the rich asshole’s tariffs intended as ‘middle finger’ to White House aides he no longer likes: report
some rich asshole (Photo: Gage Skidmore/Flickr)
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President some rich asshole doesn’t like being told what to do, and he’s reportedly setting policies to thumb his nose at advisers who have lost his trust.
the rich asshole has sidelined chief of staff John Kelly and economic adviser Gary Cohn and intends to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum, which he’s wanted to do since the campaign, to deliberately disrespect them, reported Axios.
“His staff at times managed to talk him off the ledge. No more,” reported Mike Allen and Jonathan Swan. “Tired of the restraints, tired of his staff, the rich asshole is reveling in ticking off just about every person who serves him.”
the rich asshole has grown to despise Kelly’s authority and purposefully bypassed his process to announce the tariffs, which triggered a stock market dip, and were intended as a “middle finger” to Cohn, the website reported.
Kelly is engaged in a power struggle with the rich asshole’s children and son-in-law Jared Kushner, and Cohn seems likely to leave now that he’s lost the fight on tariffs.
National security adviser H.R. McMaster, who the rich asshole regards as long-winded and opinionated, is also reportedly on his way out of the White House.
Senior officials and staff tried to slow-walk the process on tariffs, possibly in hopes that he would lose interest, but Axios reported that he “finally exploded” when aides wouldn’t give him what he’s wanted since before launching his campaign.
“Staff can try to impose their views on the rich asshole,” Axios reported. “But when it comes to trade — the one thing he’s believed consistently for 30 years — they will inevitably fail.”
the rich asshole trade tariffs are a wanton act of economic self-destruction
BY COLIN GRABOW, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 03/02/18 09:05 AM EST
Six months after reportedly thundering to senior White House staffers of his desire for tariffs, President the rich asshole may be about to finally get his wish. Although details remain scant, the rich asshole says that next week he will approve the imposition of 10 percent duties on imported aluminum and 25 percent on foreign-made steel.
Making clear this was no passing fancy, the president also stressed that the protectionist measures would be in place “for a long period of time.”
Economists and trade watchers across the Twittersphere were equal parts amazed and aghast when the news broke — it’s not often that leaders of advanced economies vow to engage in such brazen and wanton acts of economic self-destruction.
On the steel front, domestic production is little changed from that of 20 or 30 years ago, and the U.S. military requires a mere 3 percent of this to meet its needs. Of the top 10 foreign suppliers of steel, meanwhile, China does not feature and six are countries with whom the United States has mutual defense arrangements.
Regarding aluminum, the Commerce Department admits that “defense-related products” require only 10 percent of U.S. domestic production. The No. 1 source of imports in 2016, meanwhile, was NATO-ally Canada, which accounted for more aluminum imports than the next 11 biggest sources combined.
Little wonder that Secretary of Defense James Mattis is said to be among those in the administration opposed to these tariffs and recently authored a memo expressing concern about the impact of their broad use on key allies.
The economic case is even more preposterous. While the rich asshole argues that the steel and aluminum tariffs will produce employment gains in those sectors, he fails to recognize that these will be dwarfed by job losses among steel-consuming industries which account for a vastly greater number of workers.
This is no idle theorizing. When President George W. Bush imposed tariffs on imported steel ranging from eight to 30 percent in 2002, one study found that the result was a net loss of 200,000 jobs. That stock markets immediately dove on news of the tariffs is also indicative of the likely impact on the broader economy.
The bad news doesn’t end there.
Beyond shooting the economy in the foot, the rich asshole’s tariff move also poses a major threat to the international trading system. By invoking a national security justification, the president will take advantage of a little-used provision under World Trade Organization rules that allows for such measures if a genuine threat exists.
Should the rich asshole proceed on such dubious grounds, however, it could open a Pandora’s box of tariffs by allowing WTO members to follow suit with tariffs based on the flimsiest of justifications. Talk of tariff retaliation is already in the air.
It’s time for Congress to step up to the plate. Should President the rich asshole opt to pull the trigger on his tariff threats, leaders in Congress will need to act and reassert their authority over trade policy. If cooler heads are to prevail, it seems increasingly clear they won’t be found within the walls of the White House.
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RELATED STORIES FROM THE HILL
- REMY NATHAN: Aerospace and defense industries need aluminum, steel and trade
- FORMER REP. DONALD MANZULLO (R-ILL.): Déjà vu all over again: the rich asshole’s steel tariff redux
- JOE INNACE: Protecting steel as price is at a 7-year high is a head-scratcher
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Both Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) should move to introduce legislation that would nullify the rich asshole’s actions.
Even if the rich asshole indicates second thoughts and pulls back from his tariff threat — a distinct possibility at a time when policy preferences seem dictated by the president’s mood swings — a greater role for Congress is still appropriate.
One possible starting place would be a bill introduced by Sen. Mike Lee(R-Utah) last year. Called the Global Trade Accountability Act, the legislation would subject presidential trade actions, including tariff increases, to congressional approval.
Such a law would have been useful in the wake of the rich asshole’s ill-advised decision to withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and would have helped calm the waters in the wake of his continued threats of withdrawal from NAFTA.
With a minimum of three more years of the the rich asshole administration in the White House, the United States cannot afford a rollercoaster ride in the realm of trade policy. It’s time for Congress to apply the brakes and apply some much-needed supervision.
Colin Grabow is a policy analyst at the Cato Institute's Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies
Colin Grabow is a policy analyst at the Cato Institute's Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies
Ex-ethics chief scalds the rich asshole and his Cabinet secretaries for ‘living like French nobles before the revolution’
Former head of Office of Government Ethics Walter Shaub (Photo: Screen capture)
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Speaking with “New Day” host Alisyn Camerota on Friday morning, former Office of Government Ethics director Walter Shaub said the lavish lifestyles of the rich asshole administration officials on the public dime is a direct result of the rich asshole’s near-weekly trips to his Mar-a-Lago resort.
Addressing HUD Secretary Ben Carson’s plan to purchase a $31,000 dining room set, host Camerota asked, “On what planet is that okay? I mean his budget was $5,000 for the entire office.”
“This is the tone from the top I was worried about,” Shaub — who resigned from his position under the rich asshole — explained. “I said in my speech back in January, before the inauguration, I sounded the warning that tone for the top was going to have an effect on his top officials and will trickle down.”
“So you’ve got the president spending tons of money going to Mar-a-Lago almost every weekend,” he continued. “And following that example, you’ve got other cabinet officials flying around on luxury chartered jets, or other kinds of expenses like coins with Interior Secretary Zinke’s name or the code of silence that Pruitt has installed at the EPA, straight out of Maxwell Smart.”
“Now you’ve got Ben Carson taking his turn, living like a French noble before the revolution,” he added. “I think these guys think they were chosen to be French nobles before the revolution.”
Watch the video below uploaded to Twitter by CNN:
WH's Sanders: McMaster’s 'not going anywhere'
BY MAX GREENWOOD - 03/02/18 08:58 AM EST
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders sought on Friday to dispel reports that national security adviser H.R. McMaster could be replaced as soon as this month.
"Look, Gen. McMaster's not going anywhere," Sanders said on "Fox & Friends."
"As the president said yesterday in the Oval Office to a number of people, he thinks he's doing a great job," she said. "He's glad he's here."
Sanders's comments came after NBC News reported Thursday that White House chief of staff John Kelly and Defense Secretary James Mattis are working on a plan to replace McMaster.
White House deputy press secretary Raj Shah said Thursday that the rich asshole administration had no announcements regarding McMaster's possible departure from the White House, but stopped short of an outright denial of the report.
"We frequently face rumor and innuendo about senior administration officials," he said in a statement. "There are no personnel announcements at this time."
McMaster stepped into the national security adviser role in February 2017, shortly after President the rich asshole's first national security adviser Michael Flynn was ousted amid revelations that he lied to Vice President Pence and others about his contacts with the Russian ambassador to the U.S.
But McMaster, an Army lieutenant general, has often found himself at odds with the rich asshole, and media reports have indicated clashes between the men.
the rich asshole rebuked McMaster last month after the national security adviser said the evidence that Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election was "incontrovertible."
"General McMaster forgot to say that the results of the 2016 election were not impacted or changed by the Russians and that the only Collusion was between Russia and Crooked H, the DNC and the Dems," the rich asshole tweeted.
the rich asshole’s HHS Chief Busted Forcing Rape Victims To Carry Unwanted Pregnancies To Term
some rich asshole has a penchant for appointing people to position that they are not only grossly unqualified for, but also hostile to the missions of said position. Case in point, his Health and Human Services Refugee Resettlement Chief, E. Scott Lloyd.
This is a man with well-known, staunch anti-abortion views. He has used his position of power to force undocumented women – including rape victims – to give birth against their will. Oh, and did we also mention that he also told the people in his office to deny legal counsel to the women – some of them teenage girls – in the care of his agency? It doesn’t get much more despicable than that.
Luckily, the dictatorship that the rich asshole wants to build has yet to materialize and we still have great investigative reporters to expose this sort of horrific abuse of power at the expense of the most vulnerable people in our society. The Rachel Maddow show exposed what Lloyd has been doing, and now the Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement is being sued for these egregious Constitutional violations. Maddow highlighted court documents that previously had not been released regarding Lloyd’s actions, the most troubling of which is when he tried to force a 17-year-old rape victim to carry a pregnancy to term. She eventually, with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) get an abortion after weeks and weeks of trying. It is unclear what has become of at least three other women in the care of Lloyd’s agency who found themselves in similar dire circumstances.
Lloyd even got personally involved, trying to manipulate and guilt these women into carrying their pregnancies to term – even going so far as to say that undocumented immigrants are not entitled to control their own bodies under the United States Constitution.
This is insane in the extreme. And the Right tries to say that there’s no war on women. What this man is doing is criminal, and he should be removed immediately.
Watch the bombshell report below, courtesy of MSNBC and The Rachel Maddow Show:
Featured image via video screen capture
By
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March 2, 2018
The White House refuses to stand up to Moscow, even after Russia brags about launching missile attacks against the U.S.
It wasn’t the avowed foreign adversary who on Thursday bragged that his country has new “invincible” intercontinental cruise missiles that can pierce American defenses, and who seemed to fantasize about launching a deadly aerial strike on Florida.
No, the rich asshole didn’t confront Vladimir Putin following the Russian leader’s dangerous saber rattling.
Instead, at 5:49 a.m., the rich asshole lashed out at a late-night comedian: “Alec Baldwin, whose dying mediocre career was saved by his terrible impersonation of me on SNL, now says playing me was agony. Alec, it was agony for those who were forced to watch. Bring back Darrell Hammond, funnier and a far greater talent!
The actor quickly, and deftly, fired back:
the rich asshole’s priorities are, of course, warped. The supposed commander-in-chief stands down in the face of Putin openly threatening the United States, but rushes into a social media spat with an actor.
During his annual state of the nation address in Moscow, Putin bragged about the country’s alleged weapons breakthrough.
“With the new system, there is no limitation,” Putin said. “As you can see from this video, it can attack any target through the North Pole or via the South Pole. No missile defense system will be able to withstand it.”
Incredibly, “The video simulation showed multiple nuclear missiles traveling across the globe and through space before showering down on southern Florida, where President some rich asshole’s Mar-a-Lago resort happens to be,” the Huffington Post reported. “The footage of Florida being hit was recycled from a 2015 video created by the Russians.”
the rich asshole’s response the Putin’s public taunt about being able to strike the U.S. at will? Complete silence. the rich asshole remains incapable of standing up to Russia.
Note that last month the White House bragged about the next-level sanctions it’s imposing against North Korea. The move was made to pressure the regime to end its nuclear weapons program, which the rich asshole seems to be singularly obsessed with.
“If the sanctions don’t work, we’ll have to go to phase two, and phase two may be a very rough thing,” the rich asshole said at the time, hinting at military strikes.
By contrast, more than 500 members of Congress voted to impose sanctions on Russia for its role in undermining the 2016 election, yet the rich asshole still refuses to implement the sanctions.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders even suggested Russia hadn’t done anything wrong, therefore didn’t deserve to be hit with sanctions.
Is the rich asshole compromised by Moscow? Special counsel Robert Mueller might soon answer that question. For now, the rich asshole sure acts like he is.
Kushner family business failed to get financing from Qatar — and the country got blockaded a month later
Ivanka the rich asshole arrives with husband, Jared Kushner, at the Vanity Fair party to begin the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival in New York, April 17, 2012. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson/File Photo
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A new report from The Intercept is raising fresh questions about the role that the rich asshole son-in-law Jared Kushner’s family business interests play in the rich asshole administration foreign policy.
According to the publication’s sources, Kushner Companies met last April with Qatari Finance Minister Ali Sharif Al Emadi to try to secure an investment for its troubled property at 666 Fifth Avenue in New York City.
The attempt to get money directly from the Qatari government apparently went nowhere, however — and then weeks later Qatar was hit by a massive international blockade.
“The failure to broker the deal would be followed only a month later by a Middle Eastern diplomatic row in which Jared Kushner provided critical support to Qatar’s neighbors,” the publication writes. “Led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, a group of Middle Eastern countries, with Kushner’s backing, led a diplomatic assault that culminated in a blockade of Qatar. Kushner, according to reports at the time, subsequently undermined efforts by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to bring an end to the standoff.”
Interestingly, the United Arab Emirates was one of the countries that U.S. intelligence officials reportedly found discussing ways to use Kushner’s family business interests to manipulate him to do their bidding.
Kushner’s security clearance last week was downgraded and he is now blocked from accessing top-secret classified information, despite the fact that he has been charged by President some rich asshole with bringing peace to the Middle East.
In tweets calling for trade war, the rich asshole reveals he doesn’t know how tariffs work
"Trade wars are good, and easy to win."
On Friday morning, President the rich asshole expressed his support for trade wars, even though his unexpected announcement of imposing tariffs on foreign steel on Thursday rattled the markets.
“[…] trade wars are good, and easy to win,” the rich asshole tweeted.
A few hours later, the rich asshole added that the United States steel industry is in danger, and without steel, there is no country.
the rich asshole’s plan would impose a tariff of 25 percent on steel imports and 10 percent on aluminum, but he did not specify whether certain countries would be exempt from the tariffs. This approach towards penalizing foreign steel is an attempt by the rich asshole to make good on a campaign promise of protecting the American steel industry, but could have, what House Speaker Paul Ryan called, “unintended consequences.”
Unfortunately for the rich asshole, tariffs are taxes and aren’t necessarily paid by countries like China, but more so by American consumers of Chinese goods. These tariffs will also likely have the adverse affect of rising the prices of American goods that rely on steel.
As The New York Times put it:
The most immediate losers are the industries that rely on steel and aluminum as an input and will face higher prices. That includes some of the nation’s biggest industries: the automobile sector; aerospace; heavy equipment; and construction. In short, the chassis of a Ford, the body of a Caterpillar bulldozer, the wings of a Boeing aircraft, and the steel girders inside a New York skyscraper are all about to get more expensive.
Following the tariff announcement on Thursday, some American breweries voiced their concerns that an aluminum tariff would raise the costs of their products.
“Anything that raises our raw material costs will affect the bottom line,” Henry Schwartz, founder and CEO of Milwaukee brewery MobCraft Beer told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
According to the beer industry experts, for every dollar worth of beer produced in the U.S., brewers spend about a dime for cans and roughly five cents for aluminum. This small amount will quickly add up, considering brewers produce more than $55 billion worth of beer annually.
The 10 percent tariff on aluminum would cost beer and beverage producers $256.3 million, according to the Beer Institute, based in Washington, D.C.
Members of the president’s own party cautioned that the rich asshole may not actually be aware of what he is doing.
“I am highly concerned about the negative aspects. I completely want fair and reciprocal trade and there’s no doubt about it America’s has been magnanimous in its trade laws,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) told reporters Thursday. “There have been abuses building up over the years. We should target those abuses. I’m just not sure this is the way to do it overall with the steel and aluminum. It really will have negative and unintended consequences.”
Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) called the rich asshole’s Friday morning tweet “kooky 18th century protectionism.”
“Trade wars are never won. Trade wars are lost by both sides. Kooky 18th century protectionism will jack up prices on American families — and will prompt retaliation from other countries,” Sasse said in a statement. “Make no mistake: If the President goes through with this, it will kill American jobs — that’s what every trade war ultimately does. So much losing.”
Both the tariff announcement and the rich asshole’s Friday morning tweets surprised even the highest members of his cabinet. Gary Cohn, the president’s chief economic adviser, was reportedly considering leaving the White House but stayed behind to stop the president from imposing tariffs. Now that Cohn has seemingly lost the battle, his future in the White House is unclear.
White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders appeared on Fox & Friends on Friday morning and told viewers that nothing is set in stone and the details on who will be exempt from tariffs, if anyone, have yet to be finalized.
“The president expects to make those announcements next week and those details are being finalized,” Sanders said. “In terms of what that will look like, I can’t get ahead of the president’s announcement.”
Not exempting Canada and Europe from tariffs would have huge trade implications, as both nations sell a lot of steel to the United States.
Morning Joe panel agrees: Presidency has ‘twisted’ the rich asshole — and they’re ‘truly terrified’ of what’s next
Joe Scarborough and Donny Deutsch (MSNBC)
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MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Donny Deutsch have known President some rich asshole for years, and they agreed he barely resembled the outsize character they remembered.
Former first lady Michelle Obama said at the 2016 Democratic National Convention that “being president doesn’t change who you are, it reveals who you are” — and Scarborough and Deutsch were alarmed at what they saw in their former friend.
“I always said he was not necessarily the type of guy I would want to be in a foxhole with, but I always felt that he was in on the joke, very sharp,” Deutsch said. “Kind of a lounge act, and he was playing — his eyes were twinkling, like a Howard Stern.”
“Howard knows what he’s doing, and he’s a different guy and I always felt, you know what? It was something charming,” Deutsch added. “Like I said, wouldn’t want to be in a foxhole with him, you had to check your pockets when he left. I’m not saying he’s the most moral high ground, but nothing as far as the twisted, in many cases, cruel and evil and also kind of unhinged as we’re seeing now, and what scares me and this week more than ever you felt something shift. You really felt the noose tightening.”
Deutsch then doubled down on his comments from earlier in Friday’s “Morning Joe,” and warned the rich asshole could launch a nuclear war to distract from the special counsel probe that’s reaching deeper into the White House.
“I am truly terrified of what he is capable of doing,” Deutsch said. “I know this is insane, but nothing short of starting a war to protect his hide and we have to start to look at this latest tariff situation this clearly cost a lot of people a lot of money but not lives, what is this man cornered, dangerous, unhinged now, a very different man than 20 years ago — what is he capable of doing?”
Scarborough agreed there had been warning signs, such as his bizarre hatred for Rosie O’Donnell, and he admitted he never considered voting for the rich asshole — but he said his presidency had been even more “unmoored” than he could have imagined.
“Yes, he could be cruel publicly, he could be unkind, but the level of chaos, I think, has far exceeded a lot of people’s expectations, and the problem now is, again, what Donny said, cornered,” Scarborough said. “some rich asshole is proving to be a very dangerous person, a very dangerous person for his own White House, a very dangerous person for people who are investing in the stock market and a very dangerous person for those of us who care about U.S. interests globally.”
CNN panel ridicules the rich asshole’s early morning fixation on the ‘dieing career of Alex Baldwin’ as White House falls apart
Alisyn Camerota, Chris Cuomo -- CNN screengrab
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Reacting to President some rich asshole’s bizarre — and misspelled — Twitter attack on actor Alec Baldwin very early Friday morning, the CNN New Day panel wondered what must going through the president’s mind as his White House is caught up in turnover chaos and his steel tariff announcement was brutally attacked.
the rich asshole was on Twitter earlier than usual on Friday randomly attacking actor Baldwin after watching a Fox News report about the actor.
“Alex [sic] Baldwin, whose dieing [sic] mediocre career was saved by his impersonation of me on SNL, now says playing DJT was agony for him,” the rich asshole tweeted. “Alex, it was also agony for those who were forced to watch. You were terrible. Bring back Darrell Hammond, much funnier and a far greater talent!”
The tweet was deleted after a few moments, only to be replaced by one with the spelling fixed — but making no more sense.
On CNN’s ‘New Day,’ host Alisyn Camerota read the tweet to the amused panel and noted the rich asshole’s errors and the randomness of it all.
“I think he should resubmit this for his spelling errors,” a laughing Camerota said. “But he deleted it.”
“He deleted it which, by the way, doesn’t work,” co-host Chris Cuomo added. “You’re the president of the United States, we report everything you put out for posterity.”
“The president of the United States woke up at 5:42 this morning and the first thing he is thinking is critiquing who should play him on ‘Saturday Night Live,'” an incredulous John Avlon submitted. “It’s beneath the office and it shows that he really should be in the role he’s happy with, commentating on the Oscars, being famous for famous sake. Responsibility doesn’t seem to suit him.”
“I’m sure it was just autocorrect, the true demon in all grammatical errors,” Cuomo smirked.
Watch the video below via CNN:
MSNBC’s Donny Deutsch warns ‘cornered’ the rich asshole will destroy the world with nukes to ‘save his own hide’
Donny Deutsch (MSNBC)
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MSNBC contributor Donny Deutsch dreads what President some rich asshole might do now that Hope Hicks, his trusted aide and security blanket, has left the White House.
The president has apparently decided to launch a trade war through aluminum and steel tariffs as his most trusted advisers — Hicks, son-in-law Jared Kushner and daughter Ivanka the rich asshole — have either decided to leave or been hit with a series of damaging blows.
Friday morning, the president tweeted a misspelled attack against actor Alex Baldwin and then boasted that trade wars are both “good, and easy to win” — and the “Morning Joe” contributor winced at what might come next.
“This week if you were concerned about some rich asshole being our president, you really felt the noose tighten with Hope Hicks leaving and the Kushner story and the new conspiracy leading directly to the rich asshole from (special counsel) Robert Mueller’s point of view,” Deutsch said. “You really feel it, and the bad news, though, if you’re somebody that’s concerned about the rich asshole, is you’re really starting to see the beginning of a cornered some rich asshole, and what is he capable of doing at the expense of the world or the United States or the consumer to save himself?”
Deutsch, who has known the rich asshole for years, worries that the president’s enthusiasm for a trade war might signal his eagerness to provoke nuclear war.
“I’m concerned that this is a harbinger of things to come, in what will he do with North Korea at the expense of the rest of the world?” Deutsch said. “What will he do in any scenario to do this kind of shiny toy thing?”
He said the loss of Hicks, the White House communications director who had been at the rich asshole’s side since the beginning of his long-shot presidential campaign, could prove devastating to an increasingly unhinged presidency.
“Hope Hicks leaving is very scary,” he said. “I mean, if you know people that have run companies or people in organizations, there’s always one or two people in there that run a company that you go to that is somehow the sanity check or somehow the calmer. That’s not there anymore, and as the Mueller noose continue tighten and the Kushner noose continues to tighten, this is a man with his hand at the controls. Yes, a trade war is very concerning, (but) what are the other things he’s capable of doing at the expense of all of us to save or protect or deflect when it comes to his own hide?”
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March 2, 2018
the rich asshole's pollsters tried to prove the American people support what the rich asshole is doing. Their polls proved the opposite.
Despite the rich asshole’s historic unpopularity, loyalists like the dark-money group America First Policies are convinced the people support the rich asshole on the issues. But when they ran a secret poll to back this up, it bombed spectacularly.
According to America First Policies’ September 2017 findings, the rich asshole’s base is no longer interested in building the wall. the rich asshole voters rank it dead last on their list of policy priorities.
The group’s February 2018 findings were even more disastrous on a number of levels. Voters disapprove of the rich asshole’s handling of health care by 17 points, Dreamers by 13 points, “draining the swamp” by 13 points, North Korea by 10 points, and national security by 4 points.
And by a margin of 58 to 34, voters agreed “our Members of Congress should be a check and balance on some rich asshole.”
The poll’s bad news wasn’t limited to the rich asshole himself. It also included ominous signs for Republicans in Congress.
According to the February results, voters back Democrats by 5 points on the generic congressional ballot. And by a margin of 68 to 31, voters prefer leaving Obamacare as is, or improving it, to repeal.
On the GOP tax scam, which Republicans hoped they could run on in the midterms, the findings are less than stellar. Though public opinion on the tax bill has improved from its disastrous numbers last year, and it is now slightly above water at 46 to 43, it is still bitterly divisive. By a margin of 51 to 41, voters say neither they nor anyone they know has benefited from the bill.
Perhaps most embarrassingly, the poll found that by 49 to 43, voters agree with Democratic House Leader Nancy Pelosi’s comment that the tax benefit for the middle class is “crumbs” compared to corporate tax breaks.
Republican operatives had hoped to attack Democrats with this line, even going so far as to chant it at activists holding a rally for school shooting victims. But after seeing their new paychecks, and after House Speaker Paul Ryan cluelessly boasted about a secretary getting an extra $1.50, voters clearly think Pelosi has a point.
The fact that even this alliance, led by such the rich asshole campaign veterans as Corey Lewandowski and Katrina Pierson, could not find enthusiastic support for the rich asshole and the Republican agenda speaks volumes.
the rich asshole faces a reckoning in the midterms. And as even his own loyalists have found, it could end in disaster.
Baldwin fires back at the rich asshole: I'll keep up my impression for your impeachment, resignation
BY BRANDON CARTER - 03/02/18 07:59 AM EST
Actor Alec Baldwin fired back at President the rich asshole after the rich asshole attacked his “dying mediocre career” Friday, saying he intends to continue playing the rich asshole on “Saturday Night Live” through the rich asshole’s “impeachment hearings" and "resignation speech.”
“Agony though it may be, I’d like to hang in there for the impeachment hearings, the resignation speech, the farewell helicopter ride to Mara-A-Lago,” Baldwin tweeted. “You know. The Good Stuff. That we’ve all been waiting for.”
Agony though it may be, I’d like to hang in there for the impeachment hearings, the resignation speech, the farewell helicopter ride to Mara-A-Lago. You know. The Good Stuff. That we’ve all been waiting for.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter published Thursday, Baldwin said that playing the rich asshole on "SNL" is "agony."
"Every time I do it now, it's like agony. Agony. I can't," he said.
the rich asshole took to Twitter Friday morning to slam Baldwin, calling his impression “terrible.”
Alec Baldwin, whose dying mediocre career was saved by his terrible impersonation of me on SNL, now says playing me was agony. Alec, it was agony for those who were forced to watch. Bring back Darrell Hammond, funnier and a far greater talent!
the rich asshole has long gone after Baldwin’s impression of him and has previously taken to Twitter to attack the actor and "SNL" as having poor ratings and not being funny.
Baldwin won an Emmy in 2017 for his portrayal of the rich asshole on the show.
the rich asshole rips Alec Baldwin impression: ‘Bring back Darrell Hammond’
BY MAX GREENWOOD - 03/02/18 07:14 AM EST
President the rich asshole lashed out at actor Alec Baldwin first thing Friday morning, blasting his "Saturday Night Live" impersonation of him as "terrible" and calling for the comedy show to bring back Darrell Hammond, an SNL alum who once played the rich asshole.
"Alec Baldwin, whose dying mediocre career was saved by his terrible impersonation of me on SNL, now says playing me was agony," the rich asshole wrote on Twitter. "Alec, it was agony for those who were forced to watch. Bring back Darrell Hammond, funnier and a far greater talent!"
Alec Baldwin, whose dying mediocre career was saved by his terrible impersonation of me on SNL, now says playing me was agony. Alec, it was agony for those who were forced to watch. Bring back Darrell Hammond, funnier and a far greater talent!
the rich asshole posted a similar tweet earlier on Friday, in which he referred to the actor as "Alex Baldwin," though it was quickly deleted.
Baldwin, whose the rich asshole impersonation on the NBC show has gotten rave reviews, told The Hollywood Reporter in an interview published Thursday that playing the president is "agony."
But the rich asshole has long bristled at Baldwin's performance, and has repeatedly insisted that the impersonation – and SNL more broadly is not funny and delivers poor ratings. Those attacks, however, had declined in recent days.
Hammond, a former cast member on SNL, played the rich asshole on the program for more than a decade. He reprised that role during the rich asshole's presidential campaign, before Baldwin took over in September 2016.
the rich asshole tweets — and then deletes — bizarre attack on ‘Alex Baldwin’ and his ‘dieing’ career
Alec Baldwin's the rich asshole
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President some rich asshole launched a misspelled attack against actor Alec Baldwin over his “Saturday Night Live” portrayal but deleted the post minutes later.
The president twice misspelled the actor’s name as “Alex” in the tweet, which was posted at 5:42 a.m., and insisted Baldwin revived his “dieing” career by playing the rich asshole on the sketch comedy program.
“Alex Baldwin, whose dieing mediocre career was saved by his impersonation of me on SNL, now says playing DJT was agony for him,” the rich asshole tweeted. “Alex, it was also agony for those who were forced to watch. You were terrible. Bring back Darrell Hammond, much funnier and a far greater talent!”
The tweet was deleted by 6 a.m., but multiple Twitter users took screenshots of the misspelled post.
the rich asshole then reposted the attack, but with the misspellings corrected, 25 minutes after the original tweet, at 6:07 a.m.
Like many of his early morning tweets, this one was prompted by a Fox News report that aired at 4:24 a.m. about Baldwin, who gave a lengthy interview Thursday with The Hollywood Reporter.
That's a whole lot of chaos coming from this administration. One position replaced 5 times in one year compared to Obama refilling that position 5 times in 8 years.
Former Bush ethics lawyer nails the rich asshole White House for ‘getting their ethics advice by watching Fox News’
David Cay Johnston and Richard Painter (Photo: Screen capture)
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During a panel discussion with CNN’s Don Lemon, biographer David Cay Johnston noted that he wasn’t surprised to see questionable business dealings from Jared Kushner and his family, because they’re similar to President some rich asshole’s own dealings. The sentiment was echoed by former ethics lawyer to George W. Bush, Richard Painter.
“I’m not the least bit surprised,” he told Lemon about the revelations about Kushner. “You look at the Trumps and the Kushner family they’ve been intermarried with and everywhere you turn it’s sort of squirrely money and squirrely deals and, of course, Donald, his entire life has been squirrely money and squirrely deals. So, not the least bit surprised there are questions being raised about this Vancouver operation.”
He noted the biggest concern for him is that the foreign investors from China are concerning and raise further questions about foreign agents having an impact on America’s government.
“It’s just the top of the ice berg,” Painter agreed. “The Kushner family has deals going on all over the place and financing from China. Apparently some discussions with Russian banks. Jared Kushner and his family owe money to a lot of people. A lot of people have been going into the White House apparently trying to get various favors from the United States government. So, this Vancouver operation is just a piece of a much larger puzzle.”
Painter went on to say that the deal reeks of conflicts of interest.
“That’s because they wouldn’t sell the businesses upon entering government, as others do,” he continued. “The ethics lawyers advised them to sell the businesses. They didn’t want to do it. They want to run the business and collect money all over the world while they’re working for the government. And of course that’s a recipe for corruption. So, somebody is going to be offering payments and it’s nothing but scandal. And meanwhile Jared Kushner can’t get a security clearance because of (special counsel Robert) Mueller is hot on his tail. It’s not a good situation for them. They don’t belong in the White House.”
Johnston noted that Citigroup is heavily regulated by the federal government because when it was created originally it wasn’t in compliance with the federal government under the Glass Siegel Act. Thus, their interest is in relaxing regulations, he implied.
“They’re trying to get the Consumer Financial Bureau paired back, if not destroyed to reduce regulation of banks,” he continued. “And their CEO meets with Jared Kushner and they issue an enormous loan? I’m sorry, even if there was nothing wrong, this stinks to high heaven.”
