, 2016. The Security Clearance Review Act, spearheaded by Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA) and Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), would authorize the FBI Director to rescind Kushner’s clearance should the Director decide it poses a national security risk.
“some rich asshole’s refusal to hold his senior staff accountable for their deceptions on Russia have sadly made this legislation necessary,” said Beyer in a statement on the bill. “Despite all we have learned about his secret meetings with Russians, Jared Kushner apparently continues to hold his clearance. Kushner’s case and that of disgraced former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn make it clear that we need further protections when it comes to security clearances for the President’s family and closest advisers.”
Kushner reportedly receives a copy of the Presidential Daily Brief, a daily compilation of America’s most important intelligence information, prepared for the president.
Kushner’s misdeeds not only affect his own security, but also that of Ivanka the rich asshole, one of the president’s key advisers. In July of 2017, two dozen representatives called upon the F.B.I to see if Ivanka the rich asshole omitted any details on her SF-86. The security clearance form requires the applicant’s spouse and/or sibling to disclose any foreign contacts, meetings, and business interests. This means she would have had to disclose Kushner and some rich asshole, Jr.’s meeting with a Kremlin-linked Russian lawyer in the rich asshole Tower on June 9, 2016.
Eric the rich asshole took his little fingers to his Twitter account to reminisce about his father’s primary, and said the presidential election “will be remembered in this history books.” It sure will, Eric. Scandals have plagued this administration and the Internet did not let him forget that.
“It is hard to believe it was two years ago today that we sat there, as a family, the night before @realDonaldTrump would win his first primary,” Eric tweeted. “What would happen thereafter will forever be remembered in the history books but this was the start! #NewHampshire”
It is hard to believe it was two years ago today that we sat there, as a family, the night before @realDonaldTrump would win his first primary. What would happen thereafter will forever be remembered in the history books but this was the start! #NewHampshire
That didn’t go over well.
And in the criminal law books for years to come.
What will be written in history books will not paint the trump family in a good light.
You all knew what you were getting into.
Everything you’ve ever done, did & about to do will and is under scrutiny & in the public eye.
If you don’t like it; too bad. That’s the way it is.
Oh it’ll be remembered in the history books, that’s for sure...
This week on true crime family...
Lmao! Lmao! Lmao!
Yeah, it'll go down in history alright, just not the way you think. It'll be a cautionary tale of corruption & destruction.
Yes, it was the end of morality, civility & kindness in the USA...it will go down in history for sure. #Resist
Melania’s hands are on her lap.
I’m guessing she is protecting herself from your dads signature move.
And In some Criminal and Law books as well!!
Promises were not kept. Instead of draining the swamp, some rich asshole filled it up. Aides and staffers are being fired or resigning by the droves. The former reality show star has lowered the bar of decency in this country. America elected its abusive boyfriend and voters act shocked when he’s abusive. Four of Donald’s associates have been indicted so far and he’s only been on the job for just over a year. So much winning!
But yeah, this administration will be remembered in history books. So was Richard Nixon.
Marco Rubio defends Mark Warner after Fox News ‘bombshell’ report suggests misconduct
Elizabeth Vale
Posted with permission from Rare
Republican Senator Marco Rubio (FL) came to the defense of his Democratic colleague after a Fox News report suggested that he engaged in misconduct by texting with a lobbyist linked to a Russian billionaire.
Rubio defended Senator Mark Warner, D-VA,聽a top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, after Fox News reported that he had “extensive contact” with lobbyist Adam Waldman in 2017 in an attempt to contact Christopher Steele, the British spy behind the infamous “Steele dossier” on then-candidate Donald Trump.
Waldman’s lobbying firm worked with Russian oligarch聽Oleg Deripaska in 2009 and 2010. The firm, according to Fox News, also has ties to Hillary Clinton.
The Fox News article alleges that “secrecy seemed very important to Warner” and that he wanted to connect “directly with Steele without anyone else on the Senate Intelligence Committee being in the loop — at least initially.”
RELATED:聽 84-year-old music mogul Quincy Jones claims to have dated Ivanka Trump
After the article was published, Rubio came to Warner’s defense in a tweet Thursday evening, writing, “Sen.Warner fully disclosed this to the committee four months ago.Has had zero impact on our work.”
Sen.Warner fully disclosed this to the committee four months ago.Has had zero impact on our work. fxn.ws/2nXIdM6 #FoxNews
Senator Richard Burr, R-NC, also issued a joint statement with Sen. Warner after the report, which they derided as “leaks of incomplete information.”
“From the beginning of our investigation we have taken each step in a bipartisan way, and we intend to continue to do so,” Warner and Burr said in the statement. “Leaks of incomplete information out of context by anyone, inside or outside our committee, are unacceptable.”
President Donald Trump, on the other hand, focused on the text messages’ content and the lobbyist’s ties to “crooked Hillary.”
“Wow! -Senator Mark Warner got caught having extensive contact with a lobbyist for a Russian oligarch. Warner did not want a 鈥減aper trail鈥� on a 鈥減rivate鈥� meeting (in London) he requested with Steele of fraudulent Dossier fame. All tied into Crooked Hillary,” President Trump tweeted Thursday night.
Wow! -Senator Mark Warner got caught having extensive contact with a lobbyist for a Russian oligarch. Warner did not want a “paper trail” on a “private” meeting (in London) he requested with Steele of fraudulent Dossier fame. All tied into Crooked Hillary.
RELATED:聽The White House just fired back at Omarosa after her disparaging remarks about President Trump
Pence: 'No tolerance' for domestic abuse in the rich asshole administration
BY JOHN BOWDEN - 02/09/18 04:17 PM EST
Vice President Pence said Friday that the rich asshole administration has "no tolerance" for domestic abuse following the resignation of White House staff secretary Rob Porter on Wednesday.
In an interview with NBC News, Pence addressed reports that senior White House officials including chief of staff John Kelly knew about allegations of physical and emotional abuse from Porter's two ex-wives for months before a Daily Mail investigation uncovered the claims.
“There's no tolerance in this White House, and no place in America for domestic abuse,” Pence said Friday. “When I return to Washington, D.C., I'm going to look into the matter and I'll share my counsel with the president directly.”
Pence also reiterated a statement made by White House deputy press secretary Raj Shah, who said of the Porter situation Thursday that the rich asshole administration “could have handled it better.”
“We all could have done better over the last few hours, the last few days, in dealing with this ... but the emerging reports were not reflective of the individual we had come to know,” Shah said Thursday.
Pence's comments come after a Washington Post investigation found that White House counsel Don McGahn knew about the allegations concerning Porter as early as January 2017, while Kelly learned last Fall.
“I was shocked by the new allegations released today against Rob Porter. There is no place for domestic violence in our society,” Kelly said in a second statement after initially defending Porter.
“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,” he continued. “I accepted his resignation earlier today, and will ensure a swift and orderly transition.”
After taking down an absurd editorial bemoaning the diversity of Team USA, Fox News laughably claimed that the article — penned by one of the network's top executives — "does not reflect the views or values of Fox News."
In the face of intense criticism, Fox News has removed an inflammatory editorial penned by veteran network executive John Moody, who argued in the article that the diversity of the U.S. delegation could cost Team USA medals at the 2018 winter Olympics.