He recalled the questions raised about Dick Cheney’s stock options with Halliburton when the company was chosen for a major contract during the Iraq war.
“This is just beyond belief that we are not in the streets saying, ‘This in wrong!'” Johnston continued. “You know, you’re there to do the government’s business, not your business.”
Lemon read the statement from Kushner’s lawyer, which Johnston called a “non-denial denial.” At the same time, the White House is implying there haven’t been any red flags raised about Ivanka the rich asshole.
“Well, excuse me, Don, if counterintelligence is asking questions about it, by definition that’s a red flag,” he said.
Painter called out the ethics concerns of the White House and the rich asshole family, but said that it was nothing more than business as usual for them.
“First of all, there is no ethics advice given in this White House,” he said. “This is the ethics shop that wrote the Office of Government Ethics and said that the rules don’t apply to the White House staff. They get their ethics advice by watching Fox News. And it’s also accurate to say that this is nothing has change because this is how the White House has operated since January 20, 2017. The president came in with unprecedented conflicts of interest. And he has basically gave the middle finger to anybody who said he ought to divest assets.”
He went on to note that such rules are “trickling down” throughout the rest of the staff. Those staffers are continuing to make money while having conflicts of interests and serving in the government. So, anyone who wants to curry favor can do so easily.
“It’s obvious what’s going on. Everybody knows what’s going on,” Painter said.
Watch the segment below:
Publishers already contacting Hicks about book deal: report
BY JOHN BOWDEN - 03/01/18 10:40 PM EST
Book publishers have already begun contacting White House communications director Hope Hicks to obtain the rights to her memoir upon her exit from the the rich asshole administration, the British tabloid Daily Mail reported Thursday.
The 29-year-old longtime the rich asshole aide could be expected to make up to $10 million from an advance to a book deal and is actively being contacted by movie and TV producers as well, the Mail reported.
"Next to Ivanka and Melania, Hope is the woman closest to the president," one publishing executive told the Mail. "[She] knows all the secrets, all the foibles, all the quirks."
One White House insider also told the website that Hicks reportedly kept a "detailed diary" of her interactions and time in the White House, a resource that could be a major asset if she plans to write a memoir.
"[But] she is certainly under some sort of nondisclosure agreement," that source told the Mail.
One literary agent who has represented Pulitzer prize-winning journalists told the Mail that many in the entertainment and media industries see Hicks's story as a political blockbuster, citing Michael Wolff's "Fire and Fury: Inside the the rich asshole White House" as an example.
Wolff's book, which has been criticized as inaccurate in parts, nevertheless was widely popular on its release in January, with sales of the book topping 1.7 million.
"Michael Wolff with his unauthorized tell-all has sold something like 900,000 books, and it's made him a millionaire, even though there's been questions about some of his reporting," the agent said.
"Believe me when I say that the publishing world and Hollywood are in a state of excitement over getting her to agree and sign on the dotted line. I'd kill to have her as my client."
Hicks announced her resignation Wednesday, with White House aides saying she would leave the the rich asshole administration within the next few weeks.
US ambassador to Mexico quits in latest sign of roiling relations
March 1, 2018
Tracy Wilkinson
Tribune Washington Bureau
Posted with permission from Tribune Content Agency
WASHINGTON — Roberta Jacobson, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico and one of the State Department's most experienced Latin America hands, said Thursday that she is quitting in what appeared to be fallout of the Trump administration's roiling relations with Mexico.
Jacobson, who spent 31 years as a diplomat, becomes the latest veteran foreign service officer to step down in an unusual exodus of senior talent under Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, amid low morale and drastic budget cuts at the State Department.
Joseph Yun, special representative on North Korea, resigned this week, and John Feeley, the U.S. ambassador to Panama, in January announced his decision to leave. Feeley said he could no longer advocate for U.S. policy in the Trump administration.
The State Department unit that handles Latin America, the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, has been especially hard hit even as Washington and Mexico seek to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, battle over immigration issues, cooperate on interdiction of drug trafficking and organized crime, and face other joint concerns.
In addition to Jacobson and Feeley, a 28-year veteran, Thomas Shannon, undersecretary for political affairs, announced his retirement last month after 34 years at the State Department. Shannon, a former ambassador, was seen as a foremost expert on Latin America.
President Donald Trump has yet to nominate an assistant secretary of State for Western Hemisphere affairs, and Tillerson has faced criticism from members of Congress and foreign policy experts who say he is steadily dismantling the State Department. He has rejected the criticism, saying he is trying to improve efficiency and streamline operations.
Jacobson's departure comes at a particularly difficult time in traditionally close U.S.-Mexican relations. Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto called off an official visit to the White House — for the second time — after a testy phone call with President Trump on Feb. 20.
Trump reportedly insisted on the call that Mexico pay to build a border wall, as he had vowed during the 2016 campaign. Mexico has repeatedly rejected that demand, and the dispute has blocked an official visit since Trump took office last year.
Jacobson, 57, did not mention the bilateral tension in her resignation memo, which was distributed to employees of the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City. She said her resignation would take effect May 5, the Cinco de Mayo holiday.
"I have come to the difficult decision that it is the right time to move on to new challenges and adventures," Jacobson wrote. "This decision is all the more difficult because of my profound belief in the importance of the U.S.-Mexico relationship and knowledge that it is at a crucial moment."
Jacobson saw her authority undercut at times as Luis Videgaray, Mexico's finance secretary and later foreign secretary, built a back-channel relationship to the White House through Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser.
Trump had given Kushner the Mexico portfolio, among other responsibilities, and Videgaray has visited the White House without telling the State Department.
The Mexican Foreign Ministry said in a statement Thursday that Tillerson telephoned Videgaray last week to notify him of Jacobson's decision to step down.
The ministry praised Jacobson's "responsibility and commitment ... not just in Mexico but for the benefit of the entire region." It thanked her for working to build a "frank and open relationship" between the two governments.
But experts say representing the Trump administration to the Pena Nieto government had become increasingly difficult.
"The last year has been particularly tricky for (Jacobson) because of her commitment to the bilateral relationship and President Trump's propensity to send mixed, sometimes harshly critical messages to Mexico's people and their president," said Eric Olson, deputy director of the Latin America program at the nonpartisan Wilson Center think tank in Washington.
Arturo Sarukhan, a former Mexican ambassador to the United States who now works as a consultant on both sides of the border, said Jacobson would be "sorely missed ... at a truly trying moment" in the relationship.
Rep. Eliot L. Engel of New York, the ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said the U.S. had been fortunate to have Jacobson's "steady hand" amid "the Trump administration's all-out offensive on the U.S.-Mexico relationship."
Her resignation is "another example of the Trump administration pushing our most accomplished diplomats to the exits," Engel said. "This White House's continued assault on America's diplomatic corps is causing damage to our national security that will take many years to repair."
State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert pushed back, however, contending that the recent departure of so many senior diplomats, including Jacobson, would not harm U.S. diplomatic efforts.
The high number of unfilled vacancies and resignations "doesn't mean there aren't other experts" at State who can handle the issues, Nauert told reporters at a briefing Thursday.
Jacobson previously served as assistant secretary of State for Western Hemisphere affairs, built up security cooperation between Washington and Mexico City, and played a key role in renewing U.S. diplomatic ties with Cuba under former President Barack Obama.
the rich asshole’s refugee chief barred women from speaking with lawyers — and forced them to give birth against their will
HHS Refugee Resettlement chief E. Scott Lloyd. Image via screengrab.
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E. Scott Lloyd, the head of the Health and Human Service’s Office of Refugee Resettlement, not only believes that undocumented immigrants do not have a constitutional right to abortions — he also forced multiple women under his office’s care to give birth when they did not wish to do so.
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Thursday night introduced the previously-unreported legal documents set to be used by the American Civil Liberties Union in court against Lloyd tomorrow that alleged he barred multiple undocumented women from accessing abortions and instructed his staff to not allow them to speak with lawyers.
Lloyd, who never worked with refugees prior to taking this job in 2017 and did not apply for the position but was rather appointed, published multiple editorials citing his staunchly anti-abortion views, which extends to opposition to contraceptives. He was grilled on those views by the ACLU in a December deposition, which Maddow played.
“Are there any circumstances under which you would approve an abortion request?” an ACLU lawyer asked him in late 2017 during the clip the host played.
“I don’t know,” Lloyd replied.
When trying to force a 17-year-old rape victim to carry to term a pregnancy that resulted from her assault, the ACLU alleged in documents provided to Maddow that Lloyd instructed his staff to remind her that her child would be a citizen because it was to be born in the United States and that the procedure may further traumatize her. He reportedly also told staff “to not let pregnant girls meet with lawyers to get an outside approval from a judge for an abortion.”
The girl was eventually able to get an abortion — but only after someone near her tipped the ACLU off and they took him to court. Along with the 17-year-old Jane Doe who worked with the ACLU, Lloyd has attempted to force at least three other refugee women to carry pregnancies to term against their will, and it’s unclear whether or not he was successful.
Watch Maddow outline the case below, via MSNBC.
Part 1:
Part 2:
the rich asshole might not even be in the US when his multi-million dollar ‘grand military parade’ is held
President some rich asshole marching through his inaugural parade with First Lady Melania the rich asshole. Image via screengrab.
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Despite forcing the Pentagon to plan a dictatorial military parade, President Donald the rich asshole may not even be in the United States when the Veterans’ Day event is held.
The Washington Examiner reported that on Veteran’s Day, which falls annually November 11, the rich asshole is expected to be at a summit in Paris, France along with 79 other world leaders. Ironically, a military parade the president witnessed in France when visiting new French President Emmanuel Macron is said to have inspired his desire for a similar event stateside.
Nevertheless, the Pentagon on Thursday announced that is is “looking towards November 11, around Veteran’s Day, and also possibly in conjunction with the World War I centennial celebration.”
The military parade will come with a hefty price tag with or without the president in attendance. White House budget chief Mick Mulvaney has said the parade will cost between $10 and $30 million taxpayer dollars.
1. CONFLICTED
Report: the rich asshole Privately Asks John Kelly to Boot Jared Kushner and Ivanka the rich asshole
03-01-2018
JONATHAN ERNST/REUTERS
President the rich asshole has reportedly begun directing his ire at his daughter and son-in-law amid ongoing White House woes, privately saying the pair should have never come to serve in the West Wing. White House aides cited by The New York Times on Thursday said the rich asshole had become isolated and angry in recent days as tensions brewed between Ivanka the rich asshole and Jared Kushner and White House chief of staff John Kelly. Kushner, already under scrutiny for his international business dealings, had his top-secret security clearance downgraded by Kelly earlier this week, while Ivanka has reportedly irked other White House aides, including Kelly, by exploiting her role as first daughter. Despite the rich asshole telling the two they must remain in their White House positions, he has privately complained that they never should’ve joined him in the White House and said they should leave, according to the Times. He has also privately asked Kelly to help get them out, aides said.
Wall Street Journal rakes the rich asshole over the coals for ‘biggest policy blunder of his presidency’
President some rich asshole (YouTube)
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In an op-ed from the conservative Wall Street Journal, the editorial board called out President some rich asshole for allegedly making “the biggest policy blunder of his presidency.”
the rich asshole shocked aides and advisors Thursday with his announcement of a trade war by imposing a 25 percent tariff on foreign steel and 10 percent on aluminum. The Journal wrote that the move would “punish American workers” and would ultimately “invite retaliation” from other nations that would “harm U.S. exports.”
the rich asshole campaigned on such tariffs, but it was presumed his choice of economic advisors from Wall Street would never allow the pledge to come to fruition. The news today prompted the Stock Market to fall 420 points and senior economic advisor Gary Cohn threatened to resign.
“Apparently some rich asshole can’t stand all this winning,” The Journal wrote. They predict a few American companies will do well for a short time, but that in the long-term, it will harm the U.S.
“We have with us the biggest steel companies in the United States. They used to be a lot bigger, but they’re going to be a lot bigger again,” they cited the rich asshole saying Thursday.
“No, they won’t,” The Journal said simply. “The immediate impact will be to make the U.S. an island of high-priced steel and aluminum. The U.S. companies will raise their prices to nearly match the tariffs while snatching some market share. The additional profits will flow to executives in higher bonuses and shareholders, at least until the higher prices hurt their steel and aluminum-using customers. Then U.S. steel and aluminum makers will be hurt as well.”
WATCH: NRA’s Dana Loesch dodges Anderson Cooper’s questions as he asks if she feels ‘betrayed’ by the rich asshole on guns
Anderson Cooper and NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch (Photo: Screen capture)
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Anderson Cooper was dogged in asking if the National Rifle Association felt betrayed by President some rich asshole after his comments Wednesday that he was willing to take guns without due process.
NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch refused to answer whether or not she felt “betrayed by this president.” Instead she said that there were a lot of things discussed in the meeting that the NRA opposed.
“If President (Barack) Obama had said ‘I kinda believe in taking the guns first and going through due process second,’ I would imagine the NRA would have spoken out incredibly strongly about that as would many Republicans,” Cooper said. “Again, just officially does the NRA feel betrayed by this president? Due process is something I hear you and the NRA talk about all the time and understandably this president just said due process comes second. Take the gun. That’s the fear of so many gun owners in the NRA.”
Loesch agreed saying the NRA wants to “maintain the Constitutional rights” of Americans and told the rich asshole as much. However, she still attacked Obama, saying that he never came close to the support the rich asshole has had for guns.
“We know that former President Obama did not — he did not even come close to thinking as President the rich asshole does on international reciprocity or other issues,” she said. “He was pretty clear on that. I think the response could have been the same.”
Cooper asked if the rich asshole continues to demand the age to purchase assault weapons be increased to 21, eliminate bump stocks and the other proposals, “even taking guns, worrying about due process later” if the NRA would continue to support him.
“What’s the message from the NRA to him on that in terms of what will happen in the voting booth?” he asked.
“We’ve made it clear where they stand in terms of where we are with increasing the age,” Loesch said. “It just doesn’t make sense to punish people to do that.”
Cooper asked once more if she, the NRA or NRA members felt betrayed by the rich asshole, but she never answered.
Executive Director Chris Cox tweeted that he had a meeting at the White House and that the rich asshole is back behind opposing “gun control.”
I had a great meeting tonight with @realDonaldTrump & @VP. We all want safe schools, mental health reform and to keep guns away from dangerous people. POTUS & VPOTUS support the Second Amendment, support strong due process and don’t want gun control. #NRA #MAGA
The president went on to confirm the meeting, saying that it was a “good (great) meeting.”
Watch the full interview below:
the rich asshole is ‘annoyed’ that Kushner is ‘another problem to deal with’ as he fights with his attorney general
Jared Kushner, Senior Advisor to President some rich asshole. (DoD Photo by Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Dominique A. Pineiro)
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President some rich asshole is growing increasingly “annoyed” with top aide Jared Kushner, and he’s “sounding regretful” Kushner is taking fire, while simultaneously infuriated his son-in-law has become yet another legal liability.
According to a New York Times report from Maggie Haberman, The Kushner problem adds to other mounting problems like chief of staff John Kelly battling with the rich asshole children and news that chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn was ready to resign after the rich asshole’s speech on tariffs.
Kushner’s legal problems and the reports of the Kushner family’s real estate company causing his security clearance downgrade, both the rich asshole and his staff have been frustrated. The Times reported that some aides even regret the rich asshole’s daughter and son-in-law working in the West Wing and want them to leave.
According to Haberman, the rich asshole has told them to stay, but privately told Kelly to move them out.
At the same time, Cohn, a former Goldman Sachs president, lobbied against the rich asshole’s trade war. He’s already threatened to resign in wake of the rich asshole’s allegations that there are “bad people on both sides” at the Charlottesville riots. The tariff might be the nail in the coffin.
Devin Nunes just sent Jeff Sessions a letter accusing the FBI of breaking the law
House Intel Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA, left) and AG Jeff Sessions (right). Images via Creative Commons.