The article, titled “In Olympics, let’s focus on the winner of the race — not the race of the winner,” slammed the U.S. Olympic Committee for its efforts to attract more diverse athletes, and asserted — without any basis — that some Olympic athletes may have been given a spot on Team USA because of their skin color or sexual orientation, rather than their performance.
“Unless it’s changed overnight, the motto of the Olympics, since 1894, has been ‘Faster, Higher, Stronger,'” Moody wrote. “It appears the U.S. Olympic Committee would like to change that to ‘Darker, Gayer, Different.’ If your goal is to win medals, that won’t work.”
The editorial was met with swift backlash and demands for Moody to apologize to the athletes competing in the winter games.
“The executive vice president of Fox News targeted some of our nation’s top athletes with vicious anti-LGBTQ and biased rhetoric at what should be the proudest moment of their lives,” said Sarah Kate Ellis, president and CEO of GLAAD.
“These athletes are at the Olympics because they already won by qualifying to represent the United States on the world’s stage; and they did so despite facing discrimination from places like Fox News throughout their careers. Moody should not only apologize to the athletes and fans for this disgraceful post, but Fox News should open their site for diverse athletes to share their own personal stories and perspectives.”
On Friday, Fox took down the article, claiming that it “does not reflect the views or values of Fox News” and “was not properly vetted” before it was published. A source inside Fox News blamed editors for being “too deferential” to Moody, citing his “longevity” at the network.
The network then absurdly claimed that Moody — a Fox News executive editor and executive vice president — “has zero editorial oversight” on any of Fox’s platforms.
But Moody’s history at Fox News tells a different story.
Moody joined Fox News when the network launched in 1996. He left in 2009 to lead Newscore — a company owned by then-Fox News parent company News Corp — and returned to Fox News in 2012.
According to a 2011 account by Rolling Stone, Moody was handpicked by former Fox News chief Roger Ailes, who placed him at the helm of the network’s ideological wheel:
After Bush was elected, Ailes tasked John Moody, his top political lieutenant, to keep the newsroom in lockstep. Early each morning, Ailes summoned Moody into his office — often joined by [Brit] Hume from the Washington bureau on speakerphone – and provided his spin on the day’s news. Moody then posted a daily memo to the staff with explicit instructions on how to slant the day’s news coverage according to the agenda of those on ‘the Second Floor,’ as Ailes and his loyal cadre of vice presidents are known.
Moody was such a fixture at the right-wing network that he was reportedly considered as a potential replacement for Ailes when the former head of Fox News was ousted in 2016 amid a slew of sexual harassment allegations.
To say that Moody doesn’t speak for Fox News is laughable. Based on all available information, Fox News’ voice was crafted in large part by Moody — and his editorial is hardly out of step with the network’s coverage.
Fox News has created a for-profit outrage industry by manufacturing controversies and diving headfirst into the culture wars with warnings about “political correctness run amok” and rants about the plight of those suffering as women, minorities, and LGBT people gain equal rights. The network trafficks in racist, sexist, and homophobic propaganda, and rage-clicks are its currency.
Moody’s editorial was tailor-made for the views and values of Fox News.
And on a practical note: If bigotry were a red line, Fox News would have gone out of business years ago.
Kelly asks WH staff to say he took 'immediate and direct action' on Porter: report
BY JULIA MANCHESTER - 02/09/18 01:14 PM EST
White House chief of staff John Kelly has instructed senior staff to say that he took "immediate and direct action" after learning that the allegations of domestic abuse against staff secretary Rob Porter were credible, according to The Washington Post.
Kelly reportedly told the senior staff to relay what he said on Friday to subordinate staff and that he cares about combatting domestic violence.
Aides told the Post they are concerned that Kelly's account is untrue, as it appears to contradict past statement on the matter from White House officials.
Kelly and White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended Porter in the Daily Mail story. Kelly called him "a man of true integrity and honor."
But after that story was published, The Intercept published its own story on Porter in which a second ex-wife, Colbie Holderness, also alleged abuse. The story featured a picture of Holderness with a bruised eye that she said she suffered when Porter hit her in 2005.
Porter denies the allegations.
The White House announced Porter's resignation on Wednesday.
Kelly issued a statement on Wednesday saying he was shocked by the new allegations
"I was shocked by the new allegations released today against Rob Porter. There is no place for domestic violence in our society,” he said in a statement.
Multiple reports Thursday stated that Kelly first learned of the accusations against Porter last year, but took no action. The Washington Post reported on Thursday that White House counsel Don McGahn had first informed Kelly of the abuse allegations against Porter last fall.
The allegations prevented Porter from receiving a full security clearance. Multiple people in the White House were aware of the allegations before they were reported by media, according to reports.
White House Instructs Staff To Lie About ‘Immediate’ Action To Fire Domestic Abuser Rob Porter
Former White House staff secretary Rob Porter is out of a job after multiple domestic violence allegations against him became public, and the White House is scrambling to do damage control.
The Hill reports that White House chief of staff John Kelly instructed senior staff to say he took “immediate and direct action” after learning of the allegations against Porter, telling staffers to say that he “cares about combating domestic abuse.”
Multiple reports earlier this week indicated that Kelly actually learned of the allegations last year, but chose to ignore them even after they prevented Porter from receiving a full security clearance. Aides say they are concerned that Kelly is not telling the truth, as his account “appears to contradict past statement on the matter from White House officials.”
As for the rich asshole, well, he just doesn’t believe poor sweet Rob Porter could hurt anyone.
“I found out about it recently and I was surprised by it,” the rich asshole said of the allegations against. “We certainly wish him well. It’s obviously a very tough time for him. He did a very good job while he was in the White House.”
“He says he’s innocent, and I think you have to remember that,” the rich asshole added in support of the ousted staff secretary. “He said very strongly yesterday that he’s innocent, but you’ll have to talk to him about that.”
Does he look very innocent based on this photograph taken of his ex-wife Colbie Holderness in 2005?
Another ex-wife, Jennifer Willoughby and a third woman also says he beat them. The third unnamed woman contacted both Holderness and Willoughby begging for advice on how to leave Porter and escape with her life.
the rich asshole’s White House will lie about anything and everything if it means covering up their own wrongdoings.
‘Little’ Adam Schiff liked it better when he had a nasty nickname to himself
Robin Abcarian
Los Angeles Times
Posted with permission from Tribune Content Agency
When you get a busy congressman like Adam Schiff on the line, you don't want to waste time with small talk. You want to get right to the point.
So I did: "Exactly, how tall are you, Congressman?"
Schiff chuckled, but he didn't duck.
"I'm 5-10." Pause. "And a half."
My sharply honed journalistic instincts led to my next question:
"Are you taller than 'Little Marco'?"
"I am taller than 'Little Marco,'" replied Schiff, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee who has become one of President Donald Trump's most vocal — and entertaining — critics.
Although the president has tweeted in the past that Schiff is "one of the biggest liars" in Washington, it turns out the California Democrat was telling the truth. Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, one of Trump's presidential primary opponents, is 5-foot-9. (I Googled it.)
In his never-ending quest to, well, belittle all who oppose him, Trump, it appears, has run out of fresh insults.
"This was a letdown," Schiff told me Tuesday, a day after asking the president to allow Democrats to release their rebuttal to a Republican memo aimed at undermining special counsel Robert S. Mueller III's investigation into the Trump campaign's ties to Russia. "The last nickname he gave me I had all to myself, and now I have to share this one."
He was referring to a Trump tweet last July, in which the president called the congressman "Sleazy Adam Schiff."
At the time, Schiff's 15-year-old son, Eli, was away at camp, where he had no access to electronics.
As he and his wife picked him up, Schiff said, "Eli, something has happened. The president of the United States called your father 'Sleazy.' "
Eli paused for a moment, Schiff said. And then he looked at his father and asked, "Can I call you 'Sleazy'?"
To which Schiff responded: "Not unless you want me to call you 'Sleazy Jr.'"
For those who can't spend all day watching cable news, House Democrats and Republicans have been fighting over whether a warrant to eavesdrop on a Trump campaign associate known to have ties to Russia was properly issued by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in October 2016.
Republicans, led by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes of California, say the warrant was based on information from a biased source — the "Steele Dossier," which was commissioned by a firm with ties to the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign. That information, say Republicans, was not properly disclosed to the court by either the FBI or the Justice Department, which sought the surveillance. Democrats say, as Nunes would later acknowledge, the court was indeed aware that the information had partisan roots.
You can read up on the fight until your eyes cross; you will only come to understand that Democrats are battling a ham-fisted attempt by Republicans to undermine Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, which presents a political liability for the Trump presidency and the GOP itself.
"In broad terms," Schiff said, "the investigation by Robert Mueller has gotten closer and closer to the president. There is a rising level of panic in the Congress and the White House. Like I saw as a prosecutor, when the facts are incriminating of your client, you try to put the government on trial."
Thus, Nunes has pushed a narrative that the FBI and Justice Department cannot be trusted.
I guess if I were the president or one of his congressional allies, I'd be freaked out, too.
Four of Trump's campaign officials have either been charged with or pleaded guilty to serious crimes such as conspiracy, money laundering or lying to the feds. One of them, his former national security adviser, pleaded guilty to lying about contacts with Russian government agents.
On Monday, Nunes told Fox News that one of those who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, George Papadopoulos, had never met with the president "as far as we can tell." This howler is all the funnier because of a photograph — circulated in 2016 by the Trump campaign and readily available online — that shows Trump in a meeting with foreign policy advisers, including, prominently, Papadopoulos.
Hard to believe that Nunes leads the Intelligence Committee.
Schiff, as it happens, is the perfect foil for a guy like Trump. He's calm, unflappable and wry, always the grown-up to the president's spoiled child.
After Trump's latest anti-Schiff tweet, for instance, the congressman replied:
"Mr. President, I see you've had a busy morning of 'Executive Time.' Instead of tweeting false smears, the American people would appreciate it if you turned off the TV and helped solve the funding crisis, protected Dreamers or ... really anything else."
Schiff said he briefly considered running to replace U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, but once she decided to run for reelection, he threw his support behind her. I guess that's the "higher office" Trump accuses Schiff of being "desperate" for.
Had Schiff decided to run, his newly heightened profile — thanks to Trump — would serve him well.
Last June, Schiff appeared on the UC Irvine campus with the law school's then-dean, Erwin Chemerinsky. Chemerinsky was happy to have Schiff, but school was already out for the summer: Would anyone show up?
The event was a smash; the 750-seat auditorium sold out.
"My rabbi even called me to see if I could get him tickets," Chemerinsky said.
Schiff always sounds amused by the president's hate tweets, but he considers them a badge of honor.
"I'm in good company," he told me. "Meryl Streep, the whole cast of 'Hamilton,' the New York Times. And I have never gotten so many questions about my height before."
Will Mick Mulvaney be the end of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as we know it?
The Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
Posted with permission from Tribune Content Agency
White House budget chief Mick Mulvaney once likened government regulations to a "slow cancer," an attitude he shares with many in the Trump administration. So it's hardly surprising that, in his new part-time role as acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Mulvaney would waste little time pulling back on the agency's rules and its authority. It's yet another reminder, as if any more were necessary, that elections have consequences.
But some of Mulvaney's moves suggest that he's forgotten both why Congress created the bureau and the regulatory gap it exists to fill. If he has, the consequences may be both severe and unwelcome.
The subprime mortgage collapse that triggered the Great Recession in 2007 exposed many weak beams in the financial industry, one of them being the dangerous willingness of lenders seeking short-term revenue to offer loans to people with limited ability to repay. The perversity of the incentives involved became obvious once huge swaths of subprime and exotic loans started going bad, but by then it was too late.
The problems in the mortgage market stemmed in part from irresponsible lenders outside the jurisdiction of federal bank regulators — think New Century Financial Corp. of Irvine, which made more than $51 billion in subprime loans in 2006 only to go bankrupt in 2007. But even for the lenders within their purview, regulators were far more focused on the companies' financial health than on their compliance with laws designed to protect consumers.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was created to address both of those issues, enforcing existing consumer-protection laws with new vigor and applying them to financial companies that bank regulators overlooked. The two main missions assigned by Congress were to guard against discriminatory practices and to ensure "fair, transparent, and competitive" markets for consumer financial products and services. By cracking down on predatory lending — that is, the making of loans that borrowers can't easily repay — the bureau also provides one more firewall against a new flare-up of loan defaults.
The bureau was active and aggressive under its initial director, former Ohio Atty. Gen. Richard Cordray. In addition to ramping up enforcement actions for lending discrimination and unfair terms, the bureau issued the federal government's first-ever regulations for payday lenders, proposed rules for prepaid credit cards and issued guidelines to combat discrimination in automobile loan terms, among other steps.
Its new rules on payday loans are a good illustration of the bureau's value. It didn't try to ban payday lending, as some states in effect have done through interest-rate caps; instead, it set limits on repeated loans to people with no verified ability to repay. That's an important safeguard against the debt traps that have tainted the payday lending business. Payday loan companies' defenders insist that they provide credit to people who can't get it otherwise, but that's no argument for loans that can't be repaid.
Mulvaney has moved swiftly to undo or delay much of the bureau's work under Cordray, suspending lawsuits, canceling investigations and promising to alter a number of rules and guidelines, including the new payday lending rules. He reportedly dropped the bureau's investigation of the data breach at Equifax that enabled hackers to steal sensitive personal information about 145.5 million Americans. He also pared the bureau's efforts to identify and crack down on discriminatory lending practices, and suggested that the bureau will roll back the data it collects from lenders about mortgages. The latter move smacks of the kind of see-no-evil regulation that helped pave the way for the subprime fiasco.
Shortly after taking the job in November, Mulvaney told reporters that he'd rather not have a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. "If the law allowed this place not to exist," he was quoted by Politico, "I'd sit down with the president to try to make the case that other agencies can do this job well if not more effectively."
But Congress created the bureau because other agencies didn't, and couldn't, do the job well. Rather than trying to undo the bureau's accomplishments, Mulvaney should focus on identifying and stopping the predatory and discriminatory practices that could fuel the next financial meltdown.
US government officially shuts down as Congress fails to pass spending bill in time
But some of Mulvaney's moves suggest that he's forgotten both why Congress created the bureau and the regulatory gap it exists to fill. If he has, the consequences may be both severe and unwelcome.