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House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) sent Attorney General Jeff Sessions a letter on Thursday accusing the FBI of breaking the law when acquiring surveillance warrants against former the rich asshole campaign adviser Carter Page.
In the letter, which was obtained by Fox News, Nunes claims the bureau violated the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide by obtaining warrants for Page on the alleged base of an unverified dossier that purports as evidence of ties between some rich asshole and the Kremlin and other Russian individuals.
The letter to Sessions takes the allegations outline in the House Intelligence Committee memo declassified by the president in January that laid the basis for the claim that the FBI used the so-called “golden showers dossier” to obtain Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants against Page. Page, however, had been under FISA surveillance since 2014, when the FBI became suspicious of his ties to Russian entities.
Sessions on Tuesday announced an internal investigation into the claim that anti-the rich asshole bias is widespread within the Justice Department. On Wednesday, the rich asshole called his AG “disgraceful” on Twitter for not investigating President Barack Obama, only to be rebuked by Sessions, who said he and the DOJ would “continue to do its work in a fair and impartial manner according to the law and the Constitution.”
You can read Nunes’ letter to Sessions below.
Nunes to Sessions: FBI may have violated criminal statutes in Carter Page FISA application by Fox News on Scribd
A long-serving aide departed, lawmakers were forced to scramble over gun control and the stock market sunk on trade news
First some rich asshole ignited the fury of conservatives by embracing gun control measures in his signature freewheeling style. Then came the resignation of his longest-serving political aide. By the next morning, the stock market was plunging in the wake of the rich asshole’s unexpected policy announcement on trade.
While the US president is no stranger to chaos – it has been a hallmark of his year-long tenure – the last 24 hours brought turmoil to the White House that was exhausting, even by the rich asshole’s standards.
The perfect storm has arrived as the rich asshole seeks to broker a deal on gun control following the 14 February high school shooting in Parkland, Florida, which left 17 people dead. The president convened a meeting on Wednesday afternoon with a bipartisan group of senators, reminiscent of a similarly televised policy discussion he held on immigration.
But within hours, the rich asshole had left lawmakers on Capitol Hill scrambling by backing comprehensive gun control measures long opposed by the National Rifle Association and congressional Republicans. The president signaled he would support universal background checks and new age restrictions on gun purchases; he even toyed with the idea of an assault weapons ban.
Lawmakers had been eyeing a narrow compromise on background checks. But the rich asshole’s endorsement of more expansive reforms, however temporary, gave ammunition to Democrats to bolster their demands of the Republican-led Congress.
Back at the White House, the focus on policy was short-lived. Late Wednesday afternoon, the White House communications director, Hope Hicks, announced her resignation.
Hicks had testified the day before to congressional investigators on Russia that she occasionally had to tell white lies to appease her boss. While Hicks said she had long been mulling her exit, her decision to leave marked the latest high-profile departure from the White House and left the rich asshole without one of his closest and most loyal confidantes.
By Thursday morning, the rich asshole had moved on to other matters.
He used Twitter first thing to blast his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, over the justice department’s handling of the Russia investigation. The attack drew a rare rebuke from Sessions, prompting speculation over his future in the administration.
Sarah Sanders, the White House press secretary, was later unable to say if the rich asshole planned to fire Sessions, simply stating: “Not that I know of.”
The turbulence continued throughout the day.
On Thursday afternoon, Roberta Jacobson, the US ambassador to Mexico, said she was resigning from her post. Although the veteran diplomat did not specify the reason for her departure, the announcement came amid strained relations with the rich asshole, who has overseen a swift deterioration in US-Mexico relations.
the rich asshole was meanwhile poised to set off another firestorm. In a sudden move, the rich asshole said his administration would impose stiff tariffs on steel and aluminum imports as early as next week.
The decision, made against the will of some of the president’s top advisers, sent the stock market into a tailspin and escalated the prospect of a global trade war.
Even the rich asshole’s former aides acknowledged the volatility at the White House had soared to new heights.
“The morale is terrible … It’s messed up,” another former White House communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, told CNN Thursday.
“It’ll be up to the president to figure out if he wants to fix it or not.”
BY CHANTAL DA SILVA ON 3/1/18 AT 7:58 AM
The rich asshole administration official responsible for denying abortions to undocumented minors in U.S. custody has said he does not believe they have a constitutional right to undergo the procedure.
Scott Lloyd, the director of the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Refugee Resettlement—which provides care for undocumented minors who enter the U.S. without their parents—denied seven abortion requests between March and December 19 last year, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has claimed in a lawsuit filed against the rich asshole administration.
Asked in a deposition delivered in December if he believed undocumented minors have "no constitutional right to abortion" because of their immigration status, Lloyd replied "yes."
He said he did know what "facts could present themselves" that would lead him to approving an abortion request, adding that he would "potentially" allow an abortion when asked if he would provide approval "if the young woman's life was in jeopardy if she carried the pregnancy to term."
However, he said "that wouldn't even come up to my desk," explaining that there is a "blanket emergency exception" that ensures that "no medical emergency requires approval from [Lloyd] in any circumstance."
The ACLU is suing the rich asshole administration over its policy of halting abortions among undocumented minors, a determination that was established by email without formal legal vetting, according to documents released by the union.
The policy represents a significant departure from the approach of previous administrations to pregnancies among undocumented minors. Both the Obama and Bush administrations did not require the ORR director to sign off on abortions unless federal funds were requested for the procedure, which is typically the case in cases of rape or incest.
The ACLU represented four pregnant undocumented minors who had been denied abortions, which resulted in three girls being allowed abortions, with the fourth being released to a sponsor.
Lloyd, who previously worked for anti-abortion group Knights of Columbus, has never approved an abortion during his time as ORR director, according to ACLU's depositions. He did, however, allow one procedure "to be completed" after he was informed that it was already in progress, according to a deposition from deputy director of the ORR, Jonathan White.
In December, Lloyd denied a request for an abortion from a minor who had allegedly been raped and tried to enter the U.S. weeks after the assault.
"Certainly, it is understandable that a woman who is pregnant from the vile actions of a criminal would want to terminate her pregnancy," Lloyd wrote in a memo issued December 17. "But I cannot authorize our program to participate in the abortion requested here, even in this most difficult case."
The 17-year-old, called Jane Poe in court documents, was eventually able to get an abortion after winning a court order.
White said in his deposition that the rich asshole administration's policy on abortions for undocumented minors had been decided by political appointees such as Lloyd and Maggie Wynne, a counselor at U.S. Health and Human Services.
White said he had made a written recommendation "in memo form once" in support of permitting an undocumented minor to have an abortion. He added that he "never recommended against a termination."
However, he said Lloyd "makes the determination" on whether an abortion request will be approved or denied "based on the totality of the circumstances," adding that he does not know what criteria Lloyd uses to make his decision.
In his own deposition, Lloyd confirmed that decisions on whether to approve or deny an abortion are made on a "case by case" basis.
The rich asshole administration has taken a number of steps over the past year to reduce access to legal abortions in the U.S. and around the world, including the reinstatement of the Mexico City Policy, also known as the "global gag rule," which allows states to block funding to family planner centers like Planned Parenthood.
Vice president Mike Pence has also previously said that he believes America could see an end to the right to terminate pregnancy "in our time."
by Reuters / Mar.01.2018 / 9:49 PM ET
The White House announced on Thursday that President some rich asshole will meet with executives from the video game industry next week to talk about gun violence.
But the industry is hitting the pause button on that notion.
Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said at the press briefing that the meeting will be in the context of issues of violence and school safety, and the executives will offer their input "to see what they can do on that front."
Later Thursday, the Entertainment Software Association, which represents video game companies, said that the meeting is news to them.
"ESA and our member companies have not received an invitation to meet with President the rich asshole," the group said in a statement.
Related
While the rich asshole indicated support for a series of gun measures on Wednesday in a meeting with Capitol Hill lawmakers, last week he also talked about the problem with violence in video games and movies, and suggested that the current rating system was not adequate.
It's unclear if the White House will seek a similar meeting with studio reps and the MPAA.
In the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shootings in 2012, then-Vice President Joseph Biden held a series of meetings with different groups over the issue of gun violence. He met separately with representatives from the movie and TV business, and later from the video game industry.
No concrete action came out of the meeting, although the White House did recommend more research on the connection between on-screen violence and real life.
The Supreme Court in 2011 struck down a previous attempt by the government to regulate the depiction of violence in video games, concluding that the games were protected by the First Amendment. At issue was a California law that attempted to restrict the sale of violence video games to minors.
The video game industry has long pushed back against claims that there is a link between on-screen violence and real-life acts.
The ESA said on Thursday that "the same video games played in the U.S. are played worldwide; however, the level of gun violence is exponentially higher in the U.S. than in other countries. Numerous authorities have examined the scientific record and found there is no link between media content and real-life violence."
The group added, "The U.S. video game industry has a long history of partnering with parents and more than 20 years of rating video games through the Entertainment Software Rating Board. We take great steps to provide tools to help players and parents make informed entertainment decisions."
In the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shooting massacre, the NRA pointed to video games and movies as contributors to a more violent society, and gun rights activists have labeled Hollywood figures who have spoken out on the issue as hypocritical given the content that comes out of the industry.
But some gun control groups also have been wary of discussion of gun violence veering off into the role of media violence, as they see it as a distraction from taking more concrete steps such as expanding background checks and restrictions on assault weapons.
Think the White House is in chaos now? Just wait.
(CNN)President some rich asshole has, throughout his life, embraced chaos as a life philosophy. (He's like Littlefinger in that way.)
But now, chaos -- spurred by surprise departures, the ongoing Russia investigation and the rich asshole's own grudge-nursing -- is threatening to overwhelm his presidency, and there's every reason to believe things will get worse, not better, in the coming days.
Here's why: the rich asshole is not only beset on all sides by bad stories -- Russia investigations, a feud with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Ben Carson's taste for fine furniture, etc., etc. -- but he is also forced to face these stories with an ever-diminishing group of loyalists around him.
It's a perfect storm for the rich asshole -- and not in a good way.
The descriptions coming out of the White House describing the rich asshole's state of mind over the last few days all paint a picture of a frustrated and angry executive who feels more and more isolated in his own White House.
"The tumult of the past week has fueled a deep and seething anger within President some rich asshole -- not an uncommon emotion for the insolent commander in chief -- but one that allies and aides say has escalated as he faces a new gauntlet of problems."
"After a crazy 24 hours, sources close to President the rich asshole say he is in a bad place — mad as hell about the internal chaos and the sense that things are unraveling."
Even longtime the rich asshole defender -- and 10-day White House communications director -- Anthony Scaramucci acknowledged in an interview with CNN's Chris Cuomo Thursday morning that "the morale is terrible."
Scaramucci: Culture of fear inside White House 01:05
What's important is not that the rich asshole is angry or thinks he is ill-served by staff. He thinks that pretty much all the time. What's different this time is that three of the people he trusts most -- his daughter Ivanka, his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his longtime aide Hope Hicks -- are either leaving him or weathering problems that put them in weakened positions, at best, and in jeopardy of being forced to leave the White House, at worst.
Hicks' decision to resign as communications director was clearly a blow to the rich asshole on a personal level. Hicks' title is far less important than how the rich asshole regarded her: as a trusted loyalist who had been with him when everyone else thought his presidential candidacy was a joke. Outside of his immediate family, the rich asshole trusted no one more and listened to no one more than Hicks.
Speaking of the President's immediate family, they've had a rough run of things too. Ivanka's trip to the Olympic closing ceremonies in South Korea raised the hackles of the likes of chief of staff John Kelly. And her response that it was "inappropriate" for a reporter to ask her about the sexual misconduct allegations against her father simply served to highlight the difficulty of simultaneously being the daughter of the President and a senior adviser to that President.
If Ivanka's last few weeks have been bad, Kushner's have been worse. First came the news that his security clearance had been downgraded by Kelly amid ongoing questions about Kushner's ability to secure a permanent clearance. Then the news that countries had targeted Kushner as vulnerable to manipulation due to the complexity of his financial holdings. Then The New York Times reported Wednesday night that Kushner's family had received $500 million in loans following meetings between Kushner and the heads of investment companies that made the loans.
The spate of stories on Kushner have occasioned talk that he might not be able to even approximate the job he has been assigned in the rich asshole White House and may have to move on -- whether to the rich asshole's growing 2020 staff or return to the private sector.
Even if Javanka stays put -- and yes, it's totally fair to consider them a matching set -- it's not clear they are in any sort of position to talk the rich asshole down when he is angry or frustrated -- or both. They are dealing with problems of their own, problems that distract them from giving their full attention to the President of the United States.
All of which means that the rich asshole faces the most serious set of problems since the start of his presidency with fewer and fewer people he feels he can truly rely on.
And a lonely and cornered the rich asshole rarely reacts well.
I keep thinking back to the early days of the rich asshole's time in the White House -- when he was largely alone and unhappy. This, from a stunning New York Times story in February of 2017,is the image that sticks in my head:
"Usually around 6:30 p.m., or sometimes later, some rich asshole retires upstairs to the residence to recharge, vent and intermittently use Twitter. With his wife, Melania, and young son, Barron, staying in New York, he is almost always by himself, sometimes in the protective presence of his imposing longtime aide and former security chief, Keith Schiller. When some rich asshole is not watching television in his bathrobe or on his phone reaching out to old campaign hands and advisers, he will sometimes set off to explore the unfamiliar surroundings of his new home."
While the White House denied that the rich asshole wandered around the White House in his bathrobe and Melania and Barron have since moved to Washington, there's little question that the more isolated the rich asshole gets -- or feels -- the more he gives in to his most basic instinct: score-settling via Twitter.
Without the likes of Hicks to rein him in, we are likely headed into an even more chaotic moment for the rich asshole. Unleashed to say and do what he wants when he wants -- and increasingly convinced that he is being victimized by, well, everyone -- the rich asshole is likely to get even more unpredictable in the weeks to come.
That's a prospect that has to terrify Republicans, who are desperately trying to hold on to their House and, to a lesser extent, Senate majorities in November. But they better get used to it. It's likely to be the new normal.
Jared Kushner Is Deep in It Now
What happens next?
“We’re living in a sensitive age, Cuke, and I’m not altogether sure you’re fully attuned to it.”
—Mayor Frank Skeffington, The Last Hurrah
—Mayor Frank Skeffington, The Last Hurrah
I cut my teeth doing political reporting in and around the State House on Beacon Hill in Boston. I have a healthy inbred respect for the many and varied forms of political grift, graft, brigandage, and chicanery. My gob is not easily smacked. My flabber is not easily gasted. That said, this latest news out of Camp Runamuck, as brought to us by The New York Times, is both beyond my comprehension and completely off the damn hook.
Joshua Harris, a founder of Apollo Global Management, was advising the rich asshole administration officials on infrastructure policy. During that period, he met on multiple occasions with Jared Kushner, President the rich asshole’s son-in-law and senior adviser, said three people familiar with the meetings. Among other things, the two men discussed a possible White House job for Mr. Harris. The job never materialized, but in November, Apollo lent $184 million to Mr. Kushner’s family real estate firm, Kushner Companies. The loan was to refinance the mortgage on a Chicago skyscraper.
Even by the standards of Apollo, one of the world’s largest private equity firms, the previously unreported transaction with the Kushners was a big deal: It was triple the size of the average property loan made by Apollo’s real estate lending arm, securities filings show. It was one of the largest loans Kushner Companies received last year. An even larger loan came from Citigroup, which lent the firm and one of its partners $325 million to help finance a group of office buildings in Brooklyn. That loan was made in the spring of 2017, shortly after Mr. Kushner met in the White House with Citigroup’s chief executive, Michael L. Corbat, according to people briefed on the meeting. The two men talked about financial and trade policy and did not discuss Mr. Kushner’s family business, one person said.
It has not been a good week for the Dauphin-in-Law. First, he gets his security clearance pulled, at least in part because oligarchs from foreign lands considered him the biggest sucker on the planet. Now, he’s at the center of a steaming pile of corruption so blatant that it would have embarrassed Ferdinand Marcos. If he’s at all smart, he’s spending hours in front of a mirror, repeating the phrase, “To the best of my recollection,” over and over until he can appear sincere.