The subprime mortgage collapse that triggered the Great Recession in 2007 exposed many weak beams in the financial industry, one of them being the dangerous willingness of lenders seeking short-term revenue to offer loans to people with limited ability to repay. The perversity of the incentives involved became obvious once huge swaths of subprime and exotic loans started going bad, but by then it was too late.
The problems in the mortgage market stemmed in part from irresponsible lenders outside the jurisdiction of federal bank regulators — think New Century Financial Corp. of Irvine, which made more than $51 billion in subprime loans in 2006 only to go bankrupt in 2007. But even for the lenders within their purview, regulators were far more focused on the companies' financial health than on their compliance with laws designed to protect consumers.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was created to address both of those issues, enforcing existing consumer-protection laws with new vigor and applying them to financial companies that bank regulators overlooked. The two main missions assigned by Congress were to guard against discriminatory practices and to ensure "fair, transparent, and competitive" markets for consumer financial products and services. By cracking down on predatory lending — that is, the making of loans that borrowers can't easily repay — the bureau also provides one more firewall against a new flare-up of loan defaults.
The bureau was active and aggressive under its initial director, former Ohio Atty. Gen. Richard Cordray. In addition to ramping up enforcement actions for lending discrimination and unfair terms, the bureau issued the federal government's first-ever regulations for payday lenders, proposed rules for prepaid credit cards and issued guidelines to combat discrimination in automobile loan terms, among other steps.
Its new rules on payday loans are a good illustration of the bureau's value. It didn't try to ban payday lending, as some states in effect have done through interest-rate caps; instead, it set limits on repeated loans to people with no verified ability to repay. That's an important safeguard against the debt traps that have tainted the payday lending business. Payday loan companies' defenders insist that they provide credit to people who can't get it otherwise, but that's no argument for loans that can't be repaid.
Mulvaney has moved swiftly to undo or delay much of the bureau's work under Cordray, suspending lawsuits, canceling investigations and promising to alter a number of rules and guidelines, including the new payday lending rules. He reportedly dropped the bureau's investigation of the data breach at Equifax that enabled hackers to steal sensitive personal information about 145.5 million Americans. He also pared the bureau's efforts to identify and crack down on discriminatory lending practices, and suggested that the bureau will roll back the data it collects from lenders about mortgages. The latter move smacks of the kind of see-no-evil regulation that helped pave the way for the subprime fiasco.
Shortly after taking the job in November, Mulvaney told reporters that he'd rather not have a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. "If the law allowed this place not to exist," he was quoted by Politico, "I'd sit down with the president to try to make the case that other agencies can do this job well if not more effectively."
But Congress created the bureau because other agencies didn't, and couldn't, do the job well. Rather than trying to undo the bureau's accomplishments, Mulvaney should focus on identifying and stopping the predatory and discriminatory practices that could fuel the next financial meltdown.
US government officially shuts down as Congress fails to pass spending bill in time
· The Senate failed to pass a spending bill before a midnight Thursday government shutdown deadline.
· Some government agencies will run out of money and workers will get furloughed.
02-08-2018
U.S. government funding lapsed Friday as Congress' efforts to pass a spending bill fizzled out in the Senate for the second time in less than a month.
Despite bipartisan support for a massive budget agreement, Congress failed to approve a funding plan before the midnight Thursday deadline. It is just the latest example of gridlock on Capitol Hill during the current GOP-controlled Congress.
In this case, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., blocked repeated moves to vote on the measure over concerns about massive spending increases contained in the budget deal. Paul called the spending reckless and pushed for a vote on an amendment to reinstate budget caps, which Senate leadership did not allow.
The Senate recessed until early Friday and funding expired at the end of Thursday, leaving the government partially shut down. Some government agencies will run out of money and have to furlough workers.
Hundreds of thousands of federal workers would not go into work Friday if a shutdown lasts through the start of business. Others would work without getting paid at first. A government shutdown is only partial — functions like the postal service and Social Security checks would continue.
On Thursday, the Office of Management and Budget told government agencies to start getting ready for funding to lapse. The National Treasury Employees Union, a major labor union for federal agency workers, said in a statement that agencies will tell employees if they get furloughed. The union would coordinate with Congress to ensure employees get paid if they have to work, it said.
The funding lapse may not last long. The Senate passed the bipartisan funding agreement early Friday morning, and the House will vote later in the morning.
If the House can overcome opposition from both conservatives and liberals to approve the measure, Congress can send the legislation to President some rich asshole's desk to quickly end the shutdown.
The partial shutdown in late January lasted for two full days and part of a third.
Senate leaders hoped to approve their budget agreement quickly on Thursday afternoon. The bill before the Senate would set up a roughly $300 billion increase in the budget caps over two years.
It would pave the way to boost spending on the military and domestic programs, as well as authorize disaster relief for areas of the U.S. ravaged by natural disasters last year.
To vote Thursday, the Senate needed all of its members to agree on moving forward. But Paul objected to what he called reckless spending increases.
"What you're seeing is recklessness trying to be passed off as bipartisanship," he said on the Senate floor.
With Paul blocking every attempt to make the vote earlier, the earliest the Senate could start a series of votes was 1 a.m. Friday. Senate leaders were confident they had the support to pass the legislation on Friday morning.
The House could vote on the bill by roughly 6 a.m. on Friday morning.
This story is developing. Please check back for updates.
Rob Porter Should Not Have Been A WH Staffer, But Remember, The Rich Asshole Hires The VERY BEST People!
Before he became the 45th president, some rich asshole bragged about his ability to hire the very best people.
In the nearly 13-months that he’s been in office, President the rich asshole has surrounded himself with a revolving door of questionable, comedic, and sometimes, downright criminal characters. Since taking office, there have been 34 resignations or firings.
But please, tell me more about his brilliant hiring abilities.
The most recent resignation, that of former White House staff secretary, Rob Porter, is yet another indication of this administration’s inability to either properly vet potential hires, or worse, look beyond abuses in their past. Both are concerning because they are evidence of shoddy governance and willful ignorance in the nation’s highest office.
My colleague, Susan Wright, detailed what Porter’s former wives suffered. This guy is twice-divorced and both of his previous spouses seemingly dealt with a poor excuse for a man who not only possessed a horrible temper but also physically assaulted them.
Seems like a great individual to bring into the administration, am I right?
And it looks as if attempts to smooth everything over was aided by two still-employed White House personalities. Chief of Staff John Kelly – who knew of these abuse allegations – is the first.
GOP Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana had some harsh wordsfor him.
Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) said Thursday that White House chief of staff John Kelly made a “bad decision” to retain staff secretary Rob Porter despite knowing of domestic abuse allegations against him.“If you want to serve the public, particularly as a member of a president’s staff, I don’t care who you are, even if you’re a Rhodes Scholar, you can’t beat the hell out of your spouse,” Kennedy said.“I think Gen. Kelly has done an extraordinary job as chief of staff to President the rich asshole. I think he’s a good man, and sometimes good people make bad decisions.”In an initial statement after the allegations against Porter surfaced, Kelly called the aide a “man of true integrity and honor” and said that he is “proud to serve alongside him.”
The second individual is none other than White House communications director, and Rob’s current girlfriend, Hope Hicks.
White House communications director Hope Hicks, who has been in a romantic relationship with Rob Porter, was involved in crafting the response to the allegations of domestic abuse leveled against him, sources say cnn.it/2E7CsSJ
I don’t have many positive things to say about Hope Hicks, the communications director who we barely hear a peep from, who seems protected because of her youth and/or knowledge, and who goes to bat for her current flame when she should just shut the door on him. But then again, she’s part of that “very best” pool of employees.
Porter was close to John Kelly and also assisted the president. Sorry, but that requires at least some sort of stand-up character even if the man you’re helping, the president himself, is a disreputable person in the first place.
Shouldn’t we ask more of these administrations? Shouldn’t we require the best sort of people, and not just those who fit the rich asshole’s definition of what constitutes “good”?
Yes, this is something we should all agree on. However, a large swath of the electorate, those starry-eyed individuals who breathlessly voted for some rich asshole, were more enamored with the idea of a Republican in the White House than anything else. Good character and respect for women be damned!
I mean, as long as the GOP wins.
Just wait, all of this will be defended by the usual sycophants who yell “but Gorsuch!” or “but tax cuts!” or some other talking point that assuages their sense of concern (if they have any) about not only the character of the man in the Oval Office but those who surround him.
Remember when we had some individuals of actual character running for the GOP nomination? I do. But we just had to go with the guy who makes GOPers feel alive again.
Make America Great Again? Hardly.
Deirdre Shesgreen, USA TODAY Published 5:59 p.m. ET Feb. 8, 2018 | Updated 10:30 p.m. ET Feb. 8, 2018
WASHINGTON — Sen. Rand Paul, a conservative Kentucky Republican and one-time presidential contender, temporarily blocked a Senate vote on a sweeping bipartisan budget deal on Thursday — a move that could force Congress to miss a midnight funding deadline and trigger a partial government shutdown.
The bipartisan budget deal would lift strict budget caps and pave the way for lawmakers to spend an extra $300 billion over the next two years on defense and domestic programs. It seemed poised to easily clear the Senate — until Thursday afternoon.
That’s when Paul objected and said he would only allow the budget bill to advance if GOP leaders gave him a vote on an amendment to restore the budget caps, set in 2011 to rein in deficit spending. If Paul got an amendment, then every senator would want one. And if any amendment passed, it would blow up the budget agreement.
“All Senator Rand Paul is asking for is a 15-minute vote on his amendment to restore the budget caps,” Paul’s spokesman, Sergio Gor, said in an email Thursday. “He is ready to proceed at any time.”
By Thursday evening, the White House was preparing for a lapse in appropriations. The federal Office of Management and Budget told federal agencies to plan for a "limited shutdown" of perhaps a few hours.
How could one senator potentially cause a government shutdown? Two reasons: the Senate’s arcane rules essentially invite such mischief-making; and congressional leaders waited until the very last minute to unveil their deal, leaving them vulnerable to legislative glitches.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., filed a motion to end debate on the budget deal late Wednesday night. Under Senate rules, lawmakers must wait an “intervening day” before they can vote to cut off debate, unless they get an agreement from all 100 senators to speed up the clock.
McConnell and Schumer figured they’d get that agreement. But they were wrong.
Paul’s objection, if he sticks with it, would force McConnell to wait until 1 a.m. to vote to take up the budget bill and then another 30 hours for debate before final passage. Federal funding for most government programs runs out at midnight.
"I can keep them here until three in the morning," Paul said on Fox News.
Paul said he wasn't pushing for a government shutdown. But he also wasn't interested in keeping the government open for a "reckless" spending deal that busts the budget caps.
"Nobody wants to have it pointed out what an eyesore this deal is and how obnoxious it is to conservatives," Paul told Fox.
Looking exasperated and irritated, McConnell begged his home-state colleague to stop his dilatory tactics and offered to let him make his point with a procedural vote.
"Funding for the government expires in just a few hours," McConnell noted. "I would argue that it's time to vote."
But Paul rejected McConnell's offer and held the floor for what could be an hours-long speech. He noted that the bill is nearly 700 pages long, nobody in the Senate has read it, and it will add more than a trillion dollars to the deficit.
"I want people to feel uncomfortable" voting in favor of big deficits, Paul said.
If and when the budget bill does pass the Senate, it will go to the House where it faces an uncertain fate.
Liberal Democrats object to the deal because it does not include protections for undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children and whose Obama-era deportation protections will expire next month. House conservative have the same objections as Paul, arguing that it will pave the way for big spending and ballooning deficits.
Well, of course the president who claimed bone spurs to dodge the Vietnam War wants the biggest, bestest military parade ever, with lots of tanks and rockets and flags — zillions of flags — and fighter jets screaming overhead. Why is anyone surprised?
We should have seen it coming. And be careful, parade-watchers: As far as Dear Leader the rich asshole is concerned, anyone who fails to cheer as the bands play and the troops march by will surely be guilty of treason.
It was entirely predictable to learn, thanks to The Post, that the rich asshole has been hectoring the nation’s top military leaders to give him a huge martial parade down Pennsylvania Avenue, complete with heavy weapons. the rich asshole envisions a display of military might like the parades we used to see file past the Kremlin reviewing stand in the days of the Soviet Union — and like the somewhat less grim procession he jealously witnessed in Paris on Bastille Day.
the rich asshole has already matched North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un in dangerous, unhinged rhetoric. Now it appears he hopes to surpass his rival in linear mileage of meaningless military display.
It is hard to imagine any other president summoning his generals to demand not a better strategy in Afghanistan, not a detailed plan for success in Syria, but rather an elaborate entertainment that gives him an opportunity to be seen reviewing the troops. In this reality-show presidency, it sounds like the kind of extravaganza that one could imagine as a series finale. If so, bring it on.
Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders issued one of her customary useless explanations Wednesday. “President the rich asshole is incredibly supportive of America’s great service members who risk their lives every day to keep our country safe,” she said in a statement. “He has asked the Department of Defense to explore a celebration at which all Americans can show their appreciation.”
We’ve had military parades in the capital before, but generally they have been staged to mark a victory — the rout of Saddam Hussein’s forces in the 1991 Gulf War, for example. At present, we don’t have a fresh victory to celebrate — or even a vaguely recent one. the rich asshole wants the pomp without the usual circumstance.
Again, why should anyone be shocked that the rich asshole would care much about style and not at all about substance? The only question is whether the parade idea is evidence of his alleged political genius or his delicate and damaged psyche. I vote for the latter.
There is a semi-plausible argument that the rich asshole could consciously use such a patriotic extravaganza as a wedge, the way he has used the national anthem protests in the NFL. It could be a with-me-or-against-me ploy. If you support the parade, you love America; if you don’t, you don’t.
But a celebratory military parade with nothing to celebrate could also highlight the gulf between the rich asshole’s campaign promises and his actions. He pledged to wind wars down and bring the troops home; he has done quite the opposite. A claim of final victory over the Islamic State — perhaps the rich asshole’s most likely boast — would be made to look empty and foolish by the next terrorist attack.
the rich asshole is more a creature of instinct than calculation. My guess is that both his narcissism and his authoritarianism are at play in his need to honor himself with a parade.