It is important to note for the historical record that this story broke at around quarter-to-Maddow on a Wednesday night on which the news had been dominated by the departure of source-to-the-stars Hope Hicks from the highly temporary job of White House communications director. (I hear veteran rock drummer Stumpy Pepys already has submitted a resume.) Meanwhile, elsewhere in the plague-riddled business empire that bears the president*’s name, in Panama, the employees in one of his properties are in the middle of an armed standoff with police over their paychecks. From the LA Times:
Many had been at the hotel since its opening in 2011 and said they had been drawn to work there because of the rich asshole brand — which the building's new owner says has become a huge drawback…Led by Miami-based private equity fund Ithaca Capital, the owners of the hotel units voted to remove the rich asshole's name from the building and fire his hotel management company. Ithaca's manager, Orestes Fintiklis, has alleged financial misconduct by the rich asshole Hotels dating back years and has said the rich asshole's statements on immigration have rendered his brand toxic in Latin America. the rich asshole Hotels has refused to acknowledge its termination, citing a commitment by Fintiklis not to challenge the rich asshole's contract when he bought 202 of the 369 hotel units at the property last year. When Fintiklis, who is also head of the hotel owners' association, invited a team of Marriott hotel executives to tour the property last year, the rich asshole Hotel staff ran them off.
So, as I see it, he shouldn’t still be a businessman because he’s the president*, and because he’s president, he’s an even worse businessman. None of this is the way anything is supposed to work.
But, returning to young Jared, it’s pretty plain that a spit is being prepared for him at Bob Mueller’s House of BBQ, right next to the one on which Paul Manafort is currently revolving. The only way truly to judge what Mueller is doing is to see what’s leaking out, likely from defense attorneys and witnesses with nothing to lose. What’s plain is that nothing is out of bounds.
He’s looking into every dark corner of the family business, and the family business is nothing but dark corners. The family business is the context in which young Jared thought he could have an equity billionaire in for lunch, discuss a White House job, and then take a loan from the billionaire’s company to bail out his doomed real-estate business, and in which young Jared not only believed nobody would notice, but also that nobody would care. It’s all about money, ain’t a damn thing funny.
You got to have a con in the land of milk and honey.
By Michael Biesecker and Matthew Brown | AP March 1 at 9:14 PM
WASHINGTON — The rich asshole administration said Thursday it is rewriting Obama-era rules governing pollution from oil and gas operations and coal ash dumps, moves that opponents say will significantly weaken protections for human health and the environment.
The changes proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency are the latest in series of actions taken over the last year to roll back regulations opposed by the fossil-fuel industry. The agency said the revisions would save electric utilities $100 million per year in compliance costs, while oil and gas operators would reap up to $16 million in benefits by 2035.
Environmental advocates predicted the revisions would lead to dirtier air and water.
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The 2016 standards governing leaks and emissions from oil and gas drilling operations sought to reduce the amounts of methane and volatile organic compounds, or VOCs. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that traps heat in the atmosphere, contributing to climate change. VOCs are a component of ground-level ozone, air pollution that can aggravate asthma and contribute to early deaths from respiratory disease.
CONTENT FROM MITSUBISHI HEAVY INDUSTRIES GROUP
In a statement, EPA Assistant Administrator for Air and Radiation Bill Wehrum said the changes will “provide regulatory certainty to one of the largest sectors of the American economy and avoid unnecessary compliance costs to both covered entities and the states.”
Prior to joining the rich asshole administration in November, Wehrum worked as a lawyer representing fossil fuel and chemical companies regulated by the EPA office he now leads.
Environmental groups said the rich asshole rollbacks would let large-scale polluters off the hook.
“This move would put an estimated 25 million people who live in counties with dangerously unhealthy air at even greater risk from oil and gas related air pollution by rolling back measures that are flexible, cost-effective and that have been proven to work by leading states and responsible companies,” said Matt Watson, a spokesman for the Environmental Defense Fund.
The EPA also proposed amending rules to give state regulators more authority over how utilities dispose of the ash left behind when coal is burned to generate electricity. The gray ash, typically dumped near coal-fired power plants in unlined pits, contains toxic heavy metals such as lead and arsenic that over time can leach into groundwater or nearby rivers, potentially contaminating sources of drinking water.
CONTENT FROM MITSUBISHI HEAVY INDUSTRIES GROUP
“Today’s coal ash proposal embodies EPA’s commitment to our state partners by providing them with the ability to incorporate flexibilities into their coal ash permit programs based on the needs of their states,” EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt said.
The announcement came on the eve of a deadline for utilities to release reports documenting coal ash contamination of water supplies at hundreds of power plants across the United States. The pollution reports were intended as a first step toward cleaning up the contamination leaking from the ash pits.
EPA said it will be taking comment on whether future deadlines for ash pollution cleanup efforts will remain in place or be pushed back. Agency representatives did not immediately respond to questions about whether Friday’s deadline still stands.
A spokeswoman for American Electric Power said the company still intends to post its pollution reports even as it begins reviewing the proposed changes. The Ohio-based utility has 14 coal plants in eight states that are covered by EPA’s coal ash rule.
“We support EPA’s efforts to partner with the states,” AEP spokeswoman Melissa McHenry said. “We are complying with the existing federal rules, but have worked closely with our states at many sites regulated under the (coal ash disposal program) for years.”
Frank Holleman, a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center who has spent years pressing utilities to clean up coal ash, said the changes would hand over too much responsibility to state officials often too deferential to lobbyists from big utilities.
“Instead of protecting American communities and rivers from coal ash, EPA is trying to bail out utilities polluting our waterways and drinking water supplies,” he said. “These proposals will weaken rules that protect our groundwater from arsenic and mercury, and continue to extend the use of unlined, leaking coal ash pits next to our waterways. America’s families and clean water deserve better.”
__
Brown reported from Billings, Montana. Associated Press reporter Sarah Rankin contributed from Richmond, Virginia.
___
Follow Biesecker at http://www.twitter.com/mbieseck
Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
By MARK LANDLER and MAGGIE HABERMANMARCH 1, 2018
Continue reading the main story Share This Page
WASHINGTON — For 13 months in the Oval Office, and in an unorthodox business career before that, President the rich asshole has thrived on chaos, using it as an organizing principle and even a management tool. Now the costs of that chaos are becoming starkly clear in the demoralized staff and policy disarray of a wayward White House.
The dysfunction was on vivid display on Thursday in the president’s introduction of tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. The previous day, some rich asshole’s chief economic adviser, Gary D. Cohn, warned the chief of staff, John F. Kelly, that he might resign if the president went ahead with the plan, according to people briefed on the discussion. Mr. Cohn, a former Goldman Sachs president, had lobbied fiercely against the measures.
His threat to leave came during a tumultuous week in which some rich asshole suffered the departure of his closest aide, Hope Hicks, and the effective demotion of his senior adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who was stripped of his top-secret security clearance. some rich asshole was forced to deny, through an aide, that he was about to fire his national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster.
Mr. Kelly summed up the prevailing mood in the West Wing. “God punished me,” he joked of his move from the Department of Homeland Security to the White House during a discussion to mark the department’s 15th anniversary.
When White House aides arrived at work on Thursday, they had no clear idea of what some rich asshole would say about trade. He had summoned steel and aluminum executives to a meeting, but when the White House said only that he would listen to their concerns, it seemed to signal that Mr. Cohn had held off the tariffs.
Yet at the end of a photo session, when a reporter asked some rich asshole about the measures, he confirmed that the United States would announce next week that it is imposing long-term tariffs of 25 percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminum. The White House has not even completed a legal review of the measures.
some rich asshole’s off-the-cuff opening of a trade war rattled the stock market, enraged Republicans and left Mr. Cohn’s future in doubt. Mr. Cohn, who almost left last year after some rich asshole’s response to a white nationalist march in Charlottesville, Va., indicated he was waiting to see whether some rich asshole goes through with the tariffs, people familiar with his thinking said.
The chaotic rollout also reflected the departure of another White House official, Rob Porter, who as the staff secretary had a key role in keeping the paper flowing in the West Wing and who had backed Mr. Cohn in his free-trade views. Mr. Porter was forced out last month after facing accusations of spousal abuse.
It was the second day in a row that some rich asshole blindsided Republicans and his own aides. On Wednesday, in another televised session at the White House, he embraced the stricter gun control measures backed by Democrats and urged lawmakers to revive gun-safety regulations that are opposed by the National Rifle Association and most of his party.
“I always said that it was going to take awhile for some rich asshole to adjust as president,” said Christopher Ruddy, the chief executive of Newsmax Media and an old friend of the president’s. In business, he said, some rich asshole relied on a small circle of colleagues and a management style that amounted to “trial and error — the strongest survived, the weak died.”
Mr. Ruddy insisted that some rich asshole was finding his groove in the Oval Office. But his subordinates are faring less well. With an erratic boss and little in the way of a coherent legislative agenda, they are consumed by infighting, fears of their legal exposure and an ambient sense that the White House is spinning out of control.
some rich asshole is isolated and angry, as well, according to other friends and aides, as he carries on a bitter feud with his attorney general and watches members of his family clash with a chief of staff he recruited to restore a semblance of order — all against the darkening shadow of an investigation of his ties to Russia.
The combined effect is taking a toll.
some rich asshole’s instinct during these moments is to return to the populist themes that carried him to the White House, which is why his trade announcement is hardly surprising. some rich asshole has few fixed views on any issue, but he has been consistent on his antipathy for free trade since the 1980s, when he took out newspaper ads warning about American deficits with Japan — a concern that has shifted to China in recent years.
“The W.T.O. has been a disaster for this country,” some rich asshole said Thursday, asserting that China’s economic rise coincided with its entry into the World Trade Organization. “It has been great for China and terrible for the United States, and great for other countries.”
But a president who has long tried to impose his version of reality on the world is finding the limits of that strategy. Without Mr. Porter playing a stopgap role on trade, the debate has been marked by a lack of focus on policy and planning, according to several aides.
Morale in the West Wing has sunk to a new low, these people said. In private conversations, some rich asshole lashes out regularly at Attorney General Jeff Sessions with a vitriol that stuns members of his staff. Some longtime advisers said that some rich asshole regards Mr. Sessions’s decision to recuse himself from the Russia investigation as the “original sin,” which the president thinks has left him exposed.
some rich asshole’s children, meanwhile, have grown exasperated with Mr. Kelly, seeing him as a hurdle to their father’s success and as antagonistic to their continued presence, according to several people familiar with their thinking. Anthony Scaramucci, an ally of some in the rich asshole family, whom Mr. Kelly fired as communications director after only 11 days, intensified his criticism of the chief of staff in a series of news interviews on Wednesday and Thursday.
Yet some rich asshole is also frustrated with Mr. Kushner, whom he now views as a liability because of his legal entanglements, the investigations of the Kushner family’s real estate company and the publicity over having his security clearance downgraded, according to two people familiar with his views. In private conversations, the president vacillates between sounding regretful that Mr. Kushner is taking arrows and annoyed that he is another problem to deal with.
Privately, some aides have expressed frustration that Mr. Kushner and his wife, the president’s daughter Ivanka the rich asshole, have remained at the White House, despite some rich asshole at times saying they never should have come to the White House and should leave. Yet aides also noted that some rich asshole has told the couple that they should keep serving in their roles, even as he has privately asked Mr. Kelly for his help in moving them out.
To some staff members, the chaos feels reminiscent of the earliest days of the rich asshole administration. Some argue Mr. Kelly should have carried out a larger staff shake-up when he came in. That has allowed several people to stagnate, particularly in policy roles, one adviser said.
the rich asshole Is Meeting With "Members Of The Video Game Industry" To Discuss School Safety
the rich asshole is meeting with unspecified people in the gaming business to "see what can be done" in the wake of the Parkland, Florida shooting.
Video Game Industry Unaware of Any the rich asshole Meeting Next Week
03-01-2018
The ESA nor its members had been contacted as of Thursday evening.
President some rich asshole may be planning to meet with people from the video game industry next week about violence and video games, but so far no one contacted by Glixel nor the association that speaks for the industry have heard a word from the White House about it.
“ESA and our member companies have not received an invitation to meet with President the rich asshole," according to a spokesman for the Entertainment Software Association.
The spokesman for the association, which represents 34 companies including Nintendo, Microsoft, Electronic Arts and Sony Interactive Entertainment, went on to decry any attempt by the administration to link video games to an increase in violence in the real world.
“The same video games played in the US are played worldwide; however, the level of gun violence is exponentially higher in the US than in other countries," according to the spokesman. "Numerous authorities have examined the scientific record and found there is no link between media content and real-life violence.
“The US video game industry has a long history of partnering with parents and more than 20 years of rating video games through the Entertainment Software Rating Board. We take great steps to provide tools to help players and parents make informed entertainment decisions.”
White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee said during a press briefing earlier today that the rich asshole will be meeting with video game industry members.
"The president has met with a number of stakeholders," Huckabee said. "Next week he'll also be meeting with members of the video game industry to see what they can do on that front as well. This is going to be an ongoing process and something that we don't expect to happen overnight, but something that we're going to continue to be engaged in and continue look for the best ways possible to make sure we're doing everything we can to protect schools across the country."
Her comment came in response to a question about why it sounds like there won't be any action in Congress next week regarding new gun legislation in connection to the most recent school shooting. And just last week the rich asshole brought up the potential impact of violent media and video games on school-aged children.
Researchers in the field contacted by Glixel also were unaware of any sort of upcoming meetings with the White House.
GOP boos the rich asshole decision on tariffs
BY NIV ELIS AND VICKI NEEDHAM - 03/01/18 06:11 PM EST
Republicans loudly booed President the rich asshole’s announcement Thursday that he will impose steep tariffs on imported steel and aluminum.
GOP lawmakers joined business groups in declaring that slapping 25 percent tariffs on steel and 10 percent tariffs on aluminum will hurt consumers by raising prices and leading trading partners to retaliate against U.S. goods.
Opposition came from GOP leaders in the House and Senate, rising Republican stars and hardline conservatives.
“The speaker is hoping the president will consider the unintended consequences of this idea and look at other approaches before moving forward,” Doug Andres, a spokesman for Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), said in a statement.
Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), the No. 3 Republican in the Senate, also criticized the move.
“We have concerns, obviously, about actions taken that would create retaliatory action by some of our trading partners and our competitors out there, so I think, you know, we would like to see the White House adopt a, sort of, pro-free-trade position,” he said.
Conservative Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) said the rich asshole was proposing “a massive tax increase on American families” and accused him of betraying GOP principles.
“Protectionism is weak, not strong. You'd expect a policy this bad from a leftist administration, not a supposedly Republican one,” he said.
Republicans in the last week had repeatedly urged the rich asshole to not impose tariffs, arguing that doing so would destroy more jobs than they would save.
But their pleadings appeared to fall flat with the rich asshole, who made trade a central part of his presidential campaign, arguing U.S. workers had lost out to pro-free-trade policies backed by Washington politicians in both parties.
“We're going to build our steel industry back and we're going to build our aluminum industry back,” the rich asshole said Thursday.
A handful of Republicans, including some from manufacturing-heavy states in the Midwest, did express support for the rich asshole plan.
“I have argued that certain parts of our industry here do need immediate protection,” Ohio Republican Sen. Rob Portman said on Fox News.
Cleveland, Ohio, is home to steel manufacturer ArcelorMittal’s Cleveland Works plant, one of nine integrated steel mills operating in the US.
the rich asshole also won some support from Democrats.
Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) called for aggressive action.
“They’ve been talking about this and walked up to the edge for 10-and-a-half months now, causing more steel job losses, causing more U.S. companies hardship, lost revenues, lower sales, and look where we are,” he said.
Stocks fell on the news of the rich asshole’s tariffs as businesses warned of a trade war and higher costs for imports. The Dow Jones industrial average fell more than 420 points on the day.