Despite his boastful tweetstorms, the president clearly realizes that his approval ratings are historically low. He is so unpopular that he will not even risk a state visit to London to open the new U.S. Embassy there for fear of being humiliated by mass protests. The campaign-style rallies he so enjoys do not appear well-designed to advance a political agenda; they do, however, boost his spirits and massage his ego.
Imagine all the love he would feel while reviewing a miles-long parade whose participants all had the sworn duty to show him respect as commander in chief. He would be saluted and serenaded to his heart’s content. It would be an egomaniac’s heaven.
the rich asshole’s big parade would also be a massive display of power — not so much the nation’s as his own. There is not a soul on Earth who doubts the overwhelming strength of the U.S. military. I can think of one soul, however, who is insecure enough in his own authority that he accuses members of Congress who do not stand and applaud him of treason.
the rich asshole seems shocked to learn that the legislative and judicial branches do not have to do whatever he says. The military marching bands do, though.
Read more from Eugene Robinson’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook. You can also join him Tuesdays at 1 p.m. for a live Q&A.
Don Lemon breaks into uncontrollable hysterics at just the mention of Omarosa’s name — and then he got worse
Don Lemon cracks up (Photo: Screen capture)
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During a Thursday panel discussion with Symone Sanders and Scott Jennings, CNN host Don Lemon tried to talk about Omarosa Manigault-Newman, but it didn’t quite work out the way he intended.
“Don, it’s Black History Month. We gotta talk about Omarosa?” Sanders asked.
It prompted Lemon to break into hysterics. He laughed, he snorted, his eyes watered and someone had to hand him a tissue. Even after cutting to the video of the former White House aide on “Celebrity Big Brother,” Lemon still struggled not to laugh.
Watch the hilarity below:
Anderson Cooper hilariously mocks Omarosa for pretending she’s whispering a secret on reality television
Anderson Cooper (Photo: Screen capture)
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Omarosa Manigault-Newman was seen in the first episode of “Celebrity Big Brother” whispering secrets to a fellow contestant about President some rich asshole.
Anderson Cooper couldn’t help but laugh at the idea that she was whispering while on television like it was some sort of secret.
“If I whisper into the microphone, nobody can hear me,” Cooper said, pulling his microphone close to his mouth. “What’s going on? That’s crazy.”
“We should do a slow where everybody does that. It’s a ‘Saturday Night Live’ skit,” former Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA) joked.
“And who could have predicted this would happen?” asked Kirsten Powers.
“So shocking,” Margaret Hoover laughed.
Cooper wondered if it is a betrayal to the people she worked with in the White House to go on a show and speak so ill of the person who gave her a job.
Jeffrey Toobin joked that it isn’t actually betrayal if it’s whispered.
Bakari Sellers called it a “hot mess” and noted that the latest from Omarosa is indicative of what this White House is.
“Because you saw the press secretary go in and equate working in the White House to ‘The Apprentice,'” he said.
Watch the comments below:
‘Exactly like his boss’: CNN panel blows smoke at notion John Kelly is a ‘moderating force’ on the rich asshole’s White House
Gen. John Kelly (image via Homeland Security/Creative Commons).
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A CNN International panel on Thursday blew smoke at the notion John Kelly is a “moderating force” in the White House, explaining that the retired general is “exactly like his boss,” some rich asshole
Discussing the recent accusations against Rob Porter—and Kelly’s subsequent defense of the former White House aid—commentator Jamal Simmons told the panel “John Kelly is not the moderating influence on some rich asshole we might have though he was.”
In fact, Simmons suggested, Kelly may be “exactly like his boss,” arguing people may say Kelly is “just as bigoted, just as prejudiced” as the rich asshole.
Conservative commentator Matt Lewis called Kelly’s defense of Porter “really unbelievable.”
“Political malpractice for John Kelly,” Lewis declared.
the rich asshole supporter John Phillips tried to accuse members of Congress of also abusing women, prompting Kirsten Powers to shut him down.
“That’s not what we’re talking about, we’re talking about John Kelly,” Powers said. “What does Congress have to do anything?”
“We’re talking about something in the White House that happened, and whether John Kelly, who’s supposed to be a moderating force, if the way he’s responded this is appropriate,” Powers declared.
Lewis later noted that conservatives had hoped Kelly would bring two changes to the White House.
“One, we hoped that he would bring order and discipline, and I think he sort of did that, it’s a tough job,” Kelly explained. “The other thing that we hoped was that John Kelly would be an adult, he would bring a little bit of moral leadership to a president who lacks it, and I think there he’s failed miserably.”
Watch below, via CNN:
the rich asshole called Priebus to complain about Kelly: report
BY JOHN BOWDEN - 02/08/18 10:06 PM EST
President the rich asshole reportedly called former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus to complain about the job performance of his successor, John Kelly.
The New York Times on Thursday cited people close to the president as saying that the rich asshole phoned several people, including Priebus, to complain about Kelly's performance.
The call comes as the chief of staff finds himself at the center of criticism over the White House response to allegations of domestic abuse leveled against White House staff secretary Rob Porter, who resigned this week.
Kelly initially defended Porter in a Daily Mail story that revealed allegations that Porter physically and emotionally abused his two ex-wives. The White House chief of staff issued a second statement Wednesday saying he was "shocked" by the allegations.
“I was shocked by the new allegations released today against Rob Porter,” Kelly said. “There is no place for domestic violence in our society.” But he added: “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.”
the rich asshole has recently asked advisers their thoughts about Mick Mulvaney, the White House budget director, possibly serving as chief of staff, two sources told the Times. Mulvaney currently also serves as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Kelly's initial support for Porter has been criticized by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, including Republican Sen. John Kennedy (La.), who said Thursday that Kelly made a "bad decision."
“I think Gen. Kelly has done an extraordinary job as chief of staff to President the rich asshole. I think he’s a good man, and sometimes good people make bad decisions,” Kennedy said.
Porter denied the claims in a statement announcing his resignation from the White House on Wednesday, calling them part of a "coordinated smear campaign."
Rob Porter’s ex-wife confesses she’s fearful for Hope Hicks: ‘I don’t think he’ll stop’
Rob Porter and Hope Hicks (Photos: Screen capture and via Twitter)
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Jennie Willoughby, the second ex-wife of disgraced White House staffer Rob Porter, revealed to CNN’s Anderson Cooper that she fears for the safety of his current girlfriend Hope Hicks.
The former White House aide recently resigned after news came out about alleged abuse from two ex-wives. Hicks serves as the White House communications director has been dating Porter for several months and helped draft statements to defend him. But Willoughby warned that when Porter feels stressed is when he often strikes.
“I don’t think he’s changed,” she told Cooper, who asked if that concerns her. “It worries me for a lot of reasons. I mean, it definitely worries me because if I’m being frank with you, if he hasn’t already been abusive with Hope, he will. And particularly now that he’s under a lot of stress and scrutiny. That’s when the behaviors come out. If he hasn’t already, he will.”
Cooper asked if she thought Porter could stop and Willoughby said she doesn’t believe he can.
“I don’t think that he has done the self-reflective work to acknowledge this issue,” she said. “I don’t think that he has really taken the time to deconstruct why it is that he behaves this way, and until he’s able to do that, I don’t know that he has control over it.”