“The problem with any kind of tariff or tax hike on imports is that it doesn’t make America more competitive or punish high-tax countries, it only hurts American industries by driving up manufacturing costs and, ultimately, costing jobs,” said Nathan Nascimento, executive vice president of Freedom Partners, a right-leaning group partly funded by the Koch brothers.
Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) noted that when President George W. Bush imposed steel tariffs in 2002, higher steel prices led to net job losses.
Bush was forced to drop the tariffs within a year after trading partners retaliated.
“Targeted measures against countries that don’t play by the rules, such as China, could help American workers," Alexander said. “Broad tariffs against steel and aluminum imports will raise prices on consumers and hurt American workers.”
the rich asshole’s decision, which could still change by next week, went slightly beyond the Commerce Department's recommendation of a 24 percent tariff on steel and a 7.7 percent tariff on aluminum.
Under section 232 of the trade law, the president can impose tariffs or quotas on imported materials for national security purposes.
“I generally support free trade, but there are instances where because of national security you’ve got to do things, and this may be one of them,” said Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), who said he was still undecided on the move ahead of the announcement.
Toomey said he didn’t buy the national security argument, and noted that the United States had already taken sensible trade action against Chinese steel dumping.
“Our defense needs are a tiny fraction of our domestic consumption of steel, so it’s not a plausible argument that we need it for national security,” he said.
the rich asshole often raises subject of Russia probe with aides without warning: report
BY JOSH DELK - 03/01/18 08:41 PM EST
President the rich asshole reportedly brings up Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation of Russian election interference in conversations, despite warnings from his legal team not to talk about the probe.
Current staffers told Politico that the rich asshole frequently broaches the subject in conversations with top aides, including with outgoing communications director Hope Hicks — even though his White House lawyers have told him to avoid in-house talks of the investigation.
Hicks — who has already spent thousands on legal bills throughout the course of the Russia probe due to her close relationship with the president — will likely be the subject of future questioning by the special counsel despite her departure from the White House.
A rich asshole administration official told Politico that the discussions put Hicks and others "in a very precarious position.”
According to that official, the conversations on Russia initiated by the rich asshole could lead to aides being questioned in Mueller's probe.
Hicks gave a testimony to the House Intelligence Committee, one of the congressional panels investigating Russian election interference, just one day before she announced her resignation.
During her testimony, the longtime the rich asshole confidante did not answer questions related to the rich asshole transition or first months in the White House, a stretch of time under intense scrutiny by investigators.
the rich asshole, who has long maintained that there was no collusion between his presidential campaign and Russians over the course of the election, was reportedly upset with Hicks after her testimony for saying she told "white lies" in her post.
Hicks clarified in the session that she never lied about any matter pertaining to the Russia investigation.
the rich asshole's 'surreal' guns meeting delays White House rollout of policy proposals
Washington (CNN)President some rich asshole's freewheeling meeting with a bipartisan group of lawmakers Wednesday has delayed what top White House aides had promised would be the rollout of specific policy proposals about guns and school safety by the end of the week, multiple sources tell CNN.
The chaotic meeting -- which multiple lawmakers recalled with bewilderment over the last 24 hours -- saw the rich asshole break with his party on key issues and take positions, like a suggestion to take people's guns away before a judge has a chance to weigh in, that his administration and Republicans on Capitol Hill had never proposed.
A day before the meeting, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders had told reporters that the rich asshole would unveil tangible policy proposals on guns before the end of the week.
"Specific to school safety, yes, we expect that there will be some policy proposals that will be out by the end of the week," Sanders said Tuesday.
But then came the rich asshole's meeting, which one source described as throwing a wrench in those plans and delaying the policy rollout. Aides had been working behind the scenes on policy proposals for school safety and guns based on what the President had stated for days.
Another source said the rich asshole's meeting turned everything upside down inside the White House, especially because the President had taken positions that were different from what his aides had planned to roll out.
For example, one of the sources said the plan was to roll out a policy that would make it easier for a judge to weigh in on whether someone with a mental illness should have a firearm. But the rich asshole said the opposite on Wednesday.
"Take the guns first, go through due process second," the rich asshole said.
The source tried to walk back the rich asshole's statement on Thursday, telling CNN that what the President meant to say was he wanted to create a process that would make it easier for a judge to weigh in on someone's ability to own guns on the front end of a dispute, rather than in the back end.
Before they roll out any policies, the source said, officials are now trying to get the President back to where he was on the issue before the meeting.
The White House rollout is also expected to include a plan to fund school grant programs to help protect against shootings and an endorsement of the "Fix NICS" bill, a proposal from Sen. John Cornyn, a Republican from Texas, and Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, that would improve reporting to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System.
The subtext to the uncertainty around the White House policy rollout is that the rich asshole was so all over the place on Wednesday that it made it impossible for the White House staff to come up with specific proposals that would comport with what he had said during the meeting and what he had previously proposed.
Even Republican lawmakers were befuddled when they returned from the White House on Wednesday.
Cornyn, who sat next to the rich asshole for the meeting, described it as "surreal."
Others suggested the rich asshole's meeting will lack follow-through.
"If we don't do it this time, then this will get old," said Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican. "If the President has another one of these sessions and he doesn't follow through -- it's going to hurt him. It's going to hurt the Republican Party."
Graham attended a similar meeting at the White House on immigration earlier this year. Lawmakers and the rich asshole administration have so far been unable to strike a deal on an immigration package.
All of this comes two weeks after the deadly school shooting in Parkland, Florida, where 17 people were killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
CNN's Lauren Fox and Ted Barrett contributed to this report
BREAKING: Ivanka the rich asshole Now Under Investigation By The FBI
Just after Jared Kushner lost his top-level security clearance, his wife — the rich asshole’s daughter and (according to The rich asshole) primary sexual fantasy — now finds herself under the FBI’s microscope.
CNN is reporting that US counterintelligence officials are now looking into one of her international business deals surrounding the rich asshole International Hotel and Tower in Vancouver, which opened just after President Stable Genius took office:
The FBI has been looking closely at the international business entanglements of both Ivanka the rich asshole and her husband, Jared Kushner, to determine whether any of those deals could leave them vulnerable to pressure from foreign agents, including China, according to a US official.The development — a 616-foot beacon dotting the Vancouver skyline and featuring a trademarked Ivanka the rich asshole spa — opened in February 2017, just after the rich asshole took office.The rich asshole Organization does not own the building. Instead, like other the rich asshole projects, it receives licensing and marketing fees from the developer, Joo Kim Tiah. A scion of one of Malaysia’s wealthiest families, Tiah runs his family’s Canada-based development company Holborn Group. President the rich asshole’s June financial disclosure form said the rich asshole Organization made more than $5 million in royalties and $21,500 in management fees from the Vancouver property.
“CNN is wrong that any hurdle, obstacle, concern, red flag or problem has been raised with respect to Ms. the rich asshole or her clearance application,” said Peter Mirijanian, spokesman for Ivanka the rich asshole’s ethics counsel. “Nothing in the new White House policy has changed Ms. the rich asshole’s ability to do the same work she has been doing since she joined the Administration.”
the rich asshole Organization executive vice president and chief legal officer Alan Garten says that “the company’s role was and is limited to licensing its brand and managing the hotel. Accordingly, the company would have had no involvement in the financing of the project or the sale of units.”
The White House refuses to comment on the ongoing investigation.
“One of the senior vice-presidents pulled me aside and said: ‘Joo Kim, it’s really important in your presentation that you connect with Ivanka. In other words: no one else is in the room, you have to understand that,” Tiah said in 2015.”In that meeting, it was clearly just me and Ivanka talking about the project.”
It’s unclear if Robert Mueller is interested in this deal, but this makes yet another person close to some rich asshole who is currently under investigation by the FBI in some capacity.
Many legal experts have wondered why Ivanka the rich asshole has not been targeted by Mueller’s investigation at this point.
“Either he’s just biding his time,” CNN legal analyst Michael Zeldin speculated recently, “or he has obtained this evidence elsewhere and he doesn’t need her, or he appreciates the possibility of a major eruption were he to do that.”
Could this new development be a signal that it’s her time in the barrel?
the rich asshole Staffers Desperately Want To Quit, But No One Else Will Hire Them
With the rich asshole administration in shambles, the revolving door at the White House is about to get a lot of action if staffers can get employment elsewhere, however, that doesn’t look good for those trying to make an exit right now. Staffers are reportedly suffering from low morale and constant frustration over the neverending chaos in the rich asshole administration.
BuzzFeed News reports that sources close to the White House say that “many mid- and low-level staffers are anxious to leave and are actively looking for jobs elsewhere.”
Those seeking to leave were surprised by communications director Hope Hicks’ abrupt resignation on Wednesday and saw that as a sort of tipping point for them.
One former White House official told BuzzFeed that he’s spoken with more aides who are trying to leave the rich asshole administration, however, they aren’t getting the kinds of high-paying offers in the corporate world that former aides usually get.
The source admitted that things are “bleak” right now in the scandal-plagued administration.
“Things are still pretty bleak inside the White House,” the source said. “I’ve talked to several people in the last week trying to find a way out, but they can’t get out because no one is really hiring people with the rich asshole White House experience. Not a fun time to say the least.”
“The White House has lost Hope,” the source said, referring to Hicks’ sudden departure just one day after she admitted to lying for the rich asshole. “That about says it all, right?”
The exodus at the White House has been fierce with staffers leaving to distance themselves from the chaotic administration, and some have been fired. But, it was their decision to join the toxic administration and forever be tied to some rich asshole.
Who knew that working for a madman would not look good on a resume?
the rich asshole rolled back pipeline safety regulations, benefiting equity firm that loaned money to Kushner
An ethics lawyers told ThinkProgress "the whole things stinks to high heaven."
The equity firm magnate that advised the rich asshole administration on infrastructure and whose company gave a $184 million loan to Kushner Companies also benefited from three rule changes relaxing pipeline safety regulations.
Last year, Joshua Harris, founder of equity firm giant Apollo Global Management, advised the rich asshole administration on infrastructure policy and discussed a possible a White House job that never materialized, the New York Times reported Wednesday. During that time, Harris also met several times with White House advisor Jared Kushner. Shortly after those meetings, Apollo gave Kushner’s family real estate firm the nine-figure loan to refinance the mortgage on a Chicago skyscraper, according to the New York Times report.
Harris’ company also has a number of large investments in energy companies that stand to gain from three the rich asshole administration rule changes, including EP Energy and Northwoods Energy. Those ties were first revealed in a January 30 report published by the progressive think tank Democracy Forward.
“It is a very serious conflict of interest when you have the president and other officials who work for him who are indebted to any business or any entity that wants something out of the United States government,” said Richard Painter, a former White House ethics lawyer under the Bush administration. “The whole thing stinks to high heaven.”
Painter added that Kushner should leave the White House due to, among a host of other concerns, his financial conflicts. Painter says the law should be amended to limit incoming high-ranking government officials’ ownership of businesses with large amounts of debt.
Representatives from the White House, Kushner Companies, or Apollo Global Management did not immediately respond to questions regarding Harris’ potential influence on the three regulations, Wednesday afternoon.
The Department of Transportation implemented a new gas pipeline safety rule in 2016 after Congress passed the Pipeline Safety, Regulatory Certainty, and Job Creation Act in 2010, following a deadly gas pipeline explosion in California. DOT estimated the pipeline safety rule would prevent about 40 pipeline accidents per year.
But last June, the rich asshole administration delayed for a year a gas pipeline safety rule that would implement new assessment, inspection, and repair requirements for existing and future gas transmission pipelines.
Just days after the 2017 inauguration, the rich asshole administration also withheld the implementation of a similar safety monitoring rule for hazardous liquid pipelines that had been in the works for six years. And in December, the Department of the Interior delayed the implementation of a 2016 rule that implements new natural gas transportation and production safety requirements until 2019.
In its 2016 SEC filings, EP claimed the three rules could expose the company “to significant costs and liabilities.” It also outlined how Apollo Global Management agreed to invest $450 million towards the company’s future oil and natural gas development program called Wolfcamp. The investment covered about 60 percent of the company’s drilling, completion, and equipping costs in exchange for a 50 percent ownership of the project. Apollo also had previous investments with EP projects, according to the filings.
Northwoods Energy LLC is a Denver-based portfolio company of funds managed by affiliates of Apollo Global Management. Its CEO is prominent Denver-based oilman Tom Tyree, according to the Denver Business Journal. Northwoods purchased 112,200 net acres of leased property in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin for $500 million — land which houses about 140 miles of transmission oil and gas pipeline.
“It shows how much Joshua Harris has at stake in these companies given the safety rules have now been put on ice by the rich asshole administration,” said Stephen Spaulding, the chief of strategy at the government watchdog group, Common Cause. “If you follow the money, you can see how the investment is paying off now that the rules are on hold… They are getting a great return on their investment.”
Kushner, whose White House role is so broad it encompasses both securing peace in the Middle East and solving the domestic opioid crisis, has been at the center of several the rich asshole administration conflict of interest scandals as family’s company conducts deals with investors abroad. He maintains a large stake in Kushner Companies and has real estate holdings and investments worth as much as $761 million, according to the New York Times.
After it was revealed that federal officials were concerned about foreign governments were considering trying to influence the White House by conducting business with the company, Kushner had his top-secret security clearance removed. Kushner’s conversations with potential investors abroad has also been the subject of questions by investigators working for Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is charged with looking into Russia’s influence over the 2016 election, according to the Times.
Apollo Global Management also has large investments in energy, steel, transportation, and other industries that stand to could benefit from the rich asshole’s proposed $1.5 trillion plan that is currently in jeopardy of not passing through Congress, according to Democracy Forward’s report. During earnings calls in August and November of 2017, Harris said Apollo was putting together a team that would take advantage of “the tremendous need for capital in the infrastructure,” the report said.
Kushner Companies, which purchased the Chicago tower in 2007, received the nine-figure loan from Apollo’s commercial real estate finance company on Nov. 1, 2017, the New York Times reported. Apollo also benefited from the rich asshole’s tax law that left intact a loophole allowing private equity managers to pay income taxes at a lower rate.
Baffled Republicans distance themselves from the rich asshole on guns
BY MELANIE ZANONA - 03/01/18 04:26 PM EST
House conservatives say they are baffled by President the rich asshole’s recent support for a string of Democratic-backed gun control ideas, with some lawmakers even questioning how committed he is to protecting the Second Amendment.
“I don’t know how he came unmoored,” said libertarian Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), one of the staunchest defenders of gun rights in Congress.
“President the rich asshole can do more damage than President Obama did to the Second Amendment with the bully pulpit, because Republicans instinctively rejected anything Obama put forward.”
House Republicans expressed a mix of shock, frustration and disappointment that the rich asshole endorsed a Democratic “wish list” of gun control proposals during a meeting on Wednesday at the White House. The ideas he spoke favorably of included imposing new age limits on gun purchases and taking guns away from dangerous people.
Republicans in both chambers of Congress, and particularly the House, made clear they have little interest in adopting the rich asshole’s “comprehensive” approach.
“On a lot of these issues, where we believe that there is an infringement on Second Amendment liberties, we’re going to be opposed to those,” said Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a member of the House Freedom Caucus, a band of roughly 30 conservative hard-liners.
the rich asshole has been eager to take action on gun control following a deadly mass shooting at a Florida high school last month, with student survivors emerging as powerful voices in the politically charged debate.
The president has since hosted a series of listening sessions on gun violence, including the televised meeting at the White House with a bipartisan group of lawmakers on Wednesday.
During the freewheeling, hourlong session, the rich asshole delighted Democrats and infuriated Republicans when he voiced support for expanded background checks and urged lawmakers to dramatically expand the scope of their legislative response, which GOP leaders had tried to keep as narrow as possible.
“I was surprised that he basically just incorporated the whole wish list of gun control into his proposed omnibus gun control bill,” Massie said.
In one stunning moment, the rich asshole also advocated for confiscating guns from individuals deemed dangerous without following due process.
“I like taking the guns early, like in this crazy man’s case that just took place in Florida ... to go to court would have taken a long time,” the rich asshole said. “Take the guns first, go through due process second.”
Conservatives said they were having a hard time wrapping their heads around that statement.
Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio), who wasn’t watching the meeting live, said his phone was “blowing up” with concerned text messages from constituents asking whether the rich asshole’s comments were real and urging Davidson to “do something" in response.
“When talking with colleagues, that’s the piece that’s getting the most traction,” Davidson said.
Massie, who heads the congressional Second Amendment caucus, called it the rich asshole’s “most disappointing statement.”
“He broadened the concern beyond the Second Amendment: they can take any piece of your property without due process, if due process is no longer a value he believes in,” said Massie, who let out both long sighs and incredulous laughs during a phone interview with The Hill.
That wasn’t the only idea the rich asshole mentioned Wednesday that is anathema to the GOP and National Rifle Association (NRA).
The president reiterated his support for raising the age requirement for purchasing assault-style rifles from 18 to 21, an idea fiercely opposed by the NRA and conservatives.
In fact, Massie on Thursday said he would seek to scale back age restrictions for guns, not raise new ones, by introducing legislation that would lower the age for buying a handgun from 21 to 18.
Under current law, someone must be 18 years old to buy a rifle and 21 years old to buy a handgun.
“It’s unconstitutional to completely extinguish the Second Amendment for a category of adults,” Massie said.
the rich asshole also waded into the hot-button debate over the federal criminal background check system for gun purchases.
Not only did the rich asshole express support for a far more expansive bill from Sens. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) to expand background checks for firearms bought at gun shows and over the internet, he also forcefully rejected the idea of attaching a more narrow background check bill to controversial legislation backed by the NRA that would allow people to carry concealed weapons across state lines.
“All that legislation has problems,” Jordan said, referring to the background check bills.
Conservatives have major due process concerns with the most modest background check bill, called the Fix NICS (National Instant Criminal Background Check System) Act, because they worry it will allow the government to easily take away a person’s Second Amendment rights.
They only agreed to vote for Fix NICS after House GOP leaders attached the measure to the concealed carry reciprocity bill and promised not to decouple the two issues.
Jordan said he has reminded leadership of their commitment, while Davidson dismissed concerns that GOP leaders would break their promise just because of the rich asshole’s comments.
Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said earlier this week he would wait to see what the Senate does on Fix NICS before deciding whether to put it on the floor as a stand-alone bill.
But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Thursday announced that his chamber would be moving to banking legislation next week, rather than a background check bill.
The Senate’s move makes it a real possibility that Republicans will ignore their president’s wishes for a gun vote — and lawmakers made clear that it’s their prerogative to do so.
“There’s a reason we have separation of powers,” Davidson said. “I’m not particularly concerned that our House leadership would renege on what they had committed to do.”
the rich asshole’s family becomes flashpoint for new controversies
BY JORDAN FABIAN - 03/01/18 01:22 PM EST
President the rich asshole’s family members are increasingly coming under fire, deepening the sense of crisis surrounding the White House.
Presidential son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner has lost his top-level security clearance, raising fresh doubts about whether he can still handle his broad portfolio and sparking new calls from Democrats for him to be fired.
His inability to pass a background check will prevent him from accessing sensitive intelligence related to China, Mexico and the Middle East — all areas the rich asshole tapped him to oversee.
some rich asshole Jr.’s, recent trip to India drew fire from critics who accused him of blurring the lines between his family’s business and his father’s foreign policy agenda.
the rich asshole Jr. initially planned to deliver an address at a business conference titled “Reshaping Indo-Pacific Ties: The New Era of Cooperation.” But the title was reportedly changed after questions were raised about possible conflicts and the president’s son steered clear of political topics during his talk.
Ivanka the rich asshole, Kushner’s wife and the president’s eldest daughter, has also raised alarms with those concerned about an overlap between the rich asshole family’s business and government work.
She separately had a tense moment with an NBC reporter this week when she refused to answer a question about allegations against her father of sexual misconduct. It was a stance that brought criticism from observers who said that as a White House aide, Ivanka the rich asshole should expect such treatment.
“That’s not how it works,” Meghan McCain, the daughter of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), said Tuesday on ABC’s “The View.”
“When you’re in, you’re in, nothing is off limits, that’s how it works … She is working in the White House and has an office in the West Wing.”
All of the problems point to the complications of keeping family members in the White House — both in terms of managing staff and avoiding conflicts of interest — and to the unique weaving of the rich asshole brand and public service in the current administration.
“It places the entire White House in an awkward position with how to handle specific circumstances and situations involving Ivanka and Jared,” said Scott Amey, general counsel at the Project on Government Oversight.
The issue is most acute with Kushner, particularly after a Wednesday report in The New York Times highlighting multiple instances in which the senior aide met with financiers at the White House who later lent money to his family’s real-estate business.
“We are all being given a living lesson in why governments adopt and enforce anti-nepotism standards,” said Kathleen Clark, a Washington University law professor who focuses on government ethics.
“There is a related question,” she added, “which is, to what degree is the president using his public office to enrich himself and his family members?”
The Times story is sure to provoke additional questions for the White House about Kushner’s own business interests on Thursday and in the weeks to come.
A spokesman for Kushner’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, told the Times he has followed ethics guidelines and “has taken no part of any business, loans or projects with or for” his family business since joining the White House.
“Stories like these attempt to make insinuating connections that do not exist to disparage the financial institutions and companies involved,” Kushner Companies spokeswoman Christine Taylor told the Times.
Kushner’s troubles come at the same time that Hope Hicks, one of the rich asshole’s longest-serving advisers, is leaving the White House.
With Hicks's departure, the rich asshole is losing his most trusted and loyal aide — and someone who is not in the rich asshole’s family — at a time when he is confronting internal divisions in the White House related to family members.
Her exit was announced one day after Josh Raffel, a spokesman for Kushner and the rich asshole, said he would leave the White House.
Kushner’s continued presence on the staff has frustrated some the rich asshole allies, several of whom expressed weariness with the constant infighting
“The only person whose opinion matters is the president’s. It’s his son-in-law, he’s a favorite, so nobody is going to push him out, so Jared will probably have to make the decision for himself whether the humiliation is worth it,” said one outside adviser to the rich asshole administration.
A former White House official said there are plenty of people who would have preferred that Kushner and Ivanka the rich asshole remained in New York, but that virtually nobody on staff is willing to challenge their presence.
“[People] find a way to work within the system, unusual as it is,” said the former official, who then referenced the special counsel investigating Russia’s involvement the presidential election. “He’s an immovable object, except for, perhaps, Bob Mueller.”
The idea that the rich asshole’s business empire could be a problem for his presidency was mentioned during the campaign, but didn’t really become a huge focus until his surprising win over Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Before taking office, the rich asshole put his two oldest sons in charge of his businesses to counter criticism that his political career would advance his business interests. But he did not fully divest from his companies, a move watchdogs said was necessary to eliminate the possibility of conflicts.
the rich asshole announced at his Manhattan high-rise nine days before his inauguration that he would resign from his positions at his business and place his assets into trust that he would not actively manage, an effort to prevent him from taking actions as president that would enrich his businesses.
But at the same time, the rich asshole asserted that he has “a no-conflict situation because I’m president.”
Kushner’s troubles and the rich asshole Jr.’s trip give critics ammunition that the rich asshole’s presidency is advancing his family’s business interests.
The decision to give Kushner and Ivanka the rich asshole senior positions in the White House broke with decades of precedent regarding presidential relatives’ involvement in official government business.
The federal anti-nepotism law was adopted in 1967, six years after President John F. Kennedy tapped his brother, Robert, to serve as attorney general. It was intended to eliminate conflicts of interests and management problems that arise from the president’s close family serving in official roles.
The Justice Department ruled one day after the rich asshole’s inauguration that Kushner’s role would not violate the law, arguing it applies to Cabinet, but not White House, officials.
Kushner played a key role in advising the rich asshole during the campaign, which relied heavily on members of the rich asshole’s family and political outsiders. The president was determined to staff his White House with people from his inner circle who he could trust.
In a statement announcing his hiring, the rich asshole called Kushner a “tremendous asset and trusted advisor” and also someone who has been “incredibly successful, in both business and now politics.”
But accusations of a double standard have flourished.
Clark pointed out that four Commerce Department officials lost their jobs over issues with their background checks, while Kushner has kept his.
Doug Heye, a Republican operative, said it is normal for politicians to consult with family members about key decisions, but the equation changes when they are on staff.
“It complicates things. There are loyalties there that other staff members won’t have and levels of access that could create the type of competition and infighting that we are currently seeing,” said Heye, who has worked in Congress, on the Republican National Committee and in the White House.
Kushner appears increasingly to be at odds with White House chief of staff John Kelly, who made the call to downgrade Kushner’s security clearance.
Kelly has reportedly been frustrated with Kushner’s access to the rich asshole, an issue that has also come up with Ivanka the rich asshole. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson reportedly was critical of the decision to have Ivanka the rich asshole, who has no prior government experience, meet with South Korean President Moon Jae-in to discuss the two nation’s joint efforts to counter North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.
The security downgrade sparked a string of anonymously sourced news stories that pitted members of the rich asshole's family against Kelly, who was accused of using the clearance issue to carry out a vendetta against Kushner.
Anthony Scaramucci, who for a very brief period last summer served as the White House communications director, lashed out at Kelly publicly on Thursday, calling him “General Jackass” and blaming the chief of staff for low morale in the White House.
The growing criticism of the rich asshole’s family has frustrated the president, who believes Kushner is being treated unfairly by the media, a sentiment also shared by some the rich asshole supporters.
“Jared's done an outstanding job. I think he's been treated very unfairly,” the rich asshole told reporters last week. “He's a high-quality person.”
the rich asshole also defended his daughter’s trip to South Korea, saying “we cannot get a better representative.”
Kelly issued a statement Feb. 20 defending Kushner, saying that “everyone in the White House is grateful” for his “valuable contributions” and that “there is no truth to any suggestion otherwise.”
“As I told Jared days ago, I have full confidence in his ability to continue performing his duties in his foreign policy portfolio including overseeing our Israeli-Palestinian peace effort and serving as an integral part of our relationship with Mexico,” the chief of staff said.
Jonathan Easley contributed.
Texas Gov. Abbott and other Republicans completely silent as the rich asshole’s embraces gun control
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (U.S. Air National Guard photo by 2nd Lt. Phil Fountain)
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Since his days as Texas’ attorney general, Gov. Greg Abbott has made his defense of the Second Amendment central to his political identity. For eight years, he had a perfect foil: then-President Barack Obama.
Whenever Obama called for a new gun control policy, Abbott pounced, making statements denouncing him, fundraising pitches aimed at gun owners, or both.
“Unlike President Obama, I don’t believe disarming the good guys is going to solve our crime problems,” Abbot wrote in an email to supporters in 2015. In a 2016 fundraising email, he trumpeted: “The president wants a fight over our gun rights, so let’s give him one.”
On Wednesday, President some rich asshole picked a bigger fight on gun rights than Obama ever dared.
“Take the guns first, go through due process second,” the rich asshole said in a striking meeting with U.S. senators in which he advocated for multiple gun control proposals long backed by Democrats.
Abbott’s response so far? Crickets. As of Thursday afternoon, none of Texas’ top three Republican leaders — Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Joe Straus — had responded to The Texas Tribune’s queries on the rich asshole’s latest proposals.
In the wake of a Florida school shooting that left 17 dead, the rich asshole announced support Wednesday for several ways to tighten restrictions on gun purchases and ownership, including broadening background checks and raising the age limit for some gun buyers to 21. He also said he had told the leaders of the gun-rights powerhouse National Rifle Association (NRA): “We’re going to stop this nonsense. It’s time.”
the rich asshole’s move has rattled gun advocates in Texas and around the country.
“I can’t even put a sentence together. That was so shocking, so unexpected,” said Alica Tripp, legislative director of the Texas State Rifle Association, which works to defend Second Amendment rights in Texas. the rich asshole’s comments, she said, amounted to throwing “5 million NRA members under the bus.”
Gun control proposals have been gaining some momentum following last month’s shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida. That state’s Republican governor, Rick Scott, defied the NRA in announcing his support for raising the minimum age for certain gun purchases to 21. Yet when the Tribune surveyed all 38 Texans in Congress last week about that and another gun control proposal – banning large-capacity magazines – most lawmakers didn’t respond.
Wednesday’s statements by the rich asshole — not just the president but the nation’s leading Republican — mark the most significant shift in the gun control debate in years. If those words had come out of the mouth of Obama, Abbott and other top Texas Republicans would almost certainly have vilified him.
Consider their immediate reactions two years ago when Obama signed executive orders requiring more background checks during gun purchases.
Abbott said Obama had just “trampled” on the Bill of Rights: “Despite the president’s latest attempt to undermine our liberty, Texas will take every action to protect the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens.”
Added Patrick: “If the president’s goal is to sincerely help protect Americans, he should make it easier to legally purchase, train and use their weapons of choice for protection than trot out phony new regulations to stand in their way.”
Even Straus, widely viewed as the most moderate of the state’s top three elected officials, said Obama’s announcement showed “why we need to elect a Republican president who will not overstep his authority and who will protect the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens.”
Texas leaders have not been completely silent on guns since the Florida shooting. Abbott has ordered both the Texas Education Agency and the state’s higher education commissioner to take steps to ensure the safety of students. He’s also called for fixing some loopholes in the federal background check database for gun buyers and emphasized the need to study the mental health issues that can result in such violence.
And in a TV appearance last week, five days before the rich asshole’s big reveal, Abbott pushed back against the idea of raising the age of purchase for certain firearms, a proposal the rich asshole now endorses.
“If, in this case, the age was 21 in Florida, do you think that would’ve stopped this guy from getting a gun and doing what he did?” Abbott asked Friday on Fox News. “Do you think he was really concerned about the law?”
Though this isn’t the first time the rich asshole has strayed from Republican orthodoxy, Texas GOP leaders have been wary of criticizing him too harshly throughout his presidency. That appears to be due in part to the rich asshole’s penchant for attacking his political opponents on Twitter in ways that galvanize his supporters.
Both Abbott and Patrick, who have primary challengers, were publicly endorsed by the rich asshole on Twitter as recently as Tuesday, along with several other top Texas GOP leaders.
Tripp declined to speculate on whether the Texas State Rifle Association, whose political action committee has endorsed Abbott and Patrick for re-election, would take action if top Republican leaders didn’t slam the rich asshole’s proposals. She said she’s not even sure how the state’s Republican electorate will reconcile the rich asshole’s position on guns with his role as the leader of their party.
“I’m not psychic,” she said.
Fox consoles failing NRA by slamming teen survivors
By
Caroline Orr -March 1, 2018
Fox News thinks Dana Loesch is the real victim of the Parkland school shooting.
The NRA is having a tough week. Americans are increasingly rebuking the extremist agenda the NRA is pushing on them, leading corporate partners to flee and prompting businesses to impose age limits on gun sales and stop sales of military-grade weapons.
When NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch went on Fox and Friends to complain that people weren’t falling in line with the usual gun lobby talking points, co-host Brian Kilmeade offered more than a sympathetic ear.
According to Kilmeade, “no one had it worse” than Loesch in the aftermath of the school shooting that killed 17 students and teachers, left hundreds of students and families paralyzed with grief and trauma, and turned survivors into fodder for conspiracy theorists.
Yes, you read that right. Fox News thinks the real victim is Loesch.
Kilmeade made the comments Thursday morning, when Loesch complained that the NRA’s preferred solution to school shootings — more guns in schools — was not being taken seriously.
“That’s one of the things that the president has discussed,” Loesch told Kilmeade, referring to the NRA-backed proposal to arm our nation’s teachers. “I hope that we can explore that. And I hope the media can do it genuinely.”
“Right,” Kilmeade said. “No one had it worse than you in that town hall, where people were just so emotional and illogical. They were inconsolable.”