“So, you’re really worried about Hope Hicks?” Cooper asked.
“I am worried.”
She also detailed the ways in which Porter was still in contact with her up until a few weeks ago attempting to manipulate her into changing her Instagram posts and blog posts that talk about abuse that don’t mention his name.
Watch the clip below:
CNN’s Joan Walsh smacks down right winger after he tells her she’s ‘not fit to shine John Kelly’s shoes’
Joan Walsh, Erin Burnett and Steve Cortes (Photo: Screen capture)
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In a shocking panel discussion about the growing discontent with President some rich asshole’s chief of staff, John Kelly, conservative commentator Steve Cortes came after Joan Walsh of The Nation in a personal attack.
Rumors have spread of the first family being frustrated with Kelly after the flub over Sgt. La David Johnson and his personal attack on Rep. Frederick Wilson (D-FL). That followed with a series of missteps including calling DREAMers “too lazy to get off their asses” to apply for DACA status. Finally, it was revealed he was ignoring concerns over senior aide Rob Porter and his alleged history of domestic violence.
Kelly was seen by Republicans concerned about the rich asshole’s leadership as a moderating force, but has proven to be anything but.
Host Erin Burnett questioned whether it was responsible for Kelly to not investigate Porter when it was clear there were problems and the FBI refused to give him the adequate clearance required to do his job.
Cortes blamed “the left” saying that they are coming after Kelly as “the latest boogy-man” or the “newest Steve Bannon.” He then pivoted to talk about Kelly’s service and brought up his son who died in the line of duty.
“This is a hero should be honored and venerated,” Cortes said. “A man who lives to serve the American public and American security. And for you, Joan, frankly, to besmirch him in this way–”
“Besmirch him? He besmirched himself,” Walsh replied.
“I am not fit to shine his shoes and frankly, neither of you, quite frankly!” Cortes shouted.
“I thank him for his service, Steve, stop filibustering,” Walsh said as Cortes continued to rail against the left and what a hero Kelly was. “I thank him for his service. I lament the loss of his son. Steve stop. Just shush. I lament the loss of his son I thank him for his service. And I think about the two ex-wives plus a girlfriend who told the FBI this information. It’s not like he just found it out last night, Steve. And I don’t know how you can live with yourself pretending.”
“Oh yes he did. Oh, yes he did,” Cortes disagreed, saying that Kelly only recently learned of the abuse allegations.
“No, he didn’t. OK, you’re calling CNN, you’re calling our reporters here liars?” Walsh asked. “They have reported, they have confirmed.”
Burnett cut in to say that the White House isn’t even trying to deny that Kelly knew, but she argued that he likely didn’t know that a photo existed. News of domestic violence is perhaps one thing while a photo of the violence is another, she said.
“Just because he’s a hero in one part of his life doesn’t mean he’s a hero in the rest. These women were betrayed by him,” Walsh said.
“I disagree. He is a hero, period, American hero, period. But here’s what matters, I think, OK, Erin, here’s what matters: did he know he beat his wife? Of course not. He would have never hired him. Did he know about the divorces? Yes, that was known,” Cortes claimed.
The devolved into chaos from there. Porter’s wives are slated to speak to the media about who they told and when they were told. Likely there will be an investigation into what was known and when it was known.
Watch below:
Fox News’ attack on Sen. Mark Warner was so pathetic that even Sen. Marco Rubio spoke up against it.
With the Russia investigation moving full steam ahead and the Nunes memo crashing and burning, some rich asshole’s allies at Fox News are desperate to do anything they can to delegitimize people looking into the matter.
Their latest target: ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner. But their attempt to attack him was so ridiculous that even Sen. Marco Rubio, as partisan a Republican as they come, leapt to his defense.
On Thursday, Fox News broke a story about how Warner supposedly “secretly” exchanged text messages with a lobbyist representing a Russian oligarch, for info about British intelligence veteran and the rich asshole dossier author Christopher Steele. “Throughout the text exchanges, Warner seemed particularly intent on connecting directly with Steele without anyone else on the Senate Intelligence Committee being in the loop — at least initially,” the story claimed.
But immediately after it was released, Rubio debunked its central claim on Twitter:
Sen.Warner fully disclosed this to the committee four months ago.Has had zero impact on our work. fxn.ws/2nXIdM6 #FoxNews
It appears that Warner has been in the crosshairs of the Russia probe’s opponents for some time. In late January, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange messaged Sean Hannity promising a scoop on Warner — or at least, a person he thought was Sean Hannity.
Warner has been fighting tooth and nail to keep the Russia probe going in the Intelligence Committee, one of the few committees where Senate Republicans have not managed to blow up the investigation.
If the rich asshole’s friends at Fox News thought they were taking down Warner, they were dead wrong. It is plain to everyone working with him, Democratic and Republican alike, that the Fox story is a desperate ploy to twist the facts.
UPDATE: Turns out the facts weren’t plain to everyone. some rich asshole repeated the false smear two hours after Rubio debunked it:
Two more: 7 FBI officials named in GOP’s ‘texting’ witch hunt have resigned or been fired — so far
Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, photo courtesy of the Federal Bureau of Investigations.
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Two more FBI officials cited in the declassified text messages between bureau employees Lisa Page and Peter Strzok resigned from their posts on Thursday, bringing the total of employees mentioned in the texts that are no longer in their original positions up to seven.
Politico reported Thursday that FBI assistant director for public affairs Mike Kortan will retire next week, and David Laufman, the Justice Department’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section chief, also resigned.
Both men were mentioned by Page, and FBI lawyer, and Strzok, an agent formerly assigned to special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into ties between President some rich asshole and the Russian government.
The two employees, who were at the time engaged in an extramarital affair, are one of the cornerstones of the GOP’s supposed “evidence” of anti-the rich asshole bias within the DOJ and FBI due to discussions of their personal political opinions as well as their work on the bureau’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server during her time as secretary of state.
Kortan, Politico noted, “has told colleagues for months or longer that he was on the verge of retirement.” Laufman’s resignation for personal reasons, on the other hand, was reportedly more surprising. Both were mentioned in a negative light in the messages between Page and Strzok.
“Kortan majorly screwed up,” one April 2016 text from Page read.
“I am getting aggravated at Laufman,” Strzok said in a March 2016 message.
Along with Strzok, who was fired from his position with Mueller’s office last year after his animus for the rich asshole became known to the bureau, the list of employees mentioned in the texts who have resigned or been fired includes former FBI director James Comey, whose firing by the president triggered the special counsel investigationand former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who retired early to much fanfare last month.
It also includes Comey’s former chief of staff James Rybicki and FBI general counsel James Baker, Politico noted.
Fox News executive editor John Moody worries that the "darker, gayer" athletes competing in the winter games will cost Team USA victory.
Fox News executive editor John Moody has a lot to say about Team USA athletes — but none of it is about their athletic accomplishments.
In an editorial published just ahead of Friday’s opening ceremony, Moody expressed his concern that the “darker, gayer” athletes representing the United States at the 2018 Olympic Games would cost the team medals, and asserted — without any evidence — that some athletes may have been given a spot on Team USA because of their skin color or sexual orientation, rather than their performance.
“Unless it’s changed overnight, the motto of the Olympics, since 1894, has been ‘Faster, Higher, Stronger,'” Moody wrote on FoxNews.com. “It appears the U.S. Olympic Committee would like to change that to ‘Darker, Gayer, Different.’ If your goal is to win medals, that won’t work.”
Moody went on to complain about a recent Washington Post article in which a USOC official expressed pride in the diversity of the 2018 U.S. Olympic delegation, bemoaning what he called an “embarrassing laundry list of how many African-Americans, Asians and openly gay athletes are on this year’s U.S. team.”
“No sport that we are aware of awards points — or medals — for skin color or sexual orientation,” Moody wrote, asking if this year’s athletes were “selected because they’re the best at what they do, or because they’re the best publicity for our current obsession with having one each from Column A, B and C?”
From there, Moody’s editorial devolved into a hyperbolic rant about — what else — political correctness, which the Fox News executive cited as the reason for Team USA’s diverse membership.
“Insisting that sports bow to political correctness by assigning teams quotas for race, religion or sexuality is like saying that professional basketball goals will be worth four points if achieved by a minority in that sport – white guys, for instance – instead of the two or three points awarded to black players, who make up 81 percent of the NBA. Any plans to fix that disparity? Didn’t think so,” Moody huffed.
No one is insisting that, though. There are no “quotas” or selection criteria based on race, religion, or sexual orientation used in the determination of who is qualified for membership on any of the U.S. Olympic teams. The closest thing to a “quota” in Olympic team membership is Principle 6 — the Olympic Charter’s nondiscrimination clause.
But Moody was more interested in stoking the flames of the right-wing outrage machine than acknowledging those pesky facts. Continuing his tirade, Moody went on to blame non-existent complaints about political correctness for ruining the competitive nature of sports.
“Complaining that every team isn’t a rainbow of political correctness defeats the purpose of sports, which is competition,” he wrote. “At the Olympic level, not everyone is a winner. Not everyone gets a little plastic trophy to take home.”
This year’s winter team includes more African-American and Asian-American athletes than any previous U.S. winter team, as well as the first two openly gay male athletes to represent the U.S. in the winter games. While the team is the most diverse ever, the composition of the team is still overwhelmingly white and heterosexual. Out of 243 athletes, 10 are black, 10 are Asian, and the rest are “predominantly white,” according to the Washington Post.
And despite what Moody alleges, there is no reason to suggest that the increased diversity of the 2018 team comes at the expense of competitiveness.
But Moody — who was reportedly handpicked by former Fox News chief Roger Ailes — knows what sells. For the Fox News crowd, outrage is money in the bank — and Moody has shown his willingness to chase that paycheck wherever it takes him, even if it means taking jabs at American athletes on the eve of the Olympic Games.
FBI likely has recordings of Bannon and Carter Page discussing the rich asshole-Russia dossier: report
Former the rich asshole advisers Steve Bannon (left) and Carter Page (right). Images via screengrab.
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New analysis of the House Intelligence Committee’s controversial memo alleging FBI surveillance abuses reveals the bureau likely has recordings of former the rich asshole adviser Carter Page speaking to ex-White House aide Steve Bannon about the rich asshole-Russia dossier.
Politico reported Thursday that Page had already testified before the intelligence committee that he had a January 2017 interaction with Bannon, who asked him to nix a scheduled interview with MSNBC the week of the release of the Fusion GPS dossier, which contains allegations that President some rich asshole coordinated with Russians to win the American presidential election.
“If Page was using one of his standard phones, it was probably picked up,” Elizabeth Goiten, a former Justice Department attorney who now co-directs the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program, told Politico.
“The significance of a possible FBI recording depends on the exact content of the conversation between Bannon and Page, about which Page has been vague,” the report noted. “But it means the FBI’s surveillance of Page — which has been the subject of intense partisan anger in Washington — may have touched one of the highest-ranking figures in the rich asshole’s incoming administration just days before inauguration.”
Bannon, the report continued, did not comment on Politico‘s report and “hasn’t been accused of any impropriety.”
The “dodgy dossier,” as Page has repeatedly called the Fusion GPS document, now lies at the heart of the GOP’s argument that the FBI and DOJ abused their surveillance powers. They allege the dossier was the main motivator the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court granting and renewing warrants for Page’s wiretaps. Page, however, has been under FBI surveillance since 2014 for his suspected ties to the Kremlin
WATCH LIVE: Republican Rand Paul trashes his own ‘complicit’ party over trillion dollar deficit spending
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) speaks on the Senate floor about the spending bill. Image via screengrab.
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Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) on Thursday went off on the Republican Party for their role in the nation’s trillion-dollar-and-growing deficit.
As the government spending was just hours from running out, Paul said he “can’t in all good honesty and all good faith just look the other way because my party is now complicit in the deficits.” He later said both parties are to blame for the growing deficit.
Watch a live feed of Paul and other senators’ comments below via PBS NewsHour:
White House chief of staff John Kelly has gone from the man who would save the rich asshole to the latest guy on the chopping block.
Few members of some rich asshole’s administration have fallen as far as retired general and White House chief of staff John Kelly, in large part because few members had far to fall in the first place.
Once, he was considered broadly by the press to be a nonpartisan steady hand who would clean up the White House and bring order to an administration that had none. But Kelly’s avid defense of Rob Porter following the story that he violently assaulted two ex-wives, and the subsequent controversy over what Kelly knew and when, has put his credibility and career on the line. The White House is in worse disarray than ever before.
A new report in the Washington Post finds overwhelming condemnation of Kelly by experts.
Former GOP presidential adviser Peter Wehner was horrified. “To have a chief of staff defend the integrity of a person who’s been credibly accused of being a wife beater is just stunning … and unconscionable. What he’s done as chief of staff doesn’t undo what he did as a heroic war figure, but it diminishes him as a person, and that’s regrettable,” Wehner told the Post.
Meanwhile, White House historian Chris Whipple called Kelly “politically inept” and said, “It’s clear now that those expectations everybody had that Kelly would somehow be the grown-up in the room, a moderating force who would smooth the rough edges off of the rich asshole, were just completely unrealistic.”
While even a competent hand might have found taming the rich asshole impossible, Kelly has eroded public confidence with a series of decisions that show his personal values are, in the worst possible sense, the same as the rich asshole’s.
Before his tenure as chief of staff, there was cause to doubt Kelly would make reasonable decisions. In his capacity as homeland security secretary, he happily enforced the rich asshole’s Muslim travel ban and presided over immigration raids at churches and family courts.
Upon taking the reins at the White House, Kelly besmirched his name by praising Robert E. Lee, maliciously lying about a black congresswoman who stood up for a Gold Star widow the rich asshole insulted, personally killing congressional deals meant to protect Dreamers, and claiming young people who didn’t sign up for DACA were “too lazy to get off their asses.”
But his defense of Porter may have been the last straw, not just with the media and the public but with the rich asshole himself. One GOP official told Vanity Fair that the rich asshole is “fucking pissed” about the Porter controversy, Jared and Ivanka are exploring replacements for Kelly, and former the rich asshole campaign manager Corey Lewandowski has urged the rich asshole to get rid of him.
Far from bringing order to the West Wing, Kelly has brought it to a new humiliating low. And regardless of whether he stays or goes, the disrepute and failure he has wrought on himself and others will linger.
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