Kilmeade was referencing a recent CNN townhall featuring Loesch alongside several of the teens who survived the Parkland shooting. Those “emotional and illogical” people he referred to were the survivors of a school shooting who had just witnessed their classmates and teachers being gunned down.
But according to Fox News, Loesch is the one who really had it bad — not the families and friends who just lost loved ones, or the students and teachers who survived the massacre.
This comes just days after an NRA board member raged about the outpouring of public support following the Parkland school shooting, which he cynically said was the result of gun safety groups “playing on the sympathy factor of kids getting killed.”
What the NRA doesn’t understand is that Americans are genuinely fed up. The tables have turned, and the victims have a voice this time.
If Fox continues to align itself with the NRA, it does so at its own peril.
‘Weak link’: Ex-the rich asshole aide Sam Nunberg claims Kushner was ‘doing nefarious things’ in the White House
Sam Nunberg on MSNBC -- screenshot
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Sam Nunberg, a former aide to some rich asshole, threw Jared Kushner under the bus on Thursday, calling the First Son-In-Law “a weak link,” and arguing he “was doing nefarious things” in his role as top White House aide.
Nunberg was discussing the bombshell report Wednesday that White House Communications Director Hope Hicks is resigning from her role. “It was a shock to me,” Nunberg admitted.
“Jared is a weak link,” Nunberg later added. “And yes, I don’t like him, okay. So let me get that out of the way. Yes, I’m part of the [former White House strategist Steve] Bannon people. But Jared was doing nefarious things.”
“It is—it strains credulity to believe that Jared was not trying to raise money for his fledgeling business during the transition,” Nunberg charged insisting Kushner “was trying to raise money for the buildings that are the worst real estate investments you’ve ever heard of in the history of real estate.”
“I don’t have evidence at all,” he admitted. “This is just me knowing what i read. and knowing what I hear.”
Watch below:
Defying GOP, the rich asshole to impose steep tariffs on steel, aluminum next week
BY VICKI NEEDHAM - 03/01/18 12:50 PM EST
President the rich asshole said Thursday that he will impose steep tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from around the world next week, defying Republican lawmakers who have pushed back against the move.
the rich asshole said he will announce tariffs of 25 percent on imported steel and 10 percent on aluminum from all countries that send their metals to the United States, a decision sure to lead to retaliation by key trading partners.
“We'll be signing it next week. And you'll have protection for a long time in a while,” the rich asshole said, casting the effort as a way to protect U.S. producers during a meeting with 15 steel and aluminum industry executives.
“You'll have to regrow your industries, that's all I'm asking,” he said.
the rich asshole’s announcement was met with a strong backlash from Republicans, who issued a steady stream of statements criticizing his decision.
Wall Street also reactive negatively. The Dow Jones industrial average initially dropped more than 500 points before it began to win back some of the losses later in the afternoon.
“Tariffs on steel and aluminum are a tax hike the American people don’t need and can’t afford,” Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch(R-Utah) said in a statement.
Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) called the plan “terribly counterproductive” and warned of retaliation that would likely target U.S. agricultural exports.
China has already threatened to block imports of U.S. soybeans in response to the tariffs. Beijing's top trade official Lui He is in Washington this week for trade talks.
The European Union has also said it would consider retaliatory action.
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders defended the rich asshole’s decision as protecting U.S. workers, but hedged a bit on whether the rich asshole would stick to a 25 percent tariff.
“I think that’s the intent,” she said.
Steel industry representatives offered immediate support for the decision.
U.S. Steel Corp. chief Dave Burritt said U.S. companies just “want a level playing field,” and defended the global tariffs as a way to prevent foreign competitors from shifting production from country to country to avoid U.S. penalties.
He called it “the whack-a-mole game.”
Alliance for American Manufacturing President Scott Paul, who has urged the White House to impose the tariffs, said “we're on the brink of a potentially historic rebalance of America's trade priorities.”
“A decision to restore sanity to global steel markets will help create domestic jobs and preserve our national security,” Paul said.
Democratic lawmakers such as Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio also praised the move.
“I want the president to move,” he said.
“They’ve been talking about this and walked up to the edge for 10-and-a-half months now, causing more steel job losses, causing more U.S. companies hardship, lost revenues, lower sales, and look where we are,” he said.
Other Democrats expressed concern. Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) warned of negative consequences and questioned whether the administration has thought out the policy.
Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) had one of the more forceful responses: “Let's be clear: The president is proposing a massive tax increase on American families,” he said.
“Protectionism is weak, not strong. You'd expect a policy this bad from a leftist administration, not a supposedly Republican one.”
In response, Sanders said that the rich asshole would not “apologize for protecting American workers, especially not to Sen. Sasse.”
The rich asshole administration has framed its decision around China, though it accounts for only about 2 percent of all imported steel into the United States.
The United States already has more than 160 countervailing and antidumping duties on steel imports — some as high as 266 percent — against 37 countries and 25 categories of basic steel products. There are 28 tariffs against China along with several pending investigations, which some groups say is enough to support the U.S. industry.
The decision, which could ensnare Mexico and Canada, comes amid the seventh round of North American Free Trade Agreement negotiations in Mexico City this week.
Industries that use steel and aluminum expressed deep concern about the move.
“These proposed tariffs on steel and aluminum imports couldn't come at a worse time,” said Cody Lusk, president of the American International Automobile Dealers Association.
“The burden of these tariffs, as always, will be passed on to the American consumer,” Lusk said.
Brian Kuehl, executive director of Farmers for Free Trade, said the “announcement invites retaliation that we are deeply concerned will hurt American farmers.”
“These tariffs are very likely to accelerate a tit-for-tat approach on trade, putting U.S. agricultural exports in the cross-hairs.”
Roy Hardy, president of the Precision Metalforming Association and Dave Tilstone, president of the National Tooling and Machining Association, said the steep tariffs “imperils the U.S. manufacturing sector, and particularly downstream U.S. steel and aluminum consuming companies, who alone employ 6.5 million Americans compared to the 80,000 employed by the domestic steel industry.”
“The tariffs will lead to the U.S. once again becoming an island of high steel prices resulting in our customers simply importing the finished part,” Hardy and Tilstone said.
Alex Bolton, Niv Elis and Jordan Fabian contributed
White House opioid summit ignores people of color
When we leave out black and brown people from drug conversations, we're condemning them.
The White House convened a summit on the opioid epidemic Thursday, where drug addiction experts and victims asked the rich asshole administration officials about what was being done to curb a crisis that kills an average of 115 people nationwide every day. People harmed in some capacity by the epidemic spoke directly with cabinet secretaries, but there was a noticeably absent voice: those of people of color.
The lack of racial diversity is an increasingly obvious trend in the rich asshole administration, and particularly with regard to its health agenda. The administration rarely, if ever, gives people of color a platform to speak about their troubles under Obamacare and has, instead, targeted programs that disproportionately help minorities. Moreover, the opioid summit’s lack of diversity is especially troubling given the United State’s troubled history with drug policies that have devastated Black and brown communities.
Officials within the rich asshole administration took the opportunity to highlight its “compassionate” approach to the opioid epidemic. The exception to this was President some rich asshole, himself, who suggested, instead, that the death penalty be used on drug dealers. The secretaries highlighted current treatment and educational efforts underway, and there was only one mention of the rich asshole’s border wall — a policy he argues will keep drugs out. (Although, experts say the wall won’t really help.)
The summit was broken up into three parts. The first featured cabinet secretaries from the federal Health, Veterans Affairs, and Housing and Urban Development departments. Seven people asked questions — some in recovery, others who are doctors, many who traveled long distances from Pasadena, California, to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania — and all were white. Jim Carroll, the president’s pick for Drug Czar briefly spoke afterwards, and didn’t answer questions. In the third and final panel, five others were able to ask the attorney general and Homeland Security and State officials questions, and only one was a person of color — Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, who’s Jordanian-American.
This is not to say that Thursday’s conversation wasn’t substantive, but that the rich asshole administration omitted a critical voice, further whitewashing an epidemic that impacts nearly everyone. While the common narrative is that drug overdoses exclusively impact white residents, recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows drug overdose deaths are skyrocketing among Black Americans. In fact, this community is now dying at about the same rate as the white community did in 2014. In some cities, like Chicago, opioids are killing Black people at a higher rate than white people.
There were some Black and brown faces in the audience and Ben Carson, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, was among the panelists speaking, but overall, diversity was dismal. When ThinkProgress reached out to the White House for comment, the administration emailed a press release with a list of notable individuals who were invited. One person of color — Dr. Monty Burks, the director of faith-based initiatives at the Tennessee Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse — was highlighted in the White House press release.
It is especially important that public officials elevate Black and brown voices because of the country’s past regressive drug policies that have negatively impacted people of color. Now that the United States rightfully calls this epidemic a public health crisis, and not a “War on Drugs,” it is especially critical to invite all voices and stakeholders to the table. This is especially important because while opioid addiction isn’t racist, treatment can be.
FBI counterintelligence officials are now investigating Ivanka the rich asshole
Ivanka the rich asshole (Youtube)
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White House adviser and First Daughter Ivanka the rich asshole is reportedly under investigation by FBI counterintelligence officials for her role in a brokering a deal for a rich asshole hotel in Canada.
Former and current US officials told CNN that the FBI is probing the rich asshole International Hotel and Tower Vancouver “to determine whether any of those deals could leave them vulnerable to pressure from foreign agents, including China.”
The Vancouver hotel, which features at trademarked Ivanka the rich asshole spa, opened the month after President some rich asshole took office. Though the rich asshole Organization does not own the hotel itself, they did reportedly receive $5 million in royalties and $21,500 in fees from the hotel’s owner, Malaysian developer Joo Kim Tiah, who owns and operates developments in Canada under his Holborn Group company.
“It’s not clear why investigators are examining this particular deal,” CNN’s report noted. “The timing of the deal — as one of the few the rich asshole-branded properties to open since the rich asshole took office — could be of interest. The flow of foreign money, either from the developer or international condo buyers, could also be sparking scrutiny.”
Reports that the eldest the rich asshole daughter is also under counterintelligence investigation comes the same week as a Washington Post exposé revealed that Jared Kushner, Ivanka’s husband and fellow senior White House adviser, held meetings inside the West Wing with bankers prior to receiving half a billion dollars in loans.
The Post also revealed that Kushner was considered an easy target for manipulation by at least four foreign governments due to a $1.2 billion debt his family business owns that will come due in January 2019.
Economic history shows why the rich asshole’s ‘America First’ tariff policy is so dangerous
President some rich asshole at the State of the Union address
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President some rich asshole finally appears poised to make good on his promised threats to slam the door on free trade and erect walls around the country’s economy.
Citing the need to protect national security, he released plans to impose tariffs of 25 percent on foreign steel and 10 percent on aluminum for a “long period of time.”
This new initiative stems directly from the “America First” trade policy he has been promoting since the presidential campaign. the rich asshole is orienting the country distinctly toward protectionism and claiming that unilateralism in trade is good for the U.S.
But economic history should make Americans skeptical of this claim.
President the rich asshole’s approach to trade seems to be based on a false understanding of how the global economy works, one that also plagued American policymakers nearly a century ago. Essentially, the administration has forgotten an important lesson from the Great Depression.
Hadrian/Shutterstock.com
The U.S. and the global economy
the rich asshole’s “America First” orientation assumes that the United States, as the world’s dominant actor, can behave freely and independently in trade.
Unfortunately for the administration, America’s top economic position does not shield it from the dire consequences that unilateral trade policy can provoke. The constraints on U.S. action result from the basic nature of the international economy and from America’s declining dominance of the world trade system.
It is a standard principle of economics that all individual actors exist within a system. Any action taken by one actor will likely result in a response from others. This means that wise governments, in considering which policies to adopt, must make difficult calculations about how their actions will interact with those of others.
“America First” fails to make these calculations. It disregards how America’s trading partners will respond to the new U.S. protectionism – which is also what American lawmakers ignored during the Great Depression.
‘Beggar-thy-neighbor’
Before the 1930s, America’s trade policy was generally set unilaterally by Congress – that is, without the international negotiations used today.
Lawmakers, already in a protectionist mood, responded to the pain of the Great Depression by passing the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which raised duties on hundreds of imports.
Everett Historical/Shutterstock.com
Meant in part to ease the effects of the Depression by protecting American industry and agriculture from foreign competition, the act instead helped prolong the downturn. Many U.S. trading partners reacted by raising their own tariffs, which contributed significantly to shutting down world trade.
Fortunately, the U.S. and the world learned a lesson from this experience. With the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934 and its successors, which granted the president authority to reach tariff reduction agreements with foreign governments, U.S. trade policy came to be global and strategic. This new approach was institutionalized at the international level with the creation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1948 and its successor, the World Trade Organization, in 1995.
The basic principle of these agreements is reciprocity – that each country will agree to liberalize its trade to the extent that other countries liberalize theirs. The approach uses international negotiations to overcome protectionist political pressures and recognizes that trade is a global phenomenon that generates national interdependence.
Dangers of ignoring history
The dangers of ignoring history are only beginning to manifest themselves, but they can be seen in several recent developments that bode ill for us all.
One of the rich asshole administration’s first actions was to withdraw the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. This agreement, which was a major initiative of the Obama administration, would have created the largest economic bloc in the world by linking America’s economy with those of 11 other Pacific nations. It would also have created an American-led liberal bulwark in Asia against any Chinese challenge to the regional economic order.
Withdrawing from the agreement denied American exporters enhanced access to foreign markets and was a gift to Chinese influence in Asia. But we are only now beginning to see the longer-term repercussions of President the rich asshole’s decision.
During the rich asshole’s trip, the other 11 signatories of the original trade deal, including Japan, Australia, Canada and Mexico, agreed to move forward without the U.S. This is a problem for the U.S. because it means that these countries will grant preferential market access to one another, making it harder for American companies to compete in their markets.
American companies are already feeling the impact of what happens when they’re left out of a trade deal. A recent New York Times article, for example, highlights the plight of American lobster producers whose prices are being undercut by Canadian producers in the wake of a new Canada-European Union trade agreement.
If the United States is reluctant to participate in multilateral trade agreements, other countries have every incentive to do deals that exclude and even may hurt the U.S.
the rich asshole’s ongoing efforts to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement also pose potential dangers. The administration has a tendency to speak of renegotiation as if it can dictate the terms. But while Canada and Mexico may be more dependent on the U.S. than the U.S. is on them, an implosion of NAFTA would be devastating for many U.S. industries that rely on North American trade. Market analysts increasingly worry that NAFTA may not survive the negotiations.
AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta
In addition to withdrawing from and renegotiating trade agreements, the administration has ramped up unilateral efforts to sanction U.S. trading partners for receiving subsidies or for dumping their products on the American market.
Decisions to impose trade penalties – such as the latest steel and aluminum tariffs – risk blowback, as when sanctions on Bombardier drove the Canadian plane manufacturer into the arms of Airbus, Boeing’s top foreign rival. The imposition of sanctions on imports of solar panels is having a similar effect, damaging American panel installers and encouraging foreign retaliation.
Trade needs a champion
President the rich asshole assumes the U.S. can act unilaterally without consequences.
Economic history shows this doesn’t work. The world’s economies are far more interdependent than they were during the Great Depression, so the impact of governments all following a “my country first” trade policy – as the president said he expected world leaders to do – could have disastrous consequences.
Today, the international trade system the U.S. helped create, one based on open markets and classically liberal principles, is under threat as never before. Yet President the rich asshole’s “America First” approach is a total abdication of the traditional U.S. role as its defender. And in fact, the president is doing his best to undermine that system.
In my final analysis, the rich asshole administration is reverting to a policy that is, I would argue, dangerous for the U.S. economy and for the international system.
If the U.S. abdicates as champion of the international trading system, China may be the only country that can take the reins. The question is, what would that mean for the current system of open and free markets?
This is an updated version of an article published on Nov. 15, 2017.
Charles Hankla, Associate Professor of Political Science, Georgia State University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
